Issaquah School District Board Meeting 12/09/21

001i apologize for the late start but it took a little longer than we thought it would and uh with that let's rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right and the next thing on our agenda is the oath of office we had an election as you may know and two of our board members were re-elected to their positions and superintendent thiele is going to administer the oath of office to director maraldo and director mulling this is always fun i'm going to start tonight with director maraldo so if you could please stand and raise your right hand and repeat after me i marnie maraldo having

002been duly elected to the office of issaquah school district number 411 director district 2. do solemnly swear that i will faithfully and impartially discharge the duties of this office as prescribed by law and to the best of my ability and that i will support and maintain the constitution of the united states of amer of washington sorry i threw you on that and that i will support and maintain the constitution of the state of washington and of the united states of america congratulations director mullins i sydney mullins having been duly elected to the office of issaquah school district number 411 director district four director do solemnly swear that i will faithfully and impartially discharge the duties of this this office as prescribed by law and to the best of my ability and that i will support

003and maintain the constitution of the state of washington and of the united states of america congratulations [Applause] no it's not so welcome back to both of you i am glad to have our board intact uh next on the agenda is the annual board reorganization so once we have a november election uh at the following board meeting we take this opportunity to elect a new president and when appropriate a new ledge rep but this is not a ledger up year so i am just going to read this in accordance with state law and consistent with board policy the board must elect a board president annually or upon seating of new board members upon adoption of policy governance the board eliminated the position of vice president the superintendent will preside over the election process until a board

004president for the coming year is elected superintendent thiele will declare the nominations for board president open nominations need not be seconded if repeated by the chair and may be closed by consensus or by a majority vote on motion or closure by roll call vote a president shall be elected by a majority vote and will immediately assume the gavel so on one of these rare occasions where i give up control i will turn the meeting over to superintendent felix thank you president weaver but before i jump into my official duties i we want to acknowledge uh your outstanding work this past year uh with our commemorative gavel i believe this is maybe your third one that you have uh and uh small collection wanted to uh thank you as well for uh serving as our board

005president during what turned out to be a pretty challenging year last year you moved us from fully remote meetings to hybrid meetings and learned all the technology and everything we had to do along the way and i i i can say personally but i know i'm speaking for the rest of the board and the community we thank you for your service thank you now i do have an official duty to do and i know i often joke that this is a rare moment where i have absolute power but it's for a very very short time uh and i will proceed with the task at hand at this time i would like to ask for nominations for board president and i have to do this three times so i just okay um director weaver i would

006like to nominate ann moore so uh director moore has been nominated for president are there any other nominations for president and for my third time are there any other nominations for board president see none i will close the nominations now this will be a roll call vote so i will go um from the far end of the diocese this way um and ask for your your vote so uh director gallinger how will you vote i have oprah ann thank you director moral though how do you vote and more thank you director mullins and more director more i guess and more sounds weird but i have to do it i have to ask all of you and director weaver and more okay uh there it has been decided and congratulations uh director moore you are the

007new squad board president and just that quickly i have to hand the meeting back over to the board president and that would be director moore but i believe we're going to do a little bit of seat rotating here dan and i are just going to swap okay unless that's the decision you've all made yeah but somebody else wants to move forward i will leave the gavel here i will we're just gonna so then the first thing you just want to make sure that marty wants to continue no vote is required all right i will go ahead and gavel us back into our meeting and before i start i'll get to this i also want to thank suzanne for being our president for the past year um the board absolutely appreciates her leadership as she stewed

008us through a year of tremendous change similar to what marnie did in the year before so we appreciate both of you and i can only hope that this year is much easier okay so that's what we're going to be working for all right so thank you very much and then our last part on this is um marnie would you still like to be the board's uh frn representative uh yes i would okay good then we will um record that and that one's set okay i'll hand that back to you we are now at the point of doing student input and we have two students we have ashley kirschner if i'm saying that correct and tate hayden and they are both seniors at liberty high school so if we can let them turn on their video

009and microphones we will let our two students give us student input okay i can go first oh there we go now we can see you bigger that's what we're all referring to go ahead and uh okay um so the first question we chose to talk about was what makes you hold up hold on one second let's we're getting our volume up so we can hear you let's go ahead and speak again okay um the first question that we talked about was what's happening at your school that's pushed you outside your comfort zone or helped you grow as a person and overall just coming back to school this year has forced a lot of our student body just to step outside their comfort zone after being stuck in their rooms and online school it was just

010easy to kind of slide into like what you're used to and hide behind zoom um but coming back has been a little bit different i think there's a little bit of a staff to student disconnect just in that the teachers especially kind of came back and she's in high school came back and expected us a little bit to just jump in and know everything that we were expected to learn last year and just had high expectations so coming back into classes was a little bit challenging just to get back into the routine of what school is like in person as an asb class an asb member we went to a training this fall with a man called scott bakovic and he helped us to understand that we need to give more to our student body

011than ask and we've been working on that through simple little things like we're getting hot chocolate out at lunches next week just to build more connection and um help our student body and everyone just grow together outside of this hard time all right thank you very much for that i we so i'm so glad that we have all of you students back in school and i know it's an adjustment but it's it's wonderful to have you back in class and then do we have tate yes i'm here so i'm at work i i can't tell my camera i'm not work right now but um the other the other question we chose to take on was one thing that we found both challenging and rewarding and um the thing that we think is both charging rewarding

012for our student body currently is the forced interaction that um being back in person in school has caused this force because this force interaction has been a giant change from being a whole year where every time you want to interact with someone that's out of our immediate family it's it's an actual choice we are not forced through your house really for anything now five days a week we are forced to leave our house and see like just about thousands of people that we don't know and then we have like even these interactions eye contacts like that just kind of make it few you feel like push out of your comfort zone it feels not normal and it makes you kind of feel odd um when you've been away from so long and so we think

013that we found it both challenging to get back to that normalcy of having the interaction every day um because it's it's been so different it's been so distant for so long but also really rewarding because it humanizes us it makes us it makes us feel good and uh just kind of warms us up good thank you for that input um you're both welcome to stay a part of the meeting for as long as you can if at any stage you do want to give any input go ahead and like turn on your video because then you would pop up or raise your hand and that would let you pop up so that we can call on you so we have to be able to see you so thank you very much for that and then

014let us know if you have any other participation as we go along all right we are now moving into public input uh public input is an opportunity for folks to come up at this stage and give input uh to the board on items that are not on the agenda um this is not a dialogue with the board but an opportunity for us to hear from you we ask that you keep your comments civil and directed at the board and each person is limited to two minutes we ask that you start by stating your name clearly and the attendance area you live in or what area you are from and so we will start the first person is mark burrells you walk up to the microphone and if it's not already on nancy can help get

015it on and again state your name and your attendance area and then public comment is limited to two minutes right so my name is mark burles um i live in the square highlands had three daughters um pcms the youngest is a junior at um at isco high school now i came here to speak in support of doug crandall um i understand there is something going on whose status is high school coach of squad girls has been i'm not sure what the status is right now other than he's not actively coaching so i understand there is also an investigation going on obviously if their complaint has been filed the investigation needs to um uh proceed what i ask is that should that investigation should his name be cleared it is allowed to be reinstated in a

016timely fashion my main point about coach crandall is i've observed this squad girls program for a number of years some of you know that i've been coaching kids for many years now and what i see from coach crandall and the program and culture that he's building is really special there's a sense of support there's a safe environment for these young women to grow and develop and take chances this is really fulfilling the true promise of athletics uh for young people and this is unusual it's special and it would be a shame for this community and this group of girls to lose uh the opportunity um to have him he is an amazing coach and i just wanted to be here and support him thank you for your input [Applause] hey folks i know we've had

017more clapping tonight because we've had some good things happen up here on the board but traditionally we don't have the audience clap while we have public comment if you'd like to raise your hands and do this to show your support for whatever said that would be just fine thank you very much next up on our public input list is george sic thank you i wasn't quite sure how to say that i'm george sage and i live in the issaquah islands and um with the election just behind us i was thinking about two years ago many of you ran for the board you probably could not have imagined what the next two years was going to be like and it was uh i think traumatic for everyone but two years later i see things getting much

018better and looking much brighter and i just wanted to take a moment to say first thank you to the teachers and the workers with the schools that kept things going and thank you to you um i think a lot of times we focus on what doesn't work or what could be better and we always should be looking at what could be better but one of the things i looked into was uh this school district is still one of the top districts in the state and actually top districts in the country so for all the things you have to work on and all the things that we could do better this is still one of the best school districts in the country and thank you for that input appreciate it um and then next up and

019last on my list is gavin dillon and then actually for those that are on zoom after this i'll ask if there's anybody from zoom that raises their hand because i won't i can't see it right now and i'm not in zoom so you'll have to show me if there is okay thank you so um gavin good evening uh gavin dillon i live in issaquah three kids matriculated or matriculating through the esqua school district one who's a senior in high school at issaquah thank you for allowing me this time i am here tonight representing the issaquah high school girls basketball community many of whom are in the uh the seats over here to my left and um the reason we are here tonight is because our girls are hurting um and uh we are hoping that

020this board can maybe help us relieve some of that pain and ease some of that that hurting for the girls i'll just briefly mention and mark alluded to this on monday the district made a decision to suspend doug crandall who's the head of the program the girls right before practice found out that he would no longer be able to see them he needed to leave the the grounds and he wasn't going to be their coach indefinitely as you can imagine a lot of confusion a lot of anxiety a lot of uncertainty not knowing what was uh what was going on a lot of tough questions for us as parents that night that we didn't have answers to um having said that i i think there's a way we can ease some of that that pain

021and suffering for the community um number one i hoping we can remove some of the um uncertainty around the process we certainly recognize this is a personnel matter and an investigation needs to happen we're not looking for answers to any questions around those matters but just understanding the process whether that's the investigation the timeline how long these things typically last would be great for the girls so that they know there is an end point out there for them potentially so that's one uh number two um we're hoping that we can give this community a voice um in the process um we have uh a lot of a lot of parents a lot of a lot of girls that have played for or are playing for uh coach crandall and they they look up to him

022uh admire him and your time is up so i'll ask you to finish your sentence okay so if there's some way for us to learn how we can be a part of that process and share our voice and feedback and the overwhelmingly positive um experiences we've had with coach crandall that would be greatly appreciated we'll take that into consideration as as you stated too personnel matters are not something we're not we're going to discuss here all right so is there anybody on zoom that would like to give public input on items that are not on our agenda there is nobody okay thank you stephen excellent all right so now we're going to move on to approval of the consent agenda a consent agenda is a meeting management tool all board members have reviewed all the

023items on the consent agenda and any board member can pull an item off of the consent agenda is there anything that needs to be pulled i like to pull off the item regarding [Music] sorry i should have the name of it here the uh 12 9 20 21 um [Music] certificated ct resignations all right so that item will be pulled off i think um because what we're what we've noticed is that there's a date that's incorrect and we would like to fix it i think we can just leave this item until like after student representative and we can do it towards the end and take care of that item so i made a note to add that item then and then if there's nothing else it's needing to be pulled then i will take a

024motion okay i move the consent agenda be approved as has it been amended no okay as presented well you pulled something is it presented or amended it can be amended okay remove the consent agenda be approved as amended second all right it's been moved in seconded to approve the consent agenda as amended all those in favor say aye opposed all right so that is approved and we'll have that one item to deal with a little bit later and now we are at establishment of our regular agenda are there any changes to the regular agenda yes president moore actually there there is an item that we would um like to add to the regular agenda we would like to add our recently ratified seiu agreement with our paraprofessionals all right same thing there how about if

025we get through the work that's on the agenda and then add it after we do the student reps the pleasure of the president we don't need anybody in particular that would otherwise wouldn't be here right right no okay maybe yeah i think my preference would be that it's done earlier earlier like uh i would request that it's the item replace item three uh after report out i don't have any problem if you wanna just take care of it there okay there'll definitely be more people paying attention if we do it earlier in the meeting i think and and we can take care of both items then if we don't mind moving out yeah let's do that okay all right all right so we will do the both of those after the report outs so now

026we're on the first item of the regular agenda which is a report out on the boards town hall meeting we held a town hall meeting on november 30th at the liberty oh i did they did well but thank you for keeping me on track if i didn't we want to make sure a little confusing up here tonight just wanted to make sure thank you no i think we're good on that because we're on the regular agenda and we're pulling or we're adding the one-eyed yeah okay so the town hall was held uh at the liberty high school auditorium we had about a dozen community members that came and asked questions i thought it was um it was a good process i hadn't been at the first town hall meeting so this was my first one

027to be a part of i thought the mentee worked well i know we did a little bit different because there were fewer people and we put all the questions up and then just kind of stepped through one at a time instead of ranking them i don't know i'll take other feedback on what people thought about the town hall anybody suzanne um you know i enjoy interacting with the public i like having question and answers the fact that there were only 12 people there somebody's going to probably say well 12 is a lot but you know at that rate it's going to take us 1500 town halls to get through all the people that live in the district i realize they don't all want to attend but um i would like to do more things like

028this but i would like to figure out a way to get more attendance because i just feel like it's a lot of work and energy for a lot of people to kind of have a talk with 12 people i love the town halls i i think i think they're great i think they work well i i believe that the the questions were fruitful enough and and wide-ranging enough that i wasn't as maybe concerned about the number of people in attendance i think we certainly have an opportunity to to decide or to work on what we think about having people either submit questions ahead of time or or remote participation i guess i would prefer submitting questions ahead of time um but i think it's a i think part of what we're working out what i

029like about it is having a steady drum beat of when people can connect and hear um what we actually think about these topics and not just the less than satisfying we just gave public input no one talks to me um sense of coming to the board meeting so i would like to keep doing them i think probably more than more often than quarterly would be too much um and and my hope would be if we could um because they become more regular people get more used to participating and get more used to wanting to to join them i think it could be easy to say hey not a lot of people come so not a lot of people care and not a lot of people have questions for us i just don't think that's the

030case i think part of it is just helping people get to a a direct and productive place to bring their questions which i think the town halls are yeah and i wanted to say to be clear i wasn't suggesting that we not do them i i also like it i like interacting and i'm not sure how many people were watching on youtube so maybe that's that's a piece of information we should have i i do like it i just wish there were more than 12 people i don't know how many were watching at the time but i just looked and there it's been viewed 183 times or at least it's been pulled up and started to be watched i don't know you know staff could eventually get us youtube does give you analytics about every

031single video and it's know how long um that would be interesting that we don't have access to that staff would have access to that i think that having a remote option for people is going to be vital i think that while our children struggled with remote learning a lot of adults became much more productive at home and we have learned that it saves us 30 minutes each way in traveling so it's not even about not feeling comfortable to be in person i think it really is how much time getting out of my house having to put on shoes and getting out of stretchy pants i mean there's a variety of reasons why it is much easier to do things at home if i have to stop and address something with my student doing homework i

032can still do that and participate in the meeting you can't do that when you come here in person so i think that making a remote option not only available but workable and um and and engaging i think we can still do that so i think quarterly would be interesting it would be really you know we've heard from people they get frustrated with what public input is it's it's input not output and so it can and you hear that across the nation that is why i think things have gotten so heated in a lot of the uh school board meetings is because it feels so one way and that's not what the the anticipation of the publics like i need to have a conversation about this i also think we need to do some focused work

033on what is critical race theory what is our definition of our cultural competency education that we are providing both our staff and working with students what are we doing because monsters live in the dark and i think as long as we don't really openly talk about those things we can't dissuade people the the monster that they think is there is probably not in our schools and if we were to find that it is how would we deal with that so i think those are questions that they need to hear from us and until you know we haven't had as much conversation in our district about critical race theory um but i think one way to really help people is to acknowledge you know we're not just going to say oh we don't teach it and

034walk away there's a concern there and how do we address what the real concern is i like the idea of doing it quarterly i think that if we want to do one that's uh remote that would be fine i would not advocate for a screen a hybrid model because i think that potentially the remote audience may overwhelm the people in the room and i think that would just be disrespectful to people who've taken the effort to as you described to get there um so i think there's room for both you know i think that we do we have been very purposeful over this year we were truly closed and then this year to to be really open to hearing feedback and i think the two town halls were 60 days apart and it's very interesting

035how distinctly different the feel in the room was as well as the line of questioning so i think that gives me much greater desire to based on what sydney said is like if we have them more frequently i think we get really different flavors based on sort of sort of what's going on but i i think it does give us a good sense of the pulse of the district or at least a pulse of who's there because there are common themes and there are things that are just different based on the context for like the concern about opening schools and then not believing that we were going to keep our schools open in the september town hall that wasn't there in november because like schools everybody showed them we kept it so uh so i

036think that's really helpful to see and just to see the apprehension so that the superintendent and his team would know like here's what the concern is what people are worried about and they've been able to deliver that and that's been a really huge message to our parents and community so i think they're helpful and i think quarterly would be good and getting a remote option would be absolutely a reasonable way to well with the three kind of feeder patterns you could do one in each of the feeder patterns and do a remote one and have four over the course of the year which is sort of quarterly all the school years less than a whole year but that would that would kind of hit those things sydney you know i think it is interesting how

037different it was and and it was i think very timely when we had that meeting and the number of concerns we had around school safety given uh some of the news that had broken earlier that day in michigan and so i do think it was really valuable to have that connection point to talk about frankly the robust programs that we do have in the district around around school safety and so i think there's something incredibly satisfying about being able to hear those questions and answer those questions given the heightened anxiety that day and every you know all the time unfortunately and so i do i do think there is maybe something around um like current pulse questions that could be very interesting i think we've had a couple of more maybe controversial topics that have

038been on the national stage but that one really stuck stuck out to me that day that people really wanted to understand what were we doing in their schools today around school safety i really liked that you know the first question i think it was answered was the superintendent like qualities that we're looking for in a superintendent and i thought it was really unique opportunity for the five of us to individually share what we're looking for and everything we do is in public so it's not like we've had any even side conversations about this so i think for future people who may apply to our district they also immediately can get a sense on just sort of a feel for for who we are how we interact and what what our priorities are and i think

039that was immensely helpful that we i hadn't thought about and not why we set up a town hall and and related to that of course we were able to record that and then push it out in the e-news as well so now anybody who wants to go and see what you all had to say about that very important topic can just go and observe it whether they were at the town hall or not so it did it provided a very just-in-time kind of response to two important issues that the board is has in front of them yeah so at some point it'll probably be um a time for us to figure out when we want to do another one right do we want to do another one in the skyline attendance area and what would

040be a good timing for that so that's something we'll we'll need to ponder um yeah i mean we have three elementary teacher listening sessions in this next quarter as well as all of our set meetings and superintendent search we have a lot i know it may have to be something and maybe maybe it's for the best because some of it got started at the beginning of the year because of the whole back to back to school and that's all settled down so you know maybe doing a town hall later in the year out in the um skyline attendance area would be appropriate so we'll just have to keep that on our radar that we'll want to get that cued in at some point okay well i think too um that with the super as a

041part of the superintendent's search we will be doing a lot of focus groups with stakeholder groups and we did do the thought exchange already but depending on what search firm we go with they may have their own survey that they suggest we put out so i think there will be a lot of other opportunities for the community to engage with us not necessarily in a q a format but definitely to make their wishes and thoughts known so this is going to be the year for community engagement it certainly will but i also think if this is something that we want to start doing we do have to be very intentional about making sure we get it in so that we're hitting all areas of the district so i would like to make sure we do

042one at this through the skyline theater although people can come to any of them to be clear but it does make it a more convenient when it's in your feeder pattern and near you and so i'd like to see it um be have one up at that skyline area before the end of the school year would be our goal okay we'll work on that all right unless there's anything else on that one okay we will move on next up is a report out on our was to annual conference this is the wasda being washington state school directors association which is the association our board members are a part of uh the board our superintendent we had four students and a chaperone attending with the students uh we all attended the conference it was um in

043bellevue november 18th to the 20th um and so this will give us a chance to each kind of share something that you learned attended during the conference i was going to share i attended the law conference suzanne attended as well i've done this um over several years now find it quite fascinating to hear about the legal challenges that are out there for school districts learn about cases some that just yesterday went before the supreme court and they had shared about the case and and the amicus briefs and such that nsba the national organization submits uh related to some of these items you know talked about cases relating to uh students free speech and discipline on campus off campus and so there is it's really quite interesting there were also a panel from the washington risk

044management pool because they talked to well they had somebody from the risk management pool talking about how during covid they pulled together this attorney pool that its member districts could uh reach out to to get time very timely information on how to handle the response to covid and the pandemic and um the two people speaking were carlos chavez and charles leach who are two attorneys we know and so it was interesting to hear them share about all the you know the different kinds of challenges they were addressing of which many of them were ones we were addressing in our district as well and so it was good to hear from them and um the proactiveness of the risk management pool to provide that resource to its districts i hadn't known about it before but we

045came back and asked and sure enough we had been taking advantage of questioning them as well and getting information and feedback on how we perceive things so i thought the law conference was um very valuable so if anybody else would like to share any parts of their experience at the conference suzanne well i wanted to piggyback on your comments about the law conference because my takeaway of what was really interesting on that is that we're seeing a significant shift in the courts right now i mean you're obviously seeing it in the thing that just went to the supreme court on whether or not state education funding can go to religious schools but the other case that they spent um a lot of time talking about and i can never pronounce it the mahanoi area school

046district but their the supreme court is struggling with this issue of well they're struggling with social media basically free speech versus if it's if it's not in school if it's off campus but it affects campus and and there used to be there was another court case and i don't remember what it was called where they they created that nexus rule that it has to somehow impact the school day and then the school district can still do discipline and they're kind of rethinking that and they're kind of going back to maybe free speech is more important so it was just interesting to listen to all of this and it was very very timely um the other thing that i wanted to throw out because i thought it was fabulous they were they didn't have as many

047sessions um this time it was somewhat of a truncated session it only went two days it usually goes two and a half the first day was all about keynotes and awards and speeches and then the second day was all classes i went to one that i thought was absolutely fabulous which was susan enfield and highline talking about race and identity marnie you were there and i know ron was there i don't know if anybody else was um it was really really interesting they are doing something in highline where every student in every grade receives some sort of instruction on race and identity and they are they are taking equity conversations to a whole other level in highline and it's not without detractors and there have been some bumps and some whatever but i think it's

048fabulous groundbreaking work that they're doing there and um it was just really interesting to hear their superintendent talk about that anybody else ron do you have anything you'd like to add it was an interesting format but i kudos to wasta for making the effort to have an in-person hybrid conference as a in-person attendee i much appreciated that opportunity after the fully remote conference last year i happen to be one of those learners who learns much better in person on the first day i i did enjoy hearing from brooke brown the washington teacher of the year out of the franklin pierce school district i i found her to be a compelling individual as an educator um i too liked the leading with racial equity session i thought that was good it was interesting also hearing from

049the university play school district about their 20 years of policy governance because we've clearly been involved in policy governance not quite that long but for a long time around here and so overall and then just being able to be back together i attended the superintendent component which is really not technically part of the wasda conference but we hold it in the same hotel early in the morning on the first day of the conference because we're all going to be there and that's when susan enfield was named superintendent of the year and uh so it was a good opportunity for me to connect with some of my my peers and colleagues as well so all in all i i was appreciative that the event was held this year it certainly was much nicer than the um

050full uh full remote last year um did anybody else marty i just really quickly i enjoyed um hearing from the gentleman from uh character strong so we had talked about it in the last board meeting and then he was actually there so the founder of that and just hearing his perspective on kindness which um you know i just thought was a really kind of meaningful and was appreciative at the time i'm i'm not sure i liked the way things were structured where everything was all the keynotes were on one day and all the breakouts were on another i think it's hard to kind of sit in one spot and environment it was a lot of sit and get yeah but then i also find it very difficult in between when you do breakouts going from

051one to the other i end up talking with people and then missing half of a breakout session which probably happened twice um i thought there was a great one about collaboration among regional boards um yeah it was actually as as somebody who was part of that group it really is i wish i wish i hope that we were able to convey just how meaningful that collaboration has been for us and that other other districts i i think what i might take away was i really did hear other districts talking about who could we engage with who could we start doing this with so that was exciting to hear so i i attended the inaugural networking event for school directors of color in washington which was super interesting and frankly had a lot more people than

052i expected to be there there's probably about 30 people from around the around the state it was a little light on networking which i raised um it was a bit too businessy but we did at least um i could encourage the group at the end at least to introductions and understand where folks were in different districts across the state and there's work being done there on you know what is the what is the support system and support network given that most um school directors of color and there were um lots of different ethnicities represented are the only in their district in the state of washington and um for some of those school directors they are operating environments that are not necessarily friendly um to them and so it was a really i think a good

053start of a conversation to create a support a support structure um for for that group and so i think it'll it'll continue to see what it looks like in the future so i got to co-present along with barney and several colleagues uh in that presentation for our regional collaborative work that we've been doing and then i attended the wasda onboard module for equity and their introduction to that and that's going to be or is a requirement for all elected school board directors starting next year where everyone's going to have to do like four to eight hours of professional development on equity opinion on whether you're elected or re-elected so uh i think that they are making good progress on that and certainly marny and i are part of that work in waz that help push

054the professional development to be more expeditious and get it out to people so it's less where they have to come only to bellevue or only to spokane and to more regionalize it so there's more opportunities for that in-person learning excellent um and i we can all remember that they've sent us information on how to access all the videos from the sessions that were recorded so reminds me i might go and listen to that session um from highline because i wasn't able to attend that one so that would be worthwhile to go back and try to pick up all right all right so now we're going to take care of the items that we um dispatched from earlier so let's take care of the item that we pulled from the consent agenda so it would take

055a motion for that particular item so if you go down to the consent agenda there's a motion attached to that item and so i think we could use that motion and then we could we we could get that motion into on the floor and then we could amend it okay director aldo i moved the board approved the certificated resignations retirements and non-renewals as presented so go ahead and second and then we'll amend it oh okay sorry we have a second got it i move uh that we amend the effective date for ronald thiele's retirement to zero six thirty twenty twenty two i second that all right so it's been uh moved and seconded to approve the certificated resignations retirements and non-renewals but has been amended to have uh ron feli's date be 6 30 20

05622. so we're going to start with the amendment all those in favor of the amendment unless there's any debate so if we vote against it that means i know we could try to say no i mean we could try that yeah i think we should add an extra date in june exactly exactly but barring that i think we're going to have to go forward with this so all those in favor of the amendment say aye opposed okay so now um unless there's any debate on the now motion um it's been moved and seconded or yes to approve the certificated resignations retirements and non-renewals as amended all those in favor say aye opposed all right so it has been amended and it's been approved and darn i guess we have to let you retire thank you

057all right so that one's unless diane has anything else is that one good okay okay we did it and now we're going to take care of the walk-on item which is the um approval of the seiu contract so we'll start with a motion i moved the board approved the seiu contract as presented did you want the big long official one oh is there a big oh i'm sorry you do it i move that the board approved the agreement reached with the service employees international union local 925 seiu issaquah school district paraprofessional september 1 2021 through august 31st 2024 i'll second that that's a much better motion [Laughter] all right uh is there anything you would like to share on this item well i i'm sure there's probably others too but i just want to first

058of all thank the two teams the the team from seiu and certainly the team from the asqua school district for rolling their sleeves up and getting the job done on this agreement and um it's not easy to do these things so i really appreciate the effort they put forth and i believe that um it was rat it was ratified by our paraprofessionals last night at a very high percentage so i'm happy about that i'm happy that they're happy i have we love our paraprofessionals and they've done a wonderful job for us during a very difficult time and i hope that this helps them feel acknowledged and will help us continue to attract and retain quality paraprofessionals to serve our students all right any comments from the board or questions i i just would also say

059you know i'm glad to hear that it was ratified at such a high rate because i do want them to feel like they are getting as appropriate of a um agreement as they can you know the the water they carry for this district for our students and families is pretty incredible and i am so grateful for everything they do for our schools and our community and i'm just glad that it's was a relatively smooth to this point i should have said to president moore i recommend this agreement that's key any other comments i just wanted to take this opportunity to thank our paraprofessionals and what they do um you know our teachers are wonderful they're in the classroom um but many of those pull out services are done by paraprofessionals that are working one-on-one with

060students and we appreciate that work as well it is why we continue to have students who are successful in schools is the work of the entire community that's in there and paraprofessionals really did a lot um you know there's a group of them that really they they support our students and that and they are oftentimes invisible and a lot of parents know exactly who their teacher's kid is but they don't necessarily know the pair of professionals that might be working with their student all right oh harlan did you have something else nope all right if nothing else then all those in favor of approval of and i'm not going to see the entire motion but the seiu contract please say aye aye opposed all right that has passed thank you and we do appreciate that

061that yes we were able to get that done all right so now we're back onto uh items we're on to item number three and this is our opportunity to have a discussion and potentially take action on a superintendent search consultation services the board met had a board meeting on november 30th when we also had the town hall and at that point we agreed that uh suzanne and i would reach out and uh interview uh superintendent search firms and so we did that we ended up uh speaking with and having proposals from four different firms we spoke with northwest leadership gr recruiting mcpherson and jacobson and hazard young and atiyah or also referred to as hya they were all excellent firms and provided us good information um and so i think this is now our opportunity

062to discuss any proposal positive things about the search firms and try to work ourselves to a decision that we can move forward with so we can move forward this process so i don't know if suzanne you'd like to start by making any comments about um the firms that we talked to okay well first off i appreciate the fact that um all four of these firms made themselves available to speak with us on relatively short notice and we um as you remember at our november 30th meeting we discussed um the types of questions that the board wanted us to ask so we had a laundry list of about six questions that we asked each firm um and they were broad enough that the firms could give us the overall presentation of their services and what they

063would do for us and the timelines and whatever [Music] i think that based on what i heard from the board in terms of um wanting to spread a national net and making sure that we um we don't just look at regional candidates that sort of thing i felt that um both mcpherson and jacobson and hya had the broadest reach in terms of the number of consultants that they had available across the country both of them have over 100 people who would be able to get the word out about issaquah all of the people who presented to us were very personable very pleasant i mean i could imagine working with any of them um i think i do think the board is probably going to want to go with um one of the two larger firms

064um [Music] they were fairly similar in process with a few exceptions here and there um they they all had a good track record of um people that they placed who were still in place after three years five years ten years um relatively similar pricing structures and um similar sorts of guarantees if the superintendent god forbid doesn't work out they will repeat the search um so yeah i was very pleased with all of them um i think i think the two larger firms probably um are where we want to focus so the board did have an opportunity um during our exec session on personnel to discuss the qualifications and so we were able to um have a have a conversation about it although this is our opportunity to take action i did feel that [Music] and

065in particular the mcpherson and jacobson and hya do have a more national reach to them and so felt um very good about that they were all um personable as and in somebody that would be easy to collaborate and work with um other thoughts or senses from the board sydney sure so first thank both of you thank you for going through this process and spending the time to do the initial conversations and collect that information is very helpful to have your your insights in your your summary as we talked about this so thank you um in looking at um you know each of the agencies obviously they all seem very well qualified as i said probably the town hall or before that the national reach and having a wide net was important for from my perspective

066as we look at organizations um and so i i agree it seems like the the two we were just mentioning mcpherson jacobson and hya seem um both well qualified to that end i think as well as i was pleased to see the level of detail around previous placements length of tenure etc um i think having the additional piece i believe is additional piece of information from mcpherson jacobson around um candidate diversity i thought was it was very helpful as well so they seemed to be well positioned to help us look both locally with their washington presence as well as nationally and the ability to source a wide range of of candidates for us yeah i think those are the two that i landed on um and i i think there are things that draw me

067to one and there's things to draw me to the other and that and that can be i think that the challenging part um is really kind of deciding between the two and which one we want to go with um i think you know the fact that mcpherson and jacobson is one of the most used in the washington state um you know i i hear concerns i think that my i'm i'm very interested in a national search i'm a little i don't know how much of that they do how much they're drawing outside washington state but at the same token i need to make sure if somebody moves here that they realize the sun does not come up 90 day you know other than 90 days you will see the sun and and it's real as

068as people who transplanted here 20 years ago i was originally from the pacific northwest but my husband wasn't and it was greatly impactful in our family and we've seen that happen where superintendents do come from out of state come from places where the sun shines a lot this is going to be a big change and and those are things that they could be the perfect person understand our community and just not be able to deal with it so that is my biggest concern i'd love to have somebody who has a national idea and that national perspective because so much goes beyond washington state i'm concerned about having a superintendent who doesn't really know beyond the borders of washington and doesn't have a lot of experience there so i'm so i'm really torn um because i

069think hya would really be able to give us a national level of search i'm just concerned that can they find somebody who will really commit to not only the community here but the weather here and it really does impact it's it's you know something you can joke about but it's it can have devastating effects on on a family and not on a district to have somebody come in and just say they can't deal with it i am grateful for the work that you guys did to bring forth this that was really really helpful um i think that mcpherson by talking about canada diversity was really important to me i think that mcpherson will also be able to really engage candidates on fit for this region because they do a lot of placements in the state

070of washington despite being a national search firm and those are really important to me because uh to be big shoes to fill for anyone that follows our superintendent and by virtue of uh being here nine years we we want a long-term superintendent we're not looking for someone to come for a year or two we did one of that we would be doing an interim process so that that fit part's really really important to me so suzanne yeah and i do think that either one of these firms would do an excellent job for us um one of the things that uh struck me about mcpherson and um one of the other companies also did this was that there the process and the processes that they all use are fairly similar they they cast a broad net

071they get 30 40 50 resumes they work with the board to narrow those down to a manageable number but then the step that they took was to reach out to each of those candidates with um three questions which are determined jointly by the board and the search firm and do um just a video of the candidates answering those questions and then based on those videos the board can um you know choose either a group to do a second level interview on or maybe even just move to that step of identifying finalists depending on where we're at and not all the search firms did that and i thought it was really interesting it was certainly something that wasn't available to us 15 years ago when we went through this process so i thought that was interesting

072all right so we've shared thoughts our next step is to see if we're ready to take action if we are i need somebody to make a motion you want a motion i want a moment well based on what i'm hearing i will throw out a motion that the board direct the superintendent to enter into a contract with uh mcpherson and jacobson to conduct our superintendent search firm one second that all right excellent i appreciate um yes all of them coming forward um and talking with us and sharing with us about the work that they do but i i agree i like mcpherson and jacobson for our search so are there any other comments or debate on this one okay then all those in favor of the board directing the superintendent to enter into a contract

073with uh mcpherson and jacobson to conduct our search say i opposed all right so we will thank you i've got my marching orders there i'll um we'll reconnect get the um contact information and we'll proceed and we'll get a contract review it and get it back before your eyes and thank you for that work and i'll um just know again as i've stated i'll be of any service that is appropriate as we go through this process with you all right and i'm going to bring this up later in agenda planning just to check in and see because with all of the search firms one of the first things they want to do is meet with the board and work be able to share with all of us their process uh get our input on adaptations

074to that process and get moving so i will wait till we get to calendaring but if there was any chance we could find a time that we could get together it would help them jump start our process which we want to get going as much as possible because there are many steps to the interview process of interviewing the board engaging with the community and getting that kind of community input as we move forward okay all right so next up oh we're almost on time oh oh i jinxed it oh don't say that okay sorry uh next up is the agenda item on our levy discussion uh the board at our previous meeting had requested the item to discuss our 2022 levy to discuss and uh potential levy dates um the levy committee has uh that

075our superintendent has charted has already gotten started and is doing their work i know at least suzanne and i were able to attend the first committee meeting just to hear them get started um oh yeah you were there too that's right um okay but still you got to be there there was a lot of activity going out at ims that night uh with basketball or something going on um and so at this point we could um start with a discussion we could start with emotion but we really need to hone in on when we would like to see this levy be on the ballot suzanne i think it might be good to start with the motion understanding that the motion can always be amended conversation goes a different way so i will make a motion

076that uh the board instruct the district to run the levies that we ultimately decide upon on april 26 2022 mel second that all right since uh we have a motion on the floor i'm going to give it back to suzanne to let us know why you've chosen um to offer up april 26th and then we can go through and the board can share their thoughts or debate on um that particular date okay i think there's a number of reasons to go with the april date the biggest one for me is that we have um until the last meeting in april to determine whether or not we conduct a reduction in force and if we do not have levy approval in april even if we anticipate it in august i think we would be foolish to

077count on it and therefore i think we would have to conduct a reduction in force then if it passed in august we'd have to ask all those people to come back they might or might not be available but more importantly that is really traumatic to a lot of people's lives to upend them and say yeah we're kind of not sure if we can offer you a contract stay tuned but you know maybe maybe not it's just it's it's traumatic for people um my other concern is having talked to the volunteers for issaquah schools who actually run our levy campaigns if we run a levy in august we have to be mobilizing volunteers in june and july which is virtually impossible people are checked out by june they don't want to be doing school volunteering we

078don't have pta meetings to be going to i don't know there probably are rotary and meetings like that that we could attend but it is a much much harder lift to run a campaign in the middle of summer so that's a practical consideration but my real concern is having to do what i would hope would be an unnecessary rift i just i don't want to do that to our teachers and our staff it's it just seems like it's not necessary barney i would say well because i did second the motion um i i exactly the same type of thing things i think i think one of the things that we need to be certain of and i especially with the work of the levy committee is what does the levy pay for and are the

079items on there meaningful and i think that's what we really need to talk about and be certain of and make sure that information gets out to the community and i so i think it's i think there's this hazard i i hear the voice and frustration of parents and of the community and of all that's happened over the past two years and we certainly heard it on election night and i understand that there's there's the sense of what did the board do the board didn't do enough um the school district didn't do enough um we hear it from our students i didn't get in all the learning i'm feeling a lot of pressure now so i know that there's a lot of angst feelings and so what we need to talk about is how those levy

080dollars is how we address many of the things that people are feeling right now so i think it's about our message and if our message is about what the levy will do for people and it's valuable and it's meaningful then that's why i think pursuing it in april so we don't have to put more angst on our staff because that's i mean that's at the end of the day if we don't have a levy the five of us here will still have our job until we get recalled for not having a levy um but they don't and that i think that i it's an unt to me it's an untenable position to put them in if the community comes back and says we're not passing the levy and it's april then we deal with what

081we deal with but i don't want to deal with that unless i have to unless the community says no you haven't put up you haven't put forward an offer i'm willing to pay for it right and the the challenge with levies is that a levy is levied over a calendar year and we work on the school fiscal year and so a a school year spans two calendar years and so the 22 23 school year has levy dollars from the 2022 levy which has already been voted on and approved and is is guaranteed but it's the collection that would occur in 2023 that we cannot be certain of unless we run the levy in april which would give us that certainty as we go into our budget or if it weren't to pass we would then

082deal with it at that time and what that would mean so i would agree that timing wise needing to run the levy in april is critical either up okay so i hear what you guys are saying i think that we are not far enough away from what was a really challenging year and impacted every student in our district for our community to have the confidence to vote for a very large amount of tax dollars and i absolutely want this to pass the first time so i don't want to be in a position we're like oh we have to go through it then we have to go through it that's that's not what i want to do and when we're asking people to if we're choosing that the april date that means the campaigning is during

083february and early march for ballot drop we'll be in the height of a coveted surge with omicron in the horizon and i just think that's a bad time to be doing that i think that our school district has done a phenomenal job and our staff and administrative team in having our schools be open keeping them up and having us be singularly focused on the academic and social emotional recovery of our students and i think that this would be an unnecessary and ill-timed distraction from what our main goal is and it's not like we're through covid in fact we'll be right in the heart of it and so to ask our staff to do that one more thing is i think the wrong time of year so i understand what you're saying about april but i

084i just think the timing is wrong and i frankly don't think that we're far enough away from for our families and community to feel confident that we can deliver we know because we're in it week after week and see what's happened but the community needs to see and feel like hey we've delivered and i believe a spring with normal spring activities and graduations and hey we've put a year in the books of in-person learning i think we'll go a long ways to say not tell me but show me so i i'm not it's not that i want an august to date it's that i don't want an april date and that's the difference sydney i'm processing that last comment like so are you are you are you saying august then or something after august before

085i get to my next comment like if there was a um late may date that would be more ideal for me because just from up here where we will be where i would forecast will be from a covet standpoint and like the near the finish line at the end of the year right it's a different campaigning in late april than it is campaigning in february like we are just finishing first try this semester at that point versus like people will see like oh wait we're we're we've we've gotten your debt they've seen it we've delivered unfortunately it's not an option it's not right so right we're dealing with the only dates we have are very end of april so april 26 august 2nd and november like eighth or so first tuesday i would never advocate

086for november as a first date because we we need a second date should the levy not pass so yeah i mean i think there's a lot of variables and none of this is well timed for sure i think the two things that stick out to me as the the the things to be avoided are first we if there's anything that i felt was the most detrimental in the last year it was the riff the riff and recall and i think to walk into that again when there was an opportunity to avoid it even if it's not the highest probability opportunity i would not i just wouldn't feel comfortable um putting that amount of sort of risk and instability into the into the system i i i would feel comfortable saying we did everything that was

087possible to ensure a continuity when we're just getting back to continuity the second piece for me is the piece around volunteerism for an august date i think we are already struggling in as a district in engagement um and volunteerism and and maybe it's exhaustion is one side of the coin or apathy's the other i think we see a decreased participation across a number of things that would normally be well supported in our district and the idea that by august like the june and july that people were going to give that attention i think that's near impossible in in our community um and i worry just even at voter turnout like who will take that step um to to uh to cast a ballot that time of year i just think it's i so those are

088the two things for me that while i completely would love to wait later i would completely love to clear more hurdles and for people to feel more comfortable i actually think it would be destabilizing to not at least attempt to take um the step to secure the levy in april and then walk into that um whole rift cycle again right and i would say that i would have those same concerns about an august state had i just not watched best starts for kids which is an educational levy a 970 million dollar levy in king county passed at 67 percent in king county last august so i i don't think that there is history to show that that wouldn't be successful and frankly i don't want our teachers doing that one more thing this springtime and

089i'd rather them have to dedicate some summer time to spread it out but i know that i see do you have a hand up just you know but just i just have to say but if you look at the difference in voter turnout between king county and our district it's dramatically different so for me that would that's actually a a red flag right okay i'm going to make a comment and then i see suzanne and then marnie um i mean i hear your point about the timing but i also believe that by delaying the uh the levee election to august puts us in the guaranteed untenable position of needing to do a riff and i think the action of doing a riff of 25 to 50 million dollars worth of program staff things that we

090want in our district would be very disruptive and certainly more disruptive to our staff then the need to potentially to the extent they are engaged in the levy uh and the campaign type work leading up to the april election suzanne okay so i was listening to what harlan was saying about the fact that it's a challenging year and and you know like the input we got from the students that um which i thought was really really interesting by the way i really appreciate that the students said what they did about just how hard it is to go even though everybody wanted to go back in person about how hard it was after you'd been remote for a year and and yes everybody's everybody's still at that discomfort level i want to suggest that and this

091sort of picks up what marnie was saying that we use that to our advantage we say yes we know this is a difficult year it's difficult for teachers it's difficult for students and this is what's in our levy that is going to help that these are the mental health counselors that are going to help our kids get through this and these are i don't know do we still have teacher mentors in there these are the teacher mentors that are going to help our teachers i don't know exactly yes yes we don't have a levy yet so i don't know exactly what it's going to look like but yes pbses coaches this is how we are addressing the problems that we know we still have in the system if if we have to do a riff

092that creates whole new problems in the system and that creates an incredible hurdle for teachers and it's going to create tremendous anger among parents it's going to do a lot of very destabilizing things the other thing and finance would have to um agree with me or not on this because i'm not a hundred percent sure but i don't want to put our cfo in a position of having to do two budgets right you know if we don't run a levy till august of well here's the budget if it passes here's the budget if it fails i mean that's a lot of uncertainty for admin as well as they're trying to start a new year and they don't know if the levy's in place and they don't know if those supports are in place so i

093think i think waiting till august has more destabilizing effects than running in april even though we're not really sure that the community is giving us the love in april i think we have to just go out on a limb and say look we know it's hard here's how we're going to try to make it better and we really hope you support this and then marnie was next well i i think that um yeah i'm my biggest concern is a riff i i don't know how we get past it i know i think that the cfo will still have to do two budgets what if it passes in april what if it doesn't pass in april um but i think there are so many districts that got a ton of sr dollars that don't even know

094what to do with it they can't hire the staff they have the money and they can't hire the staff i don't want to give them staff to hire yeah because there's this idea that we can recall them and there there is places all around us every single school district around us that could hire them agreed if we do a riff in april because we're going to run in august that staff won't be waiting around for us to recall them in august after we pass our levy you know and there's teachers there's professional development that begins in the beginning of august that they're not going to be there for i mean there's just to me there's just way too many barriers and why we need to work like mad as a board talking about the need

095of this levy the advantages of this levy what it does for our community and not let it fail in april since i've given everybody a chance to um speak i wanted to see if there was public input before we um continue on our our process so we'll take public input in the room first and then stephen you can help me if there's anybody on zoom too that want to give public input so i'm going to go to the room first and then you can flip us over and help me get the zoom people up i saw that george who spoke before is here and again if you could state your name the area you're from it's still a two-minute limit and suzanne here will be doing our timer and for those that are on zoom

096who can't see the countdown um that is up at the podium you'll hear a beeping sound and then at that point you'll need to wrap up what you're saying i'll give you a couple seconds but then that's it and so we'll go ahead and start with george here in the room yeah hi i'm george sage and i live in the issaquah highlands i was listening what you're saying and one thing um to consider is that the uh market for people looking for jobs is red hot now so even even in education you know you may have people get frustrated by this and decide to do something else and they're able to at this point so i would be concerned if you were to let people go uh i think marnie said it they most likely

097won't be there when you when you are looking for them again and in a very very um tight labor market you may struggle even if you get the money you want to get the people you want that's it thank you for your input and oh boy all right so on uh the zoom i think that says dorana and so we'll ask for her input and we'll let her unmute all right it looks like you're unmuted yes thank you i'm i'm doranna burkholder as quite education association president um and i'm here to speak with the board wearing kind of two hats um i first want to speak to my first hat which is always and will be my educator hat of now going on 15 years and 14 years in the issaquah school district and i

098know as an educator in issaquah how important these school levies are to educators but most importantly how impactful these enrichment levies are to our students and as educators um in issaquah we have had a tremendous amount of support with the volunteers in issaquah school district in the different campaigns that the levies have run including phone banks honking waves and personalized messages that we send to our family community encouraging them to vote for the levy and through all of those campaigns educators have been present for those come the winter months and spring months and my um concern as an educator is if we push a levy to august that educators won't be present because this year has already been so difficult come the end of the school year many educators will be off and taking care

099of themselves and being with their family and to ask educators to be present in the summer months to run a campaign will be very challenging and to speak a little bit with my second hat as the president it does bring me concern that if we do wait until august to run a levy campaign that the domino effect that will happen to rifts and to educators is going to be really impactful so i encourage you to vote for an april campaign thank you let's get my mic back on thank you durana for your input and i see a second hand up for meg iver hi i'm meg iyer um i'm actually on the levy committee representing pine lake middle school i have two students that go there i'm also a school psychologist in the district um

100and i work at skyline and i just wanted to um talk for a minute to propose that we do do the april um the april ballot uh our committee is really dedicated we're working really hard even in between meetings and i also want to remind the board in the community we're not looking to increase taxes the other levy will run out and so we're calling it a renewal because we're not asking for additional above what is already there um being a school psychologist seeing how hard this year has been for students especially their mental health i really hope that this levy passes and i think we're going to have parents and students and staff out to support it this includes mtss inclusion mental health counseling positive behavior coaches family partnerships the seventh period seven periods

101of the high school which is really important for students especially those um that are struggling and maybe not passing all of their classes they can still graduate on time if they're seven and then at the younger ages the elementary dual language um the preschool in kindergarten in the summer and um i want to encourage everybody to go to the levy website there's an email that you can write we want to hear from the community we're getting the word out we feel like if we can get a lot of engagement now and we can hear everybody's views we can get a package together that will pass so thank you and i'm really hoping for the april thank you meg is there anyone else on zoom or in the room that would like to give input all

102right i don't see anybody so i'll turn it back to the board if there are any more i'm going to go with sydney and then suzanne oh i thought you had your handbag oh i'm sorry i thought i saw you i did i saw you okay sorry oh no i thought you were cueing me too thank you okay so then suzanne i i just had one more thought as i was listening to public input i was thinking about the riff in terms of how damaging it is to the system how damaging it is to the staff who are rift and it suddenly flashed in my mind but if we do a riff in april we are also teaching in may and in june with a way reduced staff right or no but it might impact

103uh summer school opportunities that might you know it really would impact what we're doing the following year well and it would already give the staff that have been rift because a rift declares who is not getting a contract to be looking for other jobs yeah so although they're still in our schools they could already be looking for other places yeah now as soon as i said it i realized that i was wrong because yeah obviously it's contractual but i still stand by a riff it's a bad thing okay and uh our superintendent would like to make comments just to cut that out a couple of points and and uh i appreciate the the conversation with the board i think you've touched on a lot of the important issues a few things that stand out to

104me thank you director moraldo for acknowledging the lack of federal esser dollars for covet relief that we received i think that could have changed our conversation if we were one of those districts that was sitting on tens of millions of dollars right now um i also i think it just to be clear to the public and i and i think it came out fairly clearly that the state sets the four dates a year that we can actually hold elections so we don't it's not as if we just get to randomly pick a date those four dates are set the state also sets the date by which we must notify certificated staff if they'll be non-renewed so a lot of these things are kind of crashing together at the same time so i understand uh the

105the dilemma that that puts us in in terms of timing and budget development because it all kind of comes to a head at the same time i do want to um be clear too that um and you know we had a discussion earlier this board did um it back several weeks ago months ago and at that time there was even the discussion between february and april and pretty quickly for many of the reasons that director galinger has spoken to we were like no no we need more time to rebuild trust in our community and i i completely agree with that interestingly and i know all politics is local but we are part of a larger region every district around us will be running in february so i think we're going to get some bellwethers on

106maybe how some folks are feeling and again those are different districts it's not issaquah but it'll be interesting to see what happens in those levy elections with all of our surrounding neighbors this coming um this coming february and then lastly i do want to acknowledge that even an april vote is going to present challenges in the budget development and our hr team is going to have to and our business office be prepared because we we always hope for the best but we plan for the worst and so we will have to develop scenarios and we will have to be able to turn those scenarios very quickly because um you're going to have an april election and at the end of april and uh we're going to have to do notifications right away so we'll have

107to be prepared for the event that it could fail um and so we'll do all of that work behind the scenes we can do that without executing a riff if that fund the 26th and then uh even acknowledging that we may not know the outcome of the levy on the 26th because sometimes we have close elections in issaquah and uh but um so it'll be very tight and challenging um but but it is something that we can do so i appreciate the conversation and uh i hope the message too that i heard from the board and i appreciate is that we really are working hard our staff is working so hard right now to rebuild that trust in the community because we know how difficult um the forced shutdown of our schools was during the

108last school season and how hard it was to get the schools reopened and the gradually reopening and adding more and more students as the year went on and we finished strong and we finished with a lot of confidence and then came the delta variant and of course now we have another variant that's out there but um we will continue to do everything in our power to rebuild that trust and get our kids i'm actively engaged in the school system and our community back actively engaged in this school system uh you know i just personally i see this this public school system is a great treasure for this community and they've during my tenure my long tenure here they've always behaved that way and supported um their school district and i know we've we've rattled that

109confidence a bit but i'm hopeful that we will rebuild that trust whether it be april august or whenever it is and i think we're doing a good job at that right now by keeping our our schools open and functioning that's all i wanted to say thank you thank you oh back to harlan so i would say i i don't support marijuana rift either i didn't support one last spring actually but more importantly i don't want to support and can't in good faith support levy timing that i think will fail and you may recall four years ago when we put this on the ballot post mccleary in this community ours passed at 53 and all our surrounding districts had very different outcomes so while i think that february will give us data i don't think it's

110actually going to be bellwether data because our district was very different in how we voted post-mcleary and i think there is a far more contention in our community right now than there was mccleary so i i just i just don't think we're there yet and i think that we're going to get there because i think that the trajectory is really really good but it costs a lot of money for our volunteers to campaign and run a school levy and so if we were to put this on april and fail in april i don't even know where they would get the money to run another campaign and that's my biggest fear i want first pass first name i think we all do all right any other comments before we vote not seeing anybody all right all

111right it's been moved and seconded that the board instruct the district to run levies on april 26 2022 all those in favor say aye aye opposed nay okay the motion passes and at this point the board is directing you to move forward with the levies at the april date and we'll continue to watch the good work of the levy committee as they process what will be the final levy package that they and as we all recognize that they recommend to you and you recommend to us and the board has the final say on what the actual package holds no we will as was noted earlier our levy committee has begun that work because we figured it wouldn't hurt to get started regardless of whether it was in april or august 8. i appreciate the conversation

112and i think it also informs the urgency of our work and the big task ahead of us but i'm very confident and one thing that we can certainly all agree on is we don't want to ever fail we want to pass the first time so everybody will work hard we do have a date by which we have to register with king county to be on the april ballot we'll make sure that that happens and i'll continue to provide updates on the work of the levy development committee and look forward to um bringing you a package for your consideration um hopefully by the end of january that's the the goal that we've set so we know it's going to be a truncated campaign we're going to have to work really hard and hopefully the the the

113virus the the covet virus and the new variant won't create the disruption that it potentially could for us but um we we have our orders and we'll move forward thank you right yes the board will expect to um hear the package hopefully as you said by the end of january because we have to be able to turn in the ballot measure to king county by uh february 25th is the date so i know we have our february 10th board meeting which would be um ideal to know later than that date otherwise it would be a special meeting that we could arrange for to handle that but that is the timing that would get that ballot information to king county to have us move forward with april 26th my goal is to always not have to

114have you have special meetings on my behalf but uh we'll do we'll do our darndest to get all that work done okay suzanne did you have something okay all right well then that takes care of this particular item and now we are on to um ends two parts one and two this is a preview um and so this is your opportunity i think to um present what you see going into um ends two part one and two or any changes and gives the board a chance to ask questions and discuss this one no i appreciate this this is a bit of the unique issaquah policy governance process that we've created and that i greatly appreciate as your superintendent um this year our pre-monitoring discussion on ends to academics and uh foundations we'll we will have

115several things we are having to change this year in this year's report as a result of the pandemic and the closure of our schools to in-person learning during much of last year which is the period of this monitoring you'll see that we have some new assessment data in this report the use of i-ready data will will appear prominently and some different uses of the state assessment the smarter balance assessment as the state changed up some things coming as we've been transitioning out of the pandemic closures you will notice from the draft that we sent you that we still do have some work to do entering some of our psat and other high school assessment data as well so you you haven't seen a completed report that will come at the next uh monitoring phase one

116and in the first meeting in uh part two in the second um as a reminder um this report will come back again in those in those two times i've asked our executive director of teaching and learning rich melish to come up and speak to the different assessments because that's the biggest change and we will all be listening um and the staff and i and rich to the board for any questions the board might have as we prepare the final monitoring report so i'm going to have executive director melish come up one one note while rich is coming up to the podium too you will notice in these drafts from our earlier discussions of monitoring reports we are using these as an effort to create a historical record as well of the pandemic's impact on our

117school system and on public education in general in our region and so you will see notations in there about why data is different or absent and things like that as it relates to the pandemic so rich i know you've prepared some talking points around some of the data used and so i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you and then we'll take any questions from the board all right of course the i'm sorry rich malice executive director of teaching and learning services so clearly the the area that we had the most control over were our district assessments and so two major changes the the smaller one are just that our secondary common assessments we rethought them in two ways one is to really make sure that they were focused on the essential

118learnings that we wanted to make sure prepared students for whatever course they were taking next so we we did alter some of many of our secondary common assessments the second thing we did with that was we actually looked for opportunities to improve them while we did that so we have some that we actually feel better assess the core learning outcomes of the courses so that does mean that when we're comparing previous common assessments to the ones given last year they they they are an altered version of the common assessments um but the bigger change was the integration of iready in for reading in k-8 and for math in k-5 we also used alex as an assessment in middle school math as well so there are there are a lot of questions because uh it's not

119something we have great historical data on what we do know is that some very large-scale washington studies were done pre-covered to look for a correlation between achievement of the standards as measured on the sba and achievement of the benchmarks in iready and they found a very strong 80 plus correlation of that benchmark for meeting standard and that's a year-end expectation and we've worked with them to try to also say so what does that mean about where a student should be when we administer it in the first weeks of school and where should a student be when we administer it in january and where should a student be when we administer it in april so we're creating district benchmarks based on their data their research um but that's that that's something that we're going to get

120better at and better at interpreting as we go through the final piece that i just want to say before i ask if there's any questions is that we really got down the road with i ready pre-covered because we were looking to get better in diagnostic information for our students to inform tiered supports to inform a kind of a diagnostic approach to identifying the needs and gaps that students have and how we could match that to instruction to address those needs and that's where we're really starting to to get better and better at using that data and teachers have a robust way of drilling down tons of reports to give one example of how it's used when students take the i-ready math in the fall it catalogs all their prerequisite skills that they have for various

121topics when a teacher goes in to now teach a new topic in a new unit they can enter into iready what topics they're going into and it will tell you which students have the prerogat skills to be able to approach that topic which skills students are missing and it will group students by saying this group of students needs some work on these prerequisite skills then our eureka and zearn resources for our core curriculum have resources to address that but also i already provide some personalized learning pathway tools and small group instruction tools that teachers can use to additionally provide supports for students so that's just one example that yes this is a tool that we're using to try to monitor overall achievement in our district but it's really a tool that's designed first and foremost

122to inform the teacher of the specific needs of their students so that they can address those through instruction i will stop there and see if there's any questions that i can address on that um i i will note for the public that uh good send i hope you all received the i ready primer to kind of give a summary of of some of the background about i ready that i that i sent to the board this week rich i think i know the answer to this question but the state hasn't released any district by district aspect data from the fall administration yet have they no and you know we should note that the fall administration please recall that it's actually a delayed administration of the spring so our fourth grade students took the third grade

123sba they have signaled that they're going to give us final scores in february okay i'm not exactly sure why and that's when they're talking about releasing the district comparisons that is that is an unfortunately a delay that that we're bracing ourselves for in terms of the finals so we mean that we probably won't have comparison data by the time we monitor these then it looks like not not according to the signals we're getting out of ospi at this time okay thank you for that rich oh and i don't know if you were probably the same thing yeah we didn't know we didn't get anything that you were referring to about i ready uh already did where it's it's not jumping out at me that it's something else okay i got it i'm pretty sure oh

124my god i used the i used the school board at discipline oh in our okay well that's a bummer well i guess all of us are kind of drawing a blanket i just remembered it i said am i i spent a lot of time writing that so i can be ready today and that's why we want to find it so that we can um yeah yeah okay well read it before we do all right well um i will make sure you get that i'll look it up while we're sitting here tonight and make sure you get that um i use the school board yeah email address i'm almost certain i received it but i don't know if you put me in as a copy because i'm in but i am i might have put you

125in as a cc but okay i ready primer tuesday um at what time yeah it can you see the school board school board on that i wonder if it's tuesday the seventh sorry at 3 10 p.m no okay i wonder if it went into a spam folder or something yeah it went to the school board it went to me to josh it went to the whole cabinet it looks like or most or maybe the ed planning team oh but um with an attachment okay well um so you got it to the superintendent but apparently we yeah that that's weird though i mean um yeah i'm looking to see if it ended up in the junk but we'll have to have you all send it to us again maybe i could do it right here yeah

126so that we can see it okay yeah well that's okay since you haven't read that there is one more piece that i i think is worth mentioning is that one of the things that iready provides us are what's called typical and stretch growth goals for each student in reading and math as they take it so it allows us to identify whether they're keeping up with the growth and standard that's expected but for for them at their base from their baseline level but it also sets a goal for gap closing growth so we actually now have an interesting measure a target for students um just that do have a gap that says here's a really good goal getting where you want to get them in a year and so it's a really it's a really nice

127way to for us to have an objective measure of whether or not we're closing student gaps and that is one unique thing about iready that we're excited to learn more about and explore the use of this is okay this is pulling up my text can can you just walk me through the chart that's labeled expensive ela grade six to eight i ready reading sba yeah is that the one in 2.1 okay yeah 2.1 i'm seeing if he can pull it up so i can refer to where we all see it yes i think it's that one um oh i've got a different one of mine that's the that looks like that's the 10th grade could we go back it says you wanted the six through eight the grade one yeah so page four and okay

128yes so um so we have preliminary sba data so the preliminary sba is this falls data we have we have received scores from the state and they are in our homeroom school information system as as preliminary scores and then once the state finalizes them we override them with the final scores so we do it and and it is possible they change they've only changed like once when they invalidated an item um but so the the preliminary scores are relatively accurate um so yes we do have this falls makeup test from last spring in here okay and then is the top am i supposed to interpret it the so if you'd go up a little bit stephen the first set of bars yes that's supposed to be what we would interpret as correlation data potentially between

129the i ready spring score even though we don't know we don't know the student by student at this point i'm just saying you're global yeah we have we have student we can we we have done analysis and uh and i've done some correlation study between um so the i ready that you see here is from last spring so administered may june remotely and then the graph right below at the sba was administered october november this year not exactly the same students because we had some change and you know some changes we we we did know that um ireti tends to have lower scores than sba in a student by student comparison we already gave us some research on that there's a bigger difference than we anticipated in those two measures um i just don't have

130enough experience yet to really conclude all the why um i think that as we get more we also have to remember that this sba was a modified sba it only had the multiple choice portion not the extended response portion so not only was it given at a different time of year it it didn't have what was considered some of the harder portions of the test included so i i've been interpreting it as the the the actual is somewhere in between these two so if i look at the very top steven where it says if i'm done with quarterly by cohort yeah so it'd be the sixth graders in 2018 19 are the eighth graders in 2021 or without were those of there would i really be the seventh graders because those are seventh grade scores

131i see what you're asking so so that top the top chart so it would be the sixth grade is really this that's the seventh grade of 2021 yeah so what what when it says sixth grade it's what test they took so so the in the 2021 the seventh graders took the 6th grade test because that's what they would have taken in the spring of 2021 the 1920s right so you can do that where that 2019 sixth grader sure is now a ninth grader but took the eighth grade test so yes okay so when i look at this and see our seventh grade scores for our cohort that was seventh graders in 2018 19 have had dramatic learning loss well you can't see that that particular cohort's gone because they'd be they'd be that no no

132because that's not seventh graders that's the students who took the seventh grade test they are now those seventh graders then are now tenth graders and did not take the sba in the fall so you can look at the sixth grade sorry yeah i know yeah right okay that's the chart and then stephen try to can you do the math do the math oh but they took the eighth grade test and so you're showing them as you're showing them as eighth grade because they took the eighth grade test it's the test not the students so it shows me at least looking at it that language arts was relatively preserved but math was dramatically impacted by yes and that is a pattern that is a pattern throughout the data that math math had a pretty significant impact

133um especially starting around fourth fifth grade and that's a terrifying impact actually our our math our math teachers throughout the system are taking this extremely seriously are they i mean what how what give me some examples for like what does it mean taking it very seriously so like um throughout so our geometry our geometry teachers are weaving in algebra throughout their year they built in algebra throughout the geometry to make sure students are ready for algebra 2 next year they are really doing a lot we they've worked really hard together to come up with pre-assessments of prerequisite skills for each of their units to really identify what students know and don't know and come up with strategies to address that we increased our elementary math tosa to it was a half-time tosa to a full-time

134tosa and she's working really hard going out to schools and showing them how to use that prerequisite skill report to identify the very specific needs of students um and so that we can address that we're really encouraging the use of some of the tools like xern and ireti to to really try to backfill those so there's there's a lot of efforts happening what we're not sure is what the quick fixes are so students students who are quite adept at math but just missed instruction we think those are probably some areas where we might have some quicker fixes because if we can just get them good quality instruction on those things they've typically picked up skills quickly those we think we can get there and then we're also trying to identify which students are having some

135longer term needs that we're going to have to really persist at for the years to come yeah i guess it's an elementary parent i would i think i deserve and all of our parents deserve to have gotten a rep i would love to know what gaps my child has so i can do that work at home as well yes and so i'd have no access to that is yes so the terrifying we put the i ready family report on family access for for families that gave a summary view and then of course during conferences we're hoping that parents are able to have that conversation which we just had with their teacher of what their what they're seeing and noticing so the family report the second page of that family report listed listed some of those

136skills to be working on and some of those skills that they they were successful on on the assessment i guess i want the sba oh oh this is the other problem with the sba this year they're giving us there's no strand or or no strand breakdown and no skill breakdown from the sba this fall they're not providing that to the school district they're not providing it across the state is there a score all we get is a one a two a three or a four for each student there's a scale score that's associated with that but there's no there's no scale score that says here's here's the types of items they usually give us a report that says here's the type of items the student did well on they are not providing that this year

137in the fall we'll have not have it until the spring have we provided the scale scores in the the one two three or four twelve yes we have we sent it out um on right before our conferences so that would have been the that was the goal was to have that data out their parents hands for their conference yes we got it out there either right before thanksgiving or right after i think it was right after thanksgiving we sent the email that said here's how to access your we sent an e-news that said here's how to access your sba scores and here's a link to the explanation of the scales of the scores and then for elementary that could be discussed at the conferences yes that was the goal conferences were held last week right

138yes that's what i mean that but that would have been one of the key things for teachers to be conversing to make sure parents are seeing i don't have an elementary child so i i don't know what that actually looks like yeah how teachers can know if the parents are actually going in and making the connection to actually go in and look at it i think it's important to note too that is not a parent's only opportunity to communicate with their child's teacher so if there are parents out there just discovering or kind of wrapping their head around this i would encourage them to reach out to the teacher and contact the teacher yeah plea please do know that the state usually provides a family report we usually get it a couple months after the

139test but that's of course usually because we get it in over the summer and then we're able to give it to parents in the fall at this point we do not believe we will be getting any family reports from ospi from the fall sba we believe that what they've given us and what we put in test scores in skyward family access is the extent of what the information they're going to give us yeah i guess the other thing that can matter about this oh i'm sorry this might be and maybe this is going to be an andrea question but i'm really how many students if they got like an a d or an f we're just passed on to the next math class right because we were we giving f's where are we doing giving

140incompletes i mean to me i look at this date and i'm like well shoot we pretty much should have told every student just retake your math class like unless there was something that was going on in your class that you felt confident you gained that experience that i think just overall and that was kind of my feeling last year like math is the hardest thing to be learning remotely and on your own and is there something we can do about it thank you andrea yeah andrew mccormick executive director of high school i also want to just say as an elementary parent i received my kids expect scores on november 10th my school sent out a newsletter uh and received that information i had a scale report and a level report and my kid's teacher went

141over that at conferences so i didn't know if that was helpful for high school math scores um it's a placement it's a variety of things based on family and school partnerships so sometimes families want to go on to the next level because they're willing to participate in summer school or various contributing factors to why they believe the score was low they felt like it was just the online learning environment the student picked up on some of the skills and they felt like they could do that or through summer school so math teachers made recommendations to students in the spring based on how things had gone last year and we had automatically placed those recommendations into this student's course selection so when they logged into their course selection skyward the recommended math class is already sitting

142there so they had to make a conscious choice to remove it and then we we provided a lot of different information around what other access for support would be available like a lab class like a support class if they wanted to choose that to do that as an elective alongside their math class if they wanted to progress some students chose to concurrently retake say algebra 1 and take geometry in the same year so they double up on math because they can do that with algebra 1 and geometry or geometry and algebra 2. so it's a pretty wide variety i can try to get that data for you in terms of how many students that had these and f's took the concurrent class or repeated and how many completed that through summer school i can get

143more robust data on the math um progression from kovaliers and get that to the board if you'd like that i think i think it would be helpful to really understand so we can be communicating out to when when we get those emails or phone calls or whatever that we can talk to what we are doing yep i can get you that data and disaggregated by school okay i think the other piece for me i know that um we're getting this data really late but we have kind of the preliminary data is there any way that i know we're starting you know we're already in the second trimester in the middle schools but i'm thinking third trimester just really increasing those supports for um students that hey unless you're in a year-long elective you'll need to

144be taking a math lab instead of you know survival techniques or something like that um and kind of looking at schedules and i know that jason's not here today but so yeah i will really talk about high school i can just add that they're also looking at semester one data right now and semester's not completed but they have pretty good uh data right now about how students have progressed up to till december so using like the midterm and quarter grades um and they're having conversations with students right now but other options about switching math classes potentially at semester um and looking at using summer school or um taking some of those concurrent classes so there's already some partnerships going on with families that are continuing to struggle in this year's placement based on what they

145selected with all that other information so i know that like elizabeth high they're looking at collapsing one of the algebra 2 sections and adding a support class in for some students because there's enough kids in that population that want to make a change so some of that work is already happening for an actual school schedule change to add some of those supports in within the school i do know as well to director maraldo that our um with the support from our friends in the foundation our after school support is is starting to kick up more in our middle level as well i think even in our elementary level as well but because recognizing that there's a need for that because they don't have the seven period day and some of the the options that might

146be available at the high school level too and you know this data and i know i had shared some preliminary um of our preliminary analysis with the board and some previous communications but it's a the reaction that i saw here was the same reaction in the cabinet in the ed planning committee we right away and credit to rich and his team because they quickly got this out in front of us and um we could start to see what what the biggest impacts of the coveted shutdown were and clearly it was identified in math we've broken this down even further because when you when you look at the regular math students you're advanced place students when you when you pull them out they didn't experience quite the negativity here but our regular students did and that's

147a real concern to us our regular cc6 cc7 that that's a concern for us i would say common core six would probably be my biggest concern because that's the you know that they really didn't have any other place to go but cc six you know there wasn't anything before that and i think that was the year a struggle from the end of fourth grade and all of fifth grade and really not getting those math concepts that we know historically are harder for elementary teachers to teach the fifth grade math to a level of um you know clarity for a lot of students and and i know that when my daughter was in school they would switch class to room teachers so that more um more skilled math teachers at fifth grade were teaching and and

148suzanne i know you had a question or comment well yeah and it actually kind of dovetails with what marnie was saying because you know i look at those numbers and my first reaction is the same as everybody else's which is oh my goodness how do we get these kids back up to speed but i'm concerned with how we balance that with some of the input that we heard from kids of i was out for a year and a half and now my teachers expect me to have learned all this stuff i didn't learn and i'm stressed and i don't know how to deal with it and math is quite a bit sequential so it's hard to go on to the second concepts if you haven't learned the first concepts and i mean i think marnie's

149question about what math classes are we taking and does it make sense to repeat math classes that's important um i don't want our kids to be super stressed out i also don't want them to be academically behind and then you know harlan made his comment as a parent of i want to know what i need to help my kid with and then that brings up the whole concept of equity issues because some parents can help their kids with math and some parents simply can't and i just it's it's an incredible juggling act i don't know how we bring kids back up to levels without stressing them out without stressing their teachers out because now teachers have three grades worth of classes in their class and they used to have one and i don't know i

150don't really have a question it's more of a comment i'm just really concerned about balancing all that and not adding to the overwhelming stress and anxiety that our students and teachers already have so as someone currently living through all this stress and anxiety with the middle and high schooler i do think the current opportunity seems to be like what's what's the plan forward so is it is it best to switch out courses is it best to plan for repeat summer school and i know we just um have done all this amazing work to do uh all the plans to get folks back up to speed who we knew were struggling i think it's another round of that like there's the next wave of um kind of the kiddos that were fair to midland who are

151hitting a real stress point at at this point and just what are the what are the real options and which of those don't don't maybe feel like personal failure right so is that hey for you it's we're gonna it's an extra support after school because that's something that kid individual kiddo can manage or is it summer school or repeat of section i think um i think that would be helpful maybe at a counselor level or or something just to get some individual plans for those who are kind of in this middle stressor area and the key to that is the engagement between the teachers and the families the parents and the students understand where each kid is that is struggling with gaps in their skills and what individual things can be done for them as

152you're saying whether it's you know uh doubling up on something or an after school or figuring out how to get them to some you know far enough along that they can use summer school to catch up but there's got to be a lot of engagement with the student and the families to find the the intervention that's the right fit to be successful i i will say if i if if you don't mind me jumping in that um probably the best thing happening right now are vertical conversations with our math teams so they are really each at every school i'm hearing from principals and math teachers that they are talking not about how will i just address the needs of my students now but how are we going to work over time to get students back

153on track so what are we going to do in sixth grade that leads to seventh grade that leads to eighth grade and making sure that i understand exactly where you're leaving these students off and can take them that next step so what that leads me to believe is that we we just had trimester grades from the middle schools go out not too long ago and that that is meant to be an indicator of whether or not they're keeping up with the instruction and and the the learning in the class and those teachers are trying to make sure that they're slowly closing that gap and getting those skills in for those students so that we can because they know that this isn't just this isn't this is what in mtss we call a tier one problem

154it is not a tier 2 problem it's not about intervention it's about because it is it is more than 20 of the students this is something we need to build into the core instruction to bring the whole group up and that's the conversations that they're having at all of our schools i i will say that you'll see in the i ready because we did do i ready math three times last year so you have in ends to the second part um the the data from last year of the three administrations of the math and you can it really does visually show you what the problem is and um that we we know that fourth and fifth grader also have to be thrown into this this math conversation because that's when they're starting to get into

155those more complex math skills so yes common core six is really important our fifth grade teachers know that that they've got to get them ready i think just as a parent assuming that hey everybody is the solution like um i'm a pretty anti-technology at my house and so it came up at conferences about like oh well they just seem to be logging on to do cern and all these other things and i just think there needs to be more options for parents besides just hey go put your kid on a computer right i mean a lot of us had young children in the district last year have ptsd like our kids do from being on the computer all day long in elementary school so it's kind of like not not the first go-to and so

156there should be other options available to point out resources even for families that don't necessarily have all that access and that part's not there and that part wasn't at least part of our conversations at conferences nor was it brought up about sba scores at all i i would just add that um and i think i heard director mullin say essentially the same thing that there needs to be more of a menu of options and and i certainly and it needs to have an individualized aspect to it and i can't even remember which one of you now said that it's going to be critical this relationship communication between the student the family the home and i know we've drifted a little bit far afield here but i i think this is a great just feels like

157an uh ed planning conversation to me rich i don't know about you um and i i'm sorry but i'm gonna i'm gonna kind of shift a little bit to political advocacy here we have been trying to help legislators understand the impacts of covid don't just hit poor communities i'm looking at a 16 point drop in math scores on my students try to tell me that the the closure of our schools to in-person learning didn't have a negative impact on isd students my staff has already shared with me an incredibly robust summer school option that i believe many many students need to take advantage of it comes with a big price tag it's exactly the kind of thing i would be using esser funds for recovery efforts on so as we continue to have our conversations

158with legislators to me this is just another piece of data that and and i don't have any comparison data because it doesn't exist right now but i don't need it because i'm just looking at my own students and comparing them to themselves and i think one of the comments that i have shared previously is you're going to see data that doesn't look like the traditional isquad data that we've become used to uh when students are dropping from the mid 70s to the mid 50s in terms of the percentages that are meeting standard that's just not what we we're we're not okay with that here so the team is well aware of this the idea that we have to provide a menu of options the ways that we can support kids and then the last thing

159i will say and it goes a little bit to what you were saying director weaver this is going to be a process that's going to take time we're not going to bring these kids back up overnight we're going to work hard on it they're going to work hard but we can't we can't just pound them pound it into them in the next six months or anything like that we have to have after school plans for now ways to attack in the classroom as as rich was saying earlier which is critical summer school options ongoing support um and you can just see it you can see it right here in the results so and again i know that's that's a little bit far afield from the the the discussion around the mon upcoming mario reports but

160my point about this is the historical record of the impact and when you look at data like this so it's you'd be hard-pressed to argue that um the denial of in-person learning uh didn't have a significant impact on our students superintendent thiele i i do feel i need to point out that i feel like this particular chart masks the ela needs as well because this sba cut out the writing portions and the writing portions are traditionally the place where students we have the most challenges we are hearing from our ela teachers that they are noticing and our sba reading data notices some some challenges not quite as dramatic as in math but definitely some challenges in reading too and i just i point that out not to be negative but to be real yeah that

161that our our our schools and our leadership are really trying to look at finding out what the impact was so that we can make adjustments so you are going to hear schools this year talking a lot about the early literacy and and reading and reading and writing interventions as well because we are equally concerned about how that that impacts our access to all coursework if they don't have those reading and writing skills so i just want you to know we're taking that part of it pretty much just as serious as the math challenge any other questions here is there any other parts of the report you wanted to point out i don't think there was anything uh specific to that obviously there's still a lot there was a lot of things that needed to be

162updated in the report and most of that has happened um but but it is still a work in progress i think mostly we wanted to hear was there anything specifically missing that the board might be looking for in this version of the report um as we will you know after tonight we will continue forward and get ready for the actual monitoring where we'll be have another opportunity to have a robust conversation about the academic impact of i think this is really about the academic impact of what happened last year and that's what we're monitoring is last year maybe it's just me i can't get the link for way back on page two of the first part page three section are you in uh page three the non-grad report okay get the 2021 non-grad report link

163to open but maybe that's just me do we have the grad report for 2021 this is this is another good reason why going through these in advance like this is good for us um you're going to get an email from diane your account hasn't been forwarding an email since last friday apparently there's a glitch in the system oh that's been so pleasant oh yeah so you weren't losing your minds no oh yeah and i think i only received it not because i'm in the school board group but he had independently uh copied me right are we tracking how many parents percentage-wise are looking at these reports like because we can track you mean you mean through our analytics on our website no the i ready reports no when they oh family access and look on

164them like you know how the wonder you have to like acknowledge that you've looked at your kid's report card yeah yeah i don't i i don't know the answer to that direction i would just know how many families have actually looked at these i ready reports i know there was communications that went out encouraging it and i know we got some feedback that they were complicated which is what i think a little bit even prompted rich to kind of try to send an explanation as well do you know about that rich i don't i don't know um i know that we also asked teachers to send in their classroom newsletter or an email to their parents in directions for getting those so we we tried to hit it from the classroom level building level and

165district news level i will say that the family reports will continue to be accessible and but we part of the feedback we received from a variety of stakeholders is that a a simpler way of communicating those scores would be would be better for the all and then providing the opportunity to request the full family report as an option for those who want more information so we're heading more that direction for the for january at this time um so based on feedback we've received yeah especially since in in in family access they're not under test scores which is where people would generally think to look to see yeah say hey we're sending out these i already test scores they're not there yeah so we're gonna we're gonna put the next time in test scores with a

166link and then the with a communication of explanate to explain and then letting parents know that if they want the original i ready family report they may request it from their teacher that's the that's the current plan for the january distribution of results feels more familiar that way okay are you good okay then i have one and i i admit i was challenged this week to dig deep into these so this one's more maybe for andrea if she's she's still here it's on 2.4 related to the ap science exams the apib science exams and i was just you know scrolling through it and i gotta find it again it was on page four of two points of the part two oh now i lost it again there were no ap scores for computer science i

167i can't believe no one took it i think there's an answer to that question director moore andrea cormick executive director of high school sorry i'm wearing my winter coat it's a little cold in here um there are score scores and students absolutely to take that test unfortunately college board um is experiencing some of the web issues that are going around in our country and it went down the same day we were finishing that report and that was the only one and the psat scores that we hadn't pulled from collegeport's website for the ends monitoring so we will be able to get that to you as soon as their website is working again okay thank you i had heard that about the psats i hadn't heard it about the computer science which is why i said

168we'd still have some updating right updated yeah just all the rest were there yeah because i was curious to see how you know kids of course it's the one that you really want to see director more that they didn't have yeah by and large the scores held up yeah and the tests were different too though again the ap test like that's why so much of this data i think is kind of i wouldn't use it to compare to previous i guess what i would say because i know they were trying some new ways of administering ap exams during the pandemic last year okay parliament uh so the report that's e2 part two 2.7 which is the sva math and it breaks it down 10th grade math by race just for this current administration that gives

169the breakdown by meeting standard for three cohorts of kids can we get the similar breakdown by race for those cohorts as well ideally side by side i really want to know if not only did the pandemic impact learning but did it disproportionately impact learning in our district because those are pretty dramatic charts as well when it's broken down by race but i don't know if that's what our chart always looks like because i don't recall seeing this chart broken down by race previously it could just be that's the 2.7 sba math one is that correct um director gallinger so mind i understand you would like 2018 and 2019 by race as well so that you can have a comparison like that is that is easily easily accomplished i can't even i can't find it so

1702017 and 2018 i just want to make a note because when we circle back i want to make sure we yeah the 17 18 and the 18 19 school year are on there just just by the data we can do that by race as well on all of those okay side by side maybe that's good okay thank you thanks rich yeah and i i suppose and i'll say that and send this to myself i said i didn't have end up having time by the time i got these to do a really deep dive so i would encourage anybody else that reads through these in any more depth to shoot off any um comments to ron as far as something that you see that doesn't look right or doesn't feel right or you would like something

171added to so this isn't our only chance um if you look through these more deeply and you find something else that's what i would do absolutely and don't hesitate to copy rich on that email if you send it to me as well we come together through our planning and through individual conversations as we'll kind of clean these up try to bring in bring them together right because we'll bring these back they come back in january and two one in the first meeting and two in the part two in the second meeting in january okay so if there aren't any other comments all right then that's how we'll leave that one if there's um anything more anybody finds go ahead and let ron and rich know yeah please do more eyes makes it better for us

172too yeah okay thank you rich all right now we are on to our discussion about the student representatives to the board we had tasked uh sydney and marnie to take a look at this and to come up with some ideas on what we could do going forward to change the engagement with our student representative and so i'll pass it on to either one of you to share with uh and i know you sent out a proposal to us that we've had a chance to look at but i'll let you guys um walk us through where you are and where you're thinking we go next let me just go through it awesome so in the in the document that you received it's really in two parts one is if i did the narrative of the whole

173proposal making all the selections possible and then beneath that it's some of the i think options we have to choose about how we want engagement to work so they're all a bit mix and match if we think any individual one is not it's not the right choice but the um ideas put together would be that we would create we would update our approach for 2223 create a student group that consists of two students from each of our high schools one junior one senior we would allow an application open to the entire student body i'm assuming that that would mean a sophomore and junior at the time of selection and they would serve as junior and senior that the local asb would select two student representatives from the list of applicants students would form two teams

174with representation from each high school on each team and identify a need change opportunity that they would want to work to implement student teams would rotate participation at school board meetings with each team giving updates on their projects as well as the opportunity to still share public input during those sessions and that we may want to include board and or admin support as required based on what they what they select so that's like the so the summary if i go through we can kind of talk about each of these components one at a time and see if we feel comfortable with that so first it's how many students and from which of our schools so what's in here is that it'd be two from each of our um high schools so a total of eight

175um how does that how did that land i figured it could be either one to two i don't know if we i don't think we want any more than that when the two if we want to just do these one at a time does that sound comfortable um and then i'll just go through them all when we talk age grade of the students so i guess it could be any any grade in the school it could be this mix of juniors and seniors which i put in the end or just seniors um you figure the options for duration could be um you know different students come in at different times different meetings like we have today a quarterly commitment a year-long commitment i went with year-long um i think we've got a lot of choices

176for how we could select them so they could be from our existing asb uh electeds like us unlisted existing asps open the student body and chosen by the asp or have the asb short list and that we as a board could select i thought it'd be cool that asps do it since they represent student body um and then meeting participation continues today they come in they give comments this project based forum or public input and then a bit at the bottom was like and then what's the get for this student and i think it'd be good for us to clarify that and with some ideas there is it letters of recommendation community service hours you know exposure like meetings with legislators an example and then potentially a small scholarship so i will hold for discussion

177suzanne i have so many opinions dear um i actually really like your proposal the the one and i i like the idea of having a junior and senior um i know in riverview which has been doing this for forever they have a junior and senior they actually have the kids on the board for two years so the senior is always mentoring the junior right so you always have one kid that's been there for two years and one kid who hasn't um but obviously they only have one high school so it's not necessarily the same thing um in terms of your assignment duration i think it needs to be the year i i think anything less than that is not they're not going to get the sense of what we do and we're not going to

178get the benefit of them the thing that kind of i'm not comfortable with yet is i definitely think it should be an open application i don't want to limit the kids who can apply i'm not sure i'm comfortable with having the asb make the choice um because i kind of and i could be totally wrong on this but i kind of feel like there is a group of kids out there who will think well i'm not one of the popular kids i'm not one of the asb kind of kids they're never going to pick me i won't apply i don't know if that's true or not i just i kind of feel that um i think given what i want them to do given that there's a year-long commitment given that i really want them

179to engage with the work we do and you know you suggested having them do some kind of project which i think is is great um there does need to be some benefit for them um and i don't know i guess we can't really offer them course credit but but it does seem like there has to be that they need to get something out of this um i don't know what that would be so those are kind of those are my opinions harlan so i hear what you're saying about the access points for recruitment and sort of comfort level people that may feel like why bother applying because i'm not a perspective at the same time then what would i guess your alternative be because i don't want to be selecting for skyline high school over

180the student body and so i think that's and i'm not sure it's realistic today okay form this ad hoc committee and you're in your school to do that so we don't want it also to be an extra burden on staff like you know say okay principal you need to go for it so i i guess i what my response would be well they are the elected representatives of their school and now it can be incumbent on us to really focus on the recruitment part but they could like so we could still do that to address your point of making sure we get a broad-based thing and it could be like hey lunch we'll go with the high school and like or you know sometimes have a q a or go to some club i don't

181know how that worked but we could really inject ourselves into the recruitment part i think the students need to be selecting their representatives so i think and i just don't know if i'm open to other alternatives for who would do that part i just i don't want to be part of the selection process because i i feel uncomfortable with that and of course there we'd have the opportunity to really be working with the asbs to understand what we're really trying to get out of this and help them understand it's not just about picking somebody from asd or that you know or picking a popular kid i mean you know that that how to approach selecting this person if that's where it ends up landing so it's on us or um the asb directors to help

182really coach the kids on how this should work marty yeah and that's and that's kind of my sense is back to the asps whether it be i think i do want it open to the entire student body and it not just be selected from within the asb and maybe it's just something that they add to their voting when they're voting for their president and their vice president or whoever their class officers that this could be another thing that the student body is voting for because we are all elected oh that's very different i would love for it to be the broader student body because we are all elected by the members of the community we serve and they're being somewhat elected to represent the student body and i that's very different than having just the

183asp because because the way this is written you're she was talking about asb leadership versus the whole school so but this okay well this would then have a student know that they would have to they would be putting themselves in the position of basically running for a school-wide position yeah i think i have even more issues with that because yeah that's very intimidating well no i'm thinking of it more yes we're all elected by the community and what does the community do do to make that choice most of them read a 250 word blurb in the voter pamphlet they don't really know who you are um one of the questions i was actually going to ask is what's the application who develops the application do i would hope that we would develop the application um

184because again i have opinions um and i don't i don't think i want to ask the entire student body to review those efforts that's really intimidating if the entire student body is going to read your application so from that standpoint and i i kind of take harlan's point of whether or not the board should be doing it i hadn't actually thought um until you started talking of the fact that it could even create a conflict of interest if somebody has a student at one of those schools um but yeah so maybe maybe i am i i would rather the asb do it than the entire student body do it i'm i'm there too and one suggestion i might have related to if if that were the approach you took i think one of the things

185that would be valuable is in the spring as they they are prepping for elections and all of that to have one or two board members go and visit each of the leadership classes and talk to them about here's here's what we think we want or here's what we're looking for the characteristics because i my concern about a school-wide vote i don't know how to say this tactfully but i don't know how many of the students even really know what happens up here i'm just you know i'm trying to remember where my mind was when i was 17 years old and the school board and stuff and i know we have some amazing students that that come and but i think when you open it up to 2000 students it gets more complicated in that way

186well and one thing we could do is as we figure out how to do this is reach out to riverview because how did they promote and share what this opportunity is to the students so that the information really gets down to students because certainly one or two of us could go and present it in asb um but but we want it to go beyond that but how do you do that right so that it goes to you know potentially all students or many students learn about it so riverview must have sort of figured this one out and so they might be a good resource i think the riverview board does pick their students i'm pretty sure and that the board doesn't yeah but still they must have a way to promote it at the schools

187for kids to apply yeah that's two steps really the how to how to promote it school-wide so they know what it is um and then to the leadership class if they're your selection committee prepping them for to preparing them to make that that selection right so that they understand what this position really is what what the board's really looking for as far as that engagement and i bet riverview would be happy to share their application with us too interest of not reinventing the wheel i would encourage it to be i like the concept of a project i'm not sure how realistic early on that is but maybe i just don't have a vision for it um so i'm not opposed but i'd like to see us break down the monitoring calendar so rather than necessarily

188chunks of time but so if we have four ends that we could have each school and students in their own schools be responsible for going to those meetings and they can rotate over the course from year to year and then break up the els so that they so we know that we have students here that have reviewed them and then they're here to participate in the conversation and they can know far enough advance for their school schedule to make that a priority because i don't think it even has to be necessarily every meeting because i don't think that that's the point the point is we want meaningful engagement and if we even escalated from where we are today to them providing meaningful engagement in our standard monitoring calendar uh i think they would want to

189get a better sense of what we do from a governance style and two they would get to really see the depth by which we look at the student experience and the staff experience and then we would get actually student perspective at the places of meaning that we really want it so i think the trying to just cover every meeting uh i think we're we're missing the point and i think they're not getting the point so i think if we really broke it down by our monitoring calendar right we have 16 els we have four ends it breaks down nicely at least for our four high schools to divvy that up so we get because i think that should be the focus it's like what we expect from you is we expect you to be meaningfully

190engaged in important parts of our meeting and i'm not saying like hearing public input isn't important or any other than numerous parts but i really think that that's the part at least that i would want to consistently hear from if i could choose if i had to choose a limited time of our students that's that's the part that i would love to hear because we've heard some really meaningful input from students over the course of time on those and i think we've also seen their surprise at wow i can't believe you guys are talking about that or that's really cool that you guys look at that depth and tease the data out that much so i think it's an opportunity in both ways yeah and you could maybe um rotate it in such a way

191that one school would provide public input at a given meeting and a different school would participate in the monitoring so you'd have two schools in play at every meeting so they would be more engaged on an ongoing basis because this idea of i come to a meeting every three months they don't know what's going on now of course the eager overachievers would watch all of our meetings but yeah i like that a lot that way that gets it getting more of our schools involved in a way that would be i think productive um let me ask a question on that one because the way you just phrased it was different than in my mind i was bringing them together at least in this project-based one intentionally cross-school oh to mix them across school so which

192is just an idea and what the way you just went back and forth it would be staying within their school and uh as school partners i guess focu focus on el versus public in uh public input so is there i just want to bring that back up is that idea of cross school pollination interesting or not um and would we want to hold on to it i hadn't i sort of hadn't picked up on it it is interesting i think it's interesting but i think that more important i would rather see the junior senior collaboration and i would focus on that part first because i think we want i i think why brave review so successful is there like now a decade into having this mentorship relationship and i i would prefer to focus on

193that first and i don't think asking them to do that and cross-pollinate would be realistic but i also think that might be something um because you're going to talk to the students about this in january right at the um yeah the whatchamacallit meeting um and that inner district council right because i i really want to hear their feedback on this and you know that would be a question to ask them of what do they think would be more valuable i kind of think they're going to land with what harlan just said but i'm not sure right because the idea here is to kind of we're still drafting up our idea of what we want it to be but we want the students input right right so we're not formalizing anything until after we hear from

194the students right so that's why i can take you know it you can take what we're saying and create your next level of your draft but then take it to the students let me just go back and do this again so two for school felt good i think we all felt like that was a positive the junior senior combination seemed like that had support a minimum of the year-long commitment oh my god i'm sorry um a minimum of the year-long commitment or did we want it to be the two-year which i think i heard with this mentor mentee two-year um i don't think it has to be i mean that's just what riverview does and you would we would need to talk to riverview like do their kids get school credit for that or something

195because that's got to be a ton of work right and you can also that could be one of the things you can ask the students when when you go to the inner district is but i would say the other thing is if a junior does it and loves it there's no reason that junior couldn't apply for it again his senior year but if if we were to break it down just by monitoring calendar it wouldn't be necessarily a ton of work exactly your commitment would yeah would not necessarily be that much work no i'm just saying that riverview's system is a ton of work oh yeah i agree right because it's two students that come to everything yeah yeah and i think we're gonna have to think about differently because we have four high schools

196right 158 students um i've it seemed like we like the open student body application with asb selection yeah we did seem to come right back around today yeah i came around me too i wasn't sure but i i i'm putting little stars down my page and then um [Music] i guess i put these two together so engagement around the monitoring calendar so dividing up the els and the ends with the ability to rotate it and do eo update and public input yeah still having a student input student input yesterday so i'm going to stay with just make a chat and that student input to the extent possible should be not just the musings of that particular student but thoughtful input you know gleaned from his fellows yes his or okay so oh and then what

197about participation benefits is the last section so did we want to explore maybe this is where we ask for andrea's help um the things written down so far were letters of recommendation community service hours um small board scholarship exploration of credit well and this brings up something else that um anna and i chatted about a little bit because we spent a lot of time together this week which is once we have this all put together i think it it deserves to live in policy i think we ought to have a jeep you know we have a gp around what the ledger app does and what the president does we should have a gp around what the student reps do which led me to wonder because i know it doesn't exist in board policy does it

198exist somewhere in district regulations about student reps and what they do and where they come from or do we just lie by the seat of our camps and do it i think we're a seat of the flying operation under that it's probably been going on for so long yeah i don't know if anybody knows how it got started yeah it's been here for every board meeting since i've been here so i know it's been around over 20 years i know andrea the the question in case you were wondering why why your name came up back there was around to listen for this particular topic what would be the the participation benefit so if a student committed to this and it's more of a commitment obviously than what historically our students have done um sydney has

199you know some options down there like letters of recommendation community service hours the opportunity to meet with legislators the governor and the like as they have in the past and she actually even noted small board scholarship thoughts about what might encourage a student to want to do something like this and does that sound like the right thing i don't know is that about capturing your mind what you were thinking there sydney yeah i think um i can explore the credit piece that's a little bit trickier in terms of like looking into course code options and stuff so i can explore that and get back to you on that particular part um on everything else i think it's honestly all of those are great incentives for high school students um the only thing i would say

200to that is that i've heard you repeatedly talk about how you want someone who's interested in this work and wants to engage and so sometimes some of those incentives get like the wrong student in terms of like wanting it to be a resume builder and things and so just being cautious about it through the application process about making two robust of incentives that then that's what's driving the student rather than like genuine engagement with the process so that would be my only thought about those things but i think they're all great options and then just one other tiny note i asked nirmala and she cannot pull totally off topic but she cannot pull um whether how many families access their i-ready scores um the way that we're the place that it's located in skyward she

201can't pull that data from skyward so sorry thank you and before you go away is there one of those potential incentives that felt like more than others it would be incenting the wrong behavior um something that would incent but not drive them to do this just because of it i don't think so i think um i mean i think students are really good about who they ask for letters of recommendation so i think that i don't think any one of those i think maybe doing all of them might be just like a big package so really like maybe narrowing it down would be helpful but um none of them are like red flags to me about drawing the wrong student right and i don't know that we were thinking of doing all of them but

202doing something for yeah and i think it's just like students who run for asb i mean honestly you get a mixed bag of students who are doing it for resume builder versus students who really invest in the work it's always sort of um just student dependent and how it all pans out marnie i would say that i think if we were to have a dedicated group like this um that i would want them to be the ones that are engaging in the ledge conference and the years that we go to the annual conference rather than kind of we don't know who's going to show up and sometimes they're kids that never come to our meetings and so that we get so that we get something where we are all having a combined experience so i

203think i'd like that to at least be one of the benefits is that they're allowed to go to those two conferences um right as long as they're you know like the bellevue one but not i can't i can't imagine taking eight kids over to right and we may not be able to take eight kids because like usually right pledge conference they limit right so it might just be the seniors but we can also um add on to this right if we certainly can't take all of them we can potentially go down other times to meet with our legislators at the capitol and we could make it our own field trip with our students to engage with our legislators so we could make that work to add that piece in right can i offer just two

204other pieces yeah one is just a clarifying piece when you're talking about asb students being the ones who help select the candidates i just wanna it might be helpful for you all to identify what you mean by asb students because um if you're talking about like the elected exec board and like class council members who are elected by their peers versus like the asb class like a lot of times people refer to asb students in both of those ways so whether you'd want all the students in the asb class who might just like represent an assembly committee versus the elected student body from the asb group so that just might be a helpful clarification between which students are selecting and then um the other one is just promoting this it might be i can help

205you connect if you wanted to promote it through like civics and um government classes and things like that to just draw on a wider audience rather than just like asb announcements and things like that to try to just make sure that all the students get their eyes on what you're looking for right so it would seem like we've probably been referring to the asb exec board i think we have yes i think that's what we've been doing so we could just change that terminology that that was helpful um so we understand what we're saying okay i think that is um enough to do a good rev right the big thing is reach out to riverview and just get some more sense of how they're selecting their application um and then we'll have a conversation which

206um [Music] andrea if you could please share that date and time again that would be amazing is it right before our next board meeting yeah i think it's like or the next board meeting oh it's probably why i thought i'd be i think it's uh january 13th which is before the next board meeting and it's up from four to five p.m is when idsc meets and we do meet over zoom so i just need to send the zoom link to the two of you which it's ann and sydney is that good no no barney marnie and just barney and sydney okay i will send you both the calendar invite with the zoom link right so that is the day of our board meeting yeah and i'll probably just zoom from you should be here somewhere

207here zoom in the building yeah because then we'll go into our meeting at five right the other district you might reach out to and i need to go back to my notes but i think it was richland who presented at um and i want to say it was two years ago because i think it was at the remote conference um and that's what kind of got me excited about this because they have three high schools and they still have a robust student rep program which got me thinking well if they can do it with three why can't we do it with four so they would be another one that might be able to give us some useful feedback because i think particularly i mean we all have ideas about what we could ask on an

208application but to get some ideas about what districts are already doing i think would be helpful okay all the r districts that you're talking to everybody i think it was richland i can go back and check my notes okay thank you all right thank you i think this is really good though and i will be eager to hear what the students say so we should probably schedule a debrief at that meeting yeah as well we could do it at yeah at that meeting um yeah that i don't have to go to you're just so excited there marnie contain yourself you paid your dues thank you for your service that's right that's right all right well then uh and you know if you end up making a new draft of that with your edits and you

209want to send it to us as well that that's great um and then um it'll be interesting to hear your feedback from our students awesome thank you thank you so much all right so now we're onto legislative matters harlan is there anything you want to share i think we can just provide the board update uh between the last two meetings i think we met with the fifth legislative district and that was you and sydney so i'll let sadie go first since it was her first legislative linkage i think and was it all three of the fifth legislators okay it was it was i thought it was a really good meeting it was my first um meeting of that sort so i was excited seeing as how i'd live in the fifth i thought that was

210good um i think harlan did a very nice job of of um putting together i think it was three total topics off the top of my head that were pretty complicated actually to go through and to go through them quickly and land the message of the the clarity on the position we are in um financially the impacts of decisions that have been made both at the federal and statewide level and and some of the negative connotations that have happened for our district and i think it was super positive to hear the acknowledgment of that from our legislators and and really to get into some of their thinking about how to best go forward um so i thought it was a very productive discussion thank you to our superintendent and for martin turner for participating in

211another one so i think um i don't know if you're aware but um uh representative callan from the fifth has already pre-filed she is the co-sponsor on an enrollment hold harmless bill which was a big topic of our conversation with both 41st and the 5th so i think our message is really it's getting through and um it's it's actually already taken the form of a piece of legislation um so thank you for all those efforts and for all the work you do to get these things set up harlan because i know it's not easy you're herding cats a little bit with those folks but um and to martin as well for you know bringing that financial voice to the conversations so yeah i felt really good about the meetings we've held yeah i think we're

212working really hard and i hope the community understands like you know in spite of all the challenges we're doing everything we can to advocate for our students and our families and our staff yeah so they can really understand the position we're in and while i might have not have taken a popular vote tonight uh it doesn't change my uh like how hard i'm fighting for the district in our community absolutely i've witnessed it firsthand all right all right that's good thank you very much i'm glad you guys were able to meet with the fifth all right we are on um works in progress yeah um so i've got a few things that i wanted to share tonight and uh the first one i just wanted to share kind of on a related topic how i've

213been able to collaborate with superintendents from around our region but particularly in east king county around engaging with conversations with public health both at the washington state department of public health excuse me and um the seattle king county department of public health i do need to just pause here for a moment and say that the most recent work and work product of east king county superintendents came out of a conversation from our collaboration with our local school directors who invited us the superintendents to join them and i know that director gallinger and director morale had a big role in getting those conversations started during the pandemic they've continued forward and um we didn't intend to co-op the the meeting last friday or anything like that but we we as superintendents were all in the same

214place at the same time with some of our school board directors and hatched a plan to do something that something was a letter to um and we had spoken with sarah regal from seattle king county public health and she suggested that we do that um and it's really we just want them to take a closer look at some of the covid mitigation uh requirements um and really looking and we offered ourselves up as east king county because we have some of the highest vaccination rates and some of the lowest coveted rates anywhere and so we think we would be a good case study in um can we suspend some of the real burden on us right now is contact tracing and it's really drawing our educational resources away and into public health work and i

215should say the first choice we would all have would be to have a public health official as a covet supervisor contact tracer covid test administrator in all of our schools obviously that's not very realistic because that would require hundreds and hundreds of staff members that i don't know they would have any capacity to hire and and all of that but that would be the ideal situation but recognizing that that can't happen we're just asking for the consideration in the conversation around what what if we suspended for example contact tracing and we monitor our data carefully because we don't ever want to be responsible for covet spread in our communities but i would argue we've demonstrated time and time again week after week we're not that that's not happening as a result of us and so

216while we're very appreciative of the partnership with public health you know they they have the burden of of workload as well but um you know i just think if we can continue to um demonstrate incredibly low covered numbers in our community thank you community again profusely for getting vaccinated and not sending your children to school if they're not feeling well and getting them tested and taking advantage of the symptomatic testing or the test to stay options it's all it's proven we're proving that it can work and so now we're asking 70 days into the school year and proving that we can do this would you start to look differently at some of the mitigation efforts so that we could kind of loosen up if you will on some of that and and get our educators

217back focusing on the education mission now we recognize we have to our number one priority is keeping our schools open and we know in order to do that we have to keep our coveted rates low we've got to stop spread and um and i know that even for some me even talking about this may make them nervous but we're not going to do anything full-heartedly we'll always work in conjunction with public health we recognize their expertise in this area but we have experiences now and data that we can bring to the table in the conversation as well so i have to say again thank you to directors maraldo and um to director galinger because you set these meetings up and and they've really lended and and i know you presented on it at the was

218the conference so i think uh i think people should really take notice that um it is a powerful step that you know their strength in numbers i guess is the old saying and east king county is a big part of king county and sometimes we feel like there's no acknowledgement that there's a differentiation um from region to region and um anyway so we're going to continue to fight we're going to continue to fight for our employees so that we can free up all of those contact tracing obligations and all of those mitigations out there so we can get focused on our education mission but we will not take lightly the role of mitigating covet in our schools we know how important that is so just wanted to say that also just a quick update it

219was referenced earlier in the meeting we have begun our levy committee work our first meeting i thought went quite well um i'm so appreciative of all of those community members and staff who are giving a lot of their time and energy to this important work it was great to see a lot of new faces on the committee this go around and certainly a few returning committee members from previous committees as well i felt that again they got off to a good start lots of learning about public school funding and lots of good questions it is a bit of a complicated web of funding in washington state lots of appreciation to our technical team who's been working hard to prepare and dr almi and executive director attorney who are leading leading the committee and the support

220folks they worked really hard um to to get the committee um work done and get it get it up um so that we would have our springboards and and the process ready to move forward to educate the committee and um i'm looking forward our next meeting is next tuesday december 14th and it's it's it's a big lift you know we talked we have a tight timeline i know we we solidified it earlier in this meeting tonight and so i just have a lot of appreciation for that team and a lot of learning is happening out there for folks so i'm looking forward to that a couple of fun things that i got to do this past week we had a our first in-person voice mentor reception we haven't held one of those in uh nearly

221two years that was on monday and our isd voice program coordinators held it um it was a it was wonderful to see a fairly large group of voice mentors right here in in this room um we had people from our senior community we had students who were voice mentors they heard a compelling story from one of our um own isd counselors about his lived experience and the role of the mentors could play for him it really is just such a wonderful program we're so happy that our mentors are back meeting with their mentees the need is higher than ever and we're just have a lot of gratitude for those folks and i want to encourage anyone out there who's listening to this and wondering well what is a voice mentor please go to our website

222and look it up we we can always use more voice mentors we have lots of students out there that need mentors and appreciate mentors and so it was just wonderful to be in the room with them all i really enjoyed it and then the other thing that i got to do that was a really a lot of fun was i had the pleasure of spending an hour or so and i think i went a little long shocker there that i would go along when on an interview with the editorial board of the patriot press out at liberty high school and their teacher wonderful teacher chris daughter um the the the class it was a lot of fun probably more fun for me than it was for the students but um they had great questions for

223me about being a superintendent what it is what i like what i struggled with um what am i gonna do when i retire things like that um and so i'm looking forward to reading the article when it comes out and again just big thanks to miss daughters and the wonderful students in the class um we we had a really good time and it's it's just it's always a reminder to me why we do this when i get to go out there and hang out with our teachers and our students any grade level any school it doesn't matter it's just a lot of fun so those were some fun things that i got to do while we were doing levy work and looking at math scores and things like that this week so that's all i

224had to share thank you uh and and i will add to your fun things to do that suzanne and i had the opportunity to go out and tour and visit uh cougar mountain middle school at ringdale yes and so we met with jason was out there with us and erin mckee took us around and showed us her school um and took us into classrooms uh with suzanne and i both figured out we can still do middle school math uh the social studies wasn't looking too good um and the english language arts we probably could have done as well so it was it was really uh nice to be in a place where there were students and they were all engaged and heading to class and and the work that was being done in the classroom

225uh was excellent um as far as engaging the students and giving them choice on what they work on now and what they have for later and you know just spelling these things out especially for middle school kids on how to make good choices on how to use your time so that was very interesting and fun and jason said for anybody that's interested in the visiting for him particularly the middle schools to let him know and he'd be happy to help arrange um anything like that so a little note there yeah yeah it was very good all right uh so now we're on to announcements and correspondence uh the one question i have for diane is i saw that you forwarded on the emails that had gotten stuck um were they they were just stuck right

226they've still been acknowledged with their okay okay good so in your emails or a couple packets with additional emails that we hadn't seen over the last so many days so thank you okay friday and then does anybody have any announcements or correspondence they want to add suzanne uh well obviously i had a number of emails back and forth with all of the search firms that we mentioned and i also had an email exchange with the president of the tahoma school board okay all right if no one else has anything then we'll go on to calendar and future agenda topics um i know diane sent out in our update from the meeting and and mentioned the listening sessions and the levy committee meetings those are just well but listening sessions we all have to go to

227the levy meetings or just for your information um she didn't mention anything that we need to calendar and so i would ask is there any time next week that this group of five could possibly be together so that we could tentatively schedule a meeting that would allow us to meet with the um search firm to have a kick off as far as uh our process and timeline moving forward and so i will i will throw that out i know suzanne had some specific dates well i'm going to be a problem on this one because i am out of town every day except monday now i probably can participate remotely on one or two of those other days but i'm also going to be in a car traveling from chicago to cleveland and i can't vouch

228for the internet in indiana so that's probably not a good plan monday would be awesome and again this is tentative because we don't know if the search term can meet with us right we don't um but monday would be awesome i could and one day you're talking the 13th 13th i could probably make wednesday work um after that i get into like the 22nd which is perilously close to christmas but i can do it monday's the only day that i could do it the 13th it's the only day you can or can't can't can anybody else it doesn't matter i guess i would go well the one thing i would wonder about is if we gave it a time block to give them some flexibility because we still have to work this out with them

229but so i would say like no more than two an hour to two that was what's in my head two would be one to two hours do you really think that you could turn a contract around in 24 hours i just don't see that happening likely not but um my in my what i was thinking was not having fully executed the contract doesn't necessarily preclude you from talking to him but i mean that's going to be a challenge i mean we're going to have to reach out to him first thing tomorrow morning and see how i mean they might be able to get it over here pretty quickly so it's possible i guess um but we're definitely going to have somebody read through the contract um like 3 30 to 5. yeah i could do

230that you can't do it later i'm just curious after 3 30. okay oh well that's pretty true good job okay and barney right then let's start like yeah oh starting at five is even better okay i could do that okay so so help us out on if we schedule them if we made a motion now and schedule the meeting for monday the 13th at five o'clock and then we figure out we can't do it i mean we can't we can't put all the pieces together in time yeah or those or the firms not available right yeah we don't know that we have not communicated since we just interviewed them anything about this but we thought if since the five of us were together if we had the opportunity we could try to figure it out

231yeah you can cancel a meeting so you could meet i mean you could take action to schedule it and then i mean if it has to be canceled you just cancel it right and then if we um if we decide that this was our only opportunity let's say in december and i go forward trying to find a date like the first week of january we could just declare it because we don't have board action we could just declare a special meeting an emergency meeting yeah i i even have a question uh okay can i i don't believe this could be an executive session no i don't know it would have to be yeah open public meetings yes we were thinking that yeah so and i want to be clear i have other availability in december

232i'm just out of town from the 14th to the 21st but i know the closer it gets to the 25th and between christmas and new year's that's probably not real popular for a lot of people right and so so the 13th after 5 p.m is one thing we've just said and if i asked you about the week of january 3rd monday the 3rd i am again um oh no yeah i'm out of town the latter part of that week but i could be remote because that's not like well but they're coming and when we say we can do the third are we talking anytime okay i would say for me um any after 10 30. okay and but this was my question back to you if we calendar the first one oh i guess we

233could calendar see i won't be able to have another board meeting to off you know to vote on a calendar tool yeah that's true yeah so who was saying something about time sorry the third would have to be after 10 30. okay oh wait the third's not a school day oh i don't know that i i shouldn't be i don't have kids in school i don't know sorry ron do you know is the third of school day um which one is put on the calendar the monday it shouldn't be it should be the observer oh because it would be new years old oh right because it wouldn't be observed on the 31st with uh we went through this before and i got very confused i think i have it as a school day yeah because

234the new year's is on the first so isn't the observed on the 31st no i don't know yeah i think the third the first do we go to school in the third yeah who knows my calendar doesn't say that it's not a school day does it matter right there or am i missing at school it actually says the day off for new year's is the 31st yeah no the third is the school day okay so does that matter to anybody because it's not a school day for you i know i'm here i can do it so that's that's an option and but at that point the contract would be executed right so so then the suggestion is what if we just calendar two meetings and cancel one and cancel one or both if that's the

235unfortunate but the third you will to certainly have things organized by the third that sound okay guys okay um so we need a motion to do that wait how do you wait harlan's asking i'm sorry i mean you might not cancel it i mean that may be a time that you do a couple of well that could be two you're right right so yeah no but i'm saying if we schedule the 13th and the contract's not executed and they don't want to do anything until the contract's executed we don't really want to meet on the 13th do we no no i i know i'm just saying but if if ideally you can pull this off and we can meet with him on the 13th oh i see what you're saying it would be a good

236time to be able to say like sure people will be coming back fresh from break and ready to i think engaged in the process so okay it might be a good opportunity before the frat race of school starts again to get that first monday to meet with the board you mean or to do yeah focus groups yeah some type of outreach right but it wouldn't require us to be involved necessarily be involved yeah i'm good with that my only question um as far as making a motion is if we're saying january 3rd anytime after 10 30 that's actually a time or can i schedule it time to be determined yeah can i do that but we're all putting it on our calendars wide open to hold it do you want to say 11. okay all

237right i move that we schedule two special board meetings one on december 13th at 5 pm and one on january 3rd at tentatively 11 am time to be determined second all right it's been moved and seconded to have two special board meetings all those in favor say aye aye aye opposed approved all right so we've got those we will do what we can to get this all figured out as quickly as possible to let you know how this works out for those dates yeah yes i'm sorry talking to myself all right yeah it would be ideal if we can pull off next monday i know yeah it is iffy but word you know what if we don't schedule it now we're not gonna be able to have any chance at having it all right i

238think that's everything unless anybody else has anything to bring up uh oh yes no no you're reaching for your like button i'm turning it off no no harlan