001the path of a child who may cause harm. How do we defend ourselves from that liability? Kind of22 situation. It is a catch 22. Um uh Representative Ward ran a bill last year kind of trying to precipitate uh some litigation that might solve that. We haven't gotten there yet. So, he's kind of put a requirement that we remove certain types of students, but there's nowhere to remove them to. Um, so we're still not sure what that's going to mean for us ultimately. I would just like to speak to that a little bit, too. I appreciate uh Dr. Day's presentation. Tonight, we've been reviewing budget numbers and believe it or not, Cranite School District commits $10 million above and beyond special education funding that we received from both federal and state allocations. So, we're using general
002fund monies to help support uh these incredible needs. And so, when we hear these conversations surrounding uh budget cuts and some of these other challenges, um these are the types of supports we need additional help and resources for. Um, and it's it's not just a protection for our general ed or traditional ed student. It's to provide inclusivity and other activities that allow these kids to participate and be in a general ed classroom and the supports necessary to sustain them um in a traditional environment, which we know the data shows us um is benefit to them and a benefit to our general ed students. So, absolutely. we probably allocate more dollars uh per capita and per student above and beyond in in probably the entire state and it's not enough. That's what's I think a little
003bit I think we're all sensing that frustration in our tone of voice uh because that those needs continue to grow um even more dire. So, it's great to be in so many of our schools and seeing our special education uh teachers and their classroom spaces and to see some of those challenges firsthand. and uh we went around to some of our schools when we were experiencing some challenges and and I've been back around to tour some of those places and followed up with some of those teachers, some of the things and we're working through some of those challenges and we've been successful on some of those issues, but some of those issues continue to linger and we just continue to monitor those as best as we can and make sure that we're adhering federal law,
004but at the same time providing the protection necessary for all of our students. So, it it's it is a source of frustration. It is. And and I've got to I've got to hand it to our teachers who are working so hard day in and day out to provide services for the for their kids. And it's emotional for them. It's personal for them and they view them as their own kids. Um and it's hard when we have to take action against a student or move a student when we've worked so hard to support them. But sometimes that's what's necessary. And what's even harder is when we have a student that we love and we that we know needs to be here but is also harming others. And that puts a teacher in a really hard spot.
005Um but our teachers uh they fare it well and they and they take it on the nose and they come back day after day and they're some of the strongest people I know. Kind of along those lines. I don't know if you can speak to it um Dr. day or if Todd could, but I didn't I had no idea when I I've heard I've heard that we need to have special ed fully funded. We need to have special ed fully funded. I didn't know that from the federal government there is supposed to be we're supposed to get a certain percentage and we're not getting that. Yeah, let me talk about that. So way back in 1975 when they when they passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, um Congress committed to funding what it
006costs to provide special education at 40% in the states. We're going to then carry 60% of that. Right now the federal government um only funds it at 13%. Um, and so, uh, right now that equates to about $13 million is what I get from, uh, kind of federal flow through. Uh, the state gives me about 36 million on top of that. So, we we're spending well over that. Now, when you compare that to other states, and this is where we get into some um kind of pitfalls, when we when we're compared to Massachusetts or California, where their weighted pupil unit is closer to $20,000, and ours is 4,200, um the services that they can provide with that same flow through is very different than what I can provide. And when they come here, they expect
007that same level of service, which puts people like Kelly in a hard spot trying to provide the Cadillac of all services when we simply don't have pools with dolphins and, you know, recreational therapists and things like that. So the 36 36 million that we get from the state, is that are they just compensating for that lack of the 40% that they're picking up or is that just what's expected already? Is that statutoily what we should be getting from the state anyway? Um I or is there anything? There's no there's a formula that really goes through I mean Senator Rei would be better and speak to this. um and maybe the superintendent, but typically what happens is they they fund us based on the WPU and then we have the special ed add-on and the self-contained
008count, which typically up until now has carried the weight of two WPUs and now it's kind of dropping, but that's what the that what you were indicating. So, it's based on our average daily membership. I mean, I just this is what I'm hearing going back to your thing that we should be getting funded at a lot more per these students. And for your question, Kim, if we had that funding, we might be able to be able to provide services that would help to mitigate some of the problems that we're seeing. But because we're not being fully funded by number one, the federal government per the 1975 and our this is also being dropped apparently through the state. We are receiving less and less funding and so we can't we're we're having a hard time picking
009that up. Is that is that that's a fair Yeah, that's a fair okay assessment. Okay. I think there's some question that we're trying to establish how the data is important to the state there as well. Yeah. So we so part of the problem we have is uh when a special education file is a physical file. So when a student moves into Granite School District, parents are not always upfront and forward saying my student receives special education and has an IEP. And so when they move into Granite, if they provide us with an IEP, then we know about that. Then we rely on our teachers to enter that into our system so that so that uh focus will pick up and track that they are a student with a disability. Um I've got multiple different systems
010for doing that, including we have technical compliance managers who are um ESPs who go school to school um looking at our files. uh if we don't have a physical file or it takes another district, another LEA or charter a while to get us that, we're not actually capturing that that student is a student with a disability and we're not able to count them until we have that physical file. So, for example, we were about a thousand students short in our December one count um this year over last year, but in February, we added nearly a thousand students to our scram count with start dates of August. So, those students existed. We were servicing them. we didn't get they weren't counted because somewhere along the way either the file was late getting there, a teacher didn't
011put um the IEP into our system so we could count them. Uh you know, so we've got some things like that that we're trying to figure out how best to simplify the system because it it's hard. I mean, taking time out of a day for a teacher to pull an IEP and enter it into the computer when they're trying to teach is is just unreasonable. We have no other way of doing it. I just want to say that um you know we have uh in the next few weeks we have a JLC meeting where we're going to set our priorities and I I really feel like special education funding could be one of those. And every year we've kind of had that on there as something that we really support. Um but I I hope
012that we'll be able to make that a priority this year. Um, can we ask about how we committed last year to some onetime money to um to support co-taught kindergarten? Can we ask how that's going? Do we have any data on that? Uh, we do have data and it's um our co-taught kindergarten classes are uh outpacing the previous year. So when we look at actually how they perform when it comes to our beginning of year and midyear dibbles or acadens they've made more progress than we could have imagined. Um it is a significant commitment um but they're doing a lot better. We've um we had more requests this year than we had last year for Kota kindergarten. We weren't able to fulfill those because we again are limited in in our numbers. Uh ultimately a
013lot of our students, the general education students who are in those classes are also outpacing their peers in general education as well. But keeping in mind that there are up to 20 kids in those class, not 30. Um you have two certified teachers and two aids as well. So there's a lot of adult support. And do most of the aids get funded through um sped money? Okay. So do all of them in that classroom? both both the general education teacher and the special education teacher I'm paying for as well as um the pair educators in those classes. Okay. I think at some point as we get to end of year testing, we'd like to see as a board, we'd like to see some data on that just how that is compared to our general ed
014classrooms for the testing as well as you know how even anecdotally some of the data that we have that just so we we have an idea of what we are investing in and and how that's going. Absolutely. And I can come back in in June and report on that. We've got several different indicators that we're looking at monthly. Okay. As part of that, not just I mean scores are scores and there it's good to look at data, but I would like probably anecdotally behavior-wise because that was a huge concern that came in is oh my goodness with code top models, how are how is this going to work? How are they going to gel? Are the behaviors going to disrupt learning? So I would kind of like to know at at least a little piece
015of that. I don't know how you would frame that or organize it. It could be anecdotal, but uh maybe just get some feedback from some of those Kat teachers on, you know, how how difficult behavior challenges have been. Maybe they haven't been. Um but that's something that I would like to know. Well, I think we can survey the teachers as well. Yeah, I think uh I'd invite you to and and Bryce can help set this up to go visit some of these classroom spaces. I think we have had some struggles and we've tried to provide some additional supports and work through some some specific issues at some locations, but in in other places it's working really well and you would be hardressed to be able to identify who the special education kids are in those
016classroom spaces. I've sat in those classrooms, sat on the floor with the kids and um it's quite remarkable um how well that's going in some places and there's been some other challenges and that's why we're working through those things to learn and understand how we can better support this and and make it as effective as possible. Absolutely. Any further questions? Thank you so much, Dr. Dave here. Okay, we're going to move on in our agenda. We have a need of an executive session for both litigation and negotiations. And I will entertain a motion as such. We'll move to executive session for litigation and negotiations. I'll second. Okay. We have a motion and a second to move into executive session for the purpose of litigation negotiations. This is a roll call vote. Please state your name
017and your vote. Connie, we'll start with you. Connie Burgess, yes. Kim Chandler, yes. Julie Jackson, yes. Chris W, yes. Karen Winder, yes. Clark Nelson, yes. Nicole McDermott, yes. All right.