Canyons Board Meeting

001[Music] good evening i'd like to welcome you all to the meeting of the canyons board of education and first of all i want to thank you for being here and thank you for your patience with us as we are running a few minutes late um today is the meeting of the canyons board of education on february 15 2022 and we are meeting at the district offices located at 9361 south 300 east in sandy utah and um i um mrs nybauer will be joining us a little bit later in the meeting so i just wanted to announce that first item is to approve the agenda for tonight's business meeting i will ask for a motion i move to approve the agenda for today february 15 2020. [Music] oh 2022 i think we do not want to

002go back and relive from 2020 on thank you for the motion is there a second thank you any discussion to the motion okay um i'll call for a vote on the motion all in favor say aye aye any opposed that motion passes thank you uh we will now have the privilege of being led in the in the pledge of allegiance by canyon view elementary principal kirsten draper and then principal draper will give us some highlights from canyon view elementary thank you please stand for the pledge 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 you may be seated hello friends and colleagues thank you for this opportunity to be here with

003you this evening as the principal of canyon view elementary school i'm honored to speak with you about our wonderful students and community canyon view is nestled in a corner of the cottonwood canyons our 482 kindergarten through fifth grade students enjoy a majestic view of the mountains during their recess and outside learning time they also experience a lot more snow than those of us that live downhill there is a lot that makes canyon view special but today i want to focus on the efforts of our teachers and pta and what they do to help all of our students thrive as both citizens and scholars our teachers go out of their way to provide targeted and differentiated instruction every day their goal is to meet each student at their level with rigorous and engaging learning but we

004all really know what the secret sauce is to learning research shows that students learn when they feel a connection to the classroom and that connection comes with the love of learning and the love of being in the classroom so we recently had a staff meeting where each grade level shared how they engage students and provide additional enrichment to inspire their students to further their learning i'd like to share some of the things that our students enjoy at canyonview kindergarten has a show and teach program where students share a favorite book that they love some bring props and drawings that help them share what they love about their story they love being the teacher of the moment and the other children love hearing about new stories from their classmates some of our first graders had the

005opportunity to learn about 3d printing while they saw some of their favorite shapes and figures being made they learned about the connections of math with technology and art another first grade class had a friendship month where students get different recess buddies each day of the month popsicle sticks are drawn at the end of each day and students share something new they learned about their buddy in second grade fast finishers get to create a google doc where they publish their own stories they even add images to their creations and then get to share with the class when their finished product is done in third grade students have many opportunities with poetry they begin by memorizing poems and sharing them with visitors that come to the class by the end of the year each student has a

006published book with their own poetic creations collages are then created to put on the cover of their book students leave with a love of poetry and a book full of memories fourth grade students this year have dissected cow eyes and owl pellets they even got to invite their first grade buddies to join them with the owl pellet dissection it took some brave parent volunteers to help with those activities and fifth grade loves to participate in the district's film festival students have a special stem unit where they learn how to create stop-motion videos and then students create their own movie script with dynamic scenes that they then film and present sundance should keep their eyes out those kids have talent parent volunteers help make these activities and more possible our pta is active and very present

007every day of our school year they make our teachers and staff feel appreciated by keeping a snack and beverage cart stocked with healthy and some not so healthy snacks they have even provided lunch for our teachers for every one of the remote learning days this year as they say the way to the heart is through the stomach and boy do our teachers feel loved our pta also helps with all helps all of our students feel valued in the activities that they prepare with this fall fundraiser students got to attend a glow-in-the-dark dance party if they certain a certain amount of funds the pta communi communicated to the community that additional funds could be donated to sponsor students who couldn't bring in donations on their own families provided an additional three thousand two hundred dollars to

008sponsor these children so that way all students at canterview that wanted to participate in the globe party could come and finally we are so excited for this upcoming thursday this thursday is random acts of kindness day so right now kindness quotes are sprinkled throughout our hallways and each student will have the opportunity to write notes of appreciation to others who have inspired them to be kind at lunch students will get to spin the spinning wheel which is a very big deal that provides ideas on how to spread kindness throughout that day our pta has a bulletin board ready for students to write their acts of kindness on sticky notes with a goal of hitting at least 100. with 482 students i think that board will be full and a little beyond so in closing i

009invite you to enjoy this upcoming thursday by spreading kindness wherever you go and if you would like come make a visit to canyonview and you will get a special sticky note to share your good news thank you so much principal draper we appreciate you and all that your staff do for the students there at canyon view please extend our appreciation to them and all the great things that are happening thank you for sharing with us okay um next on the agenda we'll hear um some have some recognitions and i'll turn the time over to jeff haney and kirsten stewart from the communications department president tingey thank you for this time to recognize the achievements of students faculty and staff in the canyon school district tonight for our recognitions we are honoring state and national winners

010in the arts athletics and academics those who are mentioned tonight will receive a letter of commendation from the board and the superintendent but before we start the recognitions let's note that you still have time to don your 2-2 to run 2.2 to benefit canyons district stu schools and students i may note that president tingey's t-shirt and number is on our desk in external relations so she signed up to run the 2.2 i'm not sure if she's gonna don a tutu but we'll be waiting the photos and we're not sure about run either walk you know what nancy you're invited to run it with me i will be wearing it too too okay you know it's been fun to see this social media post of those who have walked or jogged 2.2 miles or 22 minutes

011for the 2 22 22 activity to benefit the canyons education foundation now you can jog like we mentioned you can walk like we mentioned you can roll if you want to and it's all done in good fun and to get in some exercise you do it between the 2nd of february and the 22nd of february and the whole point of this run is to get some exercise and raise money for the schools and the students and the teachers of canyon school district now like i said i have not had a chance yet to put on my tutu you saw last week it's blue and black with gold stars but i will be doing so and i'll be sure to get some photos and i'll share those the next time that i'm here and that i

012have completed my run for the canyons education foundation now even though i haven't yet worn my tutu i will be wearing my hat boots and belts for the canyons education foundation spring gala on april 14th the theme is boots and bling and i'll draw your attention to the photographs of the very lovely ladies in the cowboy hats those are my friends miss rodeo utah brady jill jones and the prca's miss wilderness circuit alyssa adair they will both be making appearances at the event so when you get there and stop at the photo booth you get your picture taken with miss rodeo utah and miss wilderness circuit now if you don't have a pair of boots or a hat make sure to get one before that night which is sure to be a great success it's

013held to support the foundation the foundation exists to support canyons teachers and schools the canyons education foundation also is a co-sponsor of the teacher of the year program program now we're in the middle of selecting our teachers of the year please watch social media from march 28 to april 1st where you will see the photographs and the videos of all of the school teachers of the year all 50 of our schools and programs select one teacher of the year from that field we select one overall teacher of the year who represents the district in the state and hopefully national teacher of the year competition the foundation provides 250 dollars cash to every school-based teacher of the year and a thousand dollars to the overall winner so keep your eyes out to see how we're celebrating

014our great teachers this year there's also on our website which is a new feature if you'd like to take a look at the hall of fame of all the previous teachers of the year in the canyon school district from all of our schools take a look at all of the teachers that we have honored throughout the year from 2010 to today now our first honoree tonight is sheri jorgensen who is the canyons district art specialist she has been named the 2021 outstanding music educator for section 7. now that means that she has been named the top music educator for this region and it includes california nevada utah arizona and hawaii so she received this prestigious award at the conference of the utah music educators association this award is from the national federal federation for high

015school association and sharia sherry is the only educator selected for this award in that five previously mentioned state area now she has been incredibly instrumental in building up canyons as arts program since our district's founding in 2009 she has been a tireless advocate for arts educators and the student artists who are honing their skills and pro talents in our programs and classrooms now canyons is incredibly fortunate to have her as part of our district we're thrilled that she's received this recognition for her artwork and her dedication our next honorees are big winners at the utah association for career and technical education they are two of the educators who help canyon's district fulfill the mission of ensuring that every student is college and career ready at the time of graduation congratulations to jordan high school's administrator

016of the year she well karma bateman is jordan high's cte coordinator and she was named by the acte as the administrator of the year for the utah acte and ben crenshaw from c-tech is the i.t teacher of the year from the i.t division of utah a-c-t-e so congratulations to those fine educators and career in technical education we also have one more teacher who has been national board certified cynthia krueger from draper park middle school earned this teacher certification which is one of the most prestigious teacher certifications in the country the certification is a standard that was established by teachers and for teachers a task force of policymakers educators teacher associations and business leaders combined to create the national board for professional teaching standards and established five core propositions for teaching and that forms the basis

017for the certification it's difficult to get it takes years and we're so thrilled that one more of our teacher is a national board certified teacher you may see here she was among the teachers who were recognized on the floor of the state capitol the house and the senate honored her and many others who received that national board certification so congratulations to cynthia now our next honorees are deca students from jordan high school for cte month jordan high school store called the spot has been recognized as one of only four school stores in utah to earn the highest level of distinction that's the gold certification and they will be recognized at this year's international deca conference in atlanta georgia and that conference is in april the school's administration gives a special out to chapter president and

018store ceo nathan williamson who worked tirelessly to make the project and the certification happen the spot has operated for 28 continuous years and has been recognized as a gold certified for eight consecutive years an achievement i understand that has not been matched by any other utah school store in that period of time so congratulations to the students in deca at jordan high school who run the spot which has earned the gold certification for the school store now we also want to honor the contributions of our 70 nash school counselors we are better together because of our school counselors now their wellness coaches their career advisors and their conflict resolution experts and during the pandemic they also stepped up to be those who comforted those who are experiencing difficult emotions so thank you to all of

019our counselors for doing an amazing job in a very challenging time the national school counseling week was february 7th through the 11th and to finish this off congratulations to the brighton high acadians for finishing fifth in the 5a state drill team championships the team's overall score was pumped up by a fourth place finish in the dance category and hillcrest's drill team won fourth in the show division division now we're looking forward to wrapping up all of the winter sports and we have the following championship events tomorrow and thursday 5a girls and boys wrestlers will hit the mats at utah valley university friday and saturday are the 6a girls and boys wrestling championships at utah valley university in swimming friday and saturday the 5a and 6a championships at brigham young university in boys basketball next tuesdays

020the start of the 5a and 6a boys basketball tournament the quarterfinals and semifinals will be held at the university of utah and the finals will be held at byu next monday is the start of the 5a and 6a girls basketball tournament and the rankings for both the boys and girls hoops teams will be released tomorrow we'll be looking for that to see how our teams rank so congratulations to the winter sport athletes who have already finished their seasons and won awards and best of luck to those facing the end of their seasons cross our fingers that they'll bring home another state title president thank you so much for the time that you allowed to us to recognize those who have gone above and beyond for the canyons district community thank you so much we really

021enjoy hearing about all the amazing and wonderful things that are happening across the district and we celebrate those achievements we've now come to the patron comment portion of our meeting while not required by law the board often designates time in meetings to listen to the patrons of the district please be aware that patron comment time is limited to residents and taxpayers of canyons district students and parents of students and current employees of the district may provide board members with written documents these documents must be submitted to the board secretary at the meeting over here cindy or emailed to the office of public communications by noon of the day following the board meeting time allotted for public comment tonight will be um we have six individuals so each one will get three minutes and those representing

022a group will get four minutes comments made during patron comment time are part of the public record it is the board's practice to listen and take notes during 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 those personnel issues the comments need to be civil and refrain from personal attacks insults and defamatory or slanderous comments about an individual the board of education would like to make it clear that critical race theory is not

023part of the curriculum being used in kenyan's school district there are no plans to incorporate it into the curriculum or instruction in canyon schools 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 um so tonight as i mentioned we have six individuals that have signed up to address us we'll begin with vanessa boyer followed by noah boyer good evening i'm so excited to be able to be here and talk to you guys about these amazing boys behind me i don't know how many times you can get an entire room full of teenage boys and have them be disrespectful this is the face of

024boys volleyball i'm here to talk about that my name is vanessa boyer i have five kids in the canyon school district and one of my boys is a boys volleyball player i have provided some documentations which should be in your prizes files for some quick facts and some information my boys have been playing volleyball in utah for over 30 years and participation has exploded exponentially in the last few years currently over a hundred boys volleyball teams represent represent over 60 high schools across the state from saint george to logan they're literally everywhere this year corner canyon alone has six teams we have 60 boys who are playing this year and this is the first year where we've had to turn boys away because there's not enough gym time and accommodations because it is not a

025sanctioned sport many times these boys practice past 11 p.m because there's no other time for them to do so interest for boys volleyball is also very high in utah because of our awesome byu men's volleyball team which consistently has placed in the top 10 in the top five over the last 10 years um girls volleyball has been officially sanctioned for three decades but boys still don't have the opportunity to play for high schools under the uhsaa umbrella however boys volleyball has overwhelmingly qualified as uhsaa emerging sport for the last two years based on participation alone it has also consistently met uhsaa's additional criteria for sanctioning voice volleyball caters to a very specific group of boys most boys volleyball players do not play any other sport in fact it's a very high percentage 78 70 to

02680 of these boys this is their only sport this is their main component for emotional physical and mental health all things point to sensibility and sanction and boys volleyball but it's also a very very strong community in our district these are really good kids they're good students it's a community of respect it has filled a void for thousands of young men in our state for teamwork self-respect grit and a place of belonging these kids deserve to have their sport recognized and supported by their community i've been a proud volleyball mom for five years and it has made a major impact on my son's life so i'm asking you tonight that if you get a chance to speak on our behalf or to vote on our behalf or to talk to somebody who has influence to

027vote on our behalf that it would be a resounding yes because it is something that our district needs that our state needs and it is definitely something that will be supported by our community and i just want to thank you guys for the time and hopefully you learned something awesome about these boys behind me so thank you thank you okay noah boyer and then nancy nichols oh boy [Music] well um this should already tell you something about how much i care about volleyball because i'm absolutely terrified of public speaking um um i am no boyer i am the son of vanessa boyer who just spoke and um i am 15 i'm going to be turning 16 soon i've been playing volleyball for quite some time i can't really put a limit i'm sorry like a

028number on the years um for playing but for like going to clubs and stuff i've been doing clubs for four years and three those years um [Music] yeah this is my fourth year so through those years we're in the past and this stuff with here i've tried a lot of sports um baseball well i'm not gonna even go much into that because that was that was scary um i've done stuff like soccer um ball just came to me kicked it as hard as i can that's basically all i did in that sport and then i did track and i got pretty mad when i realized i actually had to run and that was disappointing and then i got to volleyball and it's something that my dad has been coaching for a while like not coaching

029i'm reffing for a while and my mom has played in the past so that's where i kind of got that from and i got to be honest i have some censor sensory issues so the whole touchy-feely running into people thing for sports it is not for me and volleyball there's net right between you and the other team so um even though like with one thing i really like about volleyball is even though you're not like the ball isn't coming to you or you're not currently in the motion of passing the ball setting the ball ect you are always in the game [Music] and that's something that i really like i like being able to always feel like i'm helping out somehow or like i'm a part of the game i'm part of what it is

030and not that oh i have to like i have to be the one with the balls to actually be doing something in the team which i really like about volleyball and um last year with volleyball um because it wasn't sanctioned and we kind of had to squeeze in certain places i ended up doing games so late um multiple times a week where it got to the point where i was coming home at midnight and that sucked especially going home at midnight after an exhausting game and having to get up six hours earlier to go to school and i was dazed gotta be honest um i it was hard for me for school and one thing i would like to um bring up that my mother current um just said was um people are being cut

031this year and i'm not sure about all them but volleyball is my go-to for like to get away from the world get away from all the crappy stuff because you know it's volleyball and imagine being like okay i'm gonna go um second one's like therapy volleyball therapy i'm gonna go get all my emotions out i'm gonna go escape from the world and just play something that i love and that i'm good at and then going there to go get all your emotions out and to go cope and then being told you need to go find another way because you don't have time [Laughter] because you don't have a spot on the team i'm sorry um sadly i would like to say more but looks like run out of time so thanks for the opportunity to

032speak and i hope you guys are leaning towards our side on things thank you nancy nichols and then krista pippen and christa pippen is representing a group thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening um nine years ago i began a quest to understand why my son been in junior high in the granite school district um had no program of boys volleyball to go to once he got into high school and now nine years later i'm here in canyons my son's a junior and he wants to play volleyball and just joined a club since it's not sanctioned in utah yet the club that he joined had a record number of boys that tried out this year and like they said some were turned away and i am here on behalf of my son who

033had a previous commitment for tonight asking canyon's board in what way they can to help in making boys volleyball a sanctioned sport on the high school level thank you thank you krista pippen and then logan slaughter thank you president tingey executive board dr robbins i appreciate the opportunity to get up and speak tonight i am representing canyons education association and our teachers wanted to express to you how grateful they have been for the remote fridays and for your support and willingness to help us this year it's been such a tough year in fact many teachers have said that these days have been the difference in their survival and remaining in the teaching profession this year um teachers also wanted to express their thankfulness for the sacrifices that our community has had to make our families

034and our students in order to support these days as well teachers have been utilizing this time to analyze data to plan and make accommodations for small groups and the interventions that have been so crucial this year to help close some of the gaps that have been exacerbated uh by our pandemic and the disruptions in the school environment teachers have also been able to give students more individualized feedback and also more timely feedback to help them grow and to master the contents and the skills that are being taught um they've also been able to utilize technology platforms like zoom and google meet to host small groups of students who have also been behind and have given them that extra support that they need we've even have teachers ones here tonight with us that have delivered missing

035work to their students on these fridays to help them get caught back up with the excessive amount of absences we've had this year teachers have kept students at the heart of everything they've done on these fridays to make sure that the remote fridays have been used to increase the success of our students and we're just here tonight asking the board for your continued support and keeping the last two remaining remote fridays that had been scheduled for the school year so thank you for considering that thank you logan slaughter and then christine smith hi my name is logan slaughter and i'm here tonight asked to ask you for your support in sanctioning boys high school volleyball i grew up trying all different types of sports or all the ones my mom would let me do meaning

036football was out of the picture because it is too dangerous i even did high school mountain bike high school mountain biking one year and it turns out it's more of my mom's sport and not mine after after that my friend invited me to go to a summer volleyball camp um where i again learned how to play a new sport this one was different though i actually enjoyed going to practices and games after this i decided to sign up for club volleyball at sports city this turned out to be a great club and i have played with them for two years going traveling to st george anaheim and we'll be going to nationals in summer in orlando florida if you attend any of the local volleyball tournaments you will be blown away at the amount of

037boys that play this sport in utah even without it being a sanctioned high school sport as much as i have loved being part of a great club something is missing all the boys i play with except for one go to different schools across the valley i go to jordan in high school and i want to be a part of a high school team with my fellow classmates there's something about being part of a high school team that connects you more to the to your teammates peers teachers and your school i would love being a jordan b digger and would love to represent my school by playing on a jordan volleyball team i know it could be a challenge to implement a new sport into the utah high schools but us teens and parents and our

038parents are up for the challenge we want this and we need this please consider finding ways to support our schools in minnes administrators and coaches and teachers um so that so that they will vote to sanction utah boys volleyball thank you thank you uh christine smith is the concluding comments thank you yes my name is christine smith thank you so much for hearing me tonight i'm here about the dress code i have a child i'm a parent at brighton high school and as the year has gone i've gotten more and more concerned about what i'm seeing as i drop off my child and pick up my child and i wrote each of the board members on february 4th about my concerns and i appreciated your response nancy to my re uh my email and i

039know that you're as concerned as well and i looked up the on the website at brighton and it said that the dress code for brighton is that brighton high school students standard requires meat clean hair and clothing midriffs short shorts and other inappropriate attires are not permitted and then i even looked up the dress code and i know for the girls it said all dresses must have two straps hanger straps are not counted no halter tops back of the dresses must sit at your natural waist no plunging necklines short hand length or excessive slits and dresses dress lengths must be no shorter and then it didn't continue in on the website it was i've seen this being violated every day to an extreme i've seen girls wearing less than a fraction of what you would

040see on a bra on a normal and a woman i need to it's appalling i'd be appalled to see it anywhere and especially at a school setting where there is a dress code [Music] i've seen a girl come in with slits in her jeans and half of her bottom showing it's appalling to me and i just think that something needs to be done to be reinforcing the dress codes i think the students need to be know better what the dress code is and then to be have it be enforced i'm happy as a parent to help in any way i can um again my name is christine smith and thank you for hearing me tonight thank you okay um that concludes the patron comments for this evening and again i thank each of you for

041being here for addressing the board we appreciate your engagement in these matters that are of importance um okay board next is our cons consent agenda i will ask for i ask for a motion for the consent agenda and please in making that motion please list each of the items that are contained on the consent agenda i'd like to make a motion to approve today's consent agenda which includes item a approval workshop session minutes for february 1st 2022 item b approval of business meeting minutes for february 1st 2022 item c approval of higher and termination reports item d approval of purchasing bids item e approval of student overnight travel item f approval of january financial reports item g approval of lea specific licenses item h approval of administrative appointments item i approval of tssp and land

042trust amendments for alta view butler canyon view and oakdale and item j approval of tssp and land trust final report due date thank you is there a second to that motion i'll second that thank you any discussion this motion scene none i'll call for the vote all in favor please say aye aye any opposed that motion passes thank you okay um next on the agenda is item 7a the 2022 legislative update i will turn the time over to charlie evans and susan edwards from the external relations department next time we have a big crowd like that you may want to tell them it is a legislative report next and i'm sure they would want to stay we will keep that in mind um just generally we're at the point of the session now where the

043appropriations committees of subcommittees have done their work and the real appropriations can begin and so the standing committees are beginning to pick up steam and speed and it's that part of the session where you know the game so to speak is afoot we have a number of bills to talk to you about that are influx and changing and all of this that we're about to talk about it's subject to change within the next 24 hours so don't hold us to any of this one of the bills i wanted to start with or i am going to start with is sb 211 which is titled income tax fund amendments and this is a bill that changes the name of the education fund and changes it to the income tax fund and a trying to pick my

044words carefully here but um this is this is the exact opposite in my opinion of what we were assured was going to happen when our friends in public ed chose to support amendment g and so now not only do we not have a fund dedicated to education when this bill passes and i assume that it will um we won't even have an education fund anymore and all all relics and ideas that there ever was an education fund that was voted on and passed by the people of the state of utah to fund public ed will be gone and i am disappointed that the assurances that we were all given at the time have lasted two years maybe three years and you know just to state the obvious it's the same leadership that those issues the

045issues those assurances so um i was really disappointed to see this today and i'm going to do what we're going to do what we can to kill it but i don't know that we will be able to the pta has come out very strongly against and i imagine other education entities will too any questions on that mr wrigley yeah what specific differences does that make i mean you tell them about the bill but what is it what is it doing is it's not going to put any just changes the name of the fund but does that allow more people to dip into it or you know when they passed amendment g that gave them the ability to do that anyway and so it's a name change but is there any difference that's what it's going

046to do when they out step no no it's just in my opinion it's just a mindset that legislators legislators have to deal with every time they dip into that fund to fund something else with that they won't have to deal with anymore you know in two years the legislatures in the last eight years has turned over almost 90 percent you know four years from now nobody up there will know we even had an education fund so basically it leaves it open for free for all in the future well the way they set amendment g up you know they included so many things in it that they you know that you know money is fungible so they fund you know health and human services out of this and they don't have to take it out of

047uh in another fund and so that was we knew that was going to be the case and we supported it so this is really just semantics but i think it's more important than that i think that having an education fund that legislators had to deal with and like i just said you know if they want to use it for something else they have to deal with taking it out of the education fund and it's a constant reminder where you're taking this money from and what it could be used for that won't be there anymore i think it's i think it's important and i yeah i never i didn't see this coming i think it's pretty clever move on on their part it's very disappointing thank you i think uh mrs shell and then mrs oaks

048so i just wanted to say that right now on a bill it will say where the money is coming from and it says we'll say education fund so then we understand that is coming out of our pot of money right so once they change that name i mean just what charlie said then they can no longer say that it's just coming out of this other fund and then we'll kind of forget that it's really coming out of education money so it's it's not good yeah it allows things to be much more nebulous so for instance with the help scholarship or the voucher bill that's out there typically they would have to clarify that it's coming from an education fund but because you know as soon as this starts to become more nebulous they can start

049pulling from all sorts of places and in my mind it creates a major problem because the legislator can think well we've already given this much money to education well it might not be really to public education to k-12 public education it starts to become really fuzzy and less delineated so we're seeing more and more of that so every time this is watered down it makes it less likely that we're going to get the money we need in the wpu [Music] any other comments uh superintendent just i i mean this is really disappointing news charlie i appreciate you guys sharing this i just a reflection i remember last year when the amendment was passed you know looking at the history on that and that being set up in the constitution i believe like in the 1940s

050right that income tax would be dedicated to education and i just think you know what what do our ancestors have to say about this because i mean for us to claim as a state that we're dedicated to families and children and our future and and we're one of the youngest states in the country as it is and we know that you know that's such a driving force in our economy is our education system and has been such a strength to just continue to chip away at this and now this it's like you said that it's not necessarily what it does or doesn't do but the message in this is so powerful and and i i'm i'm sad many of these legislators are my friends and i'm just i'm i'm beyond disappointed that we've come to

051this point and all these assurances were made that somehow this would be better to pass that amendment and free income tax up that way and now we're to this it just i i don't know i'm very disappointed and sad so that's all i got to say about it i am too if only somebody had warned us um then i'll just talk just a minute here on the hope scholarship bill um that bill um passed out of committee uh was that just today very early um they you know they committee shocked instead of sending it to the public ed committee they sent the rev tax committee and they still only got it out of the committee on a 565 boat and of the two that were gone at least one of them were no vote and

052i you know had he been there and voted no they would have they would have just held it i mean it wouldn't have killed it it would have slowed it down which would have been nice but i think it is an indication that perhaps there is not as much support uh for this that i feared i mean when uh when they decided not to send it to education i assume they thought about what they were doing and senators sent it to the committee that they knew they could get it out of and they could still only get it out by six votes so um i think that we're a long way from killing it but i don't think they can get to 50 votes and um they may not even be able to get a

05338 but i there's no way they can get to 50 that i can see and then if so if it does pass uh it'll come down to whether or not the governor will have the backbone the governor will make decide to veto it or not that was a slip of the time i would never say that at a public meeting uh susan you want to talk about the uh yeah so if one voucher bill wasn't enough we've got the resurrection of the one from last year which we have barely been able to look at because it just came out so in in this week's fashion sb 62 was titled income tax revisions it is now titled special education opportunity school program amendments and it is bringing back last year's special education that created a private

054entity that manages money for special ed students and it's expanding that so now we have two and it was not its own bill it was it was broad ender yeah um and i'll keep going on curriculum bills um what we'll say to most of them and there's a slew of them i think we've got what's six or so listed here five six um listed here most of them um are looking to be more ideology or more of a statement kind of a heartbreaking statement on lack of trust with education public education um the one we think may go someplace is sb 114 is lincoln fillmore's we're still working on that um it's it's closer close-ish yeah so we're trying to get there on that one and we've worked pretty tirelessly so if indeed it does

055pass um that that one's someplace we can live with the rest of them and there's a slew of them but we won't even necessarily have to walk you through them we we hope that those will not gain traction but if they do we'll keep you posted yeah some of those other ones are just really bad bills would be really problematic so i don't expect any of the others to get traction i'm not and we're not sure that senator fillmore's would pass but if one passes we do think it will be senator fillmore's any questions about those curriculum bills um okay um mr wrigley and then mrs neighbour you know our teachers right now are just about over the top on stuff of these bills how many of the bills coming out will add unfunded mandates

056for more stuff to add to them or are they pretty benign just statements none of them are benign no um some of these bills pass our teachers will need criminal defense attorneys as we as everybody in this building will and so some of some of these bills are really bad you know and very draconian um and but they're so bad i just don't think they can get any traction okay one thing i will add that kind of has gotten me talked about this got me a little bit is that you've got on the one hand the same people that are supporting these curriculum bills and and you know we need to do more to be transparent we need to involve parents more at earlier stages and things the same people on the other hand are

057supporting this voucher which would take this money and put it out to private education with absolutely none of that accountability so it's kind of a there's there's a lot of uh catch-22 that we're processing through on a constant basis right now thank you mrs neymar just a question on senator fillmore's there's a lot of provisions on the back end of that have we looked into those all the extras in there yeah we are we are trying and you know we have taken a watch watched this bill approach for about the last week and 10 days and it's worked pretty good he gives it his language since then i don't think it will sit there forever but once once it becomes more clear what the intent of the legislature is with regard to that bill than

058if it is we get a sense that they do want to pass it then we'll begin working on it again okay thanks any other comments on this topic curriculum bills okay what's next a full day kindergarten passed out of the committee today on attended to vote which is very good we have there's a very good sponsor that bill or representative waldrop has done an excellent job uh the united way who we partner with on some things that's taken a lead role in advocating for that they've done an excellent job and and of course uh lowry snow who is the chair of the education committee and been a champion of all-day kindergarten for as long as he's been in the legislature has been very helpful too and this is his last session and he is he's

059going to be sorely missed we have too few people like lowry smith uh lowry snow in our in in any elected body for my money he's he's been so good for public education i personally will miss him we'll all miss him there you know some of our some of our fellow school districts are concerned i believe if i'm not mistaken that alpine has figured that if this passes they will need 60 and that what rob told us 60 additional classrooms which they have my understanding is they have 80 elementary schools so that probably a pretty good estimate and there is some pressure being applied to the sponsor to put some money in there for capital um facilities um i have suggested we have suggested that they allow more time for schools to comply rather than

060to do that we've our taxpayers have all paid for our buildings we're already having money taken from our taxpayers on uh for to pay for things in other school districts and i don't think it'd be fair for our taxpayers to build our their the buildings that they're using and the buildings that somebody else are using to and so it remains to be seen if that will be included or not i don't think that it will and i do think this bill has an excellent chance of passing i do think there is money there to fund it and i sense a will from leadership to fund it this year and i think this will be the year this bill passes and we'll have optional all-day kindergarten there any questions about that any questions school fees we

061talked about last time the objectional language that we were concerned with has been taken out of the bill and so sixth graders can't participate in extracurricular activities and we can keep our orchestras in our elementary schools and um other than that i think we're all prepared to live with this bill um there is some question as to what whether it be a line item my what we've suggested to them is they do keep it as a line item for a couple years and then fold it into the wpu at that point i don't know what they'll do uh but i this bill will will pass do you want to do these sped bills any questions on this on the fees no mrs oakes is it still at the proposed 50 million it went down yeah

062it's 24 million they cut it in half they reduced the curricular amount because you can now charge for instructional complies supplies you would your instrument rentals uh charges for sixth graders as i said they're looking at that general what they call the general fee piece and that's what they're basing it on now so cut it in half roughly so leon based off of your numbers head like i mean it seems like what the message that we gave them in jlc is that 50 million was woefully inadequate i mean with those adjustments that they've made is it come anywhere close it's still short yeah okay i i would think there's still 40 to 50 in that range for sure but i mean no i think the total cost would be in the 40 to 50 range

063so 15 to 20. whoever state board is filling out these uh fiscal note requests they don't have to balance budgets they're screwing us off bills it's probably next to curriculum bills it's the hottest topic up there is some of the special education bills we've been working really really closely with misty and her team and the other districts special ed directors chances are sb 118 which is fillmore and then um judkins i think we told you this last time hb 113 chances are they will merge so we're working hard to make sure that fillmore's bill has in it what we can live with and i think we're we're getting close on that um the kind of special one is sb 134 which has been hotly opposed um it's by senator bramble it made it all the

064way through the senate today and is now it going to house committee he did do a second substitute that have no authority on this whatsoever but we're being told the state office will like better and have will sign off on but that's not agreement from them we don't know that that's what we've been told by the sponsor so um we're gonna wait and see on that one um but that one is moving its way through and i anticipate that one uh will probably move its way through the house i think it's got some pretty strong support yeah it's got a really good house sponsor too is there any questions on those for susan okay and then we have uh senator milner's early literacy outcome improvement it has passed the senate it did that about a

065week seems like almost two weeks ago it was sent to the house education committee last week and they have not it has not been engendered yet but that is a fiscal note bill too so they're just not in a hurry on it but that bill is scheduled to pass um okay you want to talk about that and then yeah okay there's two um bills uh sb197 is public education funding amendments um leon's famous okay leon's famous words we hate this bill it was it was held in committee to um so that one right now is held up which is where we'd like it and then hb 362 is winter's taxing entity amendments and if you remember those two would be in direct conflict of each other winder removed uh public education from that bill today

066and so we've gotten school districts exempted out of that bill as of today so those have shown a little bit of positive progress for us and then the last one with some positive progress today is hb 204 which was the trust land disposal bill um and that when we received word today will not uh be ran this school year so hopefully that one is good and finished off for the year i think that was dead forever maybe forever knock on wood that's a bad idea so that's our report present happy to take any further questions sorry you seem like downers well i think yeah we're all feeling that that sense of dismissal you know we got a lot of stuff happening up there in the air it's going to be difficult three weeks i think

067yeah any other comments ford thank you for being there thank you as always for representing us nice to have a lot of you up there with us great to see you amber up there all the time james is coming up yeah and amanda's coming to our monday meetings which has been very helpful so thank you great thank you i appreciate all the work you do wow okay um next is item 7b canyon's online update i will turn the time over to principal michelle shimon good evening thank you for giving me the opportunity to give you a good summary of what we've been doing for the last year get my old lady glasses so i can see all right so the very first thing that we started off with was a vision and that is it's

068for you and it's about you and when we talk about that we're talking about the students and it's been quite a year we have started down the path to online learning and while we had a high school program in place one of the coveted lessons that we learned is that some students thrive in online learning and so we wanted to give students a choice in their path their place and their pace and provide a pathway that has not existed for all students more than ever students have become the navigators of their learning so what kind of students are we seeing and what students have we seen we've seen students that need flexibility in their school scheduling we've seen students where mentally and emotionally feel more supported at home than in a traditional setting and with

069the teachers that we have provided we've also have seen a physically safe learning environment where students and families have sought after that while we were not meant to be a coveted response that's what we became as well and so we learned that while we're living in a pandemic we can learn lessons as well and i hope that you can see some of those as we go throughout this presentation i want to start off with our celebrations a couple of things that we have done and one of the things that i feel differentiates us from all the other online programs in the state is our connection to our communities while our kids are still our canyons online students they are still a part of their boundary schools and their neighborhoods so it's important that they feel

070a part of a school and so a couple of things that we have established to provide that community and that space and time for students is we have our counselor miss river woolston who does a lunch bunch every day and these are students that can come in and enjoy time of just socializing with each other while a counselor is helping to guide through some of those conversations they've had everything from show-and-tell to what is your favorite thing that you did today and last week we celebrated miss wolfston with the counselor of the week and we created a online collaboration board where students could go in and add their thanks and that is the picture that you see are all the students they gain river for all of the work that she's done with them every

071day during the lunch bunch the other thing that we had was we had a halloween parade if any of you were here you saw that the line was clear up to the maverick and we provided a coveted safe halloween parade and really enjoyed the time with the students finally we also had a middle school new year's eve party that we held on december 17th at 2 o'clock in the afternoon but the middle school students came in and we played board games and we did dance parties and we had zoom activities for those students that still wanted to participate virtually and we counted down to 2022 on that day so it was a lot of fun so what are we hearing what are we hearing from the patrons what are we hearing from our students from

072our from our parents it's it's good stuff we're hearing a lot of good feedback one of the things that i loved that one of the students shared with one of our full-time online social studies teacher is i don't think i've ever received that much or that level of quality feedback ever i'm not just talking about online courses but any class these are coming from high school students that are not obligated to provide feedback they are choosing to provide this feedback parents thank you for your frequent emails they have helped me as a parent to keep him going i appreciate you doing your best teaching an online class it is helping him be successful and you can see that these are just a few of the many many pieces of feedback that we are receiving on

073all levels and all students that um we encounter we have students coming into our office on a weekly basis picking up pbis rewards sharing bringing gifts for their teachers sharing things with us and success stories and they're out there so let's talk about where we are right now we offer in k through 8 daily hope group synchronous instruction we provide one hour a day of this targeted full group instruction in addition to that one hour a day we also offer small group skill based instruction which is targeted instruction that is supported by the teacher and intervention programs it is difficult sometimes and challenging to reach all the students but we i have found in the k through a as i have substituted as a substitute at times as well as my observations that these students

074are making those connections with their students and our commit making those connections with each other we also have asynchronous instruction delivered through canvas in addition to that in k-8 we have special classes and resource special ed we service right now 12 acc accommodated core students and close to 30 resource students right now in our online program we also have additional support through platforms called lexia for ela dreambox for math and math space for the middle school math students we've also participated in parent square where we have improved communication with families through the implementation of this tool and found it to be very useful with our students so what are some lessons that we've learned one is success is student success equals engagement just as in a brick and mortar if students don't show up we

075can't do our magic so it's really getting students to come and not only engage synchronously through zoom but also to engage in the asynchronous work and what we've discovered is that is a critical piece of that success is the parent partnership that has to exist the parents are are engaged and they have to be engaged with their students we've also learned that digitizing curriculum is very time intensive what we have discovered is about one hour of synchronous teaching and creating and developing the curriculum in an asynchronous manner results in about three to four hours of prep time for our teachers so they are working many hours 10 to 12 hours a day trying to provide the curriculum that the students need the third piece that i think is one of the most critical pieces is

076that we need data we need students we need to know where they are we need to know how to get them to the place that that to fill up those skill gaps and that is one of the critical pieces that i will continue to work with our district departments to gather that data and to get that data from the state right now the state doesn't really have an online assessment program and so we are trying to think outside of the box in ways in which we can gather that data we've had students coming into the district office to take the acadians testing we have rise all scheduled to come in to the building but again it's getting the the students and the families here so our next steps then are to communicate with families the

077agreements necessary for successful online learning and that is to really engage in a full partnership with parents and to provide them with a lot of upfront information and we're going to start holding those parent information meetings in the next couple of weeks as we launch the next year's registration we are refining the engagement policy to meet the needs of each grade level or the engagement recommendations to each grade level we want to build a sustainable teacher workflow especially in building curriculum and one thing that i have discovered that is very successful in this is continuing our partnership with the instructional support department content specialist to work with the coaches to work with our affiliates through arizona state pd they have been instrumental in providing programs and feedback and training for our teachers and then to

078also establish a parent and student orientation at the beginning of enrollment we also are looking to build more family learning opportunities such as parent tips informational nights volunteering opportunities ways for parents to get involved and along those same lines we'd like to build more student community opportunities as well and then finally to continue to work with our various district supports departments to build a robust and support system for our online students families and teachers 9 through 12 is a program that we had in place but we i feel are improving upon that and we the ways that we are improving on that is the engagement piece our students finally are starting to see teachers behind the curriculum and that is so important that they are seeing teachers and that teachers are seeing students so in

079that shift in that instructional model we have increased our communication with students and families we've increased personalization and supports we have many examples of where we have personalized learning for individual students that need it more professional development and teacher collaboration needs to be established and that is in direct partnership with the asupd team in which they are experts in providing that professional development and with our own instructional supports development team our digital and teaching learning team has been instrumental in helping us develop that curriculum and then of course we want to continue to offer both a program for in district and out of district students as we currently do again the same lessons are learned in 9 through 12 as they were learned in six through eight the student success equals engagement and the more

080that we can get students engaged the more successful they will be a program is a program but a teacher is invaluable and they only will sustain this program if a teacher continues to engage with the students digitizing curriculum again is time consuming but again we are working on developing that curriculum as we as we go out throughout the year and then finally refining and communicating academic guidelines on the nine through 12 will be important as we coordinate with the other high schools and become that support system for them so our next steps then are to refine and communicate the academic guidelines to create an engagement policy to complete the transition from the accelerate platform to canvas utilizing the asupd curriculum and to create a store a student orientation course to be taken once a year

081at the beginning of enrollment that will help support students no matter what course they take through canyons online they will have that orientation we want to build more student community opportunities right now one of my social studies teacher omicron got in the way but we had planned a field trip for our some of our online students to go up to the legislature with her and to participate in that and we had to cancel it because of omicron but it did open up ideas and opportunities for our kids to not only engage in their boundary school but in activities that we are providing as well and then of course to work with the the district departments on this level as well and then i think one of the key pieces and one of the most urgent

082is to continue that professional learning opportunities to not only our full-time teachers but the adjunct teachers that we are currently working with are there any questions um yeah let's see superintendent do you want to add something and then yeah sure i'll just look for questions i first just want to tell michelle thank you for all of her amazing work and um you know just the evolution of the program and continuing to grow and really i think you know from the beginning just the vision for expanding pathways to success and i mean she's touched on a few of those high points you know not including credit recovery and other ways that we've done this i think you know coming back from the conference i was at in atlanta um the speed of technology and the development

083of content online is rapidly accelerating i mean that's all the way to artificial intelligence to virtual reality there's there's just so much happening in this space and i just i'm so proud of the fact that we're we're in that game and we're we're providing that support to our students i looking forward i think it you know a lesson learned is that blended learning is here to stay the number of students that are choosing to be full-time or part-time or a combination of both as a reality that being a school of choice is the way that we're going to compete in the market in the future in providing that flexibility and that responsiveness and so i just i appreciate the work um on one of my fridays one of my popcorn fridays her whole team came

084in to visit with me and packed the pack the lounge down here and we had popcorn costumes right yeah in halloween costumes but um i just to fill their energy and their passion for this and their purpose and it was on the same day as the halloween parade that's right uh it was very refreshing to me so um you all know i mean this this part of education is near and dear to me in a passion of mine and i just i'm very proud of the program and its growth and looking forward to more from michelle and her team and students so thank you thank you okay mr wrigley good job great thank you so currently how many students do we have so we have 309 or 300 sorry i think it's six we have

085hold on i'll get the exact number for you yeah i think it's 346 out of 390 to begin our final term right now we are at capacity and we have 26 kids on a waiting list can we double that next year um yeah if you can give me the teachers so one of the problems no this is i'm serious i am serious we've lost a thousand students because it covered other options we get all these darn voucher bills and everything else coming at us if we don't do something we're gonna watch our districts slowly be sucked up by a lot of other things uh we're getting more and more online courses that are coming out i would love to see jeff some of his radio announcements on ksl like i see all the rest of

086them talking about the the things that we can provide an online school rather than all the other people that are trying to make school out of an online school right so i think it's sort of interesting so i i don't joke about that i would really like to see this double every year uh because that way they make up some of the the loss we have from other things being sucked out of our district and i'd like to mention um this is just k through eight on high school we have nearly 2 000 students that are taking one or more courses with us so we have quite a large population on the high school level and we also um have students from outside of the district that participate we have two charter schools that are

087going to be quadrupling their attendance here coming up within the next couple months it would be nice if we advertise some of the options for them in regards to that from what i understand is is how many of our students in high school and maybe middle school or able and tied in with their schools are able to do sports or arts or other things is that also available in the middle school yes it is available on middle school they are able to participate in the activities at their middle their boundary school they can go in and take classes elective classes we have students going and doing band choir we have students that reached out to us through the high school level specifically because they are playing sports or they are in a uh we have

088we serviced a student that goes up to park city to train and he needs to be have a flexible schedule so that's one of the so as we start to advertise this even though we may be somewhat full just getting people aware of it i think it's very unique what we have to offer who gives the opportunity to be involved with their local schools but also give a combination of both so i don't know i encourage our district to actually start advertising this and competing with our other other alternative programs around that um so i think you added that and it looks like we got a section special ed also which is going to be really exciting to see that that blossom yeah and we are seeing a lot of success especially with our um

089academic our acc kids are accommodated for students or some of them are thriving yeah some of the some of the kids especially i do not do as well in a regular class because of some of the competition but it would be nice to have integration into arts and sports and other things social activities uh at the same time be able to get that focused into education so i'm excited about that and i do challenge you to double next year okay and advertise the heck out of it all right challenge accepted thank you thank you um superintendent i and i don't want to take long but to your point steve you turn the dogs loose we're ready to go the communications team we've been talking about full-on marketing plan and our friends to the west that

090invaded canyons last spring with their uh i'll call it campaign we are on full mode ready to counter and and to your point i mean we're full and the numbers are there but we haven't marketed or advertised pretty much at all and really i mean this is just a hook into canyon school district right many of these students are going to follow their credits maybe they want to go to hillcrest to be in the arts or whatever you know the ib program or wherever they want to go to me i think this is just the beginning and if the board is is ready for that part of it i agree we want to compete in that market and we want to get the students back that we've lost and and even more so i think

091we're primed to do it we don't have many other options i mean we're being hit from all sides and even within our own district and if we don't then we're going to be losing more students than a thousand uh and then we'll be wondering what happened well and this is just one part i think this is one piece i mentioned before i think to come out of the pandemic more than anything to address the mental health piece it's it's this plus the arts plus sports plus you know things that really attach to kids passions along with academics um which we've always been you know right at the top of the state and we'll continue to do that but i think expanding those opportunities the best that we can you know will will be attractive in

092this combination with flexibility and responsiveness to their needs so anyway okay mrs oaks mrs nybaur and then mrs arnold so i really appreciate your presentation and um i've learned a lot about where we've what we've become i have um a group of friends whose kids attend the gifted music school in downtown salt lake and that's a very demanding program but options like this allow them to do both and to be able to do that and that's a program that's specifically meant for kids who are going to go to conservatories and pursue professional musical careers um i just want to clarify for the public uh i know that we have canyons online how does that compare to what we had before i mean what is currently in place versus what we had before what are the

093changes specifically with things like driver's ed um you know online the opportunity to take health or lifetime fitness over the summer to clear high school or schedules a lot of people have questions about that how does that work so those all of those opportunities are still in place some of the things that have changed from canyons virtual high school to now canyons online nine through twelve is we do have six full-time teachers with that are dedicated to the core classes and they work directly with the students so they're engaging all day long with those students making those phone calls making those uh the emails to the parents reaching out to the students doing zooms as far as the other classes that we currently offer all of those will still be offered we will just shift

094those classes over to the campus platform on a poor on a platform that students are more familiar with teachers are more familiar with so all those opportunities will still exist and what we will what my hopes are is that we will expand that professional training that professional development of how to teach and how to reach online students to our adjunct teachers i don't believe that that's something that we've had in place is that training for those teachers and it takes training it's not just digitizing something that they get in the broken water and putting it on a canvas page that is covered response that is not online learning and so online learning really does require that specialized training and that is something that we have in plan and in place a plan in place for

095that i totally appreciate your sentiments on that because i i agree i think all of us came up against that really hard and fast during copenhagen [Music] and challenges associated with that and i um just want to put a plug in with the superintendent i really appreciated him um organizing the opportunity for us to go down some of us board members and staff to visit asu's campus and see a lot of what they're doing and i'm really excited about that partnership they really in that space are on the forefront of the best kind of practices and so really it is a remarkable opportunity for any students if we can expand this um for if there's a real demand it's a great opportunity for students absolutely and i just concur with with the asu pd and

096what they've offered to my teachers and me i meet twice a month with one of the administrators at asupd to just talk about how to be an administrator over an online program and that's been invaluable so yeah you're learning from the best best of the best i mean it's funny i have a sister-in-law who lives in georgia who is pursuing a master's degree and in actually second language learning and teaching and um from asu and it's astounding you know they've been in that space for such a long time and have been researching this and improving their craft then i think that's such a benefit for our district to plug into that expertise i really appreciate it thank you mrs nybauer mrs arnold and then mr millerberg thank you for your presentation and for your work

097in this new and adventurous field a little bit this is very a very different scope than what the virtual high school was so just a a few points of clarification could you go over how many teachers you have at what levels currently sure i have i have one teacher per grade level k through five so we have six teachers there um we have one teacher per content level six through eight so i have four teachers in middle school for ela math social studies and science they teach all three grade levels in their content area and then i have six full-time high school teachers that are strictly core teachers and 32 adjunct teachers that teach adjunctly core and electives okay great so the total is ah let's see let me add that up six and six

098is twelve and sixteen and then the thirty-two so okay yeah i'm just thinking of the 48 the ratio to the students 48 i think is what we have no more than that 58 and then are there some changes to i know some of the the online classes that we had in the past like the driver's ed has that been changed with our partnership with asu or is it the same as it always has been in past years because that's something i've gotten comments about from from the public about how kind of laborious it has been in the past has that been changed over with asu it it has not become not yet um because or sorry drivers ed comes from the state it comes from certain requirements so that has we haven't looked at the

099electives yet or how that will change okay we have to make sure we include some of those things i don't think we we can change it over to canvas but we can't take it from asu right yes yes it's the state curriculum and so it's just so uh just just to give a little context so so there are a lot of parents that's that sign up their kids for that a1 and they have an online course that's much quicker and and still meets the state's requirements uh that kids can pay for but it it i know that ours is notorious for taking taking a lot longer than what it would be to be in school in class and so that may be something we want to look into because i know into that i know

100in my community there's so many kids we lose to that a1 that they would be taking it with us so something to look at okay thanks um okay yeah go ahead that's true actually because i've had a child now that has taken the two week course at the high school over the summer versus the online one one was the online one was a lot a lot lot lot more laborious so that wasn't an interesting difference and yeah there's some truth to what she's saying okay all right mrs arnold and then mr mellenberg so you may have answered this and i'm really sorry my brain was doing several things um so i have a grandson who did his online he's autistic so he did his online classes like his reading math social studies and science online

101with his mom's help in a tutor herself but then he was allowed to go to the high school near him and take auto mechanics in theater and athletics um courses and by doing that he found a love for mechanics and um actually was able to graduate and get into first year auto mechanics this year and one of the things we found up here in the valley was that was not an option he couldn't do that he couldn't split it between being online and being in the high school um and i don't know this question that's why i'm asking have we set it up so that the students can do those extracurricular activities at the high school and still be online because i know that there are students who really need that social emotional help for

102those things at home but they also need the social help of just being engaged in some of the things they'd like to like art i remember he took art and he took auto mechanics and he took drama and those teachers were very aware you know of the situation they need to have an iep so do we allow students to split that and be able to do that absolutely yeah even at brighton high school yes they are allowed to take their their whatever classes that they want in person and then we supplement the academics that's done right through the counseling department at the boundary schools do they have a have to have like a special five before or an iep or anything or just any students no we have some students that take up to four

103courses a quarter and some students that take in addition to what they're already taking at the school and then we have some that this they may take one class from us and then the rest are in person it's very personalized thank you for clarifying now because i think lots of parents would be interested in being able to do that if they knew that that was available and that they could go and ask for that um for their students to be able to thank you mr millerberg michelle thanks for what you do thank you matt um i was glad to see the picture of the halloween parade that was a long slow line it was [Laughter] i was dressed up as a cow i was like bovine i think chick-fil-a would have been proud of me

104my grandson was dressed up as a dog and the line moved slowly i mowed and he barked and we had a good time i did have to work with some of the district staff however to explain the difference between a cow a steer and a ball they could not call me a cat question for you how many of these 346 students are out of district students we have no out of district k through eight that was not we weren't um going what about the high school level for the high school i don't have the exact numbers um i could get those numbers for you it is probably i would say i would be guessing probably between five to eight percent of our students are out of district and what happens with the wpu from out

105of district students is that shared or what happens on that how does that work leonardo yes good question so if a student takes two courses here we get that percentage of the wpu so you know a quarter of a percent coming our way yes i asked because i have a grandson that is a uh sophomore at a uh school out uh west of the river and quite honestly spanish in person did not work for him there were conflicts he couldn't get there so he signed up my son was more than happy to tell me that my grandson was now a canyon [Laughter] that's student which made me laugh but there were some issues involved with uh assignments being turned in and what got turned in and when the superintendent told me michelle that you were

106the one that they would contact i talked to my son and i said spencer be general michelle was one of andy's favorite teachers his younger brothers teachers at hillcrest and so it'd be jad also my son did the only reasonable thing he gave it to his wife to handle you know i i'm sorry but uh i guess there were some issues there as far as uh the way i got the story coming back is some of the issues belong to my grandson and some of the issues of lost assignments belong to our program to the accelerate program and it is so nice to have a reasonable person on the other end of the phone for parents to talk to and they came out of that experience very very happy with the results so thank you

107for doing that you're very welcome and i just feel like if we can make this thing really hum what a great deal that would be for our district if we could attract students and bring part of that wpu to our district so michelle i appreciate what you're doing thank you appreciate that mom thank you mrs arnold i just had one really good question we were promising to get out of here early but it's not ever going to happen um so if a student is in that position because i have somebody on my phone is asking me that um do they go to the high school and get enrolled in high school and then come to you to get enrolled in the computer online work or do they come to you to get enrolled in the

108online work and then go to the high school because um they're just needing direction on which place they go first we always say start with your boundary school and their counselors at your boundary school so that's where they would start in the high school levels with the counseling department we also though have supports that we can help block students through to register for online courses they can call our office and we can walk them through that we also have it on our website under in under the tab of how to register it shows specifically how to do that and eventually it will go back to the boundary schools but in order to make the the process very streamlined i would start at the boundary schools and move through that they'll help them get on the

109online courses and then they'll yes and they'll be able to determine they'll say okay these are the online classes that you want to take this next quarter and then they the students sign up for those courses and um with the help of their counselor or they can do it on their own on the website and then that comes through our office and then it's once we get that registration it's usually an and next day turnaround up to 48 hours is what we we ask and then they go to the school and get into extracurricular classes so they start with their counselor so their counselor can design their their schedule for them and be able to say okay these are the classes that we have to offer you that are open that you know have space

110in them then they go to those in-person classes and then they work the online classes around that we become the flexibility to that that's good information for those people listening and parents who need that thank you so much okay okay thank you oh yeah michelle thank you so much i just want to add my appreciation for all you're doing and and your team as well that's exciting okay board um before we move to the next item i just want to bring up um a little procedural thing last year when we approved this online program it was for this school year only to and then to get the update so i think it sounds like we're interested in seeing this continue and even growing so um are you okay then if we bring it back next

111time yes um so just the point of clarity the 9 through 12 the high school is a program right so they are tied to their boundary school and that's a thought you know in the future we've talked about as the program expands that eventually we could make it its own school but right now just the flow of credit and how we're working at with the schools and adjuncts that that they are part they're still tied to their boundary school k-8 is its own school so they they are coded as canyons online school so just so you're aware of how that yeah and and yeah thank you and also kind of procedurally what um we've always had the virtual high school whatever that this is that same thing it would be just that to continue the

112k-8 program so is there everyone okay if we just kind of take care of that procedurally next time okay all right next item on the agenda is the kova 19 update i will turn the time over to superintendent robbins i always get to this is the part i feel like you know administrator over the health department sometimes kovid's always attached to my presentation uh well hey uh i don't know if this is good news or bad news but the article i saw today day 700 of the pandemic so i don't know if that's somehow it feels like 7 000. so we've made it to day 700 um since it was first announced that we are officially in a pandemic so um well and this report on kovid is very positive and notwithstanding all of the

113issues and the strain that it's caused and the destruction that it's brought upon our country and our our state and our our society but there is some positive to this and that is that on the education side we we're still school still open kids are still learning and teachers and staff administrators are still doing their thing and teaching and it's just it's just uh humbling i think for me um even to think about where we've been and where we're at and to to kind of see some of the maybe some of the silver lining and what we've learned through the pandemic and how you know we might think a little different about education and how we deliver to our students so just a few of the numbers that we've been reviewing over the last few

114months you can see kind of where we're at and the decline omicron's been a little bit different than delta in what it's the course it's taken you can see uh new coveted cases uh by us overall by school and you can see that spike in january and the decline cents and just you know i just want to express my appreciation to all of our staff our our teachers our schools our parents just everybody's willingness to be flexible and and to really be patient and show grace and kindness and respect to each other in this i think you know we've taken a little bit different approach than many districts across the country and that we've been more precision in how we've handled this and that kind is going to lead to the next discussion when we

115talk about remote fridays but you know really when you think about uh the fact that we have been able to keep school open and we've kept activities going and yes there's been some hard times there's no doubt about it that we've had to kind of go through that ebb and flow of restrictions but i think for the most part that makes the most common sense to people in in our approach um versus you know more of a blanket approach that other districts have taken and you know hopefully that's hopefully over time history will look back on us in a positive way in in the way that we've handled this um you can see our courtesy kova tests have declined um drastically i brian mentioned in uh dr mcgill mentioned in cabinet that we're looking at

116pulling back on some of the uh covet testing that we're offering you can see there we're down just to a few uh cases per day and you know we've kind of adjusted that and i just have to again shout out to our nurses i mean they're there early in the morning and you know they're they're providing this service and i you know i know the strain and the weight that they've carried through all of this and they still show up to provide that service and just very grateful for all their work positivity rate you can see at that high point in january in the surge uh and we i believe about that time we were administering you know four to six hundred tests per day that's all that's declined and you can see that positivity

117rate is now down to ten and falling so that's all positive absenteeism you remember our change in methodology and kind of how we're determining uh mitigation strategies is with that we move to a three-prong approach of uh case counts absenteeism and staff capacity and i believe that's really uh we've kind of let out on that and most of the districts in the county have have followed that and it you know it really makes sense with omicron not to say that you know that may change with another variant but since our from the data that hal shared since our spike in january our case count is down 88 percent um and our you can see that our uh student absenteeism has also declined uh we want to continue to see that you i sent you the

118updated numbers on attendance rates and we're hovering in that 88 to 90 percent range which is positive during the surge i think we fell as low as 73 74 attendance and remember in that in in our mitigation strategies that we set that 70 uh threshold is kind of that level that you know would trigger us in a conversation about potentially moving to a school to remote learning under the new law and guidance from the state employee absences are also declining just on the covet front over the last i believe seven days the highest number out for covid is 12. so and i i try to get those updates to you from everett appreciate hr pulling that data together daily sally also in hr also works on our uh sub fill rate so that's positive the

119last i looked at that we were we've been over the last five or six days right around 84 fill rate on our our substitutes so less and less of our employees as you've seen in the graph are having to fill in so that's uh positive at one point in the surge if you recall i believe we got up to like 210 employees out on a given day with covid so the fact that you know we're we've been right around that that 10 mark over the last uh week or so is very encouraging so you can see again here's the substitute teacher coverage uh green is our substitute pool and you can see that coverage by other employees has fallen drastically and i again just want to reiterate my appreciation to all of our our teachers

120and our staff and our district employees so many people have stepped up to fill in to make sure that we have coverage when our teachers have been out and you know that's just a tribute to the spirit that's in canyon school district and their dedication to keeping our schools open and as a former teacher and principal that's that's not easy you know when you're exhausted and you have a prep period you kind of guard that you know with your life and so uh for our teachers and staff to give up their time to cover for a colleague is it just it's uh it's really a reflection on their valor and commitment to each other so a lot of appreciation and respect for that so um with that i think um any any questions on just

121on the kovid update tonight's a much more positive one than we've had in a while so any questions first you may be the only one with a question i will make it quick you know i i just want to i appreciate you sharing this with us it looks like we weathered another tsunami uh and this is what the second or third one in the last 700 days or whatever this looks really nice to see all this other stuff but i think people need to understand that this tsunami this latest tsunami has left war casualties of ptsd in both students and with our teachers and so our numbers are looking good which means that the battlefield is going down but we still have a lot of soldiers that have been affected over this last 700 days

122uh with this the this stuff i appreciate them continue to battle through each tsunami uh it's taken its toll though in regards to a lot of our staff um as we go through each one of these so this is good news but it's not the end i guess you would say it this is going to take some while for everybody to recover from and the recovery section of any tsunami is as long if not more to rebuild after a tsunami than it is that the water hitting the shore yeah i i really appreciate that comment steve and you know i i think it um you know it's certainly uh i think from the beginning that's something that i have personally believed and i think we've all you know understood how understated the impact on mental

123health has been and i know you know all of us including myself our teachers our staff our parents our community our board uh everyone you know everyone has suffered and the toll has been steep so yeah i i really appreciate you mentioning that and um you know we're going to continue to battle and try to you know fight through that but but i i think kind of going back to you know always showing some grace and love and respect to each other is is pretty important so and critical thank you any other thoughts thank you superintendent for that update and yeah maybe one of these meet excuse me one of these meetings we might not need an update are we starting to feel that close yet it might be a while that we appreciate this

124and and and the staff for helping to put this information together okay next is item 7d discussion on virtual learning days for the remainder of the school year okay thank you president uh so um in relation to kind of what we just talked about uh i i first want to just point out i know you know there's been some question about why would we why would we have a discussion about you know remote fridays what why and it's only uh two remaining days i think kind of going back to my my point is that the premise is is that every single day of instruction for our students is important and i think back to january when many districts during the search went out for 10 days we took half of that not even half of

125that and kept our schools open and kept in person learning as steve mentioned with a cost but i think one of the things that we've done from the beginning because we've been precision in our approach and and being more targeted is that the board has taken the time to really reflect on this because the easy way out of this would just simply to be safe to say you know that this is what was established and and we won't have any discussion about it but i think the one thing that we've learned through the pandemic that no matter what the situation is as we've continued to learn about the virus and how it works and how this affects uh all of these different factors is that that it's worthy of this of this conversation and so

126i really appreciate that um because it you know on just about every issue that we've dealt with uh through the pandemic um there there's you know many different beliefs and ideas about you know what is right or wrong or or what people's opinions are and i i hope that our parents and the public and our patrons have felt like that we've listened because we do we read every email every call every instance and so we've really tried to bring that discussion throughout the pandemic into the public square to to have this discussion on on what we think is best for our students and our employees in balancing the educational needs that everyone has with everyone's safety so these two remaining remote fridays i think i want to highlight kind of two aspects to this and

127first off really thinking about looking back on why and how these these two days came about in october when we first presented this proposal on these remote fridays really the the three key issues that we were facing at the time um was just this overwhelming sense of this crisis or impact on our teachers and our staff mental health and that hasn't changed the as you read the emails and you you communicate with our with our teachers and as i've gone out on the listening tour um you know that that sense of despair is still very real uh people are still as committed to their students and their their classes as they ever have ever been but um the weight that's on them and the demands that have been placed on them are increasing and so

128not only did we have this kind of this wellness crisis that we were dealing with at the time but at the same time the state had introduced a new training with letters and it's i don't think anyone disagrees that you know we want to improve early literacy for our students and and we're dedicated to that timing you know have a little bit of an issue with that but that's what it is i get the state's position is that they were they were able to procure that with esser you know through their funds and so it's more of a one-time situation so they want to capitalize on that on the timing of that but um i also think it's important to recognize that you know all it was kind of a perfect storm that aligned uh

129when this all came about and then so not only did we ramp up training demands on our teachers and staff but we also at the time uh were really growing in student absenteeism and it wasn't you know when i look back and look at those numbers from the previous year to to this year i don't think it was quite as um the disparity wasn't as intense as it was in january back in october but but um you know the canary was in the mine right like we at that point we could see that students were starting to to miss a lot of school and so out of that uh the board really let out in providing those additional days of support for our for our teachers and and staff and as we've said before you

130know like we talked about remote fridays last time are they are they the perfect uh scenario uh no but considering the situation that we're in and our response and the way that we've tried to address this i i think they're very effective and important in a lot of ways so we take this very serious and this feedback in this data and how we look at this and how we make our decisions and they're very data driven the other part to this equation is when we got to january we then really needed to react more in an emergency type response right and so at that point for those emergency days and the reason i'm i'm explaining this is because i think it's important that we understand the days in the fall that were approved versus what

131we did as a res as an emergency response those days were approved really under that three-pronged metric of staffing capacity case counts and absenteeism and at that point um if you recall you know our we had major absenteeism going on uh over 90 percent increase in absenteeism over that like two week time span um our sub fill rate was nearly impossible uh to to keep up with and our staff capacity as i said we we hit that one that one day in fact it was on board meeting a day that we hit the 210 uh mark for for employees being out so that prompted and compelled us to approve the board to approve those days so here we are now in this position to kind of evaluate going forward and i appreciate the board's decision

132at last board meeting to continue to monitor the situation and to look at this and to bring it back to board meeting um looking at those two remaining days you know what could i in good conscience say that those mental health issues and those wellness issues have decreased i think as steve said in the wake of omicron um it has left a a a wave of destruction that we're still dealing with people are doing their best but it still exists we still have letters training to deal with we did postpone that for almost a full month but it's still required by the state so you know there's a potential possibility that we can continue to look at cutting back on on professional development the the best that we can but at this point uh letters

133training has moved forward part of that issue is is that in that there's an additional 60 to 90 hours that teachers put in outside of that and i you know i i really didn't have a full grasp of that until i went to clarion school and she just showed me exactly you know what that looks like and i i mean i looked at it for 10 minutes and was completely overwhelmed by the amount of work that our teachers are taking on and as you read the emails from our teachers you feel that that additional weight so part of these final two days in that plan in the fall was to provide that support for letters training and my first thought was that it was act for actual in in-person professional development i'm not accurate in

134that but that time was set aside for teachers to do uh some of their letters uh training work that's required under that so so i think that uh that's still uh in play um as far as the the absenteeism and the staff capacity uh we're in good shape um so applying that metric as an emergency in this situation would not apply but i think the original idea about you know how we were planning to support our teachers still remains in play so i don't know if i've laid that out clearly and kind of the difference in that and i can take some questions thank you board any questions mr millerberg turn that on i don't know if it's so much questions is maybe just comments um at our last meeting i'm the one that brought

135up accountability um i'm thinking you know i've got 45 years licensed by the state of utah to practice public accounting as a cpa for an accountant accountability means if i'm doing a good job somebody needs to notice and give me a clean audit report when they audit my books i will say my inbox for my email has been a focal point for a lot of teachers and i think the only fair thing i can say is they are holding me accountable um i apologize i've not been able to respond to all of the uh influx of email i've had but i really do appreciate the effort they made to send the emails and call me out my intent was not that i did not trust teachers my intent was i was not aware of what

136was going on i think i'm pretty much aware now as to what's going on thank you mom um i don't know if anybody here recognizes the name frank shirley frank shirley nobody come on frank shirley in the movie christmas vacation was clark w griswold that's right that's that's right and one of my favorite parts of that movie and i love that movie i really do is after cousin eddie goes and retrieves him and brings him to griswold's house and as even his wife lets loose on him he says something along the lines of sometimes things look good on paper until you realize what it does to real people and that's kind of where i'm at with the last two virtual learning days the remote learning days it looks really good to have our kids back

137in school but i am afraid that if we put the kids back in school take those days which are resource days for teachers to complete things they need to do that that is going to whipsaw and come around and hit us up the back of the head and reduce the effectiveness and the quality of education that our kids will get the other thing i have is i think consistency is important and we've modified our calendar and there's an old joke about the guy that has just wired his trailer for uh turn signals and so he gets his neighbor to come over and say i need to have you stand behind my boat because i can't see if my turn signals are working so when i holler you let me know if they're working so he

138puts a turn signal on left and his neighbor says they're working they're not they're working they're not they're working they're not and i don't want to have our calendar look like a set of turn signals to where we're constantly changing i am perfectly fine to leave the calendar as it stands for the balance of this year with a firm resolve that we start the school year of 22-23 with a firm result that things are back to five day work weeks five day learning days in school that's my comment thank you mrs arnold then mrs nybauer then mr wrigley then mrs shill so my first comments are to month like do you spend two weeks thinking through these stories and coming up with them are they just like right there on your head and then you

139come up with them because i i can't do that and it's just the talent you have and i just really appreciate the answer the answer is yes yes and yes all right spare moments and by the way speaking of emails i'm just gonna like ship mine all over to you too because i didn't really want to do this tonight with the whole two days again but now that i think about it and we've had an explanation i think that that was worth the time to go back through the little bit of history and remind everybody about how we got here and why we're here and now what we're going to do about it but then on the same token month i have no idea what tomorrow's going to look like let alone the beginning of

140next school year like i thought we had a handle on this you know come november and december it looked pretty good yeah we had some subs we had some you know um we were tired you know letters came about and but we were hanging on there and then january hit and it was like are you kidding me i was in that line like every three days here at like 6 30 well actually earlier in that i was here like 5 30 in the morning to go through the line underneath the building to make sure i was okay to go to school to deal with all those kids and all those teachers and i have to say i so appreciated everything kenyans did because it was so helpful to me to be able to get to

141my job and take care of those kids and the teachers otherwise it was like at night you'd have to go and then the line was even longer and they were even tired so i really appreciated all those people down there how fast that line went i mean i came that one morning and i it was well many mornings i came but it was like clear down clear around the building and down the street and then down the street and then almost down the next street it was just and they still got them through they still got them out and about and i just it brought tears to my eyes so we had people that were they were that efficient and they were smiling and happy and kind and considerate um with all of my grandkids

142that were in the car that they had tests to you know and so just to say thank you for that but i too want to leave things the way they are right now we don't need any more changes we don't need the lights going on and off and on and off i think we just need to leave it and stay the course and do the best we can for right now and as we get closer to the school year i too would like to get back to as normal as we can for everybody especially the parents because they're the ones who also have to work and then make arrangements to make arrangements so they know they're there they've already made arrangements probably and um so i too would like to leave things where they are

143thank you mrs nybauer i i appreciate this discussion and this opportunity to take a good look at things um i i was never concerned that teachers and staff weren't making the most of the time that was given them having been a former teacher that lesson plan preparation uh taking a good look at where your students are that that's so valuable and being able to redirect how you're going to do things as well as the letters training and all these the other things so i have full confidence that our our teachers and and all of their support staff are are making the most of this time the the reason why i was interested in looking at this is because if we think about the past a few things that have come out of this is every

144day our kids are at school in person it's a win and i believe that and i know the difference a teacher can make in the life of a child it cannot be measured and and those connections happen in the school day i also have my email box fill up with parents who have in fact i was just talking to one two weeks ago would you i would love for you to hear what i'm saying so two weeks ago i had a parent who who came to me and said i've got a a child who ha who has special accommodations because of her learning disabilities and these virtual days are so difficult because frankly she doesn't do well with the computers and they're just completely lost days and and i have seen a dramatic difference and

145and so i i take that in and you know and it hurts my heart to think of these children who we can't meet their needs on these virtual days i've also had parents email me that say i get docs in my pay every time that i say i'm not on salary this is a big deal to our family for me to have to take days off to stay with my elementary school children and so i'm grateful for this discussion as clareen said because we we do take this seriously and recognize there's a lot of different perspectives and different effects the other thing i've thought about is we've talked a lot about how how things are unpredictable we don't know what the next month is is going to bring and and many of us didn't think

146that this year we'd be at the position we were in where actually our staffing and our kids out were far worse than they were last year with the delta variant and so you know that was the other thought in my mind is oh it would be so terrible if we just have these days and then we end up in another position here maybe it's in august or who knows what it is and we've got to take all these additional days um i've had parents emailing me saying i've moved to a charter school because they're always open and you know and those those things are concerning as well um i as a mother i you know i i tease my high schoolers who are so excited because they have a three-day weekend thursday nights right it's

147kind of a night you can be with your friends a little longer because you don't have to get up and so then i kind of worry oh i've got a kindergartner that's saying wait i have five days of school this week and very nervous about having to go five days so this has taken a toll of the expectations and what our kids are getting used to doing and you know as a mother that tries to help my children know you show up for things and you don't quit early and you you kind of go through it even if it's hard that's been hard to witness right as these kids getting used to friday is it is much of a day off um however i do also understand the emotional toll that has has has been

148taken on our teachers and how crazy it was just a few weeks ago with all the teachers out and and you know these teachers that i absolutely love and adore that we're taking on other classrooms and and so i recognize that and so i guess my thought is that i just wanted to share as i see all sides of this issue and i don't want it to go unnoticed that i have listened to the parents and the problems that arise with our children that we can't help during these days and and for the parents that it takes a toll on their family economy and and and i do hear and and absolutely know and have always felt a lot of confidence in our teachers and their professionalism that they're making the most of those days

149i i i read in an email about how these next two virtual days were in planning to help these teachers with the letters training and i know that's been such an issue so i just appreciate this opportunity to take a good look and help everyone know that we are listening and we do care about the difficulties that schedules like this bring so thank you mr wrigley and then mrs schill thank you um this all hit home this sunday i was sitting in church a close friend of mine is an exceptional teacher at one of the best schools in the area uh history teacher i looked at him for an hour uh i know ptsd the guy was shell shocked he didn't move at all he just didn't he wasn't engaging and afterward i put my

150arm around him as we went in the hall i said what's going on his response is you know i don't i don't know how i'm going to do it because you know i've got ap classes concurrent role i got some of the best kids in the state i have substituted for him before he's got fantastic students he says i spend most of my day working with at least half of my my time working with the emotional issues the kids and getting them motivated to even want to learn history and i spend the second half teaching history at this point is i don't even know if that's the primary thing i'm doing is teaching history and we had a good conversation about that and just how difficult it was with all the stressors the tsunamis i

151guess that hit the shore of this case i've had the opportunity to talk with about 12 13 teachers in our district one of our cte teachers said same thing going on with her she's been teaching classes for a while at cte for many years the kids are coming in the attitude is i don't want to learn i'm going to turn my stuff in at the end of the semester so it causes all kinds of issues um teachers are having to prod students to get them to turn stuff in our students are burnout and i talked with one of our elementary teachers who said i had to take a mental health day between the stressors the school and the stressors of also dealing with my family i was seriously thinking of suicide there is major things

152going on and i really appreciate the talking with our teachers and knowing what they've gone through this is real with our students and also with our teachers um i also learned one of the elementary teachers is we got his eight-hour trauma-informed certification also that's due i wasn't aware of that so the four days were talking four hours in each in the elementary so i'd be interested to hear about that um you know most most employers do time studies and they figure out okay if you're working under 100 of what i'm paying you for then you need to encourage and see that i think over the last several years we don't do time studies in this business education we just get more and more and more i suspect our teachers are 150 percent which in the

153in their regular years hard enough to deal with and they're going after um i think i was trying to think about this i am for going ahead and keeping the ones we have and but we need to take a look at something else on that um there's a rule called the pareto rule which is the 2080. and basically it says is 20 of what we uh produce is that it provides eighty percent of what's most important and i think if we look at this the projects and everything we have twenty percent of what it's doing is making the biggest impact what also means is that uh that leads to eighty percent that we do only gives us 20 impact and i think we really need to take a look at that 80 percent and try

154to see what's value added because it's not these two four-hour days or in some cases half days for elementary we really need to go in there and say what can we do and we need to advocate within this with the legislature and also with the state school board to say we only have so many hours any other business you'd only require them to do maybe 110 we can't do anymore so i would encourage the administration maybe encourage the board to encourage the administration to take a look at what we're doing to try to see is there anything now for the rest of the year and as we move into next year is there anything we could really say what is value added because if we really focused on that 20 percent that's making the 80

155difference which is what i'm hearing we're trying to do and try to get rid of the other 80 that may not make that much difference we might have a be able to deal with this ptsd and the other mental health issues that are going on with our staff so i'll leave it at that sort of a challenge to try to figure out not only just these two days but how can we take a look at our system to see if there's some ways that we can cut things out of to make the burden upon our teachers our administration our staff same thing in administration 2080 rules falls everything so i'll leave it with that thank you thank you mrs schill okay so i just want to start by thanking everyone for their emails all the

156teachers and um just everyone who emailed us it was really helpful for us to hear from you um i what i decided to do is go back and look at why did we make this decision in the first place so i went back to it's october 19th our board meeting to our slide deck on this and this is what it says our administrators report that their teachers are tired stressed and facing unique challenges in addition to the challenges imposed by the pandemic stressors on time and mental health include shortage of substitute teachers supporting higher rates of student absenteeism and implementation needs and in my mind none of those things have changed right now and that was our original decision to support teachers with these five days and so i do want to just leave the

157days in the calendar so last night or yesterday afternoon i really haven't heard from parents on this so i started reaching out to as many parents as i could just texting them emailing some people i knew some people i didn't i looked up their names on sec on the school websites um and overwhelmingly they all said they wanted just to keep them they said i mean there were different responses there were a couple that said no tape you know put them back i'll admit that too said that but the rest were just like no just leave him the teachers need him they said whatever whatever the teachers say that's what i want to support that's what several parents said to me and um so anyway so to me parents also just want to leave them

158and some people said we already have doctor appointments that day like i just want to leave them um so they're just a bunch of different responses but overwhelmingly parents want to just leave the calendar i mean there's just so much flipping back and forth they just they don't want that they don't want that anymore so those are my comments thank you mrs oaks all right a lot of what has been said is very much mirrors um my sentiments and feelings i i absolutely appreciate both perspectives as um as a parent and as a board member i was i've spoken with a lot of parents who have a wide range of feelings about um how effective the those virtual fridays are some honestly and they in good faith said i just thought it was like a

159freebie day i didn't realize my kids were supposed to be learning anything and i'm fine with that because the teachers need it others said oh no i'm like working several hours i mean it's all kind of across the board i will say with regard to that and i've heard this from principles and i've said this before i'm going to say it again if there are parent concerns on these days please approach your principals i've had principals say please encourage parents come talk to me if there's something that they're concerned about we are happy to address it um i've also had a similar concern to what miss nybar shared about you know are we feeding the problem a little bit are we encouraging families to go on vacation or to leave town or to go skiing

160you know like often and is that kind of encouraging less of an involvement with with their education and i've had teachers that have emailed in and rightfully so saying you know we're asking for teacher accountability but what about parent accountability are we are the parents all making sure that they're the ones who are really involved in making sure that their kids are following through on the expectations on those days um and i think that that's a fair question ask we all know that it's a partnership there are very few parents who want to do all of the teaching for their kids education themselves they need teachers and teachers need involved parents it takes both sides along with that i've also thought a great deal about the letters training that we've required of our k3 teachers

161and it is no small task every single one i've talked to it is a lot of work and some of the emails they've shared even on the virtual fridays they're they haven't even been able to get to letters because they're catching up on so much work which to steve's point i agree i think we need to take a closer look at what we're requiring of our teachers because i do think that coven there are some redeeming lessons and one of the things that i have heard quite often from teachers is that the virtual fridays in some cases have made them more effective and they've learned how to consolidate and how to go deeper on certain assignments rather than um than having more to do and i think that we can look at that more effectively

162um but i like my other board members and deeply concerned about our teacher morale at the end of the day we can't have school without teachers and um we need to keep them in the classroom i it's been heartbreaking actually for me to read their emails and to hear their very candid and vulnerable um sharing about what it is they're dealing with and how hard they're working and how much they're trying to make good use of that time and pleading with parents to be aware of how much they're doing and to reach their direction and i also think it has not helped teacher morale to see some of what's come up at the state legislature with some of the proposed bills i think they feel undermined and unappreciated and that's really um contributed to the

163problem so i am also reticent about the idea of pulling back the schedule days that we already have that these teachers have planned around so those are my comment thank you all um i just will add my a couple of thoughts without being repetitive because i i do appreciate all the points that were that were that have been brought up but i i hope that um as several of the board members have said that taking this time to really look at it is a sim a signal that we value every day every day is important and how that day is used is important from multiple multiple perspectives and so um i i know it's taken a lot of time and effort and and i do appreciate those emails that have come in and the teachers

164that have been so respectful and articulate in in describing how important these days are to them at this point in time um i hope it's been helpful for them to kind of pull their thoughts together and articulate that and will help them recognize what their needs are and what this is and i too think it would be good if we can use that same attention to detail and and the same focus that we have had on this talking about these two days if we can come up with some ideas and and of ways that we can do the 80 20 take things off the plate you know help and support our our teachers better we say it we say it we say it we mean it how much we do appreciate them and i just

165hope that they will feel of the sincerity of our comments and appreciation for them and for those parents i mean they've spent time doing education in a way that they never planned or wanted to and i think they have um also need to be commended for our parents and what they're doing and so i mean to that end i think we need to start trying to think what what does education look like what level of engagement is to be expected from students this idea of just absenteeism yes it's fine when it was associated with a pandemic but what does it look like in the future and and how can we help students be engaged in the way that is helpful to them but also supportive of teachers because if they if a teacher shows up

166with a lesson plan and a third of the students are gone for whatever reason that day because they didn't feel like it or you know whatever reason that's not helpful to teachers so i think it's not just the board it's not just the administration it's not just the legislature it's not just the the principles that can show and help and support teachers it needs to be the entire community pulling together to help and support teachers so um i think i have one with that one more thought from mrs arnold so i also think we need to look at this on the positive side too so we wanted children to move more to the platform using technology making sure the technology was integrated and part of the education system if on our fridays or virtual days

167and it's not working that's a learning lesson for us right and so the kids are learning they don't know enough technology the teachers learning we don't necessarily know enough technology the parents are learning they don't know enough technology and we learn by mistakes we learn by um you know not knowing the answer to the problems and so i think that's one other thing we can kind of start looking towards two is we wanted to move in the direction where it was a blended learning and so if we're not quite moving in that blended learning direction then we should be you know having more more conversation like collee said about about that blended learning so that fridays are um i don't know engaging enough that those kids want to get on those computers and that they're

168saying to their parent i don't want to miss this particular lesson and so um we know we know that there's some teachers who can do that and some teachers who can't um and so we can work towards having each other help each other i mean like i know we do plc's when we talk about curriculum we talk about kids we also not that i'm trying to put one more thing on people's plate but if we get together and do smarter things it won't be so harder it's just finding the time to do the smarter things it's so hard to find that one more hour to do one more thing which um you know like if my board members really want something to do y'all could do the administrative letters just to learn what it's like

169and how many hours it is so you can have a feeling for what the teachers are really going through with the letters and i don't i don't know what we're going to do with those because we still have 6 7 eight no five six and seven no five yeah six seven and eight to do next year right so we have four this year and then we have four more next year and then we still have the full day of listening to people tell us what we just read and what we just learned and so it's not going away next year it's still there and then we're implementing as you all know wonders and 95 tier one so when we're sitting here talking about trying to figure this out what we're talking taking off plates and

170putting on plates um i don't know where where we begin but maybe we need to go back to the curriculum map with um amber and and go back to the curriculum map and say all right here's this lesson it's in four different places we only need it in one right here and i'm pretty sure that's what she's working on but um just saying that if that's what we want then we got to give some people some time to figure that out thank you oh mrs neighbor thank you for your comments clarion i absolutely agree i recognized i was thinking mistakingly now we're going to have a vote to keep the days on the schedule and then i realized we don't have to i know because it's already on there so i was thinking i'll vote

171to keep the days on the schedule but i realize we don't need to initiate that vote because it's already on the schedule so this was it would only be if we were going to change it so i wanted to first say because i didn't say in my previous comments that i am in favor of keeping those virtual days so i did want to make sure i said that and i do believe this that the teachers definitely need this i wanted to also something that clarin said when we're looking and the others have said when we're looking at lessons learned and time and attention i would like to throw out this thought that we need to think about in the future with our snow days and virtual days i've gotten a lot of emails about that

172and i want to share this feedback i had a mother and i've had multiple mothers of special needs children that need extra helps and support said please don't call it a virtual day there's a segment of the population that just can't participate virtually and so i'd rather you just call it what it is that for for and i don't i don't even know how you would do that but they're saying i think we need to really look at how can we create supports for those kids who need extra for our special ed i know one of the parents i talked to her daughter goes to jordan valley and she was saying for at least jordan valley for that population maybe we can just say it's a closed day because the participation level and what's going

173on it's not really a virtual day and i'd rather call a spay display so i just want to share that feedback that i received so that we can think about in the future with snow days lessons learned as clarin was saying what we want to do with that are there some different ways we can engage learners so i think remote jeff was the official language is remote right right remote learning so um yeah but no point well taken okay thank you thank you so much superintendent that concludes item and we next item is item 7e consideration for adoption of a resolution for the board of education of canyon school district utah authorizing the issuance and sale of not more than 55 million principal amount of its refunding bonds series 2022 b and related matters this

174is a first reading i will turn the time over to leon wilcox business administrator thank you president we started this meeting some six and a half hours ago i know you've been waiting anxiously to get this item and we're here kind of feels like christmas doesn't it uh [Music] a couple of things we're gonna go really quick try to be done here in three minutes with this uh talking on two refunding transactions you know we talked about refunding bonds and we did sell bonds last week these were non-taxable bonds to refund bonds we issued in 2012. uh we've had a really good sale got about 7 million plus in net present value savings but as we work with our financial advisors we know that interest rates are going up right now and expected to continue

175to rise multiple times this in the next 12 months so we looked at that and we came up with a couple suggestions and plans that we want to run by you as we go forward here you give if you drive by i-15 you see these mortgage billboards you know that the rates have gone up probably a full percentage point from like two and a half to three and a half just in the last few weeks and so uh they're we think they're going to keep going up as a government entity we've always been able to issue non-taxable bonds meaning that bond holders do not pay federal income tax on these bonds on the interest they earn on these bonds that being said with interest rates going that gets our interest rate a little bit lower

176with rates going up we feel it's best to issue taxable bonds to refund bonds that we issued in 2013. we do feel like the savings will be greater by issuing non-tax taxable bonds now than by waiting a year when we can issue non-taxable bonds because we'd have to wait another year to do that we do think that will save us in that area four to five million dollars doing this now and then by not knowing what the future brings uh so you can see we're looking at again two transactions the blue up there's what we did last week again we put these were non-taxable bonds where what we're doing is putting delaying the principal until 2027 paying that off in 2031. again this is still saving us this transaction still saved us some 7 million

177plus a 7.8 actually million dollars our proposal is to issue these taxable bonds that's the orange color there uh they would do we'd do that in there in late march early april and then pay those off you can see we'll be starting to pay those off starting next year again we won't be paying as much interest there but again that will save us a net present value and we hope in the four million dollar range uh so that's why would focus on paying off those tax flow bonds first that gives you just a bond summary where we'd be at the end of this year still a lot of debt out there outstanding 422 million dollars again lots of numbers there but the two the two the blue and the tan are what we're proposing i

178always like to look at this in a chart format here but we're again pressing those blue lines that's the debt we issued in from our 2010 bond trying to press those forward as many years as we can save us interest again kind of like going from a 30 or more get down to a 2015 type mortgage there so that's how what that's our proposal uh here's just the last slide you can see on board docs the resolution you pre approved a resolution in january would ask you if you'd be okay to approve this resolution at our next meeting on march 1st uh also on board docs is what we call our preliminary official statement that's what investors see when they bid on the bonds that's what is that out there on there on the website

179that that is set up to bid on those and uh then we'll sell those bonds either well we're looking at late march to sell those just before spring break but with that i hope that was within three minutes but for any questions and when was the enough i could just ask would you be okay if we're proving that at our next meeting march first this resolution okay ward any questions or thoughts on that yeah yeah yeah so i so just a reminder we just barely went through this process so we'll we'll approve the resolution at the next board meeting next meeting yeah okay thank you to our financial advisors for helping us work with this interest rate volatility that we're having with this thank you yeah yeah we're grateful that they're on the watchtower for

180us on that okay that um thank you mr wilcox that concludes our business items we'll now call on superintendent for a report and then mr wilcox for a report uh just a couple of comments first wanted to express appreciation to our students and that our volleyball players and i mentioned the mom when they walked out like how tall [Music] i'm pretty tall and they're taller than me so uh but just i love their passion for their sport and i certainly uh you know understand that and just appreciate them being here to share that and also shouldn't express my appreciation to our cea leadership and for their input i leon and i meet with them monthly and they're just a great team and the fact that they come to board meeting and they're always here to

181support us and uh offer input but also the last thing that that crystal has asked me before they leave is what can we do to support the district and the board and you so i just wanted to know how much i appreciate them being here too thank you mr wilcox just a big thank you to everyone who's helping us out on the hill charlie susan their staff a lot going on you know sometimes we long for the days of things we've faced in the past with equalization and other bills but uh lots of stuff going on out there so big thank you their supports big thank you to amber for leading the jlc a couple times he's done a great job and for amanda and uh nancy for attending the jlc's as well and so

182i think they've done very good this year so and again as i'll kill what rick said it's always a pleasure to meet with kathy christa and mallory who was here and their team every month so we do appreciate the support from cea okay thank you okay let's uh for board comments let's uh start with mr millerberg thank you just a couple of comments for our meeting tonight they brought up the subject of all day kindergarten during the legislative review i i had the opportunity in the last couple of weeks to attend the uh sec at midvalley elementary and uh principal uh swanecki was sharing statistics with us as far as where they're testing and mid valley has two full day kindergarten classes and two half day and it was just absolutely amazing at the difference

183the kids are making with all day as opposed to half day and so i really welcome that idea of a full day kindergarten the other thing i have is [Music] last meeting in board comments i made a comment about putting an agenda item a discussion about late start and about the middle school schedules i left that meeting and thought you know what our rules are that we need to have two people interested in having that so i don't know if anybody else would back me up on that i would thank you okay um also last uh thursday was the uh usba director's meeting and i've got a few takeaways and some of these might be important to a few of you if you haven't figured this out already um regional meetings are coming up in

184the month of uh march uh our meeting is scheduled on uh march 9th at 6 00 p.m at the usba office over off 90th south if you can't make that there are other meetings that you could attend i'm not recommending but i will tell you last fall i couldn't make ours and i went to park city yeah dinner the grub steak wasn't a bad deal last year as a board we received the master boards award there there's a joint resolution i think it's hr0008 that is recognizing the board of education uh in the state of utah for completing the training and they will read off the name of every district that received that training and it's an indication the state legislature is recognizing the importance of having highly trained boards so i thought you'd be

185interested in that uh hb 331 is a voucher bill if it passes they're estimating about uh it would be equivalent to a reduction of about one percent off your wpu and they're projecting somewhere i've seen numbers of 35 million and numbers at 36 million but that's about the amount of reduction that would come if should in the statewide allocation of education funds there's been some discussion that on the 22nd is a legislative day on the hill all school board members are invited if you decide to go you need to enter through the east doors at the at the capitol nine o'clock nine a.m is breakfast noon is lunch and it is my understanding that the brighton drum line will be one of the performers at noon on the 22nd hmm a.m is when it starts

186and if you plan to go to that if you would uh shoot a text message or an email to amber so she'd know what time people are coming and be able to schedule things a little better um this is kind of the big one and this is what i meant once i hope you guys know this i looked up on the county uh that's what issue sheriffs wants what does she do what's your clerk county clerk and the county website says the uh filing day filing period for those wanting to run for school board is march 7 through 11. scratch through that number the legislature has passed a bill that you need to sign up to run [Music] starts on 2 28 and ends on 3 4. so if you have those other dates sign

187ups will be over before you show up uh so that's kind of a big one and this is a question and holly i think you may be the only one right now that this would impact new board member training is something usba does every other year because of the pandemic of those who those uh elected in 2020 did not receive that training we are planning right now to have that take place on december 3rd of 22 the new board member trainings will be after the election in the fall the question that i was tasked with asking is are we interested in having those who were elected in 2020 attend that as well we did do an online training actually it was by zoom you did so you would not be interested in uh attending in-person

188training on that in december um well yeah i mean it was it was a very shortened version of what they do for the in-person ones so they're looking at december 3rd at the provo marriott is where it would be held and so they just didn't want to find out if those elected in 2020 have a desire to go or if they feel like in the last two years they've picked up enough information they don't want to go so so is that something that she would need to rsvp uh they would like to well right now what we're considering is whether or not to offer it and so we're i'm we're just trying to get a uh engage on the interest level do you want me to so i'll just go ahead and reply i think

189the training and then reading coming of order and all the other things that were sent to us as well as participating in the usba conferences it may be a little bit of duplication to the work we've already done because after you've been in this position over a year and you've read all the materials you feel pretty well versed as well as we have the continuing conferences and lectures so and i i'm not putting any pressure sure i just want to know sure i i think also the committee i've been asked to chair this year so oh great i do have interest in yeah i think the usba conferences and those events and things are very helpful i think going to a training might be a little um redundant simply because of all that you've done

190in the last year to get to where you're at if that makes sense and i appreciate that like i said we want to make sure that you're comfortable with where you are and that was missed so i will take that back and we're just fine thank you uh mrs oakes did you have i actually feel like um every time i go to uspa three years into this any of the events it doesn't matter how long i've been doing this i learned something every time and to me actually when i went to the in-person training the most valuable part of it was the discussion amongst board members from different districts sharing very specific experiences or scenarios that they had come up against this is not an intuitive role i mean it's it's a kind of a

191strange sort of thing where all of your conversations with each other have to be public and it's recorded and it's it's um and there's a lot of nuances to it that i think are difficult i actually personally think we should definitely tell them that we're interested in having it as a district if only because we have you know three of us that may or may not be running again that you know who knows who's going to be in that position i want to make sure whoever is on the board that they're getting trained i think it's critically important but whoever is elected this year yeah i think whoever is is elected yes should go i think the question wasn't everyone who's elected this year would go the question was those who've already been elected and

192there was a really uh fabulous breakout session actually where we were able to add our comments and questions digitally and actually i got to meet a lot of people that were recently elected as well as those that were just in leadership positions that i found very valuable so i actually think the way they handled it was fantastic and i felt that it was very helpful very insightful they did a great job would you let them know very very well done okay okay uh mrs oaks um i just wanted to take a minute to congratulate sherry jorgensen again on her umea award she's shari's awesome there are so many things about her that i've come to realize and appreciate over the years that i've gotten to know her she doesn't toot her own horn at all

193and she um is a woman of amazing talents and when she eventually retires we're going to shortly miss her right amber i can see you're nodding your head in the back um i also want to thank the volleyball players for coming out and sharing with us their passion about their sport um amber and i were talking during part of their time up here because she used to uh serve on the utah high school activities association and they definitely um have been doing a lot of advocacy there and that is really the deciding body and we are just there as a support if we you know if we choose to say so um but i admire their passion and their organization obviously and they're teaching these kids how to to go after something they want which

194i think is great um i have enjoyed being able to participate in jlc again this year um those board members that come and are part of that and the superintendents it's an awesome experience and they're very eloquent and very passionate and they are good solid advocates for public education and i really appreciate them um i've appreciated the time up at the legislature i am sad to see some of what has taken place this year it's confusing to me that that after a year or two years of so much difficulty and um remarkable courage that our educators have exhibited that we seem to be taking such a remarkable hit at the legislative level and i want all educators within the sound of my voice to know that i value you and i see what you've done

195and similar to our healthcare workers that have worked so hard during this period of time i see what you're doing and i deeply appreciate it and we're going to continue to fight for you up there as much as we can and for the kids that participate in public education it's it's an important part of our society it i think if we were to look out 20 years from now if some of these changes that they're proposing are to take place what we will see and how that will impact our children and and what will happen to them and raising their families is it worries me we need a solid public education for the peace of a community for the balance of so many elements i mean i i can't help but think just for um

196just if you're looking at it from a fiscal perspective alone you're almost guaranteed to be paying more taxes and public services and incarceration and other things if you don't make sure that you have a very solid public education system so i think oftentimes what seems to be a short term solution is actually very short-sighted long-term so [Music] thank you mr wrigley really quick i've been texting my wife for the last hour i keep on saying maybe another 15 minutes another 50 minutes i'm afraid i might have the couch by the time i get home tonight uh just one again thank our teachers for uh for hanging in there and encouraging that things will get better i just got that feeling but thank you so much thank you mrs nybauer i too wanted to start off

197my comments by thanking teachers and if the ca could take that message back to to their teachers i did get so many emails i haven't been able to respond to all of them yet which i always try to do within 24 hours and i am over that but i just really appreciated the time they took in their busy schedules to communicate with us and i'm so grateful for our teachers i i do feel that they are the ones that make such a huge impact on our children and i'm so grateful for their efforts and all they've gone through with the stress with health and the shortages and covering classes so thank you to them i had the opportunity to go to the museum of musical instruments in scottsdale arizona this last week and what i

198found so fascinating was how in in these very impoverished areas in africa they've created these little thumb pianos because the drive for for for people to express themselves musically is is innate and it doesn't matter what resources there were hollowed out gourds and they made guitars from hollowed out gourds it's pretty interesting through the centuries and it just it made me think a little bit about our discussion with strategic planning and the discussion that we talked about tonight with with students and how to engage our learners and i look forward to this discussion as we talk about schedules because i think it applies as we come out with schedules that help our students have a more self-guided learning ability to be able to choose from elective classes and and get passionate about certain things at

199school i think that we we engage our learners and i think that we we help them broaden their horizons and and find find things to be passionate about in our school building and and so i look forward to that discussion with our school schedules and helping our kids that way and and that's all thank you thank you mrs arnold [Music] i'm getting too old my bedtime really is at 10 o'clock um just really quickly um i know the fridays has kind of been focused in on teachers but it's not the only people that it really helps it helps the administration it helps the lunch people it helps the custodians all of them not just teachers have just really had a really difficult two years um just you know thinking back about um some of the

200stories i've heard even about the custodians and all the extra extra work they've done and and then also i just one more time when i say that everybody who works within these walls who are trying to get everything done i i i if you gave me a list it would probably be 20 pages long i'm pretty sure just like even look at steve his job is just not in that ahr office when we talked about tonight responsibilities job responsibilities and um what was the other word we used roles and responsibilities look at the last two years and look at all the roles and responsibilities that got interlocked and moved and changed i mean like people from here going and subbing you know and giving up their day here but then they went to sub but

201they they still had their days work here to do which has happened you know all across the board but i just wanted in that little dialogue i just gave thank everybody because it is an everybody thing and um if you're not one of those people doing all that work it's like survivor you know you just need to get voted off the island because there's no there's nobody who can sit around and do nothing during this time it's just everyone's doing two or three people's jobs and um trying to keep things going so i just want to thank you for that thank you okay i my comments will be what everyone's been waiting to hear meeting adjourned you