001Welcome to our board meeting. This is April 15, 2025. It is 503. We're going to begin by indicating who's here. Um Connie, do you want to go first? Connie Burgess. Kim Chandler. Chris W. Karen Wonder. Todd Hubbert. Superintendent Horsley. Would you like to chime in? Nicole McD Um, we're going to exclude excuse Julie Jackson. She should be here later. And Clark Nelson, they both had a work commitment that they um were caught up in. So, they will they will join us if they can. Um, our first item of business, we do have uh patron participation time and we do want to recognize we have Senator Reby here and would like to invite her if she has anything to share. We we'd like to invite you up. Uh, I'm going to try to attend a couple
002of schoolboard meetings tonight and I just wanted to say thank you Todd for being there every day. It's so great to have a um expert there. Uh, I appreciated Superintendent Horesley's letter at the end of session. It was perfect and I really was nice to read to know that you guys are responding back to some of the stuff we're doing. So, I appreciated that letter. That was pretty much the first letter that we've ever received like that. So, it was nice to see that letter. I'd like to thank um Julie Jackson for being up there constantly also speaking on our behalf. I have a list of our interim study sessions that um it looks like they're not going to be too harsh to us during interim. Um but we are looking at salaries for uh
003administrators and we also looking at chronic absenteeism. If there's something that you'd like me to try to get onto the interim committee meetings, we can start to look at that now. It is discretion of the chair. Last year we were working with Candace Prucci trying to get more money to class size, but then that was unfunded. So, uh, I do vote exactly the way that you ask me to vote 90% of the time, probably 99.9% of the time. And, um, uh, we have all of our senators and our representatives in Salt Lake County working really hard to align ourselves with your priorities and your votes. So, I just wanted to say thank you for being there, Todd. Thank you, Superintendent Superintendent Horsesley for being there. And Julie Jackson was definitely a force to be reckoned
004with this year as well. So, thank you for all the work you do to support us while we're trying to support you guys. Thanks. Thank you. And we do appreciate your hard work and what you do for us as well. All right. This is my main thing to say. Um, when you're going to your meetings, if you could please start asking your other superintendent to reach out to their positively educationminded folks to run for office. I don't care if they're a giraffe, an elephant, or a donkey. We need people to support education. And um our rural communities are really starting to get the message. And I I try to say it all the time. I'm like, "We need to have education friendly people up there." Um I know one senator in particular was like, "Oh,
005I was so glad you were off the floor when I ran my bill so I didn't have to answer your questions." And it it was a bad bill. And so um we need more education people up there. So, please encourage your other districts to start looking for people to run. Thanks. Thanks, Senator. All right, we have um a couple items on our consent agenda. Um some purchases and then a guest for negotiating team. We've had this for a few days and been able to ask questions. So, if there's no further questions, I will entertain a motion. I move we accept the consent agenda. Second. We have a motion and a second to accept the consent agenda. Are there any comments on this? All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Right. Motion passes. We
006will continue on. We have study item. We've invited um Dr. Bryce Day to come and share with us some things about special education um and kind of give us an update on what's going on in our district. So, we're going to invite him up and turn the time over. Thank you so much as I bang my knees against the table. Thanks so much for um taking the time to hear um about the current state of special education in Granite School District. Um right now um I want to just kind of start out with some givens, just some ideas that um really need to be accepted in order to to move forward and understand special education especially is as we go from how we're operating in granite to what special education is in general. So first
007of all, special education is the most complex, expensive and latigious aspect of our school system. Um it is the one thing that experienced ad administrative remedy more than any other aspect. Uh number two, the obvious solutions are not always the correct ones. Um or I should say the intuitive solutions are not always what should be or seem like they should be the easiest ones to accomplish. Uh number three, legal requirements may differ from what are assumed. Again, it goes back to the idea that sometimes our gut instinct is not always correct when it comes to legal principles. And then number four, liability comes to light through a couple of different ways. We look at our past actions. We look at current situations and we look at future implications. Um it's not always as easy as
008the law says this air go that is okay or that's not okay because special education is really based on principles. It's litigated based on principles. So two people can take the same action and based on the principles or the operating uh system that they're using to make the decisions can determine whether that action is correct or incorrect even though it's the exact same action if that makes sense. So let's move forward. Um some of the objectives I want to talk about uh or not I don't know what I'm doing. There we are. We're going to talk about kind of the state of special education in Granite. And then I want to talk about our responsibility, meaning Granite School District's responsibility to students with disabilities. Um, and then I want to talk about how to address
009constituent concerns. And I know that um, you've got some heavy items that you want to get to. And so I'll try and go through these as quickly but as articulately as possible. So I'm just going to do that. I want to start off with a quote from Helen Keller. Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much. Special education is a team sport. Um we have teams. We talk about teams and teams the ones who make the make the decisions. But teams need to be fully informed and fully engaged. And that is sometimes difficult. Not all of our families um fully engaged in the teaming process. Sometimes it's because they're intimidated. When you have a group of professionals around a table um speaking a very specialized language, that's intimidating. And so our
010parents are quiet. They don't know what questions to ask. We use specialized language. It's very intimidating for our families. And so we need to do a better job. when we've been trying to train our teachers that we need to leave the lingo on the side and speak to parent, you know, speak parent to parent, human being to human being so that we can get down and do away with some of this language. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes we can't because a term is a term that we use, especially when it comes to professional terms or um especially when we start talking about assessment and things like that. But we want to reduce our language so that it's very accessible. Uh let's talk about who we serve right now. Um we serve about 8,12 students. Um meaning
011of our 5600 students or so, 8,000 of them are receiving special education services. We service all 13 categories in special education, but our highest prevalence rates right now are in uh specific learning disability. We have about 4700 students that are classified as with a specific learning disability. Uh the next closest is about 1,200 with a speech and language impairment. Next we have autism at just over 400 and other health impairment at just under 400. Overall when we look at the number of students we have the snapshot of kind of where those services are provided. About 5,100 of those students or 63% are receiving services in some way in the general education classroom or in a simplified pullout setting with less than uh 60 minutes of service daily. About 1,800 or about 23% are receiving between
012an hour and 179 minutes of services daily. And then we've got just over a thousand or 13% who are receiving what we considered self-contained setting or uh more than 180 minutes daily. And that the assumption there is that all of our schools operate on a 360 minute day which is pretty average. Uh staffing, we have 349 special education teachers, 55 SLPs, 11 occupational therapists, five physical therapists, two aiologists, four teachers of the deaf, uh four teachers of the visually impaired. I have 44 school psychologists and one assisted tech teacher. Um when it comes to our uh support professionals, we have 658 parz instructional assistants, transition assistants. They all go by a couple of different titles. Uh we have 13 kodas or certified occupational therapy assistants. We have five physical therapy assistants, four aiology techs, and
013then 18 uh behavior support technicians. Um they're similar to registered behavior technicians that um we see in private practice. Now, this is what what's very interesting. On average, we deliver about 64,000 minutes of service daily in Granite School District. Um, academically, uh, for behavior, it's about 26,000 and for other related services, it's about 16,000 minutes daily. Um when we add that all up all the way down to um kind of what we're operating on annually between all of our services we're we're delivering about 19.3 million minutes of service. So given our operating budget of about 83 million the return on investment is about $4 a minute of service which is pretty given that the types of services we provide and the number of students that that's quite a bargain. On top of that, we've uh
014conduct we will by the end of this year conduct about 810 initial evaluations, meaning we're evaluating students to determine if they're eligible for special education. This year, uh we have about 2600 trianual or re-evaluations that we conduct annually in in Granite School District. Uh this year we're on track to uh conduct 348 evaluations where a student does not qualify for services. Uh typically about 250 are initial evaluations. Uh and about a hundred are what we consider like signing them out of services. They no longer qualify because they've met their goals. Um we will be have we will have conducted about 8,7 uh 8,73 IEPs by the end of this year. Um and keep in mind that each of those IEP meetings is typically about an hour or more depending on the the level of services
015that we have. Now, um, when it comes to ending our faith obligation, we'll have about 369 students who are graduating who have special education services but are graduating with a regular diploma. 79 will be graduating with an alternate diploma. Those are our students who are taking the dynamic learning maps or are in our essential elements classrooms. Uh, we have about 26 who will be getting a certificate of completion. Um, those typically are our students who are more custodial, so lower functioning. um have a lower cognitive profile and typically are in and out because they're medically fragile of our system. And then we will have 53 who age out um because they're turning 22 this year. Now, when you add up kind of our our ending of our FAPE obligation, you add in all of our
016new evaluations, there's a discrepancy of about a hundred students that we're adding to the system that we don't know what's happening to them. Meaning they they came in, we evaluated them, and then they moved. So, we're not delivering services, but they're somewhere in the state. Well, maybe in the state, who knows? Can I ask real quick? Yes. Uh, can you explain FAPE? FAPE is a a free and appropriate public education. And so, we are required uh to deliver services to preschool age students all the way through age 22. And uh once they graduate with a regular diploma, our FAPE obligation ends according to the state rules. However, if they don't graduate with a regular diploma, our FAPE obligation continues until through age 22. And that really depends on when their birthday is, if it's before
017or after July 2nd. Did that answer your question? Okay. So, just some items of note. Uh SP 170 uh sub3, the school discipline amendment, it it came through. Um it addresses the use of physical restraint and seclusion in schools and it really aligns with the new board rule R277608. Um it's not anything very large. Uh Senator Esamia, I was lucky enough to work with Senator Esamia on it. Uh it really was about taking what our current practices already are and putting them into state code. There is she was attempting to kind of support districts and eleas because there is a lot of um rumor and misinformation about what schools can and cannot do. Um and because in the state of Utah, we have very few laws that actually govern special education. There's really just one
018law that directs USB to develop rules. Therefore, the rules carry the weight of law. And so there's a lot of uh back and forth between districts and and parents and and things like that. So codifying what we already have in rule into law was the intent there. Now of course um R277608 uh is the is the new rule. It was just approved by USB uh this past board meeting. It uh addresses corporal punishment and it really does combine a couple of old rules together. We had one that prohibited corporal punishment and then we had a separate one for behavior and discipline in schools. It's kind of combined into one. Um the biggest piece of this new rule is that we are going to be required to deliver behavior training for all district employees who interact
019with students. Um that's going to be a heavy lift. We're still not quite sure how we're going to be doing that. We will have a system by the end of the summer ready to go though. And then the other item of note for you to keep in mind is that the value of the self-contained count dropped from $8,59 um in FY25. For next year it's down to 7,750. Um and that's going to impact our budget by a reduction of about $400,000 because of that change. Okay. Before we move on to just special education in general, any questions? Hey, this is the fun stuff. Sorry. Yep. Why did that drop? That is a good question. That was done by the the um was it our state legislators? It was our legislators who did that. Okay. Moving
020into special education. Um, my guiding principle and I think the guiding principles of of of most special education directors across the state are really kind of um encapsulated by this quote by uh Hubert Humphrey. The ultimate moral test of government is the way it treats three groups of three groups of its citizens. First, those at the dawn of life, our children. Second, those in the shadows of life are needy or sick and are disabled. And third, those in the twilight of life or are elderly. Now, luckily, we get to deal with those first two, our children and our disabled. Now, um what is special education? It's a bit of a it's a bit of a a hairy thing, right? What what it is specifically? It is specially designed instruction to meet the unique needs of
021a student with disabilities, provided at no cost to families. So, that is the definition of special education. It's very broad and it's not very kind of on the nose, if that makes sense. So um you have to think about it in a couple of different core entitlements um that the IDEIDA sets forth. One, a free and appropriate public education. And free and appropriate are constantly litigated about what constitutes free because we have school fees. We have uh field trips. We have all of these things. And then we have the idea of appropriate. What constitutes appropriate? What should be done in schools? What should not be done in schools? It needs to be it's an individualized education. that's a core tenant. Um parents are involved in that process. We don't do it without them and that
022uh students and parents are entitled to due process protections. So ultimately where did it come from? Before 1975, students with disabilities were often excluded from school. Um up where I came from in Boxelder County, uh the Perry School was a one room schoolhouse in Perry, just down from Maddox. And um in in the late60s, a group of parents who had several children with some significant disabilities got together. They funded their own teacher, found their the district was able to give um them a classroom and they they paid for their own teacher to have a somebody teach their children. Um and they could be in school with everyone else. Uh, and it's this story that has spread far and wide in our community up there where the new superintendent came in in about 1976, was touring
023all the schools, came into this school and found this classroom with all these students with significant disabilities and said, "What are these students doing here? They should be home with their mothers." Okay. Um, we've come a long way since then. Um, 1975 uh saw the introduction of the Education for All Handicap Children Act. It came out of quite a bit of litigation uh through the east coast. Um because of of some timing and some updates, it wasn't actually put into law until 1978 with an implementation of 1979. Um it was reauthorized again in 1990, but renamed from the Education of All Handicap Children Act to the IDA. Um and then it was reauthorized in 2004. It has not been reauthorized since then. So, how do we understand the IDEIDA? Congress wrote a law, but they
024didn't explain it. Okay, the Individuals with Disabilities Act or the IDEIDA, it was written very broadly. It lacks very little guidance or detail and clarity comes from a couple of different places. Case law or court decisions throughout the different 13 uh circuit courts, administrative hearings or due process hearings, um administrative remedy that happens. We just had a meeting last week at um at USB where they went through all the administrative hearings here in the state of Utah because we are also held to account by whatever happens in an administrative hearing in Jordan or in canyons or in uh you know Park City and then of course other litigation outcomes either at the federal court or at the Supreme Court because of this what it means what the interpretations of the idea are what the different
025court tenants are are really a moving target because all it takes is one uh due process hearing officer or one administrative law judge to rule one way and it changes the meaning of suspension. What constitutes um you know uh being uh disciplined all those things can all change at the drop of a hat. Now, if we're talking about what that all really means, it means that uh all this comes down to money. Um so, special education funds, whether federal or state, may not be used to pay for attorneys fees related to IDA state complaints, due process hearings, representation of IEP meetings, facilitated IEP meetings, mediation sessions, or any other student specific legal consultation that comes directly out of the state special education rules. Okay. um a good estimate of legal fees for the state of
026Utah and this came from our last due process hearing. Um we pay about $400 an hour for our legal counsel uh parillegal services and experts and uh Doug doesn't do that. We contract with Fabian and Bangkok just like we do with with our HR stuff. Um and it it takes about 175 hours of prep. So when you do that, the simple math comes out to be about $70,000 for one due process hearing. um because that cannot come out of my special education funds. It has to come out of the general fund which means it's going to have an impact on our other students whether it's curriculum, whether it's teacher salaries or whatever. So it's always in our best interest to keep from getting to a place where we have to go through administrative remedy. Now
027because of that there are certain boundaries that we have to maintain in order to minimize exposure and risk. Um, one of those big pieces is that I have to stay out of a lot of team decisions. Um, our district administrators have to stay out of uh, team decisions. Board members need to stay out of those decisions um, because it politicizes those decisions and ultimately the idea was written specifically to not include us. So overstepping really does create um liability and it's it's hard when you're there trying to support a constituent and I understand that. Um but keeping in mind that you will never not be a board member when you step into that school and into that team. Um as friendly as you are, you will be viewed by that school team as somebody who's
028in charge of them and is giving them a directive no matter how nicely you phrase whatever question you ask. Um, and we have been continually, school systems have been continually chastised by due process hearing officers and administrative law judges when we go against what we know to be in the best interest of a student, even if it's what a parent wants. Um, and it has never turned out well for school systems when we cowtow to a parent, do what they ask when we know better, and then the parent decides that, "No, we were right the first time." And they and then they try to hold us to account because we did what they said. Um, all of the due process hearing officers and administrative law judges say, "Yep, you should have done the right thing
029in the first place." So the problem when we have influential people attending meetings is that um teams will do what you say um and if it's not the right thing that opens us up to exposure. Um there have been a couple of recent cases in the last 10 years most recently up in Malad where the superintendent and board president were um were sanctioned by an administrative law judge and required to pay $1.2 $2 million for a 504 violation because they were in meetings and were speaking to parents about things that weren't theirs to be talked about. Um, and so we just need to make sure that we're keeping our we're staying in our lane and that we are m minimizing that exposure and risk. That being said, we want to be responsive to our constituents
030and our stakeholders. So, um, what can you do to support them? Well, one, all means all. Whenever somebody is talking to you about students, keep in mind that all students, regardless of their ability level, are general education students first and they do generate a WPU to that effect. Um, model the mission of Granite School District. All students belong. Um, and we need to make sure that we're living that, not just stating it. Two, um, really investing in teacher training and resources and parent engagement. that's our our best bet I believe in really mitigating and keeping exposure and risk to a minimum and then asking the right questions whenever items come to you. Um asking how does this impact students with disabilities or asking are we building or breaking access to the curriculum to our buildings
031to whatever. I think those are the best ways you can advocate. Now that's not necessarily helpful when you have a constituent come to you with a complaint or a concern. So, let's talk about how you can respond in a way that keeps you safe and keeps the district out of harm's way. Um, I'm going to call it a wrap, right? Um, and it really comes from a a therapeutic practice called motivational interviewing. Now, first, when a when a constituent or a stakeholder comes to you with a complaint, um, we want to hear their perspective. We want to hear their emotions without expressing agreement or or disagreement. This is really hard because people who are very emotional are looking to you for some sort of clue or signal that you agree with them. So all those
032things that we typically do to uh you know intimate that I'm paying attention, nodding, listening, making sounds can be somewhat problematic because they can signal that you're agreeing with the person. So, be careful of that. Um, always reiterate what they're saying. What I hear you saying is just to make sure you understand what's going on, right? Um, it sounds like you're feeling and then label what's going on there. Um, it sounds like you're concerned about this. Um, just because sometimes what they're saying, especially when they're very emotional because our kids, my talking about my child is emotional. Talking about somebody else's child is emotional. It's a very personal thing. They're going to get emotional. And because of that, sometimes we don't speak as directly and as clearly as we want. So we want to make
033sure we understand what they're saying and what they're really upset about. And this really does just clarifying what their concern is. It builds trust without really overstepping because we we're not committing to anything. We're just trying to understand what they're trying to say. Our next step would be to assure them. Affirm that the school team is committed to the child's success. I will say with very few exceptions, even when I step into conflict, that school team is trying to do what they think is best for that child regardless. Um there might be a conflict about what that means, but everybody really is attempting to do what to make sure the student has success. Um reassuring them that they, you know, that the school team cares deeply about meeting their child's needs because I do believe
034that. Now, sometimes we have to be careful with that because they might be personally offended by a member of the team and so that's not going to land well. Um, that doing some sort of reassurance that I'm confident we can come to a resolution. I'm confident that we can get with the team and you can come to a resolution. One thing I do want a couple of things I want you to avoid saying is we will or we won't. um because ultimately that is may unintentionally commit Granite School District to some sort of legal position or uh resource commitment that we might have to make. And the last thing is to propose. Always direct the parent to an appropriate contact. We always ask they go to the lowest member of the of the team. So,
035have you spoken to your child's case manager, file holder, teacher? If if they're like, "Nope, already done that. not going to do it. Okay, let's connect you with the principal. If that that nope, I've already talked to the principal. I don't want to do that. Then direct them to me. Um, we want to make sure we they've gone to you because they're going straight to the top. The problem with going straight to the top is there's nowhere else to go, right? And as we're trying to mitigate liability, we want to refer them down to the lowest person they possibly can. So, if it's the teacher, the principal, then to me, right? And I can work with them um to resolve their issue. uh and then we can make a a decision together. And given the
036size of Granite School District um and looking at our neighboring districts of of comparable size, we have significantly fewer um state complaints, uh due process hearings and stuff like that because we do ultimately when we get involved and we we're willing to admit if we've made a mistake, we'll I'll cop to it and we'll make it right. whether that's compensatory services or whatever because ultimately we got to do what's best for the student. Doesn't always make me popular with teachers and administrators, but sometimes it's about keeping the resources where they're at. And I'd rather pay a couple of hours of compensatory services than drag a school team through a due process hearing, which is emotionally taxing and it's hard. And it really is hard. Okay, that is everything I I've got for you in a
037nutshell. What questions do you have for me? Um, I just have a couple. So, how do we compare with other districts? My mic's really loud. Um, on our student population of uh, sped kids. So, right now we're hovering right around 13%. Uh, research says that we should be right around 11. That said, we do have a high um refugee population which plays into that. Um we also have we are a majority minority district. So with our lower SCES population, it also comes with a higher incidence of spe of special education and disability. So um comparatively we have a higher rate than Jordan um and canyons. We have a lower rate than Salt Lake. I mean, if we're talking about disability rate, right, like 13%, we have a lower rate than them. Um, we do have
038a lower rate than most rural districts, but that's for a lot of different reasons. Can I just wondered along with the numbers, are are they going up or are we seeing like are they staying steady? What's So, no, our special education numbers are going up and our student enrollment is going down. So that prevalence rate is increasing year-over-year in granite. And keep in mind that they will only reimburse us for a certain percentage, the state will. So um once we hit um they they will allow up to 15% with certain caveats. Unfortunately, because we are a large district, we don't meet most of those caveats being a rural district, necessarily existent schools, stuff like that. Yeah. So we have to be very careful. But we don't want to if a student needs a service, we
039don't want to not qualify them just because we can't pay for it. That's ethically dubious in my mind. And then my other question, so thank you. Um the other question I have is just are it seems like u most districts are low on sped teachers like finding sped teachers. Do we have a shortage still or are we better um staff than we were? We are better staff than we were going through COVID and coming out of CO. That being said, um we are still about 50% of our new hires do not have special education teaching licenses. So, we're having to walk them through that. Um and some of those teachers are very motivated and and high quality and some aren't. Right. It's a it's a mixed bag. Um with a lack of kind of preparation,
040it's an uphill battle a little bit. Okay. Thanks, Bryce. Yep. Just hopefully quick question. Um you mentioned the state of special education in granite. I am curious as to the state of special education as viewed by our teachers. Um as you know earlier in the school year we had some concerns pop up and um frustrations and getting through some changes. There were some bumps. just curious as to I would say what your feel is of that that situation now overall. Um I don't know that we're a lot further along than we are were at the beginning of the year. I mean we've taken care of situations um as they arise. The problem that we have is that um the nature of some of the disabilities that we're seeing are becoming more complicated. We have a
041lot more behavior in schools, a lot more. And our teachers are dealing with a lot more than they've in the past. um and we're not getting the resources either from the federal government or from uh our state uh legislature to kind of mitigate that. If anything, they're um somewhat tying our hands. So uh for