001thank you okay we are ready to begin I'd like to welcome everyone to the study session of the Canyons Board of Education meeting tonight is November 15 2022 and we're meeting at district office located at 9361 South 300 East in Sandy Utah so um the first item on our study session is very um sorry please to turn time over to Denise haycock Foundation development director for the annual report from the beginning visitation Foundation okay and I think she has a gastronology to introduce and you have a guest this is our um Canyons Education Foundation board president Fred Lowry and he's going to be helping me with our presentation tonight so first we want to say thank you for allowing us to come and give you an update on what the fact that you should have
002been up to most of our update is going to be based on last fiscal year so we're just gonna if we look at the numbers kind of keep that in mind as well okay the first thing I want to just touch on is our board members so without the board members we have no Canyons Education Foundation right now we currently have 23 board members from a wide range of backgrounds and diversity and experience and they're wonderful people and they give up their time with their money they give us contacts to help us make connections in the business world so if you can just kind of look through there and I know many of the names you'll recognize some have been with us just a few months others have been with us since we started Canyons
003Education Foundation One member actually came over from Jordan Education Foundation so we have some long-term newer ones that first line up there starting with Fred land and John Brad those are my executive board so we are the ones who kind of look at things present to the board before it goes to a boat and of course we have our ex-officio members that would be our Board of Education Montville which we love having him on our board he gives us such great Insight of what the district is doing Dr Rick Robbins Susan Edwards and myself so we're non-voting members and then we have the mayors of all of the cities that are within Canyon school district so they're always welcome to come to our meetings they don't have an official vote but we'd like for them
004to know what we're up to so the next slide deals with the money that we receive and from the foundation so again this is for fiscal year 22. cash donations we received in over 700 000. in-kind donations 151 it's going to be free and we get these donations in through our two big fundraisers we have our golf tournament which is our largest fundraiser probably one of the most well-known and sells out every year we've got it to that level now where we're really we know that we're going to sell it out so last year we made 98 000 at the golf tournament this year we were able to bring our Gala back we had had to postpone the gala for the covered years bringing that back hopefully maybe you remember our boots in bling Gala
005at Brighton High School we had a lot of fun we raised over 70 000 at that event we did a fun run which was our 2-2 run um so we donned our two twos on February 2nd through the 22nd of 2022 and we raised twelve thousand dollars at that event that got a lot of our employees involved as well so we really like that we always do a Tools for Schools back to school donation drive with Z104 we appreciate that Community uh connection we have and then we always do our gathering for good holiday donation which we're in the process of putting together for this year as well that's a little bit about how we bring money in with our fundraising events but other ways money come in is through Partnerships and advertising so if
006somebody wants to send out a peach jar plier they pay AFP and that comes into the foundation for us to use for our students we also have a lot of private donations and I just wanted to touch on a couple that um I think are very meaningful we have a donor that someone within the district and he's a board member for a Target Corporation and so what he gave us was gift cards to Target people and buy the things that we needed for students so now I can just get the right size what they need compose the shoes food so that was a great donation and he's given us twenty thousand dollars in Target gift cards we also had some students in Frankfort they go to Lone Peak Elementary and they did a lemonade stand
007not just a little lemony stand but a full-on lemonade stand they brought in a thousand dollars in little wrinkled tens and one dollar bills and gave all of their money to the foundation so we're getting donations in on a large scale and on a small scale but they all mean so much to us so we have community and business donations a couple other I wanted to touch on Jordan Credit Union was our Apex winner and they just again they heard we need to choose so they gave me Kohl's cash for 500 in shoes this is top on top of the twenty five hundred dollars they gave me about a month ago so they just keep they hear the need and then businesses Reach Out Shields always gives us at least ten thousand dollars in a
008cash donation plus they give us so many in-kind donations over the years you may have heard about we had a shield cell at one point because they gave us so many donations we were able to give that back to the employees the Larry H Miller um family charity gives us holiday support every year you get quarters for Christmas cash for Holiday support for its man is an insurance company that partners with us for our team to choose projects Community nursing Services give back when they do flu clinics for our kids they get back any of the extra money back to the foundation of course Real Salt Lake United Way is a huge donor they give back to the title one schools and of course they've been a huge donor to the Hillcrest project and of
009course we also have our own high schools last year they gave back part of their fundraising money to the Canyons Education Foundation some gave us five thousand it was one thousand depending on how the school did but every high school goes out and they try and raise money for a charity and we said hey we've got kids in our district that could really use those funds and they answered that call and they gave back to us we thought that was wonderful for them to do um something that is not represented here on the slide next year but I wanted to let you know is that we did receive 100 000 donation from one of our board members so that was um is going to go into an endowment fund for scholarships and for teachers so
010that was just another donation that is not reflected in these numbers now we're going to let Fred talk about what we do with that money so we talk about getting all this money and I think it's important to to know that first of all we can't do this without the support we have quote from the district obviously we we are created in order to support you but we can't do it without your support and as you if you go through what we show that what we've given you know this doesn't happen without the team that we have right here um if you don't already you know you know what an amazing job Denise does and I I appreciate the way that you support the foundation in supporting your niece and it's amazing that just as
011a merrily I don't know if they're released here but what you have as a team here it's it's awesome you have a great I should thank all of the external relations because without them with our graphics and getting our signage done and getting the word out and um we release our financial secretary and so yes the external relations team really helps tour up with efficiency does thank you it's so true and I can tell you as I've been blessed to be a part of this Foundation of being on the board to see the things that are happening it's it's really rewarding give you an idea this this last year or this is in 2021 fiscal year uh we have our teacher Innovation grants which we ended up delivering those again a couple weeks ago and
012some of you joined us which we maybe keep going but last year we we gave out what 96 000 into your Innovation grants those are awesome projects and things that have happened when it's one of those classrooms and you see what's happening in this District it's it's quite amazing we also had almost 50 000 in teacher projects owners chewed now that's this is an interesting one this is another one I think when you look at what Denise does and the foundation the foundation gave out 49 442 dollars in these teacher projects however Denise and her team almost on a daily basis are looking for where donors will match those funds and by doing that really that impact turned into 160 000 that went through those matching funds and also the state had the one-time funding
013by the state that's also included in those numbers we also have 10 000 that's allocated for the college application week There's scholarships uh another nice thing is we facilitated what 50 000 and 5000 ships those are individuals that have donated or foundations that have donated money that they have the money they want to donate it and through the foundation administer the scholarships we gave it 11 000 in the the bright star and the rising star scholarships I think it's it's okay for us to know that we've approved and hoping that we've increased that almost doubled that um this next year with those Rising Star scholarships hoping that we can reward those that we give those scholarships to to reward them for continuing to continue their education we have the rice Point uh stem summer camp
014scholarships which was was that so we did um remember five thousand dollars to go up to a 500 summer camp and then rice Point picks up um to get kids excited about science then we have the my 529 college student account scholarships we haven't had as much momentum we're gonna push that out hard this year that's a 500 College savings to a first generation seventh a seventh grader who would be the first generation to go to college and so we wanted to start them out in seventh grade to have that goal like I'm going to college I've already got 500 stashed away and then it will continue to grow interest as they get ready to graduate our Teacher of the Year Awards that's another one that we think so important that we hope that that
015catches momentum with other teachers as they receive those cash prizes that they're able to that was what over fifteen thousand dollars in cash and the in-kind donations and then of course we had our the new teacher event which we appreciate the district helping support that which we did this last year at Alpha High School that's a that's an important one in helping we arranged to get the vendors and the giveaways Everyone likes free swag but it's nice to get that and then some of the special projects um [Music] very well sure um so that they could grow their own food and learn how to garden to that it was a huge success um so there's a just that whole community over there in Midvale they had a garden they were very very smart and now
016they want to just do it again so we weren't happy but it expected a lot of time um can we also sponsored the back to school meet and greet and I know some of you were there at the road home we had the principals that came over they met the students who lived home with their families were able to give every family member a Chick-fil-A dinner meet the principal feel good about it you're coming back to school and they didn't have to travel to their school so that was another little thing that we find this for them um for students in need and we're going to do that a little bit differently this year we sent out a memo um to our principals kind of keep a little more Equitable sometimes somebody would really be
017like oh we really want to give and so this one family would get so much and then this other one wouldn't quite good so much so we're gonna try it a little bit differently this year to make sure that we're doing Equitable giving for the holidays um but that's always there's always a lot of needs that come pouring in I sent the memo out last week and I probably already got about 20 requests to help with families in need for the holidays um the weekend feedbacks is where the students who are food institution we make sure they have food to get them through the weekend so nutritious shelf stable food easy to heat up easy to eat and we will supply those food bags we typically deal with the bubble schools on that there's some
018poverty in the school the title one schools are taken care of through a different mechanism that will go out and we provided all of the feedback food bags for Red Cross this year and for Willow Canyon and then we also get some additional requests where we're doing little one-offs on that but that helps kind of those non-title one yeah that still need and as I mentioned before um when we get donations in and during covid we had a lot of donations that come in and I had no what I didn't know what to do I mean there was no there were kids in school they weren't having Halloween parties so we am asked a lot of donations so I one school came back in we started sending those out and he had a great story
019about a kid who got a Halloween costume this year and how it meant the world to him to be able to just go to the office and say you're you're you could be in the parade here's a Halloween costume for you so Walmart donated hundreds of children and then we just give those out to the elementary school kids Scheels donated shoes and a North Face coats and really nice stuff that we had so many donations um that then we decided we're going to get back to our employees as well so we did a shield sale and gave it to them at a previous rate and raised money for the foundation and helped our employees be able to get some really nice things but we took care of all of the students first every employee has
020asked me if I'm doing that again no you said it was a one-time thing it was hopefully we won't have another pandemic and I won't have to do that again but that's so that's where we are and that's just that's not all the ways we give but those are the main points so can I help paint a picture real quick Denise that I think that helps you when we talk about this impact when I think of this I I just first thing that comes to my mind is I think of Elsa a student um Elementary School was a special education class some of you are with us and it was I think it was fourth grade class special education they have an area for their recess where they you know and uh you know play
021they have a picnic picnic set up where they eat lunch and their snacks but Elsa's in a wheelchair that table doesn't accommodate a wheelchair and so this teacher saw that that hey we need to get a table that Elsa can sit up enjoy those snacks and then also have some instruments that she can play as they learn music and things well as we brought that Innovation Grant to them and I know this is this year but if we need to help paint that picture um you know you announced that hey Elsa is gonna be able to sit at the table this this table will accommodate our wheelchair if you could see her light up in her arms will break the car and then she got to learn that she's gonna have instruments and it wasn't
022just her that was waving the rest of the class just cheered and those are the kind of things that those students will remember that and it's going to help develop them and that's just one of that's really what our mission statement is is to enhance the education of the students and school district and so if if it's one student if it's a classroom with students we just try and have that impact to make it a better place for our students to be we have big goals we want I guess if you go to the next slide is we're looking at enhancing our board and we've been able to add some new board members that are improving that well and we're we're happy that we've been in some board members from some corporations that will be
023fair we've been reaching out to them and now we finally got someone from their company on our board South Valley Chamber has been wonderful and we've Don Willie has joined with us on that and he also helps us share the things that we're doing with the people in the South Valley and so that gives us another important one of the things that we've added and we have a board member now from every city so we recently added um someone from Midvale Cottonwood Heights and Sandy City we've always had um who's new and of course Fred is representing the Draper Council so we've got four of our cities that are there so now our cities know exactly what the foundation's up to and what the district is doing we thought that was a very important piece
024to add to our foundation board so we've got that completed at this point and then we're also a big thing that we've been working on is collaborating with the other donations that come into the district so we have state and federal programs and our community schools our Title One school who will they'll go out and they'll get donations and I go out and I get donations and maybe I have something that they need or they know something that I need but it was always like oh this is yours and this and smile but you're not doing that anymore we are collaborating with putting everything in one location we are going to announce at the principals meeting on Thursday that you know one place where you put in a request that you need coats you need
025shoes you need food and Michelle and I we will figure out who's going to create that request and get it out so we're trying to make it easier for our principal who just put in a request and between us we'll figure it out um and if we have something extra we don't want to just keep it locked in a warehouse we want it to get to the students we think that's an exciting collaboration that we're working on and Brian is here I appreciate the mental health piece that we're always trying to Brian's going to present to our board on Thursday we always want to know what's going on in the different departments in the district and how can the foundation support that mental health has been a big piece that we want to reach out
026and help so we've asked one of the directors to come and speak to our board and let us know how we can help facilitate that we're hoping that we'll be able to be able to add another type of Grant with the teachers that we could maybe do one that will involve the counselors and be able to find ways that we can help improve and support the mental health is the educator Innovation grants that social workers and counselors and what do you need to get the mental health in your school and how can we support that so we're looking at that as another question coming through well we will continue to engage with businesses keep trying to grow that Network the relationships is what it's all about just building those relationships getting them to trust you
027getting them to understand your story and want to give to you we are part of the Utah Association of public school foundations so we meet together and we feed off of each other and get ideas from each other so it's just another way that we're building relationships in the community thank you so we just kind of end with that we are proud to support the mission of the Board of Education and we're proud that we have an impact on the students and teachers within can School District one last slide because you have to know we're fun oh did mine did my slide not get in she did just imagine introducing it yeah we've had a picture of our our Gala with the wild west where we had Leon Nancy that's okay that's on board docs
028that's okay that's okay but we we do like to have fun we like to engage people and give them a fun reason so we're happy to answer any questions you might have but that's kind of who we are and what we do thank you so much any questions or comments board uh Mr rickley to Mr millerberg so first off I've had the privilege of watching you guys grow and it's exciting to see the money you're passing out but I think more important is the engagement of the community uh Scott very healthy and growing school districts you need support of the community and they need to be part of that they're not separate and so I really appreciate that that's yes they're giving some money but more than that they're emotionally attaching and supporting our children
029and supporting our cause and it'd be nice if we went to all the businesses in this area eventually that they all want to support us so we can work together because eventually we're going to be needing them probably for some kind of internships or other things other than just money that it'll help our students and so thank you for all you're doing it's more than what you just presented to hear it's far greater than I see you guys in business it's amazing but mostly it's just a psychological aspect of having people feel part of our district feeling involved and I think that's why it's exciting that we've really got these other cities now that are involved and Sandy City is really stepping up now too which is you know they're the biggest city in the
030district and so it's it's catching on that way that's great thank you thank you Mr millerberg I know you've heard me say this before of all the board members the Board of Education I lucked out and I got the best diamonds um we go way back with the foundation on Susan you and I remember our first uh golf tournament that we did jointly with the Jordan School District as soon as when I walked out of that out of there that day and said we're not doing that again we said we're not doing that again but to watch the growth that's taken place over the years underneath you took it to a new level and thank you for doing that and we get non-school District board members like Fred step up and take leadership and they
031direct what happens in the foundation it's it's board driven and it's a great place to be and I've got to tell you that Wasatch Mountain this year after 6 30 in the morning driving a golf cart around up on the uh Mountain course and I looked down over the Heber Valley that'll be one of the luckiest people in the world to just be here and be a part of a great cause and the one question that I asked when we were on the sudden Sun bus is it more fun to raise the money or it's more fun to give the money out I think giving it away giving it away is a winner you're right yeah I gotta tell you the gala what a good time the golf tournament fantastic so well organized and board
032members if you've not been there before for a golf tournament you should really go a couple hours before it starts start starts Denise just got this finely owned machine running and everybody in a matter of about two hours sets everything up and it goes and at the very least get into the silent auction and somebody said that to my wife yeah this is our best customer for the election Chris says she wins I always tell Mom your wife was big we obviously welcome suggestions of this this school year continues on ways that we can support the district and we it's going to continue to grow and uh our hope is that we can get that endowment to a spot that where it will sustain itself and be able just to continue to grow and we'll
033be able to I've been challenged to get it to a million before I retire so here we go that's what we're going to do you know the Fun Bus what a good time I was so impressed with the young lady at Jordan High School you asked the teacher to talk about the Grant and she just stepped on said I'll do that a student a sophomore exactly what was in the grant told us why they needed it what it was going to do and that Grant was so rewarding because Jordan high was getting a grant to give back to younger students for summer camp they wanted to teach them how to build Lego robots during the summer for schools that feed into Jordan high and they were so excited that we were giving them the Lego
034robots to do that you worry about the future and then you get you go to a class like that used to even present and what could be more fun in an elementary school than raising trout my favorite Innovation group well we thank you for your time any other questions any other comments or questions thank you I think I could speak for all of us and say how much we appreciate the work that you do and and the collaboration and the Partnerships that you're building as has been mentioned to help you know that is to our community as well as the districts so thank you very much I think for most of it's not work Denise does the work thank you very much foreign okay next I don't get any ideas when you're reassign the signs
035okay um okay next on our agenda um we will have this is an annual report from the sex education instruction committee and the resources and then um I have three things together so I will introduce them all and then because we have the same presenter for all three and they all are kind of related so they're all related so the um second item is the biennial review of the sex education policy and the third item is the biennial review of specified County statistics and all of these are required by state statutes so with that I will turn time over to Jesse henneper instructional support administrator thank you it's actually been a while since I've presented to all of you so thanks for having me here I I don't blame you golf tournaments money raising that
036sounds like an amazing assignment sex education instruction committee is one that I have to ask lots of people to join so I'm happy with where I am thank you um I learned so much last board meeting about such education I don't want to learn so we the three sections we have like uh Nancy presentini said are three pieces that are by Statute required so each year I come and present these three pieces uh talk through it you're welcome please give me feedback but we'll kind of break it down a little bit at a time I have a few slides for each and then a place for questions at each section that is a welcome to ask so I wanted to give a little background on the timeline for each year because this does for some
037it is a little confusing because there's a lot of pieces to the sex education construction committee types the policy which we'll talk about here in a minute so we have two committee meetings each year one in the fall one in the spring often the spring is depending it depends on if materials have been submitted by teachers if uh complaints have been filed with schools which we haven't had one in actually in my memory that has come to the state or the district level so we have actually not had a spring meeting for a couple of years now but I'll get to that in a moment so the fall and spring meeting agenda items include reviews to request new resources if we have new speakers that have been uh identified to come into schools they have
038to be reviewed and approved by the committee and then you as a board and if there's any addition to the curriculum which we haven't had an adjustment from the state for quite some time either the spring meeting agenda includes the review of County data we've actually adjusted that because we haven't had a spring meeting we've actually reviewed that in the fall so that we hit that data even if we don't have one in the spring anytime we have a meeting the follow-up is a presentation to you as a board for recommendations for approval whether that's the fall and or the spring so that comes to you usually the next board meeting and I'll talk through that in a moment and then the annual report for what we do as the contains the annual report I
039usually like to do in August because it's the report for the year prior which is what I'm doing now in November but y'all have been busy and you've bumped me a couple of times which I'm okay because you've got lots of stuff on but today's report is for what the committee did last year so that's what we're going to do in the very beginning so this is the work that we completed in we held our fall meeting in on October 26th the agenda included a review of the purpose of our committee why we're here what we do um we had a few materials one was a video called some love for abuse that was presented and then approved by you as a board there was a video from Sandy City called stop the violence that
040was presented to you and approved and then we have some CDC STI STD brochures there were some questions on those based on the pictures that were used in those brochures and when I went back to look at it they were copyrighted so I couldn't edit or adjust it I couldn't edit or adjust those so we just left those off and we haven't re-introduced those uh mainly because the information that was in those brochures is also in our approved presentation slide presentation which you all approved as well following any of our meetings the committee members follow a rubric that we have set in place that looks through whether the resource is medically accurate whether it aligns to the standards for our health standards and whether it's trauma informed which is a way that we've moved to
041adopt which means we are not it's not fear we're we're adopting resources that take into account that some of the Learners may have gone through trauma so we're we're aware of that as we adopt these events the spring committee meeting did not occur because we didn't have any materials that were presented we didn't have any requests from teachers we didn't have uh complaints so we actually did not hold this spring because it wasn't needed and then today November 15th is the review of that so this kind of wraps up our work from 2122. I wanted to give you just a little preview and review of what we've already done this year as we're moving forward so uh you reviewed the committee membership which was approved we invited all of those committee members many returned from
042last year uh to our fall uh committee meeting the verification from speaker is required by the policy so we have to send out a communication to any of the speakers that are coming into our classrooms for sex education to ask if they've edited or adjusted their presentation and if they have we have to review that and then approve it because of those changes we called all of them got their curriculum requests and then the fall committee meeting we held on November 10th so coming up probably in the next one we will probably have our recommendation or approval of the resources that we we reviewed and then if needed the spring committee meeting will be in March so that's what we did last year that's where we're headed this year that's actually the review of our
043work so any questions or comments edits or adjustments or any questions or comments I have I just have one question I've said that um this the materials that were reviewed back next is that in the spring or so what we reviewed on November 10th we've given the committee a week so this Friday they're able to provide uh they'll help they have additional time to review and provide feedback based on that feedback that's the data that I bring to you and ask for that adoption it will most likely be I'll request the December for you to look at that but we have to get the feedback first which is this Friday I believe so thank you that how I was a little unclear about that yeah so we try to do it as soon after the
044meeting as possible which that would be the December first meeting and that would also give time for you first second reads third reads if needed but thank you and um just let me just interject here um the board members that serve on your committee I was gonna bring that up yes we actually have two board members that serve uh Mr Wrigley and Ms Oaks both serve they both attended our meeting so thank you very much we have a parent from every secondary school middle and high school and then we have teachers counselors and a couple of the secondary administrators that serve for the district level I'm also on there but I do not provide feedback I facilitate the whole of it so my data isn't included when I come for the recommendation I just pull
045it from from what our committee has has proposed great thank you that was actually one recommendation I had when I was looking through the materials before the meeting is maybe in the future it'd be nice just to have typed up what the makeup of that committee is I I we all know it but it would just be nice to have it on dots yeah yeah and you don't necessarily need to have names but just two board members a parent from each because I know that you know in previous meetings that's something you've gone over but it might be nice just for the general public that are wondering how do they determine who's in this committee yeah I can do that I actually have another question on that the policy says a written report this is
046what I've done for the last this will be the third time would you prefer a written report or is this sufficient for your needs or your information I think I'm reading words here I'm good I mean yeah it qualifies for the the policy but what and yeah and thank you um Holly for reminding us about the membership so the board actually approved the membership of the committee at the last meeting yeah but have your point is to have it associated with this written report yes exactly I can include it here um because that is the review of committee membership that is what you did in the October but I can include each of the I could include names it's public but I can include who or what positions they each hold yeah I just thought
047then they don't because not everyone knows we approved it and it would they can find it on the consent consent agenda just so it's all in one place yeah I will do that any other questions or comments for this section I was just kidding I got it it's an easy one well yeah you guys can work out the technical part of that so so the next portion is um biennial review of the policy and so um as in our last my last presentation this policy was updated and approved by the Canyons Board of Education in June of 2018. that was when the last big adjustment to State policy changed which we aligned to um when we aligned to that in 2018 there haven't been any updates to the state policy for us to review so
048it's it's as aligned today as it was when we adopted it there have no been no changes or no proposed changes from my understanding for that uh if that state policy does change or law then we would propose that for the policy Review Committee um it is the policy is 600.500 it is one of the only ones that I have memorized the number the first portion of that covers parent permission which is required to take this portion of the health curriculum it includes the instruction and what can occur there and then the what can and should occur when complaints or violations have occurred so that's what the first portion of our policy covers again the complaints and violations we haven't had any in um the time that I've been here which I think is seven
049years so we had none this year we've had no violations um that that isn't to say that a parent hasn't called a teacher with a question or clarification but it's never gone beyond that so that's something that I we don't keep track of but if it's if it's always been taken care of teacher and parent and hasn't escalated to a principal then then they don't track it as a whole which I think is a really good thing that it's able to be taken care of at that level the next part is the sex education committee and what we do as a committee and outlines what we do and where our guardrails are so one we have to have it we have to meet every year that's required and it's just best practice and then our
050duties include reviewing the materials any materials that come that's aligned to sex education any speakers or if any curriculum is proposed that is our um Duty as a committee to review that against being medically accurate aligned to state standards in teaching and state law and then once we review it along those lines we bring to you for approval um I have not had any requests for a change in policy there's no uh so I don't know what or if we need to take a next step in that or because it's working well it seems our parents have what they need to make the choices that they want for their students our teachers have what they need to instruct meet the standards and also feel protected knowing that the materials have been adopted are approved by
051us and our students are getting what they need to learn the standards that they're supposed to learn so I feel like we're in a really good place with our policy and I personally wouldn't recommend an adjustment but that's something to keep in mind yeah and I guess with legislative session coming up yes you know and that's on the lookout for if that at the state level there are changes that need to be modified that would prompt us yeah and just kind of for reference to the full policy is also posted onboard doc so if someone wants to dive deep into that it's available there I'd love to have a conversation about it if you would like questions or comments on this section Mr Wrigley so just a couple questions not I don't know if it's
052exactly in policy but we haven't covered it the materials that are improved they're online for parents to see yeah required by law but yes they are on posted online they are in the health well the instructional supports Department which is our curriculum Department under the health Tab and right about part way down is approved materials for sex education so there's the list of materials and then parents can click on the link to pull up the presentation to print pull up the video any videos that have been approved they can see the contact information for the speakers that have been approved so all of that is open to the public is there any other additional information in there sometimes of a hard time on maturation conversations with their children is there any more stuff they could
053find there or that just maybe that the stuff we have there was supplemented so we don't we don't have additional parent resources to follow up with our lessons which could be a request for our committee I think it would be very good our maturation presenter and the video that she has provided is phenomenal I I have to say we approved her it is fantastic and parents can watch that with their students we give a code for the parents to log in so they can watch that online with their students and follow up with that as well as the in-person presentations but that's that's a resource for parents to watch with have discussions about maturation between them and their student as well as the in-person I mean we don't teach a lot of this in our
054classes we'll rely on the parents and most this program is a one-on-one we'd ever consider a 102 for those parents that maybe in the high school level that are starting to go more in depth in that conversation when they're your students more mature but still want to have a little bit of suggestions I guess you would say rather than some of the books out there I don't know maybe it's something that if you think it's a great idea about because we've got the 101 which is really good it's pretty basic but we also get into High School in our high school science classes and health classes don't go really too much or readers they have it correlated with our high school classes that 102 thing that the parents could be involved in maybe help out
055in that discussion that's a great recommendation uh we had a brief but we did have a discussion on where some of the the overlap between digital citizenship and safety overlaps with sex ed not that it's there but relationships and how that builds and what can occur online and then being um students understanding those connections and what some consequences could be and one of the requests was can we continue to develop our parent resources for digital citizenship digital safety and it seems to fit in that same request in that same need so I think that's a great idea thank you thank you Mrs Oaks to speak to Steve's point the last kiddo I had that hit the menstruation age we had the video that says and it was it was amazing and I loved being able
056to do it at my own timeline to sit down with her and actually her older sister sat in on it and she was like this is way better than what I caught so we had some really good conversations so I really I do think anything that we have where it's kind of in that format where parents can sit down and talk it through with their kid because they're you know their child's not going to get on their on their own without help because you have you do have to have the coat there was no way we could get in without the code so yeah it was really effective and and this particular this is this is one of the contents um with topics that we can provide the 101 in the classes but then there
057are um there are beliefs and practices at home that parents need and should connect with but we can provide the one-on-one and that ability to make that connection with home beliefs and home understandings is is needed and so and the other questions or comments so is that something bored that there's some interest in asking the committee to kind of look into that my one question is that is I don't know how that interplace state law we have to be back to stay within the boundaries we would have to stay within the boundaries which are tight and so I don't know it would be an interesting discussion even knowing what that would look like I don't think it's a bad idea to look at what the high school curriculum is that's what I'm working for you
058is what it is to release to the pair of some of the high school curriculum maybe some answers that would answer their discussions go along with them do they have access so they sort of know what we're talking about but also just these are some questions that we've sort of talked about in class you may want to pay on some talk about so it mostly related to the curriculum rather than pulling its stuff out of the Hat I actually think it would be great to have that timing like okay we discussed this today here's the accompanying parent video that we recommend she look at with your child when you have a moment I I think the way it could reinforce some of those principles the discussion between your parents really and also a very good
059use of beauty Square so right yeah all right I will I will look through that and we'll bring it up in our next meeting any any other questions or comments about the policy okay I was just gonna say I love the idea of having the parents get that first look and opportunity to discuss with their kids too all right all right uh the third part of the presentation and definitely the Beyond numbers is the local County data so I have provided um on board docs some more detailed um spreadsheets provided by the county which you can see I've broken down some of those into some slides just to have some brief discussions if you would like and I have a summary for each of them so uh you start with Utah adolescent birth data this
060is from 2020 so we've talked about it before the data lags quite a bit um so this is the newest data that's been provided by the state and the county Salt Lake County um has and this is per 1000 women or females Salt Lake County has 14 to 1 000 as the rate of adolescent uh birth and this is adolescent is 15 to 19 in this table set so that's where the county is at this is a slight decrease overall from our last data set do they in the state of Utah 18 and 19 is that's what a lot of everybody's getting married in some cases so does it break it down to 15 to 17 or something they don't no they don't nice to know that so yes I mean Utah is a little
061bit different than some other states on that number and I did provide some contacts which which I am actually going to reach out to for see if we can get more detailed data um this is the first time we've actually had some names for that but I broke we broke it down into smaller areas so Salt Lake County is giant it doesn't all incorporate us so we pulled out of one of the data sets the the cities that do that were reported that do fall into our account our School District boundaries so Midvale again this is per 1000 females 15 to 19 and the newest date is from the 2020. Midvale is 30.7 Sandy West can't tell you where that is I'm just in general Sandy West is 14.7 Sandy Center is 9.4 Draper is
0624.1 Cottonwood is 3.6 Cottonwood Heights area and then Sandy Northeast is 5.2 those are the only ones that were reported within our boundaries of these Midvale had a slight increase the rest had a slight decrease from the last data set that was provided foreign this is the big data set of that the three top on the chart are the ones that we talked through the most often because they are the most prevalent which is chlamydia gonorrhea and syphilis and then um this is the area for those now summary of all of that constant Trend up although it's slight Trend so um over the last I think it's been seven years there's been a trend upwards for all three of those with an anomaly in the pandemic which went down but all overall the trend is
063an upwards Trend although it's a slow Trend upwards so that's what we're seeing across the counties in Utah these are the uh just some more details for I put it on there so the public could go here to see if they wanted more information you as well and this is where we will be contacting um so the health.utah.gov has more data sets um we actually have two names that we can contact if we want to try to get more detailed data for our areas and that's is the review of the data this year questions or comments that's a broad numbers do we know how many unwed mothers we have in our district is that how big of an issue that is or do we keep you to know not it is only categorized by adolescent
064birth rates by age at least the data that is available I just asked that question because I wanted to know how much of the impact could it have on their district and what are we providing the services that are needed for sure because obviously a lot of those individuals are going to school yeah so just to kind of follow up on that so what services do we provide so we do have thanks for that question but we do have our Alternative High School which is Diamond Ridge High School we also have in Toronto which are two areas that um the females women that are pregnant could take advantage of if they're not staying in their in their boundary high school so Amy Becker is the principal of both of those with Mark Matea at Entrada
065but those are two options for that um for a student who found themselves in a position where they wanted to continue school but may not feel like they want to continue at their boundary High School I would say those are the two main uh for education and then we have our nursing Services which can support to a point right um they're not they're not prenatal nurses but they can't support with what a parent might need in those cases those are the two answers I have I could look deeper into that though oh online thank you Canyon's online but so opportunities to continue their education and progress towards graduation we have for those those kids well thank you Simon Rich has a daycare sort of a thing right at least and also I know Jordan has
066a daycare center which other high schools have take care they're pretty schools a lot of them are preschools basically but they'll take them it's a preschool but I mean so it is feasible after Mother delivers to go back to their high school and either with their child at the same place which is is there any restriction a young lady going continuing to go to school when she's pregnant they can go up to the data delivery okay in their boundary school yeah there's no there's nothing would actually advocate against anyone who put wanted to put in a rule like that but no there is yeah I I just asked that question because I keep thinking years ago when we were starting our family uh my wife had to hide her pregnancy so she didn't get fired
067so you know we've come a long ways yeah yeah back to that that parent choice and and that parent student relationship they feel like that's the right choice they they can continue through with that as long as as long as she the still in thank you thank you any other questions or comments thank you so much Jesse I appreciate it good information and I will probably see you on the next one with a recommendation for some materials so all right thanks so much thank you okay board um next on the agenda item 1e policy update and we'll be taking a look these are first reading policy 300 2.07 School I think it should be student conduct investors but anyway um and then policy 600.06 School library materials selection and review and I will turn time
068over to Jeffrey Christensen assistant legal council thank you presidentini so the first policy that we have for first reading uh deals with student conduct on buses and so uh just a couple of bulleted items here as part of the 22 20 um 22-23 negotiation package there was a provision that policy committee was able to look at this policy with some of the negotiations team and really look at some provisions on buses so our last policy committee meeting in October we had those Representatives come to our meeting and then we had further follow-up at looking at several provisions on his policy this is not a negotiated policy however it is one where we have met with um during the negotiations they afforded it to the policy committee to review so what you have in the red
069line is uh Provisions that that group is reviewed and is also recommended regarding the student conduct on bus policy so uh if you look at the red line that's on board docs there's a few uh just updates that really uh focused on the bus driver in terms of students and there was some language we added that it's the driver's responsibility to address behavior and we added additives disruptive distracting or hazardous that's the recommendation of drivers they're dealing with conduct buses um in our student conduct on buses we have references to our student conduct and discipline policy and it's considered while they're on the bus at extension of the classroom and the bus driver has ways in which they can extract and report back to schools and school performance regarding issues on the bus we also
070modified language where on occasion we have a supervising adult that may be on the bus a paraprofessional or other administrator while they're on the bus still the bus Driver's Responsibility to maintain trying to looked on the bus and that supervising Adult Works under the direction of the bus driver to assist so he clarified that language and then another request they recommended for safety and travel is sports equipment musical instruments or other large objects examples or skateboards and scooters that could become dangerous if they're in aisles or other places near emergency exits to the extent they can will be kept in backpacks or in designated cases so we don't have instruments out while the buses are traveling all of those revisions were acceptable to the those that recommended this policy be reviewed and then we also
071added at the end in situations where order cannot be restored a bus driver will contact the transportation department and they will work with dispatch to contacts those are the revisions recommended for student conduct on buses and I can answer any questions regarding this one Ms Jen's comments Mr Wrigley so I I don't know if we talked about it the opposite side but has this been modified in this student student contact policy to also go along with what the behavior should be on buses because I know sometimes the kids go a little crazy and there needs to be if that's not specifically related to buses maybe we need to put a section in the student conduct so we have a section on there and they're aligned they're aligned in our student discipline policy so that in
072specific I can't I didn't hear them so specifically in our student discipline policy we address student Behavior we haven't really delegated or had language that is covering the responsibility of a bus driver this is in our general policy section this is where we cover the responsibilities of the bus driver related to students in our student conduct and disappoint discipline policy we address but not just bus discipline but classroom discipline under State Statute and other regulations so these two policies are alignment they address different issues the question I didn't have a chance I apologize I have a chance to say the other one does it specifically talk about behavior on buses that are students so that we can have that with the parents and also with students alignment Mr military you know it's almost magical when
073I walk into a classroom and watch how a trained teacher with good classroom management you know handle the kids they've been trained to do that what training is available to our bus drivers for them to be able to do this and take charge and control and drive that to me is just kind of a scary situation because what what training are we providing to our bus drivers so at the beginning of the school year there was always a bus drivers in service that is General training in our most recent meeting um ever Perry who works primarily with our ESP employees and this might coincide some with our department of student services there is some new training and I forget the term Ryan I think it's is it event or you may recall I don't know
074if you recall the the term but we have new training that will be issued to bus drivers regarding specific behavioral related issues dealing with special education that we haven't had previously and that will be moving forward so primarily we just have the in-service training that's done once a year but there will be more training forthcoming and during that training we usually try to bring in with B to the staff for marbles department and go over some protocols some training on how to handle sales situations there we try and train them up the best we can and that training takes how long to complete I think they were probably a couple hours but the next shift on safety and operating the bus was still yeah yeah I mean student Management on the bus is six hours
075a couple hours a couple hours okay good afternoon I think we should get a hold of Disneyland and ask them to donate those bars that come down after riding the bars are down and then then when the bus driver is ready to let them go he can push the button for those three seats or four seats so the kids can get out and go I just know if I've got three or four of my grandkids in the car and I'm driving right contact me here in this last week about student behavior on buses and it's really made me consider I know I'm I sit on the policy committee but I do feel like we may need to look at this a little further um and and I think Mont might be on to something here
076with more training just because some of the things that have been reported to me kids leaning out the bus yelling explicit language to people on the street and really crazy situations we've had some some you know bullying and some racism and some things on the bus that are pretty atrocious and I know we've dealt with them as as quickly and as speedily as we can but I just I think that getting I think it's a great idea to have more training for bus drivers because they are driving this big vehicle and they're liable for everyone's safety and then if kids are misbehaving it's pretty difficult I know just even driving six Boys in my car is hard right if if some sort of fight breaks out or some aggression and and there they've got you
077know times five of that so I think we may need to look at this a little further as far as additional training for bus drivers just with bus management because I think as student behavior issues may as we know and we've seen this right student behavior issues have increased since covid there may be some more things we can do to be more proactive on the first part rather than reactive I just know how hard it is for a classroom teacher who is I'm all the eyeball with a kid maintain control of a classroom and then you put a guy that probably doesn't have the training that a teacher does as far as you know classroom management is concerned and their main focus is what's in front of on this item behind the bus not so
078much as to what's going on and help me out when we did the the big the Fun Bus big yellow boss what would the gentleman's name that took the picture walked in and we were at one school and he needed to take a picture he says okay from here to here you go there from here to here you go there from here to here you go there and the kids just all complied and afterwards I said you taught school before haven't you and you know it's very apparent when you look at a teacher with good control what they can do and I just really worry about tons and tons of sheet metal moving down a road yeah I'll just leave it at that we need to make sure they have adequate training so to your
079part Holly and Mont the revisions we made to the policy is with the understanding our meeting we talked about the development of a training manual for bus drivers and so that will be forthcoming uh in terms of the policy language with meeting with the association representatives there wasn't really more that they recommended needed to be placed within the policy other than you notified the request for training so I think there will be a development of a training manual to assist them and is in progress uh so in terms of the policy itself my recommendation is we move forward and then I think the training manual can be as an exhibit to keep moving forward policy is great but you and I both know just because it's policy doesn't mean it's going to happen no agreed
080but I think we also want it Therian protection and since the association has brought it forward to us so that's that's just my recommendation to the point is that they're comfortable with the language as presented and they're requesting training can you Mrs Oates well that was my question when I initially read this I thought this kind of puts the onus on the bus drivers and part of that is federal and state law as they are the commercial right they're in their CDL license I just wonder what we're doing to really support their ability to be able to maintain discipline I mean when you're saying they're responsible for me to maintaining discipline I want to say how it doesn't say what kind of recourses are available what kind of discipline is I mean and child actually
081be you know expelled or suspended for behavior that takes place on the bus that's not clear here and I feel like it needs to be more clear in my mind if it's school property and their behavior is egregious enough that they would be eligible for suspension or expulsion and then I think the same should be true on the bus so that's and they are and that's referenced in our discipline policy so right but but yeah I agree with Matt's Point like it just it's almost like I don't know it feels like a Band-Aid and it's not really getting to the root of making sure that they're supported interval I think it's a hard thing to be a bus driver and we know that we've had some really doozy situations where they've been attacked by kids
082and we need to make sure that they are decision enough support to do what they need to so can can this be to Amanda's Point um well all of them on here it doesn't say anywhere that you can refer back to the other policy like to the discipline policy it doesn't refer that in here anywhere it does in the policy it might slides it doesn't policy itself there's several references to the disciplines so it goes back to that okay so in this slide there wasn't so I didn't read the other and I slided it's not there but it does refer three different locations where it talks about hey go back here go back here well then I think that covers who's that part of that because I know when our buses roll in and out
083if there's problems on the bus the administration's right after the bus door opens administration's taking those students in and taking care of them and submittent that they can and so I know they they really support their bus drivers and try to take care of the problems with the bus driver Mrs steinbar I am really comfortable with the language of the policy and I do like how there's links embedded to the other policies that is clear and it has been our policy policy in practice for a long time kids all the time are pulled in and there is suspension and expulsion for for um you know indecent behavior on the bus I am thinking if it would be an advantage to add the board recognizes that you know that the the bus drivers are assuming a
084lot of responsibility and we're really relying on them to maintain good behavior you know maintain discipline and all these things and talk specifically about how we are supporting them with training so it in my mind it would be another bullet point and then in the exhibit it can go through what that you know the training manual but I I do possibly like the idea of including that in there that we're going to be held to that standard that all the bus drivers are going to have an increase with training as far as bus management and discipline issues that's not policy is it no that's what I'm suggesting is that that would be added to this policy I'm saying that that isn't policy policy to add all those well so this is what we're doing this
085is what we're doing no just just like right here in this slide how he has three bullets of the changes to the policy I'm saying I would love to have a fourth little change to that policy where we talk about how we're going to support the bus drivers with with more extensive training because I sat in committee meeting and I felt really good about how we align to our other policy and everything I felt great about it and then since then I have had three patrons call me about bus issues and I thought is there something more we can do can we provide and stay in our policy that we are going to provide further training and what that looks like so so we're saying if you're a bus driver you have you will have
086this training and that's our support to you and then in the exhibit it could be the training manual we talked about it but it's just not in the policy and I always like things to be as straight and forward and clear as possible in our policy so people don't have to wonder because like Amanda said she read it and she thought well are we training the bus drivers Mont said are we training the bus drivers so I think that might be something we should and think about including do we normally talk about Trump we don't put that in policy that's why I'm saying we don't put that kind of stuff that goes that goes back to them to decide what and how to manage to get if we're talking about having a training manual in
087the exhibit it makes sense to me to have that up there and I think it also what it does is it helps the general public recognize that we understand that there have been an increase of issues and that we're we're going to strengthen what we're doing that way but I'm shifting gears a little bit here I'm still thinking about the stress that's on a bus driver especially if you have a hard lap and you and I both know that some routes are easy to take and some routes are a piece of something yeah okay I think your cake is one you're not sure any of them are okay but if a bus driver has a difficult route do we place an assistant on the bus with them to help control things we we can't we
088have in the past yes so we have about 140-ish routes uh out there uh all varying types you think some aren't very long some are longer our elementaries aren't very long because we in the neighborhood if your high school to go a little bit longer routes but we try to we try to make sure they have all the support we have you know you talk about a classroom you know usually a classroom has or 30-ish kids a bus holds 72. yeah so sometimes you have two classrooms training little training so we need as much training he's 75. we always have we also know you know anytime a bus driver has an issue we ask them to report it back to our dispatch and then we report it back to the school so they know can
089address that so we always want to make sure bus drivers are supportive they don't always have this training but know that there's a support out there for them there's our Radio Systems whatever they need so yeah how often do we have a buff accident well every if we go 10 days you know we go 30 days without an accident you can have a pancake breakfast so that's something absolutely you know we we have you just had one of those we've had a couple of years we don't have what I would call you know we have little most of the Benders happen in our garage area then I would say I'm not sure we even have once a month I don't know Jeff yeah just about just about once a month so when I say that
090would be out on the road how often do we have an accident where there's bodily harm done not very rarely very rarely it's usually when you have the biggest stick in the game I can't remember anybody being hurt on our buses the other vehicles have business what I'm what I'm wanting to hear is even with all these concerns I have her buses are still a very safe place for our kids to be I'd say the buses are of this the safest place safer than the cars driving here yeah they're safer than walking I'll tell you that okay okay and then I just I just want to add also that the buses do have video cameras on there so if there is an incident it's fairly easy for the administration to track down and and take
091care of it according to that things discipline policy um okay so thank you for that feedback any any other comments on the bus one okay next policy for consideration is our school libraries material selection and review policy I'm going to go through this one slide that just lists some timelines and facts and then I'm going to turn it over to Mr Harper who has a presentation regarding HB 374 that the board requested at our last meeting so just some timelines and facts the policy of 600.6 school libraries selection and review was revised January 4th 2022 after three readings and in that policy we set up three levels of review of Library materials we had a school review a district level review as a for an administrator remember or or uh an individual board member could
092request a district level review the school level challenge which was essentially appealing the school review and then a district level appeal then in March um HB 374 was passed by the legislature and was signed by the governor in March and then became effective May 4th um in our May meeting we added the statutory definitions of HB 374 and adjusted timelines and added procedures to protect committee members of the current um levels for the school review the school level challenge and District level appeal then the Attorney General issued an official memorandum regarding laws surrounding libraries to the Utah State Board of Education in June of 2022 and then leas were required to adopt a policy by September 1 of 2022 per USB 277 216. our policy was already on the books at that time and we're
093bringing it forward now to take a look at the review section in our policy and with that we'll shift to Mr Harper um review HB 374. while we're waiting um oh uh apple a day keeps the attorney away or something like that um so in the the spirit of uh Leon's great uh dad jokes I have a dad attorney joke have you heard about the lawyer who sued the airline company for misplacing his baggage sadly he lost his case [Laughter] no yeah do you like that Leona all right in there with Leon foreign and it's it's kind of Apt because this presentation is really about discussing not losing a case um in case we get sued uh was a bill that was passed during this last legislative session back uh during the 2022 uh session
094um it was uh Bill brought forward by uh representative Ivory and basically it prohibits sensitive materials in the school setting which includes libraries it also includes the classroom uh field trips assemblies all of these uh which are no sense of material should be utilized in any of these settings um the bill goes on to Define sensitive materials as instructional material that is pornographic or indecent material as that term is defined in section 76-10-1235 pre-existed uh HB 374. it was already in the statute and so it made sense to use that uh definition since we were already utilizing that Anna pertained to school districts already so 76-10-1235 defines pornographic or indecent material as defined in harm find is harmful to minors in section 76 10 1201 pornographic and 76 10 1203 or described in section 76-12
095and that is a typo I apologize it's 12 27 not 12 17. um and I'll go in Cindy and fix that so when it's on that'll be accurate um in essence each of these three statutes contain elements of what's known as the Miller test the Miller test is the Supreme Court case uh it's almost 50 years old um but basically where the Supreme Court looked at and tried to Define what is obscene which therefore would not be protected speech under the First Amendment there um so uh as you're probably aware there there's a bit of controversy or you know challenges related to this definition this 12 35 because the question revolves around that or um in between sections one two or three um so given a little bit of background uh after this went into
096effect in May of this year um it was Ashley veal an attorney who uh was an Assistant Attorney General working for usbe was the assigned over education and she drafted uh an opinion letter trying to provide guidance for school districts about this uh HP 374. um unfortunately it kind of created a bit of confusion because um this can be interpreted more than one way which I'll I'll show you here in a second um subsequently um because people disagreed some people disagreed with Miss Bill's interpretation uh representative Ivory went to legislative Council and said give me your interpretation of this and they came back and said well all you have to do is look at 12 27 it's a bright line Rule and you can pull things off the shelf okay well let's counsel really doesn't
097provide guidance for school districts or other things and but it does for legislators related to their legislation so that was helpful for pres for a representative Ivory but not really for anybody else um so then Sean Reyes came back and provided a subsequent opinion letter uh in June June 1st as I recall um again reviewing and trying to provide some helpful guidance uh to school districts um and there's a couple important things in this opinion letter um starts starting on page two um attorney general Reyes points out HB 374 will likely be subject to Legal challenge if the law is challenged the Attorney General's office will vigorously defend a law okay that's really important and what does that mean they will defend the law so if the law is challenged in court they will go
098in and defend the law as they are have to do um what will happen is we will be sued or some school district will be sued for following the law we will not be protected because uh State risk is already pointed out so under our insurance policy we are protected when there are monetary damages so we have a slip and fall case so many slips we had one you know not too long ago one of our schools somebody slipped in the hallway she hit her head brought you know a claim against us you know if we went to court on that one they would defend us we have our our flagpole incident you know at an assembly that we're you know going back and forth and the Attorney General's office is defending us under our
099insurance policy but if it's only for injunctive Relief no monetary damages then we are not protected we are not defended by the Attorney General's office pursuant the state risk coverage there we are on our own and the challenges that presents to the school district is that the aclu's general approach to such lawsuits is to assign lots of attorneys to it and run up the bills because even though there are no monetary damages if they Prevail you pay their legal fee and so these can cost a million dollars in the girls tackle football case for example if that side prevailed they estimate that there's two million dollars in legal fees that would need to be paid there um so so that is the challenge when he says we'll defend the law well he's not going to
100defend us so as a result this isn't to me binding because we will be defending ourselves and so we have to pursue the course that is the league most legally sound um so let's question on that sure the money for this comes from our operating funds doesn't it this is our teacher our books our bus drivers this is that's where the money comes from it's it's not something not some mass amount of money that we have or anything it's not as we have to take it out if we cut our budget because of it so it's pretty important it is it is so uh going on he then talks about these three statutes and after you know citing the language from 1201 he says uh Memphis School library book in Utah were identified and removed
101from a library shelf is vulgar obscene based on this standard 1201 it is and he puts in bold likely to pass constitutional review in a subsequent legal challenge in other words we're on solid legal ground there in fact uh we'll get into this a little bit later that statute has already been challenged not in federal court but in state court and was found constitutional he then goes on and says the exact same thing again bold likely to pass constitutional review then he comes to 1227 and he says goes on because the difference is so give me 12 17.27 that's the type though sorry again uh so 1201 in essence is the Miller test applied to minors so it has three elements you know does it appeal to the current interest in sex for minors is
102it patently offensive according to community standards as applied to minors and doesn't have any serious value which is defined as having serious literary artistic political or scientific value for minors there so that's that and that's just right out of the Miller case uh same in 1203 it's the exact same language from the Miller case but without the miners but 1227 instead creates categories of uh what our uh descriptions of illicit sex or sexual immorality human genitals and a state of sexual stimulation or arousal acts of human masturbation sexual intercourse or sodomy fondling or other erotic touching of human genitals or pubic region in other words if a description contains any of these things then it goes on to say that it has no value and then it defines that what is value no serious value
103serious value for my serious value and then it goes on to Define that as having no serious literary artistic political or scientific value again right out of the third prong of the Miller test there so the the challenge is he says if you just look at 12 27 and say all right it contains one of these things in the description there um he says such an interpretation and you remove it because it has that description such an interpretation creates categorical exclusions or a bright line rule a decision maker that removes library books based on these defined categories directly complies with State Statute but then he goes on to say even when the removal of library books meet strict compliance with HB 374 and related State statutes a legal challenge will invite application of Federal First
104Amendment jurisprudence a body of cases which have not favored brightline rules and absent in obscenity cases simply put while HB 374 provides very specific categories of material to be removed and federal jurisprudence there is no brightline rule regarding the removal of books from your memory shelves in public schools under the U.S Constitution in other words he's acknowledging that courts have never favored any brightline rules in fact if you look at the definition it's all about looking at the book as a whole taking the work as a whole you can't just pull apart out and decide oh that's obscene so I can get rid of it without actually looking at the work as a whole he goes on and I think this is very important federal court might possibly possibly not possibly plausibly read sections 12
10527 2C not as a brightline rule but as a rebuttable presumption okay I disagree with that but what's important is he's acknowledging that there's two ways of breeding it you know that a court might read it another way that is a description of depiction of things set forth in 1227 1 a 1 2 or 3 presumably have no serious value for minors unless the school proactively determines that such materials have serious literary artistic political or scientific value if you're having a hard time understanding that it's because it doesn't really make much sense walks it in and he walks what he's saying is you know it can have no value unless you look at it and decide it has value that's a remarkable presumption but you read that and I believe what you said is that
106a school could make that determination so any one of our 40 somewhat schools out there could say for our school it has value or it has no value that that's how he's saying it but I'm I'm gonna show you how I think we're on Sounder legally I am listening I just I have not understanding that's a perfect lead into the policy actually he says failure to consider Library materials as a whole may present risk of conflict with federal law and then he points to the really important part of federal jurisprudence a cardinal rule of statutory interpretation is that when a statute is susceptible to two plausible interpretations it should be interpreted to avoid the Constitutional conflict First Amendment yeah so let me kind of take you through how I see how this really is read
107and it avoids the Constitutional conflict and keeps us safely in uh solid legal Grant um so what are the Roth and Miller tests for obscenities we've kind of talked about this which is you know taken as a whole the material taking a toll for an infant and sex uh the material is patently offensive because it a friend's contemporary Community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters and the material is utterly without redeeming social values that was the Roth case the first obscenity cases and then in Miller they slightly tweaked it a little bit um but pretty much the same thing that you know the average person applying contemporary Community standards would find that the work taken as a whole appeals to the current interest the work depicts or describes in the patently
108against and the word taken as a whole like serious literary artistic political or scientific value what's important to note is that all of these refer to looking at the work as a whole when deciding whether or not it is old food you have seen there um so question is you know are those requirements the same for minors well we have a Utah Supreme course directly on point which pointed out that there are different standards for minors so when we ask you know under the statute for a committee made up of parents and others Educators and others to look at it you know it's not the same standard for for adults it's different for minors in fact this case has shown that it's actually on the sliding scale depending on the age that that uh requirement
109goes down lower and lower as to what would be considered obscene it would be a very low bar in elementary school maybe differently of what would be considered obscene in high school so it's kind of a sliding scale depending on the age of the person who would be uh reading that book okay um the course decision in Ginsburg which was about um a minor being finding a a magazine for sale that had nudity in it demonstrated that a broader obscenity standard may be applied where States interest in protecting minors is implicated the court affirmed that nude images may be considered obscene for minors even though they would not be considered obscene under the Roth obscenity standard for adults there so a little different standard uh another important thing that the court Utah Supreme Court pointed
110out was the parents interest in all of this again in the state V Watts case it is recognized the need to protect children from exposure to harmful materials the court noted that parents and others would hold who hold the primary responsibility for minors well-being are entitled to the support of laws designed to Aid discharge of that responsibility or it also recognize that the state has an independent interest to protect the welfare of children and to see that they are safeguarded from abuses which might prevent their growth into free and independent well-developed citizens you know I think this is really the basis for HP 374 I mean this is really what we're trying to accomplish with this bill um there and clearly parents have the primary interest in this and that's why the the statute requires
111that parents are on those committees that review and make those determinations all right as I said previously the Utah Supreme Court has already found 76-10-1201 is constitutional those looking at the statute 76-10-1206 76-10-1201 is actually just definitions and that definition is right in 1206 uh in section five and so says the United States Supreme Court has reaffirmed That explicit or erotic nudity by itself may be obscene for minors so we uphold the inclusion of nudity in section 76 10-1201 is constitutional and then skipping down we hold it section 76-10-1206 and by extension 1201 is constitutional okay so in other words we're we're very safe following 1201 the Utah Supreme Court has already looked at it in a case involving a minor this Watts case was basically uh there was a um a record store down
112in St George on a month's favorite hunts um there and they put up a big bed sheet and they just let people come in and spray paint on it and somebody came in and Spain spray painted um some obscene things on this and then the police came and cited this person under 1201 and 1206 and so he brought a claim saying you know this is unconstitutional and they found in favor of the state saying no 1201 is constitutional we have a ride and a duty to protect miners there all right so what is the process so what I'm saying is and you'll see this reflected in the changes uh that we'll be talking about today Step One is first determine if the instructional material contains descriptions or depictions of the following those are the elements
113of 1227 and why do we do that because 2C points out that if they contain any of these descriptions by statutory definition that book has no serious value for minors and then it goes on and clarifies that serious value means it has no serious literary artistic political or scientific value the exact language from the third promotion and 1203 it's the third prong of the Miller test so in other words as I read it that or is you can do that analysis but if it has those that's the or so when you're doing the Miller test you can just look at those and if it has those elements in it it has no value so instead of going through a value analysis that's the or you say nope we're not going to do it because Under
11412 27 we've already determined it has no value there so it's just qualifying that element of 1201 and 1203. there all right so we have some resources that make it very easy for us to do this because concerned parents have gone through found these books and probably using Kindle editions or other things and able to pull out those parts and they're readily available um to look at and review and so that's what helps us to do that analysis very quickly because what we're recommending in the revision is that we then restrict their access so in other words when somebody asks for a review or a challenge to that book The Librarian then goes in and does the 1227 analysis using the tools that are already available to them pull it up find those descriptions uh
115bits in there that probably more likely than not may qualify under 1227 and then they restrict the access until they're able to complete the rest of the analysis which does require you to look at the work as a whole under Miller and under 1201 and under 1203 there what helps us is because Alpine has already ran into a problem so they went and took 50 books and pulled them off their shelves because they said you know oh looks like they contain these elements so we're getting them off and the ACLU came back and said oh no that's prior restraint now you can't pull these things off without doing an analysis first but here we've already done part of the analysis because under Pico which is the only uh Supreme Court case dealing with library books
116uh and Pico certain books like Slaughterhouse Five and others I can't remember off top of my head are taking off the board decides we want those books off even though actually they had a committee look at it and the committee said no these books shouldn't the board says yes we want them off and they come off and the Supreme Court comes back and says no you know but if they had vulgarity uh pervasive vulgarity then you could take them off and that all of it's a weird opinion but uh because nobody can agree um lots of concurring opinions dissenting opinions there is no majority but they all agree that you could take something off for vulgarity and this in essence is reviewing it for vulgarity and we're pulling it off so I think it protects
117us if we get a challenge from these cellu saying oh you use prior restraint no we didn't we did the 1227 analysis and then we restricted access to it while we did the full review just to clarify that's restricted unless Allah the child is able to check it out so yes that is correct restricted access means hold off the shelf there but a parent who wants to have their child can give permission for that child to obtain that book there's still a way for them to access it so that's how it's restricted uh just completely removed all right uh Next Step there which again I think is a a pretty simple step which is the patently offensive under the Miller test which is reflected in 1201 and 1203 it's harmful to minor means that the
118quality of any description or representation what's over form of nudity sexual conduct sexual assignment or sadomasochistic abuse when it is patently offensive to the prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what a suitable material for minors there um and I'll show you why I think this is pretty simple because although this is a seventh circuit case and we're in the 10th circuit I think you know it's good guidance here so what is patently offensive apparently offensive Behavior included representations or description of the ultimate sexual acts which I think is another word for sexual intercourse which is on the list in 1227. normal or perverted actual or and representations or descriptions of masturbation again one of the exact elements that are in 1227. excretory functions and ludic exhibitions of the genitals
119again what's in 1227 in this case the image of the erect penis Falls within the Constitutional bound of patently offensive material a jury could reasonably find that the picture represented or described a lewd exhibition of the genitals of such image fulfills the second Criterion for legal obscenity in other words and we found that it qualifies under 1227 then it should also be patently offensive so all right we're two-thirds of the way there all right step three uh you need to determine whether description representation material taken as a whole appeals to minors current interest in sex there so this is where I think we're kind of struggling here which is this prurient interest um and uh so we have a little bit of help and guidance on that but what's important to note is it talks
120about it taken as a whole um you know both in 1201 and 1203 there um so what does that mean proven interest in sex Supreme Court says uh material appeals to the current interest only if it is to be some sense erotic the Utah Supreme Court in but these states another case dealing with 1201 says the requirement the material be erotic is a quarterly directed only at the question whether it is aimed in some significant sense at appealing to a Minor's interest in sex this is where I think uh you know additional training may be needed we haven't yet had a challenge go to a committee but if we do to help them understand that aimed in some significant sense it isn't like you know this the book itself has to be all about the
121current interest in sex for minors you know when it says taken as a whole it's not like a balancing test that there's so much erotic you know material in it that it tips the scales or something like that it's a question of looking at that you know uh description that graphic description looking at it in context is that graphic description really about appealing to The Prudent interest in sex for minors it's not the work as a whole has to appeal to the current interest and I think that's where we're getting an example um you know we had some some passages read last meeting and one of them was from um something dead girl living dead girl okay this book contains very graphic description of the rape and murder of a young woman there okay taken
122in context does that appeal to the current interest in sex for minors arguably no rape is not about appealing to their interests in sex it is not in some sense erotic there now that's not the end of the analysis because the committee should then also be asking a second question is that age appropriate in other words is it so graphic in its description even if it may not fall under sensitive materials we also are looking to see whether works are age appropriate and so then the committee should be looking at wealth is that so graphic that that probably is not age appropriate for our high school students aged 14 to 18. and to look at that and say all right it may not qualify sensitive materials it isn't appealing to the current interests in sex
123for minors in that passage but it's so graphic that we don't think it's age-appropriate so those are the things that the the committee should be looking at when deciding whether or not these materials should should stay on our shelves there and as I said today we haven't had a challenge um but when we do uh I will do my best to provide training uh for that committee Steve so what you're saying basically I think you talked about it is if this committee comes back and says that it may be restricted for only 17 and 18 year olds perhaps that would require parental in other words it may everybody below 17 we would not be appropriate so that's an interview and I don't want to get too much into Jeff's portion because one of the things
124we're we are adding and he'll talk about that is the option of restricting permanently access and so you know Bluest Eye may be just restricted for seniors instead we decide maybe not appropriate for freshmen sophomores you know so we'll just restrict that but that would only be at the appeals committee that could make that determination and place that and that would be district-wide for the that book okay but that's in our policy and I don't want to get ahead of that but yeah you're right Steve any questions about HP 374 that I can help clarify and still a thousand of them I think let's take a look at the proposed revisions to the policy and unless did you have something you know I just think I know less than I knew when I came in
125completely after the policy you'll know more I don't know I don't know that they need to be smarter we're doing the same one back to mine okay I mean I knew there was some little NBA to the lottery next week we'll have next coordinate our exam for everyone thanks to uh and our prefer news presentation we have spent considerable number of hours digesting and looking at these things and he does a great job we're very fortunate for his Council um what I'm going to do now is review having kept olive oil he has just reviewed in mind what we have done to the policy or our proposals from um where it was previously so again here's my initial slide I want to go through a few additional facts um just to sort of highlight and
126Dan already alluded to it since the policy was passed in January we have had nine District level reviews and again if you look back at the policy that's where a committee doesn't meet but an individual either an administrator or a board major could request a book to be looked at um not a formal challenge just reviewed we've had five titles that were retained under that process and four that were deselected then the initial stage which was a school level review where a licensed librarian reviews the title we've had five of those reviews and five titles were retained and that's from January to June from August 22 to the present we've had zero District level reviews so there hasn't been anyone that has requested a title to be reviewed at a district level which is not
127a challenge but just an administrative review and then we've had seven School level reviews requested of which five are pending one title has been retained and another title was removed from the catalog the library the book was lost so at this point we have had no parent or legal guardian initiate the challenge process as outlined in the district policy is Dan uh Mr Harper already referenced so we haven't gone through an official formation of a school committee to remove the title at this point the proposed policy updates that we're recommending is to refine our review process prior to the challenge and then also have some elements that could address accelerating the process that we've already had in policy thus far so let me review some of these and then I have some graphics to show
128that kind of outline how the policy would move forward through some of the review process so the policy update includes just a minor really selection and reconsideration so we're just recommending a title definition a change and then we're recommending two levels of restricted access and those were both included in the policy and then our definitions have been alphabetized temporary restricted access would be after the initial 1227 review or a sensitive materials review where it would only be able to be accessed with parent or legal guardian permission the other which is permanent restricted access would be a determination following a district level appeal so there's a number of layers before that and they would be making a determination whether to either retain the title in the library permanently restricted meaning giving it either a grade level
129or parent or legal guardian access and then the third option would be to deselect and I'll get to those in just a moment I want to focus on the sensitive materials review which what was discussed as the the 1227 review initially and it has two components I'm going to switch to a graphic you have it on board Docs um this is a flow chart that was originally adopted by Nebo School District and then we've made some additions to it this will likely be further refined but this is our first iteration of looking at the sensitive materials review as you look at it on the left is the preliminary screening which is a 1227 review on the right is the full review which incorporates the 1201 statute and the 1203 statute so you're doing a complete
130analysis of the book under HB 374 it's really in two components and the reason we've separated it is one to do that preliminary screening which would if it contains what has been outlined by 12 20 27 it would be placed in a temporary restricted access the graphic is a little hard to read but if you dig in you will see that what is in each of these um shapes is really the questions from the state statutes over here on the left where you have one two and three those are the prongs under 1227 looking for the descriptions for depictions of either illicit sex or immorality if you review the book then it doesn't have any of those there is a poor trunk that um still requires a full review so as you were looking at
131the flow chart you're going from left to right so if you did have in one two or three if it is yes for one two or three I'm looking at the gray box you have an error going up which would put the book in temporary restricted access at that point the full review is not complete and um for that preliminary review we've authorized Gretchen I think it's how long did we leave for the preliminary review that 10 days 10 days so they'll be looking at some of that website what is the book contained to determine whether or not it's placed in temporary restricted access then the full review is 45 school days in the revision allowing them to then work through depending on whether it had the fourth component the remaining parts of the Miller
132test or the other two statutes 1201 and 1203. asking those two questions if it did have in both of those yes the book would then be deselected if no then it's retained and this is just the sensitive materials review again the two questions from the remainder of 1201 and 1203 and because this fourth prong under 1227 uh doesn't automatically throw it out for serious value you have another review in that fourth prompt if no to any routine if yes then deselected good that makes sense so far with the so this is the first level of review in the policy the sensitive materials review I'm going to go back to my to my bulleted list so that's the first level now another modification in the policy is that we indicated that a parent or legal guardian
133um where the library is materials maybe accessed is limited to 10 active requests of this kind per school year so if you were to provide a list of 10 books those could be reviewed and then once one is completed you could add another one if one has been completed that was our recommendation for the number of reviews of this pie one person can do 10 reviews correct one parent or the active active at one time why did you limit that attempt our thinking was that one is primarily the bandwidth for our librarians and how many books they can realistically get through given you have not just the sensitive materials review but then you have the complete review before you determine whether or not it is retained in the library so the first step is the
13410 days to pull off the shelf and temporarily restrict access if needed but then the remaining part you still have is we've reviewed it in the review of the law we've only done one part of the analysis now the full work must be read and do the 1201 and 1203 analysis that was the rationale but that one parent could go find 10 of their best friends and have them do 10. correct and what we're anticipating given the policy is if there was an initial Avalanche of requests then we would over time look at how to address those but eventually it would taper off that was the discussion in the committee and the current policy allows two currently has two you're expanding that you know the next the next provision is a a significant change in
135the policy where initially we had laid it out you were a full book review had to be completed before a parent or legal guardian could initiate a challenge we've now removed that where um you don't have to complete a review to challenge a library material but we have embedded the sensitive materials review that I was showing you in the graphic is part of any challenge if it hasn't already been completed I'll just review that one more time so this whole process here would be part an initial Pro an initial step one of any book challenge and once it would be then completed if it hadn't already was completed then you would initiate the challenge process now in the in the policy recognize that not all challenges are for sensitive materials there could be a challenge
136for other issues and so the policy is drafted in a way that you can address both sensitive material reviews and other forms of book challenge then another modification is that the school committee addressing a challenge will only have two options with regard to library materials and that's where that committee is made up of five individuals two parents the district library media specialists library media specialist a teacher a school administrator right not the District Library but a licensed librarian a teacher the principal and two parents yep are they've from that particular school where they're being challenged are they a committee that's just always the same committee so it can be established to need and selection does not necessarily have to be at that school however um it could be at yes Gretchen so I believe your
137question is like if a book is challenged at a certain school does the committee come from that school community and the answer is yes other than the library yes at the school committee level at the school committee level everyone will come from that school Community except for in elementary school because we do not have licensed teacher Librarians at any of our elementary schools so it would most likely be myself or a secondary teacher librarian serving them that's a good question really important because if you go back to the 1221 we're talking about reflecting the values of the community too with the Miller three-prong test that's why it has to be people from that Community because this is just at the school level not the district level and there will be differences between different communities and
138schools on that we have had always noted in the policy there are Provisions to protect the confidentiality of the committee members they are not known to the to the greater public they're formed they do the address and then the committee reviews there's no um that's not public to protect the confidentiality um another change is because the challenge would include a sensitive materials review we've modified the timeline and added additional time because there's there's that initial review the sensitive materials review that would go forward as well as forming the committee to meet that's a challenge where was the 45 day then because that one says 60 days so the 45 days is the completion of the sensitive materials review so I'll show you your clearance so this review which is the sensitive materials so the first
139part in yellow would be done in 10 days the full the full review is 45 days the two orange squares at the top the top row well I know so the only good system 10 and 45 is 55 days not 60 days I'm just making it we just gave him a few more days okay uh the 60 days is for the challenge right the challenge is this process plus whatever with the challenge I'll show you what the challenge looks like now so this is after a review's been a sensitive materials review has been completed well or is this part of the process so apparently guarding the slower the materials can be accessed with an initiated challenge if it hasn't already been completed they would engage in that sensitive materials review and then the community really
140has two options to either he select the book the title or the title is retained and that's done by majority vote of those five members and that notice is sent back to the parent or legal guardian within 10 days 10 working days excuse me and this challenge process can be initiated without any other previous review and it now would include the sensitive materials review as part of that process and the last component is the district level appeal which looks much like the challenge other than um it's really just the meeting of the committee once it's been submitted and then they have the three options as we've addressed where the title is retained the title is permanently restricted as defined in the policy which is they could determine a grade level appropriateness as um Dan was
141suggesting earlier where for example Living Dead Girl where it could have an age-appropriate component placed upon it or the title is deselected depending on the vote majority vote of the committee who's on the district committee so there's seven on the committee and uh you have a second so you have three Gretchen you've looked at this more recently than I have so three parents the director of ISD school performance um I uh myself and there's one other I can't remember so it's a committee of seven with three parents that's the district level and then I'm a member of school performance an administrator and the director of ISD and they would be making this determination by majority vote on yeah I think it's important also to let them know that you face school if it's if the
142book's gone through the school and the school has decided to have it uh permanently restricted the district can't overrule that this is just for the district so so if if a school determines goes through all those processes on the flow chart and decides hey this should be permanently restricted because it doesn't meet these things it automatically goes to the district level to see if district-wide it should be restricted but district-wide they can say ah no we think for some parts of our communities and other parts of the district it doesn't have to be restricted but they can't overturn what's happened at the local level which I think is really important so just yeah that's right so just to clarify the the school level yeah I'll get you the second question so the school level um
143Library material challenge is for that school yes so if it's deselected at the school then that's for that particular school if it's retained at that school level then a challenge later um if it's retained at the school it only applies to that one school however if it's determined to be deselected during the school level challenge process it automatically goes to a district level appeal if they determine to deselect so by initiating the challenge process if it's deselected you're triggering also the appeal process if that makes sense if it's deselected and that's outlined in the policy okay Gretchen you wanted to add something oh just for clarification a title can only be permanently restricted by the appeals committee not at that school not at the school so then that's changed since our meeting in the morning
144well no no we've talked about that our meeting you and myself and Jeff Friday School level it can't be permanently restricted at the but it still can be deselected it can stay selected yeah but only the full committee at the district level can permanently restrict a title right but at the school level it still can be deselected because I thought Gretchen was just yes yeah can we do select it here and there's in this deselection only applies to the one just that school just that school and then it then it will automatically trigger yeah a district level review yeah of that deselection okay so so I I need some clarification because I met with you Friday morning and then I was on a flight and y'all met again Friday afternoon I talked to Nancy about
145it because I didn't get every anything sent from you but there's a few changes I'm hearing that I didn't hear in our conversation so so it automatically goes to an appeal that's not something we discussed before so you're saying going to an appeal whereas the district can appeal and reverse the school decision because we talked about what they cannot do that what I'm saying it's indicating here is already drafted into the policy that's not new you didn't change that so okay so when you're saying it automatically goes to an appeal process you're just saying at the district level where the district can then determine for it to be fully deselected or it can still say in other schools the show which we talked about which we did talk about when you're saying an appeal it
146sounded like an objection do you know what I'm saying and I'm like whoa whoa we didn't talk about that okay so once it's deselected this main it goes to the full District committee yes yes in the review the auctions is the red flag sometimes like when you say initiates an appeal process it sounds like I'm appealing that decision does that make sense about it yeah no you're not appealing that committee yes District level appeal is essentially reviewing yes clarify if the title is retained and the person initiating the challenge wants to appeal that decision they can definitely take that right that's right okay and then one other change is the grade level that's not something that grade level that's we talked about temporary restriction permanent restricted access but grade level that where it's determined that
147it goes to a special grade level so you're saying it should be part of this title is permanently restricted that's what's in the hands of the district's committee at the appeal to determine this book is age-appropriate for Middle School this book is age-appropriate for high school this book is appropriate for only parent or legal guardian access that that process where they're looking at age appropriate or looking at the work is only for the district level committee so then to be clear though because there was a scenario Steve was saying if there's a book like blue is Cyrus we say okay after all these committees it's permanently restricted up to the age of say you're a senior in high school so so then we've talked all about what happens with permanently restricted how that's going to
148work when they request the book but we haven't talked about that so this idea that it it can be grade level you're saying then it when they go to request it if they're a senior there's no restriction no warnings parents aren't informed it's just oh you're a senior you have access to this book but if you're younger than a senior you don't is that what you're saying if that's not something we've talked about yeah which that's the thing Steve was saying if they're a senior and then we've been talking about ages so that's not something he's going to talk about on Friday morning I'm talking about it earlier in the week yeah and I felt like after Friday we were not that wasn't something we were considering so the so so to be clear how
149is that going to work if it's failed the brightline test if it's failed these other reviews we're saying this book ought to be impermanent restricted access but now we're saying well maybe we want to put a grade Associated to that how is that going to work because clearly whether you know the way this the law works it doesn't say for minors anyone except for if they're seniors and they're 18 years old we still have to be liable that the parents that we are respecting that our leas are you know in in accordance with parents and then we take that right um you know that we acknowledge the right of parents to the access and inform consent to their kids education and the materials that we're Distributing so I'm not sure how that grade level how
150we're going to do that how it's going to work well if I might yeah that's a really good point as in determine how sensitive materials it comes off yes it fails all about and this falls under the age appropriate analysis okay if you're looking at a book they've decided no it doesn't qualify as sensitive material but it has some pretty mature themes or you know has a little bit of vulgarity or an obscenity in there you know it's it has one F-bomb in there which you know would make it R rated maybe that comes off or it has you know something else I don't know but they decide well you know it has enough value then we want to keep it but we're going to restrict access this would probably happen in the high school
151to say only seniors could do it um all the details those are important you know how we would reflect that in the catalog if there was some sign you know only seniors can check this book out to let parents know that that is a restricted access restricted only to seniors because we've determined it's not age appropriate for some of our younger students in high school that that's the scenario where I would see okay so it's not actually applying to sensitive materials brightline or anything like that you're just talking about age appropriateness only so then would that book be on the Shelf because if it's open on the shelf and kids say because this is what happens right oh okay that's only supposed to be for seniors well what's going to happen is all these kids
152are going to go look at that that aren't seniors we're still providing plenty of access so would it then be placed behind the circulation desk like our other restricted Acts so that it can't be accidentally miners can't accidentally be exposed but that far in the weeds of where they'd be putting but somehow to restrict the thing we need to think about not directly available on the shelves and I think go ahead I was just gonna say I mean this is a first reading it's opportunity for everyone to kind of provide feedback and then the committee will go back and discuss it not further so that's that's a good question so um are you finished and ready I'm just I was gonna say this so one of the issues we faced in developing this scenario in
153this process is we don't have experience with the challenge yet in our district so what this was an attempt to do is address the concerns raised with library books that may be on our shelves that individuals are concerned about with the sensitive materials review based on the policy now and the legal analysis that Dan provided we think this process would be defensible a because we're going through HB 374 sensitive materials review but also we have the second process which is following the Constitutional analysis of considering the other Federal prongs that are part of that initial analysis and then also allowing for patrons to initiate a challenge process without going through a review um and again this is for first reading if you see issues that the committee can reconsider that's why it's here okay I
154think Mrs shell said she had a comment and then Mrs Arnold um okay so first of all I just want to say thank you like I already thought we had a really good policy and I have had state board members tell me they think ours was one of the best but I really do appreciate like I think it's even better now and I really appreciate you guys I know that was a ton of work um I do have a question though and my question is a lot of the parents that came and spoke at last board meeting were saying like why can't you guys just get rid of them I mean what can we just get rid of all these books that are bad like is that the so uh that goes back to I
155think you know the the question uh what I think the parents are referring to is why can't you just do a 1227 analysis and be done there and the problem is we would probably lose in court I don't like I'm gonna spend the money Court federal court I think would we'd lose in court because no court has said yeah just take that sentence out of context doesn't matter you don't have to look at the whole work we've decided that word let's see yeah they're they're going to I'm quite confident require us to look at the work as a whole or making that determination that we can't just pull these things up but what this allows us to do is if we decide that it falls under 12 27 is to restrict the X the access
156to it while we do that whole analysis so it's not still sitting on the library shelf and that's why we've also increased the number of review requests and active ones um and then also allow them to correct to the challenge um and so and then my second question is the restricting access is that legal will that will that part of it right again safely by doing a 1227 analysis instead of other districts have just taken the as soon as somebody challenges it we're taking it off the shelf and that's the one that's more susceptible I think to the ACLU coming back and saying well that's prior restraint you haven't even looked at the book what we're doing is we're saying well we know by doing this 1227 that there are vulgar elements to the book
157we haven't looked at it as a whole but we're going to restrict its access while we do the full analysis okay thank you that's that's all okay Mrs Arnold and Mr Wrigley so I I think too with this that we need to take a look about look at what the one parent said about why are they getting on the Shelf in the first place because there are zillions of books we can choose from we don't have to put all those books on our shelves there's no law that says because these books are available you have to put them on the Shelf they're just available and if you can look at titles and you can go through that other piece that Dan showed us or reading the rating if we can go through the ratings before
158we ever purchase them then we don't have as many books on the shelves I I was totally taken back shocked in I learned more about things that I never knew existed and I don't want to learn any more about them okay I'm too old I'm sorry um so so I think we have to also look about how not to get them on the shelves in the first place so then we don't have to go through this process in the second place correct but then back to Dan I I see it both ways though if we don't take them off by the parents who are asking us to or at least you know like you said take them off and do the review in 10 days they're going to come at us and say here's the
159law and now we're going to sue and then and I know that's why we have a policy and I know that's why we're looking at this and figuring it out you know or the other parents are going to say well you're bad enough and it's like I don't know I'm a mom with nine children it's like can we just work this out together and figure it out but sometimes there's no working it out figured out together but um but I think I really like the fact that we're taking it off what we're reviewing for the 10 days so that at least we're reviewing right and then we're looking at that piece because it's it's explicit sexual content that's really bothering me that that these little 11 year olds and 12 year olds and 13 year
160olds have access to you know I just that's not right it's just not right on any level that you want to look at it and then you know and then other books have other issues that maybe can take a little longer to review and see so thank you for all the time and energy and effort you put into this I I can see how much more better this is than what we had before and how this follows the law and how we can say that we're trying you know to follow the law and doing the things that's you know best for our students um and their education because we're really here to educate as well as to I mean I I love books too and in my classroom I have hundreds and hundreds of books
161you know that I have kids read but I can't let them just read any book I have to read every book I have to make sure that there's no words in there I've gone in whacked out one word and I'll in a set of books you know like this one word shows up and so you just block it out tell them to use their imagination but um I really I really appreciate all you've done and I I think you've safeguarded us so thank you but on the other hand how do we stop getting them put on the shelves because this is an attack on children this is an attack on families and we do have the responsibility to protect them so that's my next go around and well I'm not going to be here your
162necks go around and step please would be to this policy does have a section about selecting the books with some very strict criteria so age-appropriateness and it was in there before now it is Muslims church let's see Mr Wrigley anyone else or are we ready to so I've been on the policy maybe a decade uh this has been probably one of the most difficult policies that we've tried to address I think we struggled in this process on trying to get a balance between all parents because as many parents are on this side reading books in our meetings which are getting us banned from YouTube the last video was banned from YouTube so we have a board meeting now that nobody's going to see because it's banned anyway um and YouTube's so conservative but so so
163and then I've got parents on the other side saying calling and saying I read that book in high school I want my son to be able to read that now most of they're not arguing on the sensitive materials but they are arguing on the other books that may have a word here or there or whatever uh so we've been trying to figure out and and balance that so that each book has its day in court basically each book because each author's been asking that too across the country so I think we're giving by this process we are restricting it and hopefully meeting the needs of the parent that is challenging it and that we're getting it out of their school library and if it makes a censor of criteria all School libraries across the district
164during the challenge time so that it has its day in court um and that's that due process that we need to be able to not get sued and take a day or two of our teachers pay to fight a lawsuit that we may even lose you know the legislature says I'll be up money we'll just we'll just go anyway but we don't have that money um um so the other issue that I've that so I think this process is going to give us that opportunity now there is a question we just can't have anybody in the district to say my son goes to Jordan but there is this book over in Corner Canyon and I want it out of the district we are saying you have to have some standing I think most lawsuits you
165have to have some standing don't you you know you have to have you when you take it to court you say well you can't bring this because there's no standing you know it doesn't affect you so a lot of them types of the parents if there's the books in Jordan and your parent in Jordan then you can protest this and bring it through the process right because you can't do a school that you don't have standing on because your kid's not going to read it now some other kid May and so you talk with a parent at that school you know if they have the same concern then they would go ahead and file it because that's where the book is um so I think that that that makes some sense too because I think
166we got in court the first thing to say is this parent that brought this who requests the startups had no standing her kid wasn't even going to be able to see the book because it was quarter Canyon and their kid goes to Jordan so what gives them the standing to bring that tea to begin with uh so I think that's makes it stronger during that process and there's a lot of parents at different schools that can that can do that um on top of the whole process at any point the parent can restrict this book even if it's determined that it's going to stay on the shelf the individual parent still has the right to restrict the book from their from their child so in any case it's this we're not protecting the other kids
167that they think they need to protect that they are be able to protect their particular child um then I think the last thing that we need to understand is a lot of the books that have been brought by we do not have hundreds of copies of these books in our library they're not being read every single day I think law Envoy we had one copy had never been checked out in four years in four years so a lot of these books probably don't need to be on the shelf and I think I'll agree with that and it probably would not pass this our new process but it's not like we've had kids pulling all these books off the shelf for the last several years and causing all kinds of sexual issues they haven't been reading
168them uh we still need their process but but sometimes it makes it sound like our school districts had all these books and they've been reading these books most of the books we've had they've never been read or they're lost or whatever and I think we need to do something about it but I just want to make that clear that sometimes it's it sort of seems like we've had all these books on the shelf that people have been reading and we may have had a one or two copies but I don't think we looked at the circulation of most of our books people have not read that so I think the process is sound we've spent a lot of time on it and I think is going to meet the needs of all the parents maybe
169not as much as everybody wants because I've got parents on one side that said I don't even want you to look at the book it's just himself and parents on down this side say it should just be pulled I think it's a good compromise that will stand up should we get sued on either side with the parents thank you um Mrs Oaks and Mr Miller oh sorry Mr Steiger folks Mr Miller and then just remind the board you do have a business meeting first off I just wanted to thank everyone who sits on the policy committee I'm really really grateful for the changes that we've done to this policy my largest concern at the beginning even last year was books being on the shelf and accidentally being picked up by children and the parents have
170no idea the parents are entrusting us with their children and we promise to provide a safe learning environment and so I really appreciate that we have the temporary restricted access and that quick 1227 screening I also one thing I really like about uh if if a book fails all of the sensitive materials um and the big large review of the other parts of the law what I like about that permanent restricted access is Steve says there's two sides of the issue this still allows parents if they want their children to check out the book they can they just sign an apparent informed consent and then I feel good about that because I feel like the parents know that this this isn't happening without parent knowledge and I know we can say you know I've heard
171a lot of arguments about kids can access things on phones and computers they sure can but just like we put wire firewalls up with our technology as best we can we also ought to be careful that we're not openly Distributing things in the library with the parents you know without the parents knowledge so I like that restricted access because what he was talking about parents can go in on Destiny and restrict their kids access but not all parents even know how to do that or have internet access so I like I like that we've provided this other um this other Avenue I when Steve was saying a lot of our books haven't been in circulation I think that's the best argument for for um making sure that we are selecting books that reflect the Community
172Values right if they're not being checked out it's because it hasn't been appealing to the community so I I hope um I hope also we've talked a lot about this and that's my primary concern too in the future with library media Specialists selecting the materials that there should be a really good look at all you know as they're looking through and reading just the synopsis of the book that it's not violating 1227 and the other parts of the law because this is going to be a lot of time and resource for the district to go through and as clarine said the easiest thing is not to put it on the Shelf to begin with rather than the process of getting it out but just wanted to say thank you to the policy committee because I
173definitely feel like this is a I I think this should be a model for the state so all right thank you Mrs Oaks and Mr Miller so thanks for all the work and Dan I really appreciate it I felt like I was back in law school again it was awesome I'm sorry if you got any PTSD I don't know it's good it challenged me and I'm still processing a lot and what all of this means I do have a question similar to kind of what Steve brought up I I have a constituent who is a mathematician and he brought up something I think that's a pretty viable point he said you know how many students are we talking about here that are impacted and how many resources are we spending on this particular issue and
174I think that's a viable point when we're I I'd be interested in seeing some of the books that have been contested how many times they've been checked out over even the last five years and I'm really actually under interested in understanding more about how much our students are even accessing the student the school library because speaking from personal experience I mean my kids read a lot they're not really using the school library very much they're usually going to the public library or accessing books online I'd like to see a comparison between how many students are are using the people libraries you did yeah they did one last year books a month okay you too yes I have a presentation last year and per school like which schools or is it being used for and anyway
175I just and we can get that they don't yeah I'd like to see pretty good I'm just kind of I've been processing that ever since this Patron said what he did because I think it's a really good point and um and the biggest thing that people on the other side say if a kid wants to get a hold of a book they'll get a hold of a book they can get a hold of it online they can get a hold of it at a public library how much are kids actually getting hold of the books that we're concerned about and um how offend is that happening on the other side of that I also recognize that there is a major value here attached to the sense of safety that parents have when they send their
176kids to school and it reminds me a great deal of the issue with masks in that situation we as a board when we were going through that whole thing with covid and we were trying to decide upon a policy where you know thresholds and infection rates and when we went online and when we stayed in school in person there was a major issue attached to teachers not feeling safe no masks there were a lot of parents on the other side who said we don't feel like we need him you are thrusting something upon us that we don't need it almost feels like the tide has flipped and and at that time as a board member I felt very strongly regardless of whatever your personal Precision was it's very important that you recognize that there are
177people at the table through their sense of safety and feeling like they are secure when their child goes to school or when they participate in school that they are comfortable and safe being there that is important and I as I'm processing through this policy that's part of the lens I'm looking at is I want to make sure that no parent feels like they have to take their child out of public school because it's a place where their personal or family values are being attacked in their child is vulnerable to that so kind of like what Steve said I think it's important to look at it are we protecting that value system are we making sure that kids still have access to be able to explore and Learn and Grow it's a very very difficult thing
178it reminds me a great deal of when I was in high school and I took an AP art history class and we talked a lot about what is pornography for studying all of these different Greek and Roman statues and the question does it have the intent to arouse does it not some of these are subjective questions and they're very difficult and I appreciate that some of these committees will have multiple eyes looking at it multiple perspectives and that we are trying to guide with state laws we are trying to recognize students wait long story short I really appreciate the work of the community deals is this a difficult issue if Mr Miller thank you you guys have done a ton of work you know that you know that I'm guessing um I listened to the
179concept here about many of these books have not been checked out for over 40. I'm going to make the Bold assumption that our library space for books on shelf is limited quantity and regardless of the content of a book if it's not meeting some sort of a circulation test why do we keep them in the library it needs to go anyway right regardless of the content and and that is part of the criteria that can be used to weed a book out of the collection is whether or not it's been yeah we talked about if it has sensitive materials in it and it hasn't been circulated but I don't want to get into that end of it I'm just saying regardless of the content it could go and I think you may have some issues
180if you start saying if it has questionable content we'll get rid of it but the others will keep but I think that if it's just a blank that if it hasn't been checked out in pick the number four five six years well I specifically ten well because of the budget okay I picked four you pick tan I don't care where it comes down okay thanks anyway uh the other thing that I think that I picked up as you presented tonight and if I'm reading this incorrectly please let me know that we can't just go in and start pulling books but there needs to be a challenge and the thing that I'm really really liking about that is I have so much respect for the parents that came to our last board meeting installed they quite
181literally rubbed my nose in it let me know what was in there and the one statement I would like to make is we are on the same team it's not us against them and we're not hitting somebody heads and if we are going to clean out our libraries we need those parents to make challenges so that we can do our end of it to make it happen we're on the same team so and I think that's a very very important thing to realize that we're going to work together the public schools belong to the public they don't belong to our superintendent sorry Rick but they belong with the parents they belong to us to the board we are elected to represent the people living in our district so thank you for putting that portion in
182there maybe it was just an ad to be there but the cooperation that is needed to make this happen thank you anyone have um yeah so it's it's important that we have a process that covers everything and I know it can get frustrating because but we are in public empathy and we are funded by public dollars and so we have to be very Mindful and careful and I'm going to do a 360 on this whole issue which I feel like this policy is very strong that way so um so we'll take the the feedback the committee will take the feedback and everyone's okay we'll bring this back at next board meeting for a second reading all right great that includes our study session let's take about a three minute break and then we'll notice but
183I didn't have a chance to mention it I don't see what you think of these things that's a terrible healthy I know these are terrible African adult Cindy I need some help you're not addicted I'm sorry sorry they looked really good huh I think that one of Brighton is a good place to be football really it's a difference you coming in from the backside yeah I don't expect anything to be significant thank you foreign okay um good evening we're ready to begin the business meeting portion of the meeting of the Canyons Board of Education today is November 15 2022 and we're meeting at the district offices located at 9361 South 300 East in Sandy Utah I would like to thank those that are joining us via the live stream as well as those here in
184person and thank you for being here with us and thank you also for your patience as we are running a little bit behind so um the first board the first item on the agenda is to approve the agenda for this evening I will ask is there a motion to approve the agenda I'd like to make a motion to approve the agenda for November 15 2022 as is posted on board Docs thank you is there a second to that motion I'll second it all right Mrs Arnold seconded the motion thank you any discussion to the motion can you see none I'll ask for the vote all in favor please say aye aye any opposed okay that motion passes Mrs Oaks do you want to register your vote hi okay that motion passes thank you um next
185we will be led in the Pledge of Allegiance by Daniel ashbridge Mid Valley Elementary assistant principal and then Mr ashbridge will give us some school highlights from that school thank you uh principal swaniki's homesick if you're watching sorry about that with their family so I get to go in tonight so everybody please stand ready begin I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you all right thank you see if I can get oh now turned off I'm going to share a little bit about Mid Valley over the course of I'm going to say the last couple of years um personally I've been the assistant principal this is my second year we're
186appointed with principal swaniki and myself and we were tasked with um helping the school and the community transition to a title one process and I came with a lot of resources uh by the district by um by you guys and it was quite the process but what we've seen is a lot of success and a lot of um success stories coming out of the allocation of resources and so to begin with we really want to look at what causes those successes or what does that success look like last year we really focused on our ELA test scores and improving our students outcomes with with English and we actually scored over 14 percent based on Rise data and that's the highest the school has ever achieved in history that we can mine all the way back
187and so looking at that what really shows like wow that looks good but that is a number that's a a spot on a chart and so when we dive deeper into it we want to see what is really going on and what we are seeing is that we see it's threefold we see a commitment in our community and the partnership that we're able to create with our community we're seeing the commitment of our staff members from teachers to support staff to even volunteer tears even our lunchroom and custodial staff and then obviously the commitment of our students so again we've had some tremendous growth coming on throughout this school but to begin with with again going back to title one we've been able to uh include a lot of resources and ones with the Community
188Schools facilitator and I don't know if you know a lot about Mid Valley Elementary but it is one with a lot of Rich history a lot of ingrained families who have been there for a long time a lot of history a lot of grandparents a lot of people who even come into the school who went there over 30 years ago we've even have teachers who have taught their entire careers at Mid Valley but we're also seeing a population that is growing like we only have about 100 540 students currently now as a school and it's continuing to grow so what we're doing is we're seeing this great melding of the community that's been established as well as the new community coming in and we're able to do that like by doing programs like all pro
189dads which is absolutely amazing we saw the whole media center completely filled up with nothing but men um well there was a few women in there I apologize but but it was there all to support their children have breakfast and learn for ways they can volunteer this morning we did a another um Community event that was Mom's matter same type of thing but we actually had to fill up the entire gym so they out did the dads but it's still in those great things apart for that we've been able to do community nights where we have literacy nights math nights and Technology nights and even hot dog hellos where Mr millerberg actually saved me with the barbecue and taught me how to turn it off and turn it back on so we could feed enough
190people stretching across the gym so that was a lifesaver thank you but what we're seeing is a tremendous Community input coming into our schools they want to volunteer they want to be a part of the school and it's showing that Mid Valley is the center of the community where people feel welcome to come in the other piece I want to talk about is our staff and we do really focus on our teacher development and high quality instruction and working with plcs and supporting our teachers in connection with their students and transitioning or transferring the curriculum to the students but we also have a group of individuals our support staff our ESP staff who again have been there for their entire careers who work with students at small groups they're the ones doing the interventions they're
191the ones targeting this the little skills each student needs so that they're able to jump to that next level and then we also have staff there there to support students based on their emotional and behavioral needs which coming out of covid we all know has been a big big issue so we really put a lot of support into getting our teachers the support they need as well as supporting the support staff and giving them the resources that they they need and then finally our students we've gone above and beyond in trying to recognize our Student Success we have what we call the junior husky success board where we put up every week as students exemplary work and students will wait for Thursday to come up so they can see if their name was drawn and
192then parents will come in take a picture get a certificate get a cool little pin but every student gets recognized throughout the year for their high quality work and achievement we do student surveys as part of our school Improvement um goal and what we found is over 97 percent of our students feel connected to Mid Valley they have friends they they feel an adult uh cares for them speaks kindly to them and expects them to learn and what we're seeing is that gives them confidence and it engages them in the curriculum so it's like a success story I know I only have three minutes so I'll wrap it up but but really it has been um um the right trajectory and it goes to show that given the right support the community the resources and
193the staff that we can't have a lot of success so we call it Junior husky success nothing less but thank you thank you that's wonderful report and we're so excited that to hear about all the great things happening there at Mid Valley and please please tell principal swaniki that we missed her but we're glad that you could be here to share that with us and and please um extend our appreciation out to the staff and students there thank you so much before yes Mr Dan goes away can I just make a brief comment yes he did not mention uh last week they had the uh an assembly for the school for Veterans Day and it was very touching to me I walked into the school and I was met by about five students holding a
194small American flags and everybody that walk in are you a veteran are you a veteran if you said yes you got a flack and I don't know how long that lasted maybe an hour in the uh in the gym area they sang they told you know they told stories they defined what a veteran was or is uh and probably the most touching part to me is afterwards they had a couple of benches where people that were veterans were seated there were probably at least a dozen students who came over wanted to shake my hand and tell me thanks for your service and that was just really a great day to have and I know it happened elsewhere in the district but it was really touching to me to see people understand the value the people
195that are serving and have served have made in our country so Dan thanks for making that happen thank you too thank you all right um next up we will I'll turn the time over to Jeff Haney and Kirsten Stewart from the Communications Department for some recognitions thank you president tingi and we appreciate the time that the board grants to us to recognize the students faculty and staff of the Canyon school district who have gone above and beyond those who are mentioned tonight will receive a letter of commendation from the board and the superintendent and to follow along with what Mr Middleburg was saying we would like to note all of the Veterans Day Celebrations that we had to salute the men and the women in our community who have given so much of themselves and
196protection of our country last Friday Canyon schools marked Veterans Day with assemblies and breakfasts Flags ceremonies musical performances art shows and Essay contests and then many other activities here are a few of the images that were captured at some of these Veterans Day Celebrations I believe that Mrs Oaks was at this particular Veterans Day ceremony at high school you can see there the joy in the teacher's eyes as they Embrace their former students who return back in their army uniforms to be celebrated during Veterans Day it was a very touching day it happened all across the district a Veterans Day message featuring HR administrator Everett Perry also was posted on CSD TV which is our YouTube channel it was shown in several middle schools if you haven't had a chance to watch and listen to
197it I invite you to do so Everett did a fantastic job in his Veterans Day presentation now photos and videos of our Veterans Day Celebrations can be found on the website and our social media Pages if you haven't looked at them please do so they're very touching and it was nice to go to all of these various events across Canyons to celebrate Veterans Day our first honorees tonight are student athletes from Corner Canyon High School the football team they're headed to the 6A Championship Game on Friday they advance to the Big Show at Rice Eccles with a big win over Farmington in the semifinals they won 45-28 the final game of the post season and that will determine the Champions it will be at 11 o'clock this Friday the Chargers are ranked number one they
198will play against Skyridge the Falcons they are ranked number two so it's sure to be an amazing game we wish the Chargers much luck in Friday's game we also congratulate Corner Canyons of volleyball team they battled to a sixth place finish in the 6A tournament no that's not all the volleyball team along with the charger girls cross country team are the Utah interscholastic athletic administrators Association 6A academic state champions as well so can congratulations to those teams we also want to note the post-season performance of Alta High School in the last board meeting we talked about the quarterfinals that were coming up out to high lost it was an oh so close game they lost uh they lost in the quarterfinals they barely lost going to the semifinals they lost to Orem in a 26
199to 24 Heartbreaker so a big congratulations to all of our student athletes and fall sports for their accomplishments now our next honorees are State winners in the 2022 Heisman high school scholarship Canyons District dominated this competition this year a student from Alta High School is the male athlete of the year and the Heisman high school scholarship competition and a female athlete from Corner Canyon High School is the winner before the women and the Alta high athlete his name is Ryan Richards Corner Canyons athlete is Fern Shira chadakul they are those winners of the state winner scholarships now Ryan is a three sport athlete soccer basketball and golf he's also on the honor roll Fern also is on the honor roll and she's a swimmer on the charger team and she also competes in figure skating
200they are both now being considered for national awards the two top boy and girl honorees across in the national awards received a ten thousand dollar scholarship now the program requires the honorees to submit applications and essays and this program was created in 1994 through a partnership between Wendy's and the Heisman Trophy trust so fingers crossed for Ryan and fern we hope that they are the National winners now I know that we noted this before but I have been to a few of these shows and I could not resist urging the community to go see our fall musicals this week Adams Family at Alta High School in Oliver at Hillcrest will be on the stage and then after we come back from Thanksgiving SpongeBob the musical of Brighton High School be performed formed these have been
201fantastic shows I was at crazy for you with Mrs tingy and we walked away with a smile on our face all of the shows have been phenomenal and if you haven't had a chance to see the fall musicals in Canyon's District high schools please go it's fantastic family entertainment these kids put their heart into it and as Mrs tingi says it looks like they're having a heck of a lot of fun and it's true so our next honorees are the student musicians who make up Alta and Brighton High marching bands the Hawks and the Bengals won the top awards at the 2022 Utah Regional championships of the bands of America competition this was held in Saint George Alta High School took first place and Brighton High School took second place in our division alta's band
202and color guard also received the top awards for outstanding visual award and outstanding general effects now I'm a former band dad so I know how hard these students work and I also have seen the band advisors work hard literally from Spring until now they work non-stop alta's advisor Caleb chabastery in Brighton's band advisor Michaela Mortensen they are non-stop working with the students in the band and it truly shows ten years ago Canyon's District didn't have a marching band and now we have two of the programs in the state so congratulations to our student musicians and to The Faculty advisors they've done a fantastic job our next honoree has already been mentioned for her award but we wanted to note that Mindy Robison went to Washington DC to be celebrated as Utah Middle School's principal of
203the year and she told us in text messages how special it was to be in DC over Veterans Day congratulations to Mindy once again for being the top middle school principal in the state and we're so glad that she got to go to DC to be celebrated with those other middle school principals across the country we also celebrated Sally Sampson who is the winner of the WGU Elevate Award she's a human resources administrator here in Canyon school district she was awarded this by WGU for her work in being committed to providing high quality educational and professional development opportunities for others now Sally is the very first utahn to receive this award and it's for the lengths that she goes to to find and recruit skilled Educators and also to ensure that though knows teachers when
204they get here have access to resources and feel supported as they grow in their careers so congratulations to Sally and our final honoree of the night is an education support professional extraordinaire we congratulate diamond ridge head secretary Suzanne Hills who is recognized by the Utah governor's office she was surprised at an assembly at Diamond Ridge High School she won the 2022-23 you rise award it's an honor reserved for up to two outstanding education support professionals all across Utah she's one of them and she deserves it she will represent Utah as a nominee for the U.S Department of education's National rise award now Suzanne is cherished at diamond ridge she encourages students she oversees the main office she watches the school's finances and she maintains student records and they call her at the heart of diamond
205ridge but make no mistake she puts up with with zero nonsense from the students there she's kind and she's firm and all the students know that she wants what is best for them and that's to graduate from high school so congratulations to Suzanne for being the ES P of the Year this is a rise award that's very special from the governor's office now this also comes as Canyons District prepares to celebrate education support professionals now ESP day as designated by a house resolution is November 16th across the country nearly 3 million men and women work as esps in the country schools and that makes up about one-third of the employees and public schools across the country esp's strengthen our schools our communities and associations across the country they play a vital role in the Education
206team and in the lives of students inside and outside the classroom as is tradition the Board of Education honors our education support professionals as we approach ESP day president teeny I understand the board has a statement for the official record the minutes of the meeting regarding Canyon's District's esps thank you for the time for the recognitions we turn the time over to you thank you Mr Haney so yes I will read this resolution whereas public schools are vital to the future of our community's children the strength of our democracy and the continuation of America's role as a global leader and whereas as part of American Education week a National Education support Personnel day has been Crea celebrated since 1987 and whereas a 2020 house concurrent resolution approved during the General Session of the Utah legislature
207and designated the Wednesday during the week that precedes Thanksgiving holiday as Utah education support Professionals Day and whereas the day honors the contributions education support professionals play in creating and maintaining clean secure prepared and welcoming public schools for every Canyon student and whereas education support Professionals in Canyons District have been at the Forefront of ensuring schools remained operational even during the upheaval of a worldwide pandemic with vast local implications and whereas Canyon's District joins in celebrating National Education support Professional Day on Wednesday November 16 2022 and honors the Endeavors undertaken by csds Information Technology professionals custodians administrative assistants office staff business managers instructional aides bus drivers nutrition service workers School nurses maintenance workers and so many others now therefore I Nancy tingey speaking on behalf of the canyon sport of Education recognize November 16 2022
208as education support Professionals Day and acknowledge the importance of the work done by education support Professionals in Canyon school district thank you to all those wonderful wonderful individuals that reach out and make our schools such special places all right that concludes our recognitions we have now come to the patron comment portion of our meeting the board designates time to listen to patrons of the district Patron comment time is limited to Residents and taxpayers of canyons District students and parents of students and current employees of the district patrons May provide board members with written documents these documents should be submitted to the board secretary at the meeting there's Cindy's over there or email to the office of public Communications by noon of the day following the board meeting this evening we have one individual that has
209signed up to address the board and is representing a group so she will be given four minutes and um it's the board's practice to listen and take notes during the patron comments the board of education does not discuss matters that are not on the meeting's agenda nor engage in public comment on individual students to protect their privacy or employee issues if a patron wants to comment on a district employee's character professional competence or mental or physical health the board requests that those comments be submitted to the board in writing however if the patron determines to verbally comment on these on those Personnel issues the comments need to be civil and refrained from personal attacks insults defamatory or slanderous comments about an individual the Board of Education would like to make it clear that critical race
210theory is not part of the curriculum being used by Canyon school district there are no plans to incorporate it into the curriculum or instruction the Board of Education values input on all sides of issues to maintain decorum and respect we ask that those in attendance refrain from Applause or other types of demonstrations during the patron comment time as well as throughout the meeting so with that I will Tiffany Smith has signed up to address the board so go ahead and come forward I'm gonna set my timer because online it says that you can have five minutes so I'm going to be speaking quickly to stick to the four minutes um how about you can have five minutes if that's what you were expecting then I'll breathe while I talk okay um okay well we are
211here to um advocate for the teachers of our district we currently have one day over the course of the school year to work in our classrooms without our students present one teacher work day we are drowning I want to share with you that this weekend we spent our personal time completing our report cards we sacrificed time with our families to be able to fulfill this responsibility I listened to the study session from two weeks ago and heard an in-depth discussion of how you believe that Canyon's teachers do not understand that we are being paid for 16 hours of work yes you pay us for 16 hours of work but I'm confident that you already know that every teacher in this district has worked those 16 hours by the end of the second or the third
212week of school those 16 hours are long gone by now if you think we save those 16 hours to use eight of them in November and eight of them in February for report cards you're wildly unaware of what the teachers in our district are doing do we want to be paid for our time of course but what we're asking for is the actual time to do it being built into the schedule during the same study session there was a large emphasis put on how much our community relies on the calendar of our district a board member stated that even the piano teachers are relying on our calendar the piano teachers you mean to tell us that you value the needs of a piano teacher over the needs of our own Canyon school district teachers who
213are trying to teach the Youth of our community to say that we can't change our calendar because the cities counties and even the piano teachers are making decisions based on what we publish is a cop-out it says right online that our calendars for the next three years are tentative tentative means that that gives us flexibility to make changes where needed I've done the research of the surrounding districts and I've submitted it to each of the board members and to the superintendent showing that other districts are providing between 4 to 12 teacher work days Canyons is giving one under the 990 rule we can apply for four teacher work days through the state we are currently only using two of them why aren't we using the other two the state allows for them but Canyons doesn't
214want to use them you are directly denying teachers the help of the time that's been provided and you don't see this as a problem it's shocking to us that Canyons doesn't see the value in teachers having the days that the state will allow another discussion point during your study session was that at one point a survey was conducted and the results were that this is the calendar that everybody wanted this blanket statement raises a few things to consider first when was this survey conducted I don't know for certain but I think it was around 2017 which implies that nothing has changed over the course of the last five years which with covid we know that things have changed secondly the wording of the survey was in favor of families not wanting disturbance of having a
215few Fridays off throughout the school year Fridays in which teachers were getting work done without their students the survey implied allowing for the desirable two weeks for winter break and also an earlier release for summer I've spoken with most of the parents of the students that I teach and every single one of them said that when they were answering the calendar questions on that survey they had no idea that the result would be the loss of work days for their child's teacher our surveys should be asking transparent questions and giving all the needed information in order to make an informed decision thirdly elementary teachers and secondary teachers have differing opinions on the matter elementary teachers report cards cannot be completed through taking a bunch of scores and calculating a grade to put in Skyward we
216must do anecdotal records and sit and look through each of them in order to input our our grades for our report cards the idea that some teachers want it this way meaning the current calendar that we already have isn't an acceptable reason to require it of all teachers if 60 of teachers don't want a teacher workday it's not okay to require the other 40 percent who can't manage the work to have to sacrifice their families and their mental health to stay caught up on the work that we are asked being asked to do we are barely holding it together on a normal week but a week like last week and this week where we have the pressure of report cards without the support of time is truly breaking us the group that I'm representing tonight
217is all in agreement that our classrooms are suffering when we are stretched so thin and especially during report card and Conference times which report cards went home today for us whether you acknowledge it or not the fact remains that when we are so overworked it directly impacts our students we need you to look at the calendar and we need you to give us time to do our jobs everything comes at a cost and right now the cost is at the well-being of your teachers as a district who values mental health of our students we need to also value the mental health of our teachers can you please prioritize making this change for teachers I just want to end with that you must know that a teacher's working conditions are directly a student's learning conditions thank
218you thank you yeah we appreciate your addressing the board and and all of you for attending okay um next on the agenda is the consent agenda um I will ask someone to make a motion and in making that motion please list read off each of those items on the consent agenda I will move to approve the consent agenda item a approval minutes for November 1st 2022 Item B approval of higher and termination reports item C approval of purchasing bids item D student overnight travel item e approval of October Financial reports item F approval of March 2nd 2023 as early out for secondary schools okay thank you is there a second to that motion I'll second that thank you any discussion to the motion seeing none I'll call for the vote all in favor say aye
219any opposed that motion passes thank you okay um next under new business item a school accountability report we will turn I will turn the time over to Dr Hal Sanderson director of research and assessment good evening uh it's always exciting to come and talk about student achievement and school Success but I want you to know that it's a two-part presentation so the second half will be my colleague Dr Laura Tuesday heathfield and she'll be talking about educator satisfaction survey results so there'll be a part one and a part two and I get the honor of starting out with school accountability and I've just put to make sure that we always see those connections that it ties to the Strategic plan and two kind of key areas we could probably put it into other areas when
220we bring together School results and kind of where we're at um it's hard to pull it into one measure so I want us to all think about that um there are different pieces that our current accountability has that I'll review with you if you can have those elements in mind going forward um that's going to be kind of huge they're not really any new ideas it's probably just putting it back in your memory because you'll see at the at the end as I talk about some of the findings we haven't had a school accountability report for several years due to covet and some cancellation of testing results so it's good to get back to having hopefully the right discussions one thing that I'll point out is that the high school has post-secondary Readiness indicators and
221so the high school has more points than our elementary and middle school um in terms of what they have sorry there are descriptors of what um a school can have in terms of a rating bringing those measures together in terms of total points as we look at academic proficiency we'll talk about as we look at student growth as we look at the progress of our English language Learners and then the last one is looking at our bottom 25 students and their academic growth when you bring all of that together there is some categories of school ratings that was done by the state board and these are set and fixed they're not on a curve it's based on the percent of points that are earned from the school so it's as we look at our proficiency
222way of thinking of um we do that with our students in terms of their own content and looking at grade material we need to think that way when we look at schools there could be a large majority of schools that are typical or commendable there isn't uh rating on the curve when we talk about our schools now that's been implemented for several years but I just want that to come back to your attention and the ones who helped write these descriptors for schools are a variety of stakeholders now there still is school letter grades and I've made that note off to the side but I think as we talk about wanting to go to Mastery of content that it's important that we want to talk about and get familiar with the terms of what an
223exemplary School looks like a commendable School typical developing or one that may have some critical needs so I'll just go forward the high school has similar I'm sorry that I missed the point system on that one um but it's a similar points but they have more with the post-secondary indicators um I won't go over all of it but I'll just go over the highlights and that is it's looking at um percent of students who are proficient largely it's on our rise test when we think of elementary and middle school and I'll go over those grades but it's grades three through eight so when we look at our middle our elementary schools there's a lot of grades that are not under this umbrella of school um school performance when we talk about our acadians results for
224those younger grades are not included Aspire plus is administered in grades nine and ten we have the dlm which is for our students with most severe and profound disabilities they are also included in this looking at their performance with their own level of what uh grade level or a strong understanding the material looks like it's for that group of students and you can see off to the side with the pie charts kind of what percentage of points makes that up and then there's the geeky calculation underneath I should have probably taken that off but so our growth this is an important concept that we've had on our state and many other states have it as well and that is progress for learning during the year um I'll have a chart to go over that but
225um let me do the chart first so it's called the student growth percentile it is a comparative question so it looks at a given student with a score at my examples I said in third grade I'm looking at mathematics and that individual scored a score of 322. um it then looks at how they did in their fourth grade year and the way that we get the percentile rank is set is what about other students who had that same score how do they end up after a year of instruction and what is their skill score looked like on the same test and it literally just rank orders as to where the student is so they can get anywhere from a percentile rank that you can see there that's what we have as our student growth percentile
226and that we when we talk about student growth it's a competitive look at growth how did you score compared to like scoring peers after a year of instruction it isn't standards based so that's just being uh I want to be straightforward about that just you need to keep that in mind um because of covid there was a combination that we had a student growth Target which looked at progress towards meeting grade level expectation and it looked at the amount of growth you were making towards that because of 2021 with still heavy into at least working through covet you can remember dealing with a Delta variant and dealing with a lot of absentee rates the amount of testing was good for this District um but as we went up in our grades we weren't able to
227test up to 95 percent so they looked at that and felt that it was compromised looking at that student growth projection too much so they've pulled it off for this year so that's going to play out a little bit later that I'll show for you um have these growth percentiles and then you get some points associated with it um I think it's a little too geeky I think it could be more straightforward but it didn't always listen to me on that one so that's growth at its heart it's looking at how you did against similar scoring piers and then when we jumped high school we look at some indicators that at least the first two you're very familiar with looking at our graduation rate and um that makes up 11 of the high school rating
228and um that is lagged a year as you know that we're just kind of finishing up for 2022 but on this report it was all data from largely the previous school year and it's just having to do with the data coming in um act looks at basically a a zero or a one and the number of students who get a one are getting a composite score of 18 or higher and it just looks at percent of eight of 11th graders who got a score of 18 on composite or higher and that makes up the percent for act and the one I like that we probably don't talk most about is looking at coursework um within looking at AP IB concurrent enrollment and CTE completing a pathway um or getting the Seer grade A C or
229better so it's nice that it does get to really more um that next training that we can have for students as they are moving through high school and that's included in the calculation at 11 percent and then we have wanting to look at the progress of our English language Learners or multilingual multilingual Learners and they have their own assessment which looks at academic English it's administered once during the year it's a collaboration between my department and federal programs where we test about um 2500 to 3 000 students who are English language learners and it's looking at their progress towards acquiring academic English and they have trajectories and growth targets that they should meet over several years um as part of looking at how they're doing as a group and so that's that's made up of
230both Elementary Middle School and High School and the last indicator is looking at the growth of the lowest 25 percent in their school and it asks and so this group varies based on the school composition it can look very different across our 29 elementary schools in terms of who that 25 percent is so it does vary based on school community and it asks in those that group of students what percent of them scored an SGP of 40 or higher 40th percentile rank or higher and it just adds them up so those are kind of the components of it it looks at both achievement as well as growth and then it focuses on more of those traditionally at-risk students and gives them an extra look and points to see how they're doing and so the question
231that we always get um especially for our schools and school Community Council is well so can it could be in each could a child be in each calculation in each component and yes they can be um you know almost everybody should be in the achievement I've tried to put that the percent um that you can see the growth when you look at growth you have to have a year of results so when we look at our elementary we're looking at math and English language arts for only fourth and fifth grade students and then in science we're only looking at the growth into fifth grade year because the first test they took is in fourth grade so it's a smaller percent of the school when you're looking at growth but in middle school we have every
232grade taking it and they have their prior results from elementary so it's a much more broader group at the middle school and then for multilingual Learners that range is based on our schools as to the percent of students they have in their community schools that are taking that measure and then the growth of the 25 you can see that's kind of simple math part but in this example I've kind of shown uh for this Elementary they had 20 students who were in fourth or fifth grade because they need to be in those upper grades but they were in every single calculation so if you moved those students those 20 students you would be magnifying it across four different categories in terms of looking at it so when we're looking at our results and looking at
233intervention strategies looking at those students who are more at risk and are struggling if we are moving those students it's really amplifying the portrait in the picture for the school thank you for letting me get through that it's just it's a big concept to get so let's jump over to our results I have a link there I've had it in several places if you just Google search for the community that's out there just Utah accountability report or school reports you'll be able to pull it up it's pretty user friendly there's a lot more detail that I can't put into this but if you click on every chart there's more detailed information it's it Compares where the school is compared to the district as well as the state so again with time constraints but I just
234want to encourage everybody to kind of go out and just click through it for your schools of interest because there's a wealth of information that you can learn with quite detail so I I think it's a good transparent report that people can learn a lot so I just encourage it with anybody who wants to know more um bringing it all together and again kind of looking at broader idea of student learning [Music] um and school Success we had uh 45 of 43 of our schools are in the highest category of exemplary and we had 27 and commendable 25 in typical and again typical is not huge concerns I mean that's still very solid and we have a few that are developing their critical needs but it but in that broader look if you're looking at
235the aggregate of the data coming together that's there's a lot of districts who would like that portrayal of their schools when we look at our student achievements so you're looking at proficiency overall you can see where we are with our proficiency not quite as strong as the overall rating there's you know a fair amount that are typical with their um looking at academic proficiency so even if we're in pretty solid footing there's places to go we're certainly aren't done with where we're at um there's plenty more students who can move into proficiency level that we can even go up with and then let me talk about the student growth because of covid they pulled that one component out of growth um they kind of modeled it but they kind of didn't and I think this
236is It's inflated it's giving us a little inflated picture right now um we have some student schools that are probably doing typical growth and this is a little bit too Rosy of a look I've compared with colleagues and and we all kind of smiled and go yeah it looks incredible with her growth right now but um I'm looking forward to next year where we can have a balanced pitcher because it's good but it just can't be quite this good they've changed the measure without really modeling it the way I wish they would have because I could have messaged this more if I'd known in a balanced way balanced way we want to give honest appraisal and when they change the definition it does have it can translate so I want to talk about those other
237pieces as we talk about it you know at the top level average for the school it looks really good but when we we flip over and look at the bottom 25 of our student body it doesn't look like the whole school so I've just ran an example and I don't want you to go over all of it but what you can see when you look at the percent is what does that group look like for the school but then in the bottom 25 percent what percent are they so for the English language Learners in this school there's 23 percent but in the bottom 25 percent 48 of them are English Learners so and that plays out in all of these areas there's not a category of students with disability within the school report card on
238this Top Line when you click into the report you'll see it but you can see that they're double the number as to what it is for the school and you can see that in some of those other areas so those what areas that we have um we see some traditional academic risk they're over represented um in this bottom 25 so as we look at access opportunity all of those kind of questions um we know that we're having those right right discussions and continue to look at you know Appropriations and how to approach these things there's work to be done and that's nothing as a surprise but um the picture changes as we dig a Little Deeper and so when you look at the growth of the bottom 25 I think that should be commended I
239mean that's you know that doesn't have again there's that mixture of growth that I have a little Caution with but um it's going to change a little bit with our calculation um but it's just hard to know the the impact of it but I but the ongoing concern about multilingual English learner students and kind of where they are you can see through that that state lens um we've got work to do um there's no other kind of way to put it um but there's a lot of other districts and schools wanting to have that Focus so we're not alone in that Focus but um it needs to be part of the picture when we talk about schools I think I've kind of hit on most of these for the sake of time I think I'll
240kind of leave it at that but I do want to wrap with this with um board member shell to say there's a committee that wants to look at accountability and we both have been able to serve on that I think there's some exciting ideas that it's just the starting point as there's the State Board is the one who kind of commissioned it with kind of legislative support it'll need to go up to the legislative session to look at everything regarding School accountability with that balance between state board and legislative look but at least some ideas brought forward I think were pretty encouraging but I at least want to put that out to kind of stay tuned depending on how that moves along it will be there in the session um but it's going to be
241a while for it to be fully implemented but I will tell you that the ideas and the concepts of competency-based learning and looking at Portrait of a graduate we're our pretty strong elements within that reimagined um I put re-image sorry there should be reimagined as school accountability um so I hope that there'll be a a stronger match with the board strategic plan and that part excites me as well so are there questions before I turn it over to my colleague questions or comments let's see um Mrs neibar and then Mrs schill thank you for that comprehensive report and I appreciate you already addressing the question that is always asked if they're represented in more than one student represent more than one demographic and I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that that these
242categories have been set forth from the school accountability performance Bill and so these categories that we're highlighting here are dictated from that school accountability performance correct it was it but a community came together to figure the cut points of what they were that wasn't the legislation it was as variety of stakeholders to say what's the thresholds okay thank you for that delineation so my one question is um something that I would love to see if it were possible just internally even though we're doing this as per the committee's guidelines we have another group of students that if we're looking at how our schools are performing would be a good thing to look at and that's the students that are proficient or just nearly proficient I call them the invisible students because we usually have categories
243for the lowest 25 percent and multilingual and all those are so important because we see that there's too many of them in that lowest you know quadrant but those those students who are proficient are just nearly proficient not quite there when we break it down at smaller bits like at the school level when we're writing Land Trust plans and things like that those kids sometimes are invisible and and we don't see the growth there near what we would like so I would love for us just internally when we're looking this to also look at including that group because that's a and I can tell you that we've tried to balance that message to say it's just not the growth but we want to look at proficiency so when you're looking at a group of four
244students that are just under that threshold yes my conversations with schools and with principals are let's run a few numbers if you have X percent and your average class size is this I've given some clear examples to say if one more student is proficient in each classroom what happens to the school yes portrait and it goes up quite a bit it does and every professional that I have talked to in this district and I know it would be in this District or at this at school-wide as well and that is you say if you can make one more student proficient and hold everything where it is this is where we can go as a school so it's trying to bring it more concrete to the teacher level on that goal setting so I'm hoping that
245we'll see more of that because one more student makes a big difference when every teacher has one more student that's right and and when you have a classroom of so many children it's it's hard not to have the attention and focus go to the greatest need but there are some of those kids that maybe oh well they're they're close they're good enough and they may they may um you know not receive that amount of attention and like you said it just takes a little bit of extra effort and attention and the difference it makes for that child as well as the school as a whole thank you Mrs chill um I just want to tell you thank you and I was so excited I'm like Yay then we're finally looking at data right I mean
246I love it and it's been a lot I'll be here every meeting if you want me there's a lot of it's student achievement that is exciting to look at and again our strengths and where we need to grow but I'm I'm pleased to have the the conversation absolutely I think I just think overall it's a really good report and it's something we should celebrate I mean of course we need to we have more work to do but I'm really proud of it um then I just wanted to add that the consultant he did present the whole um School accountability task force a couple weeks ago to usbe and I went and I looked at that it's on USB's website if you guys are interested but just like Hal said we got to wait and see
247what happens with usve with the legislature right because we're trying to get away from the school grade and look at a bunch of measures and actually make it more about local districts making goals yeah which I think is really exciting yeah let's just hope let's hope they'll take some of our suggestions and they've said you know there's other states watching what we're trying to do as well to blend in some local elements and honor it as much and it was a great process we had a lot of like we had superintendents we had teachers we had you know PTA we had Parents we had um they they did a bunch of parents actual nights and gathered feedback from parents and the community anyway it was a really great process and I'm excited hopefully about where
248it can go so thank you thank you thank you Mr oh can I turn it over to Laura I think we have a couple other comments Mr Wrigley and the Mrs Oakes you guys can see I'm I'm excited about some of your scores coming off here uh I think for especially coming off of covet uh we expected in fact we're here and we're doing much better than the rest of the country and probably better than some of the rest of our peers in the state it's really sort of interesting um how we measure this stuff student achievement so if I've got a kid in Draper Elementary who's never moved pretty stable High economic family and then I measure him against a kid that's in Draper that moves every six months low economic family he may
249never get the staying level of school achievement though he's making major growth is that is that correct I mean I mean sometimes though our teachers almost as better to look at the growth they make with the kid rather than if they get them up to achievement level we're second grade or third grade or fourth grade because that may be if they got it at a first grade level and they get them up to a second grade level or a third grade level in that one year that's Quantum leaps he may still not be up the fourth grade level where he's at so he hasn't met that achievement level why don't they give us more credit for that trying to think of our redesigned model and where we are with it I'm you'll probably not like
250my answer but we've we've got to keep a both message and that is we honor growth we we applaud it you can move really far but without moving to that grade level threshold we've got to have the companions together that that my concern is if we do competitive growth and we have a third grade student and they're really kind of struggling but compared to other struggling kids they have an SGP of 60 and they go this is really great but if you draw a line and say under this year to year gain it's going to take them five or six years to get to grade level that isn't acceptable to me that we've got to always balance that that measure of growth is rigorous enough and at a trajectory that we can get to grade
251level we've got that responsibility and all Educators think that way we certainly want to applaud those huge movements but we want to hand the torch to the next grade level feature to carry it on and if we can get two or three years of that we know that we can get them to grade level I mean if we're getting in grade level a really good grade level increase growth each year eventually will catch up and I think each teacher should be given credit for what they do the other one is we're getting more and more multilingual families and then to say to them that they're making no growth because they're in a different language mid bill I think is sort of a unique that way our teaching a dual language on most of our kids
252that correct why don't we test the kids for growth in their native language and see what's happening and where they're going and then growth in their English language rather than just testing on the English which they may not know they may be in third grade but have on their own native language the second grade levels but in English it's it's first grade why don't they allow us to in in our model especially where we've tried to work jointly and bring the kid up this direction here uh go in their primary language as we're raising up their secondary language you're out of my I'm out of my expertise in being able to talk about something like that I mean I just know that that we definitely want to look at their acquisition of academic English and
253want to get to their the idea in the native language it's I don't know how to speak to that um that's not my my kind of area but I can tell you some of the practicality that to build all of these things in a variety of native languages is a very expensive Endeavor but that's not that doesn't mean it's for me it's the right thing to do but I I can't speak on that because I substitute this in classes with people that are do not have the lenders yet they've been you can just see these kids are really smart but yet they don't speak their language so therefore they're tested and they're not shown so let me let me let me clarify that um it's important and I didn't do it on the slide again
254balancing time so for a student who's who's new to U.S School New to Canyons the first year they're just asked to take the test the account is participation that is it in year two that we have that students that require an academic English and this is only on the the standards standards-based testing the next year they look at only the growth calculations so that Baseline they had when they were probably not even able to engage on the test the second year of accountability it says how much did you grow it's in the third year of instruction in a U.S School in the canyons that they get all of them did you participate what was your growth and in the third year it asks did are you at proficiency level so it's not that the first
255three months they count fully in accountability it's a stepwise progression and it's year three where they have all of those elements but on the the WETA test which they take in terms of their initial screening um that is they get full credit for that um uh growth in academic English and they make some wonderful gains what we're seeing is a greater share is that those Elementary level grades and that we're we're asking the questions about making sure that we're seeing that more at middle school and high school but they are active in that and you could see from my chart those very students that we're talking about could potentially be in all four categories in year two and year three at the school setting so they should be they should be a focus interesting it
256just makes it hard on us yeah it doesn't recognize thank you Mrs Oaks so I'm intrigued by hearing what you have to say with regard to how you wish that they had weighted things differently and there's a part of me that wishes that I could see what the charts would look like if it were up to Hal Sanderson and and it kind of actually brings up this next question of I wonder um whether or not there have been other districts that have said we are going to set our own accountability measures we recognize we have to report to the state but do we do it based off of what's in our strategic plan with the things that we've established our values for the district and publish that for the public to to be able to
257see the visibility is an interesting question I would say that we have some of those progress monitoring tools that we do that are outside of State accountability and what the state wants us to do as we look at benchmarking and following where students are in interventions we have at the you know Upper Elementary grades our middle school and most high schools elected to do it almost every grade we have our reading and math inventory that has been determined as a value for our education Community they value the results of looking at it and that's completely outside of what anybody's asked us to do but we want to look at growth during the year and then look at if it's below a certain threshold some interventions that we're able to provide so that is completely that's
258a Canyons thing Holly districts especially if they're middle or large have different variations of measures that they value that they wanted to look at now again how we report on that again I talked about achievement results you want me to come back and talk about those benchmarks myself for Dr Tuesday he felt we'd be glad to talk about some other benchmarking but our schools a lot of their school plans look at the reading and math inventory because it's they can look at progress during the year so we have some of those elements but maybe we're not making it front and center as visible um there's a double-edged sword with that um we want it to be organic we want it to be important for teachers we want that the conversation with parents but I don't
259know if we want that visibility of an accountability in addition to we may there's just a double-edged sword with the increased visibility on some of these things when you're talking about growth measures is that for every strata of students you know kind of getting them back to it that's not what I talked about okay with completely disaggregate disaggregated results so we could look at very specific student groups all the way to teachers and sections and if they're doing some interventions that we're aware of we can follow that very closely well and that brings up a good point if we have that data how are we effectively using it to inform what we're doing whether it's on an SEC or at the school level are we waiting more of what is you know the states working
260on are we waiting more of what the district itself values right good question um kind of the covid thing kind of disrupted some school stuff or some state level things but some of our district measures kept going so we were able to kind of make those local decisions and the vendor helped us do some remote testing when things got closed we tried to maintain a lot of those measures and there is something to be said for local decisions and flexibility that we could do but yeah we value that you'll see that with a lot of the tssp tssa plans from schools you will see the renamatory math inventory and and many of them represented so it's it's on the minds of the Educators and being valued well and it makes me wonder whether or not
261that ability for us to to Pivot that way during covid is part of why we're seeing some better results here I don't know it's good for that thank you so much for all your work glad to do it yes yes thank you and just um kind of along this lines in I think it was 2015 the board did a lot of extensive study and identified indicators and set some targets and then um we kind of reached you know we did three year and five-year targets and then copit hit right and so so you know in the past we have had a look at some of those other indicators as well and and I don't know if with the Strategic plan if that's something the board wants to try and and do again to do a
262little bit deeper dive than just the what the state has provided so Just for future reference and conversation okay I think we're ready to move on to the next section okay thank you Dr Laura Tuesday Heath will talk about the educator satisfaction survey thank you hello thanks for having me um so I'm gonna shift gears to something much less complicated and talk about our educator satisfaction survey results from last year and we've all heard national news reports about massive resignations of teachers and teacher shortages but I think it's important to look at locally at our own district and how our own educators are feeling in terms of their job satisfaction so we have data from the last seven years on educator satisfaction and um first of all I want to talk about why educator satisfaction
263is important so research has shown that employees who are satisfied with their job and are feel supported at their work are more productive and enjoy their work and do a better job so I think employee satisfaction is an important variable to look at so we first distributed this survey in the 15 16 school year and we've continued it continued it every year since then for the last six years the 2022 survey was sent at the end of April with a three-week response window it was sent to All CSD licensed employees um the survey itself typically has 23 likert rated items in the areas of General satisfaction and expectations professional growth and value we added four additional likert items this year that are focused on belonging and well-being because the research suggests that this is also
264important for job productivity so now we have a total of 27 leopard items and then we also have two open-ended response items so our overall reliability on this survey is 92 which is considered excellent um we had 58 of our licensed Educators these are licensed Educators not including administrators who responded which is a great response rate and we had Fairly similar response rates across groups of Educators it was a little lower among our special education related service providers but pretty good response rate across all different categories of educators I'm planning to go over some of the highlights from the survey you have the actual full report that goes into much more detail but I want just wanted to highlight a few things so the first thing you're going to notice is that there's a number
265in red and that's in the 2022 column so any of the percentages that show up in red mean that it's the lowest percentage that we've seen in the last seven years of the survey so this first question or this first survey item all in all I'm satisfied with my job at CSD we've dropped to our level at from 2016. and the percentages essentially Express the um proportion of Educators who either said they agree or strongly agree with the survey item so essentially what that tells us is that the majority of our educators are still satisfied overall but it has dropped significantly and all of the items on the survey leichard items did drop from last year and the re about half of them was the lowest rating we've seen since 2016. so it kind of
266raised some red flags that perhaps we need to pay attention to what our educators are saying to us so if we look at this one item of overall satisfaction we see a 22 drop in the last two years so we're back to the rate that we were at in the 2015-16 year we were making great progress in improving overall satisfaction and we kind of took a nose dive what's interesting is that 2019-20 which was the year we had school closures we actually increased in our overall satisfaction so um pretty substantial decrease across from the last two years and overall satisfaction this kind of mirrors what we're seeing um in our district in terms of retention of licensed Educators this is data from Steve Diamond in HR this is so we did see a significant drop
267last year in our retention rate and while satisfaction is not necessarily the cause there's certainly some pause for reflection on that correlation so if we look at the different um areas of the survey again the numbers in red reflect for this year the lowest numbers we've seen since 2016. and what I've highlighted is the items that dropped the most from last year so we had we saw greater than 10 drop on these three items specifically and the 37 of individuals that would say they recommend a teaching job to have one of the relative is the lowest we've seen also a cause for concern in the area of expectations again we saw a more than a 10 drop in a couple of the items and the lowest rating on three of them um fortunately more Educators
268said that they thought the expectations for teachers in Kenya's were more realistic than nationally but not by much so that's pretty low um in terms of their can I ask you questions I have lots of questions but um on this particular one my guess would be and I don't know that the elementary teachers are the ones who think in the expectations are not realistic that would be my guess but I don't know because I don't have the daddy in front of me to see who said that it was realistic and unrealistic um knowing what they're doing but then the support of my administrator I I guess I need to know which ones are Elementary which ones are middle and which ones are high school so then how to um start fixing some of this issue
269right um do we have that breakdown of which ones are middle which ones were elementary high school so we haven't in the past years done that type of analysis but we certainly could dive deeper into the these data and break that up for you well I don't care about pastures just this year yep that's why I do have that yes well we have access to it but we haven't generated those data but we can easily it would be well for me particularly it would be great because if it's just the elementary teachers feeling overwhelmed then we can do something else to find out what we're doing that causes that unrealistic expectation right right or if it's like Middle School who's saying the administration doesn't support because maybe the kids are out of control um then
270what we can do to help the administration help with those middle school kids if that makes any sense so I'll talk to the board and ask them what they want in a minute but I just wanted to know if we had that that data we have access to that yes okay on the area of professional growth again we had one item that dropped more than 10 and two that were the lowest that they've been since 2016 and the biggest one is I've received adequate training and support to be able to manage student behaviors in my classroom this kind of correlates with reports that we're hearing of increased behavior issues in schools and then in terms of value items um we had one of them that dropped more than 10 percent and then five items that
271were the lowest that they've done since 2016. the lowest being I receive adequate recognition for good work and so Educators don't feel that they're being acknowledged for the work that they're doing and that's um just half of our Educators feel that they are these are the new items so there's the good news is that teachers do feel that they are supported and have a sense of trust with their colleagues at their school and feel like they belong at their school they don't share that same perception of relying on their administrators for that support but they do have that support from the completes the oh the open-ended items um there were two of them one is what single change would be would have the most positive effect on your overall job satisfaction there were over a
272thousand responses and that could be that one person had more than one response because they sometimes talk about multiple things in their response that doesn't mean that many Educators but that many responses the most frequently mentioned is higher salary and what we're seeing in the open-ended responses is talk about that they acknowledge that Canyons is one of the highest paid districts in the state but that it hasn't kept up with inflation and that they feel like by having that um having to ask for a higher salary makes them feel less valued as a professional the second was more prep time or more time without students again acknowledging the digital Fridays and the virtual Fridays that were provided last year that gave them a lot of relief they miss those um third was the more appreciation
273respect and recognition not just from administrators but from the community at Large and then improved communication and backing from Administration smaller class sizes more effective support with discipline and behavior again and then the second open-ended question and what supports our resources would make your job easier for you we saw some of the similar responses to the other open-ended question more prep time more collaboration time um virtual Fridays they love those they also talked about more and better quality staff including paraprofessionals um counselors Etc they also talked about extra paid time and this was reflected with the time that they're spending on their own or out of contract time to get things done balanced accountability what was most often reflected in that was that they often don't feel that their voice is being heard again more
274support from school administrators administrators who listen to their concerns and again consequences and better control for Behavior so just to summarize some of the main points we had a good reliability and strong response rate for the survey the majority of our educators are satisfied overall but it's at the lowest percentage that it has been since we started the survey in 2016. we did drop from 2021 on all of the survey items and there that decrease in overall satisfaction mirrors that drop in our own retention rate of educators so recommendations are to look at what action plans we can create to have the most impact on those identified sources of their dissatisfaction both at the district and the school building level and then establish ongoing communication of those action plans to ensure that Educators know their
275concerns are being addressed and this is one of the success criteria in strategic plan is to make sure that our Educators feel that they're supported so that's a brief synopsis of that long survey so questions or comments questions board comments Mrs Oaks thank you so much for sharing this I think it's so important for us to take a deeper look and I really appreciate the teachers that came and spoke to us tonight by the way I know not all you spoke but he did in spirit right so um it's critically important that we're taking care of our teachers there's nothing that we can do to move forward as a district if we're not and um it was a very sobering look at all the data and in our conversation in our operations subcommittee this last
276week can we talked about this and I'd like to do a deeper dive and really talk with my colleagues more about what they feel like would make the biggest difference in order to support our teachers and kind of Turn part of the ship around I'm sure I would imagine that a lot of this is based in part upon when the survey was filled out like when what month and year was that was it this past spring and so it's always in the spring yes in the spring which was at the end of a hard year so um but it's I don't want to minimize the the responses I think it's important for us to pay attention and really look at that so anyway that's that's my thought I'd really like for us to talk about
277a little bit more in the operations subcommittee and maybe bring back some ideas to the rest of the board about some ideas or initiatives we could we could consider in trying to make a difference on this thank you other comments I'm Mrs neibar then Mr Wrigley thank you for your presentation and for the work that went into this I I think there are some things to celebrate I wanted to start with that I like to see that we're in the 78 and 80 percentile in a lot of different categories having access to their achievement coaches um adequate training um that we have we're providing sufficient opportunities for professional development um you know as well as as that their administrator is available and open to discussing important matters there's a lot of great great things and
278the sense of of trust between colleagues I also think is something to celebrate 81 I mean you'd be hard-pressed to find any other organization that fills that strongly about all their co-workers when you think of how many teachers Canyon's in place so I think there's some really wonderful things here um one thing I'm very interested in is we've talked about student behaviors and it's interesting to me that better Behavior control was only 96 of the 1122 responses which is like 0.03 percent that's that I was surprised for that um I think that I agree with clarine I really would love to see the breakdown I'm going to talk about the opportunities for growth here I think the biggest thing is the expectations of teachers in CSD are realistic only 24 of the teachers saying that
279it's realistic we need to take a really hard look at that I agree with clearing it would be nice to see the teachers at which level but still only 24 of them that's going to be you know I'm sure it's going to bleed over to not just Elementary although we have more Elementary School teachers and schools than we have anywhere else and when we're looking at implementing the Strategic plan there is going to be additional differences in the classroom and probably different expectations placed on the teacher and I just think it's really important that we also look at where we can simplify and that we have established very strong feedback loops from the teachers um I really appreciate the teacher that came and spoke today I think you know we need to do what we
280can to support these teachers so that they can provide the support they need to their kids and we know that they do know what's the best need in their classroom and so really I'm really interested in taking a deeper look at that um and and would it be possible to have you come back and and do the breakdown to the different levels because I I think Elementary School teachers is something it's been in my mind and heart for over a year so with the letters and things so yeah I could I could come back or I can create a report or I can do both I would be interested in that if my fellow board members are thank you okay thank you Mr Wrigley thank you this is interesting information um I wonder how much
281of its canyons and how much of its the residual from cobit about 55 of the population are looking to change their jobs right now uh a lot of the individuals that got to stay at home are now wondering if there's a way to move to home a lot of our teachers don't have those options uh there's been a real values change in covet in that do I really want to do all this work even though I've done it all my life and now it's it's changed so we're seeing a whole bunch of stuff just nationally when you look at Gallup and all the other stuff and and we're not immune from that so when I start looking at this I'm going I wonder how much of that is just I always worked but that was
282it is but now it's changed and life sort of changed and I row your life a little different those are kinds we have to deal with you know ignore them but ever all the other Employers in the country are also looking sort of at the same thing trying to figure out I am sort of discouraged on the salaries too low at 45 percent we know teachers are undervalued as far as pay I have a state employee forever and we were lucky to get three percent increase uh and um so I mean we're like the top top third one in the whole state as far as pay and yet we're 45 I hate to see what the other teachers are thinking in the other districts um I guess the question I would have as I know
283the administration superintendent has been working on this there's some point that you maybe want to come before the board and give us some kind of ideas as we start getting into the new budget and stuff is what you may recommend that you think in the administration thinks I know you've been putting a lot of thought into this and I really value what you and the administration have to say with what are the things we can do what are the things we can't do right away I mean higher pay we all want to have higher pay we'd love to have that it may not happen this next legislative session it may not happen with budget cuts so what can we do that's realistic to address some of those other areas to compensate for the areas that
284we are out of our control good point so a couple of things on that Steve I think one thing we need to recognize is that the wage disparity Gap is across all employees not just teachers and everybody's feeling that you know um last year we advocated hard for an inflationary adjustment and didn't get that you know that needs to at least be two percent my usbas asked for 10 this year so I mean I think we're in the ballpark to recover some of that but you know it's still it's it's still felt right by everybody um we have tried to adjust and address some of the issues at least at the elementary level especially with our requirement with letters so I I hope that helps um but when you look at that you know you
285look at the data and you really think about the one thing that does stand out there is the preparation time and and teachers time to work without students present and I've heard that from multiple schools and um that's something that I think you know we really do need to consider what that might look like and maybe be creative about how we can we can build that time in it is a competitive environment other districts uh you know have done more with this and I mentioned uh to the schools that I've been at I think you know I I really take responsibility for a lot of that narrative culture because you know part way through the pandemic we really started to develop a culture out there I think with our students and our families it really
286wasn't important to be a school and so you know I felt like it was important that we really re-establish the expectation that we're back in school five days a week frankly you know maybe I overshot that kind of that tone but I think now that we're getting back to more of a normal trend line where we were pre-pandemic that as mentioned earlier you know the environment of when it was established on the amount of time we were going to provide was much different so you know now with all the Dynamics are happening our teachers are doing a lot more than they ever have before and so I think you know as we get into negotiations this spring we really should take a hard look at the amount of time that's allocated I I don't know
287what that looks like exactly it doesn't provide immediate relief right now but I do think you know considering everything that's being asked and all the changes there's probably going to be more change at the legislative level and you know and I I can understand if you remember last spring after all of the things that we had gone through last year at the same time there were transparency bills and all kinds of things happening out of state and National level that were really negative that you know were were not you know not very positive about education in general so I think it all adds up we need to take responsibility for what you know how our teachers feel and do better that's that's the bottom line yeah I asked that because are we going to be
288doing ESP survey also I don't we I don't know what do we have we done I'm not even sure if we've done ESP I I don't think we have satisfaction survey before interesting to see because a lot of times they intermix between our ESP and this I I guess what I'm asking for is is to have the administration come with this is a good report it gives us information but rather than just presenting it recommendations from the administration saying to the board we'd like to propose the following things on the next three months next six months actually well I for me I mean we just started the listening tour last week and we've got three this week and I'm getting I was actually at Tiffany school I was at up at Granite and so um
289I I think as we get into this and we're collecting that data well I think along with the the kind of those touch points that are in the survey we'll be able to come back with some some pretty good recommendations yeah that's all I'm worried about is that a lot of times we'll get this stuff and then and then six years after this well I haven't seen exact results from it so it'd be nice now that we get this to take a look at this but also look at the national Trends and say oh we're actually doing better than some of the national Trends or some of the other schools that are dealing with this too uh because it is it's just affecting everybody and it's really uh everybody should change to their values to
290change their perceptions about their jobs have changed uh so when I saw this it sounds like we're further following a lot of the trends but we need to figure out what to do and how to resolve it thank you I agree thank you Mrs Arnold it's okay I'll just make a quick comment we have our strategic plan committees and and um that's where maybe some of the ideas of how to approach some of these concerns can come from those committees as well so going back to what they always teach us in math about I wonder right well in reading too so I wonder what appreciation looks like for teachers because what it looks like for one would be for another and I wonder what administration support looks like because what it looks like for one
291person would look like different for another and I wonder what recognition would look like and I wonder what a non-realistic expectation looks like and what help they need with behavior looks like um and what being valued looks like and what being overwhelmed looks like and more time like we all know I work for Jordan School District and Jordan does have a lot of days off this year well they're not really days off we're still in the school and we're still doing PD days for those four days and then by reset how we did our um I'm in a pilot program for the new report card that looks that's based on standards but we still have to do all the grades um not only for the quarter grade Mark but we have to do them every
292month to put into a data binder to send home for parents to sign and all of that takes a lot of time even though it's not a report card and I don't have any way to do a progress report anymore which takes a lot of time and I'm telling you when I say a lot of time I go to bed at 11 I get up at five and um between the time I get home at 6 and 11 is working on school stuff to prepare for the kids the day the next day because most of it is individual work I have to do for those kids and then weekends is spent anywhere from eight in the morning to eight at night with a couple three breaks in there um to putting on my grading into
293another grade book not the Skyward grade book because I have to have grades even though I'm not having a report card and then Sunday's still putting those grades in and putting all those papers together and putting in my own progress report and sending it home so we're talking time we're talking a lot of time and okay I'm glad back to being in the classroom this year after two years Bob it's not just me it's like all the teachers and so you just feel like and I'm just sharing with you right you just feel like you have no life like I know I shouldn't be doing that on Sunday I know there should be other things I should be doing but last year I could take my granddaughters to karate I could take my granddaughters to
294art I could go out with my husband on a date once a week I I can't even figure out how to do that unless I just say to my class to heck with you you know like too bad we'll just sit there and play and do an art project for an hour but I also know in Canyons they can't play and do an art project for an hour they're being monitored and watched they have to be on time on schedule all the time every minute of the day and every piece of curriculum it's stressful it's really stressful you be on time every minute all day every day and make sure your schedules on time and you're not off by a week or two and and I'm leaving the board and this has been my fight
295for eight years is that that needed to relax that needed to somehow get moved teachers needed to have more flexibility with their schedule and yes we did we extended it from I don't know one week to two weeks both sides of the of the calendar but nevertheless it's still there so and what is sympathy you know like when they ask what is empathy what does that look like I think all of these are emotions and feelings feelings of wanting to be appreciated letting empathy wanting understanding wanting recognition so I just think we have to look at that and then I have to tell you though back to time my students get really disappointed when we're not at school every day just so you know I mean like yes the teachers want their time off but
296my kids keep going this is wild it's another Friday off and it's like yeah because they don't want to be home I'm sorry the kids don't want to be home if you have a fun environment for them to come to they want to be to school you know and like um so so there's I know you just took the blame for it superintendent but there's another piece of it that the kids want to be there they don't want to be home they don't want to have parents not there they don't want to be watching TV they're glad to be back they're done with colewood and being home and not having and not having anyone do stimulate their brains or do fun things so there there's this fine line but I would really I don't know
297how we'd go about it board members but find out what appreciation looks like and find out what administration support looks like and find out what recognition looks like let's find out what that looks like to teachers because I surely don't know I don't like recognition I don't care if anybody gives me I'm 70. I don't care if anybody gives me appreciation it doesn't matter to me and so that's sad I know I I know and I don't need help with behavior I'm I'm I'm the believer that I'm the teacher and that they are the students and that I build that relationship with them I am not their friend I never want to be a student's friend I am not that that's not what I train for that's not what I want to be so Behavior
298then we have to look at and decide are we trying to be their friend or be their teacher student relationship I've said enough anyway um it's kind of what I would would like the board to maybe look at and see what those things look like because I won't be here so have fun thank you Mrs Oaks Justin follow up I I do think one of the things that we need to talk about it's it's one thing to Grant more preparation time but a separate elephant in the room and it has been referenced for sure is how much we're requiring of them one of the things I really noticed when we had the feedback that came through for to put together the Strategic plan I read through all of those comments and coming from the teachers
299it was interesting to see how many of them felt like and it's reflected here in the data here as well that they feel like they have access somewhat to those in their building in terms of providing feedback but in terms of providing feedback to the district and having that kind of circular communication it's limited and they're frustrated with that and I do think that is something that an operations subcommittee we really need to talk about more effectively and um because if they can actually if that feedback loop is happening or functioning well I think we're going to be able to get a better hold on how much is too much where they need breathing room where the oxygen needs to come in so they don't feel so overwhelmed and um I think it's just going
300to benefit us it's going to benefit them so that's something I would really like to take a deeper look at um I it's really easy for us to make decisions over here but we need to make sure it's well informed from those on the ground so I agree and I think that whole whatever is done needs to be communicated so that they do know that that communication Loop is there yes yes that was one of the recommendations and I just want to thank the superintendent for recognizing that need and spending the time to get out there and listen to teachers because that's a really good start to answering some of those questions that that have been posed about what does it mean what does it look like so some specific ideas can I trusting they'll
301come up that so um well I don't think anyone else has comments but thank you so much for presenting this information and clearly we have work cut out for us and we appreciate um having you know I was thinking I'm glad we have the six or seven different surveys now because it does create a context yes for us thank you okay next item is item seven b approval of 2023-24 school calendar and tentative approval for the 24-25 and 25 26 school calendars this is a second reading I will turn the time over to Charice Hilton student engagement program administrator thank you very much you should have all received updated copies in your board docs we followed the instruction from the board from our last meeting to show a quarter system for our elementary schools so
302that that could be reviewed we were also asked to look at October and fall break to maybe generate some ideas there I will tell you as a calendar committee as we looked at it we found conflicts in every week of October so um in in that we left our discussion and following the guidelines that had already been provided for the calendar that it's the third full week of October unless we receive other guidelines and we'll be happy to follow those so really tonight I'm here to answer answer any questions or concerns you might have I mean thank you for incorporating the feedback from the discussion last last board meeting Mrs Arnold Let's help remind me they were talking about the four days that we were given did we did we put those two days in
303so that we could let them have more time to do preparation we we did something to help them have more time to prep do preparation for their grades or a great day right yes in uh Dr Robinson presented that as far as going to quarters where you would have an SCP report card SCP report card I may have gotten that in the wrong order which order it goes SCP report card SCP report card yes so that's what we did to reduce the amount of workload on the report cards as I understand yeah but it's the same amount of work I had that discussion already with you it's still the same amount of time to put all of that together to do the sap to put all that to go to the report card it just
304takes that much time and I'd explain that but um um so it makes no difference on time and and what you have to do to explain to parents what's going on with their students but um so I guess my question is is there any way to put those other two days in if we have four days I know we're voting on this yeah this is a second this is the second reading so yeah I'm well right so we have one more time but is there a way to put those other two days in that they're talking about so generally um and superintendent would you like to address that so traditionally we those have been negotiated has been my understanding in the spring so I my thought would be if you chose to go this route
305is as we've done before is negotiate that in the spring and then amend a calendar if there's any additions but to your point clarine you certainly you know as a board if that's something that you'd prefer to move on sooner you can but it's I think we've negotiated that in the springtime was my understanding is that Leon is that accurate it's a no negotiation item it's not a calendar and board decision negotiations are ultimately approved by the board but we've always taken that as a negotiated not in yeah any other questions I guess I'm asking you can't okay we can ask the board go ahead and do something even before the negotiations of spring if we choose to want to go ahead and do something absolutely yes you control both the calendar and and the
306negotiation process so if you wanted to add those days in obviously that's a poor decision yes but those days look like professional development day so would those days look like a health and wellness day thrown in there two times between now and I'm just throwing something out there I'm sorry um between now and the end of May okay as superintendent so just to add some context and parameters to that um as we all know we're heading into budget contraction right um so any additional days so let me just address that part first any additional days we're looking at district-wide 1.3 million per day so that that's one issue to add the state there's now to back up to the other uh point that was made earlier the state a few years back allocated for uh
307days that can be used as professional development what that looks like exactly as far as the amount of training versus prep time and the and how that works together that's another element to that that can be uh you know considered um and that's up to 32 hours and there's there's four of those days I I think we're actually not using any of those days Leon is that correct so we have are those teacher prep or parent teacher we have two days before school all right that are already built in okay so that are paid for paid for art exact days so there may be two outstanding days then that could be considered part of the calendar that could be added to the year clearing that would not wouldn't be an additional cost but it would
308take away an instructional day is does that make sense so so that there's that there are some um considerations with that when it can be approved in the amount of days that there has to be notice and whatnot to the public the other and then there's another element that districts uh have have um done it and that is the idea with virtual Friday so as mentioned the state has given flexibility to the 990 uh hour rule we don't know if that will come back into effect or not I hear both ways that there are people at the state level and state board members that would like to to you know enforce that and go back to 990 hours others are saying you know that's gone that's something of the past we're not going to do
309that we're only going to hold schools to the 180 day uh rule so you know that's still unknown I don't know how that's going to play out I think just looking at other District calendars that's how they're utilizing virtual Fridays is under the 990 Rule and they're using learner validation um language to use those days so that may be you know something else that you know you could consider but I think that's how they're getting under 180 is utilizing those four days as well as virtual Fridays um in with that flexibility but that could change so the district I know we're not using future Fridays um at all they're not utilizing virtual parties so like you said it's like some things that have to be look through and find out on what we can and
310can do thank you Mrs Oaks one more thought so um Nancy Steve and Holly and I per all participated in the student advisory Council this last week with the students and asked them questions related to high quality learning and one of the pieces that really came out of that very strongly was um an over-reliance upon Chromebooks and in the classroom still um postcovid and man I went home and asked my kids about this and they gave me an earful and really it corroborated along with what the other seniors shared with us that day and um Mr down I mean Dr Donald he really provided an invaluable Insight when we were talking about this afterwards about how we are still requiring so much of our teachers to maintain content and lesson plans on canvas and how
311time consuming that is and and so I think that's also a piece that we need to take a look at part of me actually is interested in what it would look like to pull together a committee of teachers from all the different levels to discuss what would really make the biggest difference in their quality of life and teaching as teachers I and I would imagine that would be one of the major things that you know we need to look at what is it we still require of the teachers with regard to Canvas now that we are out of um the pandemic for the most part um anyway so that's while you were talking about virtual Fridays that came to mind so oh and one more question what are these the key is a little bit
312um incomplete I'm seeing some striped days and also one that has like a checkerboard on April 26th and it doesn't say what those days are I'm looking at the 23 24 calendar I think some of the schools might be confused too if they look at it 23 24. foreign you're looking at April 26th yeah so I'm looking at September 21st and then October 3rd and then April 19th and 26th I'm not sure what those others and you know I apologize I don't know either so we'll have to go ahead because it's not listed in the list on the side so okay and that may be residual from some of the changes so I apologize we'll go back and take a look at that okay thank you any other questions or comments this is neibar I
313I would be interested in looking at how we can Implement some more teacher work days and I apologize I had to go out for a moment so I don't know if that was already discussed while I was out maybe I yes so that's something we're all interested in looking at um and then I also I think that whenever we've done a survey and it's over five years old but it's time to look again so I think the idea that we do a survey also I would be in favor of that this survey for the calendar well the one that was referenced by the the teacher and Patron comments and I know we've referenced it here in meeting a few times that the last time maybe we had a survey about the calendar I'm just thinking
314if if we get input like if we're going to implement for teacher work days that we get input from teachers and parents on that I know we have a timeline though when do we so um sorry Mr Wrigley do you want to speak up or I think Mr Wilcox actually yeah yes if I could just use this clarification I'm gonna ask Steve Diamond to come up here too and uh sorry to pull you up Steve so we just want to clarify how the calendar is is set up so teachers are on 186 day contract okay students are in school 178 of those days in person School eight the other two days are the parent-teacher conference con days okay so that gets us up to the 180 days so again the other five days are so
315six days are the first week before students come there's five days there okay five contract days the sixth day or 186th date is in January right after the end of this semester for the secondary schools that's around January 20th give or take so that's how we get to the 186 days a few years back as Dr Robbins said the legislature passed you know the provision we could have up to four 32 hours or for professional development days so we negotiated and this was around 2016-ish I'm thinking so we negotiated in two of those days into the Elementary calendar and so at that point we had a hundred 88-day contract for our teachers so then part of the part of the calendaring committee negotiation process is to get school out earlier you know keep in mind
316one of the things that came up in the survey would we'd like to in school before Memorial Day so in order to do that we got rid of those two days we still paid the teachers that still included on the top of the salary schedule that you're being compensated for the 16 hours so that drop but that got rid of those two days and they allowed us to short shorten those school year which is what yeah so we've been directed by the board to do that happened in the 19 so we in the 1718 year correct me if I'm wrong we checked this is it an 18 or 19 year we had the 188 days in the 1920 years it's right at that time we switched to the 186 days with this change to get
317out early because that's that's a little bit of history or background so right now just to be clear we do not use any of those four days that are out there so as the board wanted to choose to shorten again as Rick said short instructional time a little bit and take advantage of that you could you could do that yeah so in comparison right because we're kind of comparing I have to go until June 2nd so I go a week longer and then I still have to do 16 hours during that last week to make up those other two days where I have to go back and be at the building for those two days so I'm actually in school seven more days after school lets out and to make that happen then we had
318the week in a little more like that three days more right in October which we didn't do in Canyons we only did the two days now three days so like there's these gifts and takes you know like a lot of them personally I would have not there had gone in October and actually got out on the 31st of May and not on the third or fourth of June but there's those gives and takes and and if there's going to be as you know everybody going yes I want more Christmas no I want more fall break no I want to get out of school earlier and so that's why we set up the guidelines to help us stay within those guidelines to help the parents have guidelines to help teachers know when their times are off
319and not off but anyway just okay thank you let's see Mr Diamond did you have anything to add or you're just there to answer questions okay um let's see Mr Wrigley and then Mrs chill okay first off I shot when we had the calendar survey it was of parents as to what days they wear off for a vacation and not teachers what day they wanted off so I mean when we came in here and well it was how many days you went off during Christmas how many days you went off this year no no was it not it was two different calendars that we sent out we asked which calendar do you prefer that's what happened and it was to everyone it was to all employees it was yeah but I don't think Canada teacher
320days off and stuff like that did it oh Steve do you remember I don't know it was a long time I just know that's the thing about the survey it was two different options and everyone gave input on it and it was right normally about vacation time shorting it down that everybody wanted to start later and end earlier and longer because you're trying to do the balance and those two days that we put pulled out and allowed people to work whenever they want to compensate helped us do that and to shorten by two additional days so my comments on this I think we're barking up the wrong tree I've said this a couple times we need to look at the level of requirements of the teacher and if you can get the levels of requirements
321down you may not have you may solve some of the stuff you're talking about going out with your wife and husband and stuff like that rather than just having a one extra two extra days and still having that so you started to look at that we're starting I think we really need to take a look look at what what's being expected and get those expectations down so that we have time maybe within the classroom to do those on Fridays and other stuff that we've what we have otherwise what we're doing is we're cutting student learning time and that's been shown that's not good either because at the same time we're trying to get our grades up but but giving extra days to do stuff that's 120 of what they should be doing only still Burns
322people out anyway so really think it gets down to really trying to streamline what do we need to do and what can we get rid of which may solve some of that problem some people because otherwise we have like 29 days off already uh and the parents are but are really concerned about all the time off anyway thank you Mrs chill so I can't I can't remember if I said this last last meeting or not but I'm just going to give you guys some context about why the calendar committee even started looking at the calendar did I say this last meeting so we we started with usbe has if you search on USB's website they have a chart that shows the beginning day of every District like fall break Christmas Spring Break end date and
323we started when everyone else started but we went a week longer and that's because we had some like 15 random days we had all these random days so that's what the calendar committee looked at doing so that I mean that's just the history of it and I'm not you know things have changed so I mean I'm sure we can look at that again but it is very complicated it's not just it's not just let's have four more days or two more days and it will be at the sacrifice of student learning so so we have to realize that too I mean our board during covid we wanted students in school right so I don't know I just think we have to balance and look at all sides um sorry are you finished okay Mrs neibar
324I appreciate the comments of Mr Wrigley and Mrs shill I do agree it would I think we should start at simplifying the teacher workload for all the a lot of the the requirements are although they all have great purposes when you look at that list that teachers have emailed us of what they need to do during the 30 minutes of before kids come with their contracted time so I do think simplifying should be part of the equation I do think it's also important to remember like Hattie says it's not just minutes in a seat it's quality instruction time and we do have to recognize too that as teachers are less stressed um and and less bogged down by all of the check marks they have to do that the the kids are going to be
325able to fill that too and we definitely need to make sure that we're allowing for time for time for them to be creative in their classroom to do the Arts integration to do the Hands-On and the project base and all of those things and you know what I think those that's the cost that that's the price that we're paying is is to do more integrated learning techniques that requires a lot more time and so however we manage that I just think we must we must we've got to find a way to to simplify the to do's and the task list for our teachers so that we can unlock their full potential as a teacher to be creative in their classroom and to engage their students so however that looks I am on board and we
326need to we need to be dedicated to it okay any other comments oh yes Mrs Shield I forgot to say that that process the calendar committee went through I mean that took months to serve it to come up with the survey to come up with the compromises too I mean I'm just saying it's not it's not going to be like next meeting we can have that hey yeah thank you and and the um at least for the 23-24 school year that those start and end dates have already tentatively been approved that's part of the tentative approval so that high schools can contract the venues for high school graduation we we can't lose sight of that and parents have booked you know whether it's vacation or you know summer camps and activities and things like that
327so we just need to keep that in mind as well so back to the item at hand the the calendars that have been prepared by the calendar committee because I think all this other discussion it needs to be held separately from this task of of the calendar um development at this point because these calendars are developed based on I think Mrs Arnold said board policy and guidelines so um and has also been mentioned there's you know a lot of work that would need to be done to if we wanted to do any modifications that way so um with that other than maybe clarifying what the key is on those markings on the calendar are there any other requests of the calendar committee before they bring it back okay scene none we'll look forward to seeing
328you again at the next meeting thank you okay we are now moving to item 7c strategic planning focus groups reports so it looks like first of all we'll turn time over to Dr Bob dowdle and then are you doing all of the reports oh no I'll do the first one out of four okay we'll have four people come up all right thank you but I am pleased to talk about high quality learning uh we have a an excellent committee uh in our last meeting we talked about the first impact statement which is focusing on portrait of a graduate I guess I ought to use the slides so in Utah's portrait of a graduate we quickly went over and I think you've all seen this many times you're familiar with it uh there are 13 competencies
329in Utah's portrait of a graduate and what we've been coached to do by usbe is that they encourage all schools and districts throughout the state to develop their own portraits of a graduate these documents will be helpful as education leaders continue to innovate for competency-based learning to improve outcomes in public schools by advancing student mastery and Concepts and and skills so we discussed that uh the fact that a group of us went to several days of training at usbe we worked with the vendor who um which is knowledge works you can see that up there who led the state in developing their own portrait of a graduate and following their criteria here you can see what we've been asked to do and that is take the 13 competencies and hopefully get them down to six
330or fewer traits that we focus on not that we're discarding any of the 13. in fact if you look at our strategic plan nearly every one of the 13 are mentioned by name so the board is fully committed to that but in creating our own portrait of a graduate it would focus on a smaller group um what I'm going to show you today does not fall in line with the visual yet because we're not done with our conversation but eventually it will have icons it will be beautiful concise one page big buttons nice colors you'll love it um we did spend some time in the portrait gallery and the Portrait Gallery was something that was provided by knowledgeworks and what it did is show us many examples from across the country so we admired food
331and odd a little bit some of the other people's work some others we said nah but uh it led to a very good conversation about what we want to do so as I said most of the competencies are listed in our own strategic plan but we did narrow the focus and what we did is we took the it was interesting if you went up into it's still up on our white board in the conference room up in school performance but if you went up there you could have seen the way that we started with the 13 and then we started having discussions about each one of them and narrowing them and some of them slightly morphed so um if you look at for example on Mastery academic Mastery for us that Mo that really morphed
332into Scholars and we discussed the number of definitions so there's descriptors there and I have to say that the scriptures are still a work in progress for our committee what I've done up there is I've shown some of the thinking that is going on just to give you a taste of what we're doing but uh we love the idea of Scholars as being our centerpiece of our graphic that the others would really rotate around um so one of the ideas out there and a lot of these are plundered either from the state or from other districts or even universities and then conversations have added on to that but Scholars a person of learning and learning never stops the true scholar produces a healthy dose of humility and a keen awareness of his own areas of
333improvement that was something that Dr Robbins actually read and and people really stopped and noticed that and and then after that people started uh saying well maybe that is really good but maybe it ought to be shorter so we're still in that conversation a second area of focus is innovators that is one of the 13 It's actually half of one of the 13 and I'm not going to read the descriptors to you I think you've had plenty of time with this material and I certainly don't want to bore you but you can see Down Below on on 2A there was an alternate idea that was thrown out by one of our members committee members and then we really liked the idea of critical thinkers and um that descriptor was thrown out shared with the whole
334group and and then came a suggestion on 3A to shorten it a little bit further or actually in this case add to it uh four we liked hard workers but then we kind of morphed that one a little bit if you look on the one of the competencies that's hard-working and resiliency and it's switched from hard worker almost in popularity in our conversation to more of resilient Learners so I think we still have a little bit of work to do on that as far as which one we're going to pick but the momentum for the recommendation to the whole board was shifting towards resiliency or as a resilient learner we really like the idea of impactful leaders to begin with but that morphed as you can see into impactful citizens and there were a number
335of our committee members who came back on that and said that um for example not all people want to be leaders and all people don't need to be leaders but we all should be impactful citizens so that's still a conversation that needs to take place obviously we need another meeting right and so we'll do that but um the the sixth one that we really looked at was collaborators so um I felt really good about the conversation that we had in that committee meeting it was vibrant everybody participated um there the conversation continued after the fact although I have to say I did have to prod everybody a little bit to uh respond to my email that I sent out trying to summarize what we did but everybody eventually jumped back in the game um so
336what we're looking at is trying to create a recommendation for the full Board of Education on Canyon school districts very own portrait of a graduate meaning our probably temporary focus on six areas I think they will land pretty close to what you've you've seen up here with descriptors that will help our administrators teachers our students our parents understand what our Focus really is one of our feelings was that all 13 is really too much to remember it's too much to focus on we don't want to confuse we want to create Clarity and help everybody know where the focus is going which needs to be in line with our strategic plan so as soon as we do have another meeting and do have a better recommendation or a tighter's recommendation especially on the descriptors we will
337enlist the support of our Communications Department and the graphics artists so they can put together a nice one-page graphic that you'll be pleased with do you have any questions about our work from the last meeting questions [Music] nope I put my notes I'm looking forward to seeing that because I could catch the excitement just in in this report it was really great do any of our three board members want to say something that I missed did I blow something this is hoax I actually one of my favorite parts of the meeting was when we went from having passive words to having something more active where we were describing what we want our graduates to be that they are innovators that they are citizens that they are Scholars like I I love that that it it's
338Visionary in the sense that like let's Envision who we want them to be when they leave our schools and so I I really enjoyed that meeting and I think it's going to be awesome I'm excited to see how the graphics turn out so thank you Mrs neibar I appreciated when you said everyone contributed in the room I've there was such Synergy in that room so thank you for facilitating that and I'm guilty of being one of those you had to prod a few times I started my email two different times and and never finished it uh because there's so many thoughts that came but just excellent job with the discussion and I'm really excited to meet again so thank you thank you anyone else thank you to you and the committee next one is access
339and opportunity okay um you have to picture a much taller stylish Wendy Dao I have the red hair but that's all I got going for him okay um yeah well I don't think there's shoes tall enough to make up the difference between okay but and for the record it's Cindy Hansen director of um school performance over middles who is also stylish yes well thanks Holly um but Wendy is is sick so I'm I'm stepping in she gave me some some lovely notes and um and I know the board members who's who are on the committee with us can can help out so access and opportunity um there are several links here I don't know if you've had time to look at them the descriptors kind of address what the links tell you but we have
340an inventory that allows us to identify at the elementary middle and high school so there's three documents there um the student groups that we're identifying in terms of access so these were kind of our breakdown we have all students Advanced Learners students with disabilities we even divided that up a little bit in terms of service minutes multilingual mckinney-vento students with Logan come students of color 504s Title One Native Americans so we tried to kind of think through as many possible students that would have specific needs and barriers and and have access that we needed to address so when you look at that inventory it gives us an opportunity to look at the the students and then to look at the barriers and to identify a different need that they might have and then things that
341we could offer them so it's really critical as we're we're going through this work I think in our committee we really recognize that there are a lot of things that all of our students have access to that we do well but we really want to make sure that we're we're identifying those specific things so when you think about the steps as we're completing that inventory so we started just looking through that in our group but the mtss team which has directors and Associate directors teacher Specialists are going to go in and add additional information in terms of what do we offer these students now in all these different groups what are the resources that we have for them and then what are the kinds of things that would need to be added it's available to
342you in that link because one of the things we talked about is that for you you're getting a lot of of information from your constituents about what they need or what they feel like is lacking so there's a place for you to be able to fill in in any of those charts where you might see some of those additional needs that you've heard that we need to be considering and then also we're going to be looking at our December 5th that's the big day next meeting the additional needs and prioritize the things that are most important based on what we have in that inventory and then look at the action steps that we need to do to move forward so trying to be really strategic about collecting the information prioritizing it and then having something
343to move forward um our second discussion item you're very busy was the honors course requirement so the state just recently made some some changes to the the rule about honors classes and one of the things that they identify is that these are standards so if you have honors courses K-12 there's some standards in terms of what those classes should look like and what they should not look like and so one of the things is that they're available to all students that there's no required prerequisite to get into the class and that there's no barrier to any student who wants to take it and that the schools are supposed to try to meet the needs of as many students who want to be part of that so we talked a lot about how um and I
344think president tingey brought up when we were looking at things that should be is that we would hope that every class would have those those characteristics so that all of our our students would be able to have that high quality learning so we felt like it really aligns with a lot of those components in our strategic plan and one of the other pieces in the honors course is that you have to have a clear intent for increased workload it's not just like here's more worksheets here's more of this here's here's extra so the way they defined that was that you're engaging in problem solving and critical thinking you're deepening the standard knowledge you're collaborative you're broadening perspective so they really were looking at what that intent might be so we spent a lot of time
345talking about that some of the concerns that came out also often honors classes create a tracking an unintended consequences is students are tracked and then they're with the same kids all the time and then they it's harder to get them in other classes and so there's some complications with tracking we also know FTE can be problematic especially with some of the qualifications they had we have some schools with smaller populations where they don't have as much FTE and so you know it's that whole piece of how do we balance our master schedule to be Equitable for all of students and to meet all of their needs so we know that can be a problem also we anticipate that there there would be additional professional learning and our teachers are already feeling overwhelmed that if we're
346looking at these standards of this is what what it needs to look like in a classroom then we'd need to have that presented to and give the teachers support to make those things happen and we know that the honors piece is is a priority it's been a priority for board and constituent members because we often hear that we're losing students to Charter Schools because parents want more advanced opportunities they want more rigor they want these other kinds of things for their students so we want to be cognizant of that and really be thinking about what that might look like um so also that was the question there just some ideas some of the middle schools have already done this but um discussing further what an honors designation would look like in terms of that clear
347intent for that additional broadening of knowledge and deepening of standards and understanding for the students and how that would align with the requirements that the state's provided and also looking at which classes would receive an honors designation at this point in the middle schools it's just math and English so we'd look at is there other are there other classes are there other ways we'd want to look at that and we know at the high school it's a little different um because typically this this piece about honors course from the state does not apply to our AP classes or our concurrent enrollment classes they have guidelines from the College Board from the colleges that they are under so it's more about you know there might be in a high school a grade level and then an
348honors English or an honors science before they would move into a concurrent enrollment or an AP course so it's it's a little bit different with our high school classes so that was part of the next steps here is that we're going to get feedback from our middle school and high school principals on Thursday we have our level meeting so we're going to talk to them about what this looks like kind of their thoughts about these changes to the code we're also going to look at what classes might receive an honors designation and what that would actually mean for the schools and determine what kind of professional learning would be needed for teachers so providing that feedback from our principals to our committee when we meet on the fifth um one of the things that we
349just barely kind of touched on we didn't have time to get into a lot of discussion um was the equity formula so one of the important pieces that we've done as a district and we've worked a lot with Steve Diamond and HR on this is trying to have an equity-based FTE formula because typically FTE is just allocated based on your number of it's divided by the number of students right so in elementary it's a certain number Middle School it's 26.3 students per class in high school it's 27.3 something like that so we know that we have more needs and we have schools with a high percentage of ml students they have high Mobility rates you know we have schools where 35 40 percent of their students are mobile below proficiency rates in the rise or
350in the ri or Mi data we also know that DLI and salta have impact on FTE programs so we've come up with or hr's really helped to come up with some really specific formulas at each grade level based on that research or that data rather that we can access and then we try to award FTE based on that formula and adjust it so the schools who need those additional supports can get them the problem is as I'm sure you know we have a lot more need than we have FTE so um there's always some issues that we're we're looking through to try to make that serve our students and and really get the FTE where it needs to go we do know that in high schools um their tssp and their land trust budgets are
351much larger because they have bigger populations and so a lot of those principles will offset FTE needs with those larger budgets and and get Personnel that way um some of our high schools though the Jordan and Hillcrest feeders it's harder because they have higher rates of all those students and so they need more for intervention classes and all those additional things so a larger percentage of some of their budgets have to go just to just to account for for those needs so we really want to be mindful of those pieces as well so that's part we just kind of started on that but if you want to look at those really complicated formulas I'm happy to explain or you can look at those and have questions or we can talk more about that next time
352um we also want to just make sure that the sustainability is is present because we have to have something that we can sustain over time and get our schools what they need because I really think that's that's where our focus is we know that that's where it's most important is getting the supports for the students in the classrooms um that they need to learn and grow and and do the best that they can um so our our action steps there are to get our schools involved in conversations to prioritize their needs and I know Dr dowdle and I have already visited all of the secondary school principals we've been we've had we have a little worksheet we've talked through FTE you know we know esser's money is going away after next year so we've had
353really um specific conversations with them about what they need how they would allocate money out of trust lands and and uh tssp and just wear their greatest resources need to come from so we've started that process and then we just need to make sure we're collaborating across all of our departments so we know that everybody at the district level and um Beyond is is working to support what the schools need so that would be our next step um so for future discussions things we didn't get a chance to talk about yet but we're collecting data for is the FAFSA for 2022-23 so Trends across years we also know that um we struggle to keep some of our teachers in in certain feeders and so we want to talk about recruiting and maintaining high quality teachers
354at our most highly impacted schools making sure that we're getting really great people to stay in those really high needs places we also know that we have some targeted schools a couple were added couple high schools were added for their multilingual students so we need to make some some growth in that area so we want to be cognizant of our TSI schools and what those discussions need to look like questions board members who were there did I and did I do it just questions yes excellent report Mrs Arnold did you have anything to add okay Mr Wrigley um honors classes as we start looking into this um when they took away the requirements to get into honors class that became a problem because honor classes became another class which was really difficult for the teacher
355because sometimes kids going in honors class is not the choice of the child but it's the choice of the parent um and I've taught in multiple high schools and middle schools across two three districts it's interesting to see a handful of kids on your honors class that really don't want to be there and so how are we going to deal with that I mean because the teacher doesn't want any child to fail but if a child comes in with a c c minus and the parent went in honors classes how there's not going to be able to to spend enough time with the students that need to get up to the desire higher level of rigors at the same time trying to get the other child up or just eventually I mean can we get
356a talk with the parents about this or what can we do to make sure we're not setting that child up for failure yeah I think um that's a great question and certainly because they've removed the ability to have any kind of no prerequisite you you have those conversations and when I say you it would be counselors administrators teachers have those conversations with kids and parents where they'll say you know you really should try honors you would you I think you can do this or if the parents are wanting that to say you know these are the things that your child should be able to expect or this is kind of what level they're going to operate on and there's going to be supports so you try to inform right and help them understand what that
357class might look like what the expectations would be um but then that's why that professional learning piece will be so important because the teachers it will be less tracked in that case if you have three students that are not up to the same levels or it's the class the teacher has to really focus on those three students and it takes away time from the rest of the class which really happens in every class I mean that's kind of the you have that Continuum of learner no matter what your class is it's a bit interesting because a lot of parents put their kids in honors programs because they want to um behaviors which causes problems at the schools too you know you have everybody with non-behaviors in one class and all the kids would Behavior so
358it's an interesting dilemma yeah so it it's gonna be like an important discussion and it's going to take time and and a lot of teachers who currently are teaching honors it's going to be a shift for them so that's what I'm saying it's gonna have some real time involvement for learning I'm sorry I'm not the one to call any okay um Mrs Oakes Mrs nybar Mrs schill and speaking to Steve's point I think it's a it's a good one I mean I remember taking one of my kids over to Hillcrest to check out whether or not he was interested in doing the IB program and it was really helpful for them to go into depth about what would be expected how much time outside of class how much additional time would would really happen and
359they had the students speak to it and and it helped us make a decision as a family about whether or not that was a good fit for him and I think that that's one reason why the IB program is very successful because they're very clear and up front with those families beforehand I feel like it like even just this is how many more hours per week will be expected of you in order to be successful at this you know in this class I think is worthwhile so yeah we'd have to that clear intent would definitely need to be defined and explained yeah thank you this is nybar and then Mrs schill thank you for the presentation and all the work I'm very very excited about this uh this has been something that that I have
360this has been a big thing for me um as I've talked to a lot of families that that is a big reason why they look elsewhere lots of times that they have an advanced learner and they you know don't feel like those needs are met in the neighborhood school and then they look into the Salter program and that's a drive away anyways and they're no longer with their friends and neighbors it's easier to open up that door and say well is public school even the best or you know should we go to private school or should we look at Charters or alternative options so and with this discussion with the honors course requirements um I when you're saying must have clear intent for increased workload I think that's a big one I think that right
361now the way the standards are written in our district for the honors classes that um deeper level learning and a deeper dive it's a little ambiguous and it doesn't necessarily mean a stronger workload and so some you know arguably you could almost argue that and teachers and administrators say this at the middle school level it's honors in name only actually the workload's the same as a regular class and so that's something that we want to be clear about with our intent and a stronger you know curriculum based on what honors means and then I think as far as what Mr Wrigley's saying and Miss Oaks if if then parents are told and and the kids are told what the expectation is going to be I would think if the kids are having a hard time
362in that class they would self-select out because the workload you know maybe isn't a good fit or something like that but I do like the idea that we have that access and opportunity to any child who's interested in it because we know some pretty amazing things happen when our Learners are engaged and they can reach you know higher potentials than maybe others would have seen in them so I'm grateful for this discussion so just a question then are we looking at I mean I see clear intent for increased workload but are we looking at also having a stronger rubric or outline of what an honors class means that's more specific than what we have currently written because that's the the tricky part is that at least at the middle school level there is no honors
363curriculum right right there's just English Math Science Social Studies like there's one curriculum so um how that would look you know is part of that discussion we're going to have with principals and that's part of when we talk about the designation because right now what some of the middle schools are doing is they're not in a separate class they just have some other that that clear intent some other additional things that they do um that give them a designation of honors on the report card or on their record um so that's part of what we're going to need to come back to our committee with on the fifth with kind of the feedback from principals and what this might look like what it would mean for our next steps okay great and and I would
364love us to also keep in mind that we're preparing these kids for high school for their AP and honors classes as well I know some kids that in middle school you know they get to high school and I know kids that are trying to transfer into honors classes after the fact because they're they were intimidated at first and then think well maybe I can do it and so I think that preparation the middle school for high school because I that makes a big difference to what colleges they can get into and a lot of colleges look at that rigor and so I think that as we're looking at what what standards we're setting in our honors classes in middle school we need to have an eye forward to what path that sets these kids up
365for for high school and for admissions into college thanks yep thank you Mrs chill and then superintendent okay so I am going to bring up something that my son actually brought to me and I started thinking about like well we have never talked about this as a board so I'm going to bring it up um and he's he's like why don't we do a weighted GPA so he's in high school he has like several you know AP classes but his point which I think is a good point we want kids to take honors we want them to take more AP but students are afraid to take them because they don't want to ruin their GPA whereas if we had the weighted GPA taking a harder class you get a higher GPA so I don't know
366I just thought I'd bring it up maybe we can start discussing it at some point I'm not sure if it's a I don't know if anyone does it in our state or if it's even allowed by state law but high schools used I mean I need some high schools that did it when I was teaching I don't know right off the top of my head who still does but it's something that yeah so I mean if that's really our priority is to provide opportunities for advanced Learners I think it's maybe that is something we should look at and we can we can discuss it and thank you thank you superintendent just to add to that one other thought there are models out there where the honors is actually designated post at the end of the
367class so it's not it's not designed as you don't you don't advertise it as an honors class but based on personalizing it for each student based on rigor and how the student you know maybe it's through project-based learning or how they demonstrate that that designation is awarded at the end so that might be another way kind of to your point Amber of you know recognizing the students that achieve more or take more rigorous courses that we maybe we look at it with a designation at the end not on the front side thank you Mrs Oaks I think the difficulty with that though is one of the benefits of those owners courses is if you have a group of kids that are really engaged and ready to show up and they kind of take on the
368challenge it creates a different Synergy and ability for them to discuss like even just to have more Socratic discussion in the classroom if you have a you know half the class that's really not interested in that I think it kind of breaks down part of the intent of the class of what's supposed to take place so that's my big concern with that hey thank you thank you for that report and yep bring you lots of good stuff next time work to do still and and it will be interesting to see what feedback we get from the principles and thank you all right next will be the report from the human centered supports group and Dr Brian McGill great thank you president uh in the spirit of high quality learning as well as access and opportunity
369uh and weighted gpas we actually unveiled and rolled out our step to the U assembly to all the Juniors at Jordan High School this morning so it was a lot of fun for me to be in their presence uh there's a lot of enthusiasm a lot of their kids were very engaged very excited about the uh Prospect and opportunity of Us opening this up so I want to thank Dr eschler for having me in and for conducting the presentation allowed me to connect with some kids which I don't always get every day so it's pretty exciting to be a part of that um last meeting I didn't have a joke prepared but I do for this meeting so uh what did the math students say to the guidance counselor I have a lot of problems
370to solve there you go all right with regards to human-centered supports which is ironic we're talking about it at 1007 at night but here we are um impact statement all students families and employees feel safe support it and have a sense of belonging within their school community and this really touches on the culture and climate for both students and our staff as we've been discussing tonight looking at that work and school environment is is critically important um the Strategic initiatives I'm going to actually just kind of skip over both of these because these are included in the Strategic plan just for the sake of time and just jump right into the immediate priorities um so the four immediate priorities that as as a focus group we discussed on September 29th and again uh on November
3717th is the tier one life skills curriculum which is going great we've had two parent advisory groups that we've ran to date uh with a third of those being this Thursday and we will have it uh cleanly wrapped up parents have been very impressed we've had a lot of positive feedback they've had some great feedback as far as edits uh as well and a big thanks to Laura and Jonathan Stewart and ISD who have actually been implementing those edits as those parent requests have come forward each night so that we're staying up with with updating that and as we all know that tier one based curriculum provides for safer schools and empowers students in their learning this second immediate priority is uh creating and sustaining inclusive schools and classrooms um you know creating a positive
372culture and climate again one of the ways in which we we do this is ISD has our achievement coaches they go in and do PBIS walkthroughs administrators in the schools conduct ipops looking at those best practices in terms of inclusion in classrooms so that's one of our high priority needs increasing middle and physical health needs for students across the district this is something that we have talked about and we'll continue to talk about um and as we've talked about supports for staff here this evening one of the things that Dr Robbins has mentioned more than once now in both cabinet as well as in this committee is potentially maybe the opportunity of looking at uh like a clinic uh for both medical needs as well as potentially mental health needs for some of our staff
373and as we were talking about that you know aside from health insurance and the EAP perhaps maybe there's another Avenue and opportunity that we could look to maybe partner with some mental health agencies just like we do with hopeful beginnings and project connections for our students so something to consider there and then supporting teachers with Behavioral Management we actually had a meeting today focused on this very topic of discussion and we talked about uh the potential for our school Sikes potentially taking some ownership and helping to train our achievement coaches which we have quite an abundance of resources within ISD to provide those supports behaviorally to both students and teachers and helping them with maybe some of our more challenging students if you will so it's already resource poll that we have available it's just
374a matter of how we can support them as they support teachers with their tier one instruction for academics and behavior both um also as part of our group a big part of our discussion at our last meeting was focused on staff Focus supports um I won't regurgitate what Laura already presented but in essence what we did is we took a look at the exit survey data uh looked at the strong indicators which a lot of those are extrinsic in nature and again those lowest indicators which have already been identified tonight again looking at culture and climate flexibility workload expectations which I know has been a big topic tonight uh recognition and appreciation and then just feeling valued overall as an employee um as part of that discussion as well uh it was brought up and
375it's been brought up again tonight uh if we do an ESP exit survey which it sounds like we do not so potentially that's maybe something that we need to look to incorporate uh moving forward I won't speak for Steve Diamond and HR but uh certainly was a recommendation that was made as part of the focus group another interesting component that was brought up in our discussions is potentially looking at the possibility of like varying employee packages right like uh with the generation the teachers coming up they might value time more than money um so you know I know it's kind of throwing it outside the box but potentially looking at different you know types of employee packages that could be a draw for particular teachers and Educators into our district um ways to increase recognitions
376appreciation and then just helping employees feel valued um and this has been discussed again tonight too probably looks a little bit different in each of the schools based upon the administration and what they do um I know in my time at Alta I try to put a lot of time and effort and energy into assuring that my staff across the board despite their role and responsibility felt like they were a part of the family and being valued and being recognized we incorporated ESP and teacher recognitions into every faculty meeting which is great to do um we talked about just adding value-added measures and a couple of things that have been brought up uh since we met originally in September is hr's offered up some yoga classes for employees across the district um we've also just
377recently opened up our Middle School gyms I believe Draper Park Mount Jordan midvolve I'm not mistaken are going to be opened up for employees to be able to access and take advantage of uh the ability to exercise at no cost and Dr Robbins that I've even talked about maybe you know maybe we have our PE teachers or weight training teachers um they can maybe make a little extra money and actually train our staff on how to utilize the equipment in each of the facilities um the letters training adjustment which I think we're all very familiar with and aware of here so again trying to remove things from the plate of teachers and Educators as a whole uh and then we also discussed associating the exit survey indicators uh by age group so we look we
378could look at potential patterns and Trends as it relates to our generation of teachers that are coming through again student Focus supports we've touched on the life skills curriculum um the focal points they're aligned with that this is K-8 obviously we've got 912 to follow um so a lot of discussions to be had around that and what that might potentially look like if we have success with K8 potentially we'll look at you know maybe replicating the model that we've created as we've done for like I said the K system um and then just aligning that with his strategic initiative um positive atmosphere positive culture and climate at school and so one of the things that I had prepared for the meeting and again these are one hour meetings uh we spent a lot of time
379on the staff side of survey exit data and evaluating and analyzing that and just And discussing potential uh options to bring about additional value-added measures but in our meeting I did provide for all of our staff and this is where we'll continue with our next meeting is looking at the senior exit survey questions the uspe culture and climate questions uh prepared some information on attendance discipline disciplined Trends using data dashboard our safety reports which can be pulled up by Lea or School uh the sharps data and then in talking with some of the student services directors across the state we recently had our director's meeting and actually some of the districts have created their own survey instrument internally that they do so that might be something for us to take a look at I know
380our principles are kind of clamoring for some type of ongoing uh you know validated reliable measure that they can use year to year so they can assess the culture and climate of their school so we have lots of different ways in which we're doing that uh but it'd be nice to have one instrument one tool that provides them with data so they can strengthen their tssp plans at their school student Focus supports again just continuing there obviously we provide mental health Staffing supports uh we're near 350 students to one counselor ideally the national recommendation is 250 to 1 but we're in the state of Utah we've got four elementaries without a full-time counselor we've got four schools also uh that were short School Sykes um nurses we don't have one for every school we've got
381a lot of shared coverage there and then we have our Partnerships with our school-based Mental Health Providers both hopeful beginnings and project connection and I'm actually looking to potentially further expand that um we've got a meeting set up with the Multicultural Counseling Center as a potential option to be able to provide additional supports for the students and parents in our schools family Ed Center which provides lots of opportunity at night for our students as well as parents and then our mental health screening nights which have been designated the first of those being this Thursday at Draper Park another one in January at Midvale March at Jordan high and in April doing one at Eastmont middle school and we moved the last screening night up from May to April for obvious reasons is the end of
382the school year is approaching give kids and parents additional opportunities to get supports and services before the end of the school year um and then again I think we need to pay particular attention and not lose sight of the fact that our parents um you know need supports as well and so I know this year we've expanded the canyoneering knights we've worked with external fairs uh to provide those with various different topics and I've been able to present at each of those uh our life skills parent advisory group I know they've been very appreciative being involved and just seeing the transparency in our process of unveiling the life skills curriculum again family Ed Center parent Square multilingual nights college going nights parent access to our sis systems Community councils parent-teacher conferences PTSA [Music] um so
383next steps we also are meeting on December 5th part of the reason why we do that is we've got a lot of members that are on both the access and opportunity as well as uh the human centered supports Focus Group and so uh we're planning to meet on the fifth and we'll get an opportunity to actually review through the student culture and climate data that we prepared for last meeting that we didn't get a chance to go through and then just evaluating other culture and climate metrics and again continuing to provide ways to support our students staff and parents across the board so so I got questions all right thank you questions or comments board this is nybar thank you for your presentation all your hard work I just wanted to also um thank you
384I've talked to some parents who are part of the parent committee for the student life skills and they all have just had very positive feedback how grateful they are with the process how you've made yourself available if they have further questions and that they're really excited about it and that's just a really awesome end result because a lot of those parents that are on that committee were once that had concerns and and and now they're very happy so I appreciate all the extra effort with that committee specifically thank you it's you know as I told Dr Robbins uh it's been a very challenging task but I'm telling you to see the the parents and the responses that they had has been very rewarding um to see how excited they are about the prospect in fact
385several of them said we need to license this we need to look at potentially selling this you know get something out of it uh which I'm like hey of course as long as those funds go back to Mental Health Services that's right but no we're really excited about um the prospect of it so I appreciate that thank you thank you other questions or comments Mrs hoax I got immediate phone calls on texts after your last meeting and they were raving about it so yeah I really really appreciate it that is a heavy lift Brian like you have had a whole spectrum of people in there very different perspectives and I think what you've been able to do with them is is quite significant so thank you I appreciate that yeah and honestly I mean that
386thanks has to be extended across our directors that have contributed a lot of time we've had a lot of Specialists be involved and it's truly been a district-wide collaborative effort uh we've had folks from sped from ISD from our department federal and state programs school performance everybody you know working collaboratively together to ensure that we're going to have success with this so great all right thank you so much and thank you to your committee and that you're doing pretty much presenting appreciate it all right last last report um the committee for operations and I'll turn the time over to Mr Leon Wilcox business administrator thank you president Tangy and O'Brien it's still my joke I did have one about a lawyer in the airport who lost his luggage but that one got stolen as well
387uh go quickly here I have a couple slides in uh Kirsten and Jeff have a couple as well to share one of the things we really focused on as we met last week was our staffing and how we could support them again that's been talked about uh you know and and just the labor shortage that we're in we all know that you know we're this is as of last week we're down you've seen the number of teachers we're down 16. uh good news at Jordan Valley we have hired at least four I think I've even heard we're up to six there so that helps out but we're still down in assistant custodians and yeah I'm still maybe another 10 or 12 bus drivers lunch workers everything across the board we're a little bit better than
388we have been in the past but still struggling in many areas uh Steve actually pointed this out gave me this article that we reviewed and I can send that out the link probably doesn't keep there but uh you know as we talk about as Laura presented her the the teacher satisfaction survey we wanted to hit on you know this article pointed out six things that employees want in their next job salaries and benefits that's always been number one it was 30 years ago or 50 years ago and it still will be but uh number two which isn't too far behind is a greater work-life balance I think we heard that a little bit in the uh teacher satisfaction survey that actually was a big jump from the last survey they did a couple years back
389up from about 50 up to 61. three is a big one I think for us and our teachers and our other employees ability to do what they do best you know what roadblocks can we remove before we're actually very good at greater stability you know obviously the school district will pretty stable with job security I thought five and six were new uh covered vaccine policies both sides of the aisle on that uh and six you know um organization is diverse and inclusive of all types of people you know those were a little bit lower down but up on the list nonetheless so appreciate all the work we're doing with sunlight works there again hitting on the teacher the compensation you can see these are the 22 23 this year's starting teacher salaries you can see
390where we rank uh fourth out of the 41 school districts in the Gap there between the top ten or those within the top ten uh one of the things we did talk a lot about is what roadblocks we can look at removing both externally when we say externally that has to be maybe with the usbe or the legislature and then what can we do internally we talked a lot about our teacher shortage how we can get you know we're probably headed down a road we're going to have to have more Apple candidates so how do we support them how do we remove some of the robots at the state level the the tests they have to take and how can we support them better here locally because like I say we just the numbers we're
391hearing at the universities we just don't know if that's gonna Supply the demand that's going to come here the next few years with teachers starting to maybe retire out of the system uh also we spent some time talking about how to ex how to get more experienced teachers in our Title One schools we're actually going to meet with the legislator next year about maybe running next week about maybe running some bills on this you know such as a retention bonus uh you know a big one is maybe can we extend the school year we look at those particular the two schools that are in a turnaround status for us and just extra support so we'll discuss that more at our next meeting which is going to be on December 8th uh so with that if
392there's any well maybe we'll just have Kirsten come up to hers and then Jeff and ask any questions for him any of us we can hit those okay well we've talked a little bit about the challenges we face with regard to um the Recruitment and Retention of employees and we'll talk a little bit about now the challenges we face with Recruitment and Retention of students you know we've heard about the morale issue and that's a real issue and I don't want to Discount that but I think it's also important our committee talked about this to sort of understand writ large the demographic pressures that we're also dealing with so um when the pandemic hit it was kind of all consuming and it really kind of I think masked some of those slower moving demographic challenges
393um democrators now will tell you that you know a lot of the supply chain shortages and worker scarcity issues that we're experiencing are now are sort of a result of a shrinking population as much as they were of a pandemic I don't say that to scare anyone but just so that we understand that we're in more of a marathon situation than the Sprint with regard to a lot of this so um Utah's course is no longer an exception to this issue we have a declining fertility rate in the state we have now in 2020 we slip a low replacement value which means we're no longer uh having enough babies to replace ourselves so what does this mean for schools um the baby bust is is here it's actually kind of a Now problem you're seeing
394it districts mostly urban districts throughout the state districts that are talking about all kinds of reactions to this um district-wide our enrollment since the high water mark of about 34 000 students in 2008 2019 year 2018 2019 year has dropped about an average of 1.4 percent per year with the steepest declines happening in grades kindergarten first and second that trend is expected to continue and I know we're going to be sharing more about this in an upcoming board meeting so I'm not going to get too much into the you know enrollment projections um we know that kind of we talked about how the birth rate plays a big part of this and that housing is also an issue the cost of housing right it's you know hard for young families to to rent here and
395to buy here another reality that we face is um we lived in a very well developed part of Salt Lake County which means there's sort of a limited room for construction of new housing right so the house housing that is being built is mostly also the housing that is being built is mostly apartments and single fat family attached units which are like condos and townhouses and historically we know from experience those those units don't yield as many students as say single family homes so limited growth limited room for development so what does this mean for Canyons district schools well the bad news is we are projected to see enrollment declines in the next five years at 26 of our 29 elementary schools and some of our middle schools and high schools again we're going to
396talk more about that at a later date but um you know the good news is that we have a lot of strengths right um we are high performing District our students outpace their peers on end of year tests sometimes by as many as 15 percentage points we also have a large share of top ranked schools in this District by at least one measure Public School review we actually ranked number one for the most top-ranked schools in our district so and I think you uh see that as evidenced by the increase that we're seeing in transfers to CSD from other districts and the decline in transfers from CST to other districts and of course we've also got the point which is a big development that we're looking at like many years down down the road so
397having said that I know I'm speeding through this but it's late so let me know chime in any of you that were part of this discussion um we've been asking what we can do operationally to kind of make it easier for families to choose Canyons right it's so how can we connect students to the educational opportunities best suited to their interests aspirations and needs how can we support them to ensure they succeed with us um so enrollment data we've always kind of used it to guide decisions about School boundaries and facility needs and FTE you know School Staffing our academic programming that will continue of course but we also want to dig a little bit further and kind of use this data to understand why our Canyon why are students choosing canyons and how satisfied
398are they with experience experience that they have here and then we want to use that data to guide the marketing of our programs customer service improvements and student Outreach and supports um and when I say we this is a big weed it's actually something that's involving like practically everyone here in this room most of the Departments from you know student services and school performance to to I.T and research and assessment so um it's kind of an all hands on deck Enterprise so um we didn't get a chance to talk touch on this month much as our committee or our work group but we um I thought it was important to kind of just kind of give a brief recap of some of the progress that we are making um most of it's been on kind
399of the data Gathering front so we've conducted a survey of homeschooling families and one of the things that we found from that is that a lot of our homeschool families uh either it didn't realize that they could dual enroll or they felt sort of disconnected from their neighborhood school and so we've added them to our mailing list so that we can kind of start to better engage them um we've also been serving student transfers so both incoming students and outgoing students to better understand kind of why they've made the decisions they've made we'll be hopefully reporting it more on that um and we're working to automate those surveys in the future so that you know someone drops from Canyons they're going to get an automatic survey or as they're permitting to transfer two Canyons they're
400going to have to you know answer a couple questions or we'll ask them to answer a couple questions um we're working with our academic team and I.T Department to streamline our back to school registration um you know as a district we've always prioritized customer service which is sort of the face-to-face interactions that we have with our families and our students um but we also want to focus on customers experience which is kind of the experience that families have with our brand as a district so for example you know are they um having to complete like a ton of steps as part of the registration process and can we make that a little more frictionless are we closing the loop with them when they do register right with the onboarding and orientation um or you know
401what berries are families facing as they look for information on our websites and how can we remove those so toward that end we're also redesigning our home page to more prominently display admissions information for families who are exploring Canyons as an option and also to sort of convey what sets us apart as a district um this week Jeff mentioned of course that tomorrow is ESP day and tomorrow we're hosting some customer service trainings um so to kind of inspire our administrative assistants bus drivers and custodial staff and help them be empowered to make a difference in students lives because we know they do already um we know that we can't manage what we don't measure and so we're really working on kind of improving our data Gathering also making sure that we're operating from Some
402solid data so school performance is working with I.T to update our school capacity numbers so we've had a lot of construction as we all as we all know I think 27 School upgrades and rebuilds in 13 years um so like we felt the time was really ripe to kind of tackle that um Susan Edwards is working with it and city planners to audit our new construction projections to ensure that we have really a full accounting of all the developments out there right that's that's a lot of footwork and it's going to take a lot of work but we believe we can do it um we've also been Gathering post-secondary data to show how we perform when it comes to college acceptance and scholarship rates student services is partnering with the University of Utah sending mailers
403at various times throughout the year to our high school students to let them know hey you've met the threshold for acceptance to our institution and you know sort of another service that we're providing so that they understand that they you know even if they thought that maybe the University of Utah was out of their reach that they realized No in fact it isn't um and finally we're creating some talking points for Frontline staff when faced with questions about enrolling or disenrolling so that we're kind of all um making sure that we're providing the best customer service possible so um there are more recommendations that we'll be talking about I think as a group and maybe bringing to the to the board um but you know we have been doing kind of a lot of administrative
404footwork um toward I guess the retention and uh recruitment of our students so yeah you wanna thank you Kirsten uh in addition to keeping track of how the community views Canyon school district and how we can respond to that the board of education has asked us to conduct a series of surveys and we've also included this in our plans to consistently keep tabs on how the community feels about the Canyon school district our operations and our programs one of the most recent requests the board is to conduct a survey to gauge public sentiment on Shifting the start and end times of high middle and elementary schools in the canyons District now the potential survey questions will be drafted by the committee of the operations part of the Strategic plan we are studying operations and the
405initiatives and therefore the board of education has asked us to take a look at this you'll see in front of you the proposed timeline for gauging our public sentiment on that question of whether or not we should change the start and end times of our schools now our conversations have focused on on asking this question in and then engaging the community on this based on the interest on going down that row we can ask them first are you interested in us doing this and then from there we can work on more specific plans the following in front of you is a proposed timeline for seeking input from the communities at the outset of the year after the new board is seated and starts in Earnest on the New Year's issues we can provide a draft
406of the survey to the board before we leave for the winter recess January 3rd is the day that we return on January 5th we're proposing that the draft would be approved in the instrument is sent and prepared to launch from there you will see the dates of when we would like to provide information to the board of education on the question that they've asked us to seek answers to now the survey would be sent to parents and employees via email this would be an online survey they'd be given substantial time to respond and reminders to complete that survey now once these results are compiled we'll provide that information to the board now from there we would get guidance on how we would want to you would want us to move forward now it's worth mentioning
407that at any public interest work done right now would be informed the guidance but not likely be ready to to be impact to impact the 2324 school year given the time frame and the logistics that would be required to take a look at the entire District Bell schedules and bus routes but it still would inform decisions that the board would make about how we would move forward in future years do you have any questions any questions anyone thank you thank you oh Mrs Neibauer not a question just a comment that is so comprehensive I'm really excited about this and I think that you you both have done and your departments have done an excellent job in looking at things from all angles so I'm excited to see this great thank you yes as as a
408member of this operations committee I just also want to just make a comment that um looking at things from operational perspective is really valuable because we are a large organization and and creating a system that runs smoothly is going to be helpful in all the other aspects of what we're trying to be successful at superintendent do you have anything to add to these reports yeah I just uh want to express my appreciation to our leadership team and the board I think you know one of the things that we set out to do was really build a strong relationship and Alignment between the board's vision and administration executing it and it's just it's very humbling to be surrounded by the great leaders that we have in the district and you know we don't often talk about
409that but um you know they really have created with you a North star that we can anchor to and you really think about all of the discussion and and those points of contact I mean the culture that's developing in the direction that we're going uh whether it's high quality learning and portion of a graduate and defining what that actually looks like to really having deep discussions about recruiting and retention and trying to you know make it better for our students and our employees and then you know the human ex or human-centered supports of trying to really provide all of the wraparound services to capitalize on that and then finally just these conversations you know about operations and just really deep diving and understanding our student enrollment data and how we move forward how we communicate
410better and how we allocate resources more equitably and more fairly I mean it's it's pretty pretty inspiring to be quite honest and just honored to be surrounded by the best of the best so I appreciate every one of them great thank you any other comments on this on these reports Mrs Oaks um thanks you guys for everything that you reported and by the way Kirsten I think it's so appropriate that you had that conversation with us on the day apparently that the Earth just barely hit the 8 billion population Mark today I don't know if you knew that but I thought it was fascinating actually look at the demographic charts um years ago there was a documentary that came out that that talked about population demographics I found it completely fascinating in everything that they
411predicted were seeing happen right now so understanding how that impacts the school district how that impacts the state how it impacts our Workforce is really It's Tricky but I'm so grateful that you're getting out ahead of it and helping us understand how to anticipate and and make good decisions so okay thank you um that that concludes the new business items we'll now have staff comments um I'll turn time over to superintendent Robbins and then to Mr Leon Wilcox just wrote a brief I want to give a shout out to we're starting the listening tour as mentioned earlier and just appreciate uh all the participation and input from our teachers and staff as we go out and I hope uh they'll all attend if they can it's been great so far and this week we were
412still going we're going to be at Copper View tomorrow and then it won't be on Friday and just continue on with that and so appreciate all of the input that's we're getting so thank you thank you Mr Wilcox yes thank thank you president tingy uh last meeting I talked about our open enrollment Insurance just want to thank our insurance department and all the employees we got up to 94 enrolled which is really good as far as the IRS goes so thank you to everyone for that uh tomorrow we're looking forward to the rubbing cutting at Peruvian Park uh compared to most parts of the Reuben cuttings the school is more complete than others but we still have some tile that is not down so you're going to see a couple hallways that are not tiled
413but other than that uh just big thank you to everyone who's made this possible all the contractors who put in the late hours and or as well as our staff moving everything and Leslie dukes and her team and just again big thank you to all our esps you know we couldn't do this without them they just mean we nor worse can say how much they really mean to us I know we had a from the association Mary the uh administrative assistant at Willow Canyon was here as well as Amanda McConnell from transportation and I know they've both long gone but uh thank you to all them for all that they do every single one of them they mean so much so that's all I have thank you um let's now have um board member comments
414um let's start with Mrs Shield okay so I'm gonna go super fast since it's really late so I had a great time delivering Foundation grants I went to the Canyon View PTA meeting and I was just really impressed with the parents they were very engaged and their fundraiser raised over forty thousand dollars which I thought was I think that might be a district record I'm not sure we're in elementary school um I also went to the Brighton High School school career Council and that was really fun they just have a huge group of parents and the meeting was like over two hours long and we had just a lot of good discussions there I want to thank all the principals for planning all the wonderful Veterans Day assemblies I got invited to several but I
415had a conflict of the Canyon View PTA meetings um anyway I just really appreciate that I'm sure that was a lot of work for them um I want to congratulate Brighton ban I'm going to second place and then lastly I just want to thank the superintendent for being willing to always listen to parents and employees and for doing that walking walking tour listening to her okay thank you thank you Mrs neibar thank you I too wanted to thank uh all of our schools that participate in honoring our veterans I've participated in those programs in years past I was out of town this year but I loved getting the report from Jeff I I'd like to congratulate some some students we had 10 seniors from Corner Canyon make the All-State team and there was only 25
416athletes recognized from 5A and 6A so the fact that 10 came from there is pretty amazing Jessica Flores Brooke Barney Ella Nelson Avery Adamson Lauren Easton Olivia sharp Ella Duff and Annabelle Harris Jade Winkle and Christine Schmidt so congratulations to those those kids uh and I know Christine Schmidt her mom does a lot of volunteer hours in PTA at our schools um I also wanted to take a minute to talk about very briefly I really appreciated uh meeting with our student advisory committee with our kids and we had some very interesting discussions talking about how when do they feel most engaged and excited in the classroom so I took down a lot of notes and I just wanted to do a shout out and emails will follow but our AP Government teacher Mr Rogers a
417lot of comments about is it Miss Rogers a lot of comments about how awesome that that classroom is in engaging the kids and how what happens is they draw connections that pertain to their own life uh Crenshaw in RC Tech had a lot of great comments about that um English teacher Mr Meyer that opens up the classroom with a deep question and has the kids coming and then has personal connections with the kids um I think there is two others the AP Literature class Miss Clark um she she has a lot of Arts integration in her classroom which how fantastic is that goes right along with our strategic plan and let's see uh Miss Yi has a passion project where it was fun this this student was talking about how it kind of makes you
418just stop for a minute because you have to use your brain in so many different ways and and at first you're kind of frustrated but then throughout the process he was saying I'm always going to remember what I learned through that project and I loved that um some other really awesome things about or AP Chinese teacher Miss jaw um and some wonderful things going on at Hillcrest anyway I just I wanted to take a minute to thank those kids because that discussion was so valuable talking about how many times they're engaged in the classroom I one important feedback I want to remain positive but one important feedback is they're talking about group projects and and it came up you know unfortunately some of our group projects are we're working on a PowerPoint so we're just
419individually working on a slide and we're not really collaborating and talking as a group so then I asked the group how many of you feel that most of your group projects are that way and it was 90 of them so that was really a good a good experience to learn from how we can breathe more group projects that were actually collaborating collaborating as we look at the skills for for moving on to the workforce how important it is to be able to communicate and be able to you know work together as a group so anyway really appreciate those kids coming they were so prepared a lot of them even had their pamphlets on the Strategic plan in hand how awesome is that so good job to those students saying good job to those amazing teachers
420and many more of you that I didn't name thanks thank you Mr Wrigley so I told my wife there's I'd definitely be home by 10 o'clock so I'm definitely in trouble anyway uh just really quickly lots of meetings sometimes three a day so I'm not gonna go over all those uh just really appreciate our teachers especially our esps we don't recognize them very often as much as we should so thank you I'm glad we're doing that this particular week looking forward to the next couple weeks and all the fun we're going to be having I am tomorrow you gotta come the end of the year Peruvian park being open free admission just for the board um and um I'm looking forward and while ready with clarine we're writing our obituaries for our celebration of Lifest
421ceremony in December so uh you're already you're welcome to come thank you Mrs Oaks I Echo so much about my fellow board members have said I um want to congratulate Corner Canyon on their advancement to the finals and their semi-final game was a riot it was so much fun even in the freezing freezing cold we got to see a couple 95-yard touchdowns which was quite something right there on the field um but and I I love their musical crazy for you that which just finished up last night it was awesome I cannot believe how much time and effort collectively goes into those musicals but I loved it it was a lot of fun but um I want to primarily Focus my comments on the Veterans Day assembly at Alta High School that was so deeply
422touching and and Brian it's fitting that you're here because I know that you have had a lot to do with that in the past I made sure that that was a long-standing tradition at Alta and man did it show um seeing those kids walk into the gym in shirts and ties and dresses in respect for the day was really touching and to see what kind of respect they showed those veterans there were a lot of veterans there they had a huge section of the gym with the vets and their families they had them stand up we recognized them anyway I just I was so impressed and so thrilled to see um the gift that was given those students that day because they won't walk away in the future as adults forgetting why we celebrate Veterans
423Day that was really clear and it was felt and they were extremely respectful for high school students it just it kind of blew me away so I just really want to thank all of our schools that have taken a lot of time and energy to make sure that that's a priority I actually have had so many people from the community some who don't even have kids that they saw what I posted online about it and they said this is what we need in our schools we're so grateful someone is taking the time and energy to teach our kids this thank you thank you so you need to hear that and Ken needs to hear that I just um I really appreciate all of that effort so thank you Mrs Arnold I just wanna go back
424to what Leanne said and thank all the SPs it's their week this week and we need to recognize all that they do um I watched this movie Once where they had all the people who worked in fast food places disappear I get sucked up into I don't know um a spaceship and how nothing could function nobody had anything to eat and um nobody knew what to do and they didn't have enough food storage at home anyway I kind of feel like that's what had happened if the esps like all disappeared like we'd be in a world of hurt right we'd all be emptying our own garbage would all be making our own food we'd all be trying to figure out how to feed the kids so I um as you know I love teachers but
425I also know we really have to have esps and thankful for all that they do every day um my one son Tommy about a few months ago he was standing in his um he's a custodian and he was standing there and he loves the kids and he's standing in the lunchroom and this little teeny girl came up to him and he goes I love you Jeffy and um Dan she just threw up all over his pants he's like six foot six and um he said he said it was the best day ever mom he goes they're so cute when they say that you love you he didn't even care about the throw up it was really funny when he told me the story but anyway so just so you know I just really respect all
426those people out there trying to make everybody else's jobs a little bit easier and that's exactly what they do every day so thank you thank you and I just want to thank all of the administrators and for all the work that they've done this has been a long meeting and and as long as this meeting is it's it was uh preceded by many many many many many many hours of meetings and so I I appreciate that and and I just want to um also make a comment about Veterans Day I attended the program at Quail Hollow Elementary and that is I mean again it's a tradition that they built at that school and it's so impressive and it um it was very impactful many students say that's their favorite assembly of the whole year is
427that assembly and they had a student from Brighton at one point played Taps and it was very very reverent and very touching and very moving um so I again just thank you to all of those folks in our schools and I know a lot of it is supported by parents through the PTA and the SEC so thank you for all that they do and nothing else I will declare the meeting adjourned and thank you all for participating