Canyons Board Meeting

001located at 9361 south 300 east in sandy utah [Music] the first item on our study session agenda is a report on utah college application week and i will turn time over to tori gillette comprehensive guidance specialist here so if she might walk in and we might have a second student come as well to talk but but i'm gonna have sophie come up and speak a little bit about her experience with college application hi i'm sophie jensen i'm the spo president of brighton high school i love my school and it has been 10 times better that it is a new school this year um i love the students and teachers at bryan it's a great place i want to go to utah state and hopefully be an ambassador for their college i applied for college during

002utah college application week it was helpful having the ambassadors here from utah state i met them and got to know more about the college and the programs that they have i also got help from my counselor and she helped me send my transcripts my parents were also able to participate in the fafsa night i know that helped them with fafsa process also with being an sbo and having being a senior and like not having much free time after school is really nice to have like in school time to apply for those colleges um so applying to college can be intimidating it is helpful that students can get help from counselors and colleges at school during college application week thank you for your time thank you sophie and like i said hopefully her other student will

003be here but we're looking at it so um this year for college application week we helped for 100 1 473 students applied to college we also had some students that had applied before college application week so as of the end of october which october was the month for college application week we had 1509 seniors ahead applied to college but 1473 of those were during uca which means that the majority of our seniors had applied during the time when we were helping them so so providing that time is very helpful for our seniors we also helped students for a total of one thousand nine hundred sixty dollars to help pay for some of those application fees thank you to the canyons foundation now that is quite a bit lower than we've done in the past and

004the reason why is because salt lake community college and university of utah had free applications during you call this this year so where most of the money we spent in the past was for um salt lake community and university of utah they are most attended schools we didn't they had free applications this this year and so um we appreciate that we were able to pay for the ones that we did pay for but some of the colleges slowly but sure they are coming to having free application during that time um i also printed off for you the school board or sorry not school where the the um high school feedback reports [Music] um and it is a report of i gave you the 2019 graduating class in the 2018 graduating class and it shows the

005enrollment of our seniors who graduated during those years and gives you some um details i also i i'm printed off you the report for all students and then low-income students so you can see the difference there you can see that most of our students attend salt lake community college or university of utah followed then by uvu and usu one thing that i found very interesting is um for the 2019 class we had um a pre approximately 19 percent of students had previous college credit and math and 40 of students had previous college credit in english but that was up from 9 and 33 from the previous year from the 2018 so we have been increasing the numbers of students um getting college credit for math and english entering as a freshman so just some information

006for you to look at the the reports do come out um a year later so we'll get 2020 next year and kind of so that they can gather all the data for all of that information but but we thank you for your support um with utah college application we find it very helpful for to have the seniors have a place to go help with fafsa any questions questions board mr wrigley i sure appreciate all what our counselors do i've noticed that that's an important part of getting your students is there anything the board can do to support you in this process if there is anything that we you still think we need to do to enhance our our college admissions and stuff in this district um i know um that's a good question uh i

007think just promoting i think what we're trying to do more and more of with our with our students and our parents is promoting that college does not necessarily mean a four-year university so continuing to educate our families that when we're talking about post-secondary we're talking about one two four or more and if if your desire is to not go to four-year college what is your next next step and is that a one-year certificate a two-year degree or four plus right so just helping us educate the that when we're talking about college application we're talking about all of it we're not talking about just a four-year university we're talking about helping students plan for their next step and that can be in any of that so we also have a lot of students that we help

008with military applications cosmetology schools some of these other schools that aren't listed in yushi um helping them during that time so just promoting that we're doing all of it even though college has typically been thought of as a four-year university we're talking any post-secondary plans we're working on helping students with that i mean it might be helpful if in fact you're keeping any data you tell that too so we give you credit for all the great things you're doing so if you have the applications for other places just as college it'd be really nice to know that too just how that is great i'll look into that thank you mrs arnold so how does the communication go out to the students to let them know that we're doing this because i thought it was pretty

009well just for applications for college too but how do we how do we communicate that we're helping them with getting signed up for the military or getting them into internships with some of the electricians that are always looking for high school students or the accountants who are always looking for high school students and willing to train them how are we communicating that so we we as a district send out to all seniors and their families information um uh mail all of their families information about college application week uh what it is what we're there to help with um when we send it out in english and spanish um and then the schools will do their own advertisement on their level sending out reminders to parents of what to bring reminders of what nights are are

010their fafsa nights and and other things so so we do send something out specifically to all parents but we can highlight that even more in there that this is even more than just a four-year college that this is for any post-secondary okay thank you thank you for all you do yeah thank you any other questions or comments mr millerberg i really appreciate you bringing students with you and jody i i enjoyed listening to to you only because my son had the ambassador scholarship at utah state and that was just an amazing amazing thing he went up there as a freshman then he left for two years for i'll call it a religious sabbatical and came back he was able to recruit probably 20 people when he was on his sabbatical to utah state and he

011continues he just turned 30 last year in march or this year in march and he continues to recruit for utah state that is an amazing opportunity if you get it i i wish you nothing but the best thank you any other questions or comments thank you for this report and thank you for all that you do and and if if the other student comes will you just let me know and we'll be happy to hear from them as well okay thank you okay and next on the agenda update on the i.t plan and digital citizenship report i'll turn time over to mr scott mccombs i.t director kenneth sorensen assistant a isd director and susan edwards community engagement coordinator mr mccombs hello can you guys hear me okay i'm not tall enough to stand up to

012the mic i guess i really appreciate the opportunity to share what we've been up to in iet with the board we really appreciate the board support and want to make sure that we're headed down the right path so i'll try to be brief i'm happy to answer any questions as i go however as well okay um so first of all every year when i come in and present to the board i've shared our ratio of number of devices to our students this year rather than giving you a hard count i've really presented what we're doing for a one-to-one model so we are one to one at this point with every student we have a few different models that we've put in place so for all of our secondary students we have provided what i call

013a 24 7 model what that means is we've presented provided a chromebook to every secondary student and they have the opportunity to take that device to and from school every day okay and we have a different model in our elementary schools so our elementary students we're doing one-to-one with them as well however it's a classroom based model so students two through five are presented a chromebook that chromebook is waiting for them in class we've asked that the student used the same chromebook every day that doesn't always happen but they have the opportunity to do that and then grades k through one is the same thing classroom based one-to-one with ipads for those students now one of the other things that we've done is we've created an overhead for all of the the schools with their

014one-to-one technology so each school has at least five percent additional devices now those devices are used in the classroom we've asked particularly in the secondary schools every classroom has one to five chromebooks in the back of the classroom those devices that extra five percent is meant to take care of if a student breaks their device or doesn't bring a device charged or you know whatever whatever the challenges are we want to make sure that we have a few extra devices in every location so that they can be used regularly okay any questions on that before i move on physical support has been a big challenge for us so you can imagine that prior to us going one to one we had field techs our techs out in the schools we were providing the support really

015to the teachers when we transitioned to the one-to-one model our field techs continue to provide that support to the teachers and now they're also surprised providing support to students and families as well so the needs for our field techs have really grown exponentially as we've gone to this new one-to-one model we've received some great support from the administration we've been able to add some field texts so our our current model as it stands for every high school and middle school we have a tech assigned to each location okay now the elementaries we have uh typically one tech assigned to three elementaries in addition to that we've we've put into place what we're calling our tech assistant team uh we've added 10 part-time tech assistants and we treat them as kind of a geek squad model

016where if there's something that needs to be done we can send the tech assistants to get it done send them out as a group or we can give them specific assignments so some of our tech assistants are directly helping like in transportation technology some of our tech assistants are helping with computer repair we've used them in av primarily we're using them in the classroom helping our field techs uh primarily at the secondary level to be able to support the one-to-one we've received feedback from our team that really those tech assistants have made a world of difference in our support they've been able to help our field techs keep their head above water and that's really made a difference for our staff but also for the the staff in the school and for our students as

017well i i will mention here this is not uh in this but as we talk about the physical support and about the the one-to-one model our computer repair has increased 733 percent um from this time in 2019 so it is uh it is a substantial challenge for us to be able to repair all the devices that come in we've got a great team who works on it and they're they're doing everything that they can to keep those chromebooks in students hands but a 730 percent 33 increase is uh it's hard to be able to manage so um connectivity has always been a big issue for us so uh last year when i presented to the board we talked about 15 of the district at least who didn't have adequate connectivity and i'll remind you about

018exactly what we talked about so last year we had done this survey we had 10 of our district who told us they needed additional access and then we had an additional 20 who didn't respond and so it was hard for us to really get our hands around it as we kind of extrapolated that we we felt that it was at least 15 this year our numbers are different so we've we've again done the survey through our back-to-school registration we made it required that every student respond every family respond and so this year our number is 12 now within that 12 percent is about 1200 students 1200 families who did not respond to the back to school registration those students we know were not able to do that online back to school registration so they they're

019counted in that 12 percent so this year i think we've made some headway we still have work to do 12 percent still is is too high we've been really busy uh trying to bridge this this gap so we've rolled out over 800 hot spots a hot spot is still a good solution it provides some challenges so imagine trying to tell a family uh you know hook up to my cell phone all all three of you and get your school work done that's really what's happening on a on a hot spot is it's only cellular speed so you know it it works but it's it's uh and it works well in the cases that we need to use it but it still is is not what i would hope uh ultimately to be able to give

020to a family we've also partnered with comcast internet essentials we've done a lot of work on this so um with comcast internet essentials comcast will hook a family up to 50 meg per second connectivity and allow the district to pay for uh that service it's 10 a month it is faster than cellular service it's faster than a hot spot in previous years comcast has really put some obstacles in place where it was challenging for us to use this primarily comcast wanted our schools and that the family's signing up to prove financial need and that that proof came through pay stubs and w-2s and social security numbers and all those types of things the families that we're really talking about were really apprehensive to share all of that information with our schools we negotiated with comcast

021that they no longer require our administration to provide that proof so now if for principal or their desi me will say that there is financial need comcast will take our administrators word for it and i i think that's huge i think that's a huge accomplishment that we've been able to make with with comcast i still am disappointed to say we still don't have that many families taking advantage of it and um communications has done a great job sending postcards out all the families letting them know it's available we've publicized it in the schools we still know we have 12 percent of our district who is not being served adequately with internet we we can and should do better at continuing to connect families to comcast uh one of the other things that we're working on

022is ed jerome so a jerome i think is has a lot of potential it's basically a a higher education network so if you go to salt lake community college or the u byu eduroam is is a network that's publicized on these higher ed networks 99 of public education in utah is now using it as well it allows students and staff to be able to get on to eduroam and authenticate back to our network so they're filtered they're authenticated it's safe and secure one of the exciting things that we can do with eduroam is start to reach out to our communities and communities whether it's a community center or whether it's a vendor they can sign up for eduroam they don't have to be a a authenticated user they don't have to create accounts they just

023have to be a service provider that means that they're allowing our eduroam users to use some of their bandwidth again it would authenticate back to us and one of the exciting things about eduroam is all of our students all of our staff could take advantage of it as well as higher education so if we could really push eduroam out into our community that really the only thing we're asking for them is to allow our students to use some of their bandwidth i think we really could gain some traction on helping bridge some of this divide not only for students in need but for all students and staff and then the last thing i'll talk about is private lte now this has gotten a lot of attention here in the state murray school district is has

024done a great job leading out on this wasatch is also doing this we are doing this in our our midville area for us private llte has not really taken off what what this means is we have some radio equipment up on uh the top of midvale middle we are trying to broadcast our network through cellular through lte out into the community right now we are reaching kind of the edge of the parking lots which we already had lit up with our network so you know there this is very much a pilot uh all of the areas leading out on on this plte private lte are leading out in the nation but there's a lot of work for us to do to get it really figured out some of the challenges with private lte is it

025requires a very specific radio for the the consumer to use it so the hot spots that we've given out phones chromebooks would not work so we'd have to buy different devices to take advantage of the plt it it still is a good technology i have a lot of hope for it but it is not the silver bullet there there isn't one silver silver bullet to solve this i really believe that we'll have to continue to uh try to solve it with multiple forms you know comcast is great but we've got landlords who won't let cable be installed in the home we have areas where comcast won't reach into the district so some of these areas hot spots are really the better solution we're really trying to tailor the need for the specific uh needs at

026that location um one other thing that i'll mention i think this is is also exciting so assessment is still one of the tails that wags the i.t dog we have to have devices that are at the same level that our assessment software expects it to be done this last year we we replaced about 7 000 chromebooks because they weren't able to do end of level assessment we rather than just surplusing those devices we made them available to both students and staff who needed devices we have given out we believe it's about 4 000 chromebooks that were surplus to students who are in need that that really is remarkable these are have become basically a private device we would have surplused them and put them in disposed of them but we were able to reuse them

027by allocating them back to students and staff who needed a device any questions on that before i move on okay what's that okay one one other thing uh that i really like to bring to your attention is some of the funding that we've been able to bring in so there's a federal project called uh emergency connectivity fund uh we filed for that in it we were allocated 4.2 million dollars worth of funding we're using that funding to replace 15 000 chromebooks this year chromebooks that will not work for end-of-level testing in the 22-23 school year we're also using some of that funding for hot spots and to continue with comcast so that that funding is assured we're also really focusing on e-rate another federal funding uh avenue and we brought in uh 300 000 in

028e-rate funding this year and we've brought in three and a half million dollars worth of funding through e-rate in the time that we've been a district so we've we're really trying to be as creative as we can on funding and bringing as many different avenues as possible kind of the final thing i'll talk about is some of the challenges that we face so supply chain is not just an issue in i.t it's an issue everywhere but it it does impact us as we talk about trying to bring in 15 000 chromebooks you can imagine the the issues that we're having with supply chain in the conversations uh staff transition and turnover this is a remarkable number i think so last year i shared this number with you and it was this year it's 47 of

029the it department that's either in a new assignment or is has left us i feel like if you ask me what i've done this year i've done interviews new employee orientations and looking at a 47 percent turnover makes a lot of sense and and it's a challenge that we'll continue to have because industry is paying so much more than we're able to pay and uh there's such a need for technologists that this will continue to be a challenging funny of one-to-one will continue to require real commitment you know only we're talking about devices but just the computer repair that the supplies that we have to buy will continue to take a real commitment and then filtering filtering is is a challenge so we do filter every device that goes home doesn't matter where it's at

030if a student takes a chromebook it is filtered they could take it home to cottonwood heights they could take it to the caribbean they could take it to china it will always come back and filter to us so those devices are always filtered we have a lot of parents wanting to create a specific filter for their student it would be impossible for us to manage 34 000 different filtering requests and filtering is the technology is becoming more and more difficult as the internet continues to become more and more encrypted which helps us with security each of us individually that encryption really challenges the ability for our filters to be able to look at the sites that somebody is going to make sure that they're appropriate so those those will continue to be issues for us

031in it good evening nice to see everyone so i'm here to just kind of share with you the updates on digital citizenship as you know with moving to one to one and everything virtual world all of the things that have happened over the last few years digital citizenship has come out and we've needed to really help everyone understand it emphasize it a little bit more than maybe what we've done in the past and try and just continue to educate not only our students our staff and parents in that process so through digital citizenship we start first just by connecting it back to the house bill 213 and i've kind of linked you some insights on that i won't take time to read all of that and i've included what the sec training goes over and

032those resources that are on the websites currently for anyone and everyone to access in regards to digital citizenship so with the school sites what we do is we have identified one person in every school building who is the building digital citizenship coordinator they then are responsible to help disseminate information to their teachers who then are asked to share it with parents they are also asked to share it with principals who then can put it in newsletters emails skyler's anything that they want to include it in on their websites to help get parent information out to them so they go through a a simple training and really i've just kind of highlighted here what it is that we are trying to provide resources for as we move forward with digital citizenship so one of the things

033that we highly encourage and we provide even more resources for is the digital citizenship week we align that to a national digital citizenship week most of our school most of our schools choose to participate during this week with the district focus some will do it not only this week but then they will pick another week to bring it back and a lot of the elementaries will tie it to white ribbon week different things like that so we know as the school communities kind of outline what their goals are that they will choose to join in or add on to what we've also provided so with that our theme this year as you can see that cute poster was just a digital citizenship is everyone's responsibility really trying to emphasize that it's not just one or

034two people in the building that it's their job to provide this but because we are really one to one now everyone needs to understand what that means that they are always talking about it and reminding kids and teaching the kids how to be safe online so the little circle that kind of hits those six um strands of digital citizenship those are kind of where we focus our lessons on so that everyone can learn to be responsible be kind give credit be aware know your footprint and then be safe online so that's where our focus is in providing monthly lessons or tips and tricks for our students and teachers we also have family letters that we send out during digi-set week and we sent those out prior to fall break announcing that this would be coming

035up so that they would have the information and know what it was that we would be discussing during our lessons so i've given you and linked those in as copies as well um again i just kind of put that the student education really comes down to this is everyone's job to be doing so we have trained our teachers we have highlighted with our teachers during um the first week of school when we do our our technology summit we really kind of remind them of the importance of emphasizing this and working with their kids and always spotlighting those tips as they come through on a monthly basis and then we ask that every faculty goes through an annual faculty training we have provided a basic power point for the digisip coordinator to use but then a

036principal can always just step in and add more insight knowing what their community and what they want to do in addition to what we've provided them so our focus this year was on what is digital citizenship and then we went over those six strands and and shared that with the teachers in the building then there is an opportunity as you all know for a school based scc presentation on all things around digital citizenship that's actually required to have happen so our digital citizenship coordinator i don't know i have a hard time saying that but they um they are there to kind of plan with the principal what that presentation may look like they have information that they can share the principal can invite them to actually be the ones that share it or the principal

037can just take that information and share it at the sec themselves and then they all have to complete a school-based school plan that says they've all received information and respond if they feel like the filtering the supervision that the student education and the parent education is appropriate or if there's more need from the sec so i actually just went through all of those plans this week and check to see where we're at they're actually not due for a few more days so some are in progress but for the most part i would say that um the ones that i was able to look at all of the secs have felt really comfortable and we've had very few requests coming in for additional information so that was nice to see that on this particular side they're

038feeling like what they're getting and what our students are getting is adequate i hate saying adequate i don't want to set out quick um so again just a reminder we do have ongoing community communications every week every month our isd will push out a parent communication to the digit coordinator that then can be disseminated to teachers for them to then share with parents or to the principal like i said previously so we feel that's important and at this particular time it's very critical that everyone is continuing their education in this area so i've just given you an example of what that school plan looks like on the dashboard that principals have to fill out and they have a little time and then again i'll double check those and if there's any additional needs or concerns

039that come in we will respond to those in support where needed is that quick enough a lot of great information questions questions mrs okay um before we get to that susan did you have want to speak to the sec part of it we're going to stay on the question part as you can tell we're quite a team here in canyons on working on this between uh the three of us and and others uh i do the school community council training piece that kenneth talked about we take what they're gonna do uh and bring to the schools and the digital citizenship coordinators do in the schools we bring that to the sccs and train them each year as many of you are familiar with and then just continue to follow up with them and with their

040discussions uh to make sure that they're having them and that any questions they have are answered and then we triangulate again to make sure that everything is covered great thank you all right mrs nybaur first i want to thank you for presenting tonight and for this great foundation with digital citizenship i feel this is such a pressing need and these are great efforts but we need to go much farther with them in conversations i've had with many different counselors across the district they say some are saying as much as three-fourths of the issues at school all are around phones and some of them say even higher i know in our school climate surveys both with parents and teachers this is the number one concern obviously um you know we saw with our bathrooms this year

041with the you know evil tricks or whatever that was and cyber bullying i've had emails from parents about i actually had a conversation with the lone peak elementary school teacher talking about her third grader addicted to pornography from a personal device i think our one-to-one technology has has been most likely in a lot of homes even before the chromebooks so a few questions i have um one question is i know the isd department is the one that sends out the the newsletters and i just wanted to throw out there a consideration of possibly having student responsive services work with that because so many of the students a lot of their emotional and social health right now is surrounding this this technology and their social media platforms so i think it might be helpful to have

042have that into play um i i know principal brian mcgill at alta had a really great powerpoint showing a lot of times i think we have these really awesome and i love the six layers and i i love the efforts that we do but i feel like there's a disconnect with the kids of how that pertains to their real life and something president or principal mcgill did was he had a powerpoint where it demonstrated to the kids if you do this on your phone this is the legal consequence this is what can happen a lot of kids don't understand that they don't understand taking pictures or posting or these things that actually you know that can be a misdemeanor and they don't understand the long-term effects another question i had was i know right now

043most of our digital citizenship is run through the librarian and the library media specialist and i just have a question about could we possibly think about having a counselor someone that has um further training and is actually the one that's referred to when these kids have a cyber bullying event and those things we could think about maybe running more of it through through there i know especially this year our library media specialists are going to be quite busy in for some time a question i had i know i know i've had feedback from parents that have gotten um i've been on the volunteers of the digital citizenship week a lot of the feedback i've gotten from parents is we love the white ribbon week with silly socks and things like that but we really need

044more concrete newsletters about you know how how how students time on screens affects their emotional wellness and health and and can increase negative behaviors i know with our our chromebooks we just have kids on screens so much more and so a question i had was an effort with digital citizenship if our teachers can have some extra training regarding for example i've gotten emails kids have been getting surveys like 11 year old children am i gay survey that's part of the quizlet and somehow it's kind of leaching past our firewall and so if teachers had training hey if we're going to do these different platforms let's embed it in canvas so that it has that extra firewall protection um let's see uh i had an email a child had some pornography come up on their chromebook

045doing homework and thankfully the mother was right there in the kitchen so questions about our firewalls and i know that firewalls aren't foolproof and things can happen but that might be a question for i.t as far as i know we can't give 100 guarantees but what are your thoughts regarding that um and then have we considered ever doing some sort of campaign i know years ago i was a cub scout leader and there was like a if something comes on your screen stop crash your computer tell an adult do we have any little three-step thing that we're doing with young children that they not currently but we've definitely been thinking on that campaign cool that's awesome we work on that just one additional thing that that we wanted to add is um superintendent robbins has

046has given us a charge to look at this in the next few weeks in light of some recent cyber bullying yes and some different areas to really uh dig deep into this and study green from our end and then to bring back both to cabinet and here uh to bring back what is working where there might be gaps yes um the why of what we're doing and are we meeting that why and so i think within the next few weeks you'll see something come back with some recommendations from our group that are going to be looking at the different aspect who all is involved in what pieces we have and then what that looks like oh that's great thanks actually those are two of my next questions was the piece on cyber bullying and then

047if you could come back and share with us some of those digital citizenship plans and that would involve the three of us plus um brian mcgill you mentioned dr mcgill yes as he transitions into this office that would involve him all of us and then him great another question i had was with our um with our information that we're putting out have we ever considered doing anything any information for teachers regarding okay you know if if we're spending this amount of time with chromebooks then what project-based learning or increasing movement in your classroom and those things for kind of the mental and physical health for kids with balancing that screen time um let's see i think that's it great thank you so um we will definitely reach out to dr mcgill and see if we

048can get access to that powerpoint and build off of that for future for maybe a district-wide look at how that can be presented um library media so and versus a counselor so in the elementary world um right now it is really we ask the principal to designate someone to this role they get to choose whoever they feel meets that role the best so we have a variety of people in the elementary world in the secondary world uh again principals are given that option to choose anyone they want they currently have defaulted to the library teachers teacher librarians and as i was just revisiting with gretchen and kind of reminding myself of where their standards are in the library because we actually have library standards and they have three strands and there's one strand that is

049completely around digital citizenship so i think that's why the secondary principles have chosen to go there with that particular assignment because it actually aligns to exactly what they're supposed to be teaching and they they do see every student in the building so they have an opportunity whether it's them teaching the lesson themselves or co-teaching with a content teacher or any other teacher in the building they go in and actually work and co-teach on a lot of those things because digital citizenship like i said is everyone's responsibility and so we see a lot of those standards overlapping in the different contents i do not think it would be terrible to bring counselors in and give them some information or just some specific training but right now we feel that giving the principals the option to figure

050out who they feel fits that need that's where we've kind of landed but we can talk about how we can support counselors having some additional information as well um yeah and then i think scott i don't know if you wanted to add anything more on just firewalls with so so i talked a little bit about filters uh so we have a few different layers of filters first of all we do have a firewall that does some filtering but the majority of our filtering comes from a device called filter so it's it's called content filter content keeper sorry content keeper is an educational specific filtering uh technology that we've put in place you're right no filter is going to be perfect and so uh you know i've i've described and i think i've described to the

051board that i kind of look at the internet like um new york city i've been to new york city i love new york city go yankees right anytime you can go to yankees game it's a good thing but there are places in new york city that i wouldn't want to go and i don't necessarily know where those places are and so the internet i think is very similar there are great things to see on the internet there's obviously places that you don't want to go to on the internet and and my example i can't imagine a teacher ever telling a third grade class hey you know what let's go down to the subway i don't know where we're going to go but let's just ride the subway we'll get off somewhere and and see what

052we see right i i think the same thing needs to happen with parents and teachers that if you were taking kiddos to new york city they would be supervised and and to me that is what we're talking about is digital citizenship really needs to happen with us individually and as as parents and teachers we need to make sure that those students are supervised quick question for you if if teachers are able to embed most of those quizzes and things in canvas won't that eliminate some of that random pop-up ad stuff that's coming up yeah so so you mentioned the the quizlet and the the quizlet about lgbtq that was because they were using a free version of the software and because of that they get ads and that lgbtq quiz was one of the most

053popular quizzes that students were seeing and so it wasn't necessarily because of what our teachers or students were doing it was across the nation and so so again we need to focus on good tools make sure that we're buying the right tool and using the tool the right way as well this is in this case i i think quizlet's a fine tool but we shouldn't have been using the free version so every teacher should have access to the paid version then if if it's something that they want to use to make sure that we're being safe we should do it now the state i've asked the state if they have uh looked into it and the state has no intention to make quizlet available at the state level so if if it's something that we

054want to use either the school needs to purchase it the district needs to purchase it or a teacher needs to purchase it as well okay thank you for that information appreciate it yes thank you it sounds like a lot of great work is happening and that there's more work that will be done and that we'll probably be hearing from you all again before too long so we appreciate it and before we um i just want to ask superintendent if he has anything to add to this just real quick president um i think i i'm not trying to lengthen the discussion but uh there is one thing i think a point of clarity that needs to be made there there's a distinct difference between chromebooks and productivity and personal devices and i think that sometimes that

055water gets a little bit muddy but when when we're talking about privacy and first amendment rights and and personal property that is on a person and that being you know pretty much across all populations right including schools that's a question in itself right some schools are moving toward an environment where phones are are not allowed in classrooms even some of our schools have moved in that direction that comes with its another host of questions and challenges right separate from that uh are chromebooks and and i just i want to make the point because um the learn platform that the state provides us that monitors our devices which you know by the way i i think for all intents and purposes compared to what is monitored and filtered uh at home right the the standard for

056schools is very very high every keystroke is cached it can be monitored so the level of security is high to scott's point as the internet becomes more encrypted that becomes more of an issue because it's harder to see that but in our learn platform the top four sites accessed by students in this order canvas google drive google docs and google slides so our students are using these as a tool and you know we're in a fourth industrial revolution that is requiring our students to function in this blended environment and it doesn't take away from in-person instruction we know that and we continue to get better and better and better at it but i i'm excited for the future the pandemic has obviously you know kind of made uh invention out of necessity right but at

057the same time going forward beyond the pandemic the demand for this choice and the way that our economy you know is working it really i think you know that should be part of our future vision is that our students operate in this world and so teaching them these skills that you're talking about you know i think hopefully will continue to bubble up and emerge in in strategic visioning but i just wanted to make clear that you know the separation between personal devices and how our students are using chromebooks with productivity or two different things i for me being out in our classrooms and i see this every day the the technology pedagogy content and knowledge model that amber and ken and her team train our teachers on from the beginning of the pandemic to now

058the acceleration in our teacher's skill set to really balance a blended environment has increased exponentially i mean if you think about at the beginning of the pandemic the level of confusion and what was happening versus now um i'm there they've worked so hard to really you know refine and get better at our craft at delivering in this model so um you know there's there's still a lot to be learned for sure but i think we want to as we go forward try to try to keep the issues in in their proper place so that we can address them appropriately so that's all i had to add thank you thank you so much for this great report and we look forward to future conversation about some of these things [Music] okay yes no it is it's

059really exciting how much has happened in the last little while and how how helpful this is thank you so um tori can we just we'll just before moving on to the next item i think we have another guest yes thank you um we have another student here i want to celebrate this is opportune heath and i want to celebrate her because she just got her driver's license and she drove here all by herself and trying to find the directions and didn't take her quite to the right place so she was in the over there in the um neighborhood driving around trying to find us so we're glad she's here um this is opportune she's from brighton high school so she's gonna share a little bit um good evening everybody so my name is opportune head

060i'm from wrestler i'm senior i'm going to graduate this year and i come from africa chad and i've been in brighton for three years now and i came in america i did not speak english but being around brighton with friends and teachers i started learning how to speak english okay any question so um the last the week for the college and our counselor helped us how to apply for college um so i already took some college class in my school so my counselor just helped me to do some application for the university of utah and that's really helped me because some word that they're right i don't understand well because i'm studying english so she translates some word that i don't understand and i want to go to sleep to continue with my study study

061our culinary art and graduate there and find a better job and go to do anoda university yes okay thank you oh thank you we really we're excited for you we're grateful that this college application we has been helpful to you and we wish you the very best in your future okay thank you thank you thank you for being here yes yes uh mr millerberg did you have a comment i just wanted to say with culinary arts when you open your first restaurant please let us know thank you okay um next item is update on strategic planning i will turn the time over to superintendent rick robbins thank you president and i also just want to congratulate her um it's rare that this room falls dead silent like that but to hear her message and her

062story and about her futures is what this is all about so kind of gets me a little emotional so i'm really excited to to share tonight giving drew the night off because we'll talk more about this after we have steering committee but we concluded our planning team meetings this last week and i first want to thank everybody that was involved over that time period there were so many hours donated and put into the work in the planning teams parents teachers administrators board members staff our our administrative team uh cindy and her team uh providing all the accommodations and food and whatnot i it just was overwhelming to think that we're still in the middle of a crisis and a pandemic and yet so many of our school community show up night after night um you

063know three four hours i i don't know about all of you but after those meetings ended just the conversations that continued on after just showed me uh how much people care and how dedicated they are to the future of our district and of our kids and it shows the the promise to our students even in the midst of this crisis that we would keep school open and continue to provide them with the education that they richly deserve as a reflection on you as a board your vision and our community um as i listened i had the opportunity to kind of go around and just you know bounce in and out of all of the um teams and hopefully you've had a chance to look at the consolidated workbooks but just some amazing work has come

064out of that and really emerged uh i think in a lot of ways it supports and confirms uh much of the the strength that is already within the district but it also provides a glimpse into the future and some of the opportunities that we have to improve and you see really central to that i i you know you saw my little corny word cloud that i put out to you hopefully you looked at it but it kind of culminates and it was just exciting to see you know students teachers were some of the largest words in the word cloud that was really central to the focus but the some of the things that i saw that clearly were emerging one is student achievement that it's still a bedrock in the district it's still something that

065all of our stakeholders expect is that our students achieve secondly is skills and i think it's exciting to as you look at that and you think about all of the skills necessary to compete in the economy in the world going forward and how exciting that is and you saw things um you know whether it's in the arts or in stem some of the themes that were emerging through the planning teams i i think really provide kind of that glimpse and that's exciting and then lastly uh the peace on disposition so a lot around whole child and social emotional support and really you know building our students up as individuals and as citizens and how they contribute so um from here this this is just another step in the process this work will go forward to

066the steering committee uh on wednesday and uh really what i see in that steering committee meeting is an opportunity to refine condense there's a lot of overlap in many of those teams i think you know we all know in a strategic plan that you know probably 10 tenants or focus areas is probably too much it kind of you can get lost in the weeds but i can see a lot of overlap and then i think the other element here is that the piece about really being inclusive and and honoring diversity and inclusion and some of the dni work that's been happening in really how that language is is flowing through all of the planning teams and supporting all students so i'm excited to see that happen i mentioned to nancy earlier if you think back

067about a year ago when we first had this conversation i i'm so proud and just so humbled that um here we are tonight and i and i have in front of me the planning team uh impact statement documents we have our accreditation report is finally finished the superintendent listening tour is complete uh the survey data is complete and all of these points are starting to come together to really support the board in your work in in creating the strategic vision going forward so i'm just overwhelmed with pride tonight that we're where we're at so it'll be exciting to get that to the steering committee and then from there that recommendation will come back to the full board for work in january so thank you board members any questions or comments on this report mr wrigley

068just have a quick question here i as i sat in those meetings um we spend so much of our time on reacting it was so good to spend that much time on being proactive and looking to the future and i just sat there and i was so grateful for their parents and everybody and just to take that time and say rather than just the whatever is going on this week and reacting to it is to look forward to future to say this is what our future is we are designing and building our future uh and it'll give a real firm foundation for the district and the board in the future and to dealing many times with the stuff that we're reacting to because we'll now know where we're heading and uh even better i mean

069i think we've always had a good direction but i think this will be much more clear thank you mr millerberg and then mrs nybaur yeah i just superintended i have just one easy question okay um steering committee which will include some of the board members meets uh wednesday i guess that's tomorrow then we were told there would be a meeting in january with the date yet to be determined my january calendar is filling fast and i've got things done there that are fixed and immovable and so yeah sooner is better than later thank you mrs nybauer and then mrs oakes i too just wanted to express my gratitude for this whole experience with strategic the strategic planning and for the amount of hours that teachers and administrators and parents came i thought there was some

070awesome synergy and it was really i really really enjoyed my group and and getting to know one another and working together and i thought it was pretty fantastic and i think um as as the administrator here that's led this effort i just wanted to thank you dr roberts to have this all come about within this year so i know that there was a lot of your part in that and then a question i had is up until this point everything's been on google slides and so once it's edited we cannot see the original and as we looked at this this timeline with strategic planning and steering committee this last two steering committees are actually very impactful because they're taking the work that and and refining that and so my question is can we preserve this

071this uh google slide so we can see what the changes are and be really up to speed when we have that discussion once it's done yeah one of the things that i totally agree um i think for historical purposes as well that once this is complete and through the process that it's archived in a way that you know for future generations to be able to go back and look at the process and what was available and you know it's great that these tools are available now that we can do that so yeah that's exciting but i'll talk to drew and make sure that we have those preserved great thank you so much and i think that's a great way also for the community members who came out to also feel like that work was preserved

072thank you so much thank you mrs oakes thank you so much i'm i've loved this whole process i've been so excited about being able to do something like this and get greater feedback from the community and really get an idea of where people want canyons to go um i also have the same request as mom because i i want to make sure i can make that that meeting number four and just as a reminder um tomorrow's meeting includes steve um clearing and amber and then and the meeting number four will include myself and steve so um anyway i'm looking forward to how this comes together and you're right we've had a lot of important milestones in the middle of a really crazy year so thank you for your leadership we appreciate it thank you any

073other comments no this is exciting and bored i think we will be spending some significant amount of time in the next few board meetings discussing some of the details of this work um rather than just an update because uh the steering committee will do their part and then they'll turn it over to us for a little bit and then we can turn it back to the steering committee and and we're we're getting there so thank you thank you to all that been involved okay um next item is the district accreditation report and i will turn time over to cindy hansen school performance director and jesse hennifer assistant isd director good evening board um i will excuse my my accreditation partner in crime jesse hennifer it's actually home celebrating his birthday with his family so he's

074here in spirits yes so i know so i'm gonna be able to share this celebration with all of you i know it was very exciting when we received the engagement review report from carmen pugh banks who was our lead evaluator we are just our last step in this long process is the global commission final stamp of approval we're hoping that's gonna come any day i reached out to carmen a couple of weeks ago and she said it's it's imminent that they'd be sending that but so we're waiting for that piece but we did have their written report that they sent in to the global commission that's what's been shared with you and that's what i'm going to just touch base on tonight just to go through those pieces um so first of all i i

075think that most people what they want to know is what's the score what's our grade how do we do so we're going to start with that um the way that cognia scores things is through the index of education quality so the ieq and so the results can range anywhere between 100 and 400 and it provides information to the institution about how they perform compared to those expected criteria so those are those three domains that we've been working with the 32 standards that we're always measuring ourselves against so an ieq of 275 and above is an indication that your institution is beginning to reach that impact level so impact is the highest we have initiate improve and then impact so they're looking at sustainability over time and those pieces that are embedded in our culture so

076our score proud to announce was a 320.65 that's a really really good score and if you look their average the cognia network institution average is 378 to so we're we're way above the average for or oh sorry oh that was bad almost bad oh it's because i can't see exactly 278 to 280 sorry president um so yes we were we were way above the average which was was awesome so we really felt good about that we're proud of all the work that people did we're we're proud of the engagement we had with our stakeholders and we just want to kind of take you through some of those areas of of strength and improvement that we identified in that document um so just as a reminder the way that all the standards are measured is with

077the initiate which really that's all about your your focusing on what you need to improve on so the areas we really need to kind of focus on and so most of the things that i identify tonight as areas of improvement are from the initiate phase in our documents the improve phase we're really starting to see this continuous improvement but the difference there in between impact is the impact is all about um that improvement over time so the sustainability of our growth and the embedded practices within our culture that they're protected that they're part of our culture and our system so our strengths are really part of those impact pieces and then we had a few that uh areas of improvement from the improved phase that you'll see all right so our leadership um domain so

078just so you know as as we put this together it wasn't just jesse and i kind of deciding what to share um we we looked at the superintendent had some feedback we sent it to our cabinet members who gave feedback we also had our mtss which is a group of department directors members of our communications department we reviewed it there we took it to our academic core team which is the isd leadership and school performance so we had a lot of eyes on this and a lot of feedback given for kind of the key pieces because if you saw the the engagement review there's a lot of narrative and there's there's a lot of information in the document so we tried to just kind of pick out the things that we were most focused on

079all right so our domain strengths so leadership there's 11 standards in the leadership domain and so the areas of strength that were really pointed out was our our leadership capacity and this involves things like um staff super staff supervision which we see below engaging our stakeholders cultivating our leadership effectiveness our organizational leadership the policy the ethics the management that's all credit to you as the governing body and the strengths that we have there those were all in our impacting phase so thank you for that leadership the supervision and evaluation that we have with our class system the things that we do to improve our organizational effectiveness so the cognia insights these are some of the direct quotes from their review document their narrative that they shared so um some of the things that related specifically

080were that we have a strong branding in our district with commitment and support that's evident and that our systems administration there's durable leadership development practices within our communities and within our schools so those were direct things that they took from not only our data but from the multiple stakeholder interviews that they did across all of all areas of stakeholders in our leadership areas of improvement again this this was related directly to the initiate those areas where we really need to start focusing more um one of them is to engage more in a continuous improvement process that produces evidence through student outcomes we talked a lot about how there's there's lots of data that the schools do but at the district level we don't always look at all of our data and our outcomes and evaluate

081that looking at providing and collecting a wide range of feedback through our stakeholder groups that inform our decisions making sure that we're engaging all groups and having that equality assurance process that's going to help our system be more effective than and consistent so those were our initiate areas again some quotes from the narrative they talked about a fully developed data aligned strategic plan being in progress which we were excited about that and that we have a process to continually assess our programs and our practices that we don't really see yet at the system level so being more strategic about how we actually are assessing everything that we're doing in our learning domain there are 12 standards in this domain and so our areas of strength again these are all in our impact phase there we

082have a really strong approach to college and career readiness and i think you see that not only in in our uco and all of the things that we do for college planning but also we have some really great technical programs and and multiple opportunities i mean i think it's a whole paragraph in their narrative about how many opportunities we have for students we have deeply embedded systems for teaching and learning we have great pd we have curriculum maps we have lots of things that are are part of our culture here in canyons the positive relationships it was more focused on the learners having positive relationships with the adults and peers in their schools and in their settings we have a learning culture that's really focused on success and promoting that student success we have high

083expectations especially in our curriculum implementation and trying to prepare our learners for that next level that next step whatever that may be as they progress through our system k-12 and again that was one of my really exciting pieces about doing a system accreditation is that we're looking k-12 at our ability to grow and really create this dynamic amazing system we have a system that supports future planning and we have effective use of formative and summative data that drives our instruction so lots of amazing celebrations there in our learning domain some of their quotes they said there's a solid approach to to prepare students for college and career readiness and that there are robust support systems for teaching and learning that are deeply embedded so we we really see that and i think as you talk

084to to teachers and administrators and parents and students that was reinforced in our stakeholder interviews as well the areas of improvement in learning again in our initiate phase is looking at that providing that equitable opportunities for learners access to all of our basically our our levels of support the learning priorities that we establish in our district and making sure that those opportunities are available for all the learners providing a learning culture of creative creativity innovation and collaboration and that's down below in one of their insights and i think um that came a lot from our student stakeholders that really were looking for more opportunities in these areas and then having a systematic process of program evaluation and organizational conditions again we see that whole piece of reviewing what we do having that ongoing process the

085quotes here they said one emerging focus of the system is to expand opportunities to ensure equity and creative innovative and collaborative problem-solving instructional techniques are not systemic so wanting to really look at what that looks like k-12 and providing those opportunities for our learners to really provide them with the things that are going to be most challenging and helping them to learn in the best way our resource domain there are eight standards and resources um in this one we have our professional learning the learning environment and achievement those are our some some of our great strengths how we support that how we develop that our our mentoring our induction programs our coaching we hear a lot about that hiring and retention of qualified personnel and that strong branding came back i know our hr department

086works tirelessly and has developed many connections across the country to get us the very best teachers i know they work well with communications and do a lot to try to you know csd is the place to be and make sure that we're getting the best folks and then our long-range planning and the support that we get with our resources so their quotes um support of the instructional coaches teachers are appreciative of the curriculum maps technology collegiality of the iplc's and each school has a student support team so they have focus focused targeted interventions students have access to psychologists social workers we've really increased that support and it's much appreciated that's one of our strengths areas of improvement and interestingly in resources it was our only domain that did not have any standard fall in the

087initiate phase so everything was improving or impactful so that's a great success so we just kind of identified some of the improvement pieces that we felt like we could really um touch on and and many of them fall kind of in line with our digital citizenship piece but but looking at our alignment of the human material fiscal resources to needs priorities and student performance i know we're working a lot with district support now to really be thinking about you know we have esther's money what happens when that's gone how do we really meet the needs that we need to the whole instructional technology integration how do we strengthen that how do we strengthen that combination that blended learning with our technology with that in person with the engagement piece and make that a strong instructional

088process the access to info to the information resources that will support our curriculum and programs the needs of our students um as mr mccombs was saying you know with access to the internet and all of those services that we want to make sure we provide and some of their um areas of improvement just some some quotes they for one thing they loved our dashboard jesse and i spent i think an hour and a half just giving them a tour of the dashboard and oh what's that let's see that you know okay here it is but they had a couple of things they said um you know we could expand it to look at some specific skill based interventions and they thought about like how many surveys we do and whether there was a way to

089embed survey results that are easily accessible there or how we might use the dashboard in that capacity as well and then one of their other quotes about resources and this came back to the um the alignment above is that the approach towards the equitable system it's not easy nor is it a single shot that we need all of our leaders to commit to a process of developing a working definition of equity answering hard questions um reflective analysis and that comprehensive data review that we always keep in mind so what we did then um with all of those groups is we picked out three things that we felt like were really embedded in all of our domains that they they brought up multiple times in their responses and things that we felt like were part also

090of what the strategic planning process has been and so one of them was was equity and these were just again a couple of the quotes they had and one of the things that they said previously and again here is just that idea of defining what equity means for our purposes and what it looks like when we implement it in canyon's and then thinking about again as we looked back to our stakeholder groups making sure we have representation conversation and evaluation um the strategic planning that was one that came up in multiple areas as well and so just three basic things one was the smart goals making sure that we're creating actual smart goals we have baseline data we have benchmark data we're really monitoring progress and that once we have that plan that we're creating

091a process that evaluates our progress over time especially looking at how it's going to be implemented over kind of a five-year accreditation works in a five-year rotation so thinking about our progress over that time and making sure that we're having that systematic movement um was one of the the key points and then finally uh k-12 designated time for collaboration so whether that's late start whether that's early out whatever that might look like but they they mentioned multiple times that we have iplcs as a norm in elementary and middle school and we see a lot of success because of that and so to have that replicated at high school would give us a cohesive systemic approach across our our system and that having that protected time would enhance the function at all levels so those were

092kind of our big things so as we wait for the global commission final stamp and then you won't have to hear from me for i don't know five years maybe um at least not about accreditation but but those were the the areas that we identified so i don't know if you have questions i think there was just so many great things to celebrate um and so much important work and i'm really grateful to all the people who helped us go through this process jesse was a great partner in isd and numerous numerous folks to thank so thank you so much for that report it is fun to see it all come together yes for terrific amount of work um board any questions or comments mr wrigley okay oh let's have superintendent give a comment and

093then mr wrigley and then mrs arnold i'll be brief just i want to tell cindy and jesse and the team uh how much i appreciate their work and this and um i i'm just i'm so proud of the district and i want to tell our teachers our administrators our staff i mean an index score of 320 especially considering everything that's been going on in the world in the middle of a pandemic and a crisis i i'm just so proud of our teachers and our staff for you know administrators everybody that participates bus drivers lunch workers custodians i mean this is a team effort parents and most of all our students um for staying uh to the to the course and keep moving forward this is a neutral group from outside looking in and really kind

094of breaking down our systems i the part that really stood out to me in the teaching and learning um to really have that noted in such an impactful way um really tells me that you know we are focused on the right things to is it perfect no do we have a lot of room for growth absolutely but it's a reflection of just the great practice happening in our district so congratulations to all thank you uh mr wrigley mrs arnold and then mrs oakley just a couple of questions a couple statements of the school districts in the state how many have full accreditation of the entire system like we do uh there's only two so davis district and ogden district just did theirs just so out of the what is it 31 41 districts in the

095state there's 30 there's three districts now so i don't really know sometimes the public doesn't understand some of the stuff we do instead of maybe we don't tell them the why i think it's really important the public to know that this is basically we as a district put ourselves forward every five years we have high school accreditation you wouldn't send your kid to school that doesn't have accreditation you wouldn't send your kids to college it was not accredited you couldn't get funding because accreditation means there's a certain standard of accountability and that's why you hold it so typically every five years we do high school accreditation we stuck our necks out on the line this year following our tenants on the wall and said we want to have accreditation of k through 12 all over

096our entire system so we have accountability to our taxpayers and also accountability our staff and other people that are patrons in the district as to what is going on so i think that's been really sort of a we've got some very good feedback for the future for this but more than that it's shown that we're a well-run system that that we do have a lot of stuff there my wife was talking this morning like she's in private practice and a couple of people have come in and oh i'm going to go into charter school or private school and how great i'm going well we're accredited we're one of the three schools in the whole state that's accredited so i think this is this is a really big thing as far as our district being able

097to say we're we want if we're in business you'd be like apple going and saying hey we want to credit you know outside look on apple to come in and tell us what's going right and going wrong most the time apple would say no i don't want any feedback but we've been open to that and i think has been very helpful i think there was some concern as to what we get back from the seaport i think it's very much in in line with what you get any business consultant coming back and very specific as to what we need to do so thank you for your time and and just thank you for all of our staff i mean this has been fantastic we are always saying we're we're a district of distinction uh now

098we proved it right you know no we don't mean we're perfect it means we still have a lot of different things we want to do but at least we know we know our awards and we know where to move forward from this but we also know the other things so i'm hoping that the the public says oh man this was a big thing for our district to go forth and to be able to to say hey we're going to go for go for the whole way we want to see if we can be have a national accreditation and we received it so thank you that's a big thing for our district big day thank you mrs arnold and the mrs oakes it's hard to go after steve because you don't know what to say because

099you already said it all but once again thank you for everything that you've done and stephen the superintendent pretty well covered the whole gamut but data does prove that we're going where we need to go and do what we need to do thank you mrs oaks i just want to give a shout out not only to you and jesse but to so much of the staff of the district as i was reading through this report which i've now read multiple times i actually find it fascinating to see what we're doing well what things that they suggest or they noticed but i see so much that is complimentary of many different departments here in the district you know i see whether it's the branding whether it's the support of the teachers there's so many things that

100i look at the different individuals that have been working here so hard and in such difficult circumstances and it's a credit to you and i just want to thank everyone here or you know and whether it's the teachers whether it's the the school-based administrators whomever it's it's so much work on the part of so many so i'm really really grateful um i just want to encourage all of us as board members as we're going into the next strategic planning meetings to consider all of the data that we've received i think it's great timing you know i'm seeing certain things whether it's a discussion from the students about a greater need for creativity innovation collaboration or making sure that that's consistent across the district there are certain pieces that i'm seeing consistently coming across you know

101in strategic planning and with this so i think it's really helpful to see what's really being reinforced and what we're learning from it so i'm looking forward to seeing what we do with this and with the strategic plan i think we have good things ahead thank you very much thank you uh mrs schill so i just wanted to add i mean amanda kind of said what i was going to say at the very end there but i just wanted to add my thanks i know it was a ton of work for so many people so thank you for all your work and i was one that was a little skeptical about doing the accreditation at the same time as strategic money because i just didn't know how that was going to work so anyway but

102it's great just to see how they are overlapping and i think it's actually really good that we've done them together because now we can incorporate some of these suggestions so thank you and i think um we all feel the same way we're very grateful and excited for what this has shown us and what it will lead us to in the future so thank you and please tell jesse we appreciate his work and this as well and happy birthday to him i'd say maybe he's watching but i yeah he better not be he should be eating cake he's celebrating yeah i'll send him a text okay thank you okay um board our next item and while we're in kind of a expressing appreciation mode is we thought it would be good as this year this is

103our last board meeting for this calendar year to give each of us an opportunity to just express some appreciation for our employees this year so with that in mind we'll just take a few minutes and how about if we just maybe go down the row and we'll start on this end with mr millerberg [Music] this is truly one of those things you just don't know where to start there's so many good people and if you stop and think about what uh what happens in our school district every single person in the district is employed to make the education of our children better top to bottom uh our superintendent loves the man he's a good guy he's a great leader he's a strong leader but never in my life have i ever heard anybody say without

104that superintendent my life would have been different it it boiled down to what happens in the classroom last year i refer to it as a year from hell it's it was a year that people were just scrambling to make everything fit we went from uh having instruction take place in the classroom to be online instruction in a matter of days um it was a real difficult time and this year we've we've moved from scramble mode to where now the pressure is really on to make sure that every student is learning and receiving a quality education and there's a fine balance the balances between educating our kids and having them get the most they can and the demands that are being additional demands that are being placed on education professionals some way we need to make

105sure that our teachers our building administrators our district administration that they all feel valued and they have the energy to put into educating kids just my personal belief i think that the 20 21 22 school year is more difficult than the prior year was um classroom teachers had a hard job before covid and it hasn't become in any easier everyone in the district as i said before is employed to support what happens in the classroom the classroom is where the rubber meets the road and the classroom as i've said so many times before is where the magic happens so top to bottom superintendent to those that sweep our buildings and clean everybody is here to make education better for the kids and i just want to express appreciation because i have 16 grandkids that are

106still getting educated thank you mrs schill [Music] okay so i just want to thank all our employees for the incredible work that they have done um over the past year and a half um like mont i've heard a number of times how this year is actually harder for our teachers than last year so i want them just to know that i appreciate them that that we know it's hard it's hard actually for all of us every single person us up here administrators it's hard for all of us but i do feel proud of the fact that we've kept students learning we've kept them safe and i um i just want you to know that as a board we want to support you and help you and um we do appreciate everything that each one of

107you do thank you mr zoax so i have a darling niece who's been a long time teacher down in the provo school district and i saw her on sunday for a family get-together and she made an interesting comment as we were talking about how difficult this past year is i kind of joked with her about the fact it's been akin to birthing an elephant feels like and really she said you know teachers and the education public education has always kind of served as a safety net for society at large we catch the kids and so many situations at the end of a long line of things that haven't worked out for a lot of families we're there to help feed them we're there to help love them and educate them provide men social emotional supports

108and mental health supports and so many things but she said this year it has felt like that safety net has been weighed down deeper and more heavy than ever before i want to recognize that sacrifice that has been made thousands of times over in this district and on behalf of thousands of children that is no small thing it's like what our health care workers have done for us in ways that i think most of us will never fully comprehend but we do comprehend what it is like to try and help children it's we need each other we need the community to support us we need to support the community it takes a large group of us it's like an organism and without each other we can't make this we can't help it to move forward

109so i just want to recognize that sacrifice and that work and that effort in the face of very very very difficult circumstances and tell you i am incredibly grateful and i think about it from individual situations and circumstances with my own children and then i try and replicate that thousand times over and it's i just can't even wrap my head around it but i am unbelievably proud of what this district has been able to accomplish during such a difficult time and um just know that our thoughts are with you and we are thinking of you and hope that you have the most restful winter break possible so thanks thank you mr wrigley yeah appreciate the time you know it has been a difficult last two years and in some ways the first year may have

110not been as difficult as this year because the first year we're trying to keep people from our students from regressing this year they did regress and now we're trying to bring them up and accelerate them so it's even more uh pressure on staff as we move try to move that forward against all crazy odds you know this has been a difficult time teachers and administrators and staff are going through the same emotional trauma that we're all going through but they're having to come every single day and continue to do their job and not only continue to do their job but didn't you do their job with many kids that have gone through this emotional trauma and that's causing all kinds of extra issues in the classroom so it's been a really difficult year on teachers

111are teachers and teachers across the country a lot of people i my fear is that teachers just say that i just don't want to teach and we'll have a huge problem in the future when teachers say i i can't teach what are we going to do then and so as we take a look at our teachers and stuff we need to not only recognize as the teacher but our support staff i think our support staff we have so many vacancies in the district that some of our staff are working two or three jobs in addition to going through all the emotional stress that they're going through and worrying concerned and all the extra stuff that they're doing because of covet especially our janitors and stuff the amazing thing is through all of this we've kept

112together sort of the family as an educational family uh hopefully we're gonna try to support others as a board member it's difficult because i sit and i see the pain i see all this stuff going on i'm going but there's unlimited resources there's only limited stuff that we can do other than just to let you know that that we care i think one of the things as i would ask as we go into this season we really need the parents and patrons to support the teachers also not just the board but the parents and the teachers need to let our teachers know that they trust them and that they value them i mean you go to europe teachers are like doctors teachers are held in esteem united states we don't give the teachers the value

113and hold them and that esteemed as they should you can't pay them what they need at least we need to let them know that they're valued such as doctors or other professionals in the field so is it going to christmas thank you um for holidays since we can't see christmas anymore right anyway so let's go to a holiday season thank you thank you for all you've done and and we too shall get through all this somehow and we'll be a better people and and uh i know their students will be so thank you thank you mrs nybauer i had the privilege of volunteering in a kindergarten classroom this last week and it was so delightful to see how much the students love their teacher and would listen to her and what a great job she

114was masterful at organizing them into their groups and they just really i could tell that they knew she loved them and so they would listen to her and it was a really awesome experience i've mentioned before but i have seven children my two youngest are quite young four and actually my son turned six today and we've had a lot of absences in school more than we ever have because of the you know the distancing and the masks and everything all the protocols you know we needed to do last year this year it's like especially my younger kids they haven't been exposed to so many things and so my kindergartner has missed more than any of my other boys in kindergarten and the teachers have really had to deal with excessive absences this year um due

115to that and and i'm really grateful i i want to i hope maybe even alice peck who's here tonight can extend my thank you to the elementary school teachers because they are the ones that are so impacted with this new letters program that were that we're doing and training on and i am so grateful they are spending so many hours and that on top of the absences on top of postcovid and all that they're going through it's pretty remarkable the amount of energy that they expend doing that and so i'm so grateful for that um i had the opportunity to just recently uh be involved with helping host the basketball tournament at corner canyon and i took a look at these coaches and how many hours they spend with our children no matter if they're

116a basketball coach or a debate coach or the band teacher these teachers that maybe are not considered a traditional classroom teacher spend excessive hours with our children and their impact is so great and i'm so grateful and i think probably all of us can remember back to the extracurriculars that we did while we were in in school and the impact those teachers had on us so i'm grateful for that um i also wanted to er for the space of time i just wanted to extend my thank you to all of those um involved in the accreditation process i thought i'd just save it for this but thank you that was an excessive amount of time and i really am grateful for all the administrators for the extra hours for the strategic planning process as well

117um you know i i always see these administrators coming in or teachers coming in and you know our meetings are four hours long and and and i know they've already put in a full day's work and then some so grateful for that as well and um and i i think we have a wonderful community and i think we have a wonderful partnership between teachers and i'm i i know that i've heard expressions from also just today um i was in the classroom again for a few minutes and um parents that have stepped up to help substitute and grateful for that as well and think we're part of something pretty great so thank you thank you mrs arnold i can yes okay um so that the thoughts that um have kept coming to me um i

118think several of my board members also mentioned and it's this idea of personal sacrifice and i know um it's just been a really tough time and as has been mentioned this year feels harder than last year um i like to um in my mind i kind of now analyze it that last year we were in crisis mode and running on adrenaline and this year we're in exhaustion mode and running on fumes and um and so i feel like in spite of all of that amazing things are happening all over the district and classrooms school offices hallways playgrounds gyms stages cafeterias buses and um i i can't remember who said it but mentioned trying to um just trying to um quantify the amount of sacrifice that has been made and so i ran some rough numbers

119about 6 000 employees and approximately 300 school days since the disruption of the pandemic began gives a conservative estimate of 1.8 million acts of personal sacrifice and i know that's very understated amount um i'm confident that the real number is much greater and will never know everything that everyone has done but i want each of you to think back to a time when you made a personal sacrifice to benefit someone else and um and know that it's appreciated even if it's not known what you did um it's impossible to list or even to pretend to list all the ways that people have sacrificed and put aside their their own fears their own comfort to serve another and to help another feel things are going to be okay you've stayed late to meet with the student

120or parent patiently answered the same question for the 20th time in a day volunteered for a task when you're not sure how the time and energy will be found listen calmly when you're at the receiving end of criticism adapted to new ways of doing things even when it took extra work and may not make sense at the time you showed up when all you wanted to do was just close the door and withdraw until normalcy returned you faced each day each challenge each overwhelming moment with courage and commitment to what is best for the students you put aside self for the good of the whole time and time again and together as a canyons district family we've forged ahead while building a new and improving way to provide educational excellence to each and every student

121in canyons district so to the canyons district family i express my deepest most heartfelt appreciation and best wishes for a restful and joyful holiday season mrs arnold so i'm going to be really honest with you i work three jobs and so i haven't been able to um like i read my documents but i didn't read my um board agenda and on the board agenda it says comments or appreciation for employees nancy tinke so when i looked at it i just thought nancy was going to give her appreciation to all the employees and so that's the reason that i'm sitting here thinking for a moment and thinking i probably could just say amen and that would probably be sufficient because i think people have said all there is to be said um i do live in

122this world and i do testify that it has been harder this year than last year and i think we're all have post traumatic stress and we have covered fatigue i think that the only reason we're here is because we love those kids like secretary custodian the lunch ladies who are like working all by themselves because we don't have enough people the teachers who are subbing for teachers because we don't have enough people the bus drivers who are going on one route to go on another route to go on another route because we don't have enough people let me think about some superintendent who um never sleeps i don't know how he drives back and forth because he must drive looking and not seeing autopilot never seen anything right and the list goes on and on

123and on you know and it's not only our teaching community it's the whole community and and all of the firemen policemen all the people who are working at the others you know at stores and it's christmas now and i just i can't even walk in a store because i have i start crying not because i don't have money to buy things i start crying because of everybody who's working so hard but um so probably just setting me in because now i'm rambling on but i do appreciate all of you and i do walk it in your shoes so i know what you've gone through and i'll tell you what letters hasn't helped and um i told i told the teacher i was going to quote her because you know i can but i got to

124get my phone to work before i can code her just because i can i asked her what she thought about the new reading program we have coming up and she goes sorry i haven't had a chance to look at it letters is taking my time aside from lesson planning i am so pooped how are you doing we're all pooped i'm and i i know you are but thank you for getting up in the morning getting your clothes on and showing up to work and that's like every person in this whole district no matter what your job is thank you thank you thank you board um and i um i know we're running a little bit behind scheduled but i believe probably would be all right if we took about a three minute break and then

125we will reconvene for the business meeting meeting portion i'd like to welcome everyone that has joined us here in person as well as those viewing the proceeds on the live stream to the business meeting of the canyons board of education today is december 14th and we are meeting at the district office located at 9361 south 300 east in sandy utah the first item of business is to approve the agenda for this evening december 14th is there a motion i'll make a motion for us to approve the agenda for um today december 14th 2021. thank you is there a second to the motion i'll second that thank you any discussion to this motion it's saying none i'll call for a vote all in favor of the motion please say i any opposed that motion passes thank

126you we will next uh be led in the pledge of allegiance by indian hills middle school principal doug graham and then principal graham will afterwards share with us some school highlights from indian hills middle thank you for the audience please stand and join with me in the pledge of allegiance 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 please be succeeded [Music] thank you president superintendent robbins and all of our steam board members for having me tonight with a chance to highlight indian hills middle school but before i begin i do have to say a couple things mont that jacket [Laughter] could you please stand up and i have to say one more

127thing leon take note [Laughter] i want to see it one day yeah just just let leon know that epa's can have a personality i also have to take a moment um before i begin to uh appreciate my utes um for those of you going to the rose bowl okay get that on the record um we'll be down there so thank you very much um indian hills middle school let's get back to business indian hills middle school we have a motto it's not about me it's about we and this motto is brought to life in the service of others it's this sense of community that we try to instill in our students each and every day today i'd like to honor three particular indian hills middle school service oriented student groups and their teacher advisors the

128first group is called web which stands for where everyone belongs and their goal is to help sixth grade students integrate into middle school each year we begin the new year with our sixth grade orientation just like all the middle schools in the district but ours is a little bit different we have a team of eighth grade students we have 71 involved in it this year who met to our sixth grade students this team of web leaders is trained in the summer by a group of outstanding teachers welcome our sixth grade students to indian hills on orientation day our sixth grade our eighth grade web leaders extend invitations personally to each sixth grade student through a phone call during the summer to invite them to our orientation our web leaders work with approximately eight to ten

129sixth grade students throughout the day on orientation which allows our new students to make connections with each other through team building activities they get a tour of the building they learn the ropes from the true experts our eighth graders also this helps our sixth graders not feel so isolated and not so be intimidated by our eighth grade students as they have some friendly faces in the hallways webb then continues to hold activities throughout the year to stay connected to each of our sixth grade students matter of fact we're having a web activity this friday a web luncheon where our eighth grade students will go in and have lunch with our sixth grade students once again the next group is our student council and everyone has student council most schools have a student council this group

130meets monthly to help promote well the well-being of our school they they and their advisors help to guide our efforts and be welcoming to all students and they brainstorm ideas to help improve the school from the students point of view many of these students are also involved with our weekly announcements spending their own time to broadca to to broadcast to our student body important information throughout the week finally this group is also responsible for our annual food drive which once again raised over 10 000 items to donate to the utah food bank just before thanksgiving the last group is our national junior honor society we all know njh is a excuse me we all know that njhs is an important service oriented group of students at indian hills middle school our national junior honor society

131combines with our student council for a very special service project each year for the past six years we have had a fundraiser in february dedicated to the make-a-wish foundation our standing goal is to raise ten thousand dollars each year which funds two program recipients i'm proud to say that this noble project has not disappointed over the past six years and we expect the same results this year benefiting benefiting those who have amazing life stories to share looking outward and being part of something larger than ourselves is an important lesson for all of us at indian hills middle school our wonderful teachers and staff try to live this out every day by helping students realize that giving in the service of others allows us all to benefit as a larger community because after all it's not

132about me it's about we thank you principal we appreciate all the great work that you and the team there at indian hills are doing will you please extend our appreciation to the students and the staff there and our best wishes for a wonderful holiday break and and thank you for being with us this evening next we will turn time over to jeff haney and kirsten stewart from the communications department for some recognitions president thank you for this time to recognize thank you jeff just in the spirit of gratitude that's been shared tonight and listening to principal graham and the fact that we have dr mcgill and and principal rowley here i just want to give a special shout out to our principals um i've been one myself i know as that's been mentioned when you've

133kind of been in somebody's shoes you understand what they go through but with three outstanding principals that are here with us tonight i just wanted to make that kind of a special comment of gratitude to them as we share so thank you okay president tingey thank you for this time again we're going to honor folks in our community who have gone above and beyond our first honoree today is the artist of the district's 2021 holiday card corner canyon high senior and michaela larkins did the artwork that is featured on this year's official district holiday card now this is the 10th year that canyon school district has asked a student to produce the artwork for the cover of the card which is sent to major supporters community partners elected officials both local and federal and even

134the white house each year we ask one of our schools to take upon the task of coming up with the artwork and this year was corner canyon's turn for this task and you can see that michaela did a phenomenal job putting together the artwork for this year's card this year's card was mailed right after the thanksgiving recess so all of our community members likely have already received our cards this year and we want to thank michaela for putting together for creating this great piece of artwork for our card she is the daughter of devon and prisci larkins and she plans to study art in college so thank you michaela and we look forward to next year and what our students will create for canyon's district official holiday card our next honoree is a hillcrest high

135student seba seal this hillcrest high student majoring in finance at the university of utah is the very first graduate of a canyons district school to be named a rhodes scholar this is one of the most prestigious academic designations in the world now seba who excelled at hillcrest's ib program until her graduation in 2018 is one of just 32 students in the entire country was chosen for this honor now this scholarship provides tuition and living expenses for two years of international graduate study at oxford university we talked to her earlier this week and she plans to study the intersection of finance criminology and criminal justice she would like to prosecute white-collar crime after she gets her master's degree and eventually goes to law school so congratulations to seba one of our fantastic graduates from hillcrest now

136a rhodes scholar the very first in canyon's district's history now the next honoree is cody hagan from corner canyon high school he is the 2021-22 gatorade utah football player of the year the third year in a row that a charger has won this honor now cody's older brother cole was the 2019-2020 recipient followed by jackson dart and he also follows in a family tradition uh cody and cole's dad sean was the utah gatorade football player of the year in 92 and 93. so cody now has the opportunity to spend a thousand dollars it's a grant that was given by gatorade on a local organization that promotes athletics we'll also soon find out if he is the national gatorade football player of the year crossing our fingers for cody hagan now we'll continue speaking about our

137fantastic football players with the all-american bull selections charger quarterback devin brown and brighton high linebacker lander barton have received invitations to play at the prestigious all-american bull this is a nationalized nationally televised game now brown and barton are two of just 100 prep football players across the country who have been extended invitations to play in this game we have two of those 100 we're very proud of them they were selected for the west team to play in the 22nd annual all-american bowl this bowl will be nationally televised on nbc from the alamo dome in san antonio texas on saturday january 8th now the next folks that we will introduce were officially recognized when they were appointed at the last board meeting you'll see here that i was i'm wearing my alta hawk red just for

138this and many people said it looked like i was like santa claus but no this is alta hawk red because we are seeing the end of an era with dr mcgill in the beginning of a new one with mr rowley but before we start with that we would like to introduce to you our new facilities director matt wolford he succeeds rick conger who has been with us since the very beginning of the district and matt's a fantastic guy but he will have some giant shoes to fill mr conger has literally changed the face of canyon's district with the improvements to our facilities his retirement uh party is on thursday and we wish he and his wife ricky who also works with us much happiness as they start their new journey but we will introduce mr

139wolford and dr mcgill who has been the alta heist principal for the past eight years and is our new student services director and mr rowley who now is working as an assistant principal at corner canyon and we'll take the reins at alta high school in the coming weeks so we'll ask them all to come forward for about 30 seconds introduce themselves and their family who may be here with them and give you a short 30-second pitch on what they see as the vision for their schools and their departments when i say short 30 seconds i mean it because the snow is gonna start falling at about nine o'clock and i'm hoping we're out of here so we'll start with mr wolford then go to mr rowley and then we'll finish with dr miguel mr mr

140wolf thank you good evening pleasure to be here this is my wife stephanie we've been married 28 years she's got six great kids that are all out of the house now so with being an empty nester we thought it was the perfect time to start a new job i wasn't prepared necessarily to engage in what vision i have but with the snow coming i guess is to uh make sure we have safe schools and parking lots we'll leave it at that pleasure to be here i'm so excited i've been in healthcare for the last 23 years so uh being with uh students dr robin said it's kind of like being in healthcare so maybe i'll fit in perfect so thank you it's wonderful to be here good evening and thank you for this opportunity um

141i have my wife angela here with me tonight and uh and it is really exciting to have this opportunity i feel very humbled and at the confidence and the trust of the school board that canyons has in me being a new employee in this district this year and uh i i'm just learning a little bit about alta in the last couple weeks and i know there's a rich history there that i'm i'm beginning to learn and to really appreciate and and as i'm learning that history i'm also learning the history of kanye school district which is which is helping me a lot also and appreciate the work that you guys do and i have some big shoes to fill um dr mcgill has in the last couple weeks as i've gotten to know him he

142and i are kindred spirits in a lot of our philosophies and a lot of the ways we view education and try to approach kids and then education and uh and i've appreciated the friendship that he and i have been able to build in just a short time and i look forward to continuing that and and working with the the community about the high school and uh i'm really excited about it so thank you very much good evening my name is brian mcgill i've got my family here with me this evening uh jody miken who's a student at the university of utah and actually participated in the step to the u program that we started at alta and as a result she'll be graduating this next year two years into her studies with her bachelors my

143son braden who is a sophomore at alta right now so i know jeff haney talked about an era coming to an end but it actually hasn't come to an end because he's still going to carry on the legacy over these next two and a half years but you're looking at a row of alta hawks right here through and through my wife and i are both graduates there and it's been home more than once and loved my experience and opportunity there as you guys know i'm a huge student advocate one of the things i'm hoping to look to bring to this position is an ample number of supports for kids so that they have the mental health supports in place their physical health their overall wellness and access opportunities as it relates to dance programs and

144so those are the things that i'm really looking forward to we live in an interesting time and era right now and we know behaviors in schools is something that needs to take center fold and needs to be a top priority and so as far as the vision goes january 18th my understanding is i'll be presenting to you on my first day on the job officially so you'll get to hear a little bit about my vision uh but look forward to the opportunity and uh you know i love the altitude community this ken made mention we've had the opportunity to spend quite a number of days together uh doing a successful transition and we have very similar styles and approaches and i feel very confident very comfortable with his ability to be able to walk in

145and lead the ship to the next chapter or as i've told a lot of folks move the rocks from one point to the next so anyway thank you [Music] thank you i'll just quickly um express on behalf of the board our appreciation for your willingness to accept these assignments and to become um part of the canyons district family in these ways and we're just very excited to get to know you better and for the great things that you will bring to your respective roles president tini to wrap it up we would like to thank all of our school communities who have done acts of charity both big and small for people here in the district and abroad most of our schools do some kind of food collection or a donation drive to benefit other people

146and it's that type of service learning that has made canyons district really shine it's part of our effort to encourage student achievement and community engagement for a list of all of those schools that participated in a drive please look at our district website we couldn't be more proud of our students who have made this season a little bit more bright with our heart efforts and president tingey with that we turn the time back to you thank you we really appreciate every meeting this opportunity to recognize and celebrate the amazing achievements and in the district um let's see our next item is patron comments and i know we have a couple of patrons that are joining us on the telephone so have they been unmuted you are now unmuted great thank you uh we've now come

147to the patron comment portion of our meeting while not required by law the board often designates time and meetings to listen to the patrons of the district please be aware that the patron comment time is limited to residents and taxpayers of canyons district students and parents of students and current employees of the district patrons may provide board members with written documents these documents must be submitted to the board's secretary at the meeting over here or emailed to the office of public communications at communications at canyonsdistrict.org by noon of the day following the board meeting time allotted for public comment is at the discretion of the board president tonight the board has allotted 45 minutes up to 45 minutes for public comments and be based on the number that have signed up individuals will be given

148two minutes and those representing groups will be given three minutes to speak comments made during patron comment time are part of the public record it is the board's practice to listen and take notes during public 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 these 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 defamatory or slanderous comments about an individual the board of education would like to make it

149clear that critical race theory is not part of the curriculum being used by a canyon 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 demonstration during the patron comment time as well as throughout the remainder of the meeting um so thank you for um those that have signed up to address us i will read off three names um so that you'll know when you're when you're on deck uh we'll start out with uh christa pippen who is representing a group and is here in person and then we'll go to the telephone line rebecca gilka and then natalie day

150thank you president tingy and superintendent robbins and the board for allowing us this time to come up and give comments on matters that are important to the success of students we appreciate that i am speaking for canyons education association and we represent the licensed educators in the district and that includes our library and media specialists we are talking today about the revisions to policy 600.06 about library materials and selection and we appreciate the inclusion that you guys have made in the um language that includes um language that supports the constitutional and first amendment rights of our students and that do not exclude the supr uh suppression of ideas in schools we also um like the addition of the vetted review process that could assist in rectifying the occasional mistake in the acquisition process as well

151as the fact that many of our librarian our library professionals they inherit a library when they begin their positions and so this process for review could be helpful for them in assisting the librarians and reconsideration of age-appropriate materials um we also though have a few concerns that we would just like to bring out and into the open um one of them is that we would like to urge caution and consideration of the proposed changes to this policy we would ask for a deeper level of engagement about how these proposed policy changes would impact our students learning our students rights and also our day-to-day operation in school libraries and our effectiveness of our librarian professionals um there are a couple of areas of concern that we want to highlight and one is the vague language that

152we are seeing in some parts of the proposed policy for instance um selection of the library materials that only support community values would be extremely difficult to discern like our community and our students our school libraries include a host of diverse opinions and broad range of values we have concerns that determine values of the majority or the most vocal could be could supersede inclusion of the wide range of library materials available for our students the term deselection is not common terminology in the media field and it's not consistent with the weeding process as well we have concerns that if we normalize this term deselection that it could result in many materials being removed from the library shelves without adequate consideration it's not my time also the words of scene and vulgar we think are subjective

153and we would just appreciate a deeper look into these areas and thank you for allowing us to comment thank you on the telephone line rebecca gilca then natalie day and then in person catherine bates and these are all represent individuals i appreciate all you have done so far to listen to parents regarding these pornographic and inappropriate books in school libraries the law trumps any district policy pornography for children is against the law your rule of only two challenges a year is outrageous if you have inappropriate books on the shelf in the library i should be able to challenge as many books that fit that description if i take time to go through the process to show you exactly what's inappropriate i should be able to challenge it i understand there's a large volume of books

154but if the book genderqueer with its literal graphic picture of a boy performing oral sex on another boy look through the cracks what other books like this are on the shelf it is the duty of the district to make sure there are no other books like this on the shelf which is why you should allow as many challenges as it takes the parents are basically doing half your job for you based on what parents have discovered all books should be taking it off the shelf and they should all go through another review if being worthy they should be giving a rating before being put back on the shelf this would also end the argument that the focus is only on minority authors there may be children who seek out pornography or inappropriate content for their

155age but there are many kids that don't if they are innocently browsing searching for good uplifting books and come across these inappropriate books it's like walking in on something you didn't want to see this should not be happening in school libraries these straw man arguments of every kid these words on social media is not true my kids aren't on social media nor do they want to be i would say every kid has access to the internet but while they are at school there are strict blocks on inappropriate sites and content the same cannot be said for the library why should it be treated differently in my opinion any librarian that knowingly kept the book genderqueer in the library should be fired for this reason i told my children they're not allowed in the library i

156don't trust the librarians in our school if they've kept this content on the shelf especially if they refuse to remove it after being told to take it off thank you thank you natalie day and catherine bates and then catherine smith and katherine smith is representing a group hi um since august september of this year i have been trying to problem solve how to make the playground equipment area with the wood chip base wheelchair accessible for one of my students for the past few years the student has used the other play area that has a foam flooring this year because of our school schedule we had to move our grade to the playground with woodchip at one point at the beginning of the school year the student's parent reached out to me and said the student

157was having a hard time wanting to go to school because she can't easily crawl out of her chair and access the playground at recess and was feeling left out so working with my principal he has reached out several times to the district person who could help us with how we could change the flooring i brought this issue to child study team um to my iplc to our sac committee i've reached out to the ot i've also reached out to another grade and we have altered a couple days a week of our playground schedule i've also asked my students to be inclusive and mindful of the student at recess and i've spoken with her mom who said she would was willing to reach out to the district i'm not sure if she has um recently the

158latest um update my principal got from the person at the district who's in charge of this was that the district was gathering information about which elementary schools have the two great playgrounds and what flooring they have my suggestion to this is that that's where we're at with this and what we're doing and it's december and we've been working on this since august september is that they also ask right now who has students with accessibility issues and prioritize those elementary schools with the same neck break speed that we dismantled second step and have removed books from library thank you thank you catherine bates katherine smith and then lisa bruns and lisa bruns is also representing a group members of the board my name is catherine bates and i'm the teacher librarian at brighton high school and

159have been for nine years um i would like to address the recent inclusion of the language community values in the library policy every year i have the opportunity to teach ninth graders about the library and how to use it and every year i tell my students that the library is theirs it isn't my library or tom sherwood's library or the school boards library i believe that the brighton high school library belongs to the students i do not believe that a community with varying perspectives percept perspectives that make our school vibrant interesting and uniquely brightened can be reduced to a single set of values and who will decide what those community values are some of the unique experiences and beliefs of the 2 300 students i serve may not be regarded by some as community values

160but the library has a responsibility to provide materials to everyone including a population in my school who in many ways are underserved and excluded i also believe that equating the values of the brighton high school community with every other high school in the district does not recognize the diversity of the populations those high schools serve in pico versus the board of education justices brennan marshall and stevens asserted while petitioners might rightfully claim absolute discretion in matters of curriculum by reliance upon their duty to inculcate community values in schools petitioners reliance upon that duty is misplaced where they attempt to extend their claim of absolute discretion beyond the compulsory environment of the classroom into the school library and the regime of voluntary inquiry that there holds its way they go on to say while students first

161amendment rights must be construed in light of the special characteristics of the school environment the special characteristics of the school library make that environment especially appropriate for the recognition of such rights i want you to know that i love my students and i can tell that you guys love my students too and i appreciate that um i just kindly ask that you remember that it is your duty to serve each individual student thank you thank you catherine smith lisa bruns and then bridget reese good evening my name is catherine smith i'm a fifth grade teacher at altera elementary and i am one of the elementary representatives on the canyons education association executive board first i want to say thank you president tingey board members and superintendent robbins for the opportunity to speak to you this

162evening i so appreciate your willingness to receive input from various stakeholders in support of providing the best educational opportunities for all canyons school district students i speak tonight in support of the elementary ela curriculum adoption proposal which will be presented later this evening sorry it's been a long day of teaching and my voice is kind of gone the work of the ela curriculum committee has included teachers coaches and school administrators from schools all across our district as well as district administration leading the work of this committee canyon's education association fully supports the recommendations of the committee and applauds the hard work of all those involved in this process over the last 12 months adopting a new curriculum is not an easy task teachers are planners re-planners and over planners nonetheless all the teachers i've talked

163with about this curriculum are excited about the quality of the curriculum and the many benefits it will provide for our students and they are anxious to get started learning about interacting with and preparing for implementation of this ela curriculum so much of teaching has been an unknown in the past two years and that in itself adds to the stress of the profession so my personal ask of the board would be that this decision be made in as expeditious a manner as the rules allow so that we can begin preparing and that creative ways for providing the professional development necessary to implement be considered and made possible for all teachers thank you so much for your time thank you um lisa bruns bridget reese and then elaine sang i wanted to speak to the library material

164policy revisions that are being discussed tonight on the agenda we thankfully talk a lot and do a lot in this district to create safe spaces for our students to learn in including having an internet filter talked about tonight called content keeper block inappropriate material based on a url database of more than a billion entries we need to have that same high standard of safety for the content available on our school libraries it's unfortunate to hear about the recent discovery of many books containing agent-appropriate sexual content found on shelves across the district the proposed changes to bolster the acquisition process and create accountability are appreciated and warranted there is a reason that utah declared pornography a public health crisis in 2016. decades of studies from respected institutions have demonstrated significant impacts of porn consumption for individuals

165relationships and society studies show that over time many can develop a compulsion toward pornography causing them to need more of it more often and more hardcore versions just to feel normal just like with mood altering drugs we wouldn't dream of offering addictive substances to children at school yet many are arguing that we should keep these questionable books that contain pornographic material on our shelves i disagree and i wanted to share with you a few of my thoughts on how we should move forward with the proposed changes we really do need a comprehensive review of the books that are already in our libraries our district alone receives seven to eight thousand new books a year and many have already made it onto our system that break the law in the last few years books that contain

166inappropriate material have been given awards by associations which is one of the criteria librarians use to make choices in acquisition one of the books canyons has pulled for review all boys aren't blue which is read aloud in this very board room graphically depicts in sexual sodomy and it received many awards two we shouldn't be making the challenge process harder although you are seeming to streamline the process with procedure i disagree that one parent can only challenge two books a year i understand it's a drain in our resources challenged too many books but at the same time our priorities should always be to protect our children first we shouldn't be putting roadblocks in the way of concerned citizens three we should take a contested book off the shelves in every school while it is under review

167as it stands now it will only be taken off and the shelf in the school that is being reviewed or challenged in if it is material like a cartoon depiction of somebody receiving oral sex like what was um found in the genderqueer book um and some child is exposed to that material during that review that violates the law um i consider that irresponsibility on the part of the district and i would be concerned that it leaves the school district liable and open to legal action like the caller said laws should always trump policy you know we um had many students and librarians who made public comment who liken their removal of these books to book burning and accuse those who are trying to take these books off the shelves in our school of not wanting

168the voices of the lgbtqia and poc community to be heard or represented truth of the matter is nobody went into looking at these books trying to target any particular groups it just so happens that those were the types of books where this pornographic material was found this issue has nothing to do with representation and everything to do with protecting our children from obscene agent-appropriate sexual material at school thank you thank you bridget reese and elaine zhang and then alyssa brooke my name is bridget reese i'm the teacher librarian at albion middle school but tonight i'm speaking as much as a mother i have two teenage daughters at hillcrest high one is with me tonight as i am as an educator about eight years ago i was a high school english teacher in jordan district actually

169one day after school one of my students came to me to tell me he'd been kicked out of his home because he had come out as gay that evening we shed many tears and i vowed that i would do all i could to make sure all of my students felt loved and accepted for exactly who they are a study from 2017 found that 14.3 percent of u.s teens identify as lgbtq in a classroom of 35 students that means about two of them students won't stop being lgbtq or stop being a minority race or stop having disabilities or stop being any kind of other simply because some from the loud minority continue to try to sweep their stories under the rug and if you need more evidence of that i only need point to the recent

170tragedy of izzy tischener in davis county district if you think that the argument over banning books and that tragedy aren't connected then you aren't listening to the actual problem happening here it is an important distinction to make that simply having a book on a library shelf does not make it part of a curriculum a school library is all about student choice a student can choose to read a book or to leave it on the shelf the ability to say no is a life skill i'm trying to teach my students if they don't like a library book for any reason they have the power to return it they don't have to finish a book they aren't interested in and they certainly don't have to read a book they know a parent wouldn't want them to be

171reading no librarian is saying that they have the authority to tell your student what to read what we are saying is that there is a vital process for objecting to a book that protects their constitutional rights one parent's ideals and viewpoints do not supersede it in other parents over the past several weeks i've heard utah parents united call me and my librarian colleagues porn pushers i've heard them say librarians aren't our friends librarians can't be trusted i've heard board state board member natalie klein on the same upu recording mock the phrase historically marginalized with air quotes and an attitude of annoyance as if being historically marginalized isn't really a thing okay i know my time is up and i really appreciate you affording us the time to speak tonight thank you elaine zhang alyssa bruff

172and then jenny olson and jenny olson is representing a group [Music] i am also a teacher librarian but i am here today as a parent with children in the school district for my children the library is their safe place from the school library they have learned about empathy compassion cultural diversity different lifestyles and so forth i can't imagine a safer place for my children than the school library for learning and gaining knowledge one of the greatest reasons that the library is a safe place is the knowledgeable professional school librarian the librarian has a relationship with my children and is familiar with the reading needs of her student population however with recent events i feel the safety of my children's school library is being threatened by people who ironically believe they are acting to protect my

173children i find it interesting that these parents have decided to attack libraries when there is far more harm caused by the internet the cdc has shown that in the last decade social media has led to a 151 percent increase in suicide rates by pre-teen girls and 70 percent increase in older teenage girls and just this year we have seen viral tick-tock challenges resulting in self-harm and destruction of property social media creates the opposite experience and yet the challenges are aimed at the library not the internet we know today's teens spend far more time online they do than they do in books according to the apa only 20 percent of teens actually read books for joy while 80 of teens spend it daily on social media why focus on 20 20 when so many more students

174are impacted by dangers out there so again is this truly about protecting my children for what is inappropriate out there because if this is truly about protecting my children then why do we allow those who have no training no background no background in books flexing collection management for young readers to have a greater voice than an educated experienced professional i do not know any other profession that allows this so again is this really about the safety of my children or is this about removing diversity from the library under the guise of pornography is this about jumping on the bandwagon of misinformation for from social media and is this about nitpicking a page from books without looking at the whole of the book esteem board members not long ago you recognize the importance of allowing the

175trained professional librarians that were hired by each school to select and manage the collection of the school library by passing a challenge policy that would allow for proper protocol i am here today to ask you to continue to keep my children safe by upholding and maintaining selections and by not allowing the books elections to fall into those hands who have a narrow and damaged agenda thank you thank you alyssa bruff jenny olsen and then melanie wheat hi i wanted to share my perspective as a parent of students in the school district i want to support the students and employees and librarians who spoke up though at the last meeting regarding the nine books temporarily removed from high school shelves not banned but still inaccessible to students i support the right of any parent to guide

176and influence the education of their children until it conflicts with my rights as a parent as i understand it a parent raised concerns about the nine books which led to a to the fear that these books are dangerous to our kids and immediate action must be taken to protect them despite good intentions these high emotions and these situations can leave us vulnerable to blind spots and there is evidence that moral panics often lead to increased restrictions that harm minority groups i cannot speak to all the books on the list but i believe that keeping the book monday's not coming on library shelves protects students and protects their first amendment rights i have read this book kirkus school library journal and common sense media all list this book as appropriate for ages 14 and up despite

177my efforts to understand how this book is a danger to kids i have been unable to track down any specific details i'm a little worried that there is something terrible that i've forgotten but i'm more worried that my values aren't reflected in this idea of community values and that our black students are losing a book that would remind them that they are not important or sorry the book remind them that they are important and not forgotten i'm worried that this is the case for other books on the list too please don't misunderstand me i am not saying that all books are appropriate for school libraries or advocating for pornography pornographic material to be kept in schools i am advocating for greater transparency in the challenge and deselection process i don't believe anyone intends to harm

178students but efforts to satisfy the demands of some parents could be detrimental to other students and could conflict with the values and interests of parents like me making lists of challenged and deselected books as well as the reasons for the deselection available to the community and parents would be a check against unintentional blind spots thank you thank you jenny olson representing a group melanie wheat representing self and then catherine care representing the group hello sorry it's my voice um i am here speaking reading a statement on behalf of you alma and you alma is the utah educational library media association as an association uelma would like to recognize the dedication and professionalism of teacher librarians in canyon school district librarians in utah must not only receive a school librarian certification which includes among other elements

179training and collection development but all secondary librarians in the canyon school district are required to have a current teaching certificate this shows a commitment to education as well as to providing carefully curated resources for students and faculty having a certified teacher as the librarian in a school brings an added level of collaboration and excitement in that school to that school environment teachers recognize their school librarian as having a great capacity for recommending resources and materials which will enrich their instruction libraries are in a unique position to see all the teaching and learning that occurs in the school building and so are equipped to offer an alternative viewpoint that helps with decision making we urge the board to consider these skilled professionals as assets to administering any library policy the teacher librarians of canyon school district

180have been highly trained in the consideration of materials the maintenance of a balanced library collection and the assistance of patrons in self-selecting items that will best suit their needs thank you thank you melanie wheat catherine care and then jack tice hi my name is mallory wheat and i'm a parent with five children in the canyon school district thank you for allowing me to speak today i wanted to comment today on the updated rule for the library's um selection library material selection um i do believe that parents are primarily responsible for overseeing what their children learn and it is with that belief that i am i am incredibly grateful for the professionalism of our teachers administration administrators and staff including our school librarians these individuals have years of training in education and in the case of

181many of our librarians years of training as media specialists it is with that trust in our teachers administrators and staff that i add that while i believe i as a parent am primarily responsible for over seeing what my children learn i am not responsible for overseeing what other people's children learn that is the job of our professionals they are responsible for ensuring that every child that walks through the doors of our schools have the tools and environment that they need to succeed the school library policy should not hinder access to literary materials that although may not be appropriate for one student may be life-saving for another books can create a sense of connection and belonging with others connecting them with others who have had similar experiences this is especially important for our minority students of

182color and lgbtq students who may feel left out in their classes additionally books give us a window to worlds that are unfamiliar to us they allow our students to develop empathy for others by letting them see from a first person perspective the experience of a life different from their own and oftentimes those experiences will deal with tough topics my child's school librarian this month kindly showed me how i can access my child's school ebook account on sora and their school library account parents should be able to know what books their children are reading and i welcome the change to the policy that allows a parent to restrict access to a book for their own student please let's increase transparency for parents rather than make it easier to remove books and limit information for students specifically

183in the policy i anticipate the words like appropriateness and harmful to minors can be subjective and should be further clarified before adopted thank you thank you um catherine care jack tice and then christine marzolowski hello my name is katherine kara i'm a parent of a special needs child and i represent three parents from the school district of special needs children um i'm here to request more child abuse prevention be taught in our schools in utah uh the department of child and family services reported that in 2020 there were over 10 564 confirmed cases of child victims of abuse and or neglect 62.88 of this abuse occurs in the child's home 88 of adults were sexually abused as children state they never reported their abuse it's critical that educators recognize abuse and know how to report

184it the school is in the perfect neutral place for children to learn to recognize resist resist and support i'm sorry report abuse because they are often experiencing abuse at the hands of their caregivers in the home we are concerned parents and would like to see child abuse prevention taught in our schools to every child every year we are particularly concerned about our special needs children who are at such high risk according to the cdc one in seven utah adults experience sexual abuse as a child that's over one in 12 men and nearly one in five women this number is alarming even more alarming is that kids with special needs are seven times more vulnerable to abuse than the general population due to their unique challenges such as that they're not always capable of communicating through

185words when something has happened to them they can struggle with understanding boundaries and perpetrators may take advantage of that and use the grooming cycle to cross these boundaries if no one is teaching them about body safety they may not understand when something is not appropriate and natural curiosity may take over the organization prevent child abuse utah has curriculums for all ages that has already been approved by the utah state board of education the state legislature has mandated school personnel have child abuse prevention reporting training every two years for educators they're saying policy states that children may have this same education prevent child abuse utah offers online training along the wasatch front to these school professionals however only 23 school professionals have been certified as on-campus prevention specialists to serve 12 849 students during the coveted

186pandemic rates of domestic violence including child abuse and internet crimes against children have skyrocketed our children need our support and and to be educated to recognize resist resist and report child abuse for your information refusal skills are part of canyon's district sexual education policy thank you jack tice christine morsilowski and then stacey peterson members of the board my name is jack tice and i'm a senior at brighton high school i recently came to learn about how a certain parent group was as trying to remove certain books from my library and i am deeply upset about the clear encroachment and support of the violation of my first amendment rights i am disturbed how this is even a matter of discussion and how the thought of taking my books out of my library is even being considered

187it's clear that this that this parent group wants to pull these books out of the library and it's based on homophobic and bigoted views there's no interest in the well-being of children the books they are demanding to remove from my library all this follow a similar pattern lgbt characters and relevant stories and stories and experiences of people of color if this group cared about the well-being of their children why are they cherry-picking the books that they personally do not agree with it is clear they are pushing an agenda that should not even be entertained these books discuss and deal with important and modern modern and relevant concepts for young adults such as sexuality gender identity and different perspectives found outside of our community i frequent the library and to me it feels like a second

188home i am able to read what i want to read without judgment in a safe and equal space however if we start removing books from the library it ruins the neutrality of this place now there is a precedent on what books are considered okay and what books are considered not okay this group wants to start telling their children that is not okay to be gay lesbian transgender queer anything in between they want to impose conformity on their own kids and dictate what the children of other parents can and cannot read and tell them that their identity isn't relevant or cared about unless they're straight and white to me this is an authoritarian grab that are clear of clear first amendment rights and ended up saying that this is an issue that's even being discussed when

189there are more pressing matters that warrant this discussion thank you christine and he'll get it one day it's all good i'm so sorry will you please it's christine morzieleski and even i mispronouncing it according to the polish way of pronouncing oh thank you thank you for correcting me all right i'm grateful that you're willing to address this issue um i have a brother-in-law that is a police officer and for several years he dealt in child pornography and child abuse it's a tough thing to do that's what he watched all day it's horrible here's my question what is the pivotal step to groom a child for sexual abuse it is pornography it's in almost every case there these kids are exposed pornography to desensitize them to prepare them to begin the process the books that we're

190looking at aren't because of a race aren't because of it a gender choice or a sexual choice it's because it explicitly goes through the act of sex whether it's between a boy and a boy a girl and a girl a man and a boy a girl and a man whatever it's because it is very explicit if you look at a pornographic image on a screen the image is important in your mind if you read it from a book the image isn't written in your mind because you make it there's no difference so here's the question i have if your neighbor were to give one of these books to your child or grandchild would that creep you out i know these ones would creep me out why in the heaven's name would my neighbor be giving

191my boy genderqueer when it's got images and it's explicit you might as well just invite him over for porn and beer this is the concern this is the problem [Music] and i know there are people who feel as though they are marginalized but you know what there are lots of books that address lgbt and gay and all these things without the pornography as a school library system we cannot have every book in the system and i don't think it's the school's job to help grooming these kids for sexual either sexuality or sexual exploitation and i think that's what we need to look at thank you thank you um stacy peterson and then marilyn larson um i just learned of the ela proposed curriculum wonders when i saw the agenda for tonight and so for 24

192hours i've been kind of crazily trying to find out what it is and what's going on i looked at the district-wide curriculum adoption checklist and it looks like this has been in the process since 2018. it's gone through all these steps um and and advanced to each of those steps and i'm a little bothered that there weren't any parent involvement in any of the steps and so here for years this has been coming up and and we knew nothing about it um the last step is to provide a copy to the school for patreon review and offer feedback apparently that started four days ago and i read every email and every newsletter i see everything i had no idea that that was at my school that i needed to go and review and so i'm

193really concerned about that we need parental involvement at some point in the process i would prefer it be earlier so that we can be part of the team but i went through wonders and there's so much i know that the district is not adopting the sel part of that i get that the whole child sel part but still when you go through it and i don't have time but you could go through it talks about social justice it talks about equity it talks about um social action uh there's one part that talks about um we are using this to take place to maintain our institutions that produce and maintain social and inequities it talks about a specific lesson students will learn about america's forced assimilation of native youth and consider how it might feel to

194be part of a minority culture targeted for erasure by the government like i just i go through all of these and i'm like why why are we doing this why can't we just teach english and language arts like why can't why does there have to be all these social agendas in there can can we not find a curriculum that just teaches the skills that the kids need in their academics i don't like that there's all these other agendas that go in there and and and if you'd asked me back in 2018 maybe we would have been able to talk about stuff like that but i get that it might be a great program for teaching them but these the content needs to be politically neutral please we are counting on you thank you um marilyn

195larson is our concluding thank you um i want to first thank you for all your work and i want to tell you i appreciate teachers principals everywhere but i also want to remind you that it is their job and they're being paid to take care of our children i would like to say that if this was the only and first meeting that i've ever attended and listened to the data report that you all listened to and smiled broadly across i would have thought holy cow we are amazing and we are the perfect school we're doing everything right but you are data driven and i heard you say over and over thank you for the data it made us feel great we look good everything looks great i'm here to tell you that through this last

196year i well it started in a little after january me coming and all of you people coming bringing data to you hundreds hundreds of signatures hundreds of parents this is not a handful and i want to ask you who are the stakeholders who are the real stakeholders it is the parents it is not the teachers it is not the district it is not other people parents are the stakeholders and you and all of us are beholding to the real stakeholders and everything you choose to do need to be saying to yourself and every teacher every librarian are we really upholding the stakeholders parents are skilled professionals whether we want to say so or not and i'll bet you if we said how many of you have a degree i would say probably 95 of our

197parents have degrees in something they might not be school teachers but they are very brilliant people and they have degrees and they are skilled in raising their children teachers do not have degrees in everything they are a teacher and they need to respect us and we are not a minority we are the voice of school we are the voice of our children and we are begging you every decision that you ever make be on the parents side thank you and this business is not one more thing i want to know when we call a state of spade when do you call us theta spade at what point do you call pornography pornography when there are sexual thank you illicit sexual time is up you need to look at the pornography in our libraries it is

198not to further anybody's agenda thank you okay that concludes our patron comments for this evening we thank everyone that has taken the time to address the board for for being here um and sharing your thoughts with us and for the civil and respectful manner that you've also brought to us um this evening okay board next on the agenda is the consent items i will ask for a motion and please in making that motion please read each of the items on the consent agenda i'll make a motion to approve the consent agenda approval of minutes for november 30th 2021 approval higher and termination reports approval of purchasing bids approval of student overnight travel and approval of november financial reports thank you is there a second to that motion thank you any discussion to this motion seeing

199none i will call for a vote all in favor please say aye aye aye any opposed that motion passes thank you next on the agenda under new business is policy update policy 500.40 student health service and requirements this is a second reading and listed as possible action i'll turn time over to dan harper general legal counsel good evening board members um when i was uh a law student i worked as a a clerk in the attorney general's office in the criminal division and one day i overheard this conversation between a uh defense attorney and his client uh the defense attorney informed his client that he had some good news and bad news for him and the client said well give me the bad news first he said well forensic unit went over the crime scene

200and they found that a lot of the blood there matched your dna said well what's the good news you said your cholesterol level is only 130. so there you go since we were talking about the student service student health service requirements uh that seemed like a really good joke but maybe not um all right this is policy 500.40 it is being amended and updated the updates have added definitions regarding individual health care plans health care teams and student support teams i think the importance is that these are teams that are looking at these decisions for health care plans which will be helpful in our schools it's also updated the language for the health and safety uh focusing particularly on training um and also it's updated the appeal process that it goes through the responsive services

201department in the event that an individual health plan is challenged and then they also made additional changes the committee separating the administrative regulations for clarity and they've also updated the forms and exhibits that go along with this policy um i think these are are very effective amendments to the policy and so it is up for a second reading and also possible adoption tonight any questions any questions ford all right thank you for your presentation so for this has been listed as possible actions so emotion would be in order i'll make a motion to update policy 500.40 student health services and requirements as proposed by dan harper our general legal counsel thank you is there a second to the motion i'll second that thank you any discussion to this motion scene none i'll call for a

202vote all in favor say aye opposed that motion passes thank you um and while i'm calling uh mr harper up for this next item um actually no it's not mr harper sorry well um amber roderick landward is coming up i just want to um briefly uh recognize in in the audience representative galen banyan who represents uh area of the district um located mostly in cottonwood heights and we appreciate your being here with us this evening uh dr roderick lanward good evening i was telling dan i'd like i need to work on my jokes because i feel like whenever it's policy or legal or finances there's always great jokes but i only have a six-year-old i'm asking for money tonight too so i also wanted to make sure i gave that prop to you leon but

203like leon i live with young children and so those are the kind of jokes that we have at our house so my son luke is a kindergartner this year and he's been really obsessed with puns so he's making up all sorts of jokes so this is uh the joke of the week what did the nuts say to the nutcracker you crack me up so time for some laughs as we head into the next two policy updates i am here on behalf of jeff christensen tonight who is unable to be here and has uh been enjoying some well-deserved time off so representing the policy committee just a reminder that this is the second reading for the two policies that we are about to review the updates that i'll be reviewing are based on feedback from the

204first reading and i want to just again welcome feedback for continued discussion as we move into the third reading scheduled for january so the first policy that we'll be discussing tonight is the curriculum adoption policy which as you may recall from our last meeting had pretty substantial changes we're actually making the recommendation that we move towards calling the policy instructional materials because we have really expanded its depth in terms of the different types of materials that we adopt and the process for each of those so since our last reading the discussion related to this policy was mostly centered in adding a specific definition to age appropriate in the policy statement we outlined specifically uh i think there are 11 12 i have the policy right here i guess i could confirm that we have 12

205criteria that really have become the backbone of this policy and are used as criteria throughout every type of adoption whether that's the district-wide primary course level supplemental intervention or teacher selected materials so looking at those 12 the committee felt it necessary to add a definition to age appropriate given that that was one of those key 12 criteria for selecting and adopting all materials also as a reminder we did add some extensive work by adding many exhibits to i think the one or two that were there previously so there are now six exhibits as part of this policy and they have been added in individual documents so hopefully that was a little bit easier for your viewing pleasure the exhibits describe the specific procedures for each of those different levels of adoption and again embed that

206criteria that i just mentioned from the board policy statement in the beginning of that policy uh president dinghy would you like me to go through both policies or pause here let's let's pause here and see if there are any comments or questions or anything about this policy and the related exhibits any questions or comments or feedback oh mrs schill well since no one's saying anything i will just say i thought it looked good and i was impressed with the detail and all the exhibits i i mean you can just tell a lot of work has gone into it so thank you to the committee and whoever else worked on that thank you anything else ford oh mrs nybaur i'm on the where i'm just asking for any questions or comments on this policy the curriculum

207adoption or instructional materials mrs nye power um i i appreciate the work that's gone into this and was i'm grateful to be on the policy committee and thought we thought through most everything regarding that patron comment today i thought it might be good to review what the process is for notifying the public when we're doing uh uh curriculum or learning materials um adoption yeah with those steps if you could outline that thank you yes so exhibit one is the most extensive process that we have in place because that is looking at district-wide primary curriculum materials which are also on the docket for tonight's discussion after this presentation within that process there are steps i believe that occur before we come to the board for an official proposal the first public posting for our patrons and

208stakeholders to be able to view materials and to start giving feedback begins with the posting on board docs that occurs as the board knows and making sure that all stakeholders know that that happens typically on the friday before the tuesday board meeting after the proposal has been presented to the board the communications department in conjunction with the instructional supports department continues to ramp up the communication to make sure that stakeholders are aware that these proposals are in place that they will be reviewed for the next three board meetings which is at least six weeks in most calendar years and during that time we collect feedback from all stakeholders and that becomes one of the topics for discussion during the three readings in which those district primary materials are discussed so there are times during that

209process that patrons can of course address the board they can submit feedback via the forms that we have available online we've had patrons call us or email us directly there are any number of ways that we will take feedback throughout the district to be able to consider that when we're making these final decisions also want to note this is not necessarily part of policy but right now as part of practice the utah state board of education has developed a 10-year standards revision timeline and if you recall it was that process that the state put in place by being really public about when each content area would be reviewed that allowed us to really refine our procedures because we had some predictability around when we may need to consider new materials based on standards that were

210being revised and that timeline is available on our website so that again you can see down the road what primary materials would be coming up for review annually based on that 10-year schedule mr wrigley yeah just so just to clarify i mean this document we've been following for some time correct and it looks like internally we have about 18 months or so that we spend on that basically you go through identifying what the needs are you meet with the teachers you meet with the specialists in the district you look at all the material out there then you make a decision as to or sometimes options for us that it comes forth and it comes to the board for example this is the first night on that one policy it comes to the board we make

211a decision if we make go forward we don't give it to the parents first we make decisions if we go forward if we decide to go forward with it then it goes out for comment and we start that process is that how that is here it's it's all connected so when we bring the proposal to the board that is when the materials are available for public review by anybody in our district so it's released at the same time simultaneously but the board that's i mean the board still make could make a decision doesn't go forward so it's really we don't spend most of our time doing anything until after this meeting to make sure that's the case even though it's released until when the board decides yes let's go to that direction for comment is

212that correct correct okay but we don't vote let me clarify yeah no but we just allow the process to go forward it's yeah it's not released really it's just out there for view so that then comment and then after the third board meeting we have an action item so we can take action on it so it's at least six weeks out and thank you comments mrs i'm sorry i was amber recognized my eye contact so um and something that we added was step 17 to notify a board and provide access to materials at least two weeks prior to first reading which i am grateful for and um you were so close there's 21 until it can be approved i'm wondering um if it might as far as on our website a calendar that's easily accessed

213of the timeline that might be helpful as a board member also just to have in mind okay you know this is going to be two weeks prior to when you know this is when step 17 is going to happen and something that would be easily accessed for the public and parents as well and maybe that's something we can consider doing is just having a little um clear communication that way i i hate to think that an involved parent that wants to be involved somehow misses it because they don't you know um go on to the website is there is there other things we can do as far as that goes well communication sends an email out to every parent i yep it's typically after this step to you as the proposals are coming and then

214um once we get through this initial presentation and jeff i can ask him to jump in correct jeff can jump in here if if if he would like to but we do the uh standard communication protocols in terms of all of our channels through csddu newsletters general news school websites rotator what am i forgetting the new yes we have a new flyer that outlines all the specifics of the summaries and overviews of the adoptions they give just a little bit more detailed information that will also be sent out and that's step 19 and we're saying that in in between step 19 and our other readings it's still how many weeks six is it about six six six weeks somewhere and many of you it's a minimum of three readings so imagine because it's christmas with

215this one so the only so that provides a lot of clear expectation and and our levels of transparency so the only other thought could be that we could possibly send out the email before this initial meeting but that would be the only extra level of transparency we could even give because we are very transparent and sending it in all those different modes of communication right correct yeah and yeah yeah the board is the first the first step is to bring it to the board and just to have on record because jeff was speaking without a mic uh the piece that we have added different from past years is the flyer that outlines the specifics that will go through the peach jar channel so that's one more layer that we haven't always accessed and that will

216go tomorrow okay thank you mrs arnold so i know this is a kind of picky thing kind of but not quite so i always have my papers run off right and handed to me in a binder form so in my binder form somebody's type sets off like i can't hardly even read what it says about um the library stuff but the form that says district level review form down here the type sets off i cannot read it so hopefully we check that before we send it out for parents to do it because it's like i don't know what it's really doing to tell you the truth but it's taking letters and putting them on top of letter letters and then spacing other letters out like this says age of provo and then the new word

217is pre-ate and then the next word is any and the next word is low and so i'm not quite sure what that means but i think it's appropriate anyway um so we please just check those documents before we put them out on the tables for um parents to read and or if we're putting them in the computer system at least a type setting that will come off clean with the words written so we can read them absolutely great catch thank you thank you like thank you for doing that and then what was my other one great oh my other one was teachers so in the six weeks how many i mean in this in this like 18 month time how many teachers have been on your committee to review this material really good question we

218had do you want to talk about this now for or as we get into the specific proposal um let's get wait until the specific proposal thank you for bringing me back on track okay any other questions about this policy no mrs snyder one comment thank you to jeff i actually was the one in district committee asking that the board take a look at it first so thank you for pointing that out okay thank you and and i would just like to comment that i feel like this process which began about three or four years ago right was when you first brought it just was is very orderly and it's very transparent and it's and it creates some predictability because prior to this it was common that that proposals would just come to the board just

219kind of whenever and now we're now it's it really is designated to be introduced towards the end of the year with um the idea that there's plenty of time for input and for for review of the materials prior to a decision by the board which then gives plenty of time for purchase and for training and and the implementation and that's the other thing that i feel is really helpful is is there's a an implementation plan is also included whenever a proposal is being made for curriculum adoption so those are just some of my thoughts um mr wrigley just a quick question a lot of the stuff we sent out to parents uh through our peachtree and stuff however parents or patrons that are not parents have the opportunity to get on all those lists is

220that correct we have they are mailing lists that we send out for just anybody but you just have to go on the list and get on there and then you'll receive those so we don't send them out to everybody because you want everybody's email address but if you want to be on that list then that's possible is that correct that that i do not know i mean don't we have a general people well general let's just send stuff out to people are interested in getting stuff in the district [Music] if i understand you correctly you're asking if these notices go to all of the parents and guardians no i'm saying if if somebody's interested in getting all of our our notices we have a a way for them to do that we can't send out

221to everybody because we don't know everybody's email addresses of all of our patrons in the district but if you're interested in getting any information in the district it's possible to do that and you've got a process so what's that process just go online and there's a place you sign up for getting on emails isn't it absolutely so as you mentioned all we have do have a database that we have that we put together or at least but the information was provided to us during online registration and this is the information that parents provided to us of the phone numbers and the email addresses where they would like information sent to and we also have the addresses of our students so we can contact parents and guardians of our students either by email by phone or

222sending something to their physical address if there is somebody who wants to participate in candy's district who doesn't have a student in our district and so they're not in our database if they would contact us we would gladly provide that information for them in addition most of our communications that we send to parents are also replicated in in various parts of the website and on social media so it's very rare that there would be one piece of information that was just sent out one time in one form to parents and guardians you would be readily available in various channels we often place things on the website that creates the url we to things on social media and then turn around into a longer piece in a podcast or an article on the website so there

223are various in many ways that people can't get information about the district even if they don't have kids in in the in canyons and then of course if they really would like us to send things to them either by email or by hard copy mail we would be happy to do that as well they would just need to contact us call me direct or send an email to communications at canyonsdistrict.org and we'll provide the information for them great thank you i knew there were several ways that we have our just a regular patrons uh mrs schill well and i would just like to point out i mean jeff has said a ton but there are these little icons at the bottom of the district page where you can click on these and get all these

224different things this is my personal favorite that i would love everyone to sign up for is board meeting summaries or connect canyons podcast or general news updates you can just click those unsubscribe so it's very easy okay great any other comments on this policy all right so let's move on to the next one okay so since our last gathering for the first reading of the school library media selection review policy the committee met and did make some additional changes to the policy based on the feedback so you can see those outlined hopefully in your documentation and i'll call them out specifically in the policy so in the board policy statement specifically we added a few edits there to acknowledge a school library is distinguishable from a public library we also added the definite a definition

225for a public school library to make it even more clear in that particular section we also made sure that in this particular statement we acknowledge the constitutional and first amendment principles regarding student access to expression of ideas and to affirm a student's constitutional rights that they are not shed at the schoolhouse gate so those areas were amended in the policy statement further down language was modified in the information regarding acquisition and collections section to be more clear about how patrons can access the online catalog for each of our schools that is now up and running in every school so that is not only um in our proposed policy but now in current practice as of the last couple of weeks and then we also added um some additional information around the self-exp self-selection provisions that

226would allow a student or a parent or legal guardian to place a hold for a student to be able to check out a book or to restrict access to a specific title and that is outlined in the self-selection section items two and three are those new additions to that part of the policy we also made some additional cosmetic changes as mentioned they maybe didn't come out well to the specific exhibits related to the school review and district review processes as well as just some clarity and language and consistency in the language of the policy itself and then an overview was also done to ensure that everything was readable and we tried to catch all typos i'm sure there are probably others uh luckily we have one more reading to catch those as well so those

227are the main changes that we've made since we last met okay questions comments feedback board on this one mr shiel okay so um i have a couple of questions and it's maybe for the whole committee um [Music] so and this was brought up in patreon comments but i had actually um thought about it myself when i was reading over this again today how are we defining the community values because i do think that is a little ambiguous anyway i'm just saying that maybe the committee can talk about that um and then also what was brought up also is the word deselection like where did you guys get that because they're saying that's not really used in library sciences so i'm just wondering if i re go ahead holly i i was going to ask if

228if gretchen wouldn't mind coming up because she has a great definition of that deselection she's our library media specialist and she explained it to us in our policy committee and it is a widely used term in library media so the term deselection is the opposite of selection so we are looking at a variety of stages of when materials enter our school library system so they are selected that's how they arrive in our system deselection is the opposite that's when they leave our section so they're weeded which is the act of like the process of deselecting okay great so you don't think it's it's not the correct word to use it's been synonymous with weeding but weeding is also like a vague term for the public so i we tried to use language that would be

229familiar or at least understandable to the public okay great thank you so like educators will know because we weed out books every year that like are overused that are you know printed back in 1958 and or they have been worn and we need to put new books on the shelves so we would no but she's correct in that the public when you say weeding out books they would you know if we said weeding out books people who are up there probably not right some i think there was a second question though [Music] community values daniel you got that yeah i feel if you'll notice in the uh policy the community values statement or term appears twice uh both of those in the first section which is you know the kind of board's philosophy if you

230will it's in board policy and this is in all of our policies where it's kind of a statement of the board philosophy but then the nuts and the bolts are afterwards so we don't really try to define because we don't really everything else you could say it's just an umbrella term and then everything else is kind of reflects but what we're about i think is libraries and schools is reflecting our community values and that's why i think it's in the board policies part of that but it's not down below or anything else it's not the criteria or other things so i i don't know that it's really as big an issue as some have seemed to feel like it is okay thank you that can i speak to that too just one moment um so

231uh we've talked a little bit about this before so the supreme court in a 5-4 decision in 1973 california versus miller set a three-pronged test to this right and so and it's hard it no different than pico that there was a lot of debate and uncertainty about what that actually means but justice warren berger issued this statement into this question about how do you apply contemporary community standards and in the in the three-prong test for obscenity to the basic average person whatever that means in the community appeals to the korean interest describes or depicts in a patently offensive way sexual conduct defined by applicable state law and lacks serious literary artistic political or scientific value the appeal to community standards in determining the first two prongs of the obscenity test and the assessment of the

232average person considering the work taken as a whole cemented the court's rejection of the hinckland test the test set out you know it goes on to another case but that's i mean to me that's that kind of helps at least give some guidance to that so looking at community standards and how that applies to state law and what the average person would take as patently offensive or or sexually um sexual conduct defined by applicable state law so i think that kind of helps gives us some guidance there and president may i speak to that too yes please so during this time when people have been writing us and explaining to us what they're finding in the books i have not been able to open my computer and open up what they say and the reason

233i cannot open up what they say and open up the pictures that they have sent us is because jordan's school district would fire me because in their opinion that is pornography and so so if if i as an employee of a district or even an employee even a board member here were to open up my computer to all of that and somebody would see that i had opened that i could be in a lot of trouble so when i started looking through all this and and thinking about it and it only took me to read two sentences somebody sent me and then i couldn't even read the rest okay just to be honest i am 68 years old when there was an advertisement about a bra on tv i remember my dad getting up shutting

234the tv off and saying when did we get pornography on tv now that was a long time ago but that's that was the feeling right and so yes we've come a long ways but um when we talk about sexual content sexual pornography and the thing about the words and i'm gonna go on this one is like we have pg i mean we have g-rated movies for a reason we don't want children to have a non-age-appropriate material we have pg-13 that parents have to sign to see those movies and so why then in my brain are we putting library books on that on the shelf that are probably our rated books and they paint pictures that are so more explicit than a movie like if you see a movie of two people in bed children will

235just go oh they're in bed because they don't know enough about it to know why they're in bed you know sleeping they're sleeping okay but if you read a book and then it explains all the details that go on with that married couple no matter whom they are there's a lot of there's a lot of content there that is not age appropriate for students and we're not banning books and we're not trying to stop people to have from having material that might help them find their identity or identify with their identity i really believe we're trying to find a place here where there's not we're not breaking the law there are not sexually explicit material on our shelves but there is material for our people of all ages of all kinds of all all differentiated

236everything that we have now nowadays and appropriate ones and so as i read this i keep thinking how do we define pornography because you know like if you're watching survivors they're running around in their swimming suits and their underwear and in my day and age that was pornography this day and age it seems like it's appropriate but that's that's going to be the the piece that i think we have to really work on it's how to stay within the law with the sexual content and the pornography part of it and be able to do it because if i can't open my computer and i can't see those pictures without getting fired as an educator then it can't it needs to be shelved somehow and parents who wanted i don't know go to go to the

237community library or order it on amazon i just don't know i i i've worked with this and fought with this for weeks trying to figure out how we how we manage is the pornography that bothers me not not not the groups that i'm gonna cry i'm so sorry not the groups of people it's the sex explicit stuff that i don't i don't want any you know i have 22 grandkids too and i just don't even want him to all of a sudden be seven years old taking a book off the board and reading those words and going oh my gosh people do that to that part of the body and then you know trying to explain it to them when they're trying to figure out who santa claus is is there any children in here

238sorry may i respond to that clarion so i just want to draw everybody's attention into the policy if you have it pulled up in front of you to the section around selection of library materials that begins with really identifying how purchases are selected within the library which the committee spent an awful lot of time really considering each of those 15 criteria and adding as a cornerstone of the selection being age appropriate based on emotional development ability level learning styles and intellectual development of the students for whom the materials are selected and requires a combination of five or more of the following criteria which is an increase in oversight and i think what you've heard tonight we have amazing librarian professionals in each of our secondary schools who all have master's degrees and specialized training to

239be able to really help make sure that that criteria is considered as they are selecting books you also heard that they inherit libraries so that not every book that is in the current library was purchased by any of these fantastic library professionals sitting with us tonight so i think if we can focus on what we do when we're selecting the materials and recognize that our libraries are not currently overflowing with pornography that i think would be helpful for tonight's discussion mrs nye bauer hi mr wrigley thank you i would also like to point out as a member of the policy committee one thing that we really did work on was that first tenet of age appropriateness and i know in patron comments it was mentioned that that's subjective but i believe in our exhibit section

240we have a definition of age appropriateness i know that's something we discussed in policy we have not okay curriculum policy uh it is in the exhibit of the curriculum policy but as far as the subject subjective nature of age appropriateness we have been grading all types of media for age appropriateness for decades and it is it is accepted as an objective um process and not subjective and you know in consideration of profanity you know um drug and alcohol use sexual content that we have this criteria that's basically on any platform that gives us any sort of age-appropriate label and also when building this policy uh you know the the the sacred responsibility as the school in what children are exposed to given if there's parent consent or not which we are bound to by usde

241rule and utah state laws so i think that you know we can rest assured that this is not subjective that this is objective and also i know there were some patron comments about uh marginalized groups and i think you'll find if you go on to our platform of all the different selections you can make in the library with your student we still have books with those topics and representing those groups it is really about the sexual content that was in the books which is why that was an administrative action not a board action of an administrative action and i think you bring up a really good point um holly that leading into the next session section again that we added information regarding the library acquisitions and collection that access to each school's library catalog online

242is a great opportunity for parents to sit with their children and identify the books that they feel are appropriate for their family and work on that together um mr wrigley had a comment sure appreciate the opportunity we've spent six hours so far on this it's probably the longest policies time on uh trying to enhance the current policy and answer pretty much all the questions that have been given to us as if any policy when we implement it it may come back again uh we learn from that if it works it doesn't work then we bring that policy back so this may not be the only time we ever see this policy it may be a year from now we'll come back and say there may be some issues we want to enhance in the policy

243i know there's been a lot of concerns and i've had a lot of emails from both sides i have a lot of parents i've talked with that are concerned that we're taking books off the shelf and some they're concerned we're not taking books off the shelf um and so we've been in this process trying to figure out how do we address that in this new policy because the previous policy was not very clear on that uh it didn't have that criteria we did add under board policy number three which sort of speaks to a lot of the the concerns of of just going in and pulling books off the shelf based upon one person's perception of of that that we have this philosophy and it pretty much lays it out i think in the policy

244that we came through here i think it's it's pretty clear and i think the the supreme court rules pretty clear on content is much different than than if we get into the sexual issues of the book that there may be content issues that i missed i don't want my kid reading that content but that's totally irrelevant because it goes into me oh i i think it's topic versus versus content topic oh okay okay i agree we corrected on that then uh so anyway i think we've put out some stuff it has quite a few things in there as far as the school review process the district review process it also picks it up if it's a school that also goes to a district where we didn't have that before if it's d d commissioned or

245whatever d selected yeah these yeah these selected we changed that last week so if we deselect it at the school level it goes up to the district level and then it also has a school challenge and a district challenge so it's even a higher level on that uh with a lot of input from parents and a lot of professionals on the process i don't know of any district that's doing this much i mean that is true this is pretty much the most anywhere in the districts we have we did have a question about why only two challenges why can't we have 15 or 30 or 40 challenges from a parent what was this discussion on that maybe the public does anybody really want to join me to address that that was my question too is

246why only two books prune individual and why do you have to wait three more years after that um that that's what my questions were to why why and how we came up with only two books per individual it's two books per year for the review and the three year is for a book that has been challenged and deemed that it stays on the shelf it can't be challenged again for three years so you can't continue re-challenging the same book the two years i think it was mostly just the two per year it was per volume plus it this is supposed to be mostly by for parents of students and stuff in the district we have correct 34 000 students and 64 000 parents probably or whatever so there's could be a lot of challenges coming

247out correct it's management and again knowing that the libraries are a choice place where students are not required to check out a specific title that students have again the option with their parents guidance to select books that make the most sense for their family and we have also put in a policy in here that the parent can let the library know that if there's a book that the parent they don't want to read they can sort of flag that book that is correct but i want you to know in elementary school the kids go and they just find a book that looks like a fun book to read and take it to their classroom and they start reading it and in many schools they're not allowed to take them home because they don't want them

248lost and those parents do not know what they're reading in the classroom and have no idea what the content of those books are and so i think we have to understand there's a whole difference between between elementary middle school and high school and what happens with books parents can still look on the elementary level aren't they their cards they can look at the catalog yes and again they look at the categories reassure that we do not have pornographic books in our elementary schools well okay um i think superintendent had a comment and then this is neither um from my perspective sitting in on the committee and being part of that discussion i feel it is very balanced it does protect our students first amendment rights to access the books that they would like to and

249need to at the same time and in that process it it does empower our school librarians i think it asks more of them than ever before in acquisition and weeding and deselection and gretchen and amber have been amazing at helping me understand that process at the same time it also broadens uh authority by school board members and the superintendent to ask for a review remember that's new to this and that's been silent in the current policy so there may only be two challenges uh per year for a parent that doesn't stop a parent from contacting a board member or the superintendent and asking for review and so i think there's multiple ways that balance first amendment rights at the same time allows for protection of our students and for me that's what i was seeking

250from the beginning thank you mrs nybauer then mr millerberg i just i i was actually going to say a lot of what dr robin said that we have other pathways if the parents unhappy with the review they can go to a a school board member or the superintendent or and ask for that um and to have that challenged also um and unless we've changed it since our last meeting isn't it it's two two books per school so if you know oh we changed that it's always been that it's at two books per individual per year we used to have it where it was per school so if a parent had some in high school and middle school we had a big discussion about that two meetings ago it wasn't in there it was a discussion

251of our interpretation and discussion of interpretation so i guess we have a little bit of vagueness there because we did talk about it is at per school it's per school it was in our last meeting it hasn't been changed two requests for a school level review at any school school review at event school level student attends which means if a parent has a school in elementary and met a child in elementary middle and high it's two per school level so that hasn't changed yes so that parent would have six thank you i didn't think that had changed so uh so that hasn't changed so that's another part of that um and then also i think we tried to really strengthen yes yes um you know just to be be clear on the terminology yes you

252were talking about if you're unhappy with the review go to the board no don't don't do that um there's challenges and the challenges really reflects the importance of our stakeholders and parents and patrons because the board doesn't have that option you can ask for a review and that's the end but for our parents and stakeholders our patrons they can come back and say well i i've asked for a review i disagree with the review i don't need to call my board member instead i get to challenge it and if you look at the exhibit that is a very robust uh challenge committee at the school level it has two parents on it at the district level it has three parents as well as an administrator as well as a teacher as well as a librarian

253where the review is librarians um so you know i think it really does reflect uh the importance and respect we have for our parents uh and and their ability to have these reviewed uh i think the two is a workability and and for schools um because the parents also have the other avenue of saying well you know i want this block for for my child there yes thank you so much for the clarification i misspoke i do know that is how it works if they don't if they're not happy with the review yes they can move it to the challenge also if they have already done two and they're worried about another book not only for their child but others they can contact the district or school board member just at the review level but

254not at the ch and that's what i meant to communicate yes and if they're not happy with review they move on to the challenge level also i i i guess i did make this suggestion in policy committee but it didn't make it on the chopping block but i the patron that talked about the ambiguity or the vagueness of age appropriateness i would submit that i would be interested in adding that as an exhibit to this library instructional materials collection to have that age appropriateness defined with those just those same you know um categories you can find in common sense media the way they rate movies any of those that are very objective so that it's clear and less vague are you not on that committee i am i just said i i mentioned that and

255so i had thought that it it was on there but it's not it's only in the added to the we added it to the curriculum definitions but we didn't add it in the exhibit of the library instructional material selections so my point is since we had a patron today say we feel like that's vague and ambiguous it wouldn't harm to have that in the existence that's what that's what i'm saying is if you're on the committee then when you go back to the committee meeting again because we're not passing this tonight then you can take it back to the policy committee and tell them that you would like to review that and put that in does that make sense it does i like to sometimes let our patrons know that i'm listening to their comments

256and have that for public record but thank you mr millerberg that on there we go um when the superintendent was uh speaking i looked at my notes and i had a fulcrum with a teeter-totter across it and i had first amendment on one side and protect students and community values on the other side and what we're really looking at is a balancing act um i've heard the comment tonight and it really kind of irks me to be honest with you that it's not as bad as what the kids can get at home off the internet surfing porn on their own and just because it's not as bad as doesn't make it good you know really it's not um and the other thing i've heard tonight over and over again is parents or not minority parents

257are stakeholders and they are probably the most important stakeholders we have in this equation because they are directly representing the kids the children the students that are being instructed um and you know let's make no mistake we all work for our district patrons you work for them i work for them uh and we're really they they pay us to be here one one concern i have is i kind of went off your policy thing there and i went over to the uh deal that says selection of a district level challenge committee in the selection process there and under the instructions i'm jumping down to point two on that it says three parent slash legal guardians shall be selected from a combined list of parent slash legal guardians comprised of membership of the school community council

258and ptsa i think those are great places to go because honestly if i'm a parent that really cares what's going on i am probably involved in the ptsa i'm probably trying to be on uh on the school community council but i don't see anything in there that protects either side from that body being stacked either pro or khan and that's a concern i have if i have some people that are on community council that are highly vocal and they are either opposed to or in favor of and they can swing the vote because i would like to have a representative body coming from the uh parent side and i would also like to see and maybe it's in here and i just haven't read it closely enough on that committee the challenge committee i would

259like to see the numbers just as our community councils are stacked uh to where the majority come from parents i would like to see that community or this challenge committee stacked to where there are more parents on it than district people employees do you want like a number like you know on school site councils or school community councils they have four parents three teachers you know our four parents and three staff members that's that's what i'm saying i would like it stacked in that same way on the review committee i i just want to point out that when we talk about this idea of stacking the committee whether it's in one direction or another the committee is still going to be reviewing the book in relation to the specific criteria that the policy outlines so

260that becomes the protection for the policy for that focus discussion when they're reviewing a challenge or even a review well and i under i understand that but your feelings on a specific topic in the book may not be the same as mine your feelings may not be the same as the parents that are selected and these are public schools that's why i would like to have and you know maybe stacking is a bad term to use but i would like to have the balance favor the parents on that committee for review so that's my two cents worth thanks that's that's feedback that the committee can can discuss okay thank you for that um other comments or feedback on this mrs hoax so mon i actually think it's a good idea i'm just curious if we

261need to give clear direction to the policy committee of what that looks like so i know currently the sec um and somebody can correct me if i have this wrong but it's two parents beyond total faculty members i think it's one but is it just one it's two okay so if we were to do it then we would need to clarify i mean because currently we have what two faculty one librarian who else is on that committee well at both levels i'm curious about the numbers of what that would require in terms of how many parents would sit on committee and this also draws from ptsa yeah so it would be five parents versus three [Music] and five and 5. [Music] okay that gets to be a lot of parents and i wonder if that

262becomes very unwieldy in a committee and it's a big committee it's a big committee and and one of the things that needs to be considered is the timeliness of the committee being able to accomplish the task that's asked of them so and anywhere from scheduling a meeting to getting the materials read and just a little historical knowledge just a reminder of how hard it is to get people to even serve on the uh sex ed committee that they don't have to read a whole entire book we're just just saying it's uh mrs schill so i'm just wondering what the policy committee well how they came on those numbers i mean i just like to understand that piece of it before we make changes we didn't change these from the original policy am i remembering that

263correctly so those those have been in the policy historically for both the school and district challenge okay good to know and and the we did have a little bit of conversation about um looking to parents that are serving on the sec and the pta because not only are they involved and um and but they also because of their involvement they're they're um representative role in in their leadership there at the school level as representatives yes um let's see we've got a few mr wrigley and then mrs schill and then mrs arnold yeah i i appreciate a lot of the comments but sometimes we get into minutia the reason is is if we have some really good criteria and we're having people that are professionals and parents they're sort of raising the arms swear to the

264criteria that they'll be fine is if i put three or four parents or five parents on do i also have to do the same thing and check the political thing where the staff are coming from i have to be sure that you know i mean we have to at some point say that we trust the people that are going to be on this committee otherwise you're we're now into the same thing on parent and we've got okay we've got our parents making sure our parents are are equal but now we want to make sure the staff are i mean the criteria is when i get into court i have to follow what the laws and based upon that i have to make that decision i may and i've been on several juries i may not

265agree but if that's what the criteria is i judge that based what it is and go for so i don't know i think we could we can get into large and huge committees and then have to come back on the staff and say well we really need to determine to stay where the staff's coming from too and these are all professionals and the parents that want to do this i assume will come on this and say we agree if we're on this committee to use this criteria and not how personally we want to do it but what the criteria is and there'll be some discussion like you're on a jury and then you'll vote so i don't know sometimes i think it gets a little carried away on some of this we can we could

266go crazy on making sure that everybody's equal representation totally there needs to be some trust left in education um thank you mrs arnold and then mrs schill so with that in mind can we take the principal off the list because no leave it i'm just thinking i'm i'm seriously thinking like you know if there's like six books in a year the principal's stuck reading six books and meeting with all those people to discuss the books and they are already bombarded with so much to do so that's what i was going to go for or designate because of the fact that between all their ieps and all their everything's i you know i you know anyway yes designated thank you that sounds good thank you mr shiel um i do agree with that so good idea

267there um just because yeah principles are super busy so i i have had an experience years ago being asked as a sec member to read some stuff and i was the only one who actually did it so i'm just saying i i think it's better to keep it small and especially for having multiple books i mean secs are going to be reading books all the time then also so anyway i i agree with just leaving it as it is and one other thing what happens when the parent doesn't want to read sexual explicit books i'm sorry there are people out here i got through two sentences and had to stop so then we have i mean we have the policy it's in place and and what happens mr millerberg i still feel that as a

268public school system the input from the public is very important and and that's why i would favor having a majority coming from the parents the other part of it is if i can remember where i was going with this give me a second it'll come back to me okay i'll try to get it done before the snow flies okay it was a i'm happy to take that back in policy committee to discuss further i did a lot of research with different districts across the state and there are other districts who do have more parents on that committee and this is the other the other point i wanted to make is i'm interested in what the selection process is hypothetically i have a principle that sits on that that is in the sec meeting and the

269principle favors keeping a specific book in the library and if the principal is one that says i want you and i want you to represent the parents on the committee uh and he selects people with his same point of view slash her same point of view um then i've i've got a poor representation somewhere in there even if it's only the parent on the sec or only the parents from the ptsa that are voting to say we would select these individuals to go then i would feel it would be more representative and i don't see that delineated in the selection process that's a good point we can make that clarification we did have that exactly yes and we had that exact discussion in the policy committee which i brought up because i had read it

270in another district that that the parents decided in pta and scc so it was parent nominated okay for the pa and i i think we can be more clear with that yeah i just didn't see that delineated yeah that's a good point okay thank you and again just pointing out that whether it's a school district review or a school or district challenge those 15 criteria will make up the clear process as to how that decision is made regardless of who is on that committee and even our united states supreme court seldom comes back 9-0 i i understand i'm just we have policies that guide us and i i just want to again commend the policy committee that put a lot of thought into those criteria to really help provide that guidance when times are tough

271mrs schill sorry one more thing but i have also been on scc for like 20 years what happens is the principal will say who wants to do this and then stan no one raises their hand for a long time until someone finally raises their hand it's not a stacking thing anyway that's just my experience okay any other feedback on this policy i think okay thank you we'll we'll be bringing this back at a future board meeting so that concludes item 8b and now we'll move on to item 8c introduction a proposal for adoption of new district-wide instructional materials amber roderick landward isd director yes hello again and good evening now good night i'm excited to be here for our annual curriculum adoption proposal as president mentioned earlier during the instructional materials curriculum uh or instructional

272materials policy update we started this process in 2019 and it was exactly for the reasons as president mentioned to really increase that transparency and consistency but overall that predictability and one of the things that we have heard from teachers prior to this procedure being in place was just the unknown of when a curriculum would be available and how much time they would have to engage in the process before they had to implement so those procedures that are in practice and that are now going to be reflected in policy do identify a specific purpose that gives at least 12 and preferably 18 months from initiation of the process to implementation so again that there's plenty of time for that discussion so with it being the first reading of three we in the past have typically just

273given a brief overview of all of the proposals that are on the table so that you have time then over the next couple of readings and again that six to eight week process to be able to review the information so that we can gather feedback from our stakeholders and so that you have the information you need to take action in that third reading so as a reminder the procedures for a district-wide curriculum adoption actually are a 24-step process but the first 17 are put in place before we come to this point where we make the proposal to you all and i wanted to also note that with the policy that you just reviewed for instructional materials that procedure has in fact stayed the same we've cleaned up a little bit of language and i think

274um mrs nybar brought up that we did add a step and that is that the board would have access to those materials and the overview and all of the information tubes prior to the first reading so that you have time to be prepared to this point and as you start to get questions as that information becomes public so what you receive in your board docs information is all of the documentation related to those first 17 steps of the 24 step process as well as an overview that highlights the rationale for the adoption a summary of the evidence from that checklist curriculum features for the curricula what set this particular curriculum apart from others and then any limitations knowing that no curriculum or program is perfect so that's organized in a narrative form for review and

275again all of these documents are available on board docs and public for all so for this year's annual proposal we have three proposals coming to you one in chemistry one in physics and then one in elementary english language arts i just want to highlight who these adoptions impact so in high school chemistry that's about 10 to 12 teachers that would be implementing this new curriculum physics would be the same about 10 to 12 teachers and for elementary english language art says this is a kindergarten through fifth grade adoption we currently have 777 teachers that would be impacted by this and then of course every elementary student so what i'll do is walk through just quickly each of the proposals in terms of the overview knowing that you have more information and we've got more time

276to discuss over the next six weeks and i trust that you will stop me if you have questions along the way so you'll see some similarities in the chemistry and in the physics proposals the rationale for moving forward with this proposal are the adoption by our utah state board of education of the new science engineering education standards also known as the seed standards which means the materials that we have in place though they are limited and not necessarily widely used have become outdated because of the advances in those standards and the expectations for students with regards to chemistry so the curriculum committee that consisted of a representative from each of the five high schools spent time reviewing and are recommending chemistry dimensions by hooton mifflin harcourt also known as hmh and in addition to the

277highlights that you have in your overview i also wanted to highlight some of the real specific comments from our teachers about what set this curriculum apart from the other and quite frankly with both the chemistry and the physics the top two were pretty much even so just again splitting hairs with some of those unique differences based on the course with the chemistry curriculum and the uh dimensions through hmh the teachers really felt like the specific phenomenon i identified in the scope and sequence were superior over the other programs that they reviewed they also really appreciated the extensive engineering in that particular curriculum because that's not necessarily as common and it's not necessarily something that all of our teachers um have extensive professional development or schooling in so to be able to have that resource to

278be able to support those components of the standards was something that was seen as a real asset the teachers also really liked the student consumable that came with chemistry and thought that was a nice addition in both the chemistry and the physics you'll notice in your overview that they are compatible with canvas in terms of a full integration they have great scaffolds in terms of level readers to be able to support students at varying reading levels still with the complex information and there's an online tutoring component with the digital platform the program also highlights the best practices in chemistry education and focusing specifically on those pedagogy principles that our district and our teachers have come to implement regularly in terms of integrating reading and writing and collaboration more regularly the professional learning that the chemistry

279teachers and our curriculum specialists in isd have talked through in terms of what they would need mind you they've had access this curriculum since the review process given even though there were only five on the committee all of the teachers who teach chemistry have had access to be able to give input so they've been digging in uh one in-person day right now is what is tentatively planned or what would be planned and that would be offered in june or august so that teachers have choice as to when they can access that professional learning the instructional guides formerly known as curriculum maps but will be adjusted with the new policy will be published in may which will also help guide that scope and sequence and support for beginning implementation in the fall and then as is

280with all professional learning particularly with an implementation like this ongoing coaching from the school-based coach and our science specialists will be available and deployed any questions about chemistry any questions about this one i i had one question on the student consumable is that like a workbook or is it that is my understanding okay i can give you more it's not it's not a digital thing it's an actual it's an action yeah it's a physical print copy and i can outline excuse me um the integration of that more specifically as well yeah um i guess because i don't think it's on the slides i think it was on your other documents about the cost of that so maybe could you bring that information back as well and i have that now actually kind of the one

281time and the ongoing okay so yep the um what we would recommend is that we purchased a seven year subscription for both the physics and the chemistry because then that puts us in line with upping those subscriptions with the biology and earth science so we'd be negotiating um once action is taken and the last quote that we had would be roughly about 189 students or excuse me 189 per student for the chemistry and given our current enrollment and that seven year subscription it would bring us around about a 268 000 total purchase for that seven year subscription for chemistry again still working on some of those negotiation pieces so that could and that would include the consumable for seven years worth okay and the digital license for students and teachers thank you any other questions

282on this one okay physics you can see there the rationale is the same the seed standards were new and introduced for all science courses in 2019 so here we are the curriculum that the committee has recommended is inspire physics which is also um through the same line that we adopted for biology and for earth science while this curriculum had some similar features to the chemistry which is a different publisher in terms of the ability to scaffold the committee felt and particularly the teachers really felt that the text was much more rigorous with this particular curriculum and the embedded scaffolds with those leveled readers and strategies were also much more comprehensive particularly the language supports that were available as additional resources for our multilingual learners so giving them access was seen as a a huge asset

283and step towards making all of our curriculum more accessible the professional learning for the physics teachers would be the same as chemistry they've felt like one day of time together in a professional learning environment with the specialist and the publisher would give them the tools that they need particularly because they've had access to the curriculum and then would have access to ongoing coaching this particular curriculum is a little bit more expensive for those subscriptions coming in at around 222 dollars per student and again negotiation is not final and given our enrollment we'd be looking at about a 200 000 price tag for that seven year subscription any questions about any questions on this one [Music] nope thank you keep going hey going okay elementary english language arts um this seems to be one that has

284caught most folks attention uh likely because it's impacting so many students and every teacher at the elementary level so the rationale for adopting is time i mentioned the timeline that usbe put in place for standards revision those standards for ela are in the process of being revised and from what i understand we'll be up for public review and comment um at the start of the calendar year for that 90 day review so that they can be ready to be released by the end of the school year into the summer those new standards have gone deeper in terms of the foundation standards by requiring a deeper context for phonemic awareness and phonics and not just in depth but also in breadth by adding foundation standards to fourth and fifth grade where they have not typically been

285in the past so that's a significant component that is new for the standards reading street also is expiring so we were informed in 2019 that it was sun setting and that print materials would no longer be available what they had in their warehouse at the time was all that they were selling so we've been actually without replacements for the print materials that have been needing replacement for a couple of years now our digital license is also expiring and they will not allow us to renew it so that ends after the school year with no option to renew that unfortunately and that comes into play when we talk about implementation and then finally the final component for a rationale for adoption is what we shared with you in october in terms of our student achievement data

286in reading we have been stagnant for a number of years now and particularly in the early grades one out of every three of our students is below benchmark and those students who are identified as below benchmark in first grade we are seeing them stay there through middle school so we definitely have a sense of urgency to look at how we can best support our teachers with providing the best instruction for our students so that they can be successful readers and learners in order to do this we have worked with the committee that included 53 educators 39 of them clarin were teachers so every school was represented with at least one teacher we made sure that representation with the teachers not only included every school but every program that grades were evenly represented we had dual

287immersion gifted and talented teachers representation again from all of our schools and demographics so it was a rather large committee and they worked their tails off reviewing these curricula over a couple of days and then continue to offer feedback and be the spokespeople in their school with questions their work resulted in a double adoption so the recommendation is that we adopt the 2023 version of wonders which is brand new and you can access that online through the code onboard docs that this curriculum be used to teach the reading writing and speaking and listening standards of the english language art standards and that 95 core phonics be used to teach the foundation standards 95 may sound familiar because our schools are using their tier 2 intervention for um reading so it's something that will align core

288through intervention and is even now embedded in our special education instruction so i'll walk you through the highlights of both wonders and 95 core phonics so one of the things that came up over and over again in the review from the teachers was the rigor of wonders which they loved and also recognized this is this is what our students need but this is definitely more rigorous than what they are used to and that rigor came in every aspect of those reading components and writing components the other piece that set wonders apart from the other curricula where the rich and diverse text sets and so text is a plentiful and not only is it diverse in genre it is diverse in complexity for each of the text sets as well as in diverse in terms of

289representation both in characters and in authors the reading routines also mirror what we've been teaching in our professional learning for the last several years in terms of close reading and structured classroom discussion they are embedded so rather than teachers having to add those in they have access to see those within every lesson and then this program incorporates daily writing which is something that was uh very weak in reading street that we've had to supplement and our teachers have um been telling us that for years and it connects directly to what they've been reading so again that that connection has been um continue continually seen as an asset in this particular program in addition to that writing occurring every day the rubrics for students to be able to start self-assessing and for teachers to be able

290to give consistent feedback are also embedded so it's not something that they have to find elsewhere right now those rubrics are in our curriculum maps and on the web because they're not embedded into the curriculum and this gives them the opportunity to access them right in their resources and in their curriculum i know i'm going over a lot of highlights but there were actually there were so many things that set this program apart from the others the other one that i just want to really call out is the supports that are embedded in every lesson for our language learners they are so extensive and organized by newcomer to advanced where you are in terms of that wida designation if you are a multilingual learner that we would not likely have to adopt an additional supplementary

291program to provide supports for english language development for our students that is a huge plus because that means one less curriculum program that our teachers who are serving students who are multilingual learners would have to learn adapt and integrate into what they're doing with core instruction and while we're talking about differentiated supports wonders had a multitude but it's one of the best that we have seen for providing differentiated supports for students who are above level both in terms of their access to different types of text but also with some suggestions for supporting students who are gifted and talented and need some extensions for their continuing to challenge them beyond the mastery that they may already have and then finally the digital platform has a full integration component with canvas which supports the work that dr

292robbins uh highlighted of our teachers in terms of their digital teaching and learning practices that they're incorporating and speaking of those digital practices the digital tools within the platform are very user-friendly and flexible for teachers teams and even at the district level there are some components that we can put in place to complete ahead of time for our teachers so that they don't have to do that okay in talking with board leadership i had mentioned that wonders also is widely implemented in utah and so the suggestion was made that we highlight specifically who in our state and in talking with the wonders representative today he remembers and i can confirm this for our next meeting that it's approximately 65 of utah elementary students are being taught the english language arts standards with a version of

293wonders um what we're proposing is again that 2023 version it's brand new the districts have not implemented that particular version it's not significantly different from 2020 but again i can bring those differences back to you if that is necessary as well the 95 core phonics which is part of this dual adoption some of the things that set it apart were the extensiveness in terms of the breadth and depth in which the curriculum organizes the scope and sequence for phonemic awareness and phonics as well as spelling and early decoding it's the most robust program that we have seen and we really feel like this will be a game changer for our students really becoming completely fluent and being able to apply each level of their phonemic awareness and phonics understanding to be competent readers it also

294aligns to those standards that um are coming out from usbe which we have been a part of those committees that's why we know that we have access to those early and then finally and uh perhaps most importantly our teachers have been working their guts out to um really master the science of reading and integrate that into their pedagogy through the usbe letters early literacy project this curriculum aligns with everything that they're learning which means that they'd be able to maintain what they've learned put it into practice and also wouldn't need as much training because they're getting it right now let me keep going good okay i feel like everybody's ready to run out into the snow and i'm like holding everybody back so given the conversations that we have had over the last couple of

295months around social emotional learning it caught all of our eye when there were social emotional components within the wonders program so i wanted to just highlight what those are so that we can be really clear about what it is and what it isn't prior to the business meeting starting i put on each of your chairs a yellow folder that looks just like mine that has some specific resources so that you could have a print copy of what you would see in the teacher's edition if you had a print copy of that because what i'm going to show you is actually not super easy to find in the digital platform and so i want to just make sure that we call it out there and you have access to that so wonders has organized a component

296of their curriculum into what they call teaching the whole child and they believe that teaching the whole child really encompasses three things that they feel are important for embedding into this curriculum that is so important in an elementary school and that is habits of learning you can see there that being the biggest circle and the key to what they think is teaching the whole child because it focuses on specific goals for learning and attitudes for learning social emotional learning in terms of um some of those social skills to be able to master and practice particularly as it relates to learning content in english language arts and then a component that they call classroom culture that really focuses on collaboration so when you look at the curriculum and i think all of you have a teacher's

297edition print copy that should be really fun reading over the next couple of weeks you'll see some of these components in the print copy at the beginning of every unit again you really have to do some digging to find it online those habits of learning are really targeted towards what we call in our academic framework teacher clarity and focusing on learning intentions and so you'll see those represented throughout the curriculum k through 5 in terms of those learning goals for each of the lessons the classroom culture is typically signified with collaboration and then a specific embedded component mostly in the second through five curriculum and related to writing the social emotional learning focuses on key areas that support learning development and it looks a little different in each grade level for the wonders curriculum so

298for kindergarten and first grade those habits of learning and classroom culture again two of those three circles for the whole child are referenced throughout the teacher's edition as i mentioned they are not mentioned in any of the student anthology because again that's a teacher clarity component and routines for setting up your classroom of collaboration the social emotional learning for kindergarten and first grade has some optional lesson plans for kindergarten those lessons are available each week and for first grade they're available during weeks one and four of each unit the lessons are organized into three key components what they call engage together explore together and connect the learning and you have a specific examples of a lesson plan in your yellow folder that you can review i won't get into it i know that we're pressed

299for time and then there's a key component within that lesson plan that reminds the teacher of the importance of connecting to family and then that comes with a specific letter that goes home every week with the information about the letter including the video and any um information that would be part of this lesson plan in the first grade curriculum because there is not a lesson plan every week they have what they call a teachable moment moment at the beginning of each week's overview that just reminds teachers that there are sel videos available if they want to integrate those the way these are organized in the teachers edition is i was sharing this with clarion today it's very interesting so it's at the very beginning for building background of the lesson but it is not listed

300in the actual overview of the lesson or the unit plan because it said it really is more of a connection than a critical component of the program so you'll notice in the overview i actually outlined that the sel component would not be something that we would be putting into our instructional guide for initial implementation that is something that you are welcome to direct us to consider as you make decisions about our next steps for social emotional learning for second through fifth grade it's even lighter in terms of uh again what i'm calling is a social emotional connection learning connection not really even a curriculum so using that same three component model of the whole child the habits of learning in the classroom culture are referenced throughout the teachers edition and you'll see that both online

301and in the print copy and then at the beginning of each unit there is an sel connection that identifies the tech sets for that unit and a focus that they have called out in their social emotional skills so it could be curiosity it could be confidence so they've got a list of those there as well and i've got that in your handouts and then what they have available but it is again buried in the digital platform so it's not easily accessible which is why you have a copy here is their partnership with character lab and many of you are familiar with angela duckworth and her work on grit character lab is actually her nonprofit organization where they have curated resources to be able to support skills and developing that social emotional learning really geared towards

302um i wouldn't say it's geared towards kids it's geared more towards adults and so then the process by which wonders has it connected is for the teacher to be able to learn about it to be able to model it to be able to celebrate it and enable it to happen through that implicit modeling versus an explicit lesson so that is what the social emotional learning connection looks like in second through fifth grade this graphic here shows where those character lab connections can connect to each text set in each unit again it's an optional piece this particular graphic is not even in the print or the digital teaching edition it's something that has to be searched as a separate resource so there are not any explicit sel lessons for second through fifth grades adam president i

303was going to ask if we could just close the meeting early and review all this material and come back to it the weather is really really bad out there yeah and i was just getting we need to prolong i'm getting some reports so so um do you want to just summarize is there anything that's not on these slides because i know these slides are available on board docs as well for the public that you would like to no just the only thing i just want to highlight is that the draft of the implementation plan is in fact a draft we met with the curriculum committee one more time to begin soliciting their ideas for professional learning uh loud and clear they wanted choice so we'll be working on that more extensively as well as working

304with principals to talk more about the implementation rollout in terms of with it being a double adoption um some teachers are requesting some leeway with when we adopt one versus the other so we can talk about that at the next meeting and what the principal's recommendation is as well okay and the teachers have access to the books teachers have access to uh sample print copy as well as the full digital okay mr wrigley has a quick comment just really quickly if the why understand this teaching of the whole file is more character head focused yeah and it's not council approved no so it doesn't meet the capital criterias or whatever nope it does not meet the castle criteria so there is a a reference statement i think was published a couple of years ago that

305is embedded in the teacher resource library that has mcgraw-hill's you know view on social emotional learning they reference castle as a research body and then they identify their seven principles of social-emotional learning that are not um the same line with castle okay um mrs nybaur can we consider that next meeting is the first reading because i have a ton of questions and we've just heard the presentation but yeah um so so what we'll do is um i mean this is the first reading um so but um what we'll do is we'll we'll bring it back and then if there's still questions or comments and the board wants more time you know i mean we'll just take it one step because we weren't able to discuss and i'm happy we'll take it one step at a

306time and now and then um privately that would help yeah yeah so yeah we're not going to rush it i mean there there will be time and so just to be clear um these materials are available to teachers to the public as well as to board members and we can take time review them and we'll come back at the next time and have opportunity to discuss and have questions and then also communications folks will be sending out information to parents in the meantime to let them know that this is something the board is considering and how to access the information on that so okay thank you i think yeah we are getting reports that it's pretty the roads are pretty bad out outside and so we um we will go ahead and end our meeting

307um board members is there anything you want to say in addition um i think superintendent has a quick message just real quick yeah so tomorrow will be a remote learning day we're going to pivot we've got 13 000 plus residents without power in sandy in the granite area and it looks like snow is not predicted to quit until around 6 00 a.m it's 7 a.m but the temperature is going to fall below freezing between three and five so obviously it's going to be challenging for our buses at that point along with the power outage and the um not being sure that we'll have power in our buildings in the morning we'll move to remote learning tomorrow so that communication is going out right now yeah it's it's it's not good so thank you okay thank

308you mr millerberg yeah i had a few other things but this one will happen probably before we get together again the director of the usba mets friday number one takeaway is the annual conference will be january 6 through 8. make sure you have that on your calendar changes in bylaws and handbook changes will be there they've been emailed out and they will be voted on at the conference so you'll want to come prepared for that and the legislative day on the hill is combining the district day and the student day and everything into one and if you'll mark your calendar for february 22. all right thank you for that information and everybody else left within here yeah so yes so yeah thank you all and i just want to um wish everyone safe travels and

309i'll put this on the record and wish mr miller broke happy what's left of it oh thank you [Music]