Board Meeting

001to how this task force kind of came to be in 2018 after the legislative session the legislature had passed senate bill which amended a previous bill and instituted the early literacy program that had specifics around goals that the districts had to meet as well as accountability and a required assessment to be able to demonstrate uh proficiency in the early grades that directors and administrators to really dig deep into reading achievements at the district level to again requiring districts to meet the requirements in the new senate bill 194 and the interactors and administrators about early literacy in our state at that time they also introduced the utah k-12 literacy framework that outlines specific evidence-based requirements for instruction in early literacy both for core instruction and intervention and then they also published the utah state board of

002education dyslexia handbook looking specifically at how our state defines dyslexia how that fits into a multitude of system of support and supports for families and students and teachers occurring on reading particularly early literacy at the same time we were also noticing a little bit of stagnation in our own data we were receiving some feedback from parents of students who have dyslexia requesting some additional support and information we also were receiving a lot of feedback from our educators both at the elementary duplication and alignment of services for all of our students in core instruction in tier 2 instruction and then in specialized services in special education and in english language development time for our multilingual learners so there we just had a lot of forces combining that really pushed us as a district to really start

003thinking about how we are serving all of our students with reading and so we decided to form a cross-departmental collaborative group and we called ourselves a task force to create a sense of urgency so it wasn't necessarily an officially deemed task force but we we all felt this sense of urgency to really work hard together to make sure that we were working collectively to serve all of our students and also removing barriers for schools so that they could better serve our students so that's kind of how this group came together the group consisted of representation from student advocacy and access special education instructional supports and then we had kind of a loop of feedback happening from our schools with principals and coaches so the purpose of our work together was as i mentioned to really

004align our district supports for students who are experiencing reading difficulties and we were looking at both elementary and secondary and we outlined some key tasks that we really wanted to focus on to make what we wanted to have occur in terms of that streamlining process work and and first it was looking at our interventions to streamline those pieces evaluate our current continuum of curriculum resources and assessment practices to see again if there were barriers there and to really assess what was working for which students and why develop a common vocabulary and instructional recommendations related to dyslexia across departments and uh part of that was the feedback that we were receiving from schools was that they were getting some different messages from each department in in just just slight differences but enough to to confuse people

005that we wanted to really make sure we cleaned up and then finally to spend some time designing collaborative structures for how we can work together to deliver professional development for our teachers in the future so as i mentioned the membership included folks from every department we officially started meeting in late winter early spring of 2019 and then it kind of has just evolved over the last couple of years we continue to meet and this has just become a new normal for how we collaborate around curriculum and instruction across departments so like i said it we named it a task force to create a sense of urgency to bring us together and accomplish some things but we haven't stopped meeting and we don't plan on stopping meeting we just see this as our new normal for

006collaboration so since that time um both in talking about developing the task force and then up until now once we started meeting more formally i just wanted to highlight some of the things that have been put into place so we spent a lot of time across departments aligning our vocabulary and our key reference resources to align messaging so again when we say uh dyslexia across all of our departments we're describing it the same way when we talk about uh what works for our students when it comes to reading difficulties we're all leaning on the same research and and we had a great time really geeking out and digging into both past and current research related to reading and dyslexia in general we added resources to the curriculum map to more explicitly define the science of

007reading we realized that there were some pretty key pieces that we weren't putting in every single map so we corrected that and those resources included specific information about dyslexia and connections to that utah state handbook we also implemented a phonemic awareness screener because that was not something that was commonplace in our elementary schools and dyslexia is looking at a continuum of issues related to reading that are primarily rooted in phonological awareness and so we really felt like that was a gap that we uncovered as we dug in to what was available and what was needed we were able to evaluate the effectiveness of our interventions in-house so at that time we had a menu of recommended interventions that schools could select from and put them in place depending upon their resources and the needs of

008their students we were able to do some observations examine the data and really look at what was working best for our students and then we developed a process and protocol for aligning interventions better to student need what that led to was us really looking at that list of interventions and even paring down the number of interventions to focus on the interventions that work best for students particularly students with dyslexia and what the utah state board of education handbook referenced repeatedly was the connection to interventions that are both evidence-based and rooted in what has become known in the dyslexia and reading community as horton-gillingham-based interventions and orton-gillingham-based interventions are interventions that incorporate a very explicit scope and sequence and focus on phonemic awareness while also incorporating very specific routines for a multi-sensory approach to be able

009to support students in developing those concrete opportunities to develop their phonemic awareness that lead into then phonics and ultimately reading connected text and comprehension so we assessed all of our interventions for those components and what that led to is the list that we have here a stronger implementation district-wide of these interventions so you can see we have the early reading intervention system that's actually been something we've been doing for a while it has continued to prove to be effective for closing gaps for students who are coming into kindergarten at risk as has k-pals what has evolved and been implemented now district-wide particularly since our experience with covid is implementing 95 group that's the name of the intervention for uh first through fifth grades and some key features and with the intervention uh in special education

010with some components added for intensity saxon phonics was also adopted through this research because simultaneously midvale was also going through their turn around and we were working closely with their team to identify supports that made the most sense for their population and then we had a systemic implementation of read 180 and system 44 at our secondary level and this was a really big shift and win for our students and for our schools because we pooled all of our resources in terms of personnel and funding for curriculum to adopt these programs for special ed el and students struggling with just general reading difficulties which allowed the schools more flexibility in how they schedule and provide those services and then making sure students could go in and out as needed depending on their progress and so that

011that was a really big and we've seen some incredible gains at our secondary level with the implementation of this that occurred beginning in 2019 and then finally just as as a coveted response but because we already had this work group in place and so many of these systems coming online over the last couple of years it became really easy for us to layer in the enhanced core reading instruction which is an embedded core intervention that has those multi-sensory components and explicit phonemic awareness components into whole group instruction and we put that in place this year as part of our coveted response so a lot a lot has been going on um those are all the things but to actually get those things to translate into practice and gains in student outcomes professional learning was a

012big part of our work together and so we immediately put in place after digging into our data through those usbe trainings and that bigger focus we started inviting our kindergarten through second grade teachers to training they attended a three part series it was offered in 2018 2019 it was scheduled last year but as you all know not a lot of in-person professional development was happening for those academies we hired a consultant her name is lynn she has been and is uh the president of the rocky mountain dyslexia association and is a guru in the dyslexia world and she worked with our primary teachers to really support them in understanding again that science of reading what it means to serve students with dyslexia and how to incorporate routines into their classroom our middle and high school

013teachers also went through intensive training beginning when we adopted read 180 and they started participating in a modified version of language essentials for teachers of reading and spelling it's also known as letters and then during this time we also sent a number of our specialists in the instructional supports department and the special ed department to become trainer of trainers in this letters comprehensive professional development around the science of reading so those are some of the the key pieces in terms of professional learning for all of our students and amber we have a question so mrs shell would like to ask something it's not really a question but i just want to tell you thank you because over the years just not a ton but i've had parents always come to me and say the district

014doesn't do anything for kids with dyslexia anyway so i just want to say thank you so much for all this work and i really hope that i don't have anyone else come and say that to me now that we've done all this work so thank you i think one of the things that that we learned in response to that because um often the people that would go to you would end up getting sent to me and as we would talk with parents and and meet with parents it was often uh what we found is that we were not being explicit as a district with our teachers around how all of these practices and structures that we put in place are best practices for serving students who have reading difficulties including dyslexia but we hadn't been

015explicit about that and really used that term very much and so it was a good opportunity for us to clarify vocabulary be more explicit about how what we have in place serves and then continue to layer in more specific interventions that was great thank you bauer thank you i'm really excited that canyons is doing this and i actually have that book and that the state put out and i've been reading it and a question i had is in this development with the teachers have we considered also having parents fill out a little survey once we flag a child i know i i had a son that had difficulties with reading and i went to a lot of different resources within the district to different elementary schools and a lot of times a parent has that

016kind of little intuition or hunch something's not right here a lot of times before the teacher does so i'm just wondering about that and kind of is there any when we're pulling together these resources um parents and advocates of parent you know a parent advocacy group who have kids who have had dyslexia or are reading disabilities because i think there's a lot we can learn from that in kind of being able to detect it early on because i know i had all these issues and i was going to teachers and they kept saying no everything's fine and i'm saying no i've got five others and something's different that have gone before right and and so um so just a question about that and then one other question yes um very good question so one of

017the things that we've actually been doing in in canyons well actually it was one of the first things we did as a new school district was put in place uh screening mechanisms to identify students who were at risk for reading failure right at the beginning of the school year and we continue with those practices and they're actually now state mandated practices so we screen students three times a year as you know with the acadians reading there's a series of literacy measures within each grade that each student participates in those uh continue to be the best predictors for students who are struggling with reading and allows us to flag students very early and immediately get them into intervention within that process parents are notified of their students where they're falling on that and then the supports

018that will be provided and that ongoing progress there are students maybe perhaps the situation like you're talking about in your own family holly where students are not necessarily showing up as below benchmark yes but still continue to have reading difficulties and so that's where a lot of the professional learning became critical because we could teach teachers what that looks like in students who are not necessarily showing up below on a test but other ways to monitor that progress to be able to identify what might still be happening in their brains with regards to reading and how they can be supported so that's the teacher side of it um where those flags are for parents it it still is going to be in how the student is performing commensurate with their peers in terms of that

019process of when a parent would get called in to be asked additional questions and so i think that that's just kind of an ongoing case-by-case basis with the student and the teacher and when they're calling them in so i guess to summarize there's not a specific protocol in place for the kids who are scoring on benchmark that are struggling because those are so much more nuanced and how we would problem solve those kiddos i would love for us to look at that and and being able to engage the parents because unfortunately sometimes you have a really bright child absolutely that has this little and there's a spectrum right and has something that's just not quite firing and it's very hard to detect as a teacher when you have so many kids in the classroom if

020there's a way that we can be able to reach out to parents and say you know say in first grade you know and and what's normal for parents to know you know at what age is it not normal for the d's and b's to be back you know substituted and things like that just it's just some awareness with different reading um you know reading problems that they may have and then you know i just think it'd be great to tap into the parents as a resource because when you're living it as a parent and you're saying okay now what now what do i do um i just think that might be really helpful another thing is a lot of our are reading now with the sight words and word chunks and the recognition and a

021lot of times these kids that have reading disabilities to go back to word groups and sound groups i know i went to sunrise elementary because they had the nan and tat books and i checked those out over the summer to help my son who was struggling and what a difference that made so just i think maybe even more what we can do with informing parents these are the resources available you know if if you've ever wondered if your child is struggling with this so we can catch those that maybe don't appear by test scores that they have an issue because a lot of times what happens is then in later grades right exactly and and i think you're right i think that's a really good next step for our across department collaboration is to build

022that awareness awareness with our community so that parents know what to look for how to support and what questions to ask at the school so i love that idea awesome and i had one other question texas as a state has done a lot with dyslexia and reading issues in general is there any way that we can also look towards i know that they have so many things kind of standardized have we looked at that we we have and for a long time we embedded a lot of their um reading their reading center uh the texas it's changed now i think to the meadowview center or something like that for reading but we embedded in a lot of the routines so a lot of their work was centered around the work of the shaywitz who really

023made dyslexia more commonplace in terms of language for all of us um and and a lot of that work originated in texas and so i think everybody in the country leaned on texas when all of that information was coming out and and we certainly got on board with that as well and we've been fortunate that through the adoption of um interventions over the last couple of years those routines are similar to what texas original research had put in place great thank you so much okay um mr wrigley and mrs schill again and um nancy has also asked us to speak so okay great thank you um this is another thing that i'm tickled pink about uh a couple in the last couple months this is getting good guys uh in that this has been on

024my to-do list for canyon school district for 10 years or 11 years so i can sort of halfway check it off um because the main reason is is we're talking about graduation rates overall graduation rates and a large part of that is kids with dyslexia that jump drop out and i've had several parents we had a right before meeting phoebe beecham who sits on the state task force senate email and i sent a copy to you mostly asking she thought it was official task force so it's not really an official task force so our the question is going to be at some point are we going to be going forth with those parents that have children with this disability in this in the district and telling them about that and asking for input or will

025we have i mean we have input in special ed in other areas and wondering what's your plans there yeah i i think that the the next step as holly pointed out would be to build that level of awareness with our community in in defining what what dyslexia is and and what systems are in place and if their students continue to struggle with the systems in place how then can they get support and designing those protocols because like i mentioned we've we've had a lot of really great structures for multi-tiered systems of support that was something that was very important when we became a new school district to put those pieces in place but we haven't necessarily been explicit about how that serves each individual student with needs and so i think that's the piece that

026this group really identified as missing and so as we move forward i think we can continue to build that awareness and through that process continue to collect feedback it would be nice to have parents i know i've had several parents over the years that have asked and would love to be involved in some small way in regards to curriculum and how you're going to do that i know there has been some teachers in our district i think i talked to a teacher a while back who's got our new uh glacier hills program i guess it's elementary teacher do we have we have certain special teachers that are trained in this state with us don't we well i would actually posit that all of our teachers that have participated so far in the k2 reading academy

027have had specialized training in serving students with dyslexia because we again get into those specifics around the science of reading the nuances around supporting students in in varying levels whether they're on level or off level of how to support them in reading development yeah i wish i would remember the name of the teacher was a couple years ago but i know there was very specific assessments and other stuff that she was advocating for that we're doing we're moving that direction yes and um i'm not sure which particular program or or teacher you're you're speaking about but the language essentials for teachers of reading and spelling is like the dyslexia gold standard in terms of teaching educators about how to teach reading because again it gets into all of the particular complexities related to phonological awareness

028how that translates to phonemic awareness and then what happens in your brain when you're trying to acquire those skills the input and output and and where it can go wrong in in different kids and so that that training alone is so valuable and what you will see in my next presentation is that is now a state mandate that we have the opportunity to participate in so that knowledge base will only grow with our teachers as they continue to participate are any of our students routinely screened for this i suspect some of the assessments may pick it up by maybe are we catching this pretty early now and what we're doing so as i mentioned we've been screening for um 13 years now using acadians and that is again a key screener for identifying reading difficulties

029so that's going to be that first gateway for identifying students who may have dyslexia because again dyslexia is broad where we need to start working more specifically as again the students who on the phonemic awareness screener who are showing even more difficulties students who are presenting as being on benchmark but who are then demonstrating additional difficulties in other areas and we do have some options for assessment there but that isn't necessarily something that we would do on every student because again what we are identifying now is catching the high majority of the students great thank you okay mrs schill said her questions just already been asked and um mrs tingey would you like to share with us your your comments or thoughts okay nancy you're cutting out just a little bit is are you in

030a bad spot um anyway i just think it's great that the department just kind of answered the questions that the board had but they recognized an opportunity to expand and and to build capacity and build foundation in this very important work of having every child have good opportunity and good instruction to learn how to read which one those will found one of the most um pieces of our academic development so once they thank you for them recognizing this piece before they um identify all of the offerings for reading okay thank you nancy and i'd like to also ask some questions first of all i am also thrilled to hear this as a parent with a child that is not neurotypical my heart goes out to every child every parent that that's their experience it's incredibly

031difficult to work through those disabilities um i one of my questions is with regard to the state handbook i know you said that you referenced it in terms of um making sure that the definitions are accurate and that we're going by what utah has kind of stepped forward is the standard i'm curious how else you might be using it on an ongoing basis are the teachers told to kind of use that as their their guide and personally i don't know about the rest of the members of the board i would really love to get a copy of that handbook and and what's the best way of going about that happy to get you a handbook so it's certainly one that we reference but because it is also a lot of the information that is in

032the handbook is also in the k-12 literacy framework and is also in the routines that we've had in our curriculum map for a long time they they all are similar right they're all using the same research base in terms of how we serve students and provide quality instruction in the area of of reading and so those are what we continue to anchor to um do we haven't necessarily brought in the physical copies of the handbook and worked through that in a jigsaw but continue to reference the components that align to again all of the sources coming together so that they see all of those pieces because one of the things that we we talked a lot about in our k2 academies was um we wanted to debunk the myth for our teachers that there's dyslexia

033and then there's reading difficulties because reading difficulties is the umbrella that includes dyslexia and there's a continuum of needs within that and so i think that a lot of our teachers became paralyzed thinking they had to do something very different and specific for each child with dyslexia letting go of all the things that they really knew worked for kids who were struggling with reading so we wanted to start by really integrating all of those components together for them and and helping them understand that that it's all layered and connected right anytime we're talking about any student who has a reading difficulty and and to break down those barriers of them feeling um like they didn't have what they needed to just try to support students and and i think that was really freeing for a

034lot of our teachers and then they could start to see those connections between um dyslexia literature reading science and uh what's being outlined in the k-12 framework by our state for literacy so are we using the handbook then are we returning to it again and again i mean it's it is integrated yes it's integrated as part of it so and you touched on one of my other questions because you're right dyslexia is only one reading difficulty it's an important one to recognize does this what we've been discussing tonight also include things like dysgraphia does calcium calcula i think when you have difficulty in calculating mathematical things and other related issues like those less so with just calcula by that particular name dysgraphia was integrated again as part of that root connection to phonological awareness and

035that orthographic component that then works into the encoding piece with writing and and how that developmental process works across the grades and where you have to begin to be able to get fluent in that particular piece discalcula is not something that we have addressed by that particular name explicitly however all of our work around supporting students in mathematics gets at what many would call dyscalculia would would say our best practices um okay so another question i have when we use the term reading difficulties i'm curious if when a parent has a child that has some sort of difficulty in their reading are we only using that term or are we actually identifying and using the term of dyslexia i mean i think so much similar to what holly was sharing it's it's really difficult as

036a parent when you have a child that for whatever reason despite your best efforts it's just it's not clicking something's not happening and being able to actually understand or identify what it is you're dealing with gives you a completely different set of lenses that you can go forward with as a parent and start researching and understanding what's happening so i'm curious what those discussions look like with parents so we have recommended that we stay focused on the term reading difficulties including dyslexia to describe what we're experiencing with the student and focusing on again what we're identifying as the root cause and then what we're going to do to be able to support the student with learning how to read because that's really what we want to get to is not so much the label but

037what we're actually going to do to increase those skills and so we have not outlined a specific protocol for teachers to diagnose so to speak a student with dyslexia but identified here are the critical components of reading here's how we assess them here's how we can engage in conversation provide specific interventions and start making progress with students okay so it sounds like you could have a dyslexic child and it could be labeled as reading difficulties but a parent particularly if this is like their eldest they've never gone through school before they're not familiar with it they could have a child with dyslexia but they wouldn't know correct we wouldn't we wouldn't call a parent and say your child has dyslexia we'd say here's what we've seen with your child here's how we are supporting those

038pieces and if it gets to the point where the student is not making progress and a disability is suspected we then look at a whole other set of factors as you know for identifying students as having a disability but again dyslexia is a continuum reading difficulties is a continuum and then those services become a continuum as well so when we say those services how does a parent get information or referral to to find the right diagnosis for their child i mean that's in my mind a really critical component of all of this i think as i as i've mentioned the ongoing communication with our families about our students progress is what's critical and what we're doing to demonstrate progress i think that it can become a very slippery slope to put our teachers in a

039place of diagnosing students and finding labels for them that are outside of the identified categories of ideia so i think we want to be really careful to not over diagnose and label our students but instead focus again on that instruction intervention side and how we're going to make growth isn't that and this is gets to another question i had in terms of how you're overlapping or working with responsive services because in my mind and maybe i have this off that's a point at which a child could be referred to a school psychologist and start to receive the appropriate evaluations i agree with you i don't think any teacher classroom teacher is equipped to be able to make those diagnoses but when a teacher becomes aware of the fact that there's a consistent problem a parent

040recognizes that at what point in what way are we making sure that they're getting referred to the right people within the district so every school has a student support team where they're problem solving around individual students who are not making progress in specific areas and that is where you have your team of social emotional learning specialist side of the school psychologist and or the social worker somebody who has expertise in reading often the instructional coaches are involved and and that would be where that determination is made for additional testing and where the conversation around a specific diagnosis either of dyslexia or a specific learning disability would be entertained and considered thank you that answers my question so with a diagnosis say you have a parent that comes with an official diagnosis um what do we

041do when they bring that to us and do we ever refer kids out to a neuro psychiatrist or somebody that specializes that if it's outside of our wheelhouse i'm curious how that functions we do not make those referrals outside because we again have many of those resources here and i think when you look at the number of students who can respond to effective interventions and learn how to read it is very high the research points to upwards of 96 or 97 percent and so then it really becomes that individualized problem solving for that three percent which typically those students have a much more severe learning disability that requires more support and services and uh provisions and protections that are offered through idea so those would all still be in-house services it's not really our practice

042in public ed to refer out to a neuropsychiatric unit or testing for for these particular challenges okay so one of the things i want to congratulate you on is the fact that we are getting intensive training at the secondary level for teachers on these things i mean my experience is that a lot of times we already have quite a few elementary teachers that have been really well trained and better understanding some of these things as part of their training but at the secondary level that is it can often vary across the board and i know that that showed up in our audit our special ed audit a couple years ago and so i want to thank you and congratulate you for doing that because i think it will make a huge difference i know that

043there are a lot of kids that get past fifth grade that still have undiagnosed dyslexia and other reading difficulties so i wanted to thank you about that one last question um is with regard to the utah parent center has there been any sort of outreach or collaboration with them i would love to see more parent collaboration more community collaboration of those that have a lot of experience of dealing with this as as parents um i know in the past for our family personally they were life savers in helping us better understand how to assist and advocate for our son so i'm curious you know what your interaction has been with them we we have not interacted with them as a collaborative group i know the special education department continues to stay connected with them for

044a number of reasons and supports for our parents but i think that again that would be a really great step as we're planning that building awareness supporting our parents and understanding what's available um what they can do what how they can talk about it with the school and and how they can measure progress with their students would be the the best next step awesome thank you are there any other questions okay this is neighbor i want to thank you again i have some tough questions and i'm sorry i have a friend who has several children has dyslexia and not one of them were caught in our schools um or a teacher talking to her about it and then i had some some things personally as well with my son so i want to thank you

045i know this is a steep incline you know you're taking something that i don't think is a state we've done a great job of addressing and you're trying to tackle it all so i really thank you for it first off what if we consider surveying parents who have children who have a diagnosed learning disability and ask them about their experience in our school i know you said we've had tests for the last 13 years but i know so many people who have not been diagnosed by those tests so just to find out what was the parent's experience when did they figure it out who did they go to what tests were taken i think that would be maybe a really great step and then could we consider a different screening for learning disabilities i i

046don't currently have a lot of confidence in what we have been doing just because of a lot of um a lot of personal experience and and with friends and things and there's a lot of resources that are being used outside of our district to try to get and i know i understand that we don't want to label but if we don't have a diagnosis then we don't have a good treatment plan i just really want to say that again it's so important we do need to identify what is not working for them to be able to read to be able to give them in their toolbox it's like asking a child to run a race and they only have one leg and we just keep teaching them the mechanics of running but we aren't giving

047them the prosthetic we need the diagnosis in order to get a treatment plan so um just a few things is if we could consider a different screening if we could also have an outreach for um how teaching parents how to advocate for their student if they're knowing and understanding something's not right here and where do i go for help i think something great and i actually think it was maybe miss oaks that started this with the district there was a communications thing we're working on of what parent where parents need to go and who they need to talk to if they have wouldn't that be great to have something come home to every first grade child if your child seems to be having difficulties with these things what is your next step that'd be so

048helpful as a parent and could we possibly have teachers reach out to to homes of kids that are in the lower reading groups and say you know hey here's some things we've noticed can you fill out this survey you know i know i can google online and and dyslexia has a large spectrum and there's free dyslexia tests that you can have your kids take online and they speak into the microphone and things you know can we just even have a survey hey mom and dad your child's in this reading group have you ever noticed and we can even just do a little screening that way so that we know where to direction them next um let's see um i know i i just know as as a parent and as a friend of a mother

049who's also had this she actually had a child that actually graduated from canyon school district in college and she said you know what i just got diagnosis for two of your siblings i think maybe you're on this spectrum too he got tested and now he has these accommodations that he never had before and he's you know sophomore junior in college so whatever we can do to get the proper diagnosis so we can give these kids who need the help so that they don't feel dumb so that they don't feel um excluded from this this club of all the kids that seem to get it um whatever we can do so maybe i'll email those to you but i would love i'd love a follow-up on this and i thank you so much for tackling this

050i know it's a big job thank you thanks amber and it looks like um you are here for the next item which is the usbe early literacy plan first reading so yes you're not getting rid of me anytime soon stephen i saw you glancing at that so it's it's appropriately placed that we talked about dyslexia and reading difficulties first and then that was a great segue into this agenda item where we get to annually talk about our early learning plan in canyon school district so what i'll be presenting you tonight is the plan you also have a copy of the official plan that gets submitted to usbe that plan has gone through the pre-approval process with usbe so that the final component is our local board approval and then submission for um the funding so

051just a refresher of how this plan came into play i already mentioned senate bill 194 and that coming into place in 2018 and some of those critical components of accountability that were put in place during that legislative session and then subsequent board rule some of the pieces that were new and very big to all school districts was the requirement that the state put in place asking all districts not asking telling all districts that we needed to have at least 60 of our students in the first or third grade um making at least typical or better growth prior to that we had set goals and we would meet them or we would not but the state did not have accountability in place and so this was a really big piece that was introduced with that senate

052bill they also asked that districts write their own goals and then required that we meet at least one of those as well they required that the interventions and strategies that we put in place for meeting our goals included specific intervention alignment that was outlined with the evidence base that they put in place in their k-12 literacy framework and then consequences for failure to meet either of those goals were put in place with systems of support at the state level they also added the component of local board approval which brings us here tonight for another annual review of this plan so those are the the big uh components of history that got us here i also wanted to highlight a new component that was put in place in the legislative session with house bill 114 but

053then was put on hold when we had the soft closure so it's been reinstated and that adds the component of math into what was formerly the early literacy plan now it's the early learning program and will include math they also put in place that they will at that time we're going to select a math screening assessment they have selected that and now have required all school districts to assess students in early mathematics using acadiance math that's something we've already been doing as a district so that is not going to be new for us so what you see in this year's plan does include a component of math and i anticipate um that section growing over the next couple of years as the state collects baseline data and then set specific parameters and goals for us

054to meet so the sections of the plan that you had available to you included a section on early literacy and early mathematics for each of those sections it required that each district outline how we are implementing our core instruction targeting the essential components for reading and math what evidence-based intervention system we have in place how we assess and monitor students and then what professional learning we provide for our teachers section c outlines the local goals as i said right now it's just literacy i can in the future i think we can anticipate that we'll have some math goals as well and then also new this year to the plan there's a section called pre-k three professional learning this is actually an additional grant funding that districts could include in their early plan if they wanted

055to access some additional funding we do want to access that funding so we completed that component of the grant as well so sections a through c are one pot of funding and then section d is another pot of funding any questions about those components before we just jump into the the goals okay so i wanted to share with you first how we did on our goals over the course of the 20 20 21 school year the state goal of that 60 of students in first or third grade making typical or better progress we met as you can see with 67.3 of our students making typical or better progress so we continued to show growth even given the year that we had last year which i think is something really worth celebrating unfortunately we did not

056meet our kindergarten goal which was to increase the percentage of kindergarten students who are at or above benchmark um in reading specifically the nonsense word fluency assessment by four percent from the middle of the year to the end of the year you can see we had a decrease there of five percent from the previous year that we tested which was 2018 and 19. the just a quick caveat with our goals the state does have a very specific formula of how we set our goals based on the average trend from previous years and setting something that is achievable but still ambitious so that we can make those goals our first grade goal was to increase by 22 of our students from the beginning of the year to the end of the year and as you can

057see we increased by 17 which means we did not meet our goal so we did not meet our local goal which puts us in the first year of kind of watch in terms of the state consequences so that also qualified us for a professional learning opportunity that i'm going to talk about in just a minute so as we set our goals for the 21 22 school year it again looks like we're setting lower goals but that's part of that formula that the state puts in place with averaging your growth over the past few years and then increasing it by just a couple percentage so for kindergarten you can see we set the goal to increase by two percent from that middle to end of year and then first grade uh maintaining see if we can

058get to that 22 percent this year because we did not meet our local goal last year if we do not meet both our state goal and one of these goals in the coming year that will put us in the start of the improvement cycle as a district with those additional state supports that would be required the strategies that we outlined in our plan to achieve those goals are focused on instruction intervention using the enhanced core reading instruction supplemental program to our core program that we put in place this year we were able to dissect the teachers who were using it consistently and those who weren't and we saw much more significant growth in those particular classrooms so it's something that we'll continue to implement and and work towards getting more widespread across the school year

059we also expanded the intensive intervention protocol to support our students with disabilities in their special education individualized instruction we'll have very specific professional learning which i'm going to talk about because that's part of that state requirement and then we were not able last year to get into a lot of classrooms with covid so we're hoping to be able to spend more time in the classrooms and again that will be part of that professional learning that i'm going to talk about right now so because this year our middle of year benchmark data showed that we were not making the progress in all subgroup areas in all grades the states identified school districts and required that they start participating this coming school year in the statewide professional learning literacy project this became a priority for usbe with

060their round of or their allocation of esser funds and their growing concern about our statewide literacy um status uh that had been really stagnating for the last couple of years you can see there that statewide we only have about 47 of our students who are meeting benchmark so that's a big concern for the state so they required i think i want to say something like 48 or more leas were pulled into this particular project and we saw it as a great opportunity their rationale for organizing this project in addition to just uh stagnating scores they really wanted to address the learning interruption that had been occurring with covid improve those literacy scores focus on equity and really put districts give them an opportunity to focus on something that has proven outcomes and that aligns with

061the state strategic plan so that project oh 69 i was i was way off there even more so 69 leas were identified canyons was one of those and the project includes the mandate that all k-3 general-led and special ed teachers instructional coaches elementary administrators as well as school psychologists who support the lower grades attend intensive training around the science of reading that training is something that we actually have been integrating for a while in canyons so you heard me talk about it a little bit in the dyslexia presentation but it's called the language essentials for teachers of reading and spelling or letters it is not a curriculum program it's an ongoing very intensive professional learning experience that really gets into i think a lot of the things that many of you mentioned having experience with

062your own children or friends who who are struggling with reading and that's this kind of training is not the typical training that our new teachers or any of us got in pre-service education so to have the opportunity to go this deep while you're in the classroom working with students is is really incredible so while it is mandated it's something that is very exciting to us to be able to look at how we can improve so this slide just outlines some of the background around letters it is something that has continued to be proven in terms of showing gains in reading outcomes particularly with students with dyslexia really gets into the science and how to diagnose reading difficulties and then what you can do about it as a classroom teacher in your whole group in your

063small group and with individual students so uh that that piece is a really big component that i think is compelling for participation so the intensity of this comes with what is required across this learning experience so our k-3 teachers will participate over the next two years in eight units of instruction that include full days of in-person professional learning and then online modules that have to be completed prior to professional learning they have to pass a mastery assessment and then participate in a coaching cycle with the focus of that particular component that they're learning in that unit of study so that's a that's a lot and um like i said very intensive but some of the best professional learning that i would argue our teachers will have the opportunity to participate in in their career the

064principals and school psychologists only have to participate in a condensed version that is two days but still also includes some online coursework as well so that is a a big strategy for our early learning plan that we are looking forward to you'll notice in the section for the professional learning grant that it was all geared towards supporting this process as well and this also is embedded into our esser funding because uh providing that amount of professional learning for that number of teachers is very costly thank you so much amber that's a lot to present on him when you think so um board does anyone have questions you have questions okay and just as a reminder this item is going to be coming back this is just a first reading and at the end i i'd

065like to ask each of you if you're comfortable putting on consent agenda next time so okay go ahead mrs neighbor just a ques a quick question on the the increases achieved or decreased can you explain are are these students that we're looking at the percentage of kindergarten students who are at or above benchmark in acadiance where were these all students even those that were online last year this was everyone everybody we had um depending on the grade it was in the 90s for our elementary schools i can't remember exactly what percentage i want to say somewhere between 94 and 95 participation rate for kindergarten okay and then and first grade maybe something similar but this was for all students all students whether they were online in person and then could we see what that breakdown

066was like for the in person versus the online and maybe some other little subgroups too that would be like our mlls yes i'll have that in the next presentation but not um necessarily the online so i can have that for next time okay great thank you so much okay anyone else all right oh mont go ahead you know i said to my husband last night mont is going to bring up the fact that letters is not spelled correctly i did i knew you were going to bring that up it's acronyms i hear you i'm with you because you haven't been razzed enough and i won the night okay so amber thank you so much for all of your hard work we really appreciate it so we are going to move on to uh what are

067we oh yes that's right are we okay with um putting this on consent agenda for next time that looks like that so yes so i can't guarantee that without everything that we don't have to worry about thanks amber thank you all okay we're going to move on to we are i'm running short on time so we're going to try and keep this brief but um move on to item c which is policy update with jeff christensen thank you members of the board so for tonight i have two different updates the first one deals with several just redline policy updates there's four policies listed for in the update to our student attendance policy uh we're just adding um really some alignment with statute as we were looking at our board approved legitimate absences there was a

068term that we've used for for years entitled vacation which we want to better align that with the statute with pre-approved education leave and the reason for that is is in our parents bill of rights and state statute you can request time off for a student to go to a health care provider and or they can do a family event and so what we're doing is just better aligning with the statute and making it easier for parents that if they are gone on a pre-approved leave they can access a form that will allow them to better work with administrators very minor update the other one is really just a more or less a place heading during this next school year where through a bill that was passed through our last legislative session we are unable to

069issue notices of compulsory education violations or notices of truancy of course in our policy it says we encourage student attendance because we know that with chronic absenteeism we have issues with student performance but this is just sort of a placeholder in the policy so it's clear on our guidance for next school year in our vision screening policy we're just updating and aligning with the school-based vision screening rule adding some additional grades consistent with what we do for vision screening for our students in our school access policy as we were looking at our community section we've just moved some provisions that deal with use of school property and equipment that better align in our school access policy and those are outlined in the red line and we did some minor revisions to the board languages for

070readability and then in our district and school sponsored information media policy what we've done is narrowed its focus really to focus on our school and district websites and we did some readability issues in some of the regulations just to align it with better with our website practices again all of these are for first reading you can see all of those on board docs they're all minor updates that will just better align for each of those policies i can answer any questions that's really the first item c on the agenda okay board do you have any questions while we're discussing this i just wanted to get a pulse for him from each of you about how you feel about the idea of this also going on a consent agenda in the future no you like us

071regular second reading [Music] okay i would like to have the public have us an opportunity to comment on any changes i don't see anything that bothers me but i would just like to give the public that opportunity okay thank you all right jeff go ahead and move on to item d and further policy updates so so this is a different update again we've been sort of wrapping up our look at the instruction and community section so to be clear that the police you see to be deemed obsolete doesn't mean that any of these issues are really going away what we're doing is looking at where we either have redundancies or where we've addressed the issues in other places um specifically the the student hearing conservation is just an outdated policy that's been in that section

072for a number of years and really we do do hearing screening through internal procedures that align with the department of health and so it just needs to be removed the other instructional policies are either contained in teacher disclosure statements or we're governed by usbe rule where we align with the rules that we have for conducting tests and enhanced learning opportunities so what we're recommending and again any of this can be addressed in a subsequent reading but all of these policies we as the policy committee are making the recommendation to deem obsolete the last one that talks about school property and equipment that's where we've again moved some of the relevant language to our school access policy okay thank you are there any questions okay thank you members of the board thank you mr christensen yes

073so this will come back next time for a second reading all right with a possible action that's right okay so that can that concludes everything that we've had on the agenda for the study session and um we're going to go ahead and close this portion of the meeting and have a 10-minute recess before and the beginning of the business meeting at 7 pm for which mr wrigley will be conducting so his board meeting which is being held at um uh 9361 south 300 east sandy utah for those are online my name is steve wrigley i am one of the vice presidents of the board i will be conducting night our president is absent today she will be on the phone calling in from florida she's not that good she's calling on her vacation from florida

074i'd also like to excuse uh board member caroline arnold who's not able to be here tonight so with that um we need approval of the agenda which would like to make a motion to approve the agenda for tonight and in that process can you please go on number eight uh new business move item c which is the 2021 to 2022 back to school plan up to item a if that's okay rather than you guys waiting here all day long to hear the discussion on that is it okay if i move it up the beginning okay so we're moving out from item c up to item a is nancy are you here is she here okay uh so who would like to make that motion and make those changes i will make a motion to approve

075the agend the agenda for this evening and to change item c back to school plan presented by the superintendent rick robbins to item a on right now unmuted on new business on yes under the new business section of the business meeting okay do i have a second on that i'll second that okay all in favor motion passes okay we move on then to uh pledge of allegiance which will be done by mr b.j willer our director of responsive services thank you for standing uh please repeat the pledge we do have a flag well you can sit down for a second okay so let's let's do that uh is jeff still here jeff's went to get it so we can't do that either we'll hold on just for a second well i have a few minutes

076here i would like to recognize uh representative galen benjamin and uh senator kathleen reba who are in our office today thank you both for coming and spending some time with us so this is definitely a first for us so we can go ahead and bj when i see that will the audience please stand repeat the pledge of allegiance with me i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you the audience may be seated thank you b.j okay we'll move on to we'll now move on to reconnaissance with jane uh jeff hayden our director of communications and christine stewart our associate director of communications there it is so vice president wrigley thank

077you for this time that the board grants us to recognize the achievements of student faculty and staff in canyon school district for recognitions tonight we are celebrating the achievements excuse me of canyon students who have been recognized for the creative work they have done with their hands and they're also put into practice their mathematical skills those who are mentioned tonight will receive a letter of recommendation from the board of education and from the superintendent as well as a canyons district key chain and i also am very happy to announce that starting at the beginning of the school year we will return to our practice of inviting those who are recognized to board meeting so they can appear in front of the board and shake hands with members of the board and be celebrated in person

078so i'm very much looking forward to that after the school starts on monday august 16th our recognitions tonight start with the national freshwood student woodworking competition three corner canyon high students earned awards at one of the top award shows for woodworking students in the country now these students recently won the top awards at this national freshwood student woodworking competition in las vegas the award show is held on once uh every two years now freshwood is part of the industry-sponsored association of woodworking and furnishing suppliers fair convention and is open to all students in the united states in canada you'll see this year katie farnsworth won first place in the open category savannah richards won second place in the open category and jacob farnsworth second place in the tables category apparently you need the name farnsworth

079to win at this competition ostensibly they're from the same family look at these guitars that were made by our students i would love to have that one there of the arches the one the butterflies is amazing as well that's first and second place and this is the table that won the award as well tim mcneal is this teacher at corner canyon high school who works with the students on their woodworking skills you can see that is artistic and mathematical and we congratulate the students for their achievements also as we head back to school please plan to join us at the ribbon-cutting ceremonies and open house events for brighton alta and hillcrest high school now it is a big deal to open up a high school that's been newly built now this year canyons is opening

080not one not two but three newly built high schools now so please note that we have august 11th august 12th on august 13th as the dates of our ribbon-cutting ceremonies for our newly rebuilt high schools for the brighton alta and hillcrest school communities after several years of construction the bengal hawk and husky communities are ready to start making tradition in their new schools and the projects have been completed with proceeds from the 283 million bond that was approved by voters in 2017. now we also want to note last night's party to welcome the new members of team csd we served about 500 hot dogs at the event we held this to say hello bid welcome to our new teachers in canyon school district the new teachers were greeted with a red carpet cheering cheerleaders and

081principals giving them a high five as they arrived wearing their new team csd t-shirt you can see there a picture taken by a drone of all of our new teachers in the end zone at charger stadium we had local businesses and municipal partners they had booths there they gave information on our new teachers a significant chunk of whom come from out of state and even out of country about where to live eat out and recreate the alta drumline performed and the corner canyon cheerleaders also led a cheer for team csd and we also had the state champions corner canyon chargers practicing on the field so it was very much like a pep rally for team csd at 7 15 so many people were still there that we had to cut the music and tell people

082to go home i'm very glad that we ate all of the hot dogs because i ordered enough for an army we have to have a barbecue this friday for our employees to finish out the rest of them but we did celebrate our new teachers in style about 250 new teachers started work in the canyon school district this year they've gone through orientations and training and they start their very first day as teachers on august 16th that's the first day of school just around the corner which we will celebrate with our red carpet welcomes as tradition in the canyon school district so thank you vice president wrigley for the time that you give to us to present these recognitions and we turn the time back to you thank you thanks mr haney i know was at

083that meeting last night it was exciting to see the new teachers come in just fresh and ready to go so thank you so much so we're on to our next section our picturing comment section uh so i'd like to welcome truly i'd like to welcome everybody here tonight and i do appreciate you taking your time to come to the board to tell us about your concerns and make a statement i know that takes time out of your out of your schedule to do that um it's been interesting uh i've got a written statement to state but don't get frustrated if we don't interact with you we don't have time to interact with each individual one we do hear you we do read your emails i've read hundreds of emails this last week responded to quite

084a few and sometimes we'll even ask people to call us because i really do and the board really wants to hear where you're coming from as we make and deliberate our decisions and it's going on uh miss nyber also informs inform you that if you're interested uh as we don't comment back on your comments now but if you stay till 10 o'clock tonight or whatever we're done uh then we have that opportunity to comment back on the comments made by you before so hopefully we'll be done before 10 o'clock so anyway that goes well so as i said we moved the comments forward because i assume most of you there's a couple things when it's it's a race theory and it looks like they have a mask issue isn't one of the main ones we

085move the mask issue forward so um let me just sort of read my comment statement here we have now come to the page patreon comment portion of our meeting the board of education encourages public engagement and values input from canyon school district parents employees and residents while not required to do so by law the board often distinguishes uh sets aside time in the meeting to listen to patrons of the district it will uh briefly review a few guidelines about as you address us tonight patron comments are part of the public record of our meeting so they will be published so what you say patron comment time is limited to residents and taxpayers of the canyon district students and patrons of parents of students and current employees of the district except with prior approval by the

086board leadership when several people share the same opinions the board may ask individuals to select a representative spokesman we have several people wanting to speak tonight we do want to listen to you but we have a pretty full agenda also so will we be limiting individual comments to two minutes and if you're representing a group for three minutes and we'll have a timer you'll hear the timer go off uh and you could just sort of probably see my face go from very happy just go over okay so what we do want to hear every person and give you an opportunity and and we do have other business we have to do the night too pagers may provide board members with written documents pertaining to their comments these documents must be submitted to the board secretary

087who's sitting right over here at the meeting or an email to the office of public communications by noon of the day following the board meeting and these will also be included within the board minutes time allotted for public comment and we just went out we had to change a little bit so so many people the board of education does not discuss matters which are not on the meeting's agenda nor engage in public comment on personal issues of a district employee's character professional competence or mental or physical health if a patron wants to comment on personal issues of the board request that those comments be submitted to the board in writing however if the patron determines to verbally comment on personal issues the comets need to be civil and refrain from personal attacks insults deflamatory or

088slanderous comments about that individual as we begin the patron comments portion of this meeting the board of education would like to quickly address some issues that have been raised in the community first the last school year masks were required in school by state health order this coming school year there are no health orders requiring face masking schools and a new utah law restricts school districts from issuing mass mandates unless under order by the county health department also to be clear curricula race theory is not part of the curriculum being used by kenya's school district there are no plans to incorporate it into the curriculum or instructions in the new canyon schools we are making these things clear now to answer any questions and to be make sure your patrons receive some immediate feedback as if

089the board rob boards practice the listening taking notes during patrons comments you'll see a lot of us taking notes we are very interested in what you have to say just really quickly i have talked with many parents over this last week i think that all the parents on whatever side on mask or not mask they all love their children they're all doing what they think is right and i wish denied as we make our comments we know that that we're all talking to parents that are concerned in a different way but they all love their children they're all wanting to do what they feel is right for their children the district also loves your children and we want to do what's right and so we're looking at sort of the 30 000 level elevation and

090trying to figure out how do we keep the schools open how do we deal with a hundred different factors in addition to maybe mask or not mask so the superintendent will be suggesting that soon as our what our plan will be but please give us input in that plan so with that we'll have our first one mrs oaks will be calling out names and she's perfect on pronouncing your name so you don't have to worry about that's why i heard do it thanks no pressure okay the first person we have is greg schiffman and he is representing the granite community council have three minutes sorry about that my name is greg schiffman i'm the chair of the granite community council i represent approximately 200 people in our community our community is obviously entwined uh with

091sandy we have a lot of constituents that have reached out to me and asked me you know what is the current situation with the canyon school district i've heard many many stories some of them are very hard to digest i think that going forward the granite community council may have to take some form of action if uh we find out or are contacted by constituents in the granite community i think that if our kids are going to go to school they should be learning math history and all the basics not to be put into a situation where ideology or other issues that are inappropriate for our classrooms um i just find it very disturbing what i've heard from constituents and i would really hope that you make a very good choice and try to rid

092this from the school system it's unnecessary and i think that the school needs to produce a good product and that is getting back to basics thank you very much thank you for your comments okay so the next we have is christopher phillips who i think he is calling in and speaking on behalf of himself and afterwards will be amy quintana all right father of three young children uh two that attend elementary school in the district um we're facing an unprecedented situation once again related to covet 19. our counties case counts are surging again now the delta variant has become prevalent this is problematic because the delta variant is both more contagious and more virulent than previous stars kobe 2 strains and we're about to open up schools with no realistic protections for our youngest children

093we need to encourage vaccinations whenever they're available for kids 12 and up that time is now but for kids under 12 that time has not yet arrived governor cox recognized today in his task force press conference that if children aren't vaccinated they will get covid19 this year but a large portion of our children can't be vaccinated yet earliest estimates for child vaccine eligibility are september meaning the children won't be able to be fully vaccinated which is two doses plus two weeks of time until october at the earliest are we truly willing to place our youngest children at risk through this early period of the school year when the delta variant is surging most children who have had coven 19 so far have likely been asymptomatic or have only suffered model symptoms but those children had

094earlier strains the delta strain has been affecting children differently as is travel across the united states louisiana for example which is ahead of utah on its own delta surge is seeing medical problems dr mark klein of the children's hospital in new orleans stated yesterday there were people who said children don't get the disease they can't transmit the disease we knew that those were fallacies all along but particularly now as the delta variant has emerged it has become very clear that children are being heavily impacted by this organism and by this pandemic at this point perhaps more than ever before can't afford to put our children at the mercy of this disease like we're seeing in louisiana if indeed the county decides as a health department to move forward with the mass mandate is the district

095prepared to support those efforts to protect our children and keep them out of harm's way thank you for your comments next what's up next amy quintana if you could just go ahead and announce we're going to try to get you quickly so we'll get you on deck if you just want to come up on the two front seats up here it'll make it a little bit quicker on the transition yeah and following amy as lauren cromer who is a phone call okay i just want to say um good evening thank you to the board for all your hard work and effort i know it isn't easy especially this last year i have three kids one in um corner canyon one in draper park and one in draper elementary so i'm a cab driver all day

096long um i am here just standing here to ask for a choice when it comes to mass my daughter struggles with auditory processing disorder and that is where the brain has a hard time um processing certain sounds and so masks make that a lot more difficult and she relies on more kind of nonverbal communication like the breeding and facial expressions which obviously mass are an issue with that um so for example for auditory processing to give you just kind of an example if i were to say you know please raise your hand she might hear please haze your plan or something to that effect she affectionately when she was younger said something to me like about normans and i said what are you talking about what are normans and she's like i don't know my

097friend said normans and i realized later she was talking about mormons so we have a running joke i'm like normans but that's kind of how auditory processing works so it's just really important for her to be able to read lips and so that's why i'm here i'm just asking for a choice a choice to be able to have her a chance to be able to process those sounds clearly instead of muffled ones a choice to possibly read some lips again um a choice to watch facial expressions and learn how her own facial expressions play a role um and that nonverbal communication all vital things to a child with auditory processing disorder but to be honest it's vital to all kids because we don't know what they're all struggling with so um that's all i'm asking

098for is just a choice thank you all thank you for your comments next we have lauren cromer on the phone hi um and um i just wanted to talk about um the airborne nature of provide and some of the things we can be doing as districts um one thing i wanted to highlight was a study that the cdc recently reduced release back on july 9th that you know there's so much really good science that talks about things that we can do practical things we can do to make it safer so people don't get this you know airborne virus and this particular study combines some things and one of the things they found is that universal masking in a simulated classroom or conference room environment reduced the concentration of simulated infectious particles aerosol concentration by 72

099percent um they additionally found that if you only use hepa filters without masking it could reduce those concentrations by 49 to 65 percent and if you combine them you can reduce it by 90 which is kind of amazing um thing you can do to make an indoor environment safer um i would really appreciate uh board member tini recently replied to me i i sent out all the board members a bunch of information and resources a couple days ago she replied to me and let me know what the district was doing in terms of using the existing hvac systems to try to optimize you know as much as they can filtration and ventilation but any industrial hygienist will know to tell you that in even the best design systems there's a lot of um there's um

100significant variations from room to room and how well the air is really being circulated um and i think um i obviously support masking i i i'm just so concerned about cova this year all my kids were unvaccinated not because of choice they're just too young and it's the same with all their peers but i think we should be doing the best that we can to try to keep them safe i'm just i think that you know obviously i love masking but if we could um use some of the american rescue funds to to purchase hepa filters and run hepa filters in the rooms like this study and other studies have shown we could do something to significantly reduce the risk for our children the department of education recently released the document saying how that was

101possible and that was a recommended thing to do with those funds so thank you thank you so much for your comment next we have jenny nazaro and afterwards is holly mars can you hear me okay my name is jenny nazzaro and i'm here today to ask that you work with local health departments to announce to enact a school mass mandate and put measures in place such as social distancing contact tracing testing and quarantining to prevent the spread of covid19 in schools this year with cova 19 cases increasing at a rapid rate it seems crazy to send kids back to school without masks and safety measures especially when so many are ineligible to be vaccinated last year outbreaks were prevented by strategies implemented by the canyon school district masks save lives keep schools open and prevent

102missed days due to quarantines it makes no sense to abandon what worked so well last year hb1007 has complicated the process of enacting a school mass mandate but it has not made it impossible and i encourage you to work with the health department on this process i also encourage you to enact the same safety precautions used last year when forming your back to school plans as a mother of two elementary age children who are ineligible to be vaccinated i worry about their safety attending school without masks and safety precautions during this pandemic i wish i did not have to choose between sending them to school for their best education and risking them catching covet or keeping them home to learn in a less optimal environment we should not underestimate the effects the virus has on

103children especially the delta variant dr angela dunn spoke today and estimated that one child will be hospitalized every other day with covet after school starts this virus has long-term effects on many people including children it benefits everyone to keep cases low and without masks and precautions in schools cases will soar in our community and could make our vaccinations ineffective with dangerous variances i know i have the right to send my kids to school with masks but this does not fully protect them from getting covered if others are not mass and measures are not in place the pandemic doesn't end because we are sick of wearing masks we cannot go back to school normally this year without safety precautions in place i encourage you to take the advice of the health department and medical professionals to

104make going to school in person as safe as possible for the safety of my kids other students and the rest of the community please work with the health department to implement a mass mandate and safety protocols to include social distancing contact tracing testing and quarantines great thank you so much okay holly mars after which will be rebecca collie hi thank you for allowing me this opportunity so i am a parent i've got three kids um fourth grader a sixth grader and a freshman and my first question and i appreciate the offer to stay until 10 o'clock tonight to have a you know an open dialogue but not possible with three kids at home we won't have a dialogue back and forth attend but we can help address your that time if it's not addressed by

105the superintendent okay so when can we have a dialogue that's my question i know you can't answer it right now but i know that there's some who are up for re-election and so that means that i'd like to understand what your platform is and i'd like to have open dialogue and so when i give you i would probably recommend just calling your representative for your area and talking with you i don't know who that is we could help you out without fear yeah we can get that for you okay so that was my first question my second question is why would i understand that canyons isn't teaching crt that is your stance right but last year my daughter came home from school and just because you tell teachers don't teach it they can say it

106without calling it crt so my second question is what have you implemented to stop teachers from teaching crt i had one teacher tell my daughter if you go home and tell your parents this i'm going to be mad so let me tell you this it's not a teacher's place to express personal views or opinions in class simply because they can so easily influence a student's beliefs it's not in their job description and if they could and most likely will see and it could and most likely will amongst the youngest students block free thought among students and a willingness to share their views of their own if we know if our teachers are pushing their own opinions on our kids if the kids have a differing view they're not going to feel safe it becomes a

107hostile environment and it's you can't learn in a situation like that so that's my second question what have you implemented to stop teachers from teaching crt even though they don't call it that right okay my third question why does kenya school district allow teachers to play cnn for kids in classrooms and i wasn't given permission i didn't give permission to do that um this happened in 19 and the school year 19 and 20. and i didn't know i could bring it up as a issue i should have known that but i would like to be able to give permission or deny my children from watching any sort of news i don't like the news these days i like just facts and i know the news is very opinionated these days but i would like that

108to be an option for me to opt out of my children watching cnn for kids and last question i signed a million documents when i'm registering my kids for school i read them the first year eight years ago i haven't read them since but i'm wondering i mean i was in here earlier and things change so how do i know what has changed i'm i don't want to spend three hours reading through 24 different documents for my three kids so i would like to know what has changed and let me know beforehand what i'm signing so i know what i'm agreeing to okay so if if you can give your email address over the board secretary you see about administration getting with you and we answer your questions thank you for your time thank you

109next is rebecca cauley after which will be shayla schreife i think i may have mispronounced that and feel free to correct us when you come up and before you start my time if you guys would mind just updating your website for how much time individual speakers have it still says three minutes and so i've been trying to to edit but anyway i'm rebecca cauley thank you so much for your time this evening i appreciate it um hey do you guys all remember when we segregated our society based on who got the flu shot and who didn't yeah me either so anyway you know when the government forces you to wear something what follows next is really bad it's really bad go look at the history books the older history books if you think i'm crazy

110for trusting in my own body over a product created by a company who profits off of perpetual disease that have repeatedly lied falsified data bribe doctors knowingly caused harm and isn't held liable for injury or death i suggest you actually think the final covid variant is actually called communism seems to me that that's the road we are on the problem isn't that people are uneducated or as lieutenant governor our lieutenant governor recently stated some elected officials are peddling ignorance for political points well the problem is that many are educated just enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught to those in education who applaud a government that allowed an entire generation to be killed in the womb and to sell their organs for this vaccine and other vaccine

111research things that we have been putting into our own bodies but tells children and adults to wear a mask to save lives these words are a joke and anyone who utters them should be ashamed our government is simultaneously saying that people who take the jab can still spread the virus while claiming those who don't take it are putting those who do at risk they're not even trying or attempting to be coherent it's pure divisive and i cannot understand how anyone can look at contradictory bureaucrats and hypocritical politicians and think to themselves i wish these people had more power over my life and my kids thank you thank you thank you thank you and i appreciate what you said earlier about masks and critical race theories so so i guess hopefully that that sticks true um

112i appreciate your time on this topic i'm here to talk about masks i come to you today as a mother of two elementary age children that attend canyon school district i'm a registered nurse and i also have a master's degree in healthcare administration i'm here to plead with you to not require our children to suffer through another year of mass on their faces we know now that covet is particularly not harmful to children and they represent just 0.26 of all coveted deaths according to the american academy of pediatrics we also know that all the deaths in children have been linked to other prior existing conditions so from experience as i'm sure many other parents and a teacher can attest to i have seen my children as well as countless others when i pick my children

113up from school exiting school wearing masks that are soaked in saliva kids have a tendency to chew on them this is not like adults we're talking about children here they chew on them all day they soak them in spit they chew holes in them i've watched my kids and others touch their face a thousand times more than normal while they have a mask on to adjust it and scratch under it because the material is bothering them i've watched kid drops kids drop their masks on the ground walk over them with their filthy shoes pick them back up stick them on their faces they're riddled with bacteria and there is no way that this piece of cloth is protecting any child from catching a virus it's causing more disease transmission with children introducing pathogens into their

114eyes nose and mouth by moving and adjusting it all day long and let's understand a little bit about disease transmission according to the cdc the number one way to prevent getting sick is to wash your hands so if you want to get behind having kids wash their hands three times a day at school i will donate the soap um this would cut down on all illnesses significantly i commend those people that i have seen walking around in public places with respirators and goggles because while i don't agree with their choice they actually understand disease transmission they understand that to truly avoid illnesses you have to filter your air protect your eyes from accidentally introducing bacteria into them health care choices should be made between parents and children and not mandated by health departments if parents

115decide to master children i fully support it and that's fine but do not mandate it for us please thank you for your comments okay next we have lisa brown's after which will be larry egbert hi distinguished board members pleasure to see you again um before i get started on what i really came here to talk to you about tonight i do want to know say that i noticed on the school reopening plan um there are a few slides that were kind of concerning to me and i sent it to some legal counsel and they were they said it's actually some of the stuff is there is not legal according to sb 107 you know park city sued the county over some of these similar items and they conceded so you might want to take a

116second look at that so now let me get to what i'm really here for um today i'm speaking to you as an sel advisor for you utah parents united but first i want to speak in a personal capacity i believe you are all good people i believe that when you voted to bring social emotional curriculum into our schools a few years ago you did it in the spirit of producing positive change recently though some issues have come to light that we must address i say we because i am not against you i want to be a partner with you in how to solve the problems that plague social emotional learning specifically how it has been revealed that these programs true intent is to among other things teach critical race theory to our children the document

117i provided you tonight is from castle the collaborative for academic social emotional learning entitled equity and social emotional learning a cultural analysis as i read these excerpts highlighted on the tabs for you i want you to think about the fact that this is the organization that develops the five core competencies as well as our assessments that measure success implementation for all sel curriculums i quote racial ethnic and class issues continue to vex american society cultural analysis suggests that issues of racism derive largely from an over emphasis on the accumulation of wealth within american culture historically this cultural value prompted some to exploit others for personal advancement white elites promulgated racialized and cultural stereotypes to recruit poor and working whites into a hierarchical economic system that exploited them but also empowered them to oppress and further

118exploit people of color end quote when considering the potential concerns for viewing the sel competency of self-awareness through an equity lens they write quote dominant u.s cultural norms promote materialism or acquisitive individualism an orientation associated with health problems and unethical behavior these norms are even more problematic when wealth and whiteness are conflated and uncritically accepted as indicators of success this fosters a sense of white racial entitlement and dominance as well as negative biases and stereotypes about people of color and those from low income backgrounds end quote the rest of the document reads pretty much the same the statements that i just read could have been written by karl marx himself or any critical race theorist like marx they assert that capitalism and the free market system is oppressive and instead champion collectivism which is a

119communist theory over individualism which is an american theory like all critical theorists they tell the marxist ideology that race is a social construct used to exploit people of color i'm with an organization with that five minutes that was three minutes [Music] in conclusion um the second page i got up here at our last meeting and said that you shouldn't spend any us or funds on scl i've changed my mind i honestly think it's time you invested your time and money into finding a different a political program that is not so heavily influenced by castle let us work together to make seo better thank you thank you okay next we have laurie egbert and after um laurie speaks leslie christiansen good evening school board members my name is larry egbert i'm here tonight representing a rapidly

120growing coalition of parents and grandparents within the surrounding communities whose mission statement is to raise awareness of and fight against divisive ideas and curricula being taught to our children we understand that you have provided specific guidelines for public comments at a board meeting and we believe and you believe that in order to permit fair and orderly expression you as a board have provided time to hear appropriate comments from anyone attending the meeting we further understand that the board values and welcomes civil respectful statements and clear concise communications that inform the board's deliberations and uses the public comment period as an opportunity to listen to the citizens concerns however you do not allow citizens the right to debate issues or to enter into question and answer sessions during this meeting since asking questions is the single

121most effective tool in education it is ironic that a publicly funded body that as a publicly funded body of individuals that we voted for that you have meetings where answers cannot be received without the ability to ask questions and get answers the whole exercise of inviting public comment is a waste of your time and ours since the school board does not respond to questions asked during board meetings what is the recourse for our efforts in preparing and presenting if this is not the forum to receive answers i spoke on behalf of our group last school board meeting on july 13th during my prepared comments and questions regarding critical race theory i expressed our concerns in a diplomatic and civil manner since that time i have not received a single response i made the assumption that

122the reason i was asked to leave my email upon registering to speak was to be able to receive at least a courtesy thank you for coming to exercise my right of freedom to speak if it is not protocol to thank citizens for sharing their concerns about the education of their children than it should be this appears to be just a common courtesy tonight our most pressing concerns are the following three questions of which i will leave a copy for your reference number one how do we as citizens who have elected you as our public servants engage you as board members and obtain feedback when a school board meeting restricts our right to receive answers number two we are aware that a majority of board members are up for reelection as an advocacy organization we would

123like to schedule a forum for you where you can meet your constituents and have their concerns addressed would those of you up for re-election be willing to speak to your personal platform to concern neighbors friends and voters whose children attend schools within the canyon school district we're happy to provide a crowd a location and even refreshments or if you prefer a venue of your choice we will acquiesce as long as it is scheduled in a timely manner and lastly when can we expect to hear your response and see that you are either open to scheduling a public meeting or allowing us to schedule and host a forum for you where questions can be freely asked and honestly answered thank you great thank you okay [Music] so next we have uh leslie christiansen after which jessica

124anderson will speak hi thanks for having me i appreciate your time and your listening ear and hopefully response i am here representing concerned parents of children that are school-aged and i have twins that are seven and they have yet to experience a normal school year they were torn from kindergarten midway and then returned to first grade only to be pushed back home and then migrated to other classes and they i'm hoping so much that they can have a normal experience in school this year so i'm very concerned about the mask masking children and i'm not concerned just because of it being an inconvenience or thinking that it's hard for our kids to wear masks if masks worked i would be happy to help my kids to wear them but we all know kids don't wear

125masks properly they can't do it kids k through 12 especially struggle with this teachers struggle all day with this to try to get them to follow these rules and we need to move forward from mandating and move towards allowing parental choice and allowing those who would like their kids to wear masks to have their kids wear masks and those who don't don't we all know that kids struggle to wear them properly as i said my son especially i mean i can't even count how many days i picked him up from school with a soggy piece of fabric on his face and i know that it's full of pathogens there's been many studies out there that have supported that children wearing masks that they cannot properly do it that it's unhealthy for them and it's a

126disservice to our children and our teachers to make mandates for children to wear masks science doesn't support it the american academy of pediatrics just said that they do not recommend that kids wear masks k through 12 because they live in a world of reality with these kids and they know how you know kids are just not equipped to wear them properly i i know also that you know children carry a pretty low viral load as she said before 0.26 of deaths are attributed from children that's not enough of a number to make a majority decision for a minority problem and i come here today as a concerned parent but also to voice you know for many parents in our district and i know that we can still live in a civil society and allow our

127children and our parents to make decisions when it comes to masking and that we don't have to resort to mandates and with the legislation that was passed that can be overturned by the health department and i know that that's a big concern for parents it's a big concern for me and i hope that we can all just stand up and express our opinions and voice in a respectful manner and allow our kids the opportunity to have a normal year at school and allow our teachers to promote inclusion and communication and social health we all know that these children suffer very much so from having to have a mask on their face when they cannot hear what their teachers are saying and they really struggle to have that connection with other students and so i'm advocating

128for a parental choice on masks thank you for your comments next we'll have jessica anderson after which we will hear from representative gateland binyan hi i'm jessica anderson and i have three elementary aged children that attend lone peak elementary um i'm here to express that i strongly oppose enforcing any type of mass mandates in our schools for the following reasons first we live in the united states of america where parents should be able to weigh the options of their children's health and decide what is best for them without outside coercion or interference second based on the research i have done i have come to the conclusion that masks are highly ineffective and unnecessary it is still shown that children are largely unaffected by covid and third there are absolutely negative physical and psychological effects from

129wearing masks for an extended period of time i want to make it clear i am in full support of those who choose to wear masks and i have discussed with my children the importance of respecting the rights of all um so in closing just please do everything in your power to protect the rights of our innocent children and ensure that their beautiful smiles will be seen if they wish to forgo squaring thank you thank you for your comments next we will hear from representative galen binyan after which we will hear from ellie ware hello it's wonderful to be here with all of you and um i think we've all been through a really hard year and longer than that and i appreciate all the work of the school board and the teachers and parents in

130helping us get through this time and it's a time for us to remember that we have one enemy that we're against which is the the virus and that we are all united and supporting one another in a community and i have been hearing from a lot of constituents teachers parents who have great concerns because of the delta variant i'm hearing from a nurse in our county who is also a parent and that reports that we last friday we only had four open icu beds in our county and she also reports patients or are no longer elderly with multiple comorbidities these are young adults in their 20s and 30s who are otherwise healthy the cdc is releasing new reports detailing how much more deadly and contagious this variant is please take these warnings seriously i've had

131parents call me today which i have not had before now parents calling me repeatedly today with their concerns because of the delta variant and so i especially appreciate what the women right before me said that she is teaching her her children to respect those who wear math and that we all should respect those who are not wearing masks right now but i also want to highlight what came from our governor yesterday and no from the from the health department from the utah health department yesterday and i hope we all listen to this because um the american academy of pediatric pediatrics recommends everyone older than age to wear masks regardless of vaccination status and this is because of the delta varying it is more it is as contagious as chickenpox and we need to be prepared

132so the the um department says we strongly recommend local health departments and schools use layered prevention approach including encouraging vaccination and mask wearing among other strategies which includes hygiene and hand washing as we've heard so i just encourage us all to listen to what the state health department has said and to be respectful and consider of each other we don't know the heart or other ailments diabetes that other children around us might have and um i hope that we will be charitable and wherever possible wear a mask as science has found is helpful to reduce the spread of this variant so thank you so much for listening to me and to all of the wonderful people who've come tonight thank you thank you for your comments who's next thank you next we have ellie ware

133and then christine marzel lusky sorry working on it um hi my name is ellie ware i'm a student body officer at corner canyon high school and i'm just here to give everyone a little perspective of what it's like to be a student that has to wear a mask all day and the effects that it has on mental health i just want to first off start by saying that walking down the halls is literally the worst thing ever you walk down and it's silent no one's talking to to each other you can feel the anxiousness um it's the worst no one is meeting new people everyone is just isolated and sad um it's just been so hard to see like as a student leader to see the students struggling i've seen so many students sit alone

134in the lunchroom and have made an effort to talk with them but i've just noticed that they have gone the whole year without talking to anyone they haven't met new people they're freshmen or sophomore or coming from different schools and they haven't had the opportunity to meet anyone um the classes are hard to sit through and like i said there's no social interaction um with our generation there's so much on social media and we're already so isolated and to go to school we're supposed to go there to learn and to just become better people and by having the mask we're not being able to learn we're just isolating ourselves we should not underestimate the effects that masks have on mental health and what like what i've seen with the peers around me i just hope

135that we will take this seriously and will give um the students the chance to choose if they want to wear a mask or not i'm in the chinese immersion program and because of the masks have never once spoken the language out loud this year i have forgotten how to speak it and by the end of the year realize that i have never said anything in that class um i also sat down to study for my ap psychology class and realized that i have never said the words out loud and didn't know how like to say them out loud this has a huge effect on our learning because we aren't able to remember them and like learn them correctly not only do the masks cover our faces but they cover our emotions i believe that students

136should have the opportunity to feel safe at school and wear a mask but i also feel like students should have the right to be able to express themselves freely and to meet new people and to express their passions and their loves that's why i'm asking for you to give us the chance whether or not to wear a mask we've been hearing that this is a new normal but by allowing depression and anxiety to become the new normal the school board is not doing their job by to put the student first thank you so much thank you [Applause] thank you next thing we'll have um christine warsawski okay and then senator kathleen raybee after that okay well we got to the end and everyone's basically covered it that's awesome um i would like to thank the

137young lady that came up before i taught in an elementary school last year i had planned on leaving because i had to take care of my kids and get other things done but when coveted i said you know what they're gonna have a hard time so i stayed and i was in the schools you know i'm gonna tell you right now that that is an understatement on those masks being dirty i called it the dirt donut dead serious they would suck on it they'd take it outside it dragged and then that stuck on it again and it became a dirt donut in addition to that what the other young women said is also true when the very beginning of the year for months and months classrooms were silent i'm talking about kids that talk to

138each other non-stop that make crude jokes that you know make obnoxious comments about their teachers and it's silent i teach art and they would draw masks on their animals that they would be drawing it's become a part of and it's it's sad and it's it's wrong quite candidly so the question is is when we're looking at mandating mass who are we trying to protect are we trying to protect the kids are we trying to protect the teachers it makes a difference because the kids aren't really affected only nine their survival rate is 99.995 percent it's it's not a threat to them in general and as was stated before john hopkins did a research into the 335 that died and all of them had pre-existing conditions so it's not like it's jumping out and attacking every

139child if our goal is to protect teachers they have the vaccine the vaccine works now you have breakthrough cases that's going to happen it's not 100 vaccines are never 100 nothing in life is a hundred percent um i read an article that compared it to or pointed out that only point zero zero three seven percent have gotten sick enough to go to the hospital these are vaccinated people and of those people in the hospital 0.0007 percent have died you have a better chance of dying in a car accident teachers don't need the protection they have the vaccine and kids it doesn't affect so let's let it be a choice if parents are concerned if the kids don't want to wear it they shouldn't have to thank you thank you [Applause] and our final speaker is

140senator kathleen rieby thank you so much for having me here today it's so nice to see you guys um i appreciate your service it's been a very hard year for almost every elected person and so i also appreciate all the people that are here today this is the year i've seen more people at these meetings than i've ever seen before and i really do appreciate the engagement that this has brought for our communities um i'm a mother and a teacher my kids go to brighton high so i'm excited that both of them are vaccinated i am very concerned about our k-6 students i i cannot not say that i'm worried about them and i teach in elementary school so i um i probably will be wearing a mask when i go to k through 6

141schools congratulations on all your new hires as i've mentioned in the past canyons is the 12th largest employer in salt lake county so thank you for positively impacting our community in so many ways as a member of the utah the senate education committee we are working with the utah state board and a parent vetting committee to make sure our curriculum is meets all the needs of our families and our communities this has been mentioned many times and we actually have unanimously decided to study it with the senate education committee i represent three districts and i have received thousands of emails regarding masts and i'm here tonight to listen to all the public comment i've been to three districts and i've listened to the public comment there as well so um i i want to know

142that i am trying to hear as many different opinions as possible and i also am looking forward to a normal year so thank you again for your service thank you for all the members that have come out today and please feel free to contact me with any concerns great thank you [Applause] thank you that's everyone okay so first off thank you for your civility i really appreciate you listening to another um in regards to your question it's hard to do a whole section so what do we do the superintendent is preparing to do some listening sessions i think you'll have six of them coming up or so and so those are the section you're welcome to call your board member and on a non-covered year typically the board member will do three to four public

143forums where we'll go out and spend an hour two hours with you in a discussion and we do that in the different areas based upon what we represent so that's worked pretty well in the past on those years we've had really controversial things we have a whole bunch of people out there's years that we don't we have maybe two or three but we usually hold those every quarter i think we'll probably be doing that again as school starts and we hold them in the schools and we send it out to everybody all of our constituents within that area so that's usually the best interaction on a one-to-one basis and we're not in this meeting where we're trying to get through the agenda for the night typically it comes out in in the emails that it's

144fat and we may want to try to figure out how to put that on jeff the other patrons that are that are not within the school district we're also in the process of doing a strategic plan which basically is sort of the framework for the district as we take a look at that and we will be doing strategic plan meetings throughout the district to get input from parents and and and patrons as to what they're doing so we really are trying to get that input in a different form rather than just a board meeting that you're talking about i don't may not be but the other one town halls are yeah good suggestion we may take a look at that through communications and until we're always looking for ways to get it out and i

145know nowadays we have a lot of parents that are patrons that aren't parents that are concerned and want to do that so that's a good way okay steve you may also want to mention that when the superintendent does the uh his listening tour very very good likelihood that at least one of the board members will be with him at each different venue so i know i plan on uh attending with him when he's in uh in my precinct yeah so okay so we don't have we need to move on because we're doing that if you can feel like uh come and talk with us out to or give us a call i answer i've talked with a lot of you on the phone so just just feel free to give us a call so the

146next next we're now moving on to uh new business which is the 2021-2022 back-to-school plan which i suspect most you might be interested in jen i'm sorry we missed one okay so we'll move on to number seven uh we'll go to center jenna would somebody like to make a motion uh to approve the consenogenic can you please read those okay i can make motion so i move that we approve the consent agenda item a approval of minutes for july 13 2021 item b approval of higher and termination reports item c approval of purchasing bids item d approval of student overnight travel we have a second to that i'll second that motion okay we have a first and a second we'll take a vote all approved we'll look forward aye aye aye any opposed it passes

147all votes nancy are you on the phone okay yeah okay thank you okay thank you nancy okay now i think and get back on the agenda again so we'll go back to new business i remind the audience that this is not a question and answer time from the superintendent if in fact you said something that you want to follow up on what's the best way to send an email about the secretary is there a way to send it to communications either way the communications or they can send it directly to me okay so we don't have time to move back and forth as far as conversation but if you have a question send an email to the superintendent or to our communications department and we will get back with you with an answer to that

148and really quick some of you who provided paperwork with emails you may have already gotten an email answer from me so check your email okay thank you superintendent proceed yeah thank you uh vice president wrigley too i just want to say thank you to everyone that's here tonight um and express their opinions and their input um i i it being new to the district something that i've noticed uh over the last year is is just how strong the relationships are between the district and patrons and parents and i think that's a real hallmark of canyon school district that is not like that everywhere else and i think it's a that relationship and that collaboration is a principle and a foundation that the district was is built on so uh all the are listening online or

149watching i just also want to express my appreciation to all of you for your your emails your calls your input as it's been said we've we've filled fielded hundreds of those um over the last few days so i appreciate everyone's input um i want to just start by saying it's been mentioned i i i hope and and i appreciate the civility and just a call again for kindness and respect as we go into this school year um the opinions are are so diverse and not just within communities but even within our own families i i've experienced this very phenomenon myself i've had some of my own children get covered and experience different symptoms and i have children to this day and family members that have different opinions about masks about vaccinations about everything that's happening

150so it's something that's very real it's very raw something that we're all concerned about i think to your point steve is that i think we i hope we'll all take a step back and remember that we are on the same team and if there's anything that should unite us that should bring us together it's our children it's not our children are not a partisan issue our children are our best um it's our best attribute it's what we're about and it's our future so i hope we can keep that perspective going into this fall unfortunately the pandemic has not gone away um i think you know we're tired of it we're tired of all of it i think we're frankly we're worn out from it and um we want to be done with it but i

151think we have to continue to persevere to continue to have these conversations to share our input and our insight as parents and as community members to to do the very best we can and i that's one thing that i would like to just mention also tonight for the record it's just uh how much i appreciate everyone in the community and in the district for their efforts uh you know i don't think you can really put a price on um the sacrifice that we've all made we we've all experienced no one uh has escaped uh some type of burden or trial that's been caused by the pandemic and i think that should go notice whether you're a parent or a grandparent or a patron a teacher a custodian secretary board member superintendent staff administration it doesn't

152matter we've all been affected by that and that should be noticed at the core and the fundamental foundation of our decision from the start when i got here in 2020 we started talking about this in march or april and if you remember then the information about covid was still very thin and we and we were still learning we're still learning today but the core foundation of the decisions that have been made from the beginning have been to support in-person instruction and our students experience at school with a choice of online learning for parents that felt that was what was best for them and i think it should be said that this difficult balance of protecting people's safety at the same time meeting students needs academically socially emotionally as well as protecting their mental health and

153their and their wellness is nothing short of miraculous and i'm not trying to brag or anything but i'm very proud of the fact that what we've been through and what we've learned up to this point i believe we've given our students the best chance for success given all of the the provisions the health orders the law and recommendations that we're asked to follow um so that leads us to now uh and and here we are a much different landscape even than in the spring of this past year our focus you can see there is that balance of health wellness and learning um and i think we have always tried to be as thoughtful and responsive uh to all of the information that comes in and it's it's a lot of information to to go through

154i for me we've consistently met with county and state health officials the governor's office dr brandon webb who is an ihc infectious disease specialist who also lives in canyon school district and has children in our schools he not only is the covid a chair for ihc but he advises stanford university on covet matters so along with our administrative team and the board and staff and all the input that we gain from our patrons and our parents as well as those experts those are how decisions are are formed and made to the best of our ability we've we've start from the the start we've really tried to adhere to uh state law and health orders as well as trying to take in account for recommendations and as you all know that has not been an easy

155task there has been a lot that has been silent in the law and in health orders and a lot that has been very uh prescriptive that we don't have any choice in in following is it perfect not by a long shot but considering the circumstances and considering what we've been up against uh i i believe the district has done everything possible to provide the education and the and meet the expectations of our of our students so um moving forward uh some of the lessons that that that we've learned um and you can see in the slide you know this is really a layered approach that the the district has taken and something that we learned from the start that it's not just it's not just one thing it's it's a combination of a lot of

156different strategies that work in concert and this has been supported by those experts from the start and as and we'll talk about this the law prohibits masks in our schools as a requirement this fall but there are many layers of interventions and strategies that we have currently in place that i believe in concert have made a difference it was mentioned our air filtration we moved from merv 8 filters to the highest grade possible at merv 13. our air filtration systems have run on occupied mode for pretty much the entire day it's not very efficient in our schools but it moves air through the buildings we continue to have hand sanitizer in every classrooms and encouraged hand washing we've also installed touchless water fountains in all of our buildings we know that that's another safety feature

157that that's effective we'll continue to cohort with students i also think that's been very effective and that's where students remain in their classrooms they have assigned seats it's not probably the most fun for students but staying together in the same group instead of congregating in larger mixed groups is also an effective strategy we've also as mentioned uh in uh january offered vaccines to all of our employees and currently i believe we're up to about 85 percent of our teachers are fully vaccinated um as a district i believe we're in the high 70s close to 78 i believe was the last number i looked at for a full fully vaccinated uh employees so so that's also a plus um i think it's important to note that we all want to start the year as normal as

158possible we we want to continue to look at the data we'll talk a little bit about that at the end in the next slide deck to be responsive to that many many of much of the information has has already been shared tonight you can look on the county website to look at positivity rates you can look at hospitalizations you can also see vaccination rates uh that are there but there's even more that we can do on the school level uh in the past uh this past year we also had restrictions around adult volunteers in the building we also looked at other other strategies that we we had in place that used to mitigate limiting dances or assemblies or other means we also used in our schools our principals did a great job of using uh

159directional cues for kids to just try to ensure uh the best spacing that that we can during the day and still trying to keep a whole child experience whether it's recess or or lunch we know how important those those activities are and and we recognize the importance of mental health and and wellness in that in that balance so as you can see there there's many different uh interventions and strategies that that we can continue to employ and engage the best that we can to keep students stay safe but still offer an experience at school that has has always been the expectation as well as this year again we will offer full uh full-time online education for students and parents that choose to do so so this is the elephant in the room um we have

160uh house bill 1007 that prohibits masks being required in our schools as mentioned it's optional we i think we should all take note of some of the comments tonight that regardless of whether a student or parents choose to mask up in schools that we be respectful and kind to whatever decision is best for them um as well as at the same time we have recommendations from the state health department the county health department and the cdc uh mask up at minimum ages uh up through 12 years old so that's that's where we're at that's the reality that that we face and that that's kind of the as i mentioned the elephant in the room that it puts us in a very difficult position where we have a law on one side and recommendations on the

161other and that to me is really at the heart of this polarization that that is occurring so you can see there our present position is that when we start school that that parents and guardians will make the decision that's best for for their child they can look at those recommendations and then make a decision on whether or not it's it's their decision to wear a mask at school or not and this is you can see there again that we're following uh state code this is in this was passed in special session in house bill 1007 if you'd like to look at that so um so a couple of things that uh are also i think of note uh and that is um as part of this uh trust level with our community and and with

162parents is that and and we're encouraging this with employees as well is that if you're experiencing symptoms we would ask that you stay home um and that if if you feel sick or you you have any of those symptoms that may be related to kovid whether you're an employee or a student we would ask that you stay home another service that we will provide that in my opinion i thought last year was a great help is that we will provide regular testing that's optional for students and employees right now we're looking at two days a week that employees or students at their choice can can come in and get a covid rapid antigen test it takes about 15 minutes is all to to get your results and we'll we'll get those dates and times set

163up but we're planning to do that this school year as well then you can also see just some of the things that i mentioned a little bit earlier we'll we'll continue to maintain our cleaning regimens that we had last year i think that was also part of that layered approach that was very effective in keeping our schools uh clean uh we'll we'll maintain that that level of sanitation this this uh as well this year and i i should say just a shout out to our custodians these people just work their guts out to keep our schools clean they take great pride in that we're at some levels under staff but i don't ever hear them make any excuses they they know what's on the line and how important it is to keep our schools clean

164so another part of the guideline that is uh is part of recommendations um in the guidance from the state and the county so what happens if a student is a positive or or an employee is is positive there's a couple of things here to think about the first thing that i want to emphasize is is that if you are vaccinated then you are exempt from the the recommendations and or you've had positive covid for uh 90 days or it's a mask to mask event the recommendations from county health and state health and these are recommendations these are not requirements but if you are exposed so if you're positive you you isolate for 10 days that's a requirement if you are exposed meaning you have a close contact exposure you're within six feet for 16 or

165six feet for 15 minutes you'll be notified by county health the recommendation is either to quarantine for 10 days or to wear a mask at school for 10 days again those are recommendations not not requirements so that would be up to the student and or employee to to make that a decision but the the contact will come from the county health to the uh person um and that's a little bit different than last year the county health department department's taking a a stronger role in that this year more than our schools our nurses and our assistant principals last year frankly the because of the numbers were so overwhelmed that i'm not sure that you know we have the capacity to do that again and so we're asking the county health to step up and help

166with that if a student is is out either because of isolation for a positive test or they choose to quarantine then we would ask that they utilize uh canvas uh which all of our teachers will support again this year uh online uh while they are uh out um so that's that's how that that will flow again you can see on close contact exposure uh if um at the seven day mark if you are in uh quarantine you have the option to receive a to get an antigen test at seven days um and come back again that's a recommendation that is not a requirement part of the um let me get to the yeah so these are the same uh the same considerations that we've already talked about um so in the in house bill 1007

167it talks about a test to stay event and i i understand um you know right now this is still out for discussion uh we we are talking to legal counsel as well to try and understand this in the law itself it's silent on this all it says is that when a school reaches two percent that a test event will occur and i i just want to make mention that canyon school district was one of the first districts last year to embrace this process and if you think back in our methodology and how we dealt have dealt with the virus and this was really under recommendation from dr webb is that really to stop the virus in a school you have to disrupt its cycle and there's a few ways to accomplish that one at the

168time was to move schools to online for 10 days and then reset the positive case number that works in some ways and not so much in others as we know while our students are out online that's that's not the best educational environment so in january the state made a pivot to test the state and at the time um in in the health order uh then was and it started out at an 80 percent uh participation threshold and then move to a 60 participation threshold essentially saying that that's the percent needed to test to really identify the positive cases in the school to return the school to in person so if you test positive you isolate if you're negative you you would come back to school the state actually adopted our plan we started out at

169two percent right from the beginning and um our plan was adopted by the state of utah uh in january so very proud of that very uh proud of that fact so heading into this year in statute if the school is above 1500 student enrollment and they reach a threshold of 2 percent positive cases then a test event would be held if you are a enrollment under 1500 then if you reach 30 or more positive cases then a test event will be held now the difference in the statute now than in january is that schools are required to offer in-person learning regardless and and so that is a little bit problematic and we need some clarification on that because essentially if test to stay is optional and there's no threshold and that's a choice and it's

170and we have to we're required to offer in person then to me what's the point of offering or doing test to stay and if we're not doing test to stay then the question becomes um how you know how out of control could the the virus become in you know in any school so that's still out i'm recommending that it's the test to stay if that is indeed the requirement that it's required for all to test as a stop gap and as a disruptive measure to stop the cycle of the virus in the school for 10 or at that time reset the the uh count and keep schools open and going as is so you you can see what that what that might look like but we still as i said this is still um out

171for clarification and i think right now and our legal counsel might want to weigh in on this but um we we're seeking uh intent from the legislature because it's silent on what actually test to stay means so we'll get to questions um another uh piece to this is transparency uh we we i i think last year i think one of the things that was very helpful and we know this by the number of hits on our website but our dashboard updating our parents and our public i felt like really helped with morale it helped with transparency it helped people understand uh what is happening and you could almost see you know you look back on that trend data you can kind of see how the how things ebbed and flowed um in in our district

172by zip code and i think that was very helpful my recommendation would be that we get our our dashboard back up and running before school starts i think we would likely exclude quarantine from the dashboard this year because that would be a choice so that would be very difficult to you know to measure because it would it would it would be self-reporting instead of reported to us by the the county okay cindy you want to go to the next it's not let's see um can you house yeah so the last slide deck i just want to present is just on our current data i think there's a few uh highlights to point out as to help help the board and everybody kind of understand the current situation so a couple of highlights it's really hard

173to read this is the vaccination coverage of the county and a couple of things that that i think are important to point out there is our 12 to 19 year olds i i believe were right around uh county wide in the 30 range but as a in canyon school district i the last i could see bj sent that out just tonight we're probably in the mid 40s to upper 40 percent in our in that eligible uh group so you can kind of see their county wide numbers these are the positive cases within the district you can see they're june 1st to july 29th um obviously i think we're all aware the uptick in cases in july but i think it's also important to note uh the low hospitalization rates and the last i looked in

174the zero to 19 category that number i think was right around eight or nine hospitalizations county-wide in june or july so it's definitely an uptick in cases as mentioned icu dr webb informs me that our icu beds are filling up he he did state to me that he believes that that delta variant is much more transmissible than uh than uh before and that we should be aware of that so you can kind of see just looking at the numbers hospitalizations and total number of cases in each of our zip codes within the district so i want to get to the last slide so this is positivity rates and i believe this is person on person testing if i remember right but you can see those uh positivity rates uh in in our uh zip codes

175are they concerning yes um are they manageable yes if you remember at its peak in january we were near 30 almost across the board in all of our zip codes and through that we were able to keep school open and continue to run our programs and and keep education going as expected so um you know those numbers can mean a lot of different things based on people and their willingness to to be tested and to report but it this is data that i think we want to pay attention to so with that board i'll open it up for questions from you or comments and we'll go from there thank you superintendent just to remind the audience that this is the period of time where we typically ask the superintendent questions if we don't ask a

176question that you think needs to be done send him an email okay so that's how we want to make that dialogue go so i'll start with the miss thingy mrs tingy do you have any questions for the superintendent thank you yes okay um you know i i don't have any questions at this point in time but i just want to thank superintendent robbins and the administration's staff for all the work they've done i think this is i think he's what he's presented has been a good um a representation of the situation that we're in and i just want to second his call for respect and understanding as we move forward great thank you mr miller i just have one simple question tonight we heard the phrase hepa filters and then we we know that we've

177been using the mirrors at 13. is that what it is what is the difference between a hepa and a filter so i'm gonna i don't know if leon that would be even a uh possibility for us to use with our hvac system well i i just my and leon you can you can chime in on this because i'm my memory's a little faint on this from last spring but my understanding is is that uh the merv 13 filter is industry standard for stopping kovid that um it's far above any hepa filter that you can put in a classroom at putting a individual hepa filter into a classroom and i don't want to i'm not a buildings guy but i remember we had this conversation there are risks associated with that how often those filters get

178cleaned what actually when they're turned on and off how long they're on um the the type of filter that it could possibly be utilized but all the feedback i got was i when we made this decision was is that merv 13 filters in our buildings were by far the best option to to for air filtration um to stop the virus so i i don't know if i don't know if i'm totally accurate it's been a while leon if you want yeah sure good question mont uh so the air filter that we put in you know going the hvac systems kind of like similar mode to your your filters and on your own personal furnace right so we put those in used to be merv eights across the board we've increased those to merv 13 that's

179a finer filter captures much many more particles the mirv 13s need to be changed out about every three months whereas a merv 8 again not as efficient could be changed out every four to six months okay so we have it's more of an expense more of a labor intensive to maintain those we looked at the hepa filters obviously they're fairly expensive to put one in each classroom we some of the studies we read says it just does the merv 13s are more productive because they're going to catch the filters throughout the whole building whereas the as as dr robbins mentioned the peppa ones various brands and how much they're being cleaned out and adjusted that way and unplugged and watched in that area so well we went with the as with all districts and across

180the state well some didn't go to murder 13s but uh making sure all our buildings had the merv 13s yeah anything else okay michelle so my question is about the testing events because how i mean how do you see that to us testing for elementary i really hope we don't have to do that but yeah that's what is the plan that's a really good question uh amber and um it's a difficult one because the the statute requires schools to remain open with a test event and if you remember last year we did not do a test to stay in any of our middle schools or junior high middle schools or our elementaries they never you know got to that to that threshold um and i you know as a father of an elementary age student

181i really struggle with the concept you know of doing the null swab uh with you know one of our little kids without mom and dad present so i'm not sure what that looks like you know just speaking candidly i've had ideas about potentially if that's what we do that we send the test kit home with mom and dad and they they can report back to us or we we get clarification from the legislature and intent and potentially allow for a move to online uh you know would be i i would hope that they would give us that option it's definitely not the the best but i think we're prepared to do that if if necessary so that's i think that's still something that needs to be evaluated not just elementary but also in our middle

182schools um you know those kids are they're a little older and probably more mature and able to handle that but um you know i i still have concerns even with middle school kids without mom and dad president so so the law um prohibits us from pivoting to online at all at any level we well it just what is in the languages we must offer an in-person uh an in-person experience an input in person education okay but if we're offering in-person for the whole rest of the district i don't know i mean well that's what's splitting here kind of demeans the purpose if i mean so okay so we need further clarification on that okay thank you so much for putting that all together and i i do want to say one more thing so last

183year the health department made recommendations but we all knew we had to follow them like do you is this the same or they're making recommendations but we really have to follow them well i that's the pickle we're in because we have a we have a statute and a law and then we have recommendations and they're conflicting and so unfortunately one of our members is here that's just the yeah that's the that's the situation we're in but i i you know i want to go back to to steve's point we all want our kids to be safe every one of us you know no i think all have the right intentions about keeping our kids safe and we learned so much through last year that i'm confident that you know we have layers of contingency on

184the ready i mean our plan was what 60 plus pages last year and those details are all still there so we you know we can intervene as we go forward um you know i i think we all are hoping that we can open school in the most normal way possible because we know the mental health and social emotional part of this equation is just as strong and we we saw that in canyon school district the impact on that side of the equation had just as much devastation on us as did the physical nature of the virus on the other side of the equation so so um you know i think we all we all want the same things it's how we get there i i think you know to dr webb's counsel to us last

185year that still resonates with me and that is um we have to be flexible and responsive to this uh that has been you know that's been a key to our success from the beginning and it and that's hard right because in a crisis everyone we want certainty and certainty somehow brings a sense of order and peace but we're dealing with something that the world hasn't seen before so um you know i think being flexible and responsive going into this school year is also going to be a prerequisite for any success that we have yeah and i don't i just want to add to any people listening out there that i'm sure this plan is going to change like if it doesn't i will be shocked because we just to what you're saying we have to

186be flexible we have to follow i mean there may be other mandates that we don't even know about yet so so yeah that was part of my thoughts and concerns with regard to the test to stay and you know creating opportunities for in-person instruction while also possibly having kids online the first group of people i think about are the teachers and i'm very concerned and i'm wondering how much discussion is going on with the state legislature and the health department about where that leaves our teachers and how stressed they were last year when they were trying to provide online instruction in addition to in-person instruction it was herculean effort on their part so i'm wondering what our opportunities are to be able to communicate that and to get clarity from the legislature i know that

187senator ruby is a teacher and she understands that the vast majority i think may not be aware of how that plays out with teacher burnout yeah i i certainly echo that uh amanda and you know i i think we're all very concerned about that um i i think for me i i feel much more confident heading into this year in preparation and watching um how our teachers have gone about um you know kind of strengthening their their skills when it comes to blended and online learning we're in a much better position with our one-to-one device rollout remember last year we were still way behind in our order and so we've we've accomplished that goal so i think we're in a better position that way um and um you know vaccinate the vaccine's been available to

188to our teachers and still is and so they they have that option and um if they're exposed and they're vaccinated they can still work they can choose to wear a mask or not i think it's also important to note with that that if you recall um in the second round of cares money there was fccra funds that gave employees up to 10 days of covid lee and uh the board i thought you all did a amazing job and with leon's assistance we extended that it expired in december we extended that to march but that has since expired so that also should incentivize people to get uh their employees especially to to get vaccinated because if if you have to isolate for 10 days and you we don't have ff or fccra then uh you you'd

189be expected to take regular you know leave so so there are a few different conditions that have changed since last year but but i i agree i think continuing to support our teachers i think last year if you recall um we went to a four day week essentially to start and through the year to support our teachers obviously that had its setbacks and its challenges but i think just being mindful and aware of you know their their mental wellness and ability i mean at the end of the day we need them in the classroom that's where it's at and and i just i mean looking at our achievement data i am i mean they really it was really herculean i don't know i hope no one ever forgets that that you know those opportunities were

190not lost and that's because teachers and staff frankly stepped up and made it happen mrs nybar first off i wanted to thank you for this level of preparation and and i feel like you left no stone unturned as we dialogue this and i also wanted to just express my appreciation to the teachers for their level of of work they had to do last year i'm very grateful that we do have some things that will be easier this year such as you know the canvas pages and things already started we've learned some with the synchronized streaming of lectures and things like that so i'm grateful that we are in a better position than last year because we have you know we've had time to develop some things the way i read the bill is i think

191when we were doing the test to stay program last year we were thinking of it as test to stay open as a school and the bill is when it's not providing it does provide if we reach that threshold we'll do a test to stay and those that test positive have to stay home but anyone who tests negative stays at school and it requires the school to remain open so in my mind i think it's just a shift of test to stay means students who are staying to an open school because it is in the bill that it says we do have to remain open um there is this requirement that it says um that the requirement to provide in-person instruction does not apply for a temporary period if the governor the president of the senate

192the speaker of the house of representatives and the state superintendent of public instruction jointly concur within lea's assessment that due to public health emergency circumstances the risks related to in-person instruction temporarily temporarily outweigh the value of in-person instruction so in my mind that is the scenario where the school is closed and it doesn't look like to me in the bill there's anywhere that we have to have 60 percent of the student body that's testing to prove anything it's just the testing is positive tests stay home for 10 days negative tests get to continue to stay so the question is a student or parent that refuses to test right yeah that that's the to me that you know that's the legal question that is silent in the bill so yes and i think that's true but

193i think i think that one statement is kind of providing the guidance for us as far as i think you made a good point why test at all if we're not doing any threshold of those that test positive but i think they're saying well we're trying the bill is saying we're just trying to prevent those that have positive cases from being in the building and that's their level of prevention of what their the bill is providing would that be well if that's true then the intent should be all test if your intent is that you're either home isolating or you're at school then that to me the intent would be that you right and it doesn't it doesn't distinguish a percentage and it does say in the bill too that we don't test if we

194don't have parent consent under the age of 18 yeah so we're thinking we're we're going to be asking these questions we're asking yeah i i'm saying is i'm i'm taking a more aggressive approach toward that because i i don't want us i if if if the purpose is there to disrupt the virus stop it and restart like we did which we found successful then we need clarity on that and unless we superintendents are more aggressive in that approach and and we we just let that ride and then it's an option to test with test to stay then why do it at all in my in my opinion so you so is this what you're saying you're saying then you feel that the testing to have all those who are who have contracted the virus stay

195home and those who test negative can stay open you feel like that is not enough you want a more clarification as far as a percentage of the school that we're testing or is that what you're asking when you're saying aggressively are you asking and you're asking legislators or department of health i'm just trying to let legislators it's their bill i i'd like to know what their intent was in that to leave that silent kind of leaves it it's ambiguous on what that actually means right because in the language last year it was you need 60 and which this is dr webb's language really you need 60 to 80 to identify enough of the positive cases that those that come back to school are safe and then the number resets without that then i you know

196just test to stay i i don't really understand what that means right so if the intent is hey you're positive you isolate you're negative you're at school then in my mind to to make that an effective strategy it should be required of everybody in the building right and i and i think that i think there's parts it's not addressing that but i think it is clear that it's that they're kind of thinking of it differently than last year the test to stay is just for students because they are under the assumption that the school will always remain open unless jointly those persons that are in the bill governor senator state superintendent have deemed it's a public emergency right thank you superintendent for your comments i've got a couple of questions for you i've had the

197privilege this week we're talking to several parents and it's been very insightful i've talked with parents as i said at the very beginning all the parents i've talked with love their children all of the parents had the same issues as far as same same concern as what their best what's the best for their child some thought masking was best for their child other thought because they're concerned about getting covered others said well the maybe the covet's not as bad as the mental health issues or the social issues but they all said the same thing i think one of the things that i did run into is that is people are tired of being told what to do and i think as we move forward and parents were saying well what are you going to do

198and i said well the governor today said you know go get a shot now well the people know to get a shot if they want to get a shot they'll get a shot just demanding that you get shots i'm hoping as we move forward with this i think what we're going to see is we're going to see responsible parents if their rates go way high i think for a couple weeks or a week or so they'll say hey yeah i'm willing to go for a mask not the whole time but it's my choice i'm choosing that you're not telling me this is something i choose i also thought i talked with that parent that had a a child that had uh disor immune issues okay i'm getting heart you're sleeping late abuse and she says

199well what do i do with this i and she says i'm really worried about that i kept my child home most of last year and didn't do very well on on online so and not be able to go in the dual immersion if i don't send my child to dual immersion this year he'll never be able to miss out that whole opportunity which i've dreamed for um one of the things i talked with her about is that we'll be doing this cohort thing within especially with the elementary and i would suspect as we sit do cohorts we also do seating charts correct and i suspect it'd probably be very easy to say let's put those kids that have masked in a seating chart area and those kids that don't have masks in a different area

200so then you have the mass master you get even though you don't have everybody masked up that there's a sub cohort to the cohort you know so that she said that's that's an idea you know that that that would make me feel more comfortable that my child is going to school but also still being around other peers that parents want their kids to mask and so they would be all together in a mask area and then maybe the other side because if we send kids home on a quarantine we don't send the whole school i mean the whole classroom home we usually send to different periods kids around that particular area i also talked with a couple principals elementary principals and and um they would really like us to keep the school open if possible

201there may be a possibility i think we really need to talk with parents they're saying if you know if we support not wearing masks you need to help us support and find and figure out other options these other layers that we're talking about and one may be is to do a drive-by test at this at the school site where parents come before school before work and get their kids tested right there and so we would have that they would have the parents permission the parents would be there or parent or the neighbor if they gave permission or whatever that we may be able to do that and solve that we didn't have to close the school last year because i'm asked however we have so many different variables it's like taking 15 medications and saying

202which one's really working you know we have so many things going on what percentage math did i don't know it was just one of the many things we did last year it'll be interesting to see as we go back without math with all the other mandates um i had teachers i had a teacher call me i was really concerned that the kids were not going to be masked and what maybe she could do and i said well maybe you know we're mostly concerned about you getting sick at least you are perhaps an n95 mass because that's probably the best method to keep you from getting sick versus the non-commercial mass which are quasi-effective um then i also had teachers call me and say please don't give us mass because i i really want to see

203the kids my face and i need to have that interaction and especially for the younger kids teaching the younger kids first couple years it's real hard during phonics and find a mask and stuff so somehow we need to reach out and figure out how to do that i'm excited that we got a layered look and i've talked with parents this is a layered look it's not an entire year school year if you take a look at the the delta variant over in england right now it went up really fast it's extremely contagious people get it and it goes back down again and so you're already starting to see that so i think what we start off on day one maybe totally different in day 60 or day 30 and i think we're going to be

204more responsive on that if we start off i told parents if we start off we're going to try the least restrictions but what we're doing and then if we have to ramp it up and then if we don't wrap it back down again so we can meet those people's rights and the students rights with it that because we really understand the mental health aspects of this whole thing um so as we go into this the quarantine aspect this could be really important as we go into this next year the true honesty of parents supporting us and being in quarantines especially if their kids aren't wearing masks you know if they say okay we don't choose to wear a mask please don't send your kid quarantined because this could affect all the other kids that don't

205have masks so we're going to really work as a team with all of our parents to make sure that we work together in making this happen it's not just the school district it's all the parents working together in the process um and as far as the teachers finish i just want one okay yeah as far as the teachers i think we probably need to let them know we'll take a look at this in the future based upon what this quarantine thing if if we start and they've got a bunch of kids out for the first couple weeks okay if it goes 60 days we may need to look at it you know that type of stuff so other than i think i'm i'm really especially up to today uh and meeting our meeting with our

206parents and talking about it i think we can make this through it i think if we all pull together we could meet the needs of all the different individuals because as i said at the beginning they all are doing it out of love they all are doing it for the same need they all have the same concerns they're just different concerns they're looking at it differently and i know my rights have been violated like craziness last year and i would be at like to be asked to do something and volunteer to do it rather than be forced to stump you something it's quite different so mom and dad come out just one quick thought then one elephant in the room question you know i think we've all been to cafe rio and we've read that

207getting yelled at in spanish has never tasted so good when amber was presenting i will tell you that missing our goals has never felt so good we didn't get where we wanted to be but i am just absolutely amazed at the diligence and the hard work that our teachers put into the classroom to get us to the point where we got to yeah because that was that was uh no ordinary school year the elephant in the room and i think this just needs to be clarified and stated school buses what about mass on school buses are they considered part of the school or what's happening there so um can i update can i just i'll update on that mark can i just go back to one choice steve made because i really want to clarify

208that i don't want any misinformation out there to the parents comment about segregating students by mask or not i i would oppose that i mean i i think you know there's already enough stigma and we're facing probably a lot of um you know i'm hoping and praying it's not combative or it's not shaming but i really believe that if we segregated students by mask or not that we would be doing just that so i know i've had a few parents email me about that and that's just me the board you know how you totally have the prerogative to say this is an idea that we want to pursue but i don't want anyone out there thinking that that as far as i'm concerned that is not an option at this point that comment mostly was

209in a classroom is we have a seating chart and if we put kids a seating chart based even if i i mean if i can walk into a room and say well there's my masked kids and there's my unmasked kids i i would have a real hard time with that okay um to your question mont um so there's there is some discussion on this uh originally uh the health department took a position that masks would be required on school buses that was then changed at our state superintendent meeting we received further clarification that that would not be the case that we would follow a state statute and that masks would not however since that time in our meeting with dr dunn apparently because school buses i guess have federal some federal oversight that it's there

210is a potential that through the federal government that there could be a mandate in buses and i hesitate to say that but kind of the light of day test that is out there and so right now our position is is that we're following state statute they are not required on buses but there there is that discussion going on what if i could enter yeah what we've been told is that public on public transportation the cdc is requiring mass so that would include you know front runner and tracks however and they do buses do fall under that that being said the exact uh you know we all know that issue is well it makes no sense for uh to put on a mask get on to school and take off the mask right and put the

211mask back on to come home on the bus so we're still following up on that but there is obviously conflicting guidance there mrs snyder uh one more thing um i'm thinking about a a conversation we had earlier in our committee meeting about finding guiding principles that everyone can get behind and i loved the parent who suggested she was the rn and hosp and had a degree with hospital administration that said let's let's really promote hand washing i know in vietnam actually went viral this big hand washing jive where they did this little dance about hand washing and i i i would love to see our district have some posters and really encourage the hand washing i could really relate as a mother of elementary school kids with my son coming home and thinking what did

212you do with this mask it's so dirty so um and the slobber and everything so i i love the idea too of having us have posters you know and and really promoting the hand washing because i think that's something that's not polarizing by any any parent with different concerns we can all get behind that right that's something that's been you know taught to us for for decades the importance of hand washing and so i'd love to have um encouragement that way and then just that last comment leon made about the masks i totally agree with that and something that um and talking to my kids they're they're all worried about if there's going to be mass mandates and they said you know what was weird last year is how we would wear masks in class

213and then we go in the crowded hallway and we're going upstairs and downstairs and everyone's pulling their masks down so they can breathe as they're running up and down the stairs and then at lunch where we all have no masks on and we're crammed into these little tables so you know i do know that that masking is not fail proof because actually usually where they're the most crowded is where the masks come off so anyway um not to go off on a tangent but it kind of related to the bussing thing where yeah that's gonna be tricky if we're saying masks on buses and then take your mask off and go into school so anyway anyway i thought about the hand washing and how we could promote that and other things that everyone can get

214behind staying home if you're sick some of those things i really appreciated what steve was saying if leon will just get the lady's name and send her the bill for soap that would be great she did volunteer okay with all this lebanese we probably need to move forward to meet our 10 p.m deadline uh or whatever so if they're okay with the board we'll move forward with the next one so let's go back then to aarp esser which is another great topic for us to talk about grant application this is the second reading um do we need can we get we'll ask okay good to see you all again third and and final presentation for me tonight and i just first want to thank the superintendent for trusting me to dig into this and join

215leon in developing this application on behalf of our district it's been an incredible exercise in reflection of the last year i'm not going to lie a little a little anxiety producing when i think back over the last year but overall i i just echo the sentiments that many of you shared at the start of dr robin's presentation with the heroine efforts of our teachers and all of our building level staff it's it really it's again another moment and continued moment to be proud to be in this field of education and i'm grateful for the long nights as grueling as they were for the board meetings at this time last year where you all worked very hard to keep our students in school because i think that what we're dealing with as we think through how

216we need to start our recovery process to covet we are in a very different place than so many of our colleagues across the country and and quite frankly even across the state so i just want to express my gratitude to you all for your leadership as well as our teaching and school-based administrative and support staff so as we dive in to this round of sr funding leon gave an overview at the last board meeting and i just want to recap some of those details that are unique to this grant compared to sr2 and other federal funding that we've received to recover from covid so first you see there our allocation for csd roughly just over 21 million dollars and the allowable uses for this grant are the same as sr2 for the most part with

217the exception that at least 20 percent of our allocation must be prioritized to address accelerated learning and as we talked in the last board meeting accelerated learning is looking at how we support students with the interrupted instruction experiences that they had over the course of the 18 months from beginning with closure to now and how we can support them with that unfinished learning from that interruption in talking with the state our state department for continued clarification as all of the districts are in the process of writing this grant that 20 allocation is really geared towards direct service for students so expenditures that will lead to direct impact to the students so an example would be professional learning would not be considered part of that 20 percent allocation for addressing accelerated learning it would be direct

218service to the students so you'll see that reflected throughout our expenditures as well there's also a much more extensive grant application for this round of funding that requires a needs assessment stakeholder input uh definitions of evidence-based strategies particularly related to how we're allocating that 20 percent for accelerated learning and then a specific requirement for a safe return to school because again keep in mind this is a federal grant so all of the states are completing these similar applications and many of them are heading into in-person instruction for the first time and then finally the local board approval which will be here tonight for our second reading and then leon mentioned the timeline we have these uh the opportunity to use this funding through september 30th of the 2024 school year so those are just again

219those background details so i want to start with some of the data that we have been reviewing over the last month to identify our needs as a district and the priorities for how we want to use this funding we have dug into our achievement data for this last year looking at comparisons for previous years including the year that was interrupted when kovitt began we've looked at both our screening data and our summative measures with rise and then we've continued to look at our course failure rates and early warning systems we've dug into a lot of the data that we collect around behavior bj's department has largely gathered this so that we can look more closely at how we've responded to crisis over the years our discipline trends our mental health supports and physical health we've

220also started to look at the stakeholder input as mentioned in the last board meeting our district has a very extensive process for involving the community in each school's improvement plan which gives us the opportunity to see the priorities of each individual school community through those goals and how they're allocating funding so that has been a valuable resource to look at how each community has prioritized the needs of students within that community we also opened a stakeholder survey was it last week jeff tuesday monday somewhere around there it's been open for about a week as of 3 30 this afternoon we had 1 850 responses to that survey and so we are going to send out another reminder that that survey is still open and will be open until the next board meeting and then as

221leon mentioned in our last meeting that the the board and patron comments are always an opportunity to express your input on anything that our district is doing also something to keep in mind as we mentioned last time that this plan while it has an extensive grant application it's written also in such a way that we can continue to make tweaks as needed so as the superintendent is holding his superintendent listening tour as we're continuing to gather input through from our stakeholders for the strategic planning process we'll be able to continue to make adjustments as needed so those are just some of the examples of the data that we've been looking at i did want to highlight some of those so that you could see some of the trends that we've had since the last time

222we chatted after our winter data collection piece and and where we landed at the end of the year so i'm going to walk you through just some of our screening data we are not talking about rise tonight as those results are still certified and not quite fully public yet so once those are officially released i'm sure we'll be back and my colleague dr sanderson and i can talk about those pieces as well so this particular slide identifies the percentage of students who are below benchmark and what the increase has been from last year to this year and so you can see we have grown in most cases across the board the number of students that risk population i should say has grown with the um experiences that that many of our students has have had

223through covid and this is reading so again as i mentioned in the winter for a lot of our grades you know with the exception of our early grades reading was not our biggest concern or area that was hit the most for our upper grades and and middle school um there were some other challenges that that came to us in uh math and we'll get to that in just a minute this particular graph shows the percentage of students below reading benchmark and breaks it down by population so that you can see there the dark orange are students who are economically disadvantaged the yellow represent our students who are multilingual and then our green represent our students with disabilities the black line is all students and then you can see again that data by population and by

224reading benchmark by grade so this data continues to highlight that our students who are multilingual definitely had the biggest hit in terms of increases and number of students who are below benchmark and we can see that happening across the grades with those increases beginning to grow in the upper grades and into middle school so this is certainly an identified area that we need to be considering as we move forward with recovery when we look at math uh the trends are similar to what i shared with you in february so again some real strengths and areas of celebration with that fourth and fifth grade i think i shared that with you and in in february that they've been doing a really great job and then we continued to see um some increase in our at-risk of

225reading failure population across the board with um the most hit being again those those early grades here is a similar graph by population for math and again uh highlighting the number of students in each population be it economically disadvantaged multilingual or students with disabilities and the number of those students in each grade who are below benchmark in math so again some areas that stood out to us are our students who are multilingual and how we're going to continue to support their efforts but across the board we're seeing some areas for improvement some of the data that we didn't spend a lot of time talking about in february but that has certainly risen to a high alert level i think is the number of students who have been failing one or more courses over over this

226last year and you can see some particular high increases in the number of students percentage of students rather who have failed one or more courses beginning in the sixth grade and you can see very clearly which grade was hit the hardest and who we are most concerned about and those being our eighth grade students and as we broke that data down further we looked at the average number of failed courses for our students and again this is for all students so this is taking into account the students who failed nothing and then the students who may be failed more than one course so looking again at that average that's pretty significant and double in most cases when you look at that across all of our grades so then taking it one more level deeper we

227looked at the students who had failed at least one grade and then looked at the number the average number of students that the average number of courses that those students have failed so if you have failed one course you see that the average number of courses that you failed increases exponentially so this is a something that we have always been attuned to in terms of our early warning systems but really looking at some of these significant jumps and failure rates is a big area that we have prioritized moving forward so again one of the things that really jumps out at us is that eighth grade piece and so looking at our eighth graders heading into high school next year and thinking about where they've had those interruptions and what that is meant for the unfinished

228learning that they'll be presenting for their first experience into high school and how we're going to support them so that is a big area that we've been talking about and we have plans to further that discussion and i'll show you where we've addressed that in our funding some of the other data that i just want to highlight that aren't on these slides but i think really connects to this bigger picture of some of the components that we're looking at when we think about a needs assessment is the number of students who have looked up [Music] and bj is going to jump in probably because i don't want to get this wrong but one of the things that we track on our canyons devices that students are using we are notified if there's any kind of

229security violation through the searches that students are doing we've kept that data for a little while and one of the things that was very alarming and and something that we need to be thinking about heading into recovery is that during the 19 2019 2020 school year we had 225 security violations the majority of those security violations are around students who are looking up suicide during the 2021 school year we had 2 327 security violations and all but 67 of those were around looking at suicide that number represented 1 358 students so that i think is combined with the data that we're looking at here and the high majority of those searches while we had security violations across all levels significantly higher at the high school level so i think those are some critical areas that

230we all need to take some deep breaths and look at what our students needs are when we look at a needs assessment and what the grant requires of us it it's a act of problem solving where we really think about the state of um where we want to be in terms of desired outcomes and the difference of of where we currently are to try to identify what the barriers are and how we want to really address those barriers so kovid certainly has been we could say some of the root cause of of what we're dealing with but it really just i think highlighted a number of cracks that had already started across public ed in general and some of the things that we were even looking at trying to address before cobid and just made

231them bigger so when we think about the barrier moving forward and what we need to accomplish with this grant it's really looking at the resources because as you see from our data we just have more of of needs in terms of students who have unfinished learning students who are in need of mental health supports and and just to not not leave you entirely depressed about um the data in terms of our students and and where they are mentally i also want to take this opportunity to shout out to our school-based sel staff so our school counselors our school social workers our school psychologists and all of the assistants who support those individuals in tracking that data the responsive service department noted that there were at least 86 000 individual sessions with students over the course

232of this last year and my guest and i haven't confirmed this yet with bj is that they probably didn't even get to everybody with those 86 000 sessions so our our people and our investment in those staff in our buildings um was absolutely an incredible investment and an incredible need and i think that we need to um shout out to them for the work that they did and that was only one part of their job we could continue with the stats in terms of what they did for home visits group sessions behavior assessments and a number of other things that are required of them in our schools but that level of support just i think also paints the picture of the level of need in our building so given these areas and again looking at

233population breaking it down by our students of color our economically disadvantaged our multilingual students and then our students with disabilities you again see a fair rather large disparity between those groups and all groups put together in terms of where we have greater needs so when we look at that data and again that was a just a snapshot we identified four really big areas that just kind of shouted out and these are are not surprised because they started to make themselves known as we started looking at data in that mid-year point so first looking at increasing our k-12 student achievement in literacy and math so there are some areas there that we really need to attend to particularly in early literacy and then math across the board having said that i will also just say um

234we have still seen a a level of improvement and growth that is uh i don't want to say unmatched across the state but the state department has reached out to our math team because of the amount of growth and progress that was still made in this year particularly in our middle schools so again we're talking about the areas of need but i can't stop highlighting still some of the celebrations that are worth noting along the way as well the second priority area is really looking at supporting the physical and mental health and safety of our students third outreach to students who did not enroll or consistently attend class during the covid19 year which again we could argue that this was everybody because there were interruptions across the board with quarantine school closures and pivots back

235and forth to online and then finally the fourth priority increasing opportunities for credit recovery and post-secondary school preparedness um as i mentioned with that data that that really uh hit us all and and demanded a priority so to speak so those are the key areas that the grant will focus on and what i wanted to provide was more detail within each of those priorities how we will be organizing our strategies as well as our expenditures so i'll break down each category or excuse me each priority rather and give you the overall focus and then the total allocation for that particular priority the items that are highlighted in red are those strategies that will be outlined in the grant for that 20 to allocation requirement and with those strategies and that requirement the outline for the

236evidence base for those strategies is also required so for increasing k-12 student achievement in literacy and math our key strategies and expenditures first begin with increasing the number of curriculum intervention resources that we have for our teachers with more students who are presenting need because of their experience over the last 18 months we have more need for intervention courses intervention licenses intervention assistance to be able to support and staffing and so you see that being a big priority and curriculum and software is also a very big expense so that that is a big strategy that we will be incorporating professional learning is another strategy that will support this priority i shared with you in the early learning plan the requirement for letters that particular professional learning requirement will actually cost us about 2.7 million dollars

237over the next two years so it's a very expensive professional learning um comprehensive support for our k-3 teachers one-to-one device support is also a strategy that we feel will support our student achievement continuing to refine the device the support for the devices so there are four field tech fte that will be part of this strategy as well as roughly 1.8 to 2 million dollars that we will be putting aside to support the rotation of chromebooks that will be needed over the course of this particular grant additional intervention staffing again staffing is uh not cheap and so we've allocated uh quite a bit of money to be able to support the delivery of those interventions and the support of implementing the new interventions and curriculum to help our students and then finally canyons online kenyans online

238has an asterisk here and you'll see a number of those across the strategies that have an asterisk and that just signifies that that particular strategy spans multiple priorities not just one so canyons online we are still allocating funds from essers to be able to support the fte that we anticipate particularly as numbers for that program increase continuing to provide consultation and support from our outside consultants from asupd as well as the curriculum as we're getting that program up and going and refining over the next couple of years for your information as of i think through four o'clock this afternoon about there were 215 students enrolled in canyons online that's an uptick of about um 60 from the last couple of weeks and happy to break that down by grade level if anybody is interested or

239we can chat after for that so just know that that is um a little bit of an increase since online enrollment has begun this week any questions about the k-12 priority or excuse me that increasing student achievement priority go ahead yes when we're talking about helping the children with the mental health aspect and we're talking about one-to-one technology i think that we could all agree that the amount of screen time increased and the level of isolation was impacting mental health and so i would love to maybe explore some different things we can do to to maybe um have some teaching of our of our students of how that screen time can affect mood can affect mental health um providing reasons to connect and ways to connect and do some of have some funds um going

240towards that and trying to establish healthy social connections and helping the students understand that the technology is a tool and they're the master of the tool rather than the other way around and i i think that where we're now at a one-to-one technology this is a conversation we really need to engage in because we've just given another screen and so um yeah i'd just be really interested in seeing what we can do that way to help with the mental health piece and i'm really glad that you brought that up and that's definitely been on on our minds as well and so our our team has also revamped our digital citizenship lessons and scope and sequence for that support to incorporate more of that safety around consuming digital information and so those pieces will be integrated

241and at this point they are not requiring additional expenditures and essers but know that there are a lot of strategies that are not necessarily pinpointed in this in this particular grant because they don't require funds from this grant but that will be ongoing and will either access other funds or don't require necessarily the level of funds so maybe we can bring those back at the next that would would that be helpful that would be so helpful yeah that would be great to see in a board meeting will be any questions i have one other question i just had two questions on this we're putting a lot of money in professional learning and additional intervention staff can we get them that's going to be the problem i mean because if your new professional learning you need

242to substitute teachers and they're very difficult to get and i think that may be one of the issues we'll run into this next year is we got the money but we can we get the staff we we do have concerns about that particularly you know with the letters training that i mentioned i mean language essentials for teachers of reading and spelling want not letters i'm not going to use the acronym anymore um just just that alone for this year requires um nearly 1500 substitute days so it is a concern we we are working right now uh principals are already thinking through how to identify you know back to school night their emergency subs and volunteers with that we are part of this uh strategy in terms of intervention staffing is also hiring full-time subs that

243are contracted that'll alleviate some but obviously we're not hiring dozens of them so every little bit i think is going to help but uh steve i think that is going to be a concern moving forward and we're going to have to just keep doing the best that we can and and hope that we can find folks nancy do you have any questions i know it's almost 11 30 your time there um i don't have any questions yet thank you didn't want to speak without mr wrigley recognizing me a question on your graphs what about when a student fits into one or more fits in more than one of those categories how are you placing them in that graph because i i know there'd be some overlap there there are definitely and so just so that

244we're looking at things the right way how are we categorizing that so if if someone is economically disadvantaged and multilingual were they placed on both of those graphs okay would it be possible to see because that way it's it's like we're counting them twice would it be possible to have that in a different format for us to see just so that we yep that'd be great thank you okay so heading into our second priority supporting the physical and mental health and safety of our students we've identified some key strategies and then of course an overall expenditure total for these strategies over the next couple of years as well so some of the key strategies are increasing the nursing staff so we have allocated an additional six nurses with these funds over the next couple of

245years also as just a reminder and i should have mentioned this before we started into the first priority as leon mentioned in the last board meeting we still have essers 2 that we've allocated for this year and so we're following the same priorities so that we can uh provide these allocations over the next three years so there will be additional nursing staff for the next three years for a total of six additional an increase of 13 additional mental health staff so that includes three additional social workers as well as all of the additional mental health staff for our canyons youth academy over the next couple of years the kenyans youth academy includes mental health support from behavior therapists behavior health assistants as well as licensed teachers to support our students with the most intensive mental

246health needs we are increasing the number of school community school facilitators to really be able to support um both the the mental health and safety of our students in school but also rely on these folks to help us as you'll see in the next strategy with the outreach for our students who have not been attending as consistently that's also true with the next strategy which is hiring additional outreach and intervention mentors and we are hiring 13 so that we have them for every one of our secondary schools to again support that volume of students who need that support and that will be across those three years and then you'll see again that overlap strategy with kenyans online we see this as a strategy for the physical and mental health and safety of our students because

247again it still is a great viable option for our families who have concerns about their health situation and kovid right now to be able to have this as an option for their kiddos so the total of all of those strategies end up being roughly four million dollars any questions about this priority before we move to the next one yeah just a quick question these answer funds run out at some point in time they do and we increase our staffing and the answer funds go away which means that we either take more money out of our regular budget or we fire a lot of people yes so we have a reduction in force we we may so a number of these positions um it will be very clear in their hiring that they are temporary positions

248and so that um knowing from the get-go that these positions may not last beyond these particular years and so then at that point it would either be that position ending or through attrition looking at moving them into other positions or if that becomes a strategy that has proven to be effective in a number of areas our schools could start to incorporate that into their tssp and start allocating some of that fundings we may choose through our strategic planning process to reallocate resources to make some of these permanent i think that we have a lot of options but your your point is one that we have been really going back and forth about over the last couple of weeks and really we're going with the things in place that it appears to me if you took

249the balance we have right now between different disciplines in the district it seems to me that when this finally goes away we will then skew the balance towards the mental health end potentially i think these are good questions and i think that um i don't know that i have all of the answers for the question but i i think that a number of these these strategies will be things that we need to evaluate along the way and and determine if they are things that require more permanence in our in our planning looks like it's responsive service stuff a fair number of it is and and then things to keep in mind as well uh particularly when you look at some of those k-12 increasing student achievement strategies a number of the curriculum pieces would be

250one-time funding because we would purchase for uh five years worth of licenses so those pieces and there it's also then saving money in areas where we typically allocate curriculum so so those are some of those trade-offs the professional learning at that rate um and that expense is also in response to a state mandate which is short term so some of those things again are one time i just always get worried with government government entities that it's always easy to grow but it's always hard to get up back you know i i don't disagree and like i said job will grow to the funds allowed right the the piece that i think that we we keep circling back to as a leadership team is is that responsibility to respond for the growing need that has been

251really put before us because of covid and so the hope is that with these extensive responsive supports we can get back to a level of baseline to where our previous budget could handle what what gaps we were seeing we'll we'll keep evaluating jeff wanted to put it out there i'm glad you did this is sniper along mont's point we don't have a number here of how much we're trying to increase staff and a lot of this looks like this is mainly people um that we're ex putting this expenditure on so can we have the numbers of of what we're thinking because we just have a big a big number there and we don't have you gave us some of them but in the slide can we have how many how much nursing staff were planning

252on how many people were planning on hiring their mental health staff i can go over that one more time if you'd like so the additional nursing staff we will be hiring six additional nurses the additional mental health staff will be 13 in total and that includes three social workers two teachers two mental health therapists and six behavior health assistants three so i think it would be helpful since this is a second read to bring it back the third read because i don't know what i'm approving as a board member to say these are renewing positions that we already have currently hired and this is how many we're growing do you think that would be helpful to know because i don't feel like it's clear enough you can tell me the numbers but if i see

253it and say okay so these are how many new positions we're creating for this purpose this is how many we're renewing i think that would be helpful with that and thanks for pointing that out bj i think that's a really good point um the other question i have is where we have in our state we have such a low um unemployment rate and so many people are hiring when we're saying hey and and especially nursing right there's we need nurses everywhere we're saying and this may be a temporary position do we feel confident that we're going to find all these people and and it would it may be be nice to have in this mental health piece some evidence-based programs or things that we can do as far as um counselors with those mini lessons

254that we bring in and things like that just a thought and and a number of those so i i think that like we said earlier with the the unemployment rate certainly we're concerned about finding individuals we also feel um a duty to try and outreach to find these people because we know our students need these supports remember these funds are again just for esser and covet relief and so a number of strategies that we will also be putting in place may not be represented within this grant because we're doing them with other funding and just how we operate as a school district in terms of selecting evidence-based curriculum providing additional professional learning and support along those ways so you may not see every single strategy that we're putting in place to support our students with

255covid represented here in this grant so the short answer i guess is yes we're already working on a number of those things and as i mentioned the number of supports that our counselors social workers and school side psychologists are already putting in place for their groups their integration of of lessons for social skills and then all of their individual counseling incorporates a number of those explicit supports as well if i could just move forward one thing if you look back at our if we look back at our presentation we did three weeks ago we gave you rough numbers on the number of fte we would hire in each area so you may want to just refer back to that july 13th presentation and there and plus if needed on the hiring we can always have

256jeff cook some more hot dogs that brought him out last night so we it did well yeah i first just want to tell amber thank you for her work on this and leonce this is extensive and the turnaround on this remember has only been i mean we just you know got this a couple of weeks ago so trying to put this together and and with the deadline of i think august 20th with the state um but i think it's important to understand we've talked about this before but leon can share the percentage but as you all know i mean in education the large majority of our budget's in personnel right it's people and we're in a crisis we're in a pandemic um we know that there are deficits in mental health which require people to

257address those um but having said that i think you know a couple of things one is that um we have had these discussions not just us internally but with our principles and to me and i i know i think i've mentioned this a few times is that everyone needs to be aware that this is really a zero base game right that over the next three years we need to carefully evaluate which programs move forward and which fall off the wayside one thing that i think is imminent and very apparent is that we need to drive enrollment up in canyon school district um we you know you think about some of the projections that leon's already put in front of us that have projected a decline not because of any particular reason but you know so

258we need to think about what that looks like in the future to try to offset some of these issues and you know it kind of comes back to to to really meeting students needs i mean thinking about moving more from a kind of a equal distribution of funds to being more equitable and how we allocate right so and that means that we look at programs um and that you know that's reflective of how diverse the district really is right in the students that we serve so it's not an easy equation i mean i i feel the same very grateful that this funding is available um and i think amber and and our teams done a fantastic job of trying to you know fill in gaps where they can that's one time that can meet uh

259needs that are not in personnel but at the end of the day you know relationships and getting the qualified expertise in the room with students that that need it to me is very reflective in in the budget so i just wanted to mention that okay so the the third priority is that outreach piece to our students who did not enroll cons or consistently attend and just a reminder we were down enrollment at our october one count by about 690 students as a district overall uh we're hoping that a number of those students come back um but again as rick said that's something that we need to be keenly aware of as we look to the future so for that outreach you'll see again some overlap strategies there with our community schools facilitators and those outreach

260intervention mentors as well as a component that will be adding on and allocating some funding for increased home visits our sel staff alone did 450 home visits and that doesn't even include all the home visits that our administrators did over the course of the school year but we know it's also something that needs to continue so we want to make sure that we can support that and even include our teachers in that this coming year to get our students back to school and attending consistently we also are piloting the two-way communication and translation program parent square that you are all aware of as part of this strategy as well and then the final priority is increasing opportunities for credit recovery and post-secondary preparedness so really bolstering our efforts to provide that those credit recovery options

261so there are some available through canyons online for both original credit and credit recovery for earning a grade you approved the adoption of a new credit recovery curriculum that will be continuing to phase in over the course of the next couple of years and then increasing our overall options for credit recovery by bolstering the night programs that we already have available at jordan high school the summer school options that are available or will be available at all five of our schools and then of course some independent online credit recovery options that will occur across the district as well and then the final strategy uh for this is also piloting an early pr an early college prep partnership so looking right now at partnering with asu and jordan high school and really looking at some great

262opportunities to develop those pipelines and lower risk entry to try college courses while in high school for a lot of our students that might not have entertained that in the past and we're already looking at a model that we feel will be one to look at and replicate over the course of the next handful of years in a number of our high schools so very excited to be able to have that opportunity this year as well so when you look at all of these priorities uh broken down by the budget allocation you see there we land our total in roughly the 20 million dollar mark which was the goal uh because this reflects uh also the indirect cost which is 5.7 roughly so we're trying to keep our budget right around that 20 million dollar

263mark so this will all uh go into an official application that is submitted to the state and as again leon mentioned and we talked about in our last board meeting there is some wiggle room as we assess our needs and continue to evaluate or or if we can't hire the staff we can make some of those little adjustments but we feel like these priorities really do hit the mark in term of where we need to focus and so the strategies are the way that we are going to get there any questions any final questions mrs neimer thank you i'm very excited about oh oh yes yes yes i wasn't gonna i wasn't go ahead and went let's lance each foot because it's almost midnight you need to get out of here nancy no i'm fine

264thank you um i just had a question amber mentioned as you're going through that pilot program this year do you plan to keep some data and report back to the board on the pilot yes so our wonderful jeff haney is spearheading that pilot and working with parent square and there are extensive reports that i believe we can get from parent square and i know jeff already has some other ideas for how he wants to collect data to continue to evaluate that pilot so that is already in the works even before we start so yes is the short answer okay great yeah i just kind of wanted to to circle back on that because it is a conversation that we started a while ago as a court thanks nancy thank you excited about the credit recovery

265in that last portion okay just very briefly i went back to last meetings slide eight and the reason why i was asking for the numbers is because we've had an increase with the personnel on the the last meeting it was it was 3.5 million and now it's four so i think that's why i was asking for the numbers i thought maybe we added some more people in there so just to get that specific because i think usually when we do a first read and a second read not anything changes that way so there's just a little change so and and that extra cost also reflects in that particular strategy with regards to uh sel kenyon's online is one of those strategies that goes across all four of those so we took the cost of canyons

266online and spread it across all four of those strategies so that would be part of that increase in the allocation for that particular priority so the priority i'm talking about is if you go to your supporting the physical and mental health and safety of students the personnel so maybe we need to i don't know if we need a third read or get together later i don't want to draw out the meeting but if you go to slide eight of the first read we have some discrepancy there because we have 14 ftes at 1.2 responsive services two nurses three social workers 480 000 additional teachers 16 for interventions 1.4 tutoring which would be personnel which i think would fit into this category the 4 million 350 infield ticks 3 ftes so adding all of those costs

267we it's not 4 million and i actually accidentally added in summer after school programs is that personnel and people as well okay so then we're still at 3.5 and not 4 million so i was just wondering if we're adding adding more personnel into this so we're going to come back for a third reading and maybe you guys need to get together individually sometime during the day hours and go over those numbers and then let us let us do that again that'd be great we want to emphasize this plan will be very fluid as it goes forward what what you know we'll move money around between those four and between you know the people to do that so we may year two or three we may have less nurses and more uh teachers or on canyons

268online or vice versa we you know but uh again these are just rough areas where we're looking at uh in that regard so and the first reading was a draft based on some priorities we had set with sr2 before the needs assessment was fully complete and so this represents the allocation per priority which we thought was important to highlight okay but with that i guess we're okay with letting you go home we always enjoy when you spend most of our night with you it's just a pleasure uh and in fact i give you permission to come into work 30 minutes late well thank you have a good night okay we'll go to our last item which is an update by the superintendent uh in regards to strategic planning and keeping us up to date on

269the district in the community thank you super dave robbins thank you um hold on there we go thank you i'll make this brief um just to update uh we held our first steering committee uh yesterday and we had upwards of i think 30 people participate including board members community members um administrators teachers parents um main the main focus for the group was really to kind of understand the process and to kind of build a collective capacity on on how to engage our stakeholders and the types of topics and questions that the steering committee would like to recommend for consideration and so we did some different activities to do that so really around looking at stakeholder engagement opportunities we also set in motion the different focus groups we also talked about starting to confirm dates on

270those as well as the superintendent listening tour that was mentioned earlier and for those still listening we're planning on starting those uh in august those will run through uh september we may even do more of those uh if if necessary so um if you're not in any of those focus groups or planning committees just inviting the public they can attend any of those meetings so that would be terrific i didn't just on a note on that i didn't get the opportunity to get out and meet all of our communities and patrons and parents last year so that was always part of the plan but this little thing called covid kind of got in the way but i'm very much looking forward to getting out and meeting our patron our parents and our patrons and students

271in those meetings so it's definitely a kind of a get to know the superintendent i've been kind of behind a mask all year so i'm looking forward to that but also just talking about some of these issues that um are current in the district so really looking forward to that so um that was kind of the majority of the meeting we also looked at just as uh for the record we looked at different strategic plans and examples that are out there so we started talking about format and what that might look like so i thought it was very positive so board members that were there if you have comments on it feel free i have one yeah go ahead mr mo um amber hawley and i were there yesterday and you know i thought it

272was very well run very uh productive meeting i think uh maybe levied a few items of criticism or things that we would like to do differently but one item that i have that i would just like fellow board members to consider and i it's a question not an answer don't ask me to solve the problem i'm just going to tell you the problem i felt very very invested and very involved coming out of the meeting yesterday and the problem i have is knowing that the next meeting i won't be there somebody else will be and at the next meeting i'll be there but somebody else won't be and somehow someway you know if this steering committee is authorized by the board and we are kind of the ones that are wanting to make it happen

273inside our own ranks because of uh not wanting to have a quorum present we are going to be losing continuity inside the board as far as what's happening and so i just throw that out as a thought and somebody smarter than i maybe has a solution okay so we may want to bring that up to our next meeting talk about options it may not be we may be able to do it not calling a meeting if we don't take the about well or maybe we asked dan what that looks like i mean who knows maybe we record it and allow it to be public record yeah okay and mont and i were speaking also about how we really want some parent voice always represented there and so that's another part of it is we represent

274our constituents which are parent voice and if we're all always alternating we're the minority you know by vast minority in the room and how to make sure those parent voices are represented well in that steering committee so that's the other piece of that i would we talked about just briefly how nice it would be if we could invite some parents that are emailing us one from each of our districts or things to those steering committees too because just the importance of that parent voice being present so it's another question for the group great thank you questions nancy did you have a question for us on this yes no i appreciate hearing the report and yeah it sounds like um i want to just talk through some of those questions [Music] all right is there any

275other questions regarding that so maybe you just want to give us your superintendent thing while you're up there and i don't know what else you're going to say you talked a lot tonight but go ahead tell somebody good i just uh again appreciation to all the parents and uh people that were here tonight that shared their input and their their passion about these issues i know they're hard but um you know that's what makes canyons great is we can have those conversations and share and collaborate and i just i also mentioned shout out to our teachers and staff um uh this past week uh leon and i or bob and i went over to the transportation department they're having kind of their annual kickoff and you know just feeling the optimism and the hope in

276the district that it's a better day than last year at this time is really refreshing so very grateful to everybody in the district for all they're doing and to our parents and our students great to hear from a student tonight um i'm looking forward to trying to get those get our sbos back in to meet with me on a regular basis to see how they're they're feeling uh to get the year started so thank you appreciate it mr wilcox yes thank you uh mr wrigley just a few things uh not to take too much time we really want to thank amber for all our hard work many items tonight wonderful job so thank you for that just an update rit our online registration started yesterday we've been doing online for last several years we had

277eleven thousand completed yesterday another close to 5 000 thereabouts uh today as of one o'clock so we're almost halfway done another 1200 half started have not completed it so about halfway done so we're thank you to our i.t department we took 800 calls yesterday you know insisting parents uh my we did it for our two children i know amber was actually doing hers during the uh during our steering committee yesterday so a lot of so it's gone very smooth so again appreciate it with that uh jeff mentioned our ribbon cuttings i want to give you a brief update not to take too much time but i feel like it's important to get some things on these three buildings by the way i want to talk about alta first again ribbon cutting next week alt is

278the one we're least worried about in having the finished product but as we mentioned back in we did a presentation in june we said the gym floor and probably the kitchen would not be done and those are those will not be we're looking at at least we've had labor problems at all through sites but we're looking about september 15th for the gym in the kitchen okay so and actually in all four schools we will be doing grab-and-go brown bag lunches because of the kitchen areas at all four to start the first for about the first month of the school year okay but again alta is is is progressing and again and we're pretty much limited to the gym and the cafeteria i mean the cafeteria everything else the commons and the music rooms and the

279career center and everything else will be going moving over to bright they've they had a still waiting to hear back they had a fire marshal there last week he was there again this afternoon doing their inspection we haven't gotten clearance yet we're working towards that as we said last in june and it's still going to be true we call it area g that is the east most wing that includes the kitchen the commons on the first floor the media center on the second floor and their meeting presentation room on the third floor they will not be done again we're still looking at that september 15th date now we have the fire marshal has to clear the whole building so the alarms and the sprinklers have to work in those areas even though they're not occupied

280okay so we're working on those there is going to also be tile that's not completed throughout the building as well but uh overall we're we're scrambling madly to get these done that's an understatement uh and then i want to move down to hillcrest again we've had the fire marshal was in there last week was in there yesterday gave us a list of things to do the biggest one that he is concerned as an egress out on the west side we have a plan to do that to meet his requirements but we also have some locking doors on in case of a firearm that we need to make sure that get resolved as we in case you know in case we ever had to exit the building so we're working on those those you know our

281contractor has promised they will be operational by next week by monday but we're still scrambling there we will have again the cafeteria and commons area will not be they will be able to eat in the commons area but they just will not have the cafeteria again we're probably looking at close to four weeks two to four weeks doing that where do we make all that food we'll make it at other schools and bring it in oh okay bring it in uh and also the auditorium we've always said around october 1st that's still the date we're shooting for then i'll have to do say this on behalf of hillcrest who's over there today greg levitt was taking his student body officers and his senior class officers about a dozen students around and it was wonderful to

282hear because of greg said the first thing they said was wow this feels like a college campus which is what we wanted to hear so that was really neat the students loved those 12 students loved the building loved what it was like uh so we're excited that they can bring their senior year in the new in the new school so that was that was neat to see but again we're i want to thank our contractors i know they've been going nights and weeks saturdays and sundays for the last several weeks uh trying to get there so we'll have any more updates there we're still proceeding to start on the 16th teachers there again on the ninth we did receive he's looked on the uh news you know bingham high is having the same problem in

283jordan district they have delayed school for two weeks we are not there at this point so we are still proceeding forward uh that but that is important to say that right now we do not have occupancy at least in those two we do have an about we may have it on the football field or something yeah but we you know it's important to realize we spent four years doing these buildings it was four years ago now where we passed the ball right and it's i don't think any of us understood the gravity and how much it would take to finish up the in particular brightening hillcrest to get those done and bring those online especially doing on in a pandemic with all the covert issues that we're facing and which has driven the supply chain

284which is really hampered us that way so is there any questions you may have i had some parents at brighton wondering specifically about the parking there oh yeah yeah yeah very good question thing parking brighton will still be the same as it was last year they will have about 200 more spots in the south parking lot there okay but mostly we'll still be at that lds church on the corner okay they'll have to walk down and and and into what we call the art swing so they're going to actually have to walk a little further to get into the school walk further okay and then classrooms they'll be in classrooms though yeah our that's right that's our plan yeah okay our country yeah so and then just to finish up the parking up both places

285so hillcrest will be the same they'll they have a temporary lot that will still remain we are planning to get the if you've been over there brighton's building's basically gone hillcrest is about half gone our goal is still be by the end of december to have the new parking lots in at both schools okay by the end of december end of december yeah we've always athletic fields will be put in at hillcrest yeah hillcrest will go in at the start in the spring in the spring of 22. the aria not bright part of the phase out plan was to do those first so hillcrest be in the spring uh then i think it's very important you know everybody says well classes make the most sense obviously we've got to have the classroom that's where we've

286had our contractors focus on is the classroom wings at brighton there's the two big wings and the big top four-story tower at hillcrest that has been our emphasis you know i was at hillcrest you know a few hours today we feel like those wings classrooms are set and pretty much ready to go a little some cleanup to do but uh i think they'll function very well great views for the students so we're excited to have those in there but again it's the commons areas the kitchen areas that we've had to tell them they need to delay because happen to be in the class you know we on a month ago or so we were talking about the possibility of the fourth floor not being completed is it it's going to be complete yeah that's not

287the that's not the issue science rooms will be close but we'll have those ready there but there is going to be parts of both buildings that are going to be even in the classroom wings that are just not going to be complete and we there's going to be tile as i said there's going to be moldings that need to be done there's going to be some still some above the ceiling work that needs to occur but it's one of those where we're just scrambling to get those done but uh we're moving and we're excited to have kids in there yeah that's the main thing thank you any questions on those bro okay great thank you so much mr haney do we have any swag or anything for the people that are remaining this late at

288night this doesn't usually happen guys by this time staff are here only because we pay them use hot dogs from last night okay left or right died because they were they were good last night they'll be even better tonight okay i suspect you guys are staying because you want to hear our profound comments so we'll now move to the board's profound comments nancy let's let you go first since you're after midnight back in florida oh thank you i i really don't have any more comments other just i want to express my appreciation and and um it's uh it's great all the wonderful work that's going on and i wish everyone well in the next two weeks as we get ready for the school year to start and it's another unusual school year but i have

289full confidence in our csd family that they're going to make it the very best it can be great thank you nancy and we did miss you here tonight and we stumbled through this we got through it somewhat but thank you so much you did great and i missed you out okay well good luck to you on getting back those be fun mr miller you already mentioned the group that has stayed thank you for being here um it was interesting last night went out to corner canyon high what a gorgeous addition to your community that is uh i was there for the groundbreaking i was there for the ribbon cutting and it was just good to go back out there and see that addition to your community and i am so excited for the brighton community

290the hillcrest and the alda community to have beautiful school like you have there and those are just a great addition and hillcrest is my community uh yeah i'm old enough that i went to hillcrest when it was a new school the first time which has been quite a while ago but uh so excited for these communities to have the new schools public comment i'm sure you don't make it a habit to come to board meetings all the time but that was an exceptional number of uh people coming to address the board so grateful for that that is such a that that's grassroots uh politics to me um the one thing that just rang true to me even though we have people on the math side and no math side uh i think steve you said

291it well that we all love our kids uh my case i love my grandkids too so uh it is absolutely key that people have the ability to come and speak to us whether it's in a meeting whether it's by email whether it's pick up the phone and call somebody the uh comment tonight about what is being taught and how are we going to police what's being taught if people are coming in with uh different ideas as to what history looks like than what we've been taught our community you are the grassroots on that young lady i can't remember your name student body officer coming up for the coming year ellie i should know that i've got a granddaughter named ellie um you will listen to what's being taught in your classroom you will go home

292and you will talk to mom and dad and you will tell them what's being taught you and your parents will contact somebody on the school board or district administration and tell us specifically what's going on that's how we know what's happening with 36 000 students in the district five high schools with over 2200 each some much larger than that there's no way we know what's going on in every classroom so please be aware of what's being taught if it's something you don't agree with if it's something that's out of line let us know um i think that's about all i have for tonight thank you mr wood this is oaks you guys are awesome it's good to see you um this last week and also through the month of july i've had the chance to

293think a lot about a trip that i took with my daughters a couple months ago when our kids get to um middle school and of elementary age we take them on a two-week trip to back east to williamsburg and gettysburg and washington d.c to study us history it's history is an important thing to me it's something i read a lot i study a lot i study a lot not just about our national history but also internationally what's going on and history particularly in asian countries and and because i've spent a lot of time there and i speak chinese too ellie good choice um if there was anything that was struck me and as it does every time i go to that area of the country it's the fact that there at the time that our

294nation was founded there was such a wide range of perspectives and people had different ways of seeing the world and those same people were able to come together and unite together behind a common cause and overcome what were really insurmountable odds and they also went on to create not just an initial nation but a constitution that would eventually inspire constitutions throughout the world it was a catalyst of a movement that began and one day inspired over 192 independent nations to create a system where people could actually speak and vote for their own leaders and advocate for things that were important to them it was a catalyst that led to progression of human and civil rights and that is no small thing um i feel like this last year has been a very difficult one for

295our country and the whole concept of community has been stretched so much to its limit and beyond anything i've seen in my own lifetime and with that said i feel like maintaining a sense of peace and community has never been more important and i take that role and responsibility as an elected official in the community very seriously part of that includes following the rule of law it's critically important that as a board we follow what the legislation legislature says it's critical that we follow what the health department says and learning to walk that balance being this last year has been one of the most taxing things i've ever done as a human being it's been very difficult and while also recognizing and respecting every voice while the majority of the positions that were in this

296room kind of fell on one side i can assure you we kind of get it equally on both sides and that was especially true last fall and and something to consider too i know one of the women that was here speaking and i feel badly that she came and spoke and larry edward that she was never responded to and that was an oversight that i feel badly about it's also important to realize that part of what we do as a school board is that we also have to follow the rule of law when it comes to robert roberts rules but we have certain rules and protocol that we follow as a board in how we run a meeting and it's not always possible for us to go back and forth in discussion in part because

297you guys saw like we have this huge agenda there's so many things we have to address and there are forums and ways for us to engage and discuss things with the community we're also subject to the open meetings law which i did not really appreciate until i got on this board about how tricky that is to navigate and because if we have we can't i don't know if the public knows this we can't even text or email more than three of us without it becoming subject to the open meetings act and that can be grandma requested by the public to know what the subject of those conversations are so when we come together as a board it's our time to be able to actually discuss that in front of the public we don't have behind

298the scene meanings what you see is what you're getting and when the public comes forward whether it's through email or tech you know coming and speaking to us that's really our first opportunity to hear a lot of where you're at and for us to talk about it if that makes sense um so there is an appropriate time and place to engage and one of the things that i have talked with people over the years is that public education is tricky it's it's an amazing thing it makes a huge difference in any community you're able to pull together children that fall at the very bottom of the socio-economic standing in the community we have over two thousand homeless students in our district over a third of them are on free and reduced lunch we also have

299children that are in the opposite kind of situation and trying to figure out how to educate all of them and create opportunities for equity where everyone's voice is heard for over 30 how many students do we have 34 000 students it change oversight training all of it takes a lot of time now i am a parent who has had experience in a multitude of different educational models i have homeschooled my kids i have charter-schooled my kids i've private-schooled my kids and i've public schooled my kids i've chosen the system that i'm in for a reason but it doesn't mean that that was the easiest system to create change public education to create any sort of change or shift or anything is like moving an oil rig in part because you have so many voices and

300rightfully so and so many perspectives that have to be heard and balanced and i got the sense and i've been on the other end before where there was a lot of frustration like i've talked to you about this and it hasn't happened that will never be a realistic expectation of public education we have a lot of things going for us but speed is not necessarily one of them right amber she's back there laughing so um i i understand that frustration i understand that perception and perhaps i think it might be worthwhile for the public to consider and and maybe this is selfish of me to say this but i i hope it's understood as it's meant to be the people sitting up here on the sport other than holly who came out in january and

301then she continued to experience this with us we were the same board who received unbelievable heat and criticism last fall about choosing to open school at all even with masks hate mail angry phone calls letters i mean a lot of heat a lot of heat from teachers trying to be able to balance the situation where your kids had teachers in the classroom at all that was tricky and then when we had our first outbreak at corner canyon last year i had a new york new york times reporter on my back and poor jeff haney over there like was hunted for about a good month with questions and all sorts of things she was angry how dare we have that school open when we had a teacher that was in icu how dare we keep these

302kids in the classroom when our number spiked how dare we not go by the 15 number that the state had initially suggested there was a lot of criticism and the conversation i had with that reporter at the time was listen we are looking at the whole picture we are so worried about these kids and to make sure that their mental health is considered because there is another kind of risk that we carry part of which amber addressed tonight which by the way that was jaw-droppingly sad um you know a few months later the same education beat of the new york times put out a piece about clark county nevada about how they had lost over 20 kids with suicide in a year and in that moment i knew we made the right decision sorry these

303are hard decisions and i want this community to know that we listen to everything you email us that you say we care we care about your voices we care about our teachers every part of the community is important and i hope that we can leave with a firm commitment to maintain community a mutual kindness and support we are not through this sucker yet it's hard and it's been really hard on our teachers on the staff on every single elected official in this community one thing i want to say is that there is a reason that utah has been a shining star in the darkness of this last year i have new neighbors from oregon from washington state many from california close friends that i have known for 25 years that have raised their children overseas

304and international schools which are considered the creme de la creme of education they have chosen in the last two months to leave southeast asia to bring their families here so that they could ensure that their kids all five of them were able to go to in-person school that is a credit to the state it's a credit to our teachers it's a credit to every single elected official that has taken the time to hear and balance both sides there's a reason why people are flooding here i just heard a statistic that over 200 000 people moved into utah utah county over the last year over two hundred thousand i have no idea what it is for salt lake county it's staggering and they're coming in large measure because of the schools and a large measure because

305a lot of elected officials had stuck their neck out and tried to make this work under insurmountable odds and that was possible because of our teachers too so i just want to thank the community i want to thank our fellow board members and everyone who's been involved to make this work we have a lot to celebrate in this state and i'm grateful to be a part of it that's all i have to say thank you mrs oaks mrs dybarn well first i want to address those of you who are still here it was so nice to see you here this evening i know some of you so that's fun hello amy and so great um to see our our student here too and there's two students right someone who's an awesome moral support which that

306is just as an important role i respect that and think that's so awesome okay i just wanted to first say it was so great to see you it was so great to hear from you and i really appreciated the fact that we were able to listen to very important points of view and take that all in tonight a few things that were mentioned that i wanted to address um we had our uh sweet um miss egbert here tonight that i haven't met before but she asked some very specific questions and i wanted to if you could share this with the community if you ever want direct answers and dialogue you can always email us and and i personally email back everyone who emails us and i know that our board members do that and so

307you can always engage in email we do have town halls i think miss oaks has one coming up i plan to do one in september i did one in march and that's when we do questions and answers the listening tour the superintendent mentioned tonight is another really important one um and we'll have an opportunity to really hear and please tell your neighbors this is part of our strategic planning where we're trying to listen to the values of the community and the things that are important in in efforts that are working things you want to change so there's a great um effort there for participation um the other thing i wanted to share is there are four open positions at draper park middle school's community council four seats so if you have friends or neighbors who

308have middle schoolers at draper park that's a great way to get involved there was a lady here and i can't remember who it was that talked about i do remember but i don't remember her name i know what she looked like she talked about how can we ensure that teachers are not subjecting our children to their political thought that's a hard one right because we can as a board and as a district have our guiding principles and the things that we're saying yeah we're not teaching divisive curriculum we want to unify we want kindness respect other people's differing opinions but i think a great way for that checks and balances is as parents our obligation to get involved at whatever level we can whether it's pta school community council volunteering in the classrooms and asking

309our kids what what's going on in their lives and i know we have some excellent mothers here that i'm sure do that and i know that i have just even with asking my own sons found out oh yeah there's definitely some maybe some political ideas um you know i know i had some boys that were given a paper and if they wanted to write a certain way which was a certain political school of thought they had all the evidence there for them but if they wanted to write it the other way they had to research online so that's it when we hear about that please let's call the principal we can we can do a lot of things if we hear about it so staying involved and then and then talking to the principal so

310that we can do that um as far as uh as far as what we can do to help have have a good conversation in our schools about inclusion but not being divisive with current political thoughts that come and go we we actually are meeting we've had some committee work with an equity committee and i just want to do a shout out to dr robbins pretty amazing he finds these amazing uh people and he's got such great ideas with innovation but we listened to a consulting group that talked all about guiding principles and there was a quote that came from there that dr roberts shared with us that i just want to share that was we should not judge our country by its failures but by its promise isn't that awesome and the whole idea of

311it coming together with guiding principles that everyone can agree upon respect inclusion and so all of this discussion tonight with that critical race theory our our efforts that we're trying to do um and and you'll see this in the future with training um with teachers and things is to try to evoke a situation where there's impartiality where the student wouldn't even know what the teacher's political leaning is that we listen with respect to different ideas and opinions but maybe we don't actually know what the personal opinion is of the teacher so so there's great things to come on um that way i wanted to thank leon for that update with the schools i actually have had a few parents this last week asking me what's the update with brighton high school specifically thank you to

312dr rodrick she's an awesome presenter i think what happens in the district is if there's anything difficult they give it to her because she she's great at taking our hard questions and presenting so thank you so much for that um it's been a busy summer my my boys say now doesn't the school board take a break in the summer and we've been so busy with committee work i've enjoyed committee work with the board uh school board handbook committee the policy committee the steering committee for the strategic planning yesterday and our equity committee i just wanted to um thank you for being here and and recognize that we appreciate you and and we hear you and we look forward to having you come to all of those events coming up and that's it thanks thank you

313i'm going to be very brief if it's okay since it's almost one o'clock for nancy back in florida um i do appreciate tonight and the ability we had to have a civil conversation uh and hope to do that to the computing um i do read i talked with a lot of parents and i read a lot of it and it's really difficult to read things on either side because everybody's pouring their hearts into that and that's they're almost crying as they're doing it and they all do it as i said earlier they do it out of love they do have a concern myself i'm having a hard time because the country and everything else around us is sort of falling apart and i'm trying to keep our district together so i mean we may not

314have much control about what goes on in washington or what goes on in other places but we've really been trying to keep the consensus of the district together character parents together keep our kids mentally healthy a good quality education and to be able to get them that what they need um and it's becoming really difficult as we move into this the difficult part of it is just seeing the contention that all the outside world is bringing in to our district and that contention between parents spills over to kids and that spills over to the schools and that causes all kinds of issues so as a board sometimes you're walking some interesting line because people say i want you to do this and if you don't do this i won't vote for you no and then

315somebody else the next leader says once you do this and if you don't do this i won't vote for you personally i have to vote my conscience is what's best and knowing what's happening and last year we had to make a lot of difficult decisions against what people said at the end of the year they said oh well thank you for doing that and i know it's a hard decision and yeah it wasn't it worked out okay and you're going well but you didn't say it at the beginning of the year but anyway so know that the board there's no right or wrong or left or right on this board we're just basically after the kids and trying to get quality education and trying to come to some consensus because that's how things work otherwise

316you'll have contention in the district contention on the board and with our staff and we'll feel in our own homes in our district and our community what we're starting to feel across the country so thank you for tonight and with that unless you guys want to go on i would say during the meeting for tonight and nancy you can finally go to bed good night nancy you