001[Music] all right good afternoon we will be calling the board meeting to order in a moment and spsv will begin broadcasting for those joining by phone please remain muted until we reach the testimony portion period and your name is called this is President hery I am now calling the November 15th 2023 regular board meeting to order at 4:19 p.m. this meeting is being recorded we would like to acknowledge that we are on the ancestral lands and traditional territories of the pugan co- Salish people Miss Wilson Jones the roll call please director Harris director hampson here vice president Ranken here president hery here director sarju present director Rivera present director song present director muus Swami present thank you very much I will now turn it over to superintendent Jones for his comments thank you president hery
002board members and public who's watching um I want to start out with uh speaking to Native American Heritage Month As We Gather here in November we pause to reflect on the significance of Native Native American heritage month as we stated at the beginning of our meetings here at Seattle Public Schools we live and work on the unseated ancestrial lands of the co- Salish people this month we celebrate the rich Traditions cultures and contributions of the co Salish and all Native American communi since time in Memorial I'd like to have director iush to read Governor eny's Proclamation paying tribute to this month director I would you do the honors please whereas Native Americans have inhabited the area now known as Washington State since time of Memorial and today 29 Federal recognize Indian tribes outof State tribes
003with treaty reserved rights and other tribal communities reside in Washington and whereas members and descendants of tribes around the United States and First Nations of Canada also reside in the state of Washington and whereas Native American contributions and values have shaped the social political environmental and economic fabric of the state while also enhancing Freedom prosperity and cultural diversity and whereas state law RCW 43376 directs the governor and state agencies to establish government toover relationships with tribes in order to enhance and formalize working relationships with the tribes through collaboration and consultation and whereas state law RCW 28a 32017 manag the teaching of tribal history cultural and government in common schools which will contribute greatly to improving school's history curriculum and enhance awareness for a better cultural understanding and whereas substitute House Bill 1356 prohibiting the inappropriate
004use of Native American names symb sybols or images of public school mascots logos or team names was signed into law on April 26 2021 thus removing harmful stereotypes and barriers to Racial equality cultural awareness and an equitable education and whereas the state of Washington has designated the Friday immediately following the fourth Thursday in November as a state legal and School holiday known as Native American Heritage day and whereas Washington joins other states Across the Nation in celebrating Native American Heritage Month honoring the unique Heritage of this continent's first people in reaffirming the commitment to respect each tribe sovereignty and cultural identity now therefore Jay eny governor of the state of Washington does hereby declaim hereby Proclaim November 2023 as Native American heritage month and November 24th 2023 as Native American Heritage day in Washington encourage
005all people in our state to join him in the special observance thank you so much um later in our agenda we will delve into a critical conversation about a budget resolution our current budget shortfall demands our Collective attention and strategic planning we are committed to addressing it in a matter that reflects fiscal responsibility actively incorporates feedback of our community members and ensures that our schools continue to provide high quality education the proposed budget resolution is not just a financial document it's a reflection of our shared priorities and values in the spirit of collaboration and transparency I encourage your continued participation in this conver ation we will continue to refine this document and make it better as we move forward because your insights are crucial as we work together to ensure our financial decisions align with
006our educational goals um these efforts will not only address the immediate budgetary concerns but also set a course for a sustainable and thriving educational future for our students um lastly this evening we're going to have a chance to explore data showcasing the District strides towards achieving math and literacy goals this session is is a focus of what we do this is this is what we do teaching and learning and it provides a platform for us to assess our achievements in those in those areas identify areas for growth and discuss strategic adjustments so let's engage collaboratively ensuring that our commitment to Excellence and education remain steadfast uh but before I break from uh my comments I i' would like to express heartfelt appreciation for board directors hampson and Harris for your unwavering commitment to Seattle Public
007Schools director Harris your commitment to transparency is anybody know director Harris commitment to transparency commitment to transparency and Community engagement has built trust and empowered our community in the decision-making process director hamson your advocacy for student centering student voice and student outcomes has elevated our entire Ed educational system uh your urging and guidance for us to have a student outcome focused government governance is transformative your focus on uh families and your care has been very evident uh and I also thank you for being the one to hire me as the board president uh and I have a small token of appreciation for both of you and if you both know this uh I often like to give plants as a symbolism of uh we need to take care of our students we didn't make sure
008that they have uh good water they have good good environments good climate so that they can grow and develop and be vibrant and so uh as a token of my appreciation uh I want to just give you these these plants but I hope that you all stay stay connected with us uh not just in in your board capacity but you come back and you serve in all kind kind of valuable ways so here's a here's a token of my [Applause] appreciation back to you president hery all right uh thank you very much superintendent Jones we have now come to the board comments section of the agenda before we move into our committee liaison and engagement reports this evening we will take this opportunity to recognize and thank our outgoing School Board directors director hamson and
009director Harris so what I would recommend for you as the audience unless you want to be clapping for four or five different sessions you might want to wait till the end right um so with that being said uh I cannot begin to express the depth of relationship that this role requires so much so that when reflecting on the opportunity to just offer words that in no way will ever come close to honoring these two individuals uh for their service to the city of Seattle um there are some things that through my reflection I've been able to dig out of my brain and so much so that I remember the first conversations that I've had with each of them uh I first met director Harris long before I had any interest in sitting in this seat
010um and she tried to recruit me from Federal Way to come teach in Seattle and little did she know that we would be sitting across from each other for the next four years uh and I remember the first conversation that I had with director hson shortly after uh I had been appointed and director hson had been elected where she really sized me up to make sure that I was up to the task both of these women at times could not be more ideologically apart however that is the beautiful thing about this role because at no point have I ever questioned their undying commitment to this city to this District but most importantly our students the board is quite frankly losing a wealth of institutional knowledge as well as a wealth of free lasagna and as
011a young member of this board I consider myself to be exceptionally lucky to have had the opportunity to learn and serve under both of these women who at their own times have served as president during some of the most difficult days in this District's history and as we sit here now on the other end of some of the most I would say harrowing obstacles that that our entire communities have been presented with weathering a pandemic uh weathering a strike when we could not come to an agreement with our labor Partners weathering a budget shortfall in the hundreds of millions of dollars that we are going to continue to work on tonight uh science adoptions multiple curriculum adoptions and completely overhauling the way that the board does our work through the student outcomes Focus governance model
012they each have brought their own talents and strengths in so many ways um in this experience for me would have been very different had I not had the Playbook that each of them had set out in their own specific way specifically for director hampson when I look back on the leadership that I have been entrusted with by my colleagues up here um there have been so many instances where I knew that I could call Shandra expecting to have a five-minute conversation and we would be on the phone for 2 and a half hours and I got a lot of education on things that I was not expecting but that ultimately made me the president that I am today the same could be said for director Harris uh expecting to have a five-minute conversation to get
013her opinion on something that might be before the board and then uh looking up and realizing that the sun had set and my fiance Elizabeth was angrily looking at me to get the heck off the phone uh I for one am really confused about how this board is going to feel given that this is going to be the first experience that I'm going to have with neither one of you here um and I know I almost feel as though like going back to the ideological part when I'm making decisions in leading I have lesie on one shoulder and Shandra on the other I'll let you make your own assumptions about which person serves which role I'll let that set in a little bit however what I think is probably the most important thing that I
014could say In This Moment is just thank you because this job often times is unforgiving it can be very difficult but the energy the Poise the smile that both of you have brought to this work in the face of some really difficult things for me personally has been an inspiration and has given me great context on what it means to be an elected official but even more importantly a school board director because it's not about us it's not about the board it's not about the district it's about the students and whether you want to accept it or not we are on a path to greatness because that is what our students deserve and so In This Moment expressing an immense amount of gratitude and hiding an immense amount of Sorrow for the fact that you
015two will not be joining us on this Das probably joining us from the from the stands hopefully holding us accountable continually um from the bottom of my heart on behalf of our district our city our communities and especially um all the board directors who have come before you all the ones that have come after that will come after you our student board members there are not enough words that I could say that would stack up to the amount of gratitude that each of you has owed in your own special way um so I was not as thoughtful as superintendent Jones uh with actually getting living plants but mine smell a lot better than his so I would just like to present you um with a small token of appreciation from um not only the board
016but also my fiance Elizabeth who sends her uh greatest greatest congratulations and um the hope that I too one day will be able to be in a position uh to have this type of celebratory moment so again from the bottom of my heart thank you very much for all that you've taught me and I'm sure that my colleagues will have additional words of um gratitude and Accolade for you as well so all right I am done if anyone else okay director Rivera Smith by all means thank you umen this up we are it is it is it should be noted that we are losing two former presidents who both served in the greatest capacity you can for this board and and there's there's no way to to thank you enough for that service um I
017I think like you mentioned these are two very passionate board members who I think have a lot more in common than they do apart because they both will do whatever they need to do to make this the best District they can um I remember when I was a uh candidate the first time four years ago and and I started coming to board meetings and director Harris then president Harris uh did not pause to let me come and be part of the discussions and be part of you know like literally sit at the table even though I was not yet anything um I was not official at the time and and I just thought that was amazing and was very welcoming and just showed that director Harris truly believes everybody should be at the table truly
018wants to give everybody the opportunity to do that I remember in public testimony would even respond to people from the Das um which was was that's cuz who she is that's who lesli is and uh her spunk her honesty and her respect for people uh shines in everything she does and uh and I I sometimes I literally do sometimes we're doing things up here and I think what would lesie do like like that you know that's like that's who I wish I could be I wish I could be as Brave as you sometimes and as outspoken um we all bring our own style though and that's yours and I'm I'm never going to be that probably to the degree you are but I appreciate every moment that you've been here to do that and um
019and director hson as well um definitely you know saying you know your truth every opportunity you have and it has made this District better um both of you say what you mean and mean what you say so thank you for that and um I don't have anything living but I do have um some hold on so I don't know if you really want to put these up at home but you want to remember us all president privilege okay I'm going to try to be uncharacteristically brief and I've already given you a a physical token of my appreciation um but I as Dr hery said and and uh Dr Rivera it's it's weird to imagine being up here without either of you I mean it's weird to imagine being out there without one of you by
020my side and and one of you up here it's just like I have the trajectory of this district and of my personal involvement in advocacy from 2015 a little bit before 2015 and now has had both of you inext inextricably woven into it um and I think I just uh I thought I was going to be brief ha um the commitment that both of you have to students above all else is I may even want to have a little picture of each of you just to remind me that that's that is what we are here for okay great perfect that's what we're here for that's why we're here I mean director Harris's commitment to um I mean transparency but but what I will really carry with me from you is is the focus on curriculum
021because there are so many different things that we need and want and so many different issues at the heart of it Our obligation is education and what our students need and our teachers deserve is the the support and resource in um learning materials I mean and that's you know that's something that that has gotten pushed aside because it doesn't seem as emergent as some other needs but it's the heart of what we do and so I will be forever grateful for your focus on the materials that um support our teachers in doing their work and support our students in learning and um kind of on the opposite side of the spectrum um what I will be forever grateful to director hamson for is the focus on governance and our time as a board and how
022what we do matters a lot it matters so much that until we focus on our job is I'm not going to be brief our job as a board that nobody else can or will do is to be accountable to the public for whether or not the district is serving our students whether or not students are learning our one job is to be able to answer the question how are our students doing and how do we know that's it there's other things attached to that but ultimately our job is to represent our whole community and able to reflect back to the community whether or not this organization is doing its job in meeting the needs of our students and if we stray from that and get dug into other things nobody else is going to fill
023that role it just won't happen and we won't know and kids will continue to suffer and we will continue to fail them and so I just my undying gratitude and you will not be you know uh our connection does doesn't stop here um but that that ultimately that focus on the board focusing what it does on making sure that the district is doing its job for kids and Leslie's focus on making sure that that people have what they need in the classroom so that students learn what we want them to learn are I cannot think of bigger contributions that you could have made to this district and to our entire community so thank you so very much is this on yeah it is I don't really I don't really need it anyway um so I've
024been on the board for two years and partly it's chandra's fault um I mean I did answer the call of the ancestors I really felt like I didn't have a choice and I will be having some words with them when I get up there wherever the there is about why me um but as glad as Milton said why not me and that walk that we took in volunteer Park I didn't even know you I mean I heard your name but I didn't know you that was the beginning of our relationship and me being here I will you will forever owe me for this you know what you owe me um but one of the profound ways that I have not publicly uh stated chandra's influence is she has I don't even know what the word
025is but you are responsible for me embracing my entire identity which is something I had not done before I met you and you know what that is I don't need to say it to you all because it's actually nobody else's business but she knows what it is and if my grandfather were still alive I would be able to tell him it was you because he's been talking about this his entire life my entire childhood and for whatever reason I did not that I couldn't embrace it I just didn't and it wasn't there was there wasn't a bad negative reason why I just didn't and so because of you and your family particularly one of your children you can let them know they have had a profound impact on this old lady who is now fully
026embracing her full identity and not hiding it that one piece I never hiding that game on I don't need to hide that so thank you I can't I there really aren't a lot of words that I can say but I want the public to know and I want if there are any children in here I want you to know you never know who's going to make a deposit in you that will change your trajectory you got to be on the lookout it can happen as a third grader it can happen as a 60-year-old lesie all summer I went to my backyard to smell the tiny little Blooms of lilac on that bush you gave me I'll take it for the for the children in the audience I think lesie would agree we don't always agree
027we don't we have different viewpoints but what we represent it is possible to have differing opinions and both be right right sometimes we're just flat out wrong period if you're not if you're an adult who can't admit when you're wrong I feel sorry for you because we need to model what it looks like to be wrong to admit we're wrong to say we're sorry and to move on like adults our children are depending on us to do this so while I may not always agree with you you have my respect period I can't eat your lasagna cuz I'll suffer for three days after not because of it's too much cheese I can't do it I just can't do it I can't have that pizza back there either I'd like to but I can't I'm gonna
028do my best to come by on Sunday I'll be coming from buan where I don't really have an excuse around why I sh can't stop by so I'm going put on my calendar I'm going have alarm go off cuz otherwise I'll forget to come by your place I asked that no more than two other board members no no oh wait no no more than one so I got dibs on this Sunday I got dibs if I'm not going to make it I'll text I'll do a group text to serve is this your third term to serve two terms if in this volunteer role that is completely thankless this is a thankless job except for the children this is why we do this we're not I don't need I'm not trying to build a political career
029up here and as far as I know lesli has said she ain't either so that's not why we're doing this we're doing this because we have a heart for children you have a heart for children your own children have changed your life you've talked about that and at the end of the day nothing else matters and so thank you for your gift of two terms of service you were one of the few board members who actually needed to work and and collect a paycheck to pay your mortgage right that's that's something right not all of us are in that position and you did it twice so thank you thank you for your service and maybe we'll meet at a restaurant and you'll have whatever you have and I'll have whatever I have and we'll just
030have a good time but the public has to understand that serving two terms in this role with nothing to come after it is a big commitment and so for those of you who have opinions and ideas run put your name in the bucket and run be an example to the children in this Auditorium that you mean what you say and you say what you mean hi I think never mind let me be quiet because the media is here um thank you to both of you and I I look forward to whatever is in the hinder Yonder for you all I look forward to either being on the sidelines or being lock step arm inarm at some Pro protest where we need to make a statement some of the things that um my colleagues said are
031very familiar to me namely what president hery said about a quick five minute call quickly became two and a half hours and I have also been kind of reflecting on what it will be like to serve in this role without the two of you and um the truth is is I know that I'm keeping your phone numbers in my phone I know that if I call you you will give me the same thought partnership that you have so generously given me these last two years so I thank both of you very much for that um I also want to take an opportunity to thank your families because being in this role I know what a huge sacrifice it is on their part I know the time it takes to serve in this world and the
032two of you have gone above and beyond um not just being presidents but truly above and beyond and the generosity of your time and commitment to this district and that comes at a sacrifice to your family so please please tell your families how grateful I am for sharing you with the sister um and what I'm feeling right now um in the words of director Harris is that it truly has been an honor and a privilege so thank you both would be an appropriate time to clap if director Harris or hamson would like to offer any remarks um please take it away wow um I struggled with this but I actually wrote myself a script because with any luck at all I'll be able to read it and I won't lose it uh people are asking
033me how I'm doing and and I don't have a good answer on the one hand I am thrilled proud filled with gratitude and on the other hand i'm gutted that we haven't been able to make the kind of progress that I look forward to nine years ago when I ran for this job that I wasn't looking for and I looked for a whole lot of folk and they all laughed and then my tough friend said put up her shut up Harrison those of y'all that know me know I'm not good at that so here it goes I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity to serve these past eight years to the staff the boots on the ground folks who every day serve our students in over a hundred schools nutritional Services Librarians custodians ground
034folks nurses IAS front desk folks that provide the backup here in this building capital projects team curriculum Specialists student health Team the Native American Ed team the Comm team counselors social workers accountants payroll and enrollment Specialists legal and many many others who are not recognized and cherished as much as they should be and happy education support professional day today and of course to our principals assistant principls and teachers props is well to our labor partners and great to see sea representation at the back of the room for most of our ledge meetings and work sessions in my fantasy world you'd be sitting at the table with voice not vote thanks as well to Our Community Partners including but not limited to the city's Department of Early Education and learning deal King County's best starts for
035kids and many many more to our students who in the last eight years assisted by Community Partners have found a greater void and wise input that is hugely appreciated thanks as well to former board members and those I've been grateful to serve with Sue Peters Betty Patu Stefan blanford Scott Pinkham Rick Burke Jill giri Eden Mack Zachary D wolf now Pullen Aon duri and my colleagues here at the Das we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us and wish courage candidness and Clarity to to future board members to quote superintendent Jones Clarity is kindness I'm going to steal that one forever from you also huge gratitude to the Seattle school scholarship Committee of which I have been named a new Vice chair so I'm not leaving the building it has been the
036most delightful and possibly the most impactful Duty assignment I've had did you know that we granted a quarter of a million dollars to students this year three Awards of $5,000 each to each High School including alternative high schools students who are nominated by their counselors who know them best based on excelling in the face of high challenges thanks to Mentor Steven neelon former deputy superintendent former assistant superintendent Cony pedosa tgy McAvoy Kesha Scarlet julen Bergie Carrick Campbell Diane debacher Clover Cod Michael tally and others who quote learned me up and exchange thoughtful sometimes very opposing viewpoints and time toward better student outcomes and increasing transparency and trying to improve this wild system we call SPS to friends and family especially those who paid a price for my service on the other hand my husband Michael
037has become a terrific cook in my absence and my daughter Monica who is brilliant in large part because of her Seattle public education at Pathfinder alternative school K through 8 she learned how to learn in kindergarten and uh she was a heck of a door knocker and understood when I wasn't there because of school commitments and Michael has helped cook more lasagna too many to count Monica's attendance at Pathfinder K through a is one of the major reasons that I am sitting here as well as Middle College High School who has saved countless lives including my Foster and many other children I know to my former employer and staff colleagues who work with a crazy school board schedule I thank you and I know that that was rough on you but I do not apologize
038lots and lots of wins and many failures but mostly a few remarks for the future to try and wrap this up and keep it shorter we need more transparency more learning up for the community and our friends and legislature and OSI and the city and county we need more civility pay for school board members to increase our representation and diversity and not limit our prospective prospective elected members to those with means or are retired or just a little bit nuts we need more arts and participatory Athletics Club and Unified sports too those are curricula that keep students in school and contribute to the quote unquote whole child and encourage lifelong learning more social emotional supports and more understanding of differing viewpoints laughter and friendship especially in these very dark times it sounds corny but this
039is emphatically not quote unquote a thankless job it is not I have met so many extraordinary people and learn more than I ever thought possible it has in fact been an honor and a privilege and hinder Yonder I'll be here with open arms and an open phone thank you so that means it's my turn which is really hard because all I can think about is the fact that we have work to get done I just want to get the work done um and that's really what we're supposed to be doing up here and I sat through through a lot of these um in Prior years when folks were leaving the board and um had the same perspective on the other side of the table why can't they just get to the work um so that
040being said um I do think it's important I am a big believer in ceremony and uh maybe not so much the planning of ceremony um but I I do think it's important to Mark Transitions and particularly when uh those transitions are marked by uh tremendous upheaval and um just overall change the environment that we are operating in as a uh as a team is uh about as intense as it's ever been historically and I don't think it's going to get less so um I uh we're in the business of working on behalf of children and you can't bring up news lately without hearing about all kinds of devast devastating uh things that are in connection to our children here in the US our children in Seattle um and all over the world and and to
041to take that um and translate it into nose to the grindstone work is the really difficult task that Schoolboard members take on because uh throughout the world throughout our communities particularly our most resilient students and communities we know that when you are armed with an education you are it's the greatest weapon most kind and compassionate weapon out there and you are the key to your own success and your own um Redemption and um uh life path um you it's a it's a key to to access your your joy coming into an environment um like Seattle public schools that has a relatively short culture and history and yet one that is pretty well established in terms of um the culture that that exists in this institution and even on the board and and then and I
042got elected some of us on this board got elected and then the pandemic hit and to have done this to have have come into that position to take on that role and have the um the task of trying to be great on behalf of children is pretty daunting when you know there's you feel like maybe the world is everything is is upended not just here but but in the world um so it's it's been a ride uh these last four years it has been a ride um what I will say and each and every one of you in on this um dis and in this institution um and so very very many children so very many children including my own have contributed to the most transformative experience that I've ever had and I love change
043I love transformation uh you know I didn't live in one place for more than two years until I until I moved to Seattle my second time so that was kind of a habit for me and yet I had to dig so very deep in this role in order to figure out how to show up in the most productive way for children and how to push away the cameras and the naysayers and the influencers and the you know whomever might want to for whatever reason not see us succeed and I think we all know pretty keenly um that there are pretty acutely and painfully how many people would prefer that we don't succeed that we don't get along that we don't um find a way to collaborate and work together that we don't get along with
044our superintendent that we get up here and fight cuz everybody loves a good battle our kids are in our schools videoing each other fighting and doing it intentionally and and it's it's it's happening everywhere and it's intense um and that comes into this space as well and to be at at you know this particular stage in in life um and have that be the task I couldn't be more grateful to each and every one of you uh I mean we are all cemented in each other's brains whether we like it or not um in some way shape or form but the challenges whether positive or negative the the reactions and we're going to we're about to get into some more of it tonight um have all been part of a really important journey in figuring
045out what it means to show up for kids every single time put your own ego aside and um and and also um probably the most important thing I know director Rivera Smith um the one thing you had to say about me was that I do say what I mean and I mean what I say and yet it's actually not there's a lot that I don't say there is so much that I don't say um I am always holding back and which is why you have those two-hour conversations Brandon um but the opportunity to sit up here and try to make the best possible decisions um and to be brave there I I think that the times when I haven't said what I meant have been because um conflict in this city in this environment is
046um healthy conflict is not well received and and so it takes all of us a tremendous amount of Bravery to put ourselves out there at any point uh and say what we're thinking that we believe is the question or the statement that needs to be made on behal of children um and and I think that's kind of my my biggest request from from all of you is to uh as we leave um two of you know possibly the the most vocal the the loudest the hardest asses um that you all dig into that bravery that you stay Brave on behalf of kids kids because my god do they need it do they need us um we are at a time when I'm actually want to hear from aush um and his wisdom because we are
047at a time where I don't think adults have ever been more confused about what we need to do to support children the the Gap in understanding the dissonance is greater than it has ever been and you know I consider myself of course a really cool mom and cool Auntie um but I know that we are struggling to figure that out I know our teachers are struggling I know our admins are struggling not because they don't want to do the right thing but because things have moved so fast and so quickly um but it is at the end of the day it's on us I want to hear from aush because he is such an intelligent and thoughtful um student and person and will'll have so much to offer and at the same time I still
048want to be his auntie at the end of the day and provide that scaffolding for him to let him know that I have expectations for him and that I believe in him um that I have absolutely every thought that he's going to go on and do great things and but I believe that about every kid in this District every single kid and my dream is that at some point in the future of Seattle public schools and Humanity that we get to a place where the one thing that we know is most impactful to students is they have somebody in that building that is telling them that that is giving them that message every day that is saying iush I believe in you you got this I know you're going to do great things and I
049need you to to get your homework done and it needs you to show up um and and that having that kind of relationship with each other and then also with our superintendent that's been that's the big learning and I hope that you all will stud stay Brave in that and keep challenging each other in the best possible way with tremendous compassion and tremendous accountability and again I'm grateful this has been the hardest thing I've ever done and the most transformative thing that I have ever done and yes my family is going to be really happy to have me back um and and my community is going to be really happy to have me back uh I I really want to get back to the Indian country but also you know I still got three kids
050in SE public school so I am not going anywhere um basketball season coming up you know y'all are going to be hearing from me in all kinds of ways and um so yeah Pig Gigi from the bottom of my heart um I come from a long line of people committed to education and um keep up the good work I believe in you [Applause] kids all right uh with that being said back to work we're going to go ahead and pass it to our student board me for student board member comments take it away I just want to say I'm don't think I'm as great as saying as profound things as maybe director hson might have made me out to be but I can't not acknowledge how amazing and wonderful director Harris and director hamson H
051have been and I know our time on this board has been short but the few brief interactions moments and conversations we've have have shaped me and pushed me as a leader in ways that I don't didn't think could even be be possible and you set a high bar for where I want to be both as a leader and as a person 10 20 and 30 years down the road so thank you thank you thank you I don't know who this board would be without you I don't know who this District would be without you and I don't know how I would be without the guidance if that you provided me and hopefully will continue to provide me as I move through my life and to director hamon's question about the Divide between students and staff
052and I agree The Divide continues to grow will continue to grow but what thing we can't do is give up we have to keep trying and that's the only way that the Divide will ever close and that will ever make progress in that area so don't give up just because we see obstacles just because we see difficulties cannot mean that we give up we have to keep trying we have to keep pushing and I know this board will and I know Ike will I also want to take a bit of a 180 here because I do have a responsibility in this role to be the voice for the 50,000 students who can't sit up here so I want to talk about the fiscal stabilization information that's going to be presented at the meeting today and
053I want to First acknowledge that this is the culmination of months of work from District staff and feedback from thousands and thousands of community members but I want to remind the board and this District to please incorporate intentionally incorporate the voices and the direct student feedback on plans for the future of this District both fiscally and both overall especially from our youngest students because they've seen firsthand how this district is Chang and how this district has challenged been challenged in these past few tumultuous years and more than anyone else in this room they are the people who will be most impacted by the choices we make today and there will be difficult decisions that we have to make and in those decisions I ask you please do not just think of the students and their
054needs but involve them in the decision-making process equip them with the knowledge and resources they need to make those decisions for themselves thank you very much that deserves a round of applause for [Applause] sure all right doubling back do we have any um actually we will begin with director hman hampson for an announcement of completed internal audit and report from the most recent audit committee meeting right well Dr hampson is entering the longest password ever into her District laptop um just a very quick update from the policy committee is uh that we had a actually kind of a I would say like kind of a breakthrough in our last committee meeting where suddenly things kind of click together we're really um getting comfortable with the policy evaluation tool um and uh we have have another
055meeting on the books the first week of December um to kind of finish tightening that up and move into the next couple of deliverables so that will obviously be open to the public welcome to join us in person here at the John Stanford center or listen in online um and then other sort of uh wda representative legislative liaison update is that I have been elected on behalf of the or by the um uh board members in District uh it's District area 2 in wasda the Washington State School director Association to represent King County districts on the wda board so that is elected by all board directors individually um within that area and um each each I think there's I can't remember if there's 11 or 13 but uh there's representation from each um of those
056areas uh on the wasda board and it is a three-year term and uh you know I really look forward to some more meetings on my schedule so that's that that's that's what I'm doing there director Ranken um you ready y I'm ready take it away okay so I'll start with uh internal audit this is the um announcement about a completed audit which is a requirement um of the uh internal audit policy uh internal audit requires uh sorry board procedure 6550 BP internal audit requires an announcement of completed audits as the audit committee chair I am announcing that at the October 30th quarterly audit meeting the office of internal audit presented an internal audit report on the prevention and response to employee and contractor perpetrated student safety incidents all audit reports are discussed at a public
057audit meeting and the completed report are public posted for public viewing on today's agenda and on the office of internal audit Department website as I mentioned to a constituent uh recently that was a once again a very robust and detailed um internal audit committee meeting and uh as in uh one of the reasons for that as when we revised the internal audit policy we're required that not only do all Audits and reviews that happen um associated with Seattle Public Schools regardless of who does them that they have to come through uh an audit response process through internal audit to give them for transparency purposes to make sure that folks understand that these audits took place and that they are seeing the corrective action plans um in process but um also um because there had been
058so many audits that came through but didn't go through the or reviews and and Audits and studies that um had not gone through the internal audit process um so we are still working on uh Audits and reviews that were done as far back as 2018 uh I believe and so there is was some really really rich conversation um related to the corrective action updates on those audits including the teaching and learning audit the uh nutrition services audit the um there are always capital projects audits um and in this case the initial just a really brief initial response to um the uh audit on prevention and response to employee and contractor per perpetrated student safety incidents that's different from um a much more comprehensive review of building safety that the superintendent and his team are are
059working with an outside provider to do so if you are interested in hearing the audit corrective action response on that particular um audit about um safety or any of the other audits they can be found on the internal audit website and the next quarterly meeting um will be in should be in March uh with a new chair of internal audit and encourage uh my fellow board directors um some of whom I've already talked to about uh continuing on and um or Andor stepping up as the the chair of internal audit and have talked to some of our new board members I know at least one is here um are newly elected I guess it has been certified yet so careful about what I say um but anyway so uh I just like keep internal audit
060rolling it's a really good tool for this for this board um that's my last report on that and my in undying gratitude to Andrew uh Medina and his team uh uh Kimberly fry and Amanda whose last name I'm forgetting right now but um they have just been amazing and they are trying to keep us in compliance with the things that we say we're going to do um so and then I have a a brief um update from a tribal aison update I have um an my initial probably 10th draft of the tribal consultation policy I'm going to read you part of it now uh because this is the only one of the few chances the only chance I will have to to present any of this from the Das um but um there is going
061to be I'm going to take it and and work through with um my fellow government to government uh committee members we are presenting together at wasda on Friday so encourage my fellow board members to come especially if you haven't um been to the training I know some of you have but um and to new board members to come to that that training I've also talked to um folks about the the tribal a on tribal consultation role um but so this is the the first part of um this PO it's one of the most difficult policies I've ever had to write and I think you'll understand why when I get through I'm just going to read the first part of it so that you can see where we're headed and if anybody is interested in um
062being part of the the work as this gets put into place um because the next step will be to to send it back out um to tribes um to our tribes the Muckle Sho and the Squamish and get their feedback on it um and basically kind of begin the official tribal consultation process which is now it's required by law so um so it starts with land acknowledgements both Muckle and saquamish have um preferred land acknowledgements on their websites if anybody is interested those are very easy to find we would like to acknowledge the federally recognized muleo Indian tribe The ancestral keepers of the land we are gathered on today we thank them for their immense contributions to our state and local history culture economy and identity as washingtonians m is a is party to both
063the medicine Creek and point Elliot treaties these treaties Reserve governmental rights to the Muckle Sho people and recognize their usual and accustomed territory where they hunt fish gather trade govern and live these areas include forgive my pronunciation zalal which is now known as the city of Seattle and surrounding region zalu is the traditional muleo place name for Seattle and means the shaking ground place every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people every Hillside every Valley every plain and Grove has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished that was said by Chief Seattle in 1854 we would like to begin by acknowledging that the land on which We Gather is within the ancestral territory of the Squamish people of the clear salt water expert fishermen canoe
064Builders and basket Weavers the Suquamish live in harmony with the lands and waterways along Washington's Central Salish sea as they have for thousands of years here the Squamish live and protect the land and Waters of their ancestors for future Generations as promised by the point Elliot Treaty of 1855 tribes and tribal communities have lived and thrived within the Pacific Northwest since time of Memorial Seattle Public Schools District 1 oper Ates on the lands territories and Waters of the duwamish and upper pip peoples of the Muckle Indian tribe and the Uplands and Waters of the Suquamish Nation treaties with American Indian tribes along with the United States Constitution and federal laws are the supreme law of the land as stated in article 6 Clause 2 of The Constitution following the donation land claim Act of 1850
065the first non-indians arrived at alai in 1851 to occupy what is now Seattle they arrived via the Salish sea to a place where Lut seed was spoken and the Coast Salish people lived along its Shores in cedar plank long houses where they had since time and Memorial it was one of the most populated areas north of what is now Mexico City rich with cultur cultural and economic life In 1855 the US government elected to enter into eight treaties including the treaties of Point Elliot and Medicine Creek with tri in what is now Washington State the treat's promised in exchange for 60 million acres of land the trib's right to continue to hunt gather and fish without interference in traditional areas outside tribes 6 million Acres of retained reservation lands in addition the US government agreed
066to provide supplies Educational Services and Medical Care the government also agreed to protect Indian rights and lands that were reserved to the tribes in Washington as elsewhere tribes contined to possess property and self-govern self-government rights guaranteed under treaties and federal laws each tribal reservation in the state constitutes a bordering jurisdiction subject to Federal and tribal laws Seattle's first school was created in 1861 so it was from 1855 to 1861 governed by a school board in 1865 the municipal Seattle Board of regions passed ordinance number five calling for the removal of Indians from the city despite the protections of fored in the ratified treaties a year later Chief Seattle passed away Seattle schools formerly became a public institution in 1870 the same year the US government burned down the old man house an important winter long
067house that had been occupied for at least 2,000 years in Chief Seattle's saquamish home what followed was a period of formal and informal exclusion removal and dispossession via the da alotment act in 1904 and forced assimilation of children via Indian boarding schools starting in 1860 on through the 20th century during this same period Seattle Public Schools expanded dramatically and by 1919 consisted of over 81 schools and 5,381 students in 1924 Native American Indians were granted citizenship in the United States as of 1940 there were only 222 Native American Indians in the city of Seattle then began the Indian termination policy period of the US government which included the relocation Act of 1956 this was another period of forced assimilation moving tribal members from reservations to urban areas like Seattle Seattle schools took its first census
068by race in 1957 by 1960 there were at least 3,000 Native American Indian Alaskan native residents of Seattle today Seattle public schools has 1,311 Native American Indian and Alaskan native students with 153 representing 25 of the 29 federally recognized tribes of Washington state and hundreds more including my own children representing the remaining 573 Sovereign tribal communities in the United States next is an offer of apology the time is long overdue for the elected officials of Seattle public school board to acknowledge and apologize for the harmful experiences Native American Indian and Alaskan native First Nations native Hawaiian and other indigenous identified students have had at the hands of our educational institutions past and present whether through action or inaction in response we commit this body and this institution to not only fulfilling our constitu our cons
069consultation obligations as required by state and federal law and contracts but to a moral and ethical obligation therein to create the condition for increasingly better outcomes for Native American Indian Alaskan native First Nations native Hawaiian and other indigenous students then I go into our commitments that are specific to um as dictated by both by law um at the state and federal level um as well as some um specifics related to the requirements for a to form a procedure at the board level and a procedure at the policy level I mean at the um superintendent level so um still a little bit of work to do um it's mostly formed as I said I'll be talking more about this Friday at wasda but anyone who wants to um check in with me it has significantly more
070background than we would normally have an a policy because this board and the staff of Seattle Public Schools unlike hopefully our students um have not had uh have had very very very limited education about the history and the background of uh Native people in this country and so I think it's important that that stay until such time as um the people who were sitting on the board actually had that education through Seattle public schools and see that it's no longer necessary um so thank you for that and uh taking time to listen to that during this um Native American heritage month thank you director hamon uh do we have a report on our legislative activities lit thank you uh do we have any additional leaon reports tonight equally lit thank you finally any additional board
071engagement for us to discuss tonight go for it Sunday the final lasagna Sunday lasagna District Six community meeting please come join myself and director sarju and one other board member um for a district community meeting where we can listen to our constituents and we can trade constructive criticism and uh I have learned so much for folks who have given us perhaps the most invaluable gift and that's their time and please know as well that staff is more than welcome and will treat you right thank you highp point library on 35th Avenue Southwest 2 to5 Sunday not a Saturday thank you very much okay we will next go to public testimony we will be taking public testimony by phone and in person as stated on the agenda board procedure 1430 BP provides the rules for testimony
072and I ask that speakers are respectful of these rules I will summarize some important parts of this procedure first testimony will be taken today from those individuals called from our public testimony list and if applicable the waiting list which are included on today's agenda posting on the School Board website only those who are called by name should unmute their phones or step forward to the podium and only one person should speak at a time speakers from the list may see their time to another person when the listed speaker name is called the total amount of time allowed will not exceed 2 minutes for the combined number of speakers time will not be restarted after the new speaker begins and the new speaker will not be called again later if they are on the testimony list
073or waiting list those who do not wish to have time seated to them may Decline and retain their place on the testimony or wait list the majority of the speaker time should be spent on the topic they have indicated they wish to speak about the board expects the same standard of Civility for those participating in public comment as the board expects of itself as board president I have the right to and will interrupt any speaker who fails to observe the standard of Civility required by board procedure 143bp a speaker who refuses or fails to comply with these guidelines or who otherwise substantially disrupts the orderly operation of this meeting may be asked to leave the meeting staff will read off the testimony speakers good evening um when I call your name please um unmute by
074pressing star six on the conference call line if you are remote and as I go through names um please feel free to reintroduce yourself especially as I may not uh get the pronunciation correct first on today's testimony list is Joanne Co hi my name is Joan Co thank you to the board for your service and this opportunity to speak can everyone hear me yes we can hear you okay great I am here to strongly urge you to keep our small schools open I just have four quick points small schools are happy places My Two children are students at decar elementary they love their school specifically because it's small Miss Miller their school librarian knows that one child loves Adventure fantasy books and that my other child loves comic books she makes personalized recommendations every week
075for every student Mr D their PE teacher makes class so fun that they are laughing and talking about it after school their art teacher M Monroe has the time to explain block Printing and making intricate origami flowers they know their lunch lady the janitor the garden outside and the playground teachers immediately bring up issues with parents they can do this because our school is small second we are diverse though we are an HCC school we are also an E2 School 70 % of our students come from families of color these are kids who need an accelerated curriculum along with uh special education for their learning disabilities theater is their incubator their safe place to learn three please be our partner in preventing the Mental Health crisis that's looming our kids lost kindergarten to the pandemic
076they started kindergarten staring in an iPad for four hours first grade was at Bryant our large neighborhood school they entered decer in second grade they are just starting to feel a sense of stability security and belonging closing schools is insanely stressful for students and parents believe me when I tell you that these kids will remember this school closure forever most importantly and this is my last Point SPS made a promise that if our kids started at decar we would go through through fifth grade at decar 200 families relied on this promise we are one of those families I know a lot of us will be forced to move or homeschool or some of us will have to take out loads to kids through private school does it make economic sense to lose all these students
077that's 100 fewer students who can rely on Seattle for a quality public school education thank you the next speaker is Vivan van gelder good evening directors and superintendent Jones my name is Vivian vanilda and I am the current vice president of Seattle Council PTSA and I'm here this evening to speak on the topic of the proposed Financial Planning and budgeting policy PTA is a National Organization whose mission is to make every child's potential a reality by engaging and Empowering Families and communities to advocate for all children Seattle's ptas and ptsas are part of the oldest and largest child advocacy Association in America I'd like to note here that the board's proposed policy aligns closely with the following PTA purposes and positions first one of the stated purposes of PTA is to advocate for fiscal responsibility
078regarding public tax dollars and public education funding we appreciate that this policy would direct the superintendent to consider all of the cost drivers that contribute to the financial financial situation of the district and to Steward public funds to ensure long-term sustainability in a way that places the needs of students at the center this policy also aligns with pta's stated positions on fundraising and Equity by explicitly addressing the role played by supplemental fundraising at specific schools in addition to this long overdue focus on equity and fundraising we appreciate that the policy would increase budget transparency this in turn would help to ensure that all sources of funding that come into the district are used in a coordinated way to support the critical goal of improving student outcomes we also commend this policy's built-in annual revision schedule
079that would enable it to always reflect the community's current priorities if done intentionally and equitably bringing in the priorities of the community of families and especially of students will add a critical perspective to budget decision making that is currently largely absent we commend your steadfast commitment to centering outcomes for students we look forward to continuing to partner with you to ensure our brilliant students are equipped for the Bright Futures they deserve thank [Music] you the next speaker is Samantha fog Samantha fog will be followed by Alex Wakeman Rouse and then Aaron McDougall superintendent Jones and members of the board my name is Samantha thog um and I'm speaking tonight as a parent of Three Seattle public school students and as an advocate and I'm here to set to testify in support of passing the financial
080policy for years we have talked in community in meetings and in so many spaces about the need for strong financial policy for transparency for accountability and for creating um the framework that is necessary for for staff to understand their obligations around aligning budget with Community Vision and values tonight the financial policy is on the agenda and for that I am both grateful and excited when it comes to finances and budgets our district needs to be Forward Thinking not focused solely on compliance our students deserve more than mere compliance we need to think not only about meeting student needs today but how to meet student needs next year and in in the future how to think ahead about where we're going not just scrambling to meet the needs of the moment and having a strong financial
081policy moves Us in that direction we need our budget to align with our vision and value this is how we get there we hear the words transparency and accountability a lot in community but we need the mechanisms and the framework and this gives us that I would like to take a moment tonight to thank directors hson and Harris for their service for your sacrifice because we know that the work of the board is hard for your work and for your leadership it is with deep appreciation for both of you and to all who continue to serve on our board and to our staff um that I just wanted to say thank you again for bringing forward a financial policy that will give Clarity to staff so that we can move forward in this difficult Financial
082time to get our students what they need thank you the next speaker is Alex Wakeman Rouse hi I'm Alex Wakeman Rouse proud SPS Alam and a parent of a student at Dunlap in rer beach and my mom also worked for the district so a lot like you Dr Jones um first off I want to thank director Harris and director hamson for your service thank you so much for all that you've done for students and staff um and two minutes is really hard by the way um I'm part of a Citywide movement called all together for Seattle schools we are caregivers we're community members we're educated we're United in our belief that that we need to be you all need to better partner with us in the face of this budget crisis um and the state
083should amply fund public education so I want to First say thank you to miss Redmond and Dr Jones for recent Communications about school closures that is the honest and transparent information that we're really looking for we want you to not shy away from the hard stuff but I still don't support consolidations even if you're pushing it away we're not convinced um that it's going to solve um that it's going to help student outcomes and since you are going to explore it we implore you to start engagement now engagement must be accessible it must be two-way and it must be honest with families about fiscal realities and things have not been totally upfront and honest with families about that I also want you to think rethink how Community voice is solicited and whose input you're actually
084is actually represented I'm the new PTA president at Dunlap we are tital one high poverty School 95% bipac 40% eell and I was not included in developing or reviewing this financial policy or the stabilization plan um we lost two teachers in the shuffle I reached out to the board district and Seattle Council PTSA and nobody came and talked to our school so please do whatever it takes to move resources within the district toward accessible authentic family engagement shoot five seconds um so for the financial policy I'd love for you to not vote today but if you do please accept director songs amendments we really need to honor existing labor agreements we need to have that written down we also need to have written down that the district must communicate potential impacts of budget closures to
085famili students and labor Partners thank you the next speaker is Aaron McDougall Aaron McDougall will be followed by man Manuel slly and then Sabrina Burr good afternoon my name is Aaron McDougall and I am also a proud SPS alumni I have two students in the district right now and another coming up and my mom also used to work for the district I want to thank the board and superintendent for your service and for listening to the community tonight we need more of our family's voices not only to continue to rebuild trust with all of us but also for creating good policy by helping to ensure that the strengths of our students and families are reflected in the policy-making process which I believe helps lead to better student outcomes while it's great news that you have
086changed course on closing schools for next school year knowing that this is still very much a focus in the following year puts a lot of stress on our families and school communities who are still suffering many years into this pandemic life before you commit to cutting programs please have an honest conversation with the community about the budget needs right now the broader parent Community is not feeling engaged or communicated to in a transparent way in what are truly impactful policy decisions let's work collaboratively and get creative let's Advocate together at the state legislature to fully fund our Public Schools before making major budget decision decisions for next year on your financial policy it's currently problematic and I'm concerned about the lack of community engagement leading up to the development and soon passage of this policy
087frankly the vast majority of the parent Community doesn't even know what this is and how much impact it may have on their schools and their students please pause on your policy while the new board members are oriented take the time to take your polic into the community doing due diligence to get input before you vote on it the resolution on fiscal stabilization time up uh the action was not reviewed with the racial Equity analysis tool please this needs to happen on any budget related policy or resolution before we move on to pass it if you have to pass it now please look to director song's amendments we can do this together we can turn the ship around thank you so much the next speaker is Manuela Sly bues good afternoon Dr Jones and members of
088the board my name is Manuel SL here to testify as a longtime Latino Community Advocate first of all I want to thank both directors Harris and hamson for their service on the school board my deep gratitude for their commitment to our school communities I wish you more much success in your future endeavors please stay engaged and continue advocating for public education I came here today to elevate the voices of fellow community members from my Latino Community I have engaged in the past weeks regarding the proposed Financial policy um in Spanish over the radio in person uh has been a really great experience for me a financial policy that centers students in every decision is critical to ensure District School Board labor Partners legislators and Community work in Partnership to provide all students with the best
089opportunities to succeed in their college career and life path they may choose while recognizing and dismantling the Deep inequities in our school system our students from underserved communities face every day our Latino Community finds of particular importance the much needed support for a school board to authentically engage with community in A Renewed inclusive fashion we appreciate each and every one of you for making it possible to with limited resources to engage with families and parents however the constant takeaway is that time and again the most privileged voices are afforded a seat at the table and communities that face a number of barriers including language and access are excluded so thank you so much for the opportunity to bring forward the voices of members of my beloved Latino community and please approve unanimously this transformative Financial
090policy gracias next is Sabrina bur Sabrina will be followed by Michelle Campbell and then June no Ivers tonight I'm very emotional but first I do want to thank lesie Harris and I want to thank you when I was Seattle Council PTSA president people don't know that you checked in on me people don't know that you gave me respit and I want to thank you we haven't always gotten long but one thing I know about you youve always done the best that you have thought for kids Chandra thank you thank you for being tracked down and saying yes and I'll leave it there you know my heart is full because for the last week and a half I've been dealing with an isolation and restraint case that I won't talk about but will I talk about
091is five six and seven year olds coming to our school young boys that look like Dr Jones and president hery used to look and we amputate their Spirit we steal their childhood because we don't have the resources we don't have the funding and we don't have the belief in the love I sat with an early learning program this early learning program told me that they failed this young man because they loved them too well and they did not prepare this young man for the abuse and Trauma that he would receive in Seattle Public Schools this baby is five this policy has been in community for years and what I want to say is collective bargaining agreements supersede everything so I don't know what people are talking about about for my community you have been failing
092kids for 70 years School Board directors when is too long I beg you I implore you please unanimous me unanimously vote in favor of this policy it gives the SU intendent the guidance we cannot stay in fear in disbelief fear are the cheapest seats let's go to the high place let's lead with love because I believe everybody who has this voice everybody who stands up for kids do it because they love kids but too often adult stuff get in the way let's back up let's get out of the way and let's do the job of not only graduating kids but graduating them with Mastery with love for learning for they can go out and fulfill the potential that they were divinely created to be every child every color and every ability that's what everybody should
093want for our kids and this policy is a step forward please vote in favor cuz our children they are not well the next speaker is Michelle Campell Michelle Campbell Michelle it looks like you're unmuted on the conference call line oh and if you press star six one more time we should be able to hear you you are unmuted do you want to try speaking or make sure your device is unmuted I'm going to move to the next person but I will come back around um next is June no Ivers June if you're on the conference call line please press star six to [Music] unmute I'm going to move to next speaker Chris jackins my name is Chris jackins Box 84063 Seattle 98124 on outgoing board directors I wish to thank directors Harris and hamson for
094their service to the district on the Personnel report under separations the report lists Schoolboard office staff Jamie love and legal department staff Carol rosovich I wish to thank Miss love and miss rosovich for their service to the district on the fiscal stabilization plan I have helped parents go to court against past school closures I will happily pass along the names of attorneys who can help I have written up a number of ideas to deal with budget gaps there's some 10 pages I've given to you nine points number one use the interest on Capital funds to pay for instructional supplies as Allowed by RCW 28a 32032 number two use a new city of Seattle Levy to cover budget gaps number three reduce expenditures on screen focused teaching technology number four request Transportation safety net funds to
095address racial imbalance under wack 392 34225 number five provide more real choice to All Families number six get rid of inflexible rot funding formulas number seven increase teacher salaries increase classroom AIDS increase class sizes I'm going to talk I'll be right down number eight keep and expand alternative schools to decrease special education costs number nine do a better job with capital funds also a previous board adopted a resolution to acknowledge and give support to the dames tribe please explicitly reference that resolution thank you very much the next speaker is Charlie Lou Charlie Lou if you're on the phone if you could press star six to unmute okay can you hear me okay yes we can hear you okay good hello everyone yeah this is Charlie part of parent of Seattle public students today thank you
096very much for giving me chance to have three points to share with you and the SPs first I I want to say please do not drink a poison to quinch Thirsty why here is a third circle SPS should know SPS is trying to keep more students schools with HCC program like diator have attracted the number of students families to partic participate the program from locals surrounding cities even out of Washington state now if the schools like de with HCC program are closed the inro student number will drop further down as the other school system will no longer have more highlights to retain those families this is definitely not the SE Public School want to see indeed I have already heard several H program families are planning to leave Seattle soon if the program is closed
097second SPS is depriving a group of kids Special Education rights charter school program are special education going to a charter school can offer real benefits to some kids with learning and thinking differences this is important legal rights for kids in special education if SPS take away that right sooner or later it may face a potential group lawsuit third not only kids the city of se's future needs more schools not close with HCC program but open more to keep to keep and build a stronger Global Urban competitiveness do you think we need to talk about this more no I don't think so briefly theator as a child school has been fulfilling all those kids needs please do not close further please do not stop that Builder stronger and better HCC program for Seattle future thank you
098very much the next speaker is Amy Carroll Amy Carroll thank you these opinions are my own I represent only myself in sharing them please be fiscally responsible and consolidate some schools and close some buildings I know I'm advocating for the potential elimination of my own job I work for SPS I'm also a former former teacher and a former parent at a minimum each building requires a principal admin secretary halftime office assistant one day or more of nursing a custodial engineer at least a part-time evening custodian a part-time kitchen manager also utilities water heat lights as well as maintenance of building and grounds and bus transportation my very rough estimate puts these costs at a million dollar per building it's likely very more very much more belus elected to close two schools last spring and open
099this fall with two fewer buildings functioning in the same period of time Seattle has decided to wait being a leadership position like you are requires difficult decisions that will inevitably leave some constituents unhappy that does mean they're wrong decisions deciding to close schools is not easy but that doesn't mean it cannot be done parents will be up in arms about the harm being done to children by school closures but children are resilient and absorb the attitudes of the adults around them if we consolidate two partially full schools into one not only do we save on some of the duplicate staff I referred to earlier but we'd be more likely to have more fully resourced K5 schools with music art PE Library nursing and counseling available to more children it's in everyone's best interest to close
100buildings save money and staff the buildings we do have more completely I was deeply disappointed to read the message sent out yesterday about the board's decision to not decide this year if possible I respectfully ask you to please reconsider thank you for your time next is Nolan Jones after Nolan will be cheryn kther Erica rubbery good afternoon or good evening to everyone I'm Nolan Jones I'm here coming in to speak with you guys for the very first time I just recently moved here to the Seattle area I'm living up in the north side of town I think that's District three and uh I wanted to let you guys know that I'm a software engineer an inventor of the best keyboard that's been developed in 155 years yes this is true and the thing is is
101that I just recently uh set up a pallot program that's going to be put in place inside of one of the larger school districts inside of North Carolina and I'm coming here to let you guys know that I would love for you to speak with me to get in contact with me I sent email out to uh some of the board members so that you guys will know that you should come and reach out to me and the primary reason why I know that my keyboard works works because over the last 5 years I've been going across the country you know except for the pandemic year taking my product and showing it to young children and they've been able to adapt to it within 15 seconds so within 15 seconds you can direct you can
102give a young child age of two who knows their ABCs they'll be able to type their ABCs because my product is based off of logic and this logic is so intuitive that they can use it and I would love for you guys to contact me so that you can see how this could be used and this is a just a quick look of it you probably can't see it from that distance but this is the keyboard but you'll see it inside of my email that I sent out so please reach out to me this is a game changer and I'll let you know thank you next is cherylyn Crowder hello I'm cheryn Crowder I'm the co-president of the Seattle special education PTSA we help parents understand the special education system systems in this country often
103fail those most in need of their services shifting systems takes a heavy lift but the needs are real for example the lack of visual alarms at the de for de and heart of hearing students at Roosevelt and tops K8 this issue already a year old became very real to me after learning four deaf people were killed in that main shooting you cannot seek safety when you do not know danger exists Shifting the system also relies on working together the promise of Engagement I've been hearing and I appreciate and I understand why we're all here too I'm concerned the communication work group ended without a clear outcome student outcome Focus governance was to lead to more Community engagement as it took more committee time away can we expect that in the next few weeks or months
104preferably not in August school closures are postponed for now obviously opportunity for more engagement but more Cuts in central Staffing and that's a little bit of a concern it's hard to defend bureaucracy yet I recognize the special education services that support genen Ed students with disabilities rely on multiple non-teaching staff please consider equity in those cuts thank [Applause] you speak the next speaker is Ain rubberry hi my name is Erica rubberry thank you all for your service to our kids in our communities as the parent of a second grader educator and a proud Garfield alumni myself uh I've experienced up close for decades the immense benefits as well as the shortcomings of our HCC program and who has access to it obviously this major overhaul is beyond necessary and I I just want to say
105today that I'm really concerned about the dismantling of the cohort model without clear meaningful descriptions of the Alternatives that will be offered there's often been a characterization of HC students as a sort of privileged Fringe group who are not representing those with the greatest needs in our educational system and given the history I understand where that comes from yet I also believe that there are many many students across our very heterogeneous District deserving of a more just educational experience I'd like to understand why this has continuously been painted as a zero sound game please recognize that many HC students in addition to being highly intellectually capable are also neurode Divergent Choice exceptional have learning disorders and other critical and complex academic and social emotional learning needs each one of them with a protected right to
106real highly capable Services as their basic education even in light of closures being deferred we ad decator fear that we will fall victim to the vaguely referenced quote limited program adjustments and I ask that our community please please be genuinely consulted in C- determining our future others have already mentioned the commitment made that current HC students could remain through grade five within the cohort while the pathway model is far from perfect it has served many students who are otherwise struggling significantly in their neighborhood schools but some parents have even described it as life saving as you all work to reset the Baseline for high quality education that meets student needs equitably across our schools I hope that existing exemplars of unique programs that meet unique needs will not be thrown out with the bath water
107many families made a very difficult choice to opt into theor not knowing its future and further unnecessary disruption and transitions would be particularly harmful for many of our students in the worst case if decor's building has to be closed as our population dwindles then at a bare minimum we hope and expect that our students could finish out their cohort classes housed in another neighborhood building to preserve the incredible special incredibly special community we have we expect the district to honor your commitment to our students we know there are no easy solutions here and it's an impossibly hard job you have we know that you can do it thank you again the next speaker is Karen Hartman Karen Hartman Karen if you're on the phone please press star six to unmute when to move to the
108next speaker what I will come back around next is Jillian Weiss Julian way if you're on the line please press star six moving to the next speaker Jennifer mder hi my name is Jennifer president of the Seattle Education Association speaking today on behalf of of sea and other labor Partners pass Seattle bu Building Trades Teamsters 174 Teamsters 117 and ie 302 combined we represent 7,000 approximately 7,000 employees working in Seattle public schools and we support the Amendments director song has submitted to the fiscal policies we first became aware of these fiscal policies once they were were made public at the end of September um at that point shortly after we came together as a labor Partners to review these policies and provide our Collective feedback and then we emailed that a couple weeks ago uh
109to the entire School Board director songs amendments capture our feedback we believe it will improve the budgeting process if the superintendent proactively engages and collaborates with students families and labor Partners around the annual budget projections and potential impacts from budget ch changes this engagement would include both informational meetings as well as opportunities for school community members to ask questions and share their thoughts and feedback in real time it would be most helpful to the school Community if the superintendent provides an analysis of how anticipated programmatic and operational changes compared to the prior Year may affect our school communities in particular how these changes would impact student outcomes I know the school board is working towards more trans transparency and improving collaboration and communication and for that reason it is important to be explicit and capture
110those values in your guidance to the superintendent thank you and on a personal uh note I just wanted to also thank and congratulate our directors uh Harris and director hamson thank you going back around now to the four individuals we didn't hear from earlier um maybe we could try if you are OTE and you are one of the people we haven't heard from yet go ahead and make sure you're muted on your device and press star 6 now to get unmuted on the conference call line the um going back around Michelle Campbell Michelle I think we can hear you oh can you hear me great thank you um good evening board directors and superintendent Jones I want to thank you for the continued learning and growing you are doing together publicly fostering and modeling what
111it looks like to actively live our values in Pursuit Of Our Community Vision the community has adopted anti-racism as one of our organizational values and if we're serious about this and if we're truly going to be accountable to all our students it's going to require us to intentionally restructure our distribution of power and decisionmaking student outcome focused governance is a great start and we need to keep going as we approach some very hard financial and structural decisions in the coming months I believe approval of the financial policy on tonight's consent agenda is the next step the board can take to guide us in our anti-ra work together your decision tonight is an opportunity to help our community identify and address longstanding inequities currently being M maintained by our financial policies or lack of your decision
112tonight is an opportunity to enhance trust truth and transparency in our Collective work we cannot have second and third class students in public education like Sabrina bird just testified we have students actively being harmed in our schools it's unacceptable board directors I ask you to be Brave and Bold in your vote tonight please vote to approve the financial policy unamended we cannot wait any longer our students need this strong policy thank you again if you have not provided testimony but you're on the list please go ahead and unmute on the conference call line and keep muted on your phone until you hear from me June no IV June moving to the next speaker Karen Hartman Karen Hartman and finally Jillian Weiss Jillian Weiss president hery that concludes today's testimony list you very much um that
113concludes our public testimony for this meeting thank you so much for coming out and sharing your thoughts and perspectives with us we greatly appreciate it we are going to take a let's do six minute recess please be back immediately at 6:15 uh p.m so that we can get on with the rest of our meeting thank you very much yeah what up [Music] okay [Music] okay [Music] for I don't [Music] know all right we're going to go ahead and get started we are going to go ahead and get started all right we have now reached the consent portion today's agenda may I have a motion for the consent agenda I move for approval of the consent agenda can I get a second second thank you approval of the consent agenda has been moved by uh director
114sju seconded by director Rivera uh we will remove consent agenda item number five from the consent agenda in order to consider an amendment do directors it is the financial policy if I'm not mistaken do directors have any additional items that they would like to move from the consent agenda this evening what she said no she said she said no all right do okay thank you very much seeing none all those in favor of the consent agenda please signify by saying I I I I I thank you for the pizza yep president hery can I in did you get a motion for the consent agenda as amended with number five roov yeah I guess I sure didn't since I did it I felt like I didn't need one that's my bad may I have a motion
115for the consent agenda as amended approval of the consent agenda as amended Serge you seconds all right all in favor of the consent agenda as amended please signify by saying I I I I all right first turning to items removed from the consent agenda you ready for a motion ready for a motion uh I this is number five right yep I move that the school board adopt board governance policy manual policies Financial Planning and budgeting and administration of the annual budget and financial reporting as attached to the board Action Report these will be included in the guardrail section of the board governance policy manual I second all right this has been moved by vice president Rankin and seconded by director seru um would we like to go to the sponsors of or do we need
116to recognize the amendment uh at this time as well okay well that's what I'm asking one sec hold on if you um put the amendment before you then you could probably just talk about both together let's do it okay me back up a little [Music] bit you want a motion one Mak sure that we're still in line I'm not missing anything on the talking points okay yeah can we go ahead and have an motion uh for the amendment as well yes I I move that the school board approve amendment to the board Action Report titled board governance policy manual Financial Planning and budgeting guardwell section administration of the annual budget and financial reporting numbering lettering system consistent with the board governance policy manual as adopted and substitute the version of the policy titled governance policy
117manual policy category colon recommended guardrail Financial Planning and budgeting interim policy GPM dog2 or 6000 as attached to the amendment to the extent the attached substitute policy conflicts with the information presented in the underlying board Action Report The Substitute policy shall control immediate action is in the best interest of the district second all right so um in this instance we would go to the sponsors of the original uh bar and then go to the amendment so just confirming can I get a thumb I can't see through leather thank you all right cool right on thank you take it away director amps uh well I will note that there were just some clarifying changes made um actually let me step back this is an amended version from introduction yes and um then in addition um there
118were some misspellings and grammatical things that were corrected this morning um there was one uh perspective uh let's see how do I pull that up uh addition that uh our attorney um deemed was too late too substantive to um be considered this late in the game so um it stands as is and uh don't want to say anything else about it um we we did um meet with uh director anank and I met with our uh numerous labor Partners um and pass uh principales Association and walked through um some recommendations that they had um most of which we were not not amendable to um it was just simply that they um particularly the community engagement one and uh the notification of um programmatic changes were already represented in our minds in other guardrails and so
119I think it was a lot about clarifying that this is a direction to from us as a board to the superintendent it's not uh a an administrative policy it's not meant to be specific we are hearing a lot of ass about a specific thing that this means but that's actually left to the superintendent to interpret and then um feedback to us as okay this is what we believe that this means um and that's what the board would do with this for the next um through June of um just this next year as you all go through this this budget cycle um it would inform the next set of amendments so I think that there are some both in the um in in some of of the suggested amendments um that director song has proposed um
120as well as some of the other feedback we got there are things that could prospectively be included if we do ultimately feel that they're not represented elsewhere but at the end of the day this is a uh Financial policy uh not a community we do have a community engagement guard rail uh we do have a guard rail about not making programmatic changes without letting folks know um I agree that those are incredibly important we want the district to engage um families in the budgeting process and as we heard earlier today we are still a long way from either the district or the board doing effective Community engagement um so it's a priority it needs to be a strong um guardrail priority which which it is and and I'm sure this board will look at um
121strengthening that in the in the next round of goals and guardrails do you want to add anything director inen yeah just in the context of um uh yes so thank you to the people who reached out like director hamson said we had the opportunity to talk with um labor Partners which was great and so what I want to acknowledge from what we heard from that is that because this is a new because we're moving into um this policy governance model where we are trying really deliberately to delineate between our governance policies about what the board does and how the board directs the superintendent and administrative policies which are generally policies that are still approved by the board but are about things that are legally required like a policy around special education we're not going to
122sit and go hm how do we want to uh administer special education you know there's a there's a law for that and and there's a policy connected to the law so we have been in the habit of kind of treating governance policies and administrative policies at the same level and so um this is a shift and so I totally understand the kind of confusion or concern about you know what what does this mean does this mean that all of a sudden this can't happen at buildings of this it doesn't and um I uh like just I guess I just acknowledge that because this is a new type of policy it's not there's not a context for a lot of folks to put it into um this is not about what uh anybody in buildings does
123or what any outside um organization does this is us saying to the superintendent as you go through your process of planning the budget which we're doing right now for next year we have it these iterative meetings this is basically saying we this is like presetting our expectations for what would be contained in the budget saying we expect that anything you bring to us the board to approve would includ these things so for example um Clause 11 you we expect that a budget package being brought to us will include what funding sources for different things are and if it's coming from an outside group or a grant or something that's supplementing the operational functions of out of school that we just have transparency and know if that funding is if it's a one-time funding if it's
124sustainable or not and if it isn't one-time and it isn't sustainable what's what's the plan to continue that expenditure what's the need being met and then also if it's something that um is a critical need of a school is it a critical need of other schools and how are we ensuring that that that whatever whatever service or position that that money is paying for that you know well how is that cost met at other schools so it doesn't presuppose any kind of changes to anybody's funding it's just saying when you bring us the budget you need to show us where the money is coming from and how that's Incorporated you know how that's incorporated into like the weighted Staffing standard um where you know is the allocation coming from the district or is it coming
125from an outside Source if it's coming from an outside Source what's the plan to continue meeting that need is that outside Source going to continue to provide that or is this a one-time thing that's what that means um and then uh speaking of the funding allocations you know we uh and I've said this before in in uh budget work sessions the weighted Staffing standard is a formula for allocating staff out to our buildings that was created mainly for compliance and to as a formula of distribution um what we're saying uh with the where is it number six is don't maintain that just because that's the thing that we have that was a mechanism created to allocate staff out to buildings made sense at the time we have learned and we can see that that that
126um static allocation model is not meeting the needs of our students and schools and and so we're saying don't you know figure out a better way aligned with student need and aligned with whatever other agreement about Staffing that are out there to allocate those funds we're not saying what that would be because that's not our role but we're just saying we expect you to revisit re-evaluate and align distribution of resources out to schools with whatever is going to best meet student needs at the time um so yeah I uh also in in addition to the concerns about um you know what does this mean for XYZ group I have also heard oh my gosh finally we're actually trying to add transparency into how our schools are funded where the gaps are and how we can
127close them um so um I think that's it oh the other thing regarding uh meeting with labor Partners is the other uh Habit that we have that we're trying to get away from is kind of kitchen sinking all of our policies one policy comes up and we want to say oh also put this in oh also put that in oh but what about this and as we move through our policy manual and try to get really really clear on the existence of policy and what they do and holding ourselves and the district accountable for following them we don't want to duplicate Direction so like Community engagement should be in a community engagement policy that would include Community engagement about the budget but the budget development policy is our guidance toward the superintendent about the expectations
128that we have on behalf of the community for what we will and won't accept in a budget development and I know this is a work in progress so we're a little bit like um like building the plane while flying it but here's the other awesome thing this policy belongs to us so if we're like whoops that didn't play out the way we thought it would or we give direction to the superintendent and it's interpreted not the way we intended we just bring it right back here and talk about it again and vote on any changes and we can do that whenever we want as needed all right so we will next go to the offer of the amendment director song yeah um thank you so um thank you to the community members that came and
129gave public testimony and I think really what this comes down to is I I think we're all agreement about the what but we're having a conversation about the how um and um just kind of in I'm glad that um there have been updates to um this policy after our introduction and um I'm I appreciate the work that was done with that and I appreciate the time that you took in engaging our labor Partners after they had uh put together some suggestions for us um but kind of in response to some of the comments you just made um uh I just want to counter them so um Clause 11 in your version says allow building or other leaders to solicit or accept and your characterization is that it's this should be about delineation in their budget
130um but that's not what the language is so the Clause that follows that actually does say that fail to delineate in the budget the fiscal mechanism so um I think Clause 11 is asking give giv direction to the superintendent to our building leaders not to accept one-time funding it's really not about budget reporting um and um you know I understand that we're trying to do policy governance and we don't want to be overly perspective um with the superintendent we're supposed to be giving him guidance um and yet I think the the Clause that uh our labor Partners suggested and included in our Amendment around the importance to do analysis of the impact um I think that's really at the same level of detail that we are asking for in some of the other Clauses like
131the Clause around uh the use of Grants um and you know I think overall I um will likely not be voting in support of this policy because to your point about duplicate Direction I went and I looked at some of our financial and budget Poli policies that we have already in existence and I'm really concerned that this is actually giving duplicative um Direction I would encourage us instead to take the time to um update those policies instead of adding another structure um and so um yes okay is that it okay uh so I just want to clarify just so that we're all super clear um collective bargaining supersedes any policy that the board makes right and so regardless of if we include that particular clarification in this document the same outcome would be true okay
132so director song I have a question to you would you have voted for this if the amendment was proposed [Music] so say again if the amendment were to pass you would vote for this piece yeah in the spirit of which piece sorry sorry for the you mean both he's asking me if if the moment the amendment passes will I be voting on The yes on the policy yeah um and in the spirit of collaboration because I understand what we're trying to do here I I will vote Yes on the policy if the amendment passes but I I maintain my position that I think this is just creating another level of policy it doesn't bring the clarity that I think is necessary my preference would be to go back and look at our financial and budget
133policies and I actually went line by line to find where in the policy that ref ref es a lot of the reporting is already in existence the the 4-year um the multi-year requirement that's State like we have to submit that budget if you open up our budget book the four years are already in there so I I just don't know that it necessarily brings the clarity that we are hoping to but in the spirit of collaboration I will vote Yes if the amendment passes I don't have any other questions um to the amendment I um and I said this to our labor Partners as well the um one of the things that was added this morning that was deemed too significant to be a day of amendment was to add the I guess it would
134be number 13 um Community engagement and um because we are hoping or committing to that being in a policy that does not right now exist I'm very comfortable with with adding that part of the amendment um um for in in Partnership and in Clarity that like yeah our expectation and our direction to the superintendent is to engage the community ultimately that shouldn't belong here because it belongs in a different policy but as that policy is not in front of us to see I'm totally happy to like make that commitment there and then in June when hopefully we have um you know refined our governance policy committee then say oh now it's here so we it doesn't need to be here um I'm not comfortable though with the uh honoring Collective bargain agance because that is
135Law and so we like why why have that restatement of fed of Law and not like and well honoring special education requirements anual like that's already a given and in fact because this is our direction to the superintendant who we've hired to operationalize that's already part of his obligation is to honor existing bargaining commitments we are not asking him to nor would we ask him to not honor those and even if a board wanted to do that it would be a violation of state law even existing policies that we have approved if there's a conflict between a policy and a collective bargaining agreement by state law the collective bargaining agreement wins out while it's existing so that we wouldn't we wouldn't and couldn't say hey we said this that means you have to rebar no
136because that was a commitment made for three years or however long the term of the contract is so I don't want to put that in here because that's already an expectation of state law and we're unless we're going to like the Assumption of all of our policies is that it is within compliance with the law so we need to get out of the habit of having to reiterate everything because upfront is following the law yeah okay go ahead director repair um and I and I and I kind of agree a little bit with that the idea that if things are already state law why are we restating them um but that's actually why I'm kind of concerned with the last part of this part the administration of the annual budget which I'm still kind of
137fuzzy on what this is It's policy category guard rails and I know we don't really have this yet so it's sort of a again a kind of a new entity that I'm not even positive what this place is but a lot of these are state law or already doing them or just why don't belong here um number one we're already doing number two is is incredibly vague meet liquidity guideline any I can go on I don't I'm actually not comfortable with this part as a whole so like but I hear you we're going to do this again we're going to look at it again next year we can refine it um cuz like yeah like even I really love the you know number seven about women minority owned businesses but that does not belong here
138that's not about administration of the annual budget that's another whole policy could you say that one more time I couldn't understand what number seven fail to provide contract and business preferences to women and minority own and local businesses I like that a lot that does not belong in a Thing Called administration of the annual budget um so but I'm willing to like work with this and understand that this is this is like a first version that we're going to still keep your finding um but it but but it's kind of cont here because and like to the idea that some of this is state law and but my one of these is is really just balancing a budget which is what we're doing already which is number uh basically number four um or number three
139anyhow my point is like you know a lot of this in this thing is already state law but we're putting in there anyway so we you know we're having it both ways I guess but I am more comfortable taking this all together knowing that we're going to keep working together taking more time to do it cuzz I I you know I I hear that this has been worked on for a while and and I know Dr hamson said last time that it's been available since April I saw it in in September so I have not seen it since April um I I understand you've been working on it and some people saw it it was not made public till the end of September so that's how long a lot of us have had to actually
140look at this and dig through it and um so I don't feel like we've worked together as a whole board on this just yet willing to do that um but I I am in favor of the amendment and I think like director song If it passes then I'm I'm I'm going to be more comfortable taking this holding on for further work um but I don't think I am if the amendment does not pass director hamson um so I just want to provide a couple points of clarification um one the working on the existing Financial policies really isn't an option and as much as none of them really rise through using the tool that the that the committee has developed um to look at what what is actually going to be considered um a either a
141guard rail or a delegation right in the um either it's something that we need to understand in terms of how we work together it's something that we have or it's something we have to really clearly articulate to the superintendent um or it's something that that is you know required by law I'm leave that whole discussion aside for a moment um so the the reason to consolidate these and again I used the format that is common um the very same format that is common amongst other districts in Washington state that use policy governance and um depending on who you talk to who does policy governance as a as a framework um that is uh one very um secure way of going about it to make sure that that we have something that has been tried and
142utilized in the state of Washington meaning it's abiding by the same laws um 100% agree that there are things that could be refined in here um there's been tremendous um I I don't you know September I mean we're we're in November now there's been lots of opportunity we let it go three meetings um that I was very vocal we we don't have a draft option which I've complained about endlessly in terms of um having something be publicly posted which I would love to um you might notice in the in the notes or the whatever section um uh of our agenda there's um another guardrail policy that that is um um that I'm putting forth um so as soon as I could get it on an agenda we got it out there and it was always
143open for feedback we took a lot of the feedback from the prior meeting you know as director song alluded to and or stated um and Incorporated that but this is meant to be a guardrail policy and it is a policy governance style of guardrail policy versus a much more succinct uh student outcomes Focus guard real policy because we are in a place where um to the extent that that we have enough trust and enough relationship and enough Clarity between the board and the superintendent that we know exactly how to communicate what it is that we need in order to make the decisions on behalf of kids and um these are things that have stagnated for a very very long time that we tried to capture and these policies um and it is truly a focus
144on what on our relationship with the superintendent what we need to have presented to us in order for us to make um good decisions on behalf of children and and to create transparency I mean one of the things that um was brought up was around the the building level um piece and you know we carefully we rewarded that to make sure that it was clear that hey we're not ask this is this is actually a practice that SPS already does where when you bring in Grants as we discussed at the audit meeting um you're supposed to check for alignment within SPS staff they check for alignment to um make sure that that that funding is actually going to go for something that is consistent with our goals our vision and our guardrails our values and
145this is simply saying we need you to extend that level of transparency and that decision- making to the building level for any funds that come directly to that building um as resources that are going to be included in that school budget so that we can really see as as people have asked for years and years and years to see everything that's happening at the building level and also because um again moving away from compliance to alignment we we want to empower to demand that that building leaders are empowered and communities are empowered to really see what's happening um it's it's impossible for superintendent Jones to know how to ENC um support or propose a budget for other buildings that don't have you know a massive um uh ASB fund right how how much money they
146need I mean we do have some accounting of that but we don't have any data about how that's being used and this is just saying like the the the vote for this is really vote for fiscal transparency and accountability at all the different levels of our of our district that we have not um seen and and being able to show us how that is reflective of children I mean how that is is aligned with the outcomes that we seek for children um and yes it needs to be um to have be cleaned up you know the other parts of it are about there's there's kind of a three leged stool of you know the planning right the fiscal planning the fiscal Administration how that money is given out and by the way some of this
147is is like there are some things that are repeated for this purposes of state law that are that are part of state law that we're not currently effectively doing some of it's for lack of systems like the fees piece of it right um those are the kinds of things that that we need to restate and to be really clear about like this isn't something that that we're going to wait we're not asking you to to wait to figure out how to do right by our students and by um the demonstrating that alignment and and and showing you know like investment alignment versus compliance this is a long process you all will have conversations with the superintendent when he comes back about like whether or not you're they're able to do these things that was a
148very very clear conversation with our CFO um that and that you know we develop this in conjunction with with them like the expectation is that they would then make updates to those policies that that you're talking about Dr song um that are in the 6000 series because those are really on the implementation side this is not meant to have any implementation it's meant to say you know effectively as I think superintendent Jones has has stated it um in in one context is to please present an equitable budget and we're defining the bunch of different ways in which we know that needs to happen um because there are some things that are that are not happening that are are are pretty broken and once they start happening hopefully they come off and it it slowly becomes
149just a more generalized statement so I I I think that there's a lot to agree with I I would hope my my my real hope is that um at the end of the day this is a relatively short-term um period to see how this language plays out in your relationship with the superintendent in terms of what you're able to get with in terms of information and and what their Capac capacity is to get this information right or to solve some of these problems um and and that you'll come back in June and having gone completely gone through this next budgeting or this budgeting process that we're currently in you'll have some more information to update it for the next round or you'll you know leave it for a while you'll make decisions about it um
150so I I I think it really is a vote for transparency for fiscal transparency um because that is the value um and the alignment is the value you that um we owe our students I have one other quick thing about the the legal piece is that you know what we're discovering in the a hoc policy committee is that there's legal compliance legally required and that we need to delineate between what is legally required for the district to do and what is legally required for the board to do and then where those sometimes overlap so like the administrative policies the different things are there are there is there are reporting mechanisms that like a district is required to do that go to the state that we don't necessarily see and so this is our specific direction
151as the board we want you to provide us with this information in addition to the other legal things that you need to follow this is our ask as the board on behalf of the community about the information that you share with us as you're developing the budget that also needs to be compliant so it's we were talking about this earlier I think the different that instead of being compliance driven we want to shift to being values driven on behalf of our community with the compliance but our job is not actually the compliance part our job is is Direction and oversight and the superintendent job is the compliance part so when we allow compliance to be the only thing that dictates everything there's no values added to it so we're trying to add our values and
152our Direction based on what we have heard years and years and years and years from Community about wanting better clearer information about why decisions get made how it works where the money comes from where it goes d d Etc all right go ahead director Harris mad respect for the efforts put into this however uh I I've got significant concerns in our last legislative meeting of this board's term why we are not passing this on to the new board and and and please don't roll your eyes at me president hery it's disrespectful I'm whoa that's not what's happening yo yo we have things in here that say fiscal impact indeterminate hasn't been run through the rais and Equity tool hasn't been run through the community engagement tool we heard testimony tonight about community engagement and I
153appreciate that two of our directors have met with our labor Partners but this is work session material a specific work session to learn up on this and what the unintended consequences could in fact be and I have real concerns as to whether or not our staff has the bandwidth to put forth this information and one of the things that I wondered was point of point of inquiry was this routed through the Departments like all the rest of our policies are and what was the feedback from staff I appreciate that the buck stops at superintendent Jones's desk that we are a team understanding the feedback from our impressive and important staff that Dr Jones will necessarily be delegating a great deal of this work too is important to me and and I really appreciate the passion
154from which some of our folks testified specifically U Miss Sly and Miss Burr and I don't think it's a question of of either or I think it's a question of and I I feel strongly that this deserves work sessions learning up coming at the very last meeting when you've got a new board to be seated is an overreach in my humble opinion um I'm concerned about it you know director hamson and director Ranken are absolutely correct we've been struggling with some of these issu isues for years and years if not decades specifically PTSA funding PTO funding booster clubs etc etc but it hasn't been until really recently that we've had a decent Grant inventory given to the board and I think one of the things we all agree on is that the weighted Staffing standard
155formula isn't meeting our needs and we've been forgive the term carping on that issue for several years as well this this is too big a reach for me I think it needs to be split up in several ways I think it belongs to the next board and I think it is Kitchen syncing to use director ranken's uh verbage I will be voting no thank [Music] you any other questions on this item before we move to the vote on the amendment uh yeah I mean it troubles me that y'all had some rough exchange there after after you know previous kind words um I I don't know director Harris if you wanted address that at all I'm speaking from my heart from what I believe my duty to be that does not negate any kind words expressed
156earlier tonight thank you and these are not inconsistent viewpoints with which I have expressed previously no no I just meant your interaction with director with President hery that's all I was referencing um so I think the given the sort of some things that are um kind of being attributed to this I think it's best that we just call for the vote um because I I think there's just an over um you know like I I don't know I I still haven't figure out why we have cameras here tonight um it must be us Le it must be us they're going to miss us so much that they decided to bring cameras out um I I no it's because we decided not to close the schools that we never actually said we were going to close
157well okay it might be that it might be that um so I I actually I just want to say I do think that this is the next board's polic like this is teeing up the next board to take this see what you make what you will with it this is this is our new era of focusing on a very small set of policies that people who work full-time will have the capacity to govern and um manage their superintendent towards outcomes for kids by having a much more concise and clear set of things is this it no this is our first shot at it and um I think the simplest thing at this point is to just move forward I think if if we had more um response earlier about certain things we might have been
158able to to come closer but I I think it's really just going to be a matter of time of seeing how these things play out and we have to be willing to take risks and this is a risk-taking and we're going to get to talk about the super intenance risk taking here in a minute which I'm very appreciative of of actually showing our work right like that I'm asking that rather than wait until it's fully baked that that we like our students have to do show our work that we show up having done our homework and we say this is my best shot now what do y'all think and let's fix it and make it better and then let's use it and then we'll learn in the next year and we'll do it better the
159next time it should build on it on itself um and it should be looked at every year and you know all of unintended consequence bring them on bring on the unintended consequences and let's change this district for the better um the I want to address the idea of the next board we the board right now is the board and it is also all boards that have come before us because policies were adopted before any of us were here we don't start fresh every time there's a change to the extent that board directors do change over and oh my gosh superintendant change over we have got to provide something to our community that is consistent that is documented and that can be changed as needed I know that we're all very used to so here here's
160the real thing with this whole policy governance thing the like buzz in social media which is not representative by the way of the community it's people that are part of the community for sure but it's not the vast majority or any but was that we were giving away our power and here we are trying to claim the power of the board on behalf of community by setting some governance policies that is what we have been authorized to do by the state and elected to do by the people of Seattle we're trying to actually take that power and say hey superintendent as representatives of the community these are our expectations of you this is the job we've hired you to do and people don't want us to do that all of a sudden it's I got
161to say it is baffling and we've been talking about this publicly for two years a shift in governance what I just have to say this is I am going to try to honor director hampson and folks who come to the Das who have never come down here to talk to us before and be brave and say we can decide to continue do things doing things exactly as they have been done and continue to have the outcomes we have always had or we can actually use our Authority and demand better and direct our superintendent in the way that that our community has asked us to or we can continue to rubber stamp whatever policy is waved in front of us by staff on the underlying agree underlying or the amendment what's in the amendment which we
162we have to vote on the amendment first what is the amendment the one Vivian has made or director song's Amendment quickly please quick question so let's say that June rolls around and we decide that this is not a structure that works for us what is the process for changing it any director can bring it forward to like offer an amendment to a specific policy if they've got a couple of directors that want to sign on a director could make a yeah yeah yep and so also based on this the recommendation is that it's reviewed again in June so there will be natural that that'll be on the board calendar already yeah and so leading up to that the board president will work with the board office and either like well part of that has to
163come out of our committee recommendation because we don't have a very good process but even under the current process the board president would say this policy is coming up it's our policy it's not an administrative policy I mean they're all our policies but and ask like um direct director song and director seru would you please we have this revision coming up would you please take lead and work with you know staff support to bring this forward or the board president could say hey this thing's coming up I know it need there were a lot of questions people are whatever let's have a study session like that's just and the the shift too is that and the the routing question this doesn't this is not administrative it's our direction to the superintendent right it doesn't the
164the equity tool the communication tool that's the superintendent's responsibility as the executive of the district and this is different I know it's confusing and new because we're used to not actually using our own authority and we're trying to do that and say you don't have to be a policy expert or a finance expert or an education expert to serve on the board you have to be able to represent your community and provide direction to our one employee and sorry also it's even though yes it wasn't seen by everybody in April it's been public since September and we talked about it I don't know how many meetings ago nobody up here has called to ask me questions about it bring up concerns we're literally voting right now none of this has come nobody has said hey
165I have a question in preparation for the meeting and we're all allowed to have one-on-one conversations we can't get together and talk about voting but anybody can say hey I hey between intro and action I have some questions to follow up with nobody's brought any of that I don't know about to you but not to me do you have I I just want to be clear to my colleagues that it is our job to apply a racial Equity lens that's what I do and if the rest of y'all aren't doing it okay go ahead director Harris superintendent Jones do you and your staff have the bandwidth to do this second um um if this is a guard rail then this will become part of your evaluation is that correct two questions yes my team has
166the ability bandwidth and expertise to to do this second um whether it's part of my evaluation or not that's negotiated but I wouldn't shy away from that all right let's uh move to the vote Miss Wilson Jones uh we are first voting on the amendment calling the role on amendment to to consent agenda item five director sarju wait wait wait wait wait hold on don't know I'm Amendment two is the amendment that is proposed by director song I just want to look at it I vote I vote no director song of course director hampson no director Harris no vice president Ranken no director Rivera I president hery nay this motion has not passed by a vote of 2 to5 all right uh now we will be voting on the underlying um item Miss Wilson Jones
167roll call please um we will need a motion can I have a motion for that oh wait no we don't need a motion apologies you are uh number of steps ahead thank you um so to clarify we are calling the vote on the underlying item as not amended consent agenda item five director Rivera n was that I didn't hear that could you restate that no director sarju I vote Yes director song a director hampson I director Harris no vice president Ranken I president hery I this motion has passed by a vote of four to three all right thank you very much I believe that is the only action item on the agenda uh we will now be moving to introduction items uh president hery yes I I would just like to say um I was
168very uncomfortable with the admonishment of you rolling your eyes and and I just want to note that um publicly and um ask that we do our best to to um not treat each other in that way I appreciate it okay introduction item number one is approval of board resolution number 2023 24-7 direction of the 20242 and 25-26 fiscal stabilization plan to create a system of well-resourced schools approval of this item would adopt board resolution number 24-7 direction for the 20242 and 2025 26 fiscal stabilization plan to create a system of well-resourced schools as attached to the board Action Report you want us to go down okay we are now going to move down to the tables make sure that you take your mic uh I believe there's also a presentation that will accompany this item
169e for so we can go as quickly as uh your bandwidth allows you to go and uh but um this is all very serious uh these are very serious things that we talk about uh we're in a state of affairs where Stakes are very high uh the things that we say the things that we do are are are scrutinized we've talked about the cameras being in the room but what we uh should Pat ourselves on the back is around being transparent and moving to that place where we're trying to uh show our work as director hampson says and so this is part of that effort and so what we what we want to do in this next two-part agenda item is one is uh show our work around a system of well resource School SCH
170so whenever you see well resource school it should always have a system in front of it uh there's no such thing as a well resource School singularly we're talking about uh our districtwide effort to have a uh schools that have all the elements that we know that there's almost a guarantee that students have everything they need in terms of service programs and how we build and how we use building space in a way that's effective efficient and and most importantly yeld outcomes for our students and so uh when we talk about well-resourced schools we're talking about how are we leading into strategic planning that's forthcoming how are we doing our resource allocation again how are we using our our spaces wisely and that would be buildings and so we start talking about things like levies
171and whatnot and so this is important that we walk through the information that we got from Community uh and Bev Redmond uh is going to help us walk through that but this is again showing what the community has said this is driving some of the uh some of the elements of the fiscal stabilization resolution plan that you'll be seeing after this and so uh I think you'll find this to be enlightening and uh informative around what community has said to us around uh what is a well-resourced school system look like and so with without further Ado I want to pass it over to be Redmond to walk us through several slides that really uh inform us as we go forward thank you to be very specific 16 so hang on all right good evening to
172everyone it is a pleasure to be back in space with you and to talk about this topic of a system of well resource School specifically the community engagement process that has been attached to it we we are calling this phase one because it is community engagement is never a one and done and specifically around the process of a system of well-resourced schools we know we have more conversation more engagement to have however we did promise that we would come on this evening and reveal the results of our community engagement process tonight I have for you an executive summary and the full report will be added to our website we are certainly along with the executive summary will be added to our website we are currently putting that through some ADA compliance and making sure that
173that is fully ready for our website and will be I believe ready pretty soon so with that we're going to go on into our first slide and to talk about the purpose uh as you know this past August through October we facilitated a number of meetings internal and external with the purpose of going into Community engagement regarding the system of well-resourced schools and what our parents our families our staff wanted to see in terms of the values within the schools we heard from quite a few people and it is very impressive it's something to be proud of but again it is a start if there's anything that I would like to leave us with it is the beginning of it and as Dr Jones mentioned it is to be a through line it is not
174just for this particular activity where it's not to go into a binder and sit on a shelf but be a through line to all of the decisions that we have yet to make the Strategic plan the levy and what happens in terms of the future of our schools moving on to our next slide phase of Engagement in those several months we heard from approximately 4,000 people 4,000 community members in a variety of ways many of you attended the in-person sessions there were five there was an online series two sessions offered also School staff had a chance to connect and also there was the CommunityWide survey and when you look at those particular results 63% of those responding across any of those methods of chiming in and giving input were families and caregivers 35% of the
175respondents from staff and 2% from the general Community meaning they don't necessarily have a student or a connection to our schools on a day-to-day basis but schools are a part of their community if you're looking at the respondents to the survey we're very pleased as a start again a start that we had 32% of the respondents identifying as people of color again they were self-identifying but 32% did identify as people of color places that we want to go next when we head into phase two is to make sure that we have a strengthening of our student student voice that we are able to include students in our engagement and make a strong I would say infrastructure for student voice I know that is certainly one of the passions and goals for Dr Jones this year
176to make sure that we have a place for student voice in any form of our community engagement processes also want to see more in terms of our interactions with our families of color families who are furthest away from educational Justice making sure that we have deeper connections with them so that we can realize their voice and add their voice to our further add their voices to our engagement process moving on into our next slide please and this is just a look at some of the great facilities one of the questions that we asked what do you love about your facilities and your learning spaces and that was uh thought we should bring in some of the art some of the visuals to our schools we have some incredible buildings amazing buildings and our families and
177our respondents said so you can certainly look at the screen and say where they valued and the things that they love the neighborhood location that they wanting their buildings to be the community Hub a central hub for families A Gathering Spot also the the modern AR chitecture the facilities the CL the blend of the historical with the modern also safety was highly mentioned safety security and retrofitting to make sure that we're prepared for earthquake possibilities or that we have the necessary HVAC systems to make sure that we have the air flow in our buildings that we need as well as the secure and gated perimeters and entry procedures for each of our buildings and a kudo was a big shout out to the way we maintain our buildings and grounds that they are excellently be
178that they are excellently maintained and that there is a sense of community pride and on the side of each of our slides we collected quotes directly from those who gave us responses and one of the ones that I just absolutely adore that our schools are more than just buildings more than just buildings and that again a sense of community Pride as you're moving in and about our Seattle area that when you see our schools they stand for something they count moving on into our next slide a great deal of comments came in response to what do you love about your buildings the playgrounds the athletic facilities highly mentioned what I want to make sure that we emphasize under the first playground and athletic facilities that our facilities the accessibility that it's more than a play
179area it represents access to individuals who might not otherwise have it and exposure to individuals who might not otherwise have it natural spaces natural light those are open have a little bit of feedback M the natural spaces the natural light the open hallways it really does provide a lot of opportunity it's not just a space but it's intentional space that means access for many of our students that it means places where you can spread out additional types of learning spaces highly prized by our our community moving on to the next next slide please I think we're doing a little double duty um Library as a centerpiece I don't know how many of you love a good book like I do I spent most of my childhood uh in bookmobiles in libraries and in our schools
180libraries actually as the centerpiece of learning in our thank you so much in our buildings was one of the things that was prized and loved most the artwork and the decor centering student diversity centering Equity I had the privilege to go out to John Stanford International maybe a week ago to see a mural installed in their building and just how much it brought the community together how much it lifted the spirits of students and it represented their Heritage so making sure that our artwork and our Decor reflect the student body was highly prized again common Gathering spaces those Flex spaces that we often take for granted but they represent extending the learning environment for our students moving on next yes the meat of what we do academics and extracurriculars the learning process what is it
181that our families value and our students value and our community value heading on into our next and you see those smiling faces of our students that that cap and gown it represents what we do best and that is the learning process moving on Educators the dedication and the skill of our Educators was highly mentioned welcoming respectful well-trained caring nurturing ing there was such gratitude for that and such a desire to see more in terms of our recruitment efforts and our retention efforts to make sure that we have and that we're constantly devoting our time to the best learning possibilities for our students Arts and Music again highly mentioned as an area that was valued and wants to that we want to see strengthened and that the second bullet there integrated into other curricular areas and
182into after school programming so threading those experiences across the curriculum and experiences physical education and Athletics the access to sports for students the access to those opportunities of unstructured playtime for elementary students highly prized and wanted to see continued here is a quote we value music and arts programs because when students participate in Creative Outlets they do better academically and socially that it is a through line to how they actually perform in the classroom and heading on into our next slide before and after school programs the enrichment experience that there is a desire to make sure that we have the opportunities to include extracurricular clubs academic enrichment and support Arts Sports programs where Community were highly named amongst the community appreciation was expressed and I want to give note to this that this represents child
183care support for many of our working parents and caregivers so not just an experience but it's an extension of care for our families and that there is also high quality a focus on high quality instruction and core subjects making sure that we are emphasizing English language arts and Mathematics as course Essentials in our schools and participants named appreciation for evidence-based curriculum differentiated instruction the tutors and Specialists that are needed to support students and I want to give a nod here also to our Equity work and our diversity work that there is a high value placed on including course offerings such as ethnic studies black black history and non- eurocentric world history applying social justice lenses to our classroom learning and professional development to improve educator cultural sensitivity and anti-racist teaching practices as one participant said
184the programs are valued by valued most by our community are those that promote racial equity in alignment with our district Mission and moving on on to our stem programming appreciation was expressed for school-based stem programs in addition to science courses this included uh technology education such as computer science and coding and engineering and Robotics and the belief that a well-resourced school includes dedicated infrastructure fa and Facilities such as science and computer labs stem focused enrichment programs during and after school and support career- connected learning opportunities such as internships linked to stem Pathways the same was mentioned for World languages and dual language programs in a well-resourced school learning a second language is viewed as an educational priority and consistent Staffing to support that with multiple offerings in language programs also emphasis was given to Pro
185Project based and experiential learning many advocated for integrating Hands-On experiences Collaborative Learning within the core subjects and after school extracurricular programs to promote creativity and problem solving in real world applications and community members also responding mentioned College and Career Readiness including Career and Technical education courses as a high priority I'm going to pause and take a sip of water as we're heading on into our next support services and resources what do we need to strengthen in our buildings regarding support services and resources this was our third and final area that we surveyed on as we move on the full-time staff and key support positions emphasis on having full-time counselors nurses social workers in our buildings I believe one respondent referred to the adults as a safety net of adults in our schools that these are
186absolutely essential when we are making sure that we are surrounding our students with everything that they need also the basic needs of students Desiring that those are met when it comes to nutrition when it comes to hygiene and making sure that there are connections to community-based organizations and mental health I don't how many times have we heard that as a theme throughout the last couple of years especially coming out of the pandemic the need for increased counselors social workers Mental Health Specialists social emotional learning restorative practices all of those were definitely highlighted and mentioned moving on and a high value placed around special education services multilingual learner services and highly capable and advanced learning services this is an area that um was highly represented in our survey area particularly with highly capable parents responding to
187the survey making sure that we not only remember those who We Believe are already prepared but making sure that we're standing up bringing in Services bringing in the training bringing in the translation and interpret interpretation services for our families that need that learning udl was also mentioned so a lot a lot of attention placed on what additional support services and resources that we need to strengthen our schools next slide please transportation service and you might guess that this one is the next one is really near and dear to my heart communication effective Pathways for communication for families making sure back to Transportation the progress that we've started continues consistent reliable on time clear communication around that process knowing where your child is at all times on time is super important to families drivers who know
188how to interact with student students very very important and also that Equitable access to field trips and again back down to my favorite favorite area strengthening communication in the schools there's a difference between what happens at the district level and what happens in the buildings and making sure that those communication networks are incredibly strong for families and that families are asking and you've heard some tonight you've heard it many many times that they want to be involved families students want to be involved in the decisions regarding our district I think we're getting ready to round out as a final slide taking a look at the participants and the breakdown of what they actually look like and felt like coming through being analyzed for demographics many areas of Pride many areas where we need to increase
189our representation throughout our survey so I accept it as a challenge as a blessing and a challenge it was great to get started but let's go let's keep going Dr Jones back to you yes so I just want to uh probe a little bit ask the board is this information are you surprised by this information I I I actually have some pride this is uh our community is really Savvy about what their wants wishes and needs are um but I want to just open it up to the board to just react to this this is this is uh catalytic to me in terms of what you'll see next in terms of how we're setting our priorities for our budget how we're setting the the trajectory for the the next strategic plan all of this is
190is uh feeding into that and so I just want to uh ultimately the board is going to need to validate that this is the vision and values of the community and you will say Dr Jones and team go forth and bring us a budget and bring us a strategic plan with these with these elements in it so I want to get your reaction uh your not your necessarily your thoughtful response because you're just seeing it right now to does this does this comport with you does is this in alignment with what you believe that you experienced in part when you were with the the the folks at at these sessions and now that you're seeing it in the aggregate is it does this resonate with you please just go ahead and just um Talk um
191yeah no having so attend I did attend all the in person um meetings and so this is in line with what I saw and what I heard so um I have two questions though one is um all the Post-its everyone there was like I don't know how many thousands of poits right where is it all at right where is that accessible to us to read through if we wanted to not that we have the hours that I'm sure it take you guys to do it but is that accessible somewhere so we can see was colle it is here in housee and it is in our research has it been like scanned and is it digital it has been digitized that's hope hope so yeah um that would be great to see um and one the
192thing under effective Communications um I didn't see any reference to and I'm wondering and I seeing the demographic breakdown I'm I guess I shouldn't be surprised but there was nothing in there about mention of the accessibility of communications uh nor translation availability for families who whose a primary language isn't English CU um because I for from a lot of the sessions did have like a interpretation table and I tried to you give more attention to those because I know that's the voices we don't hear the most so you know I heard and what I did hear a lot about was things about that about about having um Communications that were accessible to them in different formats different mediums and about having translations so not seeing on the slide I I do want to know that
193you captured that and that is was that something you heard too or you got anywhere out of the feedback again the demographic show that maybe the people who most responded aren't the type who were concerned about that but we should be yes uh I will say that would not be a new piece of information for me for my team and it is something that we always keep in the Forefront of our mind in terms of how we need to expand and improve yeah thank you oh oh yeah you not button in on me this time I'm teasing um I I am proud I you know I haven't seen anything like this in our district in my history of of living here and I have been very actively involved and I got another bold dog coming
194up anyway we let me not digress um what when I when I think about communication I I just want to State this because what is apparent is that well well what is apparent to me is that we don't want to mislead our community into thinking that they will have a say in every single decision that's made at every single level in this District that's not going to happen um for those of you who live in King County um which is all Seattle public school students likely um the county is in a a similar massive budget crisis while I would like to walk into executive Constantine's office and tell him a few things about what I'd like to see happen I don't get to do that I actually don't even get to send him an email
195to tell him about what I would like to see happen because my supervisor has been very clear about how the decisionmaking process is happening and so I give that example to say I really would like to give input to Executive Dow Constantine about what I think we need to be doing in my division because my division is actually the most impacted in this entire budget crisis we will have the hardest we will be the hardest hit so yes I have a an urge and I have to retain that urge and so we have to be authentic and transparent with our families around what can they be involved in in the decision making and that's a Nuance in the communication right I think this is an example of us including community in this thing we're calling
196a system of well resource schools Fred how many weeks have I been asking for a definition for well I've been putting him on the spot since I walked through the door right I have I now have a definition like I am so ecstatic I think I've publicly shared with you thank you thank you my brother my friend my colleague for helping me understand what a well resource school is the only thing I'll take credit for as being smart enough to um have Chief redond and others figure out how to answer that question but but my point my point for making that is it did while I was impatient for the definition my pressure was to come up with one quickly not not that I needed one right then and I don't think my pressure to
197come up with the definition quickly is how we got here but I think the leadership the leadership of this district is why we've gotten here this has not happened in the history of this District so I take a lot of pride in uh our superintendent and his his staff for leading the way for taking a risk for being courageous we're not going to get this perfectly right and that should not be our goal our goal should be good enough to take that step in the direction that we know we need to go to get where we want to get where we know we need to be and as we're on that path we're paying attention and we're doing what we need to do to continue to improve what we're we're offering to our Seattle public
198school students so I just want to thank the staff um it's more than just what's sitting at this table when you're at this level of leadership we are we don't get we don't necessarily get to see like all the people that were involved right but that's includes all the people that prepared this PowerPoint right like there was somebody doing this and they are part and parcel to our long-term success so I'm thankful I'm proud to be a Mimi in this District now that is Grandma for some people I am not a grandma I a Mimi that's what I am um I'm proud to be a part of this district and the leadership that we have attempting to do their best to steer Us in the right direction thank you director saru thank thank you for
199that reflection and I I do recall U the pressure that we felt for coming up with a definition of well resource schools we don't like how it sounds we don't like how it looks we we need a definition and uh it's validating to hear that you you are now proud of what we attempted to do is just wait until we heard from community and we were able to achieve that in part and so so thank you that that makes us collectively become a learning organiz ation we're growing and we're developing together so I I just I appreciate that reflection and I I I I hope we made you proud in this so um uh but anyway I know there's other comments to be made or thoughts and and aush I want you to jump in
200here too because we're we're making we you're we're taking some of your school night so at least we want to hear from you so I want to try to make space for for your voice to get in here too because this this may or may not reflect what students are thinking but I think it's a good snapshot of the 38 800 people that chose to participate or had the opportunity to participate but let let him formulate his thoughts yeah okay um so I yes like director R Smith was at all of the in-person sessions so this is not surprising um it very much aligns with what I was hearing walking around the room and what I experienced too as a parent like this is this demonstrates the the best things about Seattle public schools and
201about our individual schools um and what I notice especially on this slide is um that this was a great widenet first pass and there is a strong representation from well there's missing representation in the response disproportionate representation in the resp response and we there's no there's almost no student representation in this about how students would Define a well resource school um we're also missing you know our job as the board is to represent the interests of our shared owners of our district which is everybody in the community regardless of whether or not they have students in Seattle Public Schools so we're missing that representation also and this isn't at all CRI it Mak it makes sense to me why they weren't there and I'm thinking like if so from a from a staff superintendent perspective
202as you're trying to follow our Direction and implement it makes sense that your focus would be on families and students and what's happening in our buildings we though have to know that our job is to represent um the entire community and what they expect for students living in our community and so um this is maybe more of a note for us as a as a board than for staff is that you know what's our next step in terms of Engagement supported by staff but to include the broader Community about like hey this is what we heard from our families but we represent all of you and what you want to see for the kids in your community does this does does this meet your definition of a well research school what would you add what
203what are we missing what do you want to see for the kids in your neighborhood and your community because that has to be part of what what we do as a board um and so I would say it's a it's a great first pass it makes a lot of sense it's it's not surprising um and thank you to everybody who participated and now where how do we bring in the student voice where's the broader Community influence and also I would or or I guess would want to have further conversation about okay now the communities that we know are underrepresented in terms of our students and our families what's the plan to go another level down and specifically reach out to the families that are not as represented um when we were in San Diego council
204of great City Schools the Denver superintendent talked about actually going and knocking on the doors of families and some and especially a um Spanish-speaking neighborhood they were just like what like what are you doing here and why are you asking us because they had not at all been given the opportunity to have to participate in saying what they expected from their schools as community members and also told him you know okay great now we're probably never going to see you again and he said well I went back the next week and I mean that that's obviously an out outlying example but you know if we're serious about representing the entire community and meeting the needs of all of the students in our city we're going to have to not just ask people to come to
205us but go out to them and say hey it matters what you think and we want to hear from you and we are now going to design um very specifically for your needs not here's an opportunity show up if you can but we are coming to you with interpretation with this with that connecting with Community Partners whatever to because we want your input yeah and then the one other thing about my definition of a well resource School personally is one that can meet the academic expectations and requirements of our students so that's kind like this was a lot this is a lot of like really great things and we could have schools with like the best all the best everything but if we're not resourcing literacy which we're going to talk about in a minute
206that's not like that's not going to that's not well resourced that's not doing our job good um I think that the biggest takeaway from me is just like good job for doing it you know uh I think director sarju Put It Best in terms of like I have not been around nearly as long as Mimi but I have uh been here for a minute and I know Community engagement pretty well from a diff from a variety of perspectives and this is new this is very new especially coming out of the pandemic what I immediately my reaction is like okay so now this is we did in some ways have this as a collaborative opportunity for the board and the district to do this I am looking at this as like okay there are 3% of
207black families that are represented here out of the 15% where does the board pick up the slap like where do we now have a starting place from the superintendent what are we going to do to go out and find where uh or like try to fill in as much of this as we possibly can through our own Community engagement so I think that like great job for bringing this and placing this forward I think that this gives us a wealth of information I think that this also gives us a playbook for whoever the next president is and whoever is going to be on this board come the next meeting we have a very clear indicator of where we are lacking in terms of community engagement was very specific populations and I think that like this
208gives us opportunity to put our plan together in terms of going out and getting that information I also am super concerned about the fact that there uh is very little suit and voice here um and also want to be super cognizant that this wasn't directly designed to like fully impact and take in what student voice looks like that type of design is like very different from what it looks like to engage with adults and in a lot of ways we actually have more bandwidth and capacity to hear from our students given that like we have them on a daily basis and so it's literally pushing into classrooms and like having real conversations that is a capacity issue right that's another place where the board can step in we always like like to ask and beg
209for more opportunities to get in front of students we can go to them I think that where I'm really interested in the next steps here is knowing what were the Lessons Learned like if you were to do anything different or if you were to like do some analysis and I'm not asking you to do that on the spot by any means what were some of the barriers for families of color specifically participating and how can we work together with our expertise given that we are one of the most diverse boards that Seattle public schools has had in a bit to really lean in and get more information in a more representative fashion um and then I would also just ask myself if I'm looking at we had iners we had online we had school staff
210sessions and we had a community survey if I'm thinking about how my family would have responded to those things uh when I was going to school probably would not have participated either especially like during the summer right um and it's Pro and I want to be super clear it's not for lack of Desire it's probably lack of knowledge that this was even happening and so I'm really curious again amazing job to the district for stand this up and doing this in the way that they did I'm really curious like to have a conversation as a board about like where do we see ourselves fitting in and filling in the gaps so immediate reactions but again great job excited to do more one one thing I'm clear about is we want we saw this as opportunity
211to do this in Tandem and so uh to the extent that we can staff this and we can stand it up you all can as board members can come in and show up show up and participate uh we want to continue to make that possible uh we know that you all's bandwith to do some of the planning and all this is very limited in terms of just your seven folks that aren't aren't necessarily in the operation every day so let us do some of that heavy lifting for you to create these uh environments and so you all can direct us in terms of uh help us to find ways that we can get to more African-American um families help us to find ways that we can uh get get in get in front of students
212and I think we can start to build that I I want to consider this to be uh an evolution that this is we're starting this we're going to keep refining this this might be the road mapap for how we do this for other items that we might want to talk about but uh we want to just continue to build on this not not necessarily say okay we're done here's the information but just continue to refine it get more get more clarity as we go along so uh uh I appreciate the the board wanting to take an initiative to get in touch with uh families that weren't able to participate but we want to do we want to be supportive of your efforts to do that so I I don't want you all to have to
213do that heavy lifting solely not that we have you know a bunch of community engagement type of Staff but we actually had volunteerism internal to the to to to to District staff that came and facilitated and showed up participated um didn't know what they were going to do when they got there were were were open to be directed to these different places because they know how valuable this is too so uh I don't know who is next but I want I do want to make sure that I can jump in there from the student perspective but uh uh I I'm going ask since this is director hampson's last meeting I'm gonna let her I'm make sure she gets an opportunity to go so go ahead and then iuse okay did I use oh okay just
214a few things one I think it's great that we've had this opportunity to get nearly 4,000 community members to get feedback on us but with that I think the ball is in our field now that we have to show how or the district has to show apologies how they're going to use that feedback in a tangible way and be transparent in that because these people confided in us they took the time out of their day to give us this feedback and we have to take that and show how that's influencing the actions we make because they're not going to come back again if they see they gave the feedback and nothing came out of it or even if things did come out of it they don't see it so we have to show the actual
215actions and the actual influence this is happening this is having on the decisions that are being made second thing regards to student feedback I know President hery and Vice President Rankin touched on it a little bit but yes we do need more student feedback in this it isn't a complete picture without the student voice um and with that I think thinking about utilizing existing channels because there's a lot of fatigue there's a lot of survey fatigue that's something that I talk about all the time with my friends that we're overs surveyed we over I mean these things that come up over and over again multiple different channels because people don't communicate between what already exists so Looking Into Climate areas that already exist and incorporating these things into there rather than trying something completely different
216I think will lead to increased turnout yeah and with the points that were brought up and with what the general Trends look to be I'd say that's accurate to what students are feeling too but I'm just one person so um survey the students actually get the consensus voice from them and I think go from there thank you so much a um director hamson um was there a breakdown between K5 and I mean primary and secondary there were options options for you to identify or to select but uh I will go back and double check but if it was not represented here I don't think we have that data okay uh I'm just curious because it's feels very very K5 to me that's I think it's an accurate representation of K5 data um and that would
217be true for the advanced learner services and you know there's a number of things that that point to that um but that's also the period when people tend to have the strongest opinions true um also cuz y'all are a lot harder to manage when you get older ask meim me um uh so um I mean you don't want to be managed period so I I think um that would be really important to track I don't know I I think that this is um it does paint a really good picture and I agree that we want to be able to feed that back in terms of hey this is what we heard um this is you know kind of the vision I don't know if anybody noticed but I did get director Ranken the book on
218Schoolhouse Rock the whole book so I see a little animation of this of like what this that's what's going through my head when you were when you were doing the presentation is like the visual yeah there you can see my choreography thank you so well and I know you like the video so the that that you know we can visually represent this to people and and that is a much more digestible way for people to say that oh yeah that is kind of you know what we talked about um and I I think again very Elementary Focus because it was sort of like we need one of these and we need one of those and we need one you know the librarian and the counselor and it it's so different in the in the secondary
219environment um and you know given absent you know having more student surveys more student voice which I don't think we would necessarily ask them the same questions um and I think my my sense of um of this was very similar director director rankins in terms of okay yeah and what if you have all that but you're not learning and that's kind of my interest for asking students that question um because I started to see this drift that we get into as adults and and we as parents are particularly guilty of this of what do I want for people to provide for my child um to sort of stuff them full of things resources and versus what is my child actually need to be successful in the things that they want to do and to achieve
220their their goals and um and how to what's my so that's one piece of it that I don't see talked about um that I think if you don't and this is about how you survey but if you don't we didn't ask the question to families what would you need in order to for your student to be more successful um and I would want to ask that's a question i' want to ask the same thing of students what do you need from the adults in your environment and in order to be more successful and because the number one thing that I've been hearing from students as um uh because we and during all the campaigning I had the opportunity to hear from a bunch of students and the thing that I heard was instruction and the
221feeling that they've and this is not because um the this isn't a knock on teachers per se because we know where teachers mental capacity is right now and how overwhelmed and exhausted they are um but there's such a a low sense of like I just don't feel like they want to teach me and some of that is the belief Gap I believe that we have in this system it's very prominent in Seattle public schools and and adults not believing that that kids um are you it's that Gap we talked about earlier um I you of like just really not being able to connect with the students and make those students see and I'm not saying that this is necessarily how teachers are feeling um but it's what's happening in the dynamic and so what is
222the perceived need or what what would do you think would help you um I gave an example to superintendent Jones um of there's a librarian in one of my kids schools that is connecting with with my kid in a way that is um making the difference and it turns out this person is known for doing that and so it wasn't a surprise and every kid needs that um and so that was the one thing that I sort of saw I think it was sort of circuitously identified is like well we need one of these and we need one of these because we think those are the people that are going to create those touch points as opposed to identifying um the actual need right like that's going to help this the kid feel present and
223and wanting to learn and um that somebody believes in them and um that's what you're supposed to get from all those little jobs titles right but it's not about the it's really not about like there happens to it doesn't have to be a librarian right I mean that's that's a it's not about the um the position it's about the the risk management strategies that everybody in the system see how I work that in there um takes on like if this if like at the that's the the best result of good risk management is that everybody is a risk owner all the way down to the classroom to the you know building that means you take on the risk of checking in with this student who's wandering through the halls and say hey what the heck
224why aren't you in class um so those are the kind of things I would be interested to on that next deeper dive of like okay now we got to take this and learn a little bit more and I agree with a that there's ideally you try to see what's already out there because students are surveyed to death um and I and frankly I don't think they think that anybody's going to do anything with it um so what's some sort of method of doing because I I think they'll tell you if they they have like one to two qu I don't know this is not my area of expertise I know that um when you do it in the right way in the right time frame you can get a wealth of information in a very
225short period of time from students that will really provide some more meat around um this initial data like not not just you know an addition to this is what we what we visually think that it needs to look like in order to provide those underlying needs and now we need to talk about what are those underlying needs that are being you know like why okay why why do you need these things um what is it that you're is how is this going to support you support your student kind of thing and then the only other thing I would say is um I can tell that uh this was not using Max ID um and I guarantee I'm not going to go away when it comes to using Max ID you will get emails from me
226still about any surveys or data that comes through that is not using Max ID we've gotten surveys from other entities who have used not even our data but some other Federal data Federal data is the I can only think of expletives for it right now um because it erases students and so that 1% I just gave you the number of native students does anybody remember the number of native students that I read off earlier yeah so that's not right right but you that you pulled a real number it was just not Max ID so um I think it's really important when we're trying to say whether or not we're representing our communities that we're using the max ID that tells us whether or not we truly have those identif we're you know showing the the
227percent because it's actually lower right it's not representative um if that's 5 which you know those are rounded up I can tell so who knows what the actual number is but um so that that's just a note in terms of going into this we don't want to um I do want to celebrate that we got that high percentage of families of color um and at the same time I'm want to push us to use max ID and and dig deeper and get to those communities um I'm I'm not sending superintendent Jones out to I mean you could but there's a whole bunch of issues with that um3 thank you okay yeah so and and as we as we get into yeah disaggregating so that that's where you want to make sure you get into populations
228that we know because we know there's some multilingual populations that are on that under that Asian category that we need to disaggregate that our students further some educational Justice um so uh but you know again it's still it's it's really not bad all things considered that you managed to pull this off in August um and I think the good news is people are in invested right and and I it's a matter of giving people the right Hooks and and kind of educating them along the way um and so I think this is a fantastic starting point which is I I know that's what you were aiming for I think for what you set out to do you really accomplished a lot thank you thank you I did get a text from our research team we
229can break that down by level so sorry um building on what aush was saying is um I think there's tremendous work in terms of the people who responded giving us their feedback and tremendous work from your team and compiling this so um I'm wondering what is the next step in terms of sharing back um these sharing back this essentially Beyond this session with for directors we will be sharing out tomorrow this report as well as a break down of the rest of the meeting that is going out we will also host it on web but we will also send out directly to community so those are two immediate steps director Harris thank you thank you big time um it's a start impressive love me some pictographs and graphs um um one of the things that
230I noticed having attended four or the five I think whenever um in the hot summer we need some more TLC some more High touch we had a ton of SPS staff facil itting but but they weren't wearing their badges so folks didn't know who the heck they were and we had big trolleys full of water but we gave them to facilitators and board members well people were sweating bullets at one point at Nathan hail we rolled it down the the middle but that's the sort of thing that people you know it's like having one bad restaurant meal right everybody carps about for for years um the other and we've talked about this in the past was the framing of this uh closures and consolidations laying right on top of this and what we put out
231tomorrow if we can connect those dots with the budget process closures consolidation and the strap plan what why did I give up one of my evenings when for some folks their biggest fear and lots of us work from a position of fear especially when it comes to our kids if if we can connect the dots closures consolidations the budget process and our dreams because this is what it is this is about our dreams about our children um and and somehow synthesize but at a minimum recognize and identify that piece is would be my concern the framing of of what we put out there and then give folks what their appetite drop a carrot or two next steps that that it's not going in a filing cabinet someplace because unfortunately we have a history thank you
232very much all right so um this was uh really good I just threw a question out there and 45 minutes an hour later uh tremendous perspective uh we're we're learning in real time I think one of our uh public testimony persons today said Thank You For Being transparent thank you for your open learning and that's that's what we're doing and so hopefully this is building on that so as we transition to this next part of this pres this part of this presentation um these data that we just saw from a system of world resource schools um will ultimately be I think the road mapap to where we want to be so this is the vision for what it looks like uh it's going to take a multi-year effort obviously to get there in my in
233my view I'm thinking around 2030 is the point where we'd have all those elements that are in the well resource schools uh aggregation there uh available and up and running and that people can uh access it so as we go on to this next section where we're talking about uh the budget we're talking about the fiscal stabilization plan we're talking about the resolution um that the the system of well resource schools data points that you just saw is going to influence that and so as director Harris was talking about show how show these connections it was important that we uh let out with this catalytic set of data because this is going to influence not only again budget planning but strategic planning the levy planning and all those elements and so uh when we start
234talking about Services programs and how we're using our building spaces that covers the gamut and so next slides please so uh this is the funding our future um this is uh session number three of 11 uh as we talk about getting to uh a balanced budget in uh for the 2425 and if you go if you go back in time a little bit we were we were dealing with $131 million budget crisis uh or budget Gap um we dealt with that and we're still feeling the impacts of that that we we went into we went really deep to find ways to uh get us to a balanced budget for uh this year 2324 and next slide please and we and those gaps were caused by insufficient funding from the state of Washington we know that
235declines in enrollment previous uh service and Staffing decisions uh and it caused us really to have a structural deficit and so the structural deficit is different than a one-time deficit a structural deficit is over time when your expenditures outweigh your Revenue um you are in a structural deficit and so we had one-time sources Esser stabilization fund other other one-time resources and that masked this structural shortfall those are no longer available to cover the Gap and so we've been talking about this but year after year after year after year at least as long as I've been involved with Seattle schools we had one-time resources to do that uh what makes it so hard in 2425 planning is we don't even have really funding to do adjustments so we're now down to the point where we're looking
236at reductions and some of some people might say well that's a deficit mindset you need to have more of a growth mindset but the reality is resources are resources and we're going to be as creative as possible and so um this this meeting that we're having this part of the meeting right now is why we had the cameras here there was all the interest around what are you going to do and the C the cameras left too soon uh because because this this is it this is it uh next slide please um so our budget development goals are still the same we want to stabilize our financial future to be able to fund our highest priorities well re the system of well resourced schools those are that's what it looks like for our highest priorities
237we want to resolve long-term Decades of structural deficit spending we I I said it before we're going to be the cohort that resolves that and then we want to display fiscal stewardship and responsibility you all as board members got into a tangle about an hour ago about the fiscal policy but that's what this that's what this is all about how do we display fiscal stewardship and respons responsibility what I know that we do well is we argue over the how but we ultimately agree on the what and the what is trying to get to fiscal stewardship and responsibility that was the Genesis of the fiscal policy so I applaud the board for taking that that frightful step to go out there and uh make that happen but that's what we're trying to do next slide
238please uh you've seen these principles before now we have some graphics to go along with it we want to always prioritize quality instruction and learning that that is our bread and butter that's what we do very well uh on all measures you can see Seattle public schools around I was just with other urban districts you can look across almost every measure and we're in that top cortile and we're doing that really well but that we are not stopping there because we know we have gaps and where the standard is and where we want to be uh we are moving with good faith efforts we each share the same values and I talk about teamwork the board and superintendent are one team uh sometimes we don't do things and I and you all I'm I'm talking
239in code right now we all know what we're talking about uh as a team but sometimes uh we don't do that but ultimately we all going back to the first first graphic there we do share the same values um we need to be clear on the challenges and opportunities that's really us trying to be transparent and so as you kind of hear what we're trying to do here I I'll speak to the the nature of a of a fiscal stabilization resolution so next slide please so uh Fred's going to talk about this enrollment um and he's going to talk about the next slide and then I'll I'll come back with the actual fiscal stabil fiscal stabilization resolution plan so that we can be all on the same page about where we're trying to go for
240this 2425 budget thank you Dr Jones um it's good to know there were three uh elements Dr Jones referred to that um sets up the context that we're in that um we recognize that there's a general funding problem um in the state of Washington for basic education and um while we appreciate the efforts from the legislature there's still more work um to be done there there's our own kind of decisions and operations and then a decline in enrollment um uh in the last uh four years we've seen uh 4,900 student enrollment decline about 4,000 of that um are elementary schools uh we just finished an October account the um combined October account of uh of enrollment at our smallest 20th elementary schools is 4,000 uh 41 students so that loss is the equivalent of 20
241of our current elementary schools so that's why we need to um and while um we get Revenue as noted above and kind of we get marginal revenue for each student we have fixed costs around buildings which is um why we're thinking about how we allocate resources um uh amongst buildings are um work with our um with two um demographic firms um to look at the future um we don't see huge you know we see flat maybe slow growth in coming years so um some of the commitments we made um to the board is to restructure you know how we develop budgets and to think longer term you know not just plan a year ahead and so we're trying to get to uh recommendations that get us back to a sustainable um future that year in
242year out we are not scrambling to figure out how to budget how to um solve next fiscal Year's Challenge and then um again this has been something that's been years in the making and it's good to note that um you know over uh the last several decades our enrollment has declined about 50% and our um utilization of buildings has declined about 10% and and again all those buildings come with fixed costs that um don't uh go away as enrollment declines which is you know why we need to keep that's why we asked about questions about buildings and well resource schools and that's why we're one of the big drivers that is um leading to this discussion if we could go to the next slide please and so again I um uh mentioned that you know
243or we li with small schools the the uh prototypical model for that um describes how you um allocate funding at the state level for elementary schools kind of assumes 400 students um uh we 13 of our uh 62 elementary schools have 400 students or more so about 25% are at that model obviously 75% are um and even at 300 students um we have 20 uh 28 elementary schools 26 elementary schools and 2K through eights that have um less than 300 students which is a practice that is not shared by any of our neighboring districts in in the pet Sound area so so that's why we're looking at this um as hard as we are uh and you know it's just um we going to have to land on a strategy that accounts for this one
244way the other um uh what's the best allocation of our resources it is it more resources in each building or is it um spreading resources across more buildings that's really the core of what we're W going to be wrestling with over the next couple of years I think I'll turn it back to Dr Jones if I remember correctly make a quick comment because your your point about declining en rollment is also connected to declining birth rate I mean let's just be honest right that's what's happening in our district too is people are not having the number of children at the rate that they have previously and so when you're doing this you have to I I encourage you to reach out to whatever Public Health uh connection you have that's not me because I'm doing
245other things um but they have the data they have the the trends of the data and the birth rate is not going to go up given all the things that are happening in Seattle so that will impact you know I'm making my contribution I got one coming in you know but that's about it that that we work um I have to just get him in there every time with public health with our local planning authorities who see the same Trends we do see um leading indicators building permits and um that is by far the the biggest driver while Public School Systems and O other districts you know we still searching for some enrollment because there certainly was a a a short-term dip related to the um pandemic but the longterm outlook doesn't see us bouncing
246back um and so we and so this gets back to this needs to be a multi-year exercise we need to think um many years ahead as we as we think about how to resolve these problems are we can are you open for questions right now um the [Music] other I mean the there's the birth rates there's also the age of our city and home home ownership and housing which is that's just it is just is what it is but but something that's and I've talked about this before like this isn't like there's no reason for anybody to take this personally it's just a reality of living in a city that changes and grows and contracts and expands and if you look at the history of Seattle public schools and the population of the students in
247in Seattle that are in our Public Schools it's we're actually I I know that when there's change we're all like oh my gosh oh my gosh we're under you know this is a desperate situation where um you know losing students right we're at about the same point that the Seattle Public Schools population was in 2008 that's not that long ago so we're about the same place since then there was huge amount of growth in a short period of time and opening of a whole bunch of buildings and now that that's contracted back again but we still have 10 more buildings than we had then and that's not that's just that's just we project and we make our best guess and then sometimes things end up being different than we expected hopefully what we're doing now
248and I you know I can't imagine we're doing anything that differently than people did in the past they did the best that they could with what they knew at the time hopefully maybe since then we have maybe better tools maybe some historical knowledge um Partnerships with the city you know is going to be I already know of different housing things that are changing around we also then are going to have so like my parents still live in this single family home that I my brothers and I were raised in so there's there's no new students there and there's no new housing in their neighborhood and their neighborhood has a lot of people of their generation those people are eventually going to retire downsize move die and that's going to drastically change the landscape again and
249so I just just to say that like this isn't an un this isn't like a a crisis that's never been dealt with that we don't know how to face um and it's also not it's not that once we solve this right now okay now we never have to address it again it's never going to change no there's going to be you know it's going to it's going to CH the only thing that's going to happen again is more change so we just have to be able to meet the needs of our students that we have and also I I don't know if it's been stated but I just want to be really explicit that like closing and consolidating schools doesn't mean that we sell those buildings in that property and we never have them again
250CU we know that should birthing birth like and actually I had had just very anecdotal a lot of toddler age trick-or-treaters at my house this year and I that I haven't had right like that was a CH that's a change in just my immediate neighborhood is that suddenly there's a bunch of toddlers around so I know what people are doing during Co um but uh those kids are going to become Seattle public school students and um and then depending on what kind of housing changes are there's going to be more of them so um and then in 2030 or whenever we think you know we anticipate a swing back so we we can't ever say and and this is the decision and now this is how it is forever we don't get to do that
251because we're a public entity that has an obligation to all children who live within Seattle who want to attend Seattle public schools which is most school-aged children by the way um that's really that so I don't know I'm just saying like this is this is just a a reality of where we are at this point in time that we need to be responsive to this isn't anything that's wrong with this those schools or the people at them or the students it's this is just the reality of the moment and our charge really is to um make sure that we're representing as a body what's best for the entire District not any individual part of it because all children whether they're out of school with less than 300 students or out of school with 550 students
252whatever all students have the right to a free and appropriate public education provided by Seattle Public Schools if they live in Seattle but none of them have any entitlement or priority ownership over any particular location or teacher or principal that's we we as a community own this all together to in order to provide education to our children nobody has more ownership over a school or or that staff or whatever so Our obligation to students and serving them no matter where they live and no matter what building they're in is what we have to focus on and not get caught up in believing that our communities have to compete against each other because we're actually part of the same Community yes I I would note that our long-term plan has to account for that capacity and
253the need for variability and capacity it's easier to do um with our current design standards that has bigger buildings where the capacity is how how much you fill each building it's not opening and closing buildings in terms of being being agile and ready to deal with that is is again a bit easier to do do with um buildings that can handle higher enrollments just a heads up it's 8:30 uh and I know that this is a critical conversation but I'm not letting any of us off the hook for Progress monitoring either so that's going to be at least an hour plus questions um it is 8:30 that's fine we can have a bathroom break but let's keep it concise one super duper quick technical question is if there's is there an update sorry it's okay
254um thank you for including some of this context around the sizes of elementary schools I'll note that merca Island their elementary schools are about 500 students and they're looking to go to 600 students um I have a so I wasn't aware that we had recruited a second demographer and I was wondering if um were there different did they approach them methodologically differently um what was the rationale for getting a second demographer it it was really to provide quality assurance on the major project that Flo did and so um uh we hired uh BL Kendrick who has a firm that we worked with for many years and many districts have to see is it um uh consistent with what he's seeing in in other districts and just check our methodology and you know it's not an
255exact science and so um their um take on it was uh fairly consistent that's good to know um when Flo gave us that presentation uh just for director s's sake that he shared with us that uh we are actually getting birth data from King County public Appel so that is the Baseline that we're working with um and we are also working with the city of Seattle around um permit yeah the epidemiology Folks at King K public King County Public Health are City Seattle County Public Health are great and are are data Wizards wonderful um so um so I know that the the last time we had to do a round of consolidations that at the time the enrollment planning was that we were either going to be flat or kind of declining and then actually
256what ended up happening there was a huge increase and we had to quickly reopen some schools so what I didn't get from Flo is what is actually different this time around that gives us the belief that that won't happen again and regardless of whether or not it does happen again I understand that the expectation is that we will be planning just in case that that happens again I think the single biggest factor is the infill since then and you know at some point you get to the point where how much housing stock is possible that is going to be family housing and that um I think we had issues last time about and and this is where it still gets difficult while our um forecast for the current um year off by 47 students out
257of thou you know tens of thousands obviously it's much harder at the school level to know exactly what's happening in every neighborhood um so some of the challenges we had about was where we forecasted and then again um the city you know as the city matures it becomes it matures as a place it becomes less um malleable in terms of how much family housing can you build what are our Consultants telling us about the Seattle comp plan um because this this does have shades of the previous closures consolidation we are going to go through a revolution here with re cross the alley I got to listen to the hard where and we've got eight uh condos across the alley my neighborhood is two blocks away from a rapid ride and it's crazy town so and
258and many of those are in fact family oriented development so both our consultants and so we participate in the in the comp planning process we have staff and um they are predicting higher uh growth in populations and than our uh demographers 18 and younger um they and and concede their methodology for doing that is um just kind of based on historical Trends and much more coarse than the analysis um we've done and they said you know that it just isn't our thing to um in terms of kind of services that belong in the comp plan you know that is not a focus area for them so they acknowledge as a reason for that difference and it's really um the uh looking at building permits looking at the kind of construction aspected just is much lower
259rate of um uh housing that's two bedroom or more and you know is is the in terms of everybody's crystal ball that there's uh there's a housing um crisis in the city as We Know and there's a um uh lots of Need for Workforce housing and densifying neighborhoods but it's not necessarily leading to um the kind of housing that we expect to we haven't even figured out which iteration of the comp plan is going to be fast right and so that's why we're at the table to at least understand what what they know and then again what the goals of their plan they don't write the comp plan to satisfy our needs line of the day all right um so you all have this what's called a resolution fiscal stabilization resolution plan and this is
260uh like I said this is meeting three of 11 this is also meant to create create increasing clarity as we go along so this is some this is a preview it's insight as to what uh my team superintendent is proposing to pursue as we get to a balanced budget and so these are the elements that are within this uh resolution that we are proposing that we do our do the analytics on that we do the costing on that we go forward uh and really build for the May 8th plan that you all will actually be voting on for the for the uh balanced budget and so um this can be adjusted as you as you see fit but we are uh I think four or five months ahead of where we were last year I
261think you all might have concerns about the new board members coming on they will have an opportunity to participate in this as well uh I want to give ourselves credit for being ahead of the game and around showing you this is this is what we're trying to to do in terms of the key elements to balancing the budget and so these next slides are really the the roll up to what's contained in this this resolution document so superintendent recommendations for 2425 uh we want to be purposeful and collaborative as we build toward the system of well resource schools that we talked about uh earlier we want to make sure that we build a budget does not that does not include consolidations for the 2425 school year so that we can be planful so that we
262can bring people along so that we can talk about things like the the master plan and what that's going to look like we want to make sure that we facilitate this transition to a system of well resource schools that we may actually need to borrow a short-term basis uh Andor liquidate assets and so you're seeing that as part of our our strategy uh proposed strategy moving forward next slide and so the recommendations may include uh uh reductions and adjustments in central office and central office staffing uh and expenses uh changes to Transportation uh some sort of fees perhaps the sale uh or lease of non-school properties uh we have about we have three major pieces of property that we don't have school-based activities happening uh programmatic adjustments and restructuring we would think about delaying our
263repayment to our economic stabilization fund that we borrowed from that we we used up last year uh we also would look at reductions in any other contingency balances that we have and then we talk about reductions and adjustments in school Staffing unfortunately and the utilization of one time self-help funds and school carry forwards so these are kind of the elements are what we're going to use to balance the budget next slide please so as we look at the out years 25 to 28 uh this plan as I mentioned uh will include uh may include school consolidations we kind of have a basis for that understanding of why that might be uh a very a very plausible approach to helping balance the budget but also we wanted to we do that in a fashion that we
264would also try to uh realize some of the things in well-resourced schools we we wouldn't just do consolidation as a budget savings exercise we do this as can we um Bridge programs and schools and services in a way that our students actually get more or they we actually have some assurances we'd also look at uh grade level reorg ations what that looks like uh maybe Dr Jarvis could talk about that a little bit but then program adjustments and restructuring are what we will look at as well in the out years so I'll stop there said a lot um this shouldn't be new information we we've talked about this uh just recently but that's what the spirit of what we're trying to do this is the Arc of it uh like I said you all have
265the the the pen and the gavel to add things delete things to this but we are eager to get started on the on the depth of work that we need to do in order to get ready to provide a a balanced budget for 20 2425 so uh open it up to responses concerns wants wishes desires and fears and then we'll we can go from there uh the last two grade level reorganization program adjustments and restructuring I don't have a clue as to what that means and I don't want to um example assume thank you um so for just a minute I want to be really careful that because things can run away in a hurry um what we're trying to share with you is a toolbox a toolbox of elements that could be used in
266combination to a get us to a stable footing get us to a system there you saw earlier the values that are leading to vision and and using those values that are emerging and the vision that's emerging the present status is that we've got a a change requirement we cannot stay where we are we have to fix some things but if we're going to go about that then how do we do that so I want to be careful that I don't just roll out a whole bunch of things that people say aha that that's where they're heading uh so I'm not trying to be there but example of that would be for just a second uh you've had issues you've been looking at for a number of years on k8s um k8s could be looked at
267from two different perspectives one is what's the effect on middle schools where middle schools will be shrinking in a few years uh and what would you do or could be looked at from the other side the k5s and say if you add those as pure k5s in the system how big are they and now what's our what's our issue uh as you look at grade level reorganizations uh one of the things uh that's been done for certainly from Baby Boom times on is uh some of you live through an era of where do we put the 9th graders well we put them in the high school if I've got room at the high school uh or I kick them out of the high school because the high schools are overcrowded and districts have left them
268alone in their own building they've hoped they would go away for a year and grow up uh uh they've put them the junior high model and the Middle School model in in this case uh one example that's all it is is an example is you could look at retaining the sixth grades at the elementary and you would say I've just increased the enrollment size by 177% on the average and I haven't moved a child I just don't let any fifth graders go out of out of my school for a while uh you could combine those in a sense of do I start to phase out k eight if that's necessary and uh I'll have some weird configurations over a while but they will be part of the tools that get us to where we want
269to be by the 2030 as as we look there a little bit if president hery I know we're pressed for time but I'm going to try to say it quickly I don't think I've ever experienced in my long career a district that was literally living living strategic planning of looking at at our what what changes need to be made looking at the values looking at the vision looking at the tool set that's there looking at the assets that we have and then trying to figure out a plan I want to give a this gentleman on my right a great credit he's been very patient and not looking at immediate what do we do just to fix the budget but rather what do we do that fits the city of Seattle and a school district he
270he so obviously loves dearly uh to say this has to be part of a longer range it has to build on the on the vision so so I'm trying to answer it but at the same time be really really careful that I'm not rolling out a hidden plan or not trying to be transparent but all the tools are there to say let's when we're done and we we won't be done it'll be a fiveyear process uh but as we move through this we're moving very intentionally very appropriately with the values and the vision and we haven't we haven't ignored places that could help us get there if that's it uh what I I think I love most of all what what Beverly went through earlier is you saw the from the parents in the community
271what represents a really well-run school system it's got all these elements for my kids and and if my my needs are special services or extended program or highly capable if it's uh if it's the extracurricular if it's the the tremendous interest we've had in recent years on wellness and and student wellness and health so I'm taking that extra minute just to say the broad picture is a superintendant and I know what he's asked of me and that's to take the whole Tu box and look at it and say how do we get there honoring the community honoring the values and so there I I said it now now I'll quit thank you so much art please um so and looking at the 24 25 recommendations and the kind of the recommendations Beyond I think something
272that is missing for me is that other than flip back one please changes to Transportation yeah other than changes to Transportation there doesn't seem to be a match with what are the largest sources of our deficit so um we collectively know those to be special education Transportation multilingual substitutes is one that I learned at our last session so um I understandably I I see the vision where we're choosing some maybe onetime strategies and the 2425 budget so that we can do the work of actually addressing our structural deficit in the Years Beyond um but I think that give we need to have an understanding of the sources of deficit like why were there not options from those categories that are included in the recommendations um and then secondly specifically to the changes to transportation and
273the reductions and adjustments in school Staffing I I try to incl includ that as a addition in the financial policy that we just passed which is I think it's really important for us to when we think about these as options to have an analysis on what is the impact to the students so um I understand the goal here in December is to hear a list of ideas and you will do the work but my expectation is that there needs to be some analysis around the sources of deficit and there whatever ideas that you are proposing to us analysis on the impact on students yeah please with all du respect I think you actually heard some of those tonight but we didn't present it in that fashion that may have been a weakness so the uh
274loss of enrollment the tie of the enrollment to the funding system and ospi the 400 school size versus the small schools that that we have in Seattle those are actually the source the major source of our deficit I think what you're looking at if I may is for example special education is a is a major deficit program that's not Seattle in a way that is the the funding system that's that we have from the state it's not that we can't find efficiencies and we already have but the reality is the the major deficit you can say of X dollar and special Ed is not the source even though it's parallel in numbers it's not the source the source is exactly what you've heard we're running for example the small schools that are are not sustainable
275not fund that and and that so as you look at uh the world of staging for 25 26 consolidation closure as necessary restructuring as necessary that's right at the heart but that's the hardest part to get to unless we do a real quick knee-jerk of just let's close some schools without doing the rest of that so so I think we're trying to I I know for example the hundreds of hours have already been spent doing exactly what you're asking let's make sure we know what we're looking at before we do this which is part of the reason we're not recommending to move immediately into consolidation because that has to be part of the the rest of it so again I'm I'm pontificating and I apologize for that no that was clean I couldn't have said
276it better myself but that is exactly what we're trying to do and that's the that's the quote unquote delay we're not delaying because we never said we're going to do it but that's the longer run up to doing some of the the harder more complicated work so thank you thank you Dr Jarvis um somewhat related I think you know we're used to we're used to the onetime fixes we're used to the Band-Aids and I know like the capital gains tax has yielded more money than was anticipated and um it's you know some of it is earmarked for certain for early learning and child care and then the rest of it is supposed to go to school construction the legislator legislature could decide to to change that they're the ones that decided it would go to
277school construction they could decide to change that and um that's uh $500 million I think um and that would be well $500 million across the state um so that would be worth advocating for like hey what's what's the plan for this we have a lot of districts that could use that but that's still would be another band-aid and not help us not address the underlying issues that we have to address that would just sort of be pushing off a piece of it not to say that we shouldn't advocate for that and if it goes to districts um you know we the largest District in the state um but if it goes for Capital we are very fortunate to have the ability to um receive Capital funds from local levies and I can't remember if I
278said this before wakam has not taught chemistry in 30 years so when we're talking about $500 million like first of all that's not going to solve our under that's a one-time money because the next time the capital gains tax is collected it might not have that deficit so it could help us with some stuff but if it's earmarked for construction I'm not about to suggest that we fight for a piece of that ahead of w kayum who has uh I think six working toilets for a district of over 400 kids and the staff that serve them like no so um uh the sorry oh yeah so my question directly related to what's in the resolution is about the um uh number three the superintendent is authorized to include the following um this is sort of
279the the universe of possibilities that that will be presented but the question that I have is is is the is the um because I want to make sure I'm interpreting it the same as it's being intended like what I would like to see and we may not just we just may not have that many different options but I would like to see sort of within these things here are a range of possibilities maybe we're not actually maybe we don't have a range of possibilities but so I guess my question is is how prescriptive is this direction is it that were we to approve this and provide this Direction I mean it's a resolution so it's not binding but um were we to approve this and and affirm this direction would that mean that your interpretation
280of that would be a proposal one proposal that includes elements of these or a I'm trying to make sure I'm making sense or a sort of proposal that includes we could do this we could do this like a a kind of would you rather sort of tradeoff description of tradeoffs and again like I'm don't we don't have a huge range of options that are going to be available but how um I guess how nailed down would you view this language as yeah yes in terms of what's presented next yeah this is prescriptive in the sense that you are absolutely correct we don't have a whole lot of other options and so this is really getting your your authority to pursue these and to study them and to research them to director songs Point around which
281which which are the big ticket items and and we would start to sharpen our pencil around how do we pull all these together to get to that to that balance B ing point and so U and doing this over a multi-year uh a multi-year approach is actually good but for 2425 there's there's not like there's not 17 other options that are that are on the list that we're that we're not looking at so again I as I opened up you all can say Don't Touch number three you know Fe fees uh unless you unless you you're only talking about I'm making it up but you all could say take a couple of these off and then we have to go deeper other places but we don't have a list of 10 or 11 other choices
282here so it is somewhat prescriptive but it's it's you all can explore the universe of these these things that are on that list is that is that is that clear yeah I think so I'm I mean yeah so the other so it makes sense to think a little bit longer term but I have to reflect on what a very bold testifier who I can't remember her name I'm super appreciative of her just saying the super Brave thing um of and what you just confirmed also Dr Jervis that the source of our structural deficit is in fact a mismatch between students that we have and resources in terms of buildings and such um like that is actually the the structural deficit and so deciding to do that for one more year I I mean I think
283a lot of people breathe desire of relief but I'm thinking about the impact on students and school communities that was just felt last month what does next October look like with no consolidations and how do we keep like Dunlap from not having that same experience again um how do we make sure that we're serving students within that and then as a kind of a followup I know there are some principles in buildings and I'm who are like please just consolidate us we are struggling are we open to saying if there is a you know early early adopter or I mean I don't I don't know that anybody still feels that way but I had heard that sort of at the beginning of this year that there were some buildings that were just like oh my
284gosh we're so tired of not knowing if we're going to have a counselor and art teacher or whatever and could you just please and our building's old could you just please let us let us go here not not saying there's a ton of those but if there were to be a couple of schools School communities that were like we don't want to wait because we don't want to we don't want to do another year like this year um could could that like no consolidations meaning we're not directing them but like suppose someone like knowing that that is the source of our deficit if there was a school community that was like yeah we we don't want to wait what's the yeah so so they're probably are some school combinations of school communities that are saying
285they're approaching Readiness uh but I would question what what Readiness means are they bringing part of their Community is that ready or all of their Community is there is there K5 Community ready and not the 6 through eight Community we we so I know Dr Jarvis has been having some conversations and we've been Invitational he's been running point on just the exploration of that and so some folks are saying yeah we're we're we're thinking that we can we can actually pull this off but when we when we ask couple deeper questions do we know that we're ready to even support them in in this move right away and so Dr Jarvis can you add a little bit of context to that but I know that we're we we're thinking about that and and you know
286frankly if the board said hey if there are some folks that can exhibit some Readiness go for it I mean this is these are this is my recommendation if you all said don't be too constrictive on your recommendation if there's some schools that are ready to kind of pilot or be early adopters then you have the authority to go forward but that's that's or also go to instead of going to an interim location for a building that's going to get rebuilt they're being they're moving location anyway maybe it makes sense to say oh why don't you join this school Community for this time I'm starting to think that this conversation as fruitful as it is is getting away from the intent of the presentation it is now 9 o' and we will be doing progress
287monitoring so so so once you respond Dr Jarvis you're gonna say something and I'll try to do it quickly so yes I like what you're saying and and what I'm doing is trying to be as Invitational as as possible to those principles and leaders that say practically speaking pragmatically speaking we're probably going to have to do this there's also though the side that is very they call it loaded in a sense of I don't know too many of the principles that want to be the one that says I volunteered my school to be closed and then have their own parents say whoa what just when did this come how did we get there so we're trying to suggest that there are ways in which we will assist we will go through a very a good
288process that would engage people and we'll try to use that as a model ahead of those that are willing to step ahead but it's being it's very cautious and it's very careful and I would say I'm I'm definitely not closing the door to that but it's Invitational and it's I don't believe it's going to happen broadly uh the timing of saying can we do some of this on a frame of the fall of 2005 opens up a whole possibility to take a longer Runway as as Dr Jones said to have those same people say let's start and we can engage but it's I I've seen it up close in this last week of principls and their and their parents and PTA and just how do we make that work in a unified fashion I'm not
289naive enough to believe we're going to get consensus on any hard decision but we can get to a place where the the parents feel that they and the people they respect like their principal are leading them safely through a hazardous process uh so that's what we're trying to achieve in the short term I know Bev's been trying to get in there but I want I used to because I think you might have had a uh a connected thought to uh director ranky thought sorry I just want to get a clarifying question in before I do have to go home my mom's probably G to be pretty mad at me for staying here till 9:00 p.m. but um on this resolution I think you described as a toolbox most of the items are internal and that
290you can enact them now or you can enact them immediately but there is one item in going to the legisl legislature and getting a loan which is contingent on whether that actually happens or not and I was just wondering like how crucial is that to the budget for next year and if that doesn't happen do the other tools provide sufficient funding that we can exist without that one I think we're going to build this we're going to follow through on uh Dr Jones recommendation and the state school financing system has has Tools around financing if um if districts can't um build a balanced budget that would be our last resort we're fortunate to be a a wealthy District even if we have a structural spending and revenue mismatch on an annual basis so what we're
291ask asking legislature is to do something that's um in state government's interest to let us leverage our own resources but um there are ways to to do financing so I I mean in the end we'll have to put together a package that makes sense to the board that the board can support but um the and whatever that financing looks like it would be in the be I certainly believe it' be in the best interest of students to take that time and use that fi whatever financing mechanism we land on would mitigate impacts to students of all the other things we would have to do if we just in one year tried to um make these expenditure reductions that this is these are problems that have built up over decades and it it really isn't fair
292to the cohort of students in 24 25 to say it's all on you to to absorb the hit and so one way or the other um I uh I have confidence that we can find a way to um to basically get that bridge loan to a sustainable Financial strategy um I'm gonna head out now so bye tremendous question though that's that's great your mother's calling me to but can you clarify on the loan we're not a asking the legislature to loan US money we're asking for permission to borrow from ourselves correct I want to make sure that that's really clear I think that's a clear I mean a crucial distinction yes that we're asking to use money that is designated by the legislature for capital or for is that correct yes it's our cash reserves
293so we're asking to use that for operations which by state law we may not use as ongoing operating costs we did also did that this year for this year's budget we did receive permission to borrow from ourselves and so we're asking for an extension of that we're not asking the legislature to lend us new money I don't think that they would do that right so they they gave us permission to do that for this year we didn't exercise that option so we're asking to have that permission again that we will likely exercise okay I just want to clarify where the loan is coming from thanks I know uh Bev please jump in there were no jum jumping in or um just um signaling what might next steps be what would you be seeking from the
294board as we're wrapping up tonight director hson oh well my my comment um I think it's a response to this is related to that um I think by and large my understanding is this pretty similar to last year I think it's good to have this ahead I do think it would be ideal to give um new directors to to not ask them to vote on it um well I guess it would be it's intro tonight so I guess it would be on the consent agenda for in December um but they'll be building off of it in in subsequent meetings and so I think it's important that they have the opportunity to have another really long protracted discussion um but the uh the only concern I have is the way that number three is is worded
295is that it does feel very much like a prescriptive list as opposed to um you know number four which is to explore legislative Solutions and um because it's the it's a resolution that feels like not the right framing um that it should be the language should be something more to the um tune of you know is authorized to explore or provide um evaluate these these options um which is my understanding of what you're actually wanting to do is look at these and see what um impact they're going to have and then you know we've talked about fees before I mean these are because these are really General and changes to transportation that can mean a lot of things um that could be probably tear but because we are one of the again one of the
296a few districts that has two tiers um but it could be other things um fees we there's two components to that um I still have issue with anytime we start I think taking charging a fee to charge to to run a payment system is one thing I think as soon as you start charging families for things um that's another again I would want to see that as a net because it's not it costs money to collect that money um and then yeah I I think it's it just feels too a little too much like a laundry list um and of like okay these are the different things like that you can expect to to see are we going to see all of these things we're going to see some of these things um I I
297just something about the phrasing of it doesn't sound enough like okay but we are still going to make clear what these um the research you know the analysis behind behind all these things is and my preference would be for there to not be a list because then it just feels like we're getting into line item vetos and and and I don't think that's an appropriate discussion for us to get into director hson and the board uh would it please the board to perhaps say uh in number three authorized to consider the following instead of include and resarch consider and research yeah okay so next steps uh uh this board can give me direction on whether you want to uh respond to this and on December 13th which is proposed or a later date um and
298then pushing out to um uh January we're going to start talking about up dates on our budget development process and so that's what we're going to see in the next uh two or three months and so that's that's consistent with what's on on the budget timeline here and so we're tracking on this we have uh eight more engagements that we're going to have with you all around this around this topic we want to make sure that you all are fully fully up to speed on what we're trying to do and attempt and again this whole concept of teamwork is critical for us to to get to where we need to be so president hery uh I'm going leave it up to you on uh your board the board's determination if December 13th is a date
299that you all want to hold fast to if you say no we need we need more time for whatever reason then then we would certainly uh accommodate that yeah I think we're just naturally going to need more time given that um we're about to get a at least two new board members if I'm not mistaken um so I think it would be tough to bring them in on the third and then have them lobbied for two weeks and then put into a position to vote what what I would like to hear back from you is is there any significant difference between the 13th and when we return obviously like more time is better but in terms of getting the clarity that you need um do you see a substantive difference between those two yes a
300month makes a difference we're going to be hling to get the plan together by May and so that's we're months out right now today M and so uh if and we're still going to be working in the background we're in the lab right now looking at all these and I think we'll go forward with looking at all these anyway um but we may shrink the list if the board comes back and says no we're not we don't want you to pursue right items a b and c and then we we look at the rest of the list and can do that but I don't think it's going to significantly slow us down but we do we do we we do want to have as much time as possible so we're coming way in advance of
301what we did last year but sure um it it's still this year we're talking about reductions and not necessarily adjustments right and so that's a much more difficult process okay um I would just say please make it a significant part of new director on boarding we'll do yeah I was just going to say that the December um probably is important because we're going to be heading into school budget process in February so you're going to need some lead time that but I would encourage us to also participate in the new director on boarding thank you thank you all thank you all right take three minutes if you need to use the restroom take a bio Break um and please be back promptly at at 9:119 for Progress monitoring I'm hoping to get us out of
302here by [Music] 10:30 [Music] okay [Music] thank you to progress monitoring this evening for third grade reading and seven our seventh grade math goals today I'm joined with key leaders of this work assistant superintendent of academics Dr Mike stoski executive director of College and Career Readiness Dr Caleb Perkins and executive director of curriculum assessment and instruction uh caselle toner we'll follow the same sequence that we used at our last review of both these goals taking each memo in turn first third grade reading then seventh grade math um by spending spending a few minutes doing a independent read and we're going to bypass that today we're just going to scan it um and then we'll to refresh our memories to ensure we're all coming into the discussion with the same information uh we plan to change
303our approach slightly by providing a few slides to illuminate the student outcome data and emphasize ways we are responding to these student outcomes my colleagues and I will share some brief comments on the strategy uh strategies plural SPS is engaging to change these data uh before we get into our main discussion so any questions not hearing any thank you let's go ahead and begin our close read of the third grade memo but seriously if you have questions I entertain it how long yes yeah we'll uh just scan it briefly so you can get just refreshed and then we'll we'll proceed on you're supposed to be scanning yes third third yes third grade reading kelle's going to share a few slides to kind of help ground our discussion and uh then we'll take it from there
304so as um people are scanning the document um just uh we're excited uh because over two board meetings we've waited nine hours to get in front of you and so it's it's going to be worth the wait so we're we're yeah no no and I'm excited exed because if we make this last long enough directors Hansson and Harris we can just have you for just a little bit longer so this will be the uh I think a good one to end on which is the student work um for third grade raing and seventh grade math um some of the things that you're going to hear tonight um uh are reflected in uh questions that we had received uh that have been responded to and answered uh 25 questions or so that were uh brought back
305in October um we will talk uh briefly about some of the strategies and then also we want to get into some of the specifics because of last time that we were um going to be here in October we've done some good implementation of the work uh for both third grade reading um and also the seventh grade math that we want to illustrate uh for you in addition to sharing some of the the status of where exactly we are with our data um for our African-American boys for third grade reading so I'll hand it over to kelle who will get us started okay uh good evening everyone I'm celle toner executive director for curriculum assessment and instruction and I'm actually really excited to talk with you about this work because I feel like you know three
306four years ago we were talking about planning and imple um kind of laying the foundation for the work and now I we can actually talk about the work so let's let's get into it okay so well anyway we need the purpose one of the main purposes of this meeting is to answer the question are we on track to meet our targets okay so in the next slide you'll see um a more intricate slide yep there it is um that shows our subgroups of students that we've been um you know looking at data around but before we even get into that I just want to say that all of our children have the capacity to learn to read at grade level by third grade it's our responsibility to think about how do we build the systems
307and structure so that they can um show their Brilliance at school um just like kids do in community as well so this work isn't about fixing kids it's not about fixing communities or schools it's about us thinking about how do we build different systems in structures so that all kids can show um their Brilliance and um read at or above grade level by third grade all right so you'll see here this is smarter balance data from um last school year and the solid lines show student um outcomes over the last several years there's some Gap years in there uh when we had that pandemic um and then you'll also see the dotted lines up there are the um the targets that were sent that were set again before the student outcomes Focus govern um process
308was learned by Seattle schools and also uh you know before the pandemic so that's where we are right now you'll see that our um our outcomes are generally holding steady which um you know isn't what we were hoping for but it's also not a significant decline so that gives you a picture of where we are right now um with our African-American boys at 29% which is a couple percentage points down from where we were last year at 31.7 you will see our MultiLing Learners have um had an increase in outcomes from 24.8% uh to up to 30.6% you know anyway so that's where we are right with that I don't find I I find this information sort of like a look back in time but let's look at the next slide because it's going to
309help us understand um what I think is a little bit more interesting so this is a comparison where we look at map and SBA and we take a look at kids and their um accelerated growth so on the left you'll see the academ uh African-American boys and then in the the next um column over is students further from educational Justice and you can see the kids that were proficient on the SBA but take a look at the next sort of shade of green down which is the 16.8% or the 14% those are kids that are showing accelerated growth and that that is um first of all we wouldn't have even been able to show you this kind of data a couple years ago because didn't have map implemented across the system so thanks for your
310support on that and also we know that kids when you're not quite at grade level obviously you need to accelerate your growth so this is a tool that helps us as a system understand where our kids are and then also we can have different conversations with teachers and school leaders and and others that are supporting those systems and structures that we were talking about let's move on to the next slide all right now because we didn't get to talk with you the last time through we are here today and now we have some new data for you so this isn't actually in your memo um but it is in your slide deck and what this is is looking at um some of those predictive factors that um map has a whole Psy psychometric you know
311way of thinking about okay if this is what your um what your achievement is looking like in the fall then you are predicted to to um you know achieve like this on the SBA why that's important is because we can look at that and then we can say all right who do we need to really work with to get at that accelerated growth that we were talking about on that last slide right so if we were to just you know look at the predictive um indicators of our system right now our students furthest from educational Justice in the spring on SBA are predicted to be about 43.6% proficient on the SBA and our African-American boys would be 30 32.1% proficient now that could swing three or four percentage points one way or another but it
312is a better um it's more real-time data that helps us inform our strategies and our work we'll move on to the next slide um lots of you have asked about hey could you please break out some of the data and show us what's going on with our um subset of schools that you've been partnering with over the last several years so this is a slide that shows um our 13 priority schools that we've been working with and then there's some comparative uh comparison schools um that are research team looked at in Seattle schools if you read the fine print at the bottom there you'll see that um it's like schools that had about 15 or so African-American boys to um kind of have like comparison schools um and of those um comparison schools I believe
31311 of them are Title One schools so the Top Line shows the achievement of our African-American boys at our 13 priority schools on the SBA from last spring and the um the dotted line there below shows the uh like comparative comparison schools that we haven't been targeting those um system systems and structures and those resources toward um this is just one data point though and so I just take it as exactly that one data point and certainly we have lots of work to do and lots more to learn in that space we can move to the next slide um one of the things we've been working on uh is thinking about what other data do we need to be paying attention to in order to better understand what's happening with our kids at school so
314this is um a slide that shows um attendance rates uh for kids in kindergarten 1 2 and third fourth and fifth grade over the last several years so you can see 2018 19 21 22 22 23 and let's hover on let's just say the first uh let's say let's say third grade right this is third grade reading so let's look at that together in 201819 you would see 16% of um 18 or more days absent right that and that is our indicator for long-term absentee is ISM and now we're up at around 30% of our kids um are um you know would be considered as long-term absenteeism so how does that relate to student academic achievement you might be wondering well if you look to the right of this slide you'll see um okay I'm
315going to jump into education e for a second okay and then I'll hop out but okay map right um that's our measure of academic progress that we administer three times a year and then in the map um assessment you get this thing called a RIT score it's just the um it it roughly correlates to grade level and you can see that is if you have more days absent obviously your um achievement on the map test uh assessment it goes down right you want a higher RIT score on map um because that um correlates with grade level proficiency this is a long way around to say we need to pay attention to student absenteeism this isn't anything new that we know about but I'm going to talk to you and just a minute about one strategy
316that we're implementing to to think carefully about student absenteeism really quick clarifying sure is this saying that 32% of all students in third grade in Title One schools in SPS missed 18 or more days yes across all all tile races incomes so Title One school so yes whoa right wo is right so we need to talk about some strategies about that now that's complicated right things have happened since covid things have happened even my own kids probably would have been con been up there in the you know like this things are different now but what we need to think about is how do we respond to that as and building those systems and structures together right how do we respond um because there is a connection to student absenteeism let's move on to the next
317slide oh sure sorry that's a super tactical question have the Co um the how long you have to stay home because you're positive for covid are those protocols still in place I think you're asking like do we say do we recommend you stay home for five days now and that kind of thing when you have the when you are positive okay okay thank you you're welcome now you might be thinking gee how does this play out this school year what's going on right now and this is another advantage of coming coming back to this table right now is that we can look at this data together so um of our Title One schools you can see that we're we're tracking you know generally about the same as we were last year and so that helps
318us think about what's what can we do as the adults that support children at school and families to think about how how can we respond to that a little bit differently so we'll get to that in just a second all right let's move to the next slide Mike how am I doing on time all right excellent director hson are you looking for one of the there she goes okay um this slide helps us understand what we've been building toward over the last several years remember when we started off and I said you know it's nice to talk to you tonight about some of the real work because remember back in 2019 in 1920 we adopted the Strategic plan and that was it was generally a planning year and then 20121 that was our remote learning
319year um we did some significant work there but you know we had some challenges as well because it was remote we were back to school in person in 2122 um and we did some big work that year we implemented Dibbles across the system we were became really clear about our instructional priorities um and kind of narrowed our focus and we we learned that we needed to do that in the first two years so you can see the instructional priorities listed on that slide up there which would be uh systematic phonics instruction and fluency and comprehension work in second and third grade um we also learned that we needed to have a different mechanism for family connections and so we hired we came we um came up with a strategy around family literacy connectors and and
320staffed folks in schools and and built that out now we're in 21 20 uh 22 23 and 23 24 over there you know and that's when we were really kind of functioning as a whole uh more of a comprehensive approach to the work and now we're over here in our second uh in uh 23 24 space um I really would like to talk with you about this one of our big learnings over I'd say in the 22 23 23 24 space was thinking how much work we needed to do with our Educators around in the PLC space and really supporting that collegial conversation um so that we could ground those conversations in student work I have to say I'm so impressed every time I'm at one of our um early literacy priority schools and in
321the classrooms of our kindergarten first and second third grade teachers those folks are working so hard they're standing up um just Monumental strategies in their classrooms internalizing new practice they're engaged in you know tight coaching Cycles where they have a coach come into their classroom videotape their instruction go back together in a PLC together look at student work watch the video give each other feedback and repeat that cycle over time that's significant that's Brave work that our teachers are doing in our 13 schools is pretty amazing oh thanks for asking that um professional Learning Community yeah and another big learning is that we needed to build a similar Network for our educator for our principles so we launched something called the um early literacy Improvement Network where we bring together principles coaches um directors of
322schools my team from ccul assessment and instruction and we do that virtually um and we convene once a month with a with an instructional Focus that's aligned to what the teachers are learning and what the principls are learning and what the coaches are learning so that's that's pretty um Edge work that we've been able to stand up over the last several years and it's very rewarding um we can move on to the next um question oh sure under targeted universalism yep what we're doing in the 13 schools has been pushed out to our other k3s how many and what are the results there sure so when you look at the memo one of the ways we changed writing it this time through was to go through each one of the strategies you know the five
323overarching strategies and then we actually listed out what are the universal strategies what are the targeted strategies and then what are the um central office responsibilities or systems and structures that feed into both of those things so you can see that charted out an example of something we learned from our 13 schools and then took systemwide would be something like um the science of reading Institute that we did with our teachers at our 13 schools then we scaled that districtwide um K uh for all of our K3 teachers some work we're doing now that might lead us to scaling systemwide is some work with Dibbles because we're learning that you know if you're a kiddo that's not reading yet um you don't have your foundational skills solid in second grade and we know that from
324Dibbles at the end of this end of that assessment what are we doing in third grade to monitor your foundational skills work and same goes in fourth and fifth so we're doing a small pilot this year at our 13 schools and what depending on what we learned from that potentially we could scale that distri districtwide as well so those are some examples okay shelle should we skip to um slide 12 so you can kind of show this Universal yeah sure I would say though if we go just one second on the um on these instructional priorities I would say that that's some really big learning that we've had over the last several years at the beginning of this work it was like wow we should work on this and this and this with it with
325our Educators that's that didn't work very well we needed to narrow that Focus and be really clear about what are the instructional priorities and how do they build on each other in a sequential way so that when you're in kindergarten in first grade if you can if if all of us can help kids Master their phonic uh have uh systematic phonics instruction then that builds to fluency protocols that we can do in second and third grade and then that builds to text dependent questions so that's been some of our learning over time that we've um been engaged in a continuous Improvement cycle to to get to that clarity we can move on oh sure just um and this may be too technical of a question now so I'm happy to take the answer later but
326because you brought up Dibbles y that you know when that was adopted it was as a screener for dyslexia and so this sounds like it's being used in a different way so I'm confused about that so it's both it was implemented for a dyslexia screener for sure it also helped us as a system do something we weren't doing really well which was having a universal tool to help us understand how kids were progressing in their um learning trajectory of systematic phonics so yes it helps us identify children that are having that might be at risk for dyslexia absolutely it also helps us understand um if kids have mastered their foundational skills and if they're um moving through that progression well so I'd say it does both is it adapt for different ages y okay well
327I get I don't want to derail us too much but I am having a hard time understanding how it does both those things we can I'd be happy to talk more about that with you if You' like um okay we can hop on to the next slide okay so back to director Harris's question around t uh Universal and targeted strategies here you'll see um you know all of that sort of laid out on the um in this memo one thing I'd like to zoom in with you on and this gets to some of the learning that we've um engaged with would be around this early literacy Improvement Network that I was telling you about with our principes and coaches and um central office support um engaged around those um uh instructional priorities so we can
328move to the next slide so here is a picture of all the people that are convening every month um these are our coaches our school leaders our central office folks and we meet virtually um um and we can uh you can even see Dr sas's picture there he comes and joins us yep um let's go to the next slide and you'll see here that um in the spirit of being more precise about what are we working on and how does that level of precision um become really transparent with with all of the different stakeholders I just identified for you and then how does that scope and sequence of learning sort of connect from one thing to the next right so you'll see what uh what was the focus of our Improvement Network in September was
329um uh data review so our uh Department of uh research and evaluation helped to build specific data profiles for each one of the 13 schools including an analysis of student absenteeism at the school level and we talked about that in September you know as not necessarily our main focus but certainly something that's impacting student learning right because remember the um early literacy instruction is typically sequential and you do some work on Monday and then you do some more work on Tuesday and then you build on that on Wednesday Thursday and Friday but if you miss Tuesday and Wednesday it's really hard to think to H to jump back in on Thursday so that means that we have to come up with a solution for that you know if Mike isn't there on Tuesday and Wednesday
330then his teacher needs to have a strategy to help um you know accelerate his learning so he can jump right back in anyway we listened to um some school leaders that are doing that really well and this won't surprise you because it's a blue ribbon school but um Thor Good Marshall uh presented at that September 19th um engagement session to other to their colleagues and they talked about their strength-based approach for monitoring student um absenteeism but really it's more about student engagement and they talked to us about some of their strength-based protocols and their data practices and how they what they've learned over the last several years to address that um address that challenge of help helping kids come to school and they talked with us about having um you know various view uh various
331group uh different people on the team that's looking at that um absenteeism they talked to us about Transportation challenges and how to solve for those they talked about housing challenges and how to reach out to different Central teams right so that was really nice learning well the homework from from September to October for the school leaders and for the coaches was to think about what is your um your atten um engagement strategy for absenteeism that fits your school Community like could you devise a plan and then bring it back together in October on October 10th and then we shared those together yeah are you to share any you kind ofly went over long termism increase in 23 24 which is ex um excused absences unexcused absences um so are we seeing School refusal um School
332avoidance what's all those things yes and um the school based teams um are grappling with those questions for sure and um for the purposes of um instructionally because um if you're not at school you know we we need to figure out why that is right and we have to come up with a um instructional response to fill that Gap whether if you're home for an excused absence unexcused absence like in in summary you you're not there right to learn alongside your your piers and so we have to figure out what are we going to do about that as a system now when we met in our Improvement Network each one of the schools got um a data analysis that was specific to their own school I didn't include that in here I just went up
333a few levels to the title one group because it's kind of Representative of what we're seeing in the in the schools yeah I was just wondering if we knew what some of those larger Trends were in terms of whether they were excused like kids are sick yes and they could be I mean technically if it's if it's school um avoidance that is a form of sickness meaning they're not literally not able to get themselves to to school or are we is there some cautiousness Rel postco yeah um with sending your kids to school because of not wanting to spread things yeah and being more cautious very quickly um uh principal May um from third Marshall was talking and her team was talking about the nuances of trying to understand that um and trying to get
334to the root cause of Why students weren't coming were were not coming to school so that they weren't treating them all the same but they were trying to understand it so that they could respond differently to what the students are doing but ultimately also for the teachers knowing that every day that the students not there they got to figure out a way to accelerate accommodate for the students who are not there but trying to understand it was a a whole team wide approach which uh that that particular school team was uh sharing with everyone um and everyone's got a different take on it but it's uh director hamson it's it's getting to that Nuance trying to understand uh it by not treating all absences the same they're not here they're not here they're sick okay
335moving on there's a lot of underlying issues that uh often masked by absences I'm thinking about it you know you know future potential guardrails just around student well well-being and how this might interact with that and um in the learnings about you know I'm really glad that there's acknowledgement that absences are for a lot of different reasons um and also um teachers and principles can't by themselves go connect with every single family and be like what do you need why are you what what what's the barrier here so I mean I know we just talked about a budget deficit but in terms of aligning re like we've if we think that this is a significant contributor to um failure to progress more in Reading what resources I mean are we thinking about aligning like is
336a strategy to improve third grade reading improving attendance and if it is I guess is that a a thought and if it is what are the strategies to do that because it can't just be that teachers and principal now have to also you know follow up with every family there's going to be a I mean one you know one solution could be door to-door service if it has to do with anxiety or something related to a disability um it could be you know is door too service something that would help your child get to school that might you know the pressure as part of a bigger plan is is it housing insecurity is it you know there's so many different things and I in no way expect every teacher and principal to be able to
337to identify that and provide whatever support is needed but I do expect us as a system to support those kids so um this also crosses over into the seventh grade um uh math as well but what I would say uh the answer to that um is that when we did the third grade reading didn't go in there uh thinking about attendance being an issue we stumbled upon it by uh going through this um this work together so now that we understand it that it's a barrier that is definitely connected to the progress or non-progress of our students for third grade reading so what can we do about it's probably a part of the well-resourced school uh conversation as well um uh about you know uh you know resource officers or officers that we used to
338call uh sorry um uh in back in the day attendance officers um people Tru Andy oh my gosh but but we don't want to call that but what we want to get to is um that any position in a school should be servicing somehow the academic outcomes that we are um all involved in and so uh director Ranken you specifically called out hey if we're not doing something about the academic outcomes if we're not focused on the academic outcomes then we're could be focusing on on a lot of good things but it's the academic outcome so the third grade reading and uh School attendance they are connected now as as a part of we got to solve that somehow we got to address it in addition to these really strong reading strategies and writing strategies
339about reading uh that we're focusing on now so how does that end up on the C FL specifically attendance uh I think that's uh U Mr Howard who's here somewhere I believe behind me um would be smiling is he smiling back there wav and waving yeah he's smiling and waving yeah is it it's something that we should be putting in there because it's a part of our overall strategy that we need to call out what okay my understanding was that for some of the um Levy the fep schools that AB the attendance was one of the goals of the schools so presumably those are schools that have strategies in place and I'm just wondering if you've had a conversation with deal about attendance some and I would just say that the Paradigm has really shifted
340since Co and you can see it across all of our all of our T it's just something we need to like look at again and think about how do we resp this is how do we respond as a system that takes um into account the intersection between the sequential instruction that happens during foundational literacy right and um kids that have you know lots of absenteeism post like we we got into some of that work in 19 but it's it's a little bit different now and yes some of our 13 schools are Levy schools and some of them aren't so we have to kind of think about each unique Community I was worried about putting these slides putting this conversation in here because I was worried we would talk all about absenteeism and not so much
341about the other things and so I just I would love to talk to you a little bit about the text dependent questions but I don't know if we're going to have time so so could you show uh uh one of your favorite slides that you haven't had the opportunity to share yet and then we'll uh move it over to um Dr Perkins but I think the can I have two please director Harris said yes oh thank you thank you okay so one of the things we've also been learning and that's been a big focus of this work right is what are we learning and how are we responding differently one of the newest components that we've added to to our work this year is about text dependent questions and what you might think celle what
342is that all right well let's go to slide um slide 18 and there's a group of teachers doing some really cool work that we don't get to look at right now but this is a prompt that would be really similar to what you would what a child would experience um in um academic world in third grade right and so we've been doing some really specific work with third grade teachers at our 13 schools to do to teach to learn together about how do we help kids be super successful when they get a prompt like this so we've been doing some work about deconstructing the prompt like what is asking you to say we've been doing some demonstration lessons at schools with groups of teachers together and coaches and school leaders and directors of schools and
343we've been modeling what some um instruction can look like to help kids be able to engage with this kind of work and this is what third grade kids this is aligned to standard and what kids need to be able to do so it's not just reading right you have to synthesize your reading and do your thinking right so welcome to third grade everybody and um but kids can do this and that's the thing they really they can do this so now this is why I wanted to have two slides let's go to slide 19 together we had a lesson at a school uh and we did a demonstration lesson together and if you want to go back in the deck you can see a picture of us all in a classroom together and after 90
344minutes of instruction I believe this lesson took place on September I don't know 20th or something a third grade child was able to have instruction around that prompt that you all just kind of went whoa what is that and was able to respond to some text and give this kind of a of a response so our kids can absolutely do do the work right and this child was able to name the main character in the text and give two or three examples about how this this person in the text protects a cherry tree okay so it's pretty exciting to think about what kids can do when we as the system that supports them give really explicit instruction but that takes lots of um years of learning and and stacking of skills right foundational skills fluency
345and then being able to write about your reading Al we're out of time now I think yes yes and and kelle and the and the team the principal Learning Network met yesterday and they went over this student work they read the story I mean I was there I read the story and I read the student responses and the the goal is now as the third grade reading goal is evolving is now getting into the writing part writing about your reading and that they're synonymous they're directly connected to each other um but specifically now I think these uh teachers the principles um are evolving in their skill about being intentional about the interconnectedness and intersectionality between reading and writing um that we're hoping uh to see um uh significant Improvement for our African-American boys um and
346we're not at all satisfied with um the the current state of 29% and we know we need to accelerate that but we think we're on the right track on a number of levels with this and and worth pursuing and so making a transition to uh Dr Perkins and the seventh grade um math goal people question before we do that please so I as a teacher I'm a little confused right so for me I'm looking at this and I'm asking myself if we have a goal for third grade reading and we want the majority of our students to be reading on level can you give me an explicit like explanation of like how producing this writing which is great right fantastic is actually supporting them in the ability to read on grade level because if I
347were sitting at home I would likely be thinking actually I don't even need all of that followup can you give me a just very clear explanation about the link between this type of exercise and writing and how it gets us to reading on grade level yeah internally in the back of my head right here yep we had to skip that slide so if you want to go back to slide 15 that's a critical piece so if we could go back to slide 15 that would be awesome and there's a whole research base that talks about and act I was planning to have someone read this aloud to make that link to get it what you're asking about go for it having students write about text enhances reading comprehension because it affords WS greater opportunities to
348think about ideas and text requires them to organize and integrate those ideas into coherent whole Fosters explicitness facilitates reflection encourages personal involvement with text and involves students transforming ideas into their own words in short writing about a text should enhance comprehension because it provides students with a tool uh for visibly and permanently recording connecting analyzing personalizing manipulating key ideas and text totally get that what I am wondering given that writing is a very highle skill are we also incorporating drawing and other representations into this framework yes okay cool thank you and to get to the you're right this is a high level complex skill and that's why the um instructional priorities all build on each other right we got to start with the systematic phonics and then we got to build on the fluency so
349in second and third grade we're working really hard on fluency routines and then you have to be able to synthesize your thinking make meaning of the text and actually produce that sounds great to me I have one last question this is a great strategy in an environment where students are on a more I would say what's the word I'm looking for where students are on a trajectory that is more typical of what people would think about given that we are behind where our goals are do you feel as though this is the most efficient and effective strategy wholesale I love that question um and yes because because um we we need to have some literacy accelerators involved in our strategy right and a fluency protocol can actually cut across content we're getting in the weeds
350here for a second I can't help it but because for example we've been working on some fluency protocols that can go inside of our science time because we know that literacy accelerators are vocabulary and background knowledge and so having that kind of a fluency protocol that cuts across saves teachers time it's super effective and it and it helps kids internalize those routines so that that way when I'm working on it you know first we'll work on it all together as the coral read May and then maybe as the time goes on then I get to internalize that myself and be able to do that myself and that gets to what you're talking about as like an a more typical trajectory of of learning to read not all our kids are there for whole kinds of
351different reasons right so we have to think about how do we provide access points um to all the Learners right so the reading Wars have are done Y and the science of reading is the direction that we're going uh caselle can you talk about how these are aligned specifically to the science of reading and that to president her's inquiry the whole the whole sequence of the science of reading sure is what you're seeing here from first from prek all the way through please yes and that is what we're talking about with uh um instructional priorities and why they're sequenced that way right we know that kids all kids need to have uh systematic phonics instruction in the early year years and we as a system need to be able to measure that and monitor it
352that's why we implemented a tool right to do that dibles and why we made um other instructional resources widely available With Sips and other things like that we've talked about that for a while in this space we need to build on that though and we need to get to the next step which would be fluency and then the text dependent question work okay so yeah this is sorry weedy but directly related to President her's question which I really appreciate I um I mean I know this isn't a full presentation of all these things but this seems to me so inaccessible for kids with disabilities and kids who are English learning English um this are they well but wasn't that that slide was a projected projection that wasn't a so just the um amount of executive
353function that this requires and organizing thoughts and narrative and all of these things is like I can I absolutely know third graders that this would be no problem for I also have lived with a third grader who would not in a million years be willing to do this and probably refuse to go to school the next day I hear you if we so what how how are we supporting that from becoming because you know if a kid has a disability or is learning English that doesn't mean that we change the expectation for them that means that we increase the support for them that's right so that they can access the same learning there's no um you don't have to pass go to get to the ne a third grader should be accessing and suppored and
354learning third grade level curriculum you don't have to earn it so how how do you do that soelle wait wait for her strategic question I want to she made a statement I want to wait I want to wait for that strategic question that's in there so what are the strategies that go along with this to ensure that all Learners in a classroom are are able to access and participate in this activity and is there the same benefit for them yes and and um how we get there would is um um helping kids have access to the text would be things like everyone um Coral reading together actually maybe even the teacher modeling first right and then everyone Coral reading together and if you can't read it that's okay because you're going to hear everybody else
355a lot of the other kids reading along and that's okay because now you've just heard that text two and three and four times right and across the week because this you know there's day one instruction day two day three day four by the time you get to day four and 5 you're pretty familiar with what that text is all the Learners are um and um we've taken you know that prompt I showed you that was kind of complex we would probably pull that apart and have um depending on the Learners in the classroom and you might take the first part um you know today we read an excerpt from cherries and cherry pits that might be the only thing you're going to deal with and then you would ask yourself what text did we read
356today now I'm going to write down today we read cherries and cherry pits great draw a picture about that text right next like you build the complexity as you go across the day but it doesn't mean that the the expectation is lower it just means that the tax the text um the task is sort of pulled apart so that you can kind of Chunk it out and then um see the small bits and then put it all back together again I'm satisfied for now uh we can move on to the next presentation oh I I just had a basic question um I'm just still you gave an example of pulling it apart for myself I would say I would call it um you know dumbing it down or maybe that's Homer Simpson that says that
357uh I I'm trying to figure out why this is just a to for my edification um why a question like this for third grade and I've seen this throughout prompts in literacy in education uh why are we using so many difficult words in the prompt why is it written with so many difficult words is that intentional or excert um contributed and then the other options are impacted or LED to it there's so many ways to ask the same question and not like why is that part of this challenge or is this we're saying this is the expectation I'm questioning the expectation because I feel like the the ability to do this thing can still be assessed without using that same vocabulary that isn't no third grader is going to use a third grader's not third
358grader is not going to say an excerpt well I I I would I want to I want to push a little bit for the Strategic question in there I know I I I don't understand the strategy of having asking questions of kids I I've seen it endlessly I'm constantly having to translate things from my own kids who are in middle school and high school and when I was a kid we would look stuff up in a dictionary but that was also me and I had nothing but fields and books so I don't it's confusing to me why this is part of the so so I'm hearing at is why is this strategy effective is that is that your strategic question that's embedded in there yeah I mean I there's just so many different way I
359I would not I I'm just still blown away by this question still stuck on the Cherry's question go for it go for it cuz you well I I'd say my initial response is uh the students can do it and the the work that I saw yesterday of a teacher talking about the planning of it and then watching the teacher teach it and breaking it down for the students when she was talking about excerpt and the students in their writing were she said this is one of the things that we're looking for is that you can do this and this is what this means and so when you're looking through the text so she was setting the the standard for them to hit and the student writing that we witnessed or looked at yesterday um uh
360all had that so I think the the the part of it is that they can do it if it's scaffolded scaffold did for the students they can do it that's all right I mean heck yes ironic it's just ironic that's all yeah but they can they can do it and they did it I believe they can do it which is why I talk to my kids that way and they get mad at me all the time that's right but that's right yeah I've but that's not something that I particularly that's just how my mom did it and that's how you know her parents did it and um so but I I don't necessarily assume that that is appropriate for all children I talk to all kids that I interact with that way and I set
361those same high expectations for them but from in terms of a when when we've got 29% and we're trying to that's right so technically speaking this is this this kind of a question is aligned to third grade standard it is what kids need to be able to do um no I heard that that I'm just questioning is that appropriate right hey y'all it's 103 no and I don't mean to cut it off I think it's just like our brains are getting kind of mushy at this point and so I think your question is great director hson I think your responses have been great team I'm just asking to do a checkin with how our people cuz it's like we can continue to Marathon this out I really think this is critical right and so I'm
362just trying to do a check-in with folks around the table like do we have capacity to continue okay I I I just I'll try to clarify I'm just double checking that the standard is something that we also agree is appropriate right now I can no no I I mean I we don't we're not Brandon can answer that but we're not the exper to the state the state the state says what the standards are okay never mind uh let's move on that's not I do see director hampson's question my question I guess if I could take a crack at it what I think the question is is we know what the state standard is and what they need to be able to do we also know what our goal is in terms of being being able
363to read as close to on grade level as possible I don't know if those two things are perfectly aligned based on the measure that we are giving our students and so and that's a big question does that get close yes it does it does yeah that's what I was trying to get at I I just wanted to see because we know it's flawed and you know so that's why we have map and so that's why I'm just trying to like state standard over here what we should really be asking is here we're going to kind of try to I'm just trying to see the bigger picture of it you know because it is important to know if the state standard is actually from a neurological standpoint developmental standpoint um cultural standpoint right uh is not
364so you know I don't think we mix I don't think there's a lot of mixing up of this stuff that we're letting providing different okay we're too tired I'll stop I'm sorry I'm sorry but yeah someday but yeah I'll listen in and you guys will be ready to answer that question just Tex question my team put a let's let's put a pin in that and research those questions appr get back the opening up of so thank you for providing all this because yes that is what we need to know what we should be curious about and being able to then also track okay so this this what you're investing in because behind all of this is a need for a tremendous amount of investment for the next strategic plan and how we afford it can
365we not it for you now we'll pivot to seventh grade math um we're grateful for the time that we had on third grade now let's pivot to uh can we move to the to seventh grade math uh Dr Perkins is going to kind of lead us through this um we won't have the opportunity to review the memo um Dr Perkins is going to show us the highlights show us the Salient relevant slides that's right uh but we're still going to get the key points in front of the board with our own vulnerability around what we can do and can't do right yes sir okay thank you all right I'll just uh want to start with some notes of gratitude first of all just thank you to celle for articulating where the mathw is trying to
366go in terms of level of precision in terms of that carefulness in terms of that sequence uh we're in year two now in math um which leads me to another note of gratitude which is to Dr Jones for deciding to really invest and fund this and and to try to uh move the needle on these pieces so what I want to share is both sobering uh initially and hopefully encourage ing ultimately so the sobering piece is that the data that you see especially in the the bottom right is not going in the direction that we want to do and I I want to um again appreciate the student outcomes Focus governance process that we actually have this opportunity to publicly put this up here and and own this and to really talk about how we're
367going to try to get the the needle to move in the other direction so just to be clear on our Topline measure which we think is important since it correlates with access to Advanced cour work in math and ultimately postsecondary opportunities in in stem and so forth um we only have 20.2% of our seventh grade African-American males reaching that proficiency um and you did you all asked what were they what was the score in sixth grade it happened to be 177% so you could argue that it's going in in a different in a better Direction but that's much lower than where it was pre pandemic and it's not even close to acceptable so if we can move to the next slide it's just another cut of the data which uh celle helpfully already previewed which
368is the cor correlation between um map growth which we are so grateful to have this additional metric so I want to Echo the thanks to the board for that tomorrow all of our six School leaders our priority School leaders across these middle schools are meeting to look in depth at our map data and to really unpack what it means and what it's telling them about what they're seeing in their classroom so that's thanks to you and thanks to the these efforts that we're making but bottom line again this is showing that there's far too much in the pink and red here which is showing students who are not on track and are not achieving their growth levels in middle school math if we can go to the next slide so as celle shared we have
369more recent data that's a little bit more encouraging uh a little bit going in the right direction in terms of africanamerican male students and students cover but for still uh far from where we want to be and that leads me to what I hope is encouraging if we can go to the next Slide the memo tries to follow up on our conversation in July as you might recall where we talked about we learned a lot from the first year and celle alluded to this in her work about how to be much clearer I'm going to steal the line of the night that Clarity is kindness and that our six School leaders have been pushing for us to be much clearer much fewer and much higher in the expectations that we're making for those the work
370and I just want to highlight a couple things this is in the memo in much more detail the consistent use of our Envision curriculum and really getting into a level of specificity that we're asking all teachers to begin their classrooms with the solve and discuss piece why because learning how to solve and also share your reasoning is exactly what is required to meet standard and ultimately to have success down the road in in their math classes we're asking all teachers to do three specific curricular assessments and look at the data and use that data to inform their planning and that's already happened two weeks ago we actually had all of our school leaders to the point about how we're ing the targeted in the Universal we had all of the six uh School teachers from
371the seventh and eighth math grade math classrooms in one room and we brought all of the Middle School leaders including those who are not in the sixth priority schools down the hall to uh have a conversation with those uh Educators about what they were learning from using the curriculum em best embedded assessments um we're also engaging families in much more concrete ways we asked all of our families and I'll highlight Southshore who did calls to each of their uh families about the math nights that they held and were able to much increase in attendance and participation there and finally following what celle shared we have a much more concrete calendar as you can see on this slide of activities every month including again tomorrow a PLC a professional Learning Community Dr seru thanks for that
372reminder of Ed you speak um to engage all of our six School leaders and what exactly does this data show so I I'm very encouraged uh Dr Jones has been very uh helpful and motivated in pointing out that we need to be we need to push and we need to push harder um because we are not going where we want uh we're not where we need to be in this area so we can go to the next slide so that's just an example so tomorrow it in of itself we'll be looking very deeply at the data that we'll have and be talking about planning going forward I won't I don't think I need to spend too much more time on this we also looked at the attendance piece we're just starting that we're not as
373far along as doing the analysis but I think what's powerful is that because we're funding this work we're giving regular times for these School leaders and coaches to come together and actually talk about Solutions and we can do that um with uh with all of our middle schools and that's what we're starting to do with our school leader engagement sessions I want to give a shout out to one of our regional executive directors who I think is still here yeah Dr McCarthy who invited who said why don't you share this great stuff with all of our Middle School leaders so that's what we did on November 2nd and that's what we plan to do going forward with our school leader sessions with that I think I might be at the end yes we just wanted
374to highlight this is a cross-section of questions you asked and I'll just uh pause there again sobering data but hopefully encouraging next steps we've already made a lot of progress in just a couple months in getting much clearer about what we're trying to do and how we're doing it together um so I'm not I'm not surprised by the data and I'm actually not angry um I will be in the future um one of the things that I would like the staff to consider is messaging um we have teachers and I actually unfortunately have board colleagues who have articulated publicly that they do not believe we will ever close the gap for black boys I'm gonna let that just sit for a minute part of my problem is I knew I know too many people and
375I randomly have people tell me we have teachers and I have board colleagues who have said publicly they don't believe we're going to close the gap game on I take that up I got a meeting on the because of that comment I have a meeting on the calendar with Dr Jones if we don't believe our kids can do this then they won't cuz you know what the adults in the room are not going to do what they need to do don't worry board directors I'm not outing anybody I will be having a private conversation because we can't be talking like this in public these are children if you want to say that I'll take you and me we going to go to the African-American male classroom and you will tell them that you don't believe
376we're going to close the gap let's be honest cuz they need to know that the adults either have their back or they don't so I'm not angry about that statistic you want to know why because time after time you've come in here you've admitted you've been authentic you've been transparent you have a plan we're not turning this around when Kai gets to third grade Mr Perkins it better be turned around you got nine years that's reasonable you got nine years that's reasonable very more than reasonable and nine months okay well I'll advocate for your job a little longer but my but my point is that teachers have to believe that my grandson can achieve they have to believe that my nephew who is currently in Seattle Public Schools can achieve it starts with the belief
377and if they don't believe it go find another job like it's real simple but don't be making public comments don't actually tell children in classrooms I don't think you can do this because you know what our kids are telling us it's the instruction I think you alluded to this we do have teachers who don't believe it and they're telling our kids every day those are the people we we need to hold accountable right I no one can tell me that at third Good Marshall those teachers didn't believe they didn't get where they are with a bunch of teachers and administrators coming into the classroom telling those black kids you'll never ever close the gap just stop trying you're not going to be good at math that's the message I got so you know what I
378wasn't good at math isn't that a surprise but I got a master's degree cuz I said H I won't say what I said cuz I'm on the video but I wasn't good at math because I actually was told I would never be good Negroes are not good at math that's what I was told they told me I wouldn't graduate from college cuz Negroes don't do well in college well I got a master's degree I actually got two but we're only going to talk about the one so we have to start with the message it has to start here all of us including you retiring board members we can't be making statements that will never close the gap because you know what our children are going to hear that and they have heard it they've heard
379it so I believe I actually really do believe that what you presented as a plan to get from this pathetic outcome that we're currently in to a better place for the kids who are not doing well not to their own fault and not to their parents fault let me just put that on the table it's about what's happening in the classrooms it's about what's Happening Here If you don't believe we're going to close the outcome go go be a different kind of director because I got two years left that's my commitment that's my commitment cuz we have to believe that our kids can do it or what are we doing here what are we doing here Dr Perkins can you respond to question number two I'm I'm I'm tagging that to what director saru just
380that's the procedure the question I got your back uh please so most thank you for all those comments and and I couldn't agree more about the importance of beliefs and the why we've centered the importance of mathematical identity and understanding The Genius of of our students particularly African-American male students in terms of it the adherence to expectations and the strategy and this is where the partnership with our regional executive directors has been incredible on Friday we have our next steering committee we have a meeting every other week with the with them to go through uh each of the what's going on in each of the six schools to to debrief the walkthroughs that we're doing every week at the six schools and to provide effectively that accountability at the same time as you can see
381in the memo there's a lot of supports it's not just about um checking in on folks is making sure that they have what they need to actually meet those expectations so the nice thing is that because we've gotten so focused because we're much clearer and fewer um we believe that uh schools are having a much easier time of keeping up and and frankly uh helping us see where to go from here so that's how we're doing it um I I don't think that I ever believed that the kids couldn't do it but I confess that I wasn't really sure that the district could do it and I would say that after tonight's presentation my confidence level is really there I think finally there is clear articulation of what the strategies are and so I really
382commend this team tonight for putting the data together and putting just this clear the clarity of what the strategies are and how you're going to be approaching them how we're going to be tracking them so I really commend this team um one added comment I have um in the past year met with a lot of Community Partners who do the high dosage tutoring and they have done a lot of data analysis themselves um reading Partners tips um School connect Washington math agency and um their outcomes are very impressive and so in future conversations I would love to see how what can the board do to really support that because they are getting the results and I would love for us to invest in that because I think that could kind of address some of the
383absentee issues as well yes um so that's definitely on the horizon as a specific strategy is the high dosage uh tutoring along with uh the expanded learning during the summer uh being a specific investment that we're going to need to uh all be together with on um so we're we're on it we're thinking about it more than thinking about it trying to think about how do we get strategic about the partners that we can bring in uh to help it and then scale it up and I'll just add that I know it's been talked about in the media as well and we have regular conversations with math agency and it's a you know the the it's all about the details we're trying to figure out where the connection is because they have a very specific
384model it's incredibly impressive what they've been able to do so how how do we do it uh in a way that can adhere to the success of that model but you're absolutely right we should keep looking all right y'all um director of a Smith uh we would have time use evaluation but had to step away uh given that we are we'll just do both next time um that being said uh I'm sorry was there something I missed something I'm sorry I didn't see oh go ahead I mean we we might as well break out the sleeping bags at this point it's a question I know this is your last formal question director hamson you've got the pressure is on you've got to make this spectacular uh I I I do remain a bit confused about
385the strategies and I don't think we have time um at all to go into it and I think one of my um something I I I hope comes up relative to strategies is what we know about relevance is for students is math relevance um one of the strategies or trying to improve math math relevance I know when we looked at Envision um that was something that at least when I was looking at the curriculum I was wondering about and have it's been a question in my mind as far as why we struggle so much with math and I you know it's no offense one versus the other because I do know that the reading work started much earlier um uh that immediately when the Strategic plan hit so yeah I'm just curious about the extent
386to which that plays obviously you've in absenteeism plays a role but how much does relevance uh play a role and and the I mean the belief um I guess that's the other thing that um in terms of strategies I have asked the question about strategies to close that belief Gap and I really encourage um the district the board and the district to think in terms of asking teachers what what do you need what kind of support do you need to close that belief gap for yourself to get over that that hump um and what strategy you guys have to address that um which you've answered in some parts before but I don't know if that's changed yeah well in terms of the relevance I think that's a ongoing conversation there are things like stem projects
387references to financial literacy things that we heard from our voice are vision and that kind of Outreach to students about what they're looking for in math classrooms that we're trying to uh articulate we also do have math empowerment that some of you helpfully asked about and actually pushed on our strategy in a helpful way in one of your questions which is how do you identify students that take that I think we could be more systematic in making sure uh particular students are getting access to that as opposed to you know when it fits in their schedule which is a little bit too much of what we're doing now so those are two great points I think there's more to be done in that and I mean that's the benefit I guess of being in year
388two that we can still pivot and and learn and adjust so just maybe a closing thought this didn't just suddenly magically happen we actually demanded that it happen we demanded as a board on behalf of our community that the district show us how students are doing and explain to us where you are and if the results are not positive what you're going to change and we hired a superintendent who would do that with us so like it's not mysterious to me that we're seeing change because this is what systemic change is and this is us doing our job and spending well today a lot of time but focusing our time on talking about how students are doing and having you show us instead of talking about the whole host of other things that need to
389happen happen in the district but that we're not responsible for we are responsible for this and that's why it's here and that's why we're able to see this shift is because of the people in this room not a mystery this is our job as go this is what we do in governance and it is going to impact students and that is clear right now and also that's why we are pushing for this shift to policy governance because it's proven to improve student outcomes and that's why we are here all right thank you appreciate it I know this was a long journey together but we wound up in a good place based on that last statement thank you all there being no further business before the board meeting stands adjourned at 10:37 [Music] p.m.