001good evening thanks for joining us tonight for our regular board of directors meeting uh the time is now 5 34 and i'd like to call the meeting to order and first do a roll call to confirm the attendees i'm julie bocanegra director victoria bradford here uh director rob perkins here director jenny gronwald here superintendent mike merlino here administrative assistant laurie stroll here thank you all right good evening again um under governor inslee's proclamation 2028 in response to the covet 19 outbreak temporarily suspends portions of the open public meeting act the proclamation requires that all attendance of an open public meeting not take place in person but occur remotely including the board of directors and the public our meeting this evening is conducted via zoom audio webinar at this time i would like to do the
002pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you all right so our first order of business is that we uh need to make a motion to excuse director rachel rogers from the meeting this evening she's out of town and traveling and not able to join us did you say salute or i said soul moved all right move we excuse director rogers all right i seconded it it's been moved and seconded all in favor say aye it's an eye for me victoria i great thank you all right um now we'll go ahead and uh move to adopt the agenda do we have a motion to adopt tonight's agenda director
003grunwalt moves that we adopt tonight's agenda director bradford seconds uh it's been moved and seconded all in favor say aye it's an eye for me victoria hi rob hi jenny hi great all right next we have special recognition uh it is native american heritage month we have a proclamation to read um i believe that director bradford is going to read the proclamation this evening i am all right okay this is a proclamation from the governor's office um for the state of washington whereas native americans have inhabited the area now known as washington state since time in memorial today 29 federally recognized indian tribes out of state tribes with treaty reserve rights and other tribal communities reside in washington and whereas members and descendants of tribes around the united states and first nations of canada also
004reside in the state of washington and whereas native american contributions and values have shaped the social political environmental and economic fabric of the state while also enhancing freedom prosperity and cultural diversity and whereas the novel coronavirus has affected us all but it is a particular concern to tribal communities historically native americans have faced many foreign diseases and turn to their cultural knowledge as a resource during difficult times which holds true today during the battle against kobit 19. tribes and indian organizations are actively working to protect elders tribal communities and families from the spread of covid19 and whereas state law rcw 43.376 directs the governor and state agencies to establish government to government relationships with indian tribes in order to enhance and formalize working relationships with the tribes through collaboration and consultation whereas state law rcw
00528a 0.320.17 mandates the teaching of tribal history culture and government in common schools which will contribute greatly to improving schools history curriculum and enhances awareness for a better cultural understanding and whereas the state of washington has designated the friday immediately following the fourth thursday in november a state legal and school holiday known as native american heritage date and whereas washington joins other states across the nation in celebrating native american heritage month honoring the unique heritage of this continent's first people and reaffirming the commitment to respect each tribe's sovereignty and cultural identity now therefore i j enslaved governor of the state of washington do hereby proclaim november 2020 as native american heritage month and november 27th 2020 as native american heritage day and the seals over part of this i mean we encourage all people in
006our state to join me in this special observance and it was signed by the governor on the fifth day of november 2020 thank you victoria were you gonna say something did you say something victoria or oh no i just i think it's a i mean it's an important um recognition that we need to be very mindful of because our native american people in our community are were here first and they've had a very challenging history and so bringing back respect for their for the culture and their values i think is really important for us to understand i would agree with that i think it's actually i when we uh when we attend wasda events we we often hear the beginning of each of the meetings uh that the leader of the meeting or whoever's sort
007of kicking it off will name the tribes who had inhabited the land since time immemorial and uh if you go down to the fort vancouver area there are some presentations and things this stick is right it's it's been occupied and uh curated and maintained as uh a place for people for since since time immemorial since before europeans got here and before uh our my people began to record history um and i agree yeah it's important to remember this and and to uh always be engaged in trying to see them and help them uh especially those are those those students of ours who are uh from non-federally recognized tribes we know that the the chinookan people around here don't have federal recognition and therefore don't have a landed reservation but the students are in our schools
008and they're our neighbors and friends i'm glad we're taking time to recognize that thanks rob all right any other comments thanks victoria for reading that happy to do it all right next on our agenda is the board consent agenda uh annotation a motion for approval julie i move that we accept the board consent agenda as presented grandma seconds all right it's been moved and seconded all in favor say aye it's an eye for me victoria i rob hi jenny hi great thank you next is the superintendent's consent agenda same thing will entertain a motion for approval director oh go ahead jenny director cronwell's moves to approve the uh superintendent's consent agenda director bradford seconds uh moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye for me victoria aye rob hi jenny hi perfect thank you
009all right next on our agenda sorry is the superintendent report mike do you have a report for us this evening i do yeah so a lot a lot going on uh i'll start with uh every tuesday um the department of health puts out updated numbers of cases from the previous 14 days our report came out today the number was 171.55 cases per hundred thousand in uh the county over the last 14 days um they kind of keep a running uh you know the numbers over the last four or five weeks and so the first one that they have is october 5th and it was 95.6 uh through last week at 131.42 and then we've jumped to 171. um the you know we've seen a lot of reports not just in our community but in the
010state and across the country uh of cases uh increasing and um i think that that in some respects was expected once the weather started turning and people started coming back in indoors i know last week the state of oregon came out with some updated guidance actually loosening the guidance for returning to school um in the state of oregon um we're under we're hearing that the state of washington is going to come out with some new guidance as well the department of health there in the last week uh have been a few other um reports that have come out from folks that have done some of the the um guiding guidance of the governor there's an imd report that came out last week kind of modeling king county and looking at the uh kind of comparing
011the impact of ins in school um uh what what in school versus hybrid versus remote might do in terms of case transmissions but honestly we're just kind of waiting to see if there's any change in the guidance from the governor or the department of health uh we've just kind of settled in at this point into the status quo which is what we had said would happen we have been working still behind the scenes to look at what hybrid would look like uh there's been work uh looking at the kindergarten program that we have and i think this week yesterday canvas battleground and washubal started their small group kindergarten program that we had talked about the county moving forward with uh my understanding is that vancouver maybe is next week and um not sure about hawkinson
012and ridgefield at the end of the month of november uh we've been in place i think seven or eight weeks already we we've had conversations uh with our teachers for kindergarten with eea with respect to the workload that that creates on our kindergarten teachers we've been working through a survey with them have come up with options and our principals are working with teachers directly as well as uh i know thursday there's going to be a meeting with eea kind of looking at the model for kindergarten and what we can't do to potentially mitigate some of the work uh in that um in the secondary schools we operate in in middle schools on trimesters we operate in high schools on semesters the trimester would be coming up i think in the next two weeks or thereabouts
013in middle schools in order for us to be ready for hybrid if we ever get to the point of being able to be in hybrid we had been looking at some work on rebuilding schedules that ultimately kind of morphed into some conversations with eea and there'll be further meetings on thursday with eea as well um what we're looking at in middle school is to not not um in the short term impact the schedules for our our students or our staff we're looking at kind of transforming middle school into a semester as opposed to the trimester so that it buys us more time to kind of work out what second semester might look like and you'll remember that our mou has in it that we wouldn't go to uh hybrid until we had four consecutive weeks
014in moderate um the definition of moderate right now is below 75 cases per hundred thousand we're currently at 171 i think that there's something like five weeks to go until christmas and maybe nine or ten until we would get to what would be second semester so each week that we continue to have cases either rise or even just stay flat um it kind of pushes out that timeline for when uh hybrid might occur so there there isn't any um there isn't any movement to uh i mean obviously we can't we can't even consider moving to hybrid uh probably at the earliest until sometime after at this point almost even after christmas so we're just at at this point just kind of looking at the cases and seeing how they work some of the things that
015we're starting to hear is that the state might actually start considering restricting some of the things like restaurants or bars in order to potentially lower the cases so that we could get kids back to school um earlier i i do think that there is a at the state level uh an acknowledgement and a growing understanding of the impact on our schools being closed for the length of time that they have been and that they continue to be and the impact that that has on our students and our children and the negative impact of that so um i guess what i would say with respect to the uh covid situation we just continue to monitor where we're at right now at least we've had we've had some weeks of consistency i think for our staff uh
016i think that's actually a positive for them to have the ability to just kind of get into the actual work uh that they've been doing all along but not having this you know well what's next what's next what's next i was i was in a conversation today with one of our our assist team members who who um earlier today we got an email from ospi that there was an emergency rule on attendance that had been um apparently was being adopted or had been adopted and then our assist team which are student coordinators that work with the student system uh and with our buildings they were in a meeting with ospi student team members where this came up about this emergency rule and the emergency team members members at ospi weren't even aware that this had
017happened so i don't illustrate this to to do anything other than to show at all levels things are occurring so rapidly that sometimes it's hard even at oh in olympia or sometimes maybe more often it's hard in olympia um to communicate what's happening and that uh you know like i've said all along we apologize for the impacts of some of these it seems like decisions come and then they change and it's just kind of the world that we live in right now understand the significant impact that that has on everyone and i just think we're all doing our best to try to serve our kids as well as we can we will have further meetings with eea with our teachers as we start to kind of look to the future of what what school looks
018like potentially after the first of the year i think we did see some good news yesterday that uh they're you know we may be closer to some sort of vaccine i'm not saying that we're closer to distribution of the vaccine we're not necessarily closer to understanding whether the vaccine would be mandatory if it becomes available we're not certain whether or not our folks would be willing to take the vaccine um but uh at least we got some good news from pfizer yesterday and hopefully we will continue to receive that news because we we need hope we need to have we need to have the view for how this ends i'm very hopeful with that news that you know last year it was a much different graduation obviously for our seniors having this happen in march
019uh and i was telling somebody today you know when i first got into the position one of the first things that we did was we had graduation and one of the things that i don't know that i was necessarily ready for was standing in front of about four or five thousand people to talk at graduation and so uh that was something that you you uh you know you put on your shoes uh really quickly and you step up and you do that um and i enjoyed doing that and um last last uh early summer last spring we weren't able to do that uh with graduation i'm actually hopeful that we can look forward to uh some sort of a ceremony this spring for our students where i could again i look forward to a time
020where i can get in front of five ten thousand people and and welcome everybody back and say what tremendous perseverance every one of these students has had going through this situation that we've lived through for a period of time hopefully hopefully that's june of this year um i'm not sure whether that will be june of this year or not uh over the last few weeks i've continued to go out and meet with uh principals and just get their feedback on on what's happening in individual meetings and today i had my first individual meeting with an associate principal so i'm excited to expand my meetings into the associate principal uh group um i think that it's important for us for me to have as many relationships as i possibly can cultivate within our system i think
021it's helpful for me to know our associate principles well uh so that when uh positions open up whether it's at the district office whether it's a principal's position kind of have an idea of what their goals are and what their hopes are for the future this particular dossier i met with is his wife is going to have a baby most likely on friday so he's he's got not only the pandemic and working through that process he's got two children five and three and another one coming so he's got he's got a lot of stuff on his plate right now and so very thankful for his administration at his building for being there to support him but i'm excited to get the opportunity to get out and talk with all of our um associate principals as
022well uh i know that gail i can't see her on the screen she's kind of like the purveyor of good news i i have to say gail i haven't read the good news report so my guess is i may be stealing one or two of these things from you at this point but i had mentioned earlier that uh amy haynes had been working through our lobbyists with senator wellman um working on connecting gila with uh with senator wellman she had has an interest in um some sort of proclamation uh honoring henrietta lacks and her contribution to medicine and to society so a letter was actually written from the students of color union at henrietta lacks health and bioscience high school to washington state representative senators i want to read it real quick and we'll see
023if i can read well enough it says dear washington state representatives and senators as students of color at henrietta lacks health and bioscience high school we have come to recognize the need for henrietta lacks's story to be heard absorbed and used as inspiration for meaningful progress henry henrietta lacks was a black woman and young mother to five children henrietta unfortunately developed cervical cancer which resulted in treatment at john johns hopkins hospital's colored ward in quotes during a biopsy doctors remarked on the unusual appearance and size of her cervical tumor when the tissue was tested doctors and researchers found that henrietta's cells did not die in cell culture although henrietta lacks ultimately passed away in 1951 her cells would continue to impact the world since her cells were so prolific scientists had enough time to develop
024life-saving vaccines and treatments because of henrietta's cells we have the polio vaccine the aids treatment cocktail certain cancer drugs and her cells are even being used in the development of a coronavirus vaccine this year the troubling part is this henrietta's family was not aware of her issues being used replicated and sold informed consent laws were different then certainly but little effort to reconcile with the lacks family was made on behalf of johns hopkins until recently furthermore while conditions and policies in the medical field have improved we know that inequities persist for americans of color in arenas like maternal and infant mortality health care cost and access and pain management we right to insist the washington state legislature acknowledged the contribution of henrietta lax's cells and use elements of henrietta's story to inspire needed change toward
025both culturally responsive medicine and education here's an outline of our suggestions one publicly recognize the contribution of henrietta lacks the cells to modern medicine in the context in which her cells were taken one where educational racial and economic barriers all affected henrietta henrietta and the lacks family to promote through policy culturally responsive curriculum within all k-12 and post-secondary schools in washington particularly medical preparatory programs three continue to address economic inequalities that continue to a lack contribute to a lack of medical access in the state of washington henrietta lacks the story must not only end with a vancouver health and bioscience high school that bears her name all legislators have a responsibility to address the contributions people of color have made to the medical field and make data-driven data-driven changes in our state to advance equality
026for all in medicine and education sincerely the students of color union at henrietta lacks health and bioscience high school i an amazing letter that absolutely i think senator wellman as i understand is going to do exactly what they're recommending in the legislature this winter so it's going to be very exciting to recognize that when that occurs hopefully we can get maybe senator wellman to zoom in on a meeting and kind of share with the board and the community the impact of our students and her conversations with our students um it's just a great it's a great thing um i also want to uh acknowledge again as we have in the past the work um that our libraries have done to refresh their uh books the books that they have um the the district the board
027supported uh freeing up ten thousand dollars for every uh school in the district and an additional two for any that are over fifty percent free and reduced so ten to twelve thousand to allow our libraries to kind of refresh their collection on books around equity and diversity and inclusion we have two of the schools that actually reached out through i'm sure more than two but i've got some examples from two of the schools they did community surveys to see kind of what kind of feedback they might receive birdcraft some of the comments from fur crest parents were this is wonderful my child's life circumstances are rarely represented even in part in most children's books another parent i think all of the categories are important i feel like kids should see themselves reflected in books but
028also see how other people live as well another was my son often feels isolated like there's something wrong with him or he is alone having books that represent him would help him feel more confident with himself um and then from cascade one parent commented diverse books were underrepresented in my own reading experience i want my kids to see the world from these perspectives so i want to say a particular thank you to michelle annette at cascade and ben court and fur crest that kind of led that but i want to i want to applaud the school board for all the work that has occurred around diversity equity inclusion uh that has uh supported this work that's happening in our schools a tremendous thing and then my last thing i would mention and gail probably will
029say if she hasn't i know we talked about this and i shared the video but the the video that the community relations department put out on hollingsworth academy and the re renaming of 49th to hollingsworth academy and and honoring uh i think it's dorothy hollingsworth who i understand she just turned 100. i think that's what it says in the video and there's some hope that she may somehow be represented when we finally have the ability to bring kids in but just another great example and and uh i think within the district we're doing things to uh try to promote uh opportunities for um people of color to begin jobs and advance through the district so i'm real i'm real uh pleased that we've had a pretty significant transformation this last week rob and clarissa uh
030hightower our director of equity and inclusion were part of a group of districts that put out a social and political expression statement i think that's what we called it that was emailed out to the staff that got a tremendous response from staff i think we were maybe the first or second to put that out other districts are on the same page with us on that so i feel really good about the work that we're doing and i want to say thank you to the school board for honestly in my mind being ahead right being out front on this the district had done a lot of work around um uh i guess i would say uh socioeconomic equity but hadn't done a lot of work well i'm not gonna say i hadn't done hadn't been as
031as quick on the uh racial equity work and and i don't think it was because of the school board i think it was just the district being kind of slow to make that happen and with uh the appointment of uh clarisse in her position and the committees that we have now in place and a lot of things happening i think we have a lot of really great things happening so i want to thank school board for being supportive of everything that we're doing in that area and i could go on for another 22 minutes if you'd like me to or i could stop because i think i'm going to talk about some financial things in a budget report so i'll stop at that point and turn it back over to julie and uh yes you
032you'll get another chance to talk in a little bit but uh we're gonna take a drink right now i'm gonna take a drink right now okay uh we are gonna turn it over to gail who is going to give us some good news i am and actually i have um enough to share mike only still thunder in a couple of things so as you start looking through the good news and i want to highlight some of our community partners that have really been stepping up with our schools and students um at heritage high school sean mangan reached out and um the engineering class needed tools to complete projects and a lot of the students didn't have tools at home to work on some of these projects and so um she'd been in contact over the
033last several months with several of our building contractors in the community and they said you know if you ever need anything please let us know and so she said you know hey we could we could use some basic pools for our students to do some work at home well if you watch this video you will see they didn't just give them a couple tools or old tools they went out and they bought these gorgeous tool kits and gave them to the students and i mean these are these are beautiful tool kits and the the students were just overwhelmed but more importantly they are excited and already out using them and so thank you to um our building contractor partners in the community um we also received generous donations from the 192nd avenue walmart they provided
034us with a number of um school supplies and things like that that were in the process of distributing out through the elementaries as well as through our family and community resource centers so that students can complete projects at home and have those supplies available we continue to also help our families through drive-through pantries there's one pictured here at pacific middle school and then also orchards elementary recently held a community resource fair and so we've been used to seeing that we've been giving out food and even fresh food orchards went a step further and they gave out um clothing hygiene items bedding other things like that and several of our community or family community resource centers are also going to have very similar events coming up between now and christmas and we'll highlight those as well
035we do have some milestones to celebrate here in the district and mike mentioned one of those and that was the tie that's already happening between 49th street academy and the and dorothy hollingsworth and the hollinsworth family recently was her 100th birthday and so the students had been exchanging greetings with her and her family um and she is just delighted to have the the 49th street academy being renamed for her for the process that went into the naming of the school as well as just the opportunity that the students are offered there they have a family business and so she decided that instead of the students wishing her happy birthday she wanted to wish them um happy birthday on her behalf and so she sent gifts that were manufactured from their family business and in this
036video you'll see a little bit about that as well as then the students doing a card and sending her back and there really is a sincere desire that um when we do open the school um this coming summer into fall that if she is willing and able she will not she's willing if she's able and the community health conditions permit that she'll come down and visit the school we also had realized and started to plan for it is our 75 75th year of incorporation as we've brought together um some eight small districts in the community in 1945 formed uh and became the evergreen public school district or evergreen school district 114 is our official name and so we've been posting the last several weeks what we're calling throwback thursday and we've been going through the
037old archives and annuals that we have in our records department and posting things of note including um here's the future farmers of america which was the largest club on campus at the then union high school was 70 or 58 members strong which was a big group um we've posted pictures of some of our old buildings and then we'll continue to post buildings therapist photos just because people don't necessarily know the history of the district and really how long we've been incorporated here so that will continue and then of course our schools are continuing to make connections with their students and keep the school culture alive here in present day um there's a great story about how the marian staff has continued kind of a reward system for good behavior and good deeds and that used
038to culminate every friday with you know calling kids down to the office and things like that so they've kept that alive and the administrators are actually doing that and then taking the rewards out to the students at their home and then we again decided to celebrate with a virtual groundbreaking at mountain view high school and you will see um um talking about what the new high school will mean to them and turning some dirt and it is the sophomore leadership class that participated because they'll be the first senior class into the new mountain view and we open it in another year or two and then next good news and we'll be bringing you the yes rachel groundbreaking so that's just a little preview there so um that is your good news for this month thank
039you gail always fun to see all the pictures and things and um i have been enjoying the historical photos on instagram and facebook it's kind of fun to see all those old-time photos and um you know where we are beginning right exactly and it's been really fascinating for me to go back through the yearbooks and also try and create the history and um we have a lot of folks that either know the you know some old-time um residents of our community that know the history and then other people that are just very curious about our origins and so we're trying to uh um facilitate that conversation so more to come thank you great thanks all right next on our agenda is citizen comments um we do have several folks that have signed up this evening
040for citizen comments um so this is for people that are wishing to speak to the board um when you're called upon we're gonna unmute um by the moderator you'll state your name and address uh you'll have three minutes make sure that you they're not legal or personnel in nature and then while we are listening to the comments this evening we won't be able to respond um because it's not on our agenda this evening so first up i think we have uh jennifer is it club nick laurie are you there i am she should be on i'm on now yes club nick thank you oh okay then go ahead and state your name and address for us oh i guess my camera's not on sorry about that uh my name is jennifer klebnick my address is
04118307 southeast 24th way i'm in the clear meadows neighborhood okay um and um as i stated before i'm i'm speaking on behalf of myself and my husband about the um proposed boundary changes that are going to be given to you today i guess um i'm sure you've seen all of the emails that we've sent and i apologize for see seeing you on that but i was feeling ignored and i you know wanted to make sure we were at least being heard um so i guess i'll start um so um i'd like to point out that two members from that committee were from fisher's landing elementary and not only were they from fishers landing elementary they were from the exact same area in fact the same street i found out um so um and which is
042the furthest from fisher's landing elementary so we find it highly suspect that they chose to cull our neighborhood which is much closer to fishers landing than their neighborhood i find that the fact that that happened and the fact that two people from that neighborhood were there is not a coincidence um i don't mean to hurt anybody's feelings but you know uh the fact that there was no representation from any of the other neighborhoods i find that questionable we found out that they did not contact clarissa hightower during the process to ensure that any changes they made would not affect marginalized children or create a less diverse school diversity in our schools they went against their guiding principles objective number one to maintain contin continuity within the neighborhood they split half of our neighborhood out of
043fisher's landing that is clearly breaking up a neighborhood and the other point the last one that i'd like to point out which is the most important is that they said that they were there to maximize safety um having our safe path with one light walking from our neighborhood to fishers landing they are changing it to a school that is across not only one busy street but two busy streets without a light so we went from so they're saying that we need to go from a very safe path to a very unsafe path and that's to say it lightly and also i'd like to mention that part of their boundary proposal is having children from north of mill plain go to ellsworth which is south of mill plain i don't know if you've ever been on
044mill plain during the hours that school would be picking up buses would be picking up and school would be starting but that is an incredibly busy busy street in fact it gets backed up all the way to lisa i have seen and i have heard from many other people that it gets backed up all the way to laser that is not safe and um i guess one question was my husband wanted to know if all of the board members were able to receive his email auditing the committee what was his name dean klepnick yes i believe we did receive that yeah yeah i thought it was brilliant so i just wanted to make sure that y'all had a chance to bask in that brightness because it was clear as day yeah we got it on
045the fifth thank you so much all right thank you jennifer thank you um all right next up is sarah moody just a minute please okay and sarah should be on hello hi sir go ahead and state your name um in address please sarah moody 512 beach street vancouver 98661 thank you um so i am a teacher at pacific middle school and originally i planned to speak about the hasty trimester 2 schedule changes at the secondary level but i do appreciate the switch to the semester schedule instead i'd like to remind the school board of a few things as you plan for the remainder of the school year and also make a few requests first i'd like to remind the school board that clark county is still in the red zone and the spread of covid
046continues to rise in fact the rate of confirmed cases is starting to exhibit characteristics of exponential growth as superintendent merlino pointed out earlier our area is currently experiencing the worst effects of this pandemic since it began which makes this a very grave and serious situation so i'd also like to remind us that we're heading into cold and flu season and upcoming holidays are sure to increase transmission rates further that being said i urge the board to lead evergreen through this pandemic with health and safety as its top top priority if the data is telling you that we're not likely to meet the department of health metrics required for reopening within the foreseeable future then please remain pragmatic and make data-driven decisions teachers students and parents all want school to be back in person but pushing
047that too quickly could result in increased sickness and deaths for our community and it's simply not worth the risk second i've heard a lot of frustration from staff and parents about the lack of transparency and communication around the district's plans for reopening a prime example is the recent stress that so many teachers parents and students experienced because of chatter that our schedules would change after november 20th however none of us knew exactly what those changes were nor did we have any input regarding this decision and this is very stressful for staff students and parents when we hear talk and rumors about what the district is planning yet we've been given little to no information so i ask for transparency and clear honest and frequent communication to staff and families regarding the decision-making process for reopening
048schools in the middle of a deadly pandemic as key stakeholders in this community we deserve the opportunity for input when it comes to our own health and safety finally as current trends indicate that it will still be a while until we're back in the moderate zone is that not an indicator that we should shift focus away from pushing toward a hybrid model and instead try to make our virtual learning environment better for students and teachers there's great room for improvement and teachers could be much more effective if given proper resources training and support to make this a better experience so my final request for the board and the district is to put more effort toward quality teacher training on remote learning and this is a challenging time and it is hard for all of us
049we can't just wish this away so please i just ask that we are realistic and responsible in order to give our students the best chance to succeed this year thank you sarah all right next up is uh jana white dennis should be on jen are you with us hello this is this is chris white oh hello her husband jenna's here but um yes i i would actually like to i agree with sarah um uh this is a separate but um so i would like to second that about the challenging students that are are with the distant learning but my primary concern and why i was reaching out today is is to second jennifer's concern with the uh clear meadows uh redistricting um to columbia valley and just the the potential impact to this neighborhood as
050as a board member of the uh homeowners association here we have had a number of complaints and concerns with what the student the the the community uh impact and even the financial impact to the um to the neighborhood and the the uh like the the desirability of the neighborhood um because a lot of the neighbor a lot of the folks here who joined or moved here did so specifically to go to fisher's landing and and paid extra to be able to do that because there are concerns greater concerns i guess with evergreen school district as a whole because it um equity between all the the schools are very different you know you have fishers landing which is number 138 with in the state to illahi which is 352 and then you have columbia valley which
051is where we're proposed to go and that's ranked um in the state as far as the quality of the testing and you know so those are some of my concerns i guess is is and then the distance of you know us being um removed from fishers landing when we have other folks that are you know up to four miles away that are still going to be going to fishers landing it just seems sort of um unfair um so that's that's my piece so all right thank you chris appreciate it all right next is elena bundy elena should be on hello hi elena go ahead and give us your name and address please my name is elena bundy my address is 18207 southeast 24th way vancouver okay go ahead thank you when you're ready okay um
052thank you to the board for giving me the time to speak this evening i live in the clear meadows neighborhood i believe this elementary time is paramount for these students having a sense of a community is a lifelong foundation for their development i have been to two of the forums to learn about the process on how the decisions have been made about the new elementary boundaries i appreciate scott and the parent committee for giving the time to explain the process and answer questions i feel that moving my neighborhood to to go to columbia valley is not a safe path to commute to we would we would have to cross two busy streets grow through our neighborhood that goes to illihi which will have buses going through with no crosswalk to go to columbia valley right
053now we are able to walk or ride our bike to fisher's landing at a stoplight and then through the neighborhood another worry i'm sorry i know another worry i have is the breaking apart the community within our neighborhood the proposed plan is to take some of claire meadows neighborhood we know three families that just live on the other side of the proposed new boundary the last worry i have is that we are a device in a diverse neighborhood and this has not been taken into consideration enough however i believe the level trauma can be reduced if students are asked to move from areas of fisher's landing that are adjacent to the current boundaries of columbia valley and ellsworth elementary one such area around heritage park can be added straight into columbia valley zone by merely
054moving the boundaries south to 34th street between 164th and 176th half of this neighborhood already goes to columbia valley after school connections will be easier to maintain and develop as well so rather than commuting to a school community and living in another these students will be of one neighborhood school community i believe this will be true to the next set of students in our neighborhood and not just my kids or any other at this time another section of my concern to me is the neighborhood that was moved from marin that is on the south side of maryland border a neighborhood section was moved to go to ellsworth the section neighborhood is now crossing a busy area on mill plane to go to ellsworth i feel concerned for this neighborhood the same as mine the school
055boundaries change will be difficult for any neighborhood asked to move i would like to propose the committee to and others making the decision to think about the degree of change in the community we are asking the students to experience to meet the needs of the district implore you to take the time to look at the at some of the boundaries closely as we are asking young children to make the biggest adjustment thank you thank you elena all right then our final citizen comment this evening that signed up is bill beville just a minute please okay is using your old furniture [Music] we're having trouble finding mr bevel because he's using an old version of zoom according to the moderator i see his name on the panel list now okay so um mr bubble should be
056on as a palace now unable to speak all right bill are you there with us oh i see him he's there bill are you there he's talking but we can't hear him oh are you on mute no he's not on me no he's not just a minute the moderator is going to try to help him okay hello mr beville [Laughter] um use the arrow next to the mute button on the bottom left of your screen and make sure you have the correct microphone selected we're still not hearing you yet we're still not able to hear you another option in that same menu would be to switch to phone audio if you have a phone available okay how's that ah there you are i see two phone numbers in the attendees list i'm not sure which
057one is yours i've allowed both to speak i'm sorry can i gotta turn off my audio i think okay i believe we can hear him okay can you you can hear me yeah we can hear you bill go ahead bill okay i see that you're trying to talk thank you so much thank you for having the audio though you're not you're not getting yet you can hear me or not we hear you okay all right so uh my name is bill bevell i my address is 1004 northwest 43rd street vancouver and i am currently the president of the evergreen education association um i think that uh by now i'm i'm hoping that i've developed a reputation as a very reasonable person very reasonable man and uh we we have uh through this process had to
058work on um many issues together uh for instance we're currently working on the workload issues with uh kindergarten and i've been able to uh get good responses and in recognition of these workload issues we recognize there's an issue there and we're working together with the district to make sure that those issues are addressed we had it we had issues around the groups that were coming in to work with small groups and that we felt that those are somewhat inequitable and uh using the language of the mou and using compromise we were able to find uh good solutions for that um when looking at issues around school safety i've been encouraging my members to use the social distancing monitors of each one of their school sites and we found much success either at the school building
059or at the district level to make sure that school safety is observed recently we've had pretty bad reliability of technology issues and once again i was able to reach out and talk to people in the district who communicated back with me quickly and those issues are also being addressed even though there was some lost learning time next week last week um in special education i i made her i made some requests for additional ppe for uh sped teachers and in very specific situations who felt like their pp is not sufficient and instead of having to do a lot of advocacy or pushing it was met with pretty much instantaneous recognition and making sure that those teachers had what they needed to be safe when we look at racial um and ethnic issues uh the equity
060issues in our district at first we had some difficulty with uh some representation on the equity team and through compromise and discussion we we're able to not only uh make sure that there was recognition and there were there was uh there was voice on that team but uh we also are have invited uh miss hightower uh to some of our equity work or our equity team to discuss issues and that has been going really well um one thing yet that you should hear a common demon and all of these things we're able to work out is is good communication uh when i reach out about these issues i almost inst we get acknowledgement and we work towards solutions um but unfortunately i don't feel like that is always the case um we are having a
061hard time but the district has as all schools in the area are using advice from dr melnick um which we had gone into this believing was a pretty good advice that he is an expert in these areas but recently dr melnick is refusing to speak to us as a group and prefers to communicate over email and not really give us any time to actually have discussions about reopening plans i'm a little bit concerned about the teaching and learning directors in this district they seem to be hell-bent on making sure that our reopening plan goes for it whether without looking for loopholes in the mou and trying to find ways to mandate things that we can often get students just by discussing together and the common theme of the problems that we're having is that i
062think that we're where we are communicating whether where uh people are taught where i am and the district is the administration is talking to teachers and looking for common solutions we are finding those solutions and finding the safety and comfort of our teachers so that they feel safely opening but where there's a lack of communication we are having some very significant difficulties in getting to common solutions that work for our students and our staff one of the things that i think we need to acknowledge is this skyrocketing rate of cases in our area and just as we have language around what we should do when the numbers go down how should we hope we open schools i think we need to look at common sense solutions here in our own school district about what we
063do when the numbers go high all of the things all of the documents and references and things that are cited to recommend that schools are safe to reopen are all based on this lowering community spread nowhere where community spread is going up are these things trying to be implemented and a lot of the data is not based on places where community spread is the are not numbers very high and so i have real concerns around that i think that we need to get to some common sense solutions and use what we know about the data about the science about the recommendations to make good decisions for kids at the end of this i feel personally responsible and my members feel responsible to each other to make sure that there are no students who suffer from
064this or staff that suffer from this disease that we need to go beyond just regular uh key protocols to the other place where we actually are preventing people from catching this and not just depending on plans for what we do once they do in the in the long run i just believe that open communication is the way that we get through this we need to feel uh together and collaborative and working together and where we're being reached out to we're stepping up responding and that will continue to happen but when we get shut down when we get ignored when we aren't getting our voices heard i think that that's going to be a true issue and i'm sorry if i went a little over time with all of the technical problems here but i appreciate
065you hearing me tonight thank you you bill okay um next up is the budget update so i turn it back over to superintendent marilina for a budget update yes um i will start with uh last year um and i've shared this a number of times already we were um expecting last year to have a little bit of a decrease in our fund balance from roughly 23 0.2 million to maybe 22 to 22 and a half um as a response to some of the cuts that we had made when i first uh was put uh put into the position um then as i've been saying for months uh there were some impacts uh that helped us increase our fund balance last year uh because of the closure and i've i've identified the various reasons that that
066occurred so we ended up the 1920 school year with a little over 27 million about 27.2 million um that was actually our actual ending fund balance was about 28.2 million included in that 28.2 million was one million dollars of esser funds the cares money that we claimed last year this is something that you've been hearing i know rob's been hearing anyway through his legislative uh committee work um that uh not a lot of districts have started claiming those funds yet we claimed about a million of that last year so our 28.2 million was inflated by a million dollars but we we ended up actually adding about 4 million to the fund balance and what we've what i've been talking about all along is that those any increase that we had in the fund balance would
067help us as we started to navigate the 2021 school year because obviously we've got a number of issues uh in 2021 with respect to enrollment um impacts i really quickly want to also joe though mention as we come into 2021 um we i think this month have claimed an additional 1.9 million so we've claimed about almost 3 million of the 4.9 million uh in esser or cares funds that we were uh expecting to receive and will we'll we'll claim the remaining 1.9 million um in subsequent months but one of the things that the legislative staff and others have been critical of school districts is for not claiming those funds because their that their belief that if districts are having issues with fund balance or they're having issues with super enrollment declines they should be claiming
068the the funds well i just i'm just reporting to you that we're actually doing that what we what we will be spending those funds on are ppe that we've had through the out throughout the pandemic device costs uh we had to buy some additional devices in this summer of of 20 um furlough medical medical costs associated with furlough furloughing a number of our employees and then the increase in unemployment costs those will be the main areas that we end up spending those esther funds funds on so we come into the year with a little more than um you know we had budgeted for the full lesser airs money in 2021 so if you take that out of the 28 we came in with about 4 million 45 million more than we had expected um thus
069far you know you've you've heard me talk about enrollment impacts we reported our november enrollment in november of 19 we had 24 704 full-time equivalent students in november of 20 we have 23 289 students so almost a little more than 1400 i guess that's less students and we had expected about a 2.3 drop that's about a 5.7 drop that we've actually seen so we're we're bracing for an approximate eight ish million dollar reduction just in um our apportionment funds uh you've heard me talk a lot about transportation um throughout our first count was october normally we count about 20 000 kids in our transportation account we counted 950. uh this year that 950 uh is significantly more than i think most districts in the area uh not that this is a financial issue i think
070the fact that we're serving as many kids as we're serving uh is actually a testament to the staff that we have in the district and the effort that's being brought forth for our our children and the the kids and the the students in our school district but um where i was thinking we maybe would potentially lose maybe three four million in transportation the way transportation funding works is you there's three counts during a school year uh one of those three as we understand it is being held harmless so the spring count from last year would have counted for this year's funding that spring count our understanding is that they're giving us um the students that that they projected for us to transport but the fall and winter counts for this year are not based upon
071a projection they're based on what the actual transportation is with that in mind the fact that we're at 900 ish 950 as opposed to the 20 000 and honestly uh with the window uh the second window probably is in that range of time where where cases are i think there's a really strong chance that we'll still be in remote learning at that time um i i'm be becoming concerned that we could maybe lose as much as six seven eight million in transportation which is a significant number um uh we've also talked about the impact on special ed because special ed funding is capped at 13 and a half percent of your basic education enrollment um expecting a million-plus reduction uh in special ed so um i don't think the news is great on the revenue
072front uh matter of fact i don't think i know it's not great on the revenue front uh we as uh as you're all very well aware of um reacted with furloughs of classified staff our secretarial staff has been reduced in half and they entered into the work chair i think it's called program where they receive some unemployment for the hours that they're not here through the federal government um but the one of the difficulties is that estimating this year is going to be more difficult because we don't necessarily know when kids are coming back and so you're kind of estimating at what point in time are we thinking the staff comes back and how do we build those in i'm just raising this i started to do some projections for this year and i i
073think we will very likely see a pretty significant reduction in fund balance from the 28 million that we're looking at uh and um each month obviously we get a little clearer picture on both sides what we don't know of on the revenue side heard today on the statewide call from the ospi that ospi at least is putting in a request for hold harmless in all transportation funds so more like whatever we received this last year that what they're looking at is the state had allocated a figure for the biennium for transportation they're asking the legislature to allow them to distribute all of those funds rather than the funds generated by the formulas now the legislature has at last count about a four and a half billion dollar shortfall that they'll be dealing with over the
074next basically two and a half years uh when we had conversations i participated with superintendents and from around the stating calls with zoom calls with uh uh the speaker of the house uh speaker jenkins um i have conversations literally almost every week with representative stoner representative harris uh have been able to access senator billig the the majority leader in the senate and the messages that we get from the house is that their education's got their money previously and there are other advocates that um they believe they need the money more than we need the money for transportation so you don't get a good message from the house of of uh representatives in the state on the senate side uh what you hear is if there's any more stimulus money that comes from the federal government
075that's going to come to help offset the shortfall at the state level rather than be distributed to schools if we do receive it i assume we will at some point receive a stimulus package another stimulus package that would send money to states [Music] the question would be whatever sent to states is it going to be retained at the state level or distributed down so on the on the one chamber of the house you hear the schools have got their money uh from the state on the in the senate you hear well we need that money to balance the state's uh budget um because we may not have the votes to pass a tax increase or what have you and and so my concern is that we may not receive any help in a very difficult
076situation and i'm not getting into specific numbers right now but i'm just wanting to let you know as early as possible that that this is the case and i don't believe it's a one-year thing i believe that the conversations this winter and spring for next year are going to be difficult conversations um because um one of the things i had mentioned earlier was uh our fund balance i you know if you compare our fund balance in evergreen one of the larger districts in the state to other large districts in the state our fund balance isn't a large fund balance we as a district we certainly have um maintained the boards five percent reserve to make sure that we do have the ability to have funds in a rainy day this is obviously a rainy day
077type of situation um but you get that fund balance too low you you have a hard time even cash flow wise to not have to borrow money on a monthly basis to make all of your payments and um we've never we've never run the district as a bank it's not like we're here to collect tax money from local taxpayers so that we can build a big reserve we spend money in our schools i think we've illustrated that repeatedly over the last at least 15 years when you compare our the way we spend money in evergreen to the way money is spent uh particularly in other large districts in the state so i just raised this because i think we're probably gonna have some very difficult decisions ahead of us uh and we've always tried to
078be very transparent i believe bill referred to transparency and communication i like to make sure that everyone knows that i'm communicating and being transparent that we do have impacts from the pandemic that likely we will have to work through and we will work through as a community as we do that um so that's i guess what i would say about the current year as we get to november uh we get to december we have better estimates um then i'll start bringing actual numbers forward in terms of what i'm thinking um and and i'll leave it at that the one thing i will say and i've i've already shared this in messages to the board but we did have an extremely successful bond sale last week that was a competitive bid bond sale 275 million dollars
079for the bond projects largest uh competitive bid in the country uh last week i think at a 2.4 percent average true interest cost over the life of the 18 years so uh that's great for the taxpayers we're able to meet what we've said on the bond project in terms of delivering all the projects we said we would deliver we were able to deliver the tax rate that we have uh promised the voters and i would say more importantly than anything else is the buildings that we have and kids will be in those buildings and our staff will be in those buildings and it's coming closer every day we're getting closer those buildings are beautiful and are receiving very positive reviews mountain view is coming out of the ground that's going to be a great facility
080hollingsworth academy legacy is beautiful if you drive by that campus transitions why east is flat ready to go as soon as we move forward on that project not the school the school is intact but the property is flat and ready to start building alongside hawaii's ellsworth and marion i drive by marion literally every day gets to see that growing um we we've got really good days ahead of us there's no question about it we're gonna have some tough times for a little bit we'll figure that out we've done it before and we'll do it again so uh that's my report thanks mike um is the is the esd gonna do their listening tour again this year with the legislators yeah i believe that that's scheduled i've got the date uh let me look it up
081real quick because i just got invited to a zoom meeting i think it's a zoom thing and it might be december 4th hold on a second let me see if i can see it um you know what it's december 4th december 4th at 10 o'clock am um bsd legislative forum so it will just be them doing their zoom panel and then people being able to listen in is that kind of how it's going to work yeah my guess is that it'll probably be we'll send a link out and they'll all be zooming and then they'll kind of moderate it and will be as effective in that as zoom as we were today and and we'll we'll bring people in on different topics that's my understanding honestly because we haven't been able to meet as a
082group of uh superintendents uh i honestly i just know that i was invited i believe uh i'm gonna be talking about some of the financial impacts on school districts on that but i there haven't been a lot of conversations my sense would be it'll be like this it'll be broadcast and people will get a link and have an opportunity to participate that way okay and i didn't mention in the in the uh superintendent report that they've extended the the board meeting restrictions through december 7th so this will continue i guess december next i don't know what date our next board meeting is is it the 10th i think it's the 10th it's the 8th i think it's the 8th i'm pretty sure it's the eighth yeah it looks like it's the eighth so we'll see
083if they extend it again my guess is they will extend it again as cases are increasing okay that's it victoria muted oh victoria did you have something i'm trying to can you hear me yes oh okay um it's very frustrating because we they they keep preventing us from meeting i i'm trying to figure out we i think we're within the guidelines if we meet we have you know social distancing and then we'd be on zoom so that the public can participate via zoom so at least we're there together i i think our meetings are more dynamic that way i think that as they get as dynamic as they'll be in in our meetings but i i just i have to tell you i just am not on board with the fact that we're kept from
084meeting as we're doing some of these hybrid you know changes i just i don't like it i just i'm going on record to say i don't like it are there any exceptions to the uh the new the new um i guess act that came out today or ruling this they haven't published the details they've just said it's extended and we'll tell you later did something different stayed within the state guidelines but i mean throw us in jail it would be a violation of opma so but we'd actually be an open we'd be more open we'd still be going by zoom i mean it won't for the community so exactly the actual omp opma actually states that we are not allowed to meet yeah i think i asked paul clay this question uh if we were
085to meet anyway and i think he said that it could be fines and it could be could be that we get to choose who would be arrested and put in jail and so but it would need to be an open public meeting where we would have the vote for the community to be able to see but do you does everybody agree there's a hypocrisy here yes i completely agree um and it's very frustrating i don't like being a rule breaker but i sure as heck can't stand what we're i just i it feels like we're being you know handcuffed from doing our work and being i mean i feel comfortable in our schools when you know when i'm there you know with our mass and you know all the precautions that have been in place
086i don't have a fear of being in a boardroom with you guys six sitting six feet apart with our masks on and having our laptops in front of us and have our zoom going and still have the public engage but i don't know it just feels wrong i agree we're still done by the governor's order though i'm just like mike said i don't want to have to choose who goes to jail um and so here we are i'm myself also getting very tired of brady bunch squares and everybody turned into flat stanley if you've ever read that book it seems if we weren't a school board the six of us could go out and have a beer at 10 30 at night over great great grains of wrath if we chose to do that or
087at the pacific house but since we're a board member we can't do that since we're bored we can't do that so i kind of agree with the hypocrisy it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense if we just ran into each other and ended up at a table at a restaurant that would be okay but we couldn't have a public meeting yeah but what do i know i don't know anything well i just had an urge to just speak that because it's just driving me nuts i just can't i just don't like it maybe i'll have to call my contact in the governor's office and get it a little birdie in their his ear well maybe they'll be can some changes to them to this go around i don't know if there will be
088but i guess it's worth looking at when it comes out later as rob stated they haven't made any changes in the last three four go rounds except to say that when a county reaches phase three then groups of up to ten could meet and that would be enough to put the board and it's support some of its support people in the same room but not a full cabinet uh not the way we're used to it when a when a board meeting is lightly attended so and even then we would still have to be using zoom so that others could uh dial in and participate the way that we have been before but yeah i totally feel that need to be in person and i hope that everybody around us will do what's necessary to tamp
089down the pandemic and get us returning to normal faster because now i've gotten let us straight into board comments haven't i just sorry well i was going to say that i think we were led right into board comments so thanks mike for helping me get on that tangent there you go all right any other uh board comments yeah i wanted to point out that uh wazda has this the strategic advocacy team has two remaining listening sessions with the house education um committee uh they're on the 12th and the 19th of november so if we can't make december 4th to hear the superintendent speak and listen there's two opportunities to speak to the at least the house education committee um which i think has some area members on it i don't remember who and they might
090have changed it since then but uh they are november 12th 4 30-6 november 19th 4 30 to 6 um over zoom so even they have to abide by the opm restrictions um i wanted to just take a moment and recognize where did it go recognize the loss of kevin peterson jr who was shot in late october mike texted us to mention that he was a union graduate and i always answer that question what's the toughest thing about this work and it's experiencing the loss of a student and i just wanted to say that i kind of experienced the loss of a graduate in just about the same measure it's never it's never easy to get news like that and i wanted to publicly offer my condolences to his family and to those who feel that
091loss as intensely as i know they must um i don't know the full circumstances and i don't think the investigations are finished uh but it's still a loss and i want to take a chance and acknowledge that here uh kind of quasi-officially at least in my own voice i'm sorry he's gone it's a sad it's a very sad situation i'm very curious about the full details um it's it's it's a challenging situation for sure and it's heartbreaking it's a great way to put it i was trying to think if there was anything else uh the conference is coming up next week the wasta conference it'll be as virtual as this uh and wanted to make sure folks who are aware that three positions uh in wasda are going to be voted on a legislative committee
092and uh i was on the phone with monty anderson he won't be running for the board position the da6 board position and so if there's an interest probably i'd have some discussions um then the science i was just really looking forward to the way east ground breaking and uh grateful for the news that's preceding the pace uh this coming saturday evening is the evergreen school district foundation gala virtual so free it's free to attend i'd really like to encourage people to spread the word and to on facebook past you know share their postings so that more of our parents can come because i think they really enjoy it i may not be there um i'm moving that day i'm moving friday and saturday so if i've got myself together and can be on there i
093will but i did film a video um for the event um so hope that at least will be there but i'm gonna try i follow victoria all you need is that selfie stick and then you can just you can attend it anywhere you don't even have to be somewhere you can be anywhere and attend the gala and no one will care if i'm all sweaty and grungy looking well i don't think anybody will really be on right there probably not no i don't think they can see you i think it's we see them they don't see us we are so good you don't even have to you don't have to use the strapping tape on your phone you'd be fine i don't know i might be putting the strapping tape who knows what where i'll
094be well i'm going to do everything i can to be there because i really want to be supportive to the foundation they're doing a good job well their silent auction is already open um and live so they're taking beds they're um i heard they did the run a show and it's doing really well um that was actually my board comment as well i had let rebecca know that i would mention it um to everybody and make sure that everybody signed up and to remind you that it is free to attend you do not have to pay to attend so go sign up where's this silent auction stuff do you have to sign up before you can see that yeah they send you a link once you sign up you got some really good stuff i
095was reviewing it's a personal link um with your information from their auction system so you have to register in order to get access to the segment auction got it and every ticket every ticket purchased is entered into a drawing as well it's not purchased every person registered i guess you don't purchase them they're free i got the page up here so i'll just get it done all right anything else i know we have our equity um part of the conference next week is we have a half day equity pre-conference that i think all of us are registered for the 18th i think yeah yeah it's all of us so that'll be good thank you we know if that one's gonna be recorded for viewing afterwards as well i like um i think a conference well
096maybe you'd know this better i should know this stuff huh i think i heard them talking about it in the mazda thursday calls that they're keeping recordings of the meeting proceedings alive like days for at least a while yeah it's like i think six months but they'll all be available to view i can't remember but i can't remember if that includes the early birds so um all right i'll find out thank you i yeah i've been taking notes and sending them all to you about the wasdak coveted calls and the state updates and things i felt like that was part of what i had to give there aren't going to be any calls during the conference week or the or the uh thanksgiving break so that we'll have two weeks off of that and then
097they'll come back on the third and i wonder whether or not they're gonna whether or not they're going to move uh to maybe more of a bi-weekly or less often as the speed of the news dissipates but then again i don't know if the speed of the news is going to dissipate well i appreciate the the um updates rob yes thank you yeah so there'll be one out on the 12th and then it'll feel like a lot less to do okay anything else next on the agenda is future agenda items i believe that we might come up with some stuff from next week's conference so well might be nice to hear a report from mike in the cabinet about how the technology and the remote learning is going you hear summaries of what's been difficult
098and how they've uh corrected or mitigated that and what remains difficult what training might be needed since we build the budget up for next year um i'm sure there are elements of technology that will pop up for people that they want to keep and it might be good to hear about that from some people when the time is right we can do that yeah okay sounds good all right anything else if not we'll move on to um going to a short recess then we will come back for a board workshop where we will have elementary boundary review committee um we'll present some boundary changes proposal uh we'll have an equity and inclusion update we'll get a legislative update um another superintendent's update and a board meeting debrief so let's take a short few minute break
099and then we'll reconvene okay thank you thank you all right mike are we ready are we turning this over to scott to lead us through this we are hi scott hi julie hi everybody thanks for having us so uh so i'm joined today as well uh by four of the members of our parent committee um that are on the call with us and we're very lucky to have them so we have you know arranged a presentation for you all that uh i'll start us off and finish us off and the bulk of the conversation and what shared will come directly from parents on the committee um i think you all know that uh you know the while a slide deck that we're about to go through obviously is is shared in a linear fashion the
100work does not always proceed in a linear fashion and so we'll do our best to put all the pieces together as we go through things so i know that lori loaded up for you all not only this slide deck for those of you that wanted to take a look at it ahead of time but also a summary sheet of feedback received and that included all of the alternate proposals that we've received and that the parent committee vetted and then there were a couple of attachments in there as well probably 80 maybe 100 pages of emails received you know by me via the attendance line and my replies and all of that so i know that you have all those things and and it sounds like some other things as well that came directly to you
101so there's a lot to go through so like i said a minute ago you know all kick us off and then i'll turn it over to alicia and shelly and then following that um they will turn it over to adrien and holly and at the times that they're sharing my job will be to listen to their cues and to tell me when to click to the next slide so um you know that'll be part of this as well so and again thanks for having us so the work of the parent committee and so this really is you know an overview for you all i know you know some of this might not know some of it you know based on how things proceeded so just to make sure we're all on the same page uh
102the committee was initially formed uh last november and our first meeting was in december i reached out to the principals of the five schools that were initially envisioned to be part of this phase two work those schools being riverview fisher's landing fur crest and of course ellsworth and marion because those are the two schools in this phase two that are being rebuilt as mike mentioned before and thus have different capacity for students than their previous schools will when they open and the committee initially on paper at least had had nine people on the committee representing those five schools and some of this information that i'm sharing you know it's not new information for me but it's information um remembered really and gleaned from going back and looking at document history to try to piece together
103you know the path of how this came about and that comes largely because a lot of questions have come our way or my way with regard to how the committee was formed and so we had nine representatives on paper that were invited to that first meeting in december we had six representatives parent representatives that showed up at that meeting and fortunately the six of them collectively did represent all five of those schools that i mentioned before and and then we had in that first month you know just a little bit of shifting of the committee because two of the folks who had agreed with their principles to do it never showed up and then dropped out and then one person attended one meeting and then had to drop out and then judy added one more
104representative from fishers and so the bulk of the work that you see there in that december 2019 to march 2020 timeline was done by a group of seven parents with me facilitating just as i did along with matt handleman in phase one and so just as you know as part of the work we first put together our group norms to make sure that we could work collectively very well together and that all voices were heard and to make sure that again the parents collectively were looking out for what i would call the good of the entire district and not um you know their own school or their own neighborhood or what have you uh proved to be just like in phase one a great group of parents to work with and so i'll get to
105the guiding principles in just a moment on the next slide but we met in person for five times in that time frame that you see there and then our school buildings closed and we were in the midst of covet or at least covered was starting and so we did the last part of the work via phone and email and just did what we needed to do to arrive at our initial recommendations and then we paused the work you know mike and i talked and my recommendation at that time was instead of holding community forums right now in may and doing those virtually let's wait until the fall in the hopes that we can do both community forums and then of course the board meetings that follow in person that was our hope clearly it didn't
106work out that way so we moved forth with uh virtual community forums which just concluded a little bit over a week ago or you know 10 days ago or something like that and it's worth noting that one of those virtual community forums was entirely spanish-speaking or at least it was translated in spanish you know my talking and adrian garcia translating that and uh it was a great event it was mostly marion parents that were at that um but we were able to uh meet the needs of those folks as well and got some very good feedback and and some great questions that we were able to answer and it's also worth noting you know that uh you know as i'm sure you guys know and often talk about um even in the midst of all
107of the challenges that we and everybody in our community is facing due to the pandemic there are positives that come out of that when you look for them and so one of the positives in my view as it relates to this process was that perhaps because the community forums needed to be held virtually they were very well attended as compared to the in-person ones that were part of phase one um and uh and so that's a real positive thing and so you know already you know thinking ahead to phase three when uh burton is rebuilt and we do another section of the work and certainly hoping that the pandemic is behind us by then there is likely still going to be a place for at least some of the community forums to be virtual because
108it clearly worked out well for parents to be able to attend those so so we did that and then we met again as a group and this time you know because the group had had shrunk and it was you know four working folks and myself we all agreed to meet and separate and we met together considered all the feedback examined alternate proposals received and are here tonight to present our recommendations to you all so these guiding principles that are up probably look relatively familiar to you not only because of course we vetted them with you all back when the work was starting and when they were written but also because they are very similar to the guiding principles that were designed and then board approved by the first parent committee in phase one of the
109work when emerald was built and so you know the difference here really between phase one and phase two is that like the phase one group it was very important to this group of parents that they don't do anything to create additional patchwork quilt neighborhoods which is the are those sections that are completely separated from the main area around the school but the difference here is that the work included possibly looking to see if we could recommend to eliminate current areas of patchwork quilting because unlike the first round there are right now some areas of quilting over in the on the west side of the district and you'll see those when the parents get to that and you see the maps that are about to come up and so hopefully most of this looks very familiar
110to you and i'll cover a little bit more detail in my part toward the end about some of these guiding principles you know specifically guiding principles two and five based on feedback and questions that we've received so right before um the parents take over uh this is just a bird's eye view of the entire district so nothing that you haven't seen before or familiar with you can see over here on the right uh the pink there that's the new emerald zone you know the work that was done in phase one and then over here and i know that the parents on the committee will get into more detail when we get there but you can see over here those patchwork quilt areas that currently exist that i referenced before and so this green area where
111my cursor is is right now and has been for a very long time part of the ellsworth attendance zone and ellsworth is down here of course and then this section in between that area and mary and this is a section of quilting for fur crest elementary which is here so i'll click to the next slide and here's where we turn it over or i turn it over to alicia and shelly and so alicia and shelly however you guys have this organized you guys take it away and if one of you when it's time to go to the next slide could just speak out and let me know that i'll do that thank you scott um so my name is elisa dittman and i am the representative parent for riverview elementary school and um so excuse
112me um so what i want to kind of piggyback off of what scott said um i believe all of us or everyone that had started on the committee is there a technical glitch i know that the reason why they chose us is because they felt that we would have an unbiased objective objective and to work to ensure the equitable decisions that we had to make the the audio is fading is switching in and out we had to remove at least uh 50 schools 50 students from fisher's landing because of new development in the area and our goal was to affect as less families as possible at a district level um we were given obviously tools and maps to be able to perform our duties and make our just tough decisions um and the changes that
113we did um and also taken to travel time for students and as well as safety [Music] and so with that we looked at moving students from the south side of the 14 but there were not enough students that would be great and anyways um so um there were no close schools that would make these moves possible and re-zoning issues of the school and just the right size schools as well so rib review in the end was considered just the right size so students that would have to be moved from riverview to accommodate the fishers landing students affecting more students and we looked at that in making those changes and just felt that riverview wasn't a good fit for that at this time um shelley thank you alicia um okay so as alicia said it was
114our mandate to um eliminate 50 students from fisher's landing and so with that like she said we did consider the lower boundary and as you can see we were given tools that are not necessarily available to the general public um that we are able to see the number of students in each area so as you can see from that lower section there is a very small amount of individuals additionally when we considered this area we had to look at drive time like alicia said and if we were actually to consider either one of those um to go into the any of the other schools it would actually cause longer drive times for those said students and it would actually require us to move students from another area anyway so it was not something that we
115were comfortable with because we would end up affecting so many different students um excuse me i have notes so i can make sure i cover everything for everybody one of the other chain challenges that we actually faced is that fisher's landing as well as marion um both have natural and district boundaries that we had to be very mindful of because we can't change those things um and so we had to think okay what can we do that in these small options that we seemingly have because we don't have a lot of schools that we can progress to we also had to avoid um as scott said um patchworking i want to specify what patchworking is because i think some of the um parents had a misunderstanding of that when we were giving that said presentation
116i know you all know what it is but i would like for them also have that information so we don't want to create a patchwork which means that there's an area that is completely separate from where the other school is not that you have to go that it looks a little wonky but that specifically you're going through another district which would not you know to get to a school and again that was very hard considering there were natural boundaries and also alicia said we had to look at everything as a whole versus just one small piece at a time um okay so with that because we knew we couldn't move that bottom section and we knew that there were so few schools that were surrounding fisher fisher's landing we had to include columbia valley because
117it was either riverview which has a natural barrier with 164 thank you scott um or and if you can go to the next one actually scott if you could go to the next slide for me i apologize so we had to either consider as you can see here it's either it's columbia valley riverview and um and uh illahi illahi was not allowed to be considered because it's involved because it was already involved in the first one so was technically colombia well columbia valley was not supposed to be touched but we knew there was nothing else that we could do except for to consider columbia valley because that was the most adjacent school so when we looked at this we were very um much so aware that we would be affecting families we would be affecting
118students and there would be some major issues so we took into great consideration the um socioeconomic the um um diversity uh as well as dr like everybody said drive time how this was the effect special needs um you know di so we took everything into consideration because we knew what a big task we were taking on so when we considered when we saw that we needed to use columbia valley we requested scott speak directly to you all as the as the board to um allow us to be able to do that so that we could affect as few families as possible because there is a patch as you can see um in there's a patch that is for columbia valley that is actually closer to um scott can you remind me again what artwork thank
119you um and so infer crest so we knew that if we were able to and then a number was the number was great we also looked at the different neighborhoods and how those different neighborhoods would be affected we wanted to make sure because we knew funding was specifically regarding um the lower income levels we needed to make sure that we would not be affecting that we knew that um you know being i'm at marion oh i forgot to say that um i'm i'm the marian representative and so being that part that being with that i also do very much so know how um and we all were aware of how much that financial um assistance from depends upon your enrollments and the needs of your students and higher needs schools end up getting larger grants
120to help said students so we took that into consideration as well in deciding which areas we would move we did not want to negatively affect funding for schools if that makes sense and since we had to move at least 50 students we looked at different neighborhoods and one of the neighborhoods that we did look at was clear meta thank you scott within clear meadow you can actually see there's a natural boundary and we were like okay cool this is perfect because the numbers match we need to move 50 students we can pull the pocket from the north side the northwest side of um columbia valley put that over into the other school and we can then move um clear meadows into columbia valley because our issue is not with adding students to columbia valley but
121taking students out of fisher's landing because we knew that there was going to be new apartments that are going to be built creating more students than we have capacity for at the current time and in the projections excuse me i have to go and reference my it's a little good um so with that you know we presented it and we had our forums and since the numbers matched we were very happy with that um when we had our forums we did get a lot of feedback from the columbia valley um community saying that they were not uh pleased uh with our findings and our recommendation and we understand that it's very hard but it was also very hard to try and make these decisions so so if that's okay i would like to address some
122of those questions um one of the things that was suggested was that we moved to columbia um summer's walk but that is located in nilahi and illahi is considered right-sized so we had no need to be able to affect them um also illegal was not part of our schools that we were working with and we knew since there was already a segment of columbia valley that was connected to fisher's landing it would not create more patchwork and would also very much so be able to right-size all of the different schools okay so and that again addresses the patchwork and i addressed the funding um also we found out through a parental form with our parent forums um that in clear meadows half of the neighborhood is on an hoa half is not that was not
123something we were made aware of but because we saw the natural boundaries that were existing within this neighborhood we considered it viable we were informed that the neighborhood that was moved to columbia valley is the hoa neighborhood but the one that's staying in fisher's landing is not so we took that in consideration and when we all sat down and we met we also took into consideration drive times as well as driving routes we um consulted transportation um as well as going ourselves personally to the different neighborhoods to collect drive time data so that we could make sure that we were doing that we were looking at all aspects and all different areas of the issues that potentially this could cause because again students are the most important thing in this situation so what we found
124was that um within the columbia valley neighborhood or excuse me within the um fair meadows neighborhood thank you very much neighborhood um it was actually a closer distance driving to columbia valley than it is to fisher's school um there was questions being brought up about the streets and this is actually a bust neighborhood as i'm sure you all as a board no so we were not considering walking because by district standards that is not a walking zone and it is not safe actually to walk because it is so far that is by guidelines of the district so we did take that into consideration um the other thing that we wanted to look at uh when after we got all of those presentations and all of the um comments and communication from the parents was okay
125there was a concern about the neighborhood being split up and so what we did is we looked at it and we said okay well what if we add the entire neighborhood to columbia valley well we looked at that but there was not a viable option to re-add those students back into fishers and it would overload collaborative valley so we even considered taking an apartment complex so that we could actually maintain um the numbers and it was just too large additionally one of the other concerns that was brought up was our uh was um the equity uh equitability of our decision and whether or not we took the f into the fact of the financial diversity or ethical ethnic diversity of said neighborhoods which was actually something we very much so wanted to make sure of
126that we did correctly so we intentionally did not take the large comp apartment complex um that was that is in fishers and move it because we understood that that could greatly affect those students in a very negative way additionally we weren't able to take the students that were in the apartment complexes from columbia valley because that would also negatively financially affect the school's abilities to fund certain programs so with all of that said we also did scott did it was brought up and questioned if we would be able to be in contact with mrs hightower regarding our decisions and regarding our moves and so scott after that meeting did 100 go and speak to miss hightower and ask her her thoughts and my understanding was that um we were making it though it was a
127very hard decision we were making an ethical decision so ladies i'm gonna pass it off to you um for the uh west side okay thanks very much shelly and before we do that and i know that we had some technical glitches with when alicia was up there so so let me just go backwards real quick um just to make sure that i briefly capture that for the benefit of the board so um yeah so as was mentioned and some of this of course will be a repeat for folks you know the first area of the current fishers attendance zone that we looked at was this one the evergreen highway area with the thinking that it might be possible to either move that to ellsworth which you can see over here on the left side of
128the screen in the green or possibly move it to riverview which is why riverview was selected to be part of this because that would be closer so we ran into a couple of challenges based on the work and one of those i alicia mentioned was purely the number of students that lived here the other was the drive time from a transportation from a busing perspective if you're talking about the east side of this and how long in reality it takes to get down evergreen highway and do the stops and then get up to either riverview or ellsworth so we kept looking at that and then the other challenge that we ran into you know as far as the work is concerned is that we knew or discovered that if we move students from fishers in
129that evergreen highway area into riverview that river view is already a right-sized elementary school based on our work with facilities and with sioux so we knew if we moved 50 kiddos in we need to figure out a way to move roughly 50 kiddos out and that was the challenge because as you can see from this image the bulk of the students who attend riverview live on the east side of the school not the west side and so in order to do that without creating any patchwork quilting we would have had to involve crestline which is also a right-sized school and so ultimately we set that aside and started looking elsewhere which is where we came to this section of fisher's that that shelly talked about and so um you know as was mentioned um the
130committee came to me and asked about involving columbia valley um and i knew that and had told them that columbia valley was envisioned to be part of the phase three work because we knew as a district that we wanted to eventually see if we could address that patchwork quilt area and so a conversation was had you know at the district level with mike and i and i think sue was involved in that and then after that with the board in terms of of doing that and you guys the board members um can see and have been made aware both in the feedback we've gotten and also in that summary document that i gave that you know we've gotten some feedback from some columbia valley folks that in a nutshell is saying hey we we agree
131this kind of makes sense even though we're not happy about it but we think we should have been part of the conversation and that of course is a theme that has arisen with a lot of the parents in clear meadows as well because they would have liked to have been added to the committee at a later phase of the work once their neighborhood was being considered the last thing i'd say here just to wrap this section up is that you know here you can see the part where my cursor is down here you can see the apartment complex that um shelly mentioned and so um that's the one that she was speaking of um we've got the one large one that's in columbia valley and then this one large one that's in fishers and that's
132the only large apartment complex that is currently in the fishers landing zone and so the committee you know did not really want to move that given that that was the only one there okay and there you can see this i didn't get to this slide when shelly was talking but um for the benefit of the board you know and you can see that this is both parts of that proposal then moving this section of clear meadows into the columbia valley zone and then moving the cimarron neighborhood from columbia valley to hartwood and doing those two things together allows columbia valley's enrollment to stay roughly the same because they also are considered right-sized and so if we move people in it's best if we move people out okay so now on to the other side of
133the district and as i mentioned before the work of course you know the committee does not proceed in a linear fashion um you know it can bounce around at times and uh but shelley or excuse me um adrian and holly will take us through this part so adrian and holly why don't you guys take it away and just let me know and you want me to switch the screen to the next slide okay hi everyone my name is adrienne and i am a fisher's landing parent um so this was actually part um obviously the the biggest problem when our committee came together it was looking at this patchwork so if you look north of the the green up there that those students are bused to ellsworth um and then the and then the fur crest
134patch and then the merriam patch so um as the other committee members mentioned when we started this we really did think um moving the old evergreen highway area was going to be the solution but it became this domino effect of like okay if we move them then we move riverview then we move crestline and then where do they go and it just wasn't working out plus we have that huge uh barrier there of 205 freeway that we did not want children crossing which is much different than just a major roadway so um we were in looking at numbers ellsworth and marion are both growing quite a bit with the new buildings and we realized that if we just looked at the areas west of 205 we could right-size the schools um population wise just with
135using those areas and not touching fur crest or river view or um at the old evergreen highway area so um let me check my notes as well um the other thing with moo and originally looking at moving old evergreen highway to ellsworth um we uh two things one it's a it's a really far distance so it's two from the old evergreen area to fishers landing is between two and two and a half miles and to ellsworth is between three and a half and four miles depending on where you live in that area and then also the what we really didn't like was that if the old evergreen section of students went to went to ellsworth they would still be slated to go to shahala whereas everyone else at ellsworth goes to y east and we
136didn't like that um those students would go to middle school a complete a middle school on the opposite side of the district without any of their classmates and um with the claire meadows section that's obviously not a problem so um take a good look at the patches now uh before we go to the next slide but with marion obviously that being dual immersion that was a whole different kind of struggle because we didn't want to affect the dual immersion numbers and if we go to the net go and go the next slide scott if you look here we are really careful to focus on um the west side of town a lot of the spanish-speaking students live sorry west side of the the boundary um we didn't we really wanted to make sure we left
137those students in marion and of course a natural boundary here that is is not ideal is mel plain boulevard but the way it stands now students from ellsworth drive all the way north of the current fur crest boundary down past ellsworth so when we came up with the new um boundary lines which you'll see in a minute we do still have a patch of students that are going to have to cross mill plane but there are currently students crossing mill plane and since they will be bust when we talk about the safety uh of students we always want the safety of students but with bus that's when buses are offered we're not talking about walking so here's the new uh boundary lines this right sizes both schools we did have to go north of ellsworth
138a little bit um but and so those students would have will have to be bussed across mill plain but like i said currently the students in the very north patch of the new marion boundary are currently bust all the way down so it was kind of a trade-off there um i'm gonna go and let holly take over from here hi um i sorry i got a little distracted writing something um so yeah as adrienne said we wanted to make sure that we kept um the di program intact and we wanted to make sure that both schools had the same resources because a lot of the west side has spanish-speaking families we did learn that both ellsworth and marion have really good spanish-speaking resources for parents like translators and things of that sort one of the
139things scott if you go to the next slide this is kind of just a close-up of the area that we're talking about and where these boundaries are basically on the west side we could right-size both of those schools by just getting rid of the patchwork which is one of our guiding principles and anyways um we just split it basically in the middle or in the middle where it was for students um scott if you go to the next one this will show you the red dots on the south side of this boundary we didn't want to separate neighborhoods where students face each other so in these neighborhoods there are students that face each other and a lot of these students already go to marion for the di program anyways so we wanted to keep this
140area still going to marion even though it's technically on the ellsworth side of the boundary we're going to keep that the same from my notes one of the things that was really important to us on this side is keeping feeder patterns the same keeping the kids going to the same high schools the same junior highs that is building a community for our children that is huge um i know from personal experience i went to a different junior high than a lot of my other peers went to and i didn't know anyone going in and that's such a formidable time for children it's good to have people there that you know that you feel comfortable with that kind of just builds this environment for you to succeed um one of the things that was brought up
141for the parents um a couple of different spaces was that they didn't like that students were crossing their plane to get to um ellsworth so they used to be in marion and now they're crossing down thanks got um so if you look at the marian boundary up there then south of that that little green patch is north of um mill plain we talked about this as a the committee and we decided that it wouldn't be safe for students to walk that far to school anyway so this would definitely be a bus route additionally this isn't the only school in the district that has students crossing the plain if you look over the purple area just to the right on the east side mill plain elementary schools those students do all cross mill plane in our
142previous one all of the students from the patchwork quilt in the north side of the ellsworth district boundary we're also crossing mill plain and additionally there are columbia valley students that are currently crossing the plain to get to school so um obviously we don't want children walking to school from these areas and to make sure that they're safe it is currently bussing areas um it was really hard for us on the this side and i think maybe from what we've talked with scott and some of the other parents we had a really big challenge of getting rid of some of these patchworks um we just think as a group it was really important to keep our communities together and and keep our kids going to the same schools and making kids bus 30 minutes to
143school doesn't really seem like we're keeping our communities together um that being said we did have some feedback from parents that we shouldn't be moving students from certain areas just because of um of new developments and that those shouldn't students should be bused somewhere else and to say to that is i think that's kind of how we got in this position in the first place with all the patchworks i think that you know it may suck for some families to go through this process now but i think in the long term um what we're doing is really going to affect our communities in a positive way um adrian did you have anything else to add or any of the other parents i think no i think that's it it's just it's really hard with um
144it i've when we this plan when we looked at it overall we really all we have to affect some families but we really did affect the least amount we didn't do the domino domino effect of affecting riverview then crestline then fur crest and then on the other side um there was a suggestion to send the clear meadows folks to illahi and then illahi to columbia valley which one was off the table because we weren't allowed to deal with illihi but also that would be affecting double the amount of parents so that was a huge a huge challenge and um we went through every single email and suggestion that parents gave us but this um this is the one that makes the most sense to us so that's it okay nice work so so again just
145like last time you know for the benefit of the board just a couple of things to re-emphasize or clarify um that were mentioned now the tough part here on this side the part that we agonized over the most was how close in proximity this dividing line is or appears to marion elementary that was a really tough thing so let me zoom in on that a little bit in talking with our transportation department which of course we or i on behalf of the committee do you know throughout this process asking questions about you know safety and bus zones and all of that you know we learned that there is a very small section i think it's right here this section where my cursor is hovering that is actually a walking area to marion and then the
146rest of it is all a bus zone which doesn't of course mean that there wouldn't be more families perhaps that would choose to walk their kids to school or allow them to walk to school or ride their bikes or what have you and so that was reflected in some of the feedback as well and then the last thing i point out and it was mentioned before but this actually this work actually comes from our transportation department um and is consistent with um the work that they do or that we do in in many areas of the district because if a dividing line so to speak between two schools goes down a residential street where the houses face each other on either side um then you know as was mentioned it's important to us to make
147sure that the you know the whole street so to speak goes to the same school and so all of those uh purple dots there even though they appear green on the map because that's how the program does it that's they're all actually remaining at marion based on that work so i'll wrap it up and then you know we'll turn it over to the board with who have any questions or mike or anybody who have any questions either for myself or for the parents that are here so just a couple of things to note in terms of uh you know the guiding principle number five and so um you know these are the the two main areas that we looked at at different times throughout the process i mean right from the beginning um just as
148the first parent committee did in phase one of the work we were paying very close attention to the socio-economic factor and how many students on free and reduced lunch were at each school and also where they lived where the pockets were because we wanted to make sure that we didn't make a recommendation that might cause those numbers to fall in such a way that either state or federal funding would be affected for the school and then we also looked at the student ethnicity breakdown [Music] even early in the process especially with the knowing about the di program over at marion and looking at that but then also as i think was mentioned looking on the east side in the fishers landing area at the socioeconomic and student ethnicity diversity in each of those neighborhoods as
149well and while that is something that we the committee had looked at um you know it turned into a much deeper dive in that regard and to me this is a great example of the process working because during the community forum for fisher's landing there were there was a couple that asked some questions about the relative diversity of the section of clear meadows that we are recommending to the board change next year to columbia valley and so i was able you know at that time based on parent feedback and based on their collective advocacy really to to meet with clarissa go through all of the methodology with her show her where the diversity is in those areas of the fishers boundary that border columbia valley and then i was able to meet via zoom with
150the parents that had asked the question and they wanted to follow up with me and so i provided them with some information to show them that while we were aware and we're also celebrating the diversity in the section of clear meadows that we are recommending that the diversity in the surrounding neighborhoods was actually much greater including the east side of clear meadows and so you know again not to take away anything in terms of celebrating the diversity that exists in that neighborhood but pointing out that the neighborhoods around it um have a lot more diversity than that section does and so that's a big part of what we looked at and then here this is important for you know the board and folks to know so this is the original projected enrollment um for each
151of the schools at the conclusion of the initial conclusion of the work so when we wrap things up in april and then made the decision to wait until fall in the hopes that we could meet in person like i mentioned before these are the projected enrollment numbers at that time um for each of the schools and so you know you can see then that since our definite working definition um again depending on you know the size of the school and all of that and this is all work that we do with sue and with facilities in real in has been super helpful along the way in this regard you see that columbia valley is pretty much smack dab in the middle of that range that we desire between 450 and 550 um as is ellsworth
152and marion um when they're being rebuilt and uh so there i mean that gives you an idea of the importance of on the west side of the district of that dividing line between marion and ellsworth because there really is no way from our perspective to have marion have that entire area north of mill plain and not go over capacity and more importantly than to not have the room that we know we're going to need in the future as we the district expand the dual immersion program from one classroom for a grade level to two so you know we at the time that we landed and again these are projected enrollment numbers in april we're very happy where this landed and so then just to finish out things there for the sake of full perspective as
153you saw a little bit earlier our recommendation includes removing a patchwork quilt from fur crest which actually drops it below the target that we would have for fur crest our idea there from a district perspective is that we would like to also include fur crest in phase three of the work because when burton is built and burton moves a little bit closer to endeavor the idea is that we engage with parents from those areas as well as some others to take some of the enrollment pressure off of endeavor and hopefully return those apartment complexes that basically overlook endeavor and currently go to pro crest to endeavor and so it's reasonable to assume that the dividing line between fur crest and endeavor will change and that furquest enrollment then will will rise as part of the
154phase three work and then hearthwood which right now is our smallest elementary school um and of course right now is even smaller than what this number projects the if approved moving the cimarron neighborhood and it's approximately 50 or so students from columbia valley to hearthwood helps us get that a little bit bigger as well and then there may be some things we can do in phase three to increase that perhaps but that's the year or two down the road because burton is scheduled i think to open in the fall of 2023 so we've got a little bit of time before that work begins and then the last thing that i would share and this was mentioned a little bit before but it um it bears repeating and it did come up in feedback that we
155got this shows the current feeder patterns elementary middle and high for columbia valley so on the left side what you see is that you know the students that live in that cimarron neighborhood which is the current columbia valley patch they obviously go to columbia valley and then they go to pacific and evergreen and that part doesn't change but what you note from that is that the students in that area do not go to middle school or high school with any other of their elementary classmates because those in the cv main area go to shahala and either union or mountain view depending on where they are and as we all know when we adjust elementary school boundaries that doesn't change anything as far as middle and high school goes so if approved one of the things
156that we're excited about for elementary students in the future that live in the cimarron neighborhood is that obviously they would go to hartford if approved then they would still go to pacific but this time they would go to pacific with some of their hearthwood classmates and then when high school time comes they're going to high school to evergreen high school with everybody that they went to elementary school with so it's a much more attractive feeder pattern to us if that change ends up being approved and then on the fisher's landing side and i include this only because it came up in feedback um in terms of um you know there were some emails that talked about disrupting the feeder pattern and the effect that that would have on kids and so you know without intentionally
157taking any anything away from that perspective what this shows folks is that if claire meadows that section is eventually approved to go to columbia valley then they still those students still go to chihala with all of their classmates and they go to mountain view as well with some of their classmates because the columbia valley main area as i call it is already split with some or most i think of the students going to union but a good sized chunk of them going to mountain view high school as well and so to from our collective perspective in working with the committee this move makes sense as well and doesn't do anything to negatively affect that you know that's our perspective but of course perspectives differ and you guys have a lot of feedback related to this
158and everything else so so that's what we have for folks tonight um at this time i mean with mike's approval and i don't know how how you all want to do this um we are here to answer any questions or go back over anything and i included the proposed alternatives because i know that you have them um in that summary document that i provided but i didn't know um you know if the board wanted us to go through each of those and speak as to why ultimately we are making the recommendation and sticking with our initial recommendations so i'll i'll turn it back over to julie or mike or however you guys want to do this and i'll stop sharing my screen for now but i can always reshare it if uh anybody wanted to
159take a look at another one of those images for the sake of a question or anything julie do you you all want to ask any questions you might have yeah i'm sure that would probably have some questions um first i want to thank everybody who has worked on the committee it's not easy work um many many factors go into it you know as we build new schools and have um can hold more students and more capacity at some of those buildings we have to make some tough decisions um to kind of even out the students throughout the district so i know it's really hard work and i want to thank you all for your time and effort that you put into the committee um one of my main questions that i have is about portables
160so with the proposed changes what does this do for our portable situation at um elementaries is i think that's been one of our goals and probably in our bond work is less students and portables for sure so um well so fortunately um as has always been the case throughout this construction when marion and ellsworth reopen they will not have any students in portables because they will have the projected capacity in their building and so there won't even be correct me if i'm wrong sue but portable there won't even be portables on site so we have an opportunity there to eliminate several of those i'm not sure of the exact number but we're definitely making progress in the right direction with the construction of those elementary schools um as far as you know columbia valley also
161does not have any portables and this proposal would not drastically change its enrollment because you're adding you know proposed adding one section and then taking away another so that would stay about the same and then at fishers there would be the possibility um to eliminate some portables i guess depending on well a lot of this really quite frankly depends on okay what do what type of enrollment do we open with next fall because again and i i probably should have re-emphasized this before um all of this work that has been presented tonight and based on the screens you've seen all of it is based on what the projected enrollment was you know pre-coveted if you will right and and we all know you all know that enrollment um across the district um but definitely across
162the elementary system is down um quite a bit and um and so you noted that in some of the um alternative proposals that you saw because some of the folks have asked well wait a minute with enrollment down um why you know people are basically saying are you sure it's necessary to do this can't can't you just not do it because enrollment's down our our working theory if you will because this is very much not an exact science when you do this work even in the best of times is that enrollment will return you know as you guys know you know mike is unfailingly accurate in terms of projecting enrollment not necessarily where it's going to be always but in terms of overall numbers and so to have our enrollment across the elementary system down
163as much as it is um we are choosing uh based on what's been recommended to you tonight to believe that once this pandemic is behind us that the enrollment will return and that will return closer to those projected enrollment numbers that i shared with you earlier and so if you know to continue that example julie if we were to reduce the enrollment at fishers by approximately 50 kids then that could result in you know one less class out in a portable or maybe technically even two but of course there's no way to know that because you know we have to wait and see and the other factor there is that a large part of why we are doing this as we move through the work and i think this was briefly mentioned before is because
164there is new construction within the fishers landing current attendance area i think it's 126 multi-family units that are being built in the southeast corner i think it's a development that actually straddles our district and the camas district so the 126 multi-family units that's the evergreen part of it if that makes sense i phased out for a second you were talking about the fishers landing construction that's proposed uh yeah i mean sue could probably speak more to that or i could get you more information i mean to the best of my knowledge um last time we looked it's called 192nd station west lofts so it's um you know multi-family units are housing um 126 units that are going in in that section at that time at the time that we did this work and completed it
165in april that was the information that we had with regard to that is that proposed for the for the land between um i guess what used to be the hp property and and uh clear meadows or a different location um it's down in the southeast corner i'm looking at a map here rob and so it uh it straddles looks like southeast 20th street going east to west and southeast 192nd avenue going north to south and so our section is on the west side of 192nd so did i peg that right i think that's right i think if you guys go it should be on the public website if you scroll down to facilities we keep our subdivision tracking report on there and as we get impact fees we take off proposed development to try and
166track how many houses are really coming it's really hard to predict but um it's a good tool to be able to kind of see where we anticipate the growth coming and i can send you the link to the spreadsheet in google docs it should be on the website though and julie i do really appreciate that get rid of the portables and comment because ultimately that's the that would be the gold get them all in bricks and mortar so well yeah i can get the little thing sorry rob yeah the link could be nice i i don't know if you were going to ask another question julie but i have one more probably yeah related to the marian proposal oh i i do have one more question if you're okay so the works for this committee
167started pre-school closing last march correct correct and so we know that enrollment where i think mike said it earlier in his report we're down a thousand in elementary across the board right it's something between 800 and 1000 somewhere in that range yeah that's correct really i don't even know if i have a really question it just that's a big variable and you know where students will land um when we get them back in the seats all back in the scene it's not necessarily just in the hybrid or small groups or whatever but when we get all the students back you know where where people moved where are they going to be because right now you could you know it doesn't really matter just like i said earlier about the gala it doesn't matter where we
168are we can attend the gala right yeah no matter where i'm at i can attend elementary school so no it's a huge variable there's no question i mean i'm looking at and i have to look away from the camera to see this so i'm looking at uh you know the elementary enrollment doc now that all of our folks in the elementaries keep up so well and i'm looking at a screen that shows what we initially thought would be the projected enrollment for each elementary and then what it is today basically or within the last couple of days so you know looking at the schools that were talking about tonight you know fishers landing was projected to open with 548 students and currently they have 508 so they're down 40. right so hence in some people's
169mind the question of well are we sure we have to do this because enrollment is down it's down everywhere um at all 22 elementary schools by some so fishers is down 40. uh let's see here uh columbia valley is um down 74 students approximately over what was projected marion is down 63 fur crest is down 84. and where's ellsworth ellsworth is down 32 right based on what we were planning for as far as staffing goes and that kind of thing so um in my document um and i know that you know my in my world my you know my numbers look a little bit different than mike sometimes because he has different variables and factors that he knew um but just as a matter of one perspective as far as enrollment goes what i show
170right now in this document is that elementary is down slightly more than 1100 students based on you know right now based on what we thought you know pre-coven was going to come in so it's a huge factor there's no question of that thanks scott rob did you want to ask your question yeah could you pull up the slide scott with the northeast 9th street on it marion boundary marion okay yeah the question about ninth is um and i'm drawing this from the memory of having gone to this school okay and this this slide rob or the next one no the next one with the yeah the close-up view that green line represents what i remember is a walking path that went through between houses and out to northeast ninth um giving kids a way to
171walk to school without having to go around 97th or down 100 is that right openings still there um yes i believe so it's it's still indicated on the map and i think that's the part of uh that's why i believe and i can triple check rob but that's why i believe when i in my conversation with doreen that factors into this being a walking area because of that because of that safe passage it is it is still there rob because i've gone through it a few times on a bike in the last few months yeah so the purple dots represent homes that would be still are you are you planning to draw the are you proposing to draw the boundary behind those homes well i mean it's i mean this is how the the software
172that we use draws that in terms of that and then transportation does their thing right um and uh and every year especially when something changes um you know we always get a few phone calls and there can be a little bit of confusion if you're really close to that we had a few situations with the new boundary line between uh image and bbc this year that transportation had to help with so so these are our working maps for this work but transportation will do their own thing and and make it clearer i suppose um and it's a good point that you bring up about the you know the walking area and this or that i should have mentioned that before even though it came up a little bit but that's um as you saw in
173the feedback i mean that's one of the things that many of the parents in clear meadows are bringing up is that even though you know it's approximately you know 1.3 miles or something from there depending on where exactly you live within that neighborhood to get to fishers landing so even though it's a it's from a district perspective it's a bus zone as i think shelley mentioned that entire area is you know what a lot of families are are sharing is that they want their kids to walk now it's i don't know i'm not completely privy to what's planned there in terms of you know the construction and this or that but i i gather from the feedback we've gotten from parents that there may be some walking trails through there or what have you it
174won't change the fact that from a district perspective it is a a bus neighborhood because of its relative distance away from fissures nor will that of course change the reality that and again from a transportation perspective when we talk with doreen and crew um the the clear meadows neighborhood the section that we proposed is actually about as close as you can be to equidistant between columbia valley and fishers landing if you look up an address in the midst of that it's 1.3 miles to one school and 1.2 to the other or something along those lines and so from our perspective the we are meeting with this recommendation the guiding principle of ensuring safety because we are busing students whether they go to fishers or go to columbia valley we've had a long practice of um
175taking those busy streets like i guess that's sally's 39th or 38th and and just if you have to cross that street at all you're being offered a bus ride uh yeah i mean that's our practice for years right yeah that's the reality around the district and as um you know was shared earlier by adrian and holly i mean the right now and for a long time really for as long as as i can remember i don't even know how it came to be it's been so long the district has been busting that section to the north all the way past marion to ellsworth we are proposing to eliminate that in the approximately 30 minute bus ride to and from that those students need to endure if you will each day when they're bust and instead
176offering or recommending um a much shorter bus ride but there's no question that it's still a bus ride right because mill plan is mill plane right you know that's part of the deal the ellsworth exclave was the burton ridge in oakbrook neighborhoods up next to the golf course and country club right that's oops you want me to share the screen again do you want to see something rob i'm yeah i'm kind of looking on another screen at a satellite map of the region okay but yeah that that something that was a concern of mine when we started this work two years ago was why was ellsworth's population so far apart and oh right well um is that oh wait there we go now can you see it okay yeah well i i have not been
177able to find anybody that can remember why it is the way that it currently is right i mean laureen did it's just been that way you know for a long time that this section where my curt this oak brook area has been part of ellsworth so um again to us and um you know the members of the parent committee that are here you know i think did an excellent job of explaining um that to to us from our collective perspective this is a much more attractive proposition um can i oh go ahead can i have something that we forgot to mention so the original map if you remember had ellsworth at the top a little patch and then fur crest and then marion so those fur crest students have been crossing 205 for years and
178years and years and by we forgot to add that by putting that northern patch with the fur cross patch into marion we have a limited students from fur crest which next year will um those kids that are that the fur crest kids that currently go to endeavor will also be um we're trying to get rid of that patch as well so it made a it kind of affected everything but also just not having them cross 205 because that was that's a big deal they come to school on a bus down 98th no yeah i don't know what the bus route is but just saying like getting you know they're not going across that large it's the it's the major arterial yeah down the road okay okay what schools are in phase three um well i
179mean you know we haven't got there yet right so there's more conversation to be had but without question uh burton will be in that because that's the one that's being rebuilt right um endeavor will certainly in my mind being that because that is our most overcrowded school and here let me go back to in columbia columbia valley was originally supposed to be in phase three is that what i understood yeah um yeah that was my picks that was my original picture was that columbia valley would be part of phase three specifically for the purpose of um hopefully removing that patchwork quilt and increasing the enrollment at hearthwood so when the parent committee came and said could we do that now to me it made sense like i mentioned before we got some feedback from some
180parents that you know perhaps said that makes sense to us too but we're not happy about you know not being on the committee or being consulted until we got to the community forum stage and but in answer to your question you know as i see it at this moment in time i mean certainly burton is part of phase three because it's being rebuilt um endeavor without question in my mind is part of phase three because of its relative proximity to burton and because of how crowded it is right now um you know even in the covet situation it still you know has a lot of kids there and then the other thing you can see is you know these are the different areas that came in after endeavor was built these areas that are in
181yellow that currently go to fur crest we'd like to see with the aid of course of a parent committee if we can do something about that and maybe do something with you know moving this line the line on 18th and moving down here and busting some of these kiddos to fur crest so that these that live closest can go to endeavor so so certainly those and possibly hearthwood as well so when we did phase one because emerald was being constructed that was brand new school so we had to move kids to go to the school right because there was nobody in that attendance boundary correct um so that i because right now it feels like now it's like well if we do this now we've got this other school that's going to be impacted and
182they kind of merge just like how columbia valley got pulled into this conversation when it was supposed to go for phase three and it almost feels like you could you could talk about that with every school so what i mean what would be the um impact if we waited to see like how enrollment was and then brought all the schools in the conversation at the same time would um you mean like push like push pause on this work did nothing right now and waited yeah because i mean i even look at like fur crest and how there's that patch of those apartments because that's i remember when we made that decision because endeavor was bursting at the seams and so we took the new apartments that went in for fur crest or we those new
183apartments that were built right behind endeavor and we bust those kids to fur crest right and they literally are in the neighborhood of endeavor correct and that needs to be addressed at some point and so it's like all of these schools are overlapping where we're probably going to affect more fur crest kids moving forward um yeah i don't know it just it feels like with any school you kind of get into the next school's boundary where it makes more sense to i don't know maybe we look at it well i mean like you said or like i said earlier i guess it's um you know even without the pandemic it's not an exact science right and the pandemic without question introduces some uncertainty or some variables or at least exacerbates them to where you know
184these are thoughts that folks have in terms of well wait a minute here what you know what should we do um yeah i do know that it's part of the original methodology when this work started um to um there you know there were two things the first two things that matt handelman and i learned in our work with marcia as we got prepared to start this work was you know she said to us don't involve a school unless you have to if it's okay the way it is do your best to leave it alone and she said don't do too many schools at the same time because the work will get too convoluted and it will prove to be unmanageable and that's when mistakes are made and so in this case um up until this
185point at least it's been really easy to make sure that we don't do all the work at the same time because the construction schedule based on the 2018 bond you know dictates in large part the timing of this work right because you have to time things based on when when emerald opens and when the new sifting opens and the new image and all of that so so your timeline is kind of up to this point at least is kind of made for you based on when schools are going to open but there is no question in my mind at least julie that the decline in enrollment introduces a variable that none of us would have considered and so it's a question of uh you know what what is going to happen so i mean in
186my opinion you know that's the kind of thing that um you know we'd want to heavily involve sue in in terms of projections and construction what's going to do we'd want to talk you know a lot more about that with mike and sue i think and with you all in terms of uh that which we have time to do because of the process right because um you know we've got uh you know first reading is currently scheduled for roughly a month from now and second reading a month after that so um you know the process and the timeline that's there you know does allow for that kind of exploration and consideration there's no question mike or scott do you expect that given the reduced enrollment numbers there might be some flex uh to grant some
187equity-based boundary exceptions if the family applies after these changes we we allowed many boundary receptions i think this year we pretty much opened the boundaries this year yeah i'd have to go back and check rob to be 100 certain but i am almost positive that at the elementary level we didn't say no to a single request because there was no reason to because the decline in enrollment meant that there was plenty of space you know there may have been one or two based on the size of a grade level but i honestly can't remember saying no to anybody um and uh um and that said um you know i don't know that that would be the same situation you know next fall because none of us know for sure what that's going to look like
188i mean our operating theory is that when the when the pandemic is passed that the enrollment is going to return and these numbers are going to hold up but i of course i can't look anybody in the eye and say that i know that's going to occur because i don't now let me just recognize too what julie recognized is that it's uh difficult work i appreciate those who stuck with you and all of you for engaging with in it this way i have to say having visited pretty much all the schools i really like columbia valley it's a neat school it's got a great culture and a great welcoming culture and its emphasis on the way that they adapted their mascot to include native american culture especially in the region is just astounding to me
189it's in a good way so i want to speak positively of columbia valley as an opportunity i agree rob they're they're a great school and they've got a lot going on there it's it's a neat little area where they're a hat too it's just kind of unique um i'm kind of with julie on the i'm feeling like if we could just slow the pace down a little bit till we can see you know especially now that they're talking about a potential vaccine that may be available you know fairly quickly and but if if it if that doesn't come to fruition and it's going to be longer dealing with the virus then it seems like with the numbers that are down that we may not have to make all of those moves right away i don't
190know i just i i'm just i have an unsettled feeling about the um pace at this point just because that that number variable that we just don't know what what the total number of kids are going to be does make me wonder i have this picture of once the pandemic comes to an end with a provable vaccine if that actually plays out the enrollment numbers will kind of take a everybody will want to come back um with some very few exceptions i i think we'll actually see that very sharply and maybe even mid-year if things proceed as optimistically as as hope um kind of urges us to hope or just has to hope you know what i mean so yeah i appreciate you saying that it's unknown when it's the best answer when we don't
191know because we don't know kindergarten enrollment is down significantly too isn't it i think the amount of kids that enrolled yes i think 1300 and maybe 30 or 40 and we were even expecting a decline there at 1600 so we're probably over 1300 or excuse me 300 down in kindergarten and i will say kindergarten's the only grade that actually is seeing enrollment increase at this point and i i think that that honestly has something to do with the fact that that uh they're really skating sometime on site but i think um that next year our kindergarten enrollment especially if we're back in in person could really increase because people could be holding back their kids until they turned six yeah so just because they don't want to miss that year of instruction it's not a
192requirement at kindergarten so i could see families absolutely thinking why not hold back a year and uh if they have the ability to do that um and then and then starting a year later especially right on the age yeah yeah they gotta have the best first grade team when they start getting those basketball teams together those eight-year-olds so it's been a long night oh yeah i'm really concerned sorry i was just pulled up patrick ginn's website because living across the street from endeavor um i've seen kind of what's happened and it's doing all these boundary changes and school changes kind of give me anxiety especially when i see all of the stuff that patrick is building around here um including all of joe's farm with joe retiring all the stuff between 18th and 9th that's
193going in on the other side of evergreen memorial um the stuff that's going in up against the new admin office at lera hagen like that a lot of that is going to funnel to fur press i mean actually all of that is funneling to fur crest and so that that concerns me because the schools around for crest are already at max capacity there's no room at endeavor it is so it's i think that um we may end up having to do this again if we if we start moving too many schools right now and that's kind of where i brought up endeavor because i feel like it's part of the conversation especially with fur crest but well i guess even the people that move into my neighborhood and i literally am across the street and
194and we're not at one of the new developments they're bust um to hearthwood um or wherever is available right and that's all true and not to take anything away from that but don't you know please don't lose sight of you know part of this proposal creates additional space for crest for that future growth right or for that movement and then but is it enough is my concern yeah no that's yeah and uh you know and that's another uh you know i can't answer that with 100 certainty question where's your crystal ball come on um yeah i mean we can say with certainty that um that there would be you know obviously increased room at for crest right and we could say even with the addition if approved of cimarron going to hartford that there is
195still capacity there because that's been declining in enrollment for years and so um and and on the plus side of things just in a holistic way of looking at that with those two being relatively centrally located um that gives us potentially some options as we move forward so we can we can go back and look at the the issues that you've raised uh julie victoria robb and ginny um i think the next step was a it was it was a december first reading or a january first reading december right so so the next meeting yeah december 8th so i i think we need to um kind of hear what you're saying hear what the everyone's kind of adding into this and see if we can come up with some sort of solution um i mean
196i think like you said julie not only uh the commitment committee puts in time uh scott as well so i mean it's like there's a lot of really good work that we need to um we need to take into account but i do think exactly like you're saying this is a very unique situation where um you know the enrollment in the elementaries is much different than what it would look like in a typical situation um and it might warrant a little bit of a pause in certain areas yeah i just want to make sure that when the kids come back we we know where they're going to land and they're going to come back they're going to come back so does that if we if we do a little work and then and then kind
197of re re kind of reconvene and i know we're going to meet the eighth but we can maybe have uh some conversation i mean i know that we have a meeting next week too yeah i understand we'll be um uh at a conference virtually uh for uh two or three days as well that's going to be interesting um i'm just i'm just wondering if that's just enough time in the next few weeks to you know get information but i think we'll probably just have to talk about it next week at our meeting and go from there scott and sue and i can get together and have a conversation and and see if we can come up before we meet next week okay let's get what is it scheduled on tuesday i don't see it in
198my calendar no it's it's uh it's uh yeah okay it's a broccoli meaning okay that sound good that sounds good thank you everyone thank you for that all the work thank you for the presentation i like looking at maps so it's interesting thanks for sticking around to listen to us talk about it okay sounds good well you know all uh you know holly and alicia and shelly and adrian all i'll re-loop with you guys via email and then follow up by phone tomorrow um you know i'd like to echo what mike and so many members of the board said um you know just how thankful i am that you guys have uh engaged yourself in this work and done exactly what we've asked in terms of looking at it from you know the 30 000
199foot level so to speak and uh it has been and will continue to be a pleasure to work with you so thank you guys very much for your service and volunteerism for this very much appreciate it thank you yes it very much is okay so so mike i think i heard you say that uh we'll meet the five of us can skedaddle out of here yes you can you'll be in touch right yes unless people want to stick around because these are very exciting meetings i know that well about two hours ago i heard you say something about beer at pacific house so i've still got that in my head there are six of you and it's open till 11 i think all right thanks everybody all right thank you guys nice to meet you
200okay next is uh equity and inclusion update clarissa yes oh my gosh poor thing been staying all this time that's all right not a problem learn some new things um so just have a few updates for everyone so first of all um i had the pleasure of having our introduction meeting with the equity advisory committee they are excited about getting started on the work for many different things they share their their why if you will for being a part of the committee as well as some things they'd like to see come out of the committee um we also establish our next two meetings so to finish out uh 2020 went ahead we're going to be meeting two more times this year and the next time we meet will be november 19th and um what is
201happening right now is that we are um researching and looking into different uh existing equity policies in surrounding districts and and further away um to consider what elements and components we like to see in in hours and they will also be putting in their own input based upon some of their experiences as what they like to see in hours they're also looking at i have provided them with a couple of examples of equity lenses um which is one of the things i actually shared with our cabinet um to begin attempting to use in decision making process which just it just goes through a couple of not a couple there's a few questions that you ask yourself as you are making a decision to make sure you are um keeping equity at the forefront of that
202decision so they're looking into those and when we meet um next time we're going to be um beginning uh crafting what that will eventually look like and that will also be eventually presented to the dealt um and speaking of dopes we will be meeting this friday to um build on what we learned on last time with luis and so um one of the things that uh i'd love for you to be thinking about um as just as board members as a whole but also the two that are going to be attending the dell meeting it's just what what goals especially based on the um the review of our beloved community um audit information what specific goals you would like to set for the board um pertaining to equity and then how we will um monitor
203those goals and check them and i you know that that can look many different ways but i want you to begin thinking about it because for sure that is something that will be discussed at delt if you remember last time we focused on uh making sure we knew what our personal entry was to the equity work because it fuels your professional as well as the organizational change that we're looking for and so um be thinking about uh some goals for you all um and how i can support you in those and then speaking of the personal work i'm also uh having some one-on-one meetings with our extended board to talk with an extended excuse me extended um cabinets not extended board to talk about um their personal connections to equity work as well and then
204how that will manifest within their particular areas of supervision and areas of influence i mean those have been very pleasant most of our extended cabinet members have some really passionate stories to share about their entry into equity work and it's it's always very fascinating to hear that uh um we are also having our um first facilitators meeting uh this thursday um these facilitators will be um helping to co-facilitate our community affinity group um meetings that are going to be coming up and obviously those meetings will be um uh it's based on their availability so we'll be setting those dates as well on thursday and speaking with the facilitators we'll also be walking through what the structure of those of this first meeting will look like um keeping in mind that in order for us to
205be responsive to that group that if we come already with all the things that we want to do and all the structures we want to put into place um that that further um you know silences their voice so they have to have some input into that and will be responsive and flexible as they share that with us so that thursdays when we'll be meeting with the facilitators um and those are really volunteers of people who have um from the from the equity committee but as well as just um community members some administrators um a couple of uh former colleagues from portland public who have just volunteered their time to help facilitate these meetings and so just like mike mentioned before our political and social expression guidance was a joint effort a lot of the things
206that i am having the opportunity to be a part of have been joint efforts and it just gives me a lot of great pleasure and hope when we're looking into advancing our equity work knowing that we have this growing network of folks who are willing to give their time to see that this work is effective and has better outcomes for our students and then uh let's see finally i met with oh no i already said that oh look at that i went through them it was faster than i thought that's it those are my updates do you have any questions did you say dealt correct district and it actually would be guilt if i said all the the ease but it's district executive equity leadership team education and acronyms right that is computer science i
207know so jenny and i are on that team yes you are yeah okay okay okay the joint statement um how many districts have published so far i might get it but i didn't write the number down i believe you know what i don't want to misspeak i know for sure that canvas was right after um or right alongside us so they may have already um put theirs out but we're we were probably right at the same time um marshall is still working on it as well as um thank goodness uh we talked in discussing the document about approaching community groups uh when is the right time to do that work i'm sorry say what was the approach approaching community groups um like lulac or naacp or oh that would be now yeah now so i
208should go down to our notes and take the pieces that i that i said i'd try and take and go take them yes yes very good i'll take that as a work item okay i think it was on the middle class i'm confused what what is it you're gonna do um rob ask community stakeholder groups to sign on oh i'll say as aligned with the statement of the equity statement that is prepared this document is to me like an institutional sort of more inward facing thing anyway but if there are groups out there who will sign on and say yes we support the schools in this internal effort um then that accrues positively for the kids so do we have the list of the different organizations that we want to uh meet with there was
209a brainstorm yeah we talked about it in our um collaborative group with the districts that i mentioned um just earlier and each of us have you know some some organizations that we were already linked to um and so we just kind of listed those um lulac was one in the naacp was another we just kind of went through and then we put our names beside the ones that we'd reach out to to share the guidance with them um and then ask if that was something that they would support who you and rob or are there other people reaching out so myself rob um and then the representatives from the uh other districts that i mentioned oh i see okay i can show you the list that we came up with click here and it's not
210exhausted by any means it's just well it's just kind of an idea um yes i want to continue thank you lori and i want screen four is that large enough can't be it's not large enough um we can pour it along the uh the pre-copy if you want so you guys can see so you see city of canvas at the top and if i just scroll up a little there are organizations like clark college uh middle class alliance rotary port authority police departments you can think of i thought of mecha i think that's how you pronounce it which one of the committee members i remember too that uh bethany rivard is very involved at fort vancouver high school with mitch and might be a good resource or a good person to approach that group uh
211jesse hyatt who's the excel pto president also the portland black chamber of commerce um those were names and these were the names that we uh thought about yes you're muted victoria i took on cpsos huh well i'll get a couple of them there you go um what about the um the the city council and the county commissioners i don't remember whether we named them but yes we didn't name them they're not they're definitely not on the list but um for sure uh can reach out and there's i think there's open space for anyone who wanted to take one on and approach their groups to take one and approach their groups come back to clarissa i'd be happy to take the city council the vancouver city council went on awesome is there somebody who wants to
212take on the ca what the county commissioners you're probably approaching temple lansing don't go to what's her name systemic racism i can always reach out to temple thanks jenny like i if someone could approach diana perez uh lulac connection oh i know diana really well yeah so if you could approach her about lulac okay then that leaves me with two personal relationships to uh approach unless jesse and i have spoken two three times since the pandemic began so just so julie and i can get the stuff entered into our board calendars and our um our linkage efforts to make sure those get into our linkage list can we get just the list of those and who's assigned to them so we can make sure we get that information into our government stuff i don't know
213that we there's a list it's like clarissa said it's not complete and i don't think we got to the level of assignments but we can we can definitely give you what we have yeah okay thanks all right anything else no thank you clarissa um was it legislative update next yes do we have anything else for legislative i do yeah i don't have anything else i i mean i meet weekly we're still supposed to set up a meeting with uh um those folks the leaders in the house for brett and i to meet and talk about various things around how we've been impacted financially i think monica's uh representative stoner is trying to get that set up but it hasn't happened yet but that's coming and then the december 4th legislative forum will make sure that
214we get everybody invited to that okay those house education committee um listening sessions the two that are uh coming that i talked about in the main meeting are the only things that i had to add all right uh mike do you have another superintendent's update no i think you've heard enough from me tonight andy's shaking right yes um debrief everything went great i'm sorry suffered from a migraine all day so i'm just kind of uh um it was quick we actually got through the main part of the board meeting within what 30 minutes and got through it pretty quickly including board comments um was that 30 i thought yeah i think we were done about seven o'clock and going into our um oh that's 90 minutes yeah we started daily i think i rolled out
215of bed at 4 30 this afternoon after having a migraine all day i'm still trying to like yeah match myself up um so yeah i guess it wasn't that quick me it felt like a lot longer than 30 minutes but i thought that was just me i think everything went pretty good that no issues except for bill's connection other than that yeah gloria and her tape but that was before we went live well i hope i hope bill sensed our patients with i'm always here to help entertain you all and we love it advancements of technology it doesn't feel like advancements in moments like that though does it i mean when they when they uh when they moved our email addre addresses to two-factor authentication i encountered like 45 minutes of friction just setting it
216back up i never even got mine to do it yeah didn't let me in laurie port bless her heart was trying to figure it out and so i just said send it to my phone i'll deal with that later i can't think about it right now hey it's hard to do the meeting on your phone the whole night isn't it yes it is but either this or no victoria at the meeting at all it's not going to happen well yeah and i had no problems waiting as long as we did for the technology to catch up with us um especially in bill's case because that was clearly nobody's fault except maybe some engineers at apple it sounds like he sent us an apology an email that i caught yeah that's fine things like that happen
217i appreciated that um i appreciated the gracious um uh tenor or tone of the comments that we got tonight yeah yeah and just that sense of balancing a bunch of risk is still with me long-term surgery but the meeting went well all right anything else we'll wrap it up okay everyone thank you