4.20.26 Special Board of Education Meeting in Open Session - WORKSHOP followed by Closed Session

001Go ahead. All right, I'm going to go ahead and call our special meeting to order. Um, and just as as you all know, but just to state the agenda for tonight, we are going to start with um, an attendance boundary review update and and then we have a couple of policy items that will bring back and and then um, and then we'll make a motion to go into closed session. So, with that I'll turn it over to Dr. Gotcher. All right, awesome. Thank you President Nichols, members of the board, staff, and community. Uh, tonight's an exciting night. We've been working on building for the future under the leadership of the Assistant Superintendent Cindy Green uh, and our defined steering committee. With external partners MGT who are here to join us tonight to give you and

002the community a first public presentation at some of the many many many findings uh, that we want to focus on and concentrate our efforts on as we take this information out to the community and continue to generate what we believe uh, uh, considerations for MMSD to make in the future. Um, I'll Cindy will go over the overview and tell us how we got here. Then we'll go through uh, tonight's data. Uh, see what questions you have, but again just excited to be here. The team has been working very hard uh, behind the scenes to to put together you know, what they believe is the most relevant pertinent and you know, recent information as you know, Madison is changing uh, sometimes by the day. Uh, so this work uh, definitely is going to help guide us

003into our future and that alternative for two assistant superintendent agreement. Thank you, Dr. Gaillard. Thank you, President Nichols. Good evening, everybody. Jesse, could you share the slide? Am I and I'm driving this? You can drive. All right. Hold on, everybody. Okay. Um Perfect. So, I want to start with our MMSD vision. MMSD will be a learning community where all students are valued, challenged, and supported, inspired to reach their dreams. And I think tonight's conversation around building for the future is really going to help us realize this vision. Um our mission as well, creating safe and inclusive schools, delivering high-quality instructions, strengthening positive relationships, partnering with our family and the community to achieve student self-determination and educational success. And our guiding commitments, ensuring that we're leading with equity, fostering belonging, delivering meaningful learning, improving with purpose,

004and embracing our collective impact. And I think these guiding commitments are really going to um be coming of good use as we go into the work of building for the future over the next years. Um so, before I get started, I do want to acknowledge that one of our partners, Isaac Johnson, is also on the Zoom. Isaac Johnson works for MGT. MGT does this work across the nation. They've done hundreds of attendance area and boundary reviews. And I will start us off tonight, and then I will be turning it over to Isaac to walk through a lot of the data that you have in front of you, and also what Dr. Gaillard had alluded to. But before I do that, I want to remind the board and the community that building for the future really

005encompasses three parts. We are going to be talking about the boundary review and the attendance area work that is kind of short-term work over the next few years. The other part of building for the future is our enrollment strategy that is intimately connected and is very important to the conversation tonight and the work over the next few years. And then the third part of building for the future will be an updated long-range facility plan that the board will receive in the fall. What I'm most excited about is that this conversation isn't just about talking about the day to day of what's happening in our district now. It is truly thinking about 20-30 years from now of what we can plan for and what we are able to think about for the future of both the

006city, the school district, our students and families, and students and families that haven't even yet come to MMSD. And while I recognize that sometimes it's hard to be able to think that far out, because there's a lot of unknowns, we are going to have to make some assumptions about what we believe to be true 20 to 30 years from now to really be planning for the future and to be setting up our school district for the future families and our students. So, it's exciting work and it can also feel a little abstract at sometimes. I also want to acknowledge that this work, along with the work that we're doing with MGT, is really possible because of our partnership with the city of Madison and the city planning division, as well as the city of Fitchburg

007that we've also been working closely with. A lot of the information you will see tonight is because they've been able to work with us to give us data that is critically important to these conversations. And the last thing I'll say before I jump into it is while there is no action for the board tonight, the work that you will see tonight and the work that we will be presenting both to the community and to uh the Board of Education over the next 9 plus months will lead us to an action where the board will vote on a set of recommendations that we will be bringing forth next February. So, again, tonight doesn't have actions, but there are contingencies for future action from the board next February. Okay, so let's dive into it. So, what is

008our Building for the Future plan? We've shared this before, but when we set out to do this work, we really set out to look at our current attendance areas and our overall district boundaries. We wanted to understand where those complexities were and what we were learning about what families were experiencing with our current attendance areas. We also wanted to consider establishing attendance areas where we own land, both on the far east side by Sprecher and the far west side on the Kasha Ridge. We also wanted to understand what was happening with our current programming and options, such as our dual language immersion programming, 4K, and what future programming might our families and our students be interested in. We really want to hear our families' values and understand what their educational experiences um desires are for

009their children. So, one of the things that we are going to spend some time on tonight is looking at school capacity. And then, in order to understand school capacities, I thought it was important for the board and the community to understand how we at MMSD determine school capacities or utilization of our buildings. Um it's important to note that uh we have some buildings that you'll see tonight when Isaac shares some data that are what we would call underutilized or under capacity, and we have other school buildings that may be at capacity or over capacity. So, I'm going to walk you through our formula because it'll be relevant to the data that you have in front of you. Our formula is based on a room-based capacity because we want to understand where our children experience their

010education on a day-to-day basis and room-to-room basis. So, we look at our capacity by the number of rooms within a building and the number of rooms that are above 500 square feet or more. So, a room that is 500 square feet or more and has well ventilation for instructional spaces is how we start to think about capacity. So, that's the first thing. How many rooms do you have in your building that we define as well ventilated and are 500 square feet or more? And then what we do is we use our class size policy, right? Because our class size policy tells us the number of students per section that you should be having in a room. So, we use the optimal level of our class size policy, typically that middle range, and we use that

011number times the number of instructional spaces, and we make adjustments such as if you are an AGR school or non-AGR school at the L to get to capacity. So, for example, I'm just going to give a random example. We could say X school has capacity for 450 students, and we determine that based on the number of rooms that are 500 square feet or more times wherever that grade levels are in the optimum level of our class size policy. At elementary, we take out spaces such as music, gym, and art because those spaces are not used every day, all day. Children rotate in and out. And at the secondary level, we count those spaces, because students are in those sections all day, every day every day. And so, at elementary, we only focus on home rooms.

012At secondary, we focus on all classroom spaces that are that 500 square feet. You will see what this looks like in action when we get into the data, but I wanted to at least lead with the formula that is our district's definition of capacity. And why this is important when MGD MGT will share some of the information soon, it changes district to district, right? Districts define their capacities diff- And so, for us, it's important that we know, we determined this definition, we create how we want to use our spaces. So, we are the determining factor for some of what is overutilized or underutilized in our schools based off this definition. It will make sense when we dig into actual data. Um and so, with that, I am going to turn it over to MGT. Could

013you put the slides up? We have two separate slides. Isaac, are you there and you can hear us? I am here and I've been following along closely. Thank you for the introduction. I'm going to turn it over to you, Isaac, and I will drive your slides for you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for having me, everyone tonight. I'm stepping in for Marcy who was been working very closely with everyone on this project and I've recently been added to the team and I'm stepping in for her as she had a conflict tonight with her travel schedule. But more than happy to walk you through what we've done in terms of your enrollment forecast and how this is going to tie into the redistricting process that you're looking at undertaking moving forward. If we advance the

014slides, we'll take a look at the flowchart here that kind of explain our process and the factors that we go into when it comes to taking a look at what we expect to happen to what we call the resident student forecast for your population moving forward. And that's a key term to remember. I'll I'll go back to it several times through, but we're actually projecting how many students we expect to be living within the district boundary and actually living within each one of your attendance areas. And we do some extra analysis as well to account for where kids are actually attending school as well. But when it comes to the basis of our forecast, we're taking a look at your historical student data. So we've asked the district to provide us with 3 years, 4

015years student data directly from the student information system so we have an understanding of the exact count of the number of children that are enrolled in the district and more importantly where they're living and what grades and attributes are associated with each one of those students. So we're able to upload that into geographic information system to do some need analysis that you're going to see the results of here moving forward. But that serves serves as the base. On top of that, we apply three different factors. We'll take a look at your birth factors. We'll take a look at mobility factors. And then we'll look at student generation rates as well. So how many students do we expect to come out of new housing based on what has come out of existing housing that has been

016more recently constructed. The birth factors help us understand what goes into incoming kindergarten classes. So if we see an increase in the number of children born, we expect that to lead to an increase in the number of kindergarten students we would introduce in each year of our forecast. Conversely, if we see a decline there, that would lead us to lead to a smaller number of incoming kindergarten classes into our projections. Our mobility factor tracks the rate of change at the neighborhood level as students progress from one grade to the next. And that gets combined with planned residential development that gets applied to the total number of units that we expect to be built across the district over the projection scope, which is 5 years for the work that we're doing for you. So, we take

017the number of units, apply it towards the number of students that we expect that to be yielding, and introduce those students to come up with our overall student forecast. So, that's what this looks like, and we'll walk you through each one of these factors as we advance the slides here to give you a look at what we talked about earlier, which was the beginning of this project begins with getting that student information system download. So, we have an understanding of where all of your kids are living because we're able to plot them out by a process that we call geocoding, which you're seeing example of here in the image number two. And then we're able to do analysis at the study area level. So, we've divided the district up into small little neighborhood blocks using

018natural boundaries, waterways, major roads, rail lines, any natural break that would serve as a neighborhood or a hazard that we don't want people to travel over to come to an understanding of what we call study areas. And these are the basis of our projections and will be the basis of our redistricting plans moving forward. We go ahead and advance the slide once more. I'll show you what that looks like in terms of plotting your students out. We can see where density exists and where density lacks in different areas of the district. So, we see in the central portion of the the area here, we have a higher concentration of students, and there's a couple of pockets up there in the north. So, we have an understanding of where density is spread out throughout the district,

019and that really helps us get into some additional analysis. As we move forward, we'll go ahead and take a look at one of the neat things that really helps guide the process. It really gives us an understanding uh, as demographers coming into your community to help us work with this work and understanding of the relationship between where kids are actually living versus where they're going to school. This is an abbreviated portion that would be a full report that follows each youth. Uh, should be getting access to soon as you have not already that will give you the full version of this. Uh, but what this does is it lays out where kids are actually attending at where they're actually living by attendance area and it shows where they're actually going to school. So, if we

020were to read across the columns here, across the row, uh, we'll see that Blackhawk Middle School has 354 students living in its attendance area that are in grades 6 through 8. Of those as we read across the the columns here and across that row, you're going to see that 304 of those students of that 354 actually uh, attend Blackhawk Elementary School and live in the attendance area. All right, so this is an important distinction to understand. As we continue to read across you see where else do those 354 students actually go to school. Two of them, we know that they go to uh, Cherokee. Uh, as we go across the rows we can see that 19 go to Sherman Middle School for example. So, we can kind of get an understanding of how your district

021policies and uh, school options uh, allow people to attend schools that are their non-resident schools and understand how that happens so there can be special programs that attract people there. Uh, we also take into account if you look at the bottom line, students from outside of the district boundary attending learning schools as well to get a full understanding of where uh, the capacity and policy and boundaries all meet up together. Okay. Mr. Can I pause you for 1 second? Absolutely. Because the board has uh, the full set of matrices in front of them printed out for elementary, middle and high. So, I just want to uh, we can go into this after the presentation but I just want to call your attention to what you see on the screen, you have in front of you

022for all of our elementary schools, the middle school that you see on the screen, and high looks like this document. And then the middle school you have, and you have the high school. The other thing that I just want to note is that what Isaac mentioned talks about students coming into our district, which is what we call open enrollment enterers, what are accounted for in these charts. What is not accounted for in these charts is our open enrollment leavers. And that's just important distinction knowing that we have 1,600 open enrollment leavers, but they are not accounted for in this data. And we can talk about that. Yeah, for sure, President Nichols. Okay. Can we pause just for a like maybe just quick clarifying questions that's just what but just like on this data. So I

023I I have a clarifying question, but or member Moster do you want I'll do those two. Just those? I'll be online. Okay. Just wanting to clarify um students living within boundary or MMSD students living within the boundary. So open enrollment leavers wouldn't be there, homeschoolers aren't there, students who choose private or parochial schools aren't there. Correct. But Okay. Open enrollment enterers, people that choose MMSD are accounted for. At the bottom, second to bottom row where it says inter-district transfers, and then on the elementary you will also have 4K accounted for. I see. >> Both 4K community sites and 4K homes. Okay. Keep with the clarifying questions. Isaac, if you're good with them just cuz they're going to orient themselves to the data in front of them. Absolutely. Okay, perfect. Thank you, Isaac. to board member

024Maldrow. Uh and board member Maldrow, right now, if we can try to just do clarify >> question would be the exact same as board member Mosnarth Althams. I don't have a question anymore. Okay, got it. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. Okay, I I just want to make sure that that first row that we just talked through um for Blackhawk Middle School. So, the 354 students that were counted within the boundary um what were what were the data sources for that? To get that total count. Great question. That was data that we asked for at the beginning of the process. This is supposed to represent October, the beginning of October of 2025. And so, what we're projecting for you each year in our projections is a snapshot of the next 5 years each of

025the next Octobers moving forward for the next 5 years. So, it's our third Friday count of any student that is enrolled in MMSD on third Friday count. Okay. >> And then we look at their addresses of their attendance area, and then we look at the school that they're actually attending. Okay, super helpful. Okay, so there there are 354 students based on their physical address. Pointed to who are pointed to Blackhawk Middle School. >> Correct. And we and then following along that row, we see 304 of those students actually go to the middle school that they're pointed to. And then there are two two students who whose families selected Cherokee, one who goes to Gillespie. Nine who are going to O'Keeffe, eight who are going to Sennett, and that's where to Isaac's point our own policies

026around internal transfers um >> And dual language immersion. Don't say >> dual language immersion middle school in that area. So, you make assumptions that probably those 19 students that are going to Sherman are due to our own programs and policies. They're accessing Spanish dual language immersion. And then you'll see off in the uh white columns are Badger Rock and Wright and Spring Harbor. Remember Badger Rock Charter, Spring Harbor, and Wright are magnets. So, different policies and processes Mhm. schools. Okay, great. Thank you so much. One to five, I appreciate all the questions, and that doesn't surprise me. It's the first data piece that we're showing you, and it's very important to the work that we're doing forward. Uh so, keep your questions coming as they come up. Um Are there other I'm sorry, Isaac. I

027just want to see if there's other clarifying questions before we move forward. Okay, I have one last clarifying >> For sure. Thank you. Um so, for the inter-district transfers, those are families who are choosing to send their children to MMSD. Yes. And so, like in the middle school chart, I'm seeing 85 Mhm. um middle school scholars are in MMSD that weren't would normally not be MMSD students. Is that correct? Based on their home addresses or I might be too in in weeds. That's correct. You You're perfect. you're spot on for those are students that are coming from outside of the district boundary based upon their address. Okay. And then what we see across that row is all of the different middle schools that those 85 students are attending um including our um magnet and charter

028schools. Okay. And that's a really important number cuz remember students are and families are open enrolling into our district. It's important for us to understand how many are and where they're choosing to open enroll to. So I that's just to me a really important data point. And that we continue to understand what families are choosing and why. Yes. Okay, great. I feel oriented to the data. Wonderful. Thank you President Okay, Isaac. Are we going to go on to the next slide? Uh one more thing before we move on from the slide. The last point I want to point out here is that the total enrollment is the number that everyone is used to seeing uh when we look at your schools typically through spreadsheets, how many kids are actually attending each one of your schools

029and that's what you're seeing listed in each column as you read across uh those those columns there. Uh the number that you're going to see in all of the data that we supply you with is going to be the count of students living within the boundary in that third column there. That is the important one to look at. So just understand that we're looking at resident totals cuz we want to make sure that we get capacity to where the students actually are to help you make informed decisions about where to locate special programs and non-boundary uh school activities uh throughout the district. We'll revisit that a little bit later on, but that's what we're trying to display here and I want to make sure that everyone leaves this slide with that understanding before we move

030to the next one. So let's do that now. Let's go ahead and advance to the next slide. I appreciate >> will you go through cuz you didn't talk about the vertical data and I think it's right for the board to understand vertical data which is where the kids are when they're coming into that school. I appreciate that. Thank you. I did overlook that. Let's take a look at the Blackhawk Hall Blackhawk column where we see it starts with 304 students, right? Those are the students that we know are actually attending Blackhawk Elementary Blackhawk Middle School. As I read on down the line, I see that we have one at Cherokee, I have 12 at Sherman, at Whitehorse I have six, and the total resident the total resident students is 325. By bringing the inter-district transfers,

031the kids that are coming from outside of your district boundary, that adds four more for a total enrollment at Blackhawk Middle School of 329 students. So, that's how we read down each one of the columns so you get an understanding of where all the students are actually going to school as you read across the rows based on where their resident boundary is, and we see where they're actually going to school as you read on down the actual columns. So, thank you. >> students are leaving and going to other schools. Vertical are students that are assigned to a different school and coming Yeah. And for Blackhawk, some of those students might be our among bilingual program coming to Blackhawk as an example. Sorry, Isaac. I I just wanted to add that piece. Absolutely. No, it needed

032to be pointed out. Thank you. Right. So, like in when we go down the column looking just at Blackhawk, you can see that there are 12 students who live in the Sherman area, but their families are choosing to have go to Blackhawk. Correct. Okay. Got it. Thank you. Correct. Okay. I'll advance the next slide. Okay. So, with that understanding, the next thing we do is actually get into the actual forecast itself, and we'll talk about the individual factors. On the next slide here, you're going to see our birth rate table, which gives us an understanding of the number of children that were born in the zip codes that make up the uh district boundary. And then we uh compare and contrast that to how many students actually showed up in kindergarten 5 years later uh

033to get an understanding of what that ratio looks like and if we see an increase or decrease from our base year, which is going to be 2020. That is when our that's the the year that produced your current kindergarten class, right? Uh that number of students is 1,755 students. And that came out of birth totals that were 3,415. So, if I'm looking at the 2020 column here, uh that's what you're going to see uh in terms of our base year. And what we do is we compare that to each year prior to get an understanding of what we expect to happen moving forward. So, if we see a decrease in the total number of births uh for the following year, uh we expect that to lead to a smaller incoming kindergarten class uh the next

034year. And that's what we're seeing here. Uh we see your birth rates going from our birth totals going from 3,589 in 2017, and that has been on a downward trend mostly through 2020, uh which gives our current kindergarten class. So, it's down from 3,589 students in 2017, and it has fallen to 300 3,415 total births uh by the time we got to 2020. That trend is going to cause us to introduce smaller incoming kindergarten classes uh throughout the length of the projections based upon that falling ratio. It's important to understand that this is not unique uh to just your district. This is your data, but the trend isn't unique just to uh the Madison area. This is something that we see uh across the country in a lot of the work that we do. Well,

035people are just having fewer children. They're having um old later in life, and they're just not having as many based on a number of factors that we can all talk about whether it's affordability, family planning, a number of things go into that calculation there. The bottom line is there are more students or children born in the area that actually show up in your schools 5 years later and that's the result of maybe people moved before they get to kindergarten and then there's also the idea out there that there may be people pursuing other uh uh educational opportunities in the areas where maybe that be a private school or charter school or some other version of that moving forward and that's something that I know a lot of work is being done to try to bring

036in more of those students moving forward. So that's what you're seeing there displayed in that resident percentage to birth K line and that trend line showing us how much is typically shows up the following year and that sits right around 50 to 51% throughout the life of projections here. Um so that's an important factor to look at as we move through this. If we advance the slides, we'll talk about the next one and this is a a unique one to the work >> Isaac, can I say one thing before I advance the slide? I just want to call out this is where the intersection of the attendance area review and our enrollment strategy are really critical in terms of better understanding what families are choosing for their school for kids and where we have opportunities

037both with 4K as well as kindergarten as part of our enrollment strategy. Thank you, Isaac. Um I'm sorry. I know I'm Can I just ask one clarifying question about this data? >> Of course. And I'm I'm trying to be also just for fellow colleagues. I know that we've got a lot to do tonight so uh I'll try not to do this after every slide. I am wondering with the expansion of 4K has there been analysis of 4K attendance? I know that we had talked about this like there was 4K and then looking at how many of them actually become our kindergarteners, but is there anything Is there other data that shows us that birth kind of that birth rate data to 4K and then 4K into our kindergarten class? And maybe that might be too

038in the weeds. I'm just curious. We take a very similar approach to calculating 4K as well. It's taking a look at this ratio. We just changed the year. So we would start with data from 2021, which will give us our 4K student population. So that ratio gets applied to 4K and then we take what you're seeing here for kindergarten using 2020 as our base year, which gave us our current kindergarten class. We do have a higher number higher percentage of 4K students who enroll in kindergarten than the 51 51% that you see here. Okay. So one of the things that our enrollment team then is working towards is how can we expand the number of 4K seats we afford to our community. Got it. Because those that come have a higher likelihood to also stay

039with our kindergarten. Okay. >> percent persistence. The number of our 4K students that then stay for kindergarten is 80%. So the more we can think about expansion of full day 4K and getting more 4K students to join MMSD 4K, more likely that we'll continue to grow our kindergarten because of that 80% persistent rate. So it's So it is part of of what we're learning from MGT and it is definitely part of the intersection with our enrollment strategy. Okay, great. >> 80% persistence. All right, thank you for that. Board member Moessner Bultman. Thank you. Um oh gosh, I don't want my cell phone is listening. Um can I ask about the the birth rate if that is um all the babies born in our local hospitals or if that's um babies born to parents who live

040in Madison? Only MMSD zip codes in our attendance area, but I'll let Isaac talk about it more formally. >> Yeah, that's correct. And we take the zip codes that are the majority of that zip code fits within uh the district boundary and those are included in our study here. Got it. Thank you. Uh just to give you a difference, I think Meriter alone celebrated more than 5,000 births this year. So cheer only uh 3,400 or so are MMSD in our zip. Okay. And it's worth noting out that these trends don't change quickly over time in terms of the the actual birth rate trend, how many total students or children are born uh from year to year and they don't vary by zip code to zip code. It's a very large national uh type trend that

041that takes place. Um so that's why we're at we study that ratio and we break it down by zip code as best we can cuz that's how it's reported and try to keep it local to what actually fits within the district boundary. But there isn't much variance from zip code to zip code. President Nichols, are we good to go to the next? Yes, I believe so. Thank you. Wonderful. This is an important slide that we're looking at right now because this factor helps really drive our projections. What we're taking a look at here is how we calculate mobility. If you're familiar with um cohort survival rates, um this is very similar where we're taking a look at how many students um will advance from one grade to the next moving forward. So, how many kids

042made it from kindergarten to first grade? How many kids showed up from first grade to second grade each year that we have student data for? What makes our approach unique is that we're taking a look at 4 years of student data representing the 3 years of change, right? So, we take a look at your data from '25, '24, '23, and '22. Those 3 years of change that are in between those 4 years of student data. And we actually have geo-coded all of your students. So, rather than just doing it at a district-wide level, we've gone at the attendance area level, at your elementary school attendance level, to calculate a mobility factor for each one of your attendance areas. So, we're taking a look at how many kids live in the Chavez attendance area, and how

043many kindergarteners showed up and became first graders the following year. Did we see an increase or decrease historically over those 4 years of change? Here we see that increase was about 3%. So, we have a ratio of 1.03. So, we saw a 3% jump in the number of kindergarteners that showed up the following year and became first graders historically, averaging that out over 4 years of student data, 3 years of change. So, where you see blue numbers, you're seeing an increase. Where you're seeing yellow numbers, you're seeing a drop or a decrease. What's happening behind each one of these is people moving into your existing housing stock or people leaving your existing housing stock or people showing up uh in a building in one of your schools that are living in a home that we

044can account for or choosing to go elsewhere. Uh there's a number of factors that are going into this, and this is a catch-all to understand what the net result is. It doesn't tell us how much uh of that trend is attributed to each one of those uh things that could be occurring, but it gives us a net result that we have to be aware of. And we can see that different areas of the district are experiencing different trends. For example, uh we talked about Chavez Elementary School, that attendance area sees an increase at kindergarten and first grade and then it starts to see a little bit of a drop-off until we get up to high school again where it starts to pick up again as we go from 8th to 9th, 9th to 10th, 10th

045to 11th, and so on and so forth. If we were to compare that to another one where we see uh some more blue numbers, for example, Franklin the Franklin Randall attendance area, we combine those two schools into one attendance area for the purposes of our uh analysis, we see that we see an increasing trend for the most part all the way through 7th grade and then it picks back up again in 8th, and 9th, and 10th grade and then we move forward through the projections there. So, this shows that there are different factors, uh different trends taking place in different areas of your district and we are able to account for that in our projections as well. I want to invest the next slide. It's going to be similar data, but it just shows you

046that we're looking at the um extension of the rest of the district. We've done this for each one of your attendance areas and so you're seeing that here on the next slide where we uh show you that analysis. Typically, what we see Isaac, for one second, can I just pause and orient some since I'm in person? I'm going to I stood up and I'm going to just uh show an orientation and then I'm going to let you continue so that they all understand how to read this since you have every school showing up. Is that okay? Absolutely. Okay, thank you, Isaac. So, I'm going to take Henderson um and Isaac, just so you know, I'm going to take Henderson since it's at the top. What I see first is we only see elementary schools because

047we track all the way through 12th grade. So, within here, it shows you their middle school feeder and their high school feeder. So, for every elementary, you'll see what happens all the way through 12th grade. Okay. >> Okay? Got that so far? So, Okay. So then what you'll see I Well, how I've talked to uh people about this, I say yellow is negative, blue is positive in simple terms, right? If you're seeing anything in yellow, it means we're losing students. If you're seeing anything in blue, we're gaining students. And so this is year-to-year transition. So you follow cohorts of students, for example, and as Isaac said, we looked at 4 years where we would be. So Henderson, from kindergarten to first grade, they see a decline in students. So that's either students are the families

048are choosing to leave to go somewhere else, families move, mobility, etc. First to second, we're seeing a loss as well. Second to third, we're seeing a loss. All of a sudden, something's happening from third to fourth grade at Henderson, where we're seeing an increase in our student enrollment in the number of students in fourth grade. So for every 100 students, now we're seeing 102 students from third to fourth grade. And so on. What you will notice that is a district trend, and then I'm going to stop cuz Isaac's the expert, is that from five to six on both charts, for the majority of our schools, we see a decrease or a decline in student enrollment. So something's happening in transitions from elementary school to middle school. And one Oh, one highlight that I want to

049show you is we also have inward mobility happening at a really like fascinating approach at Lakeview, where you see every year they're increasing the number of students, right? Their enrollment is going up in transition grades. The other thing to note is that for the most part, when you start to look at 8 to 9, you see an increase. So, we're having this dip of students leaving for middle school, and then we're getting not all, but some of those students back. So, that's just how you read the chart. And sorry, Isaac, I was saying they don't have this one in front of them, so I was trying to talk them through the screen. No, that's absolutely fine. I appreciate you doing it. It's important to get an understanding of that as well. Uh you did a

050great job explaining it. Typically, what we see is an increase from K to 1 with the with districts that we work throughout the country. I saw a lot of nodding heads and we talked about the drop-off at the middle school grades. Um as someone that is getting ready to uh have uh middle school age children, there's a lot of debate within our household of what to do there, and I know that a lot of people start to show up again um when you get to the high school to take advantage of your uh extracurricular activities at the the high school programs offer. And so, we typically see an increase uh as people show up from 8th to 9th grade, and then uh depending on uh graduation rates, uh we typically see different changes throughout the

051country depending on how that is working. You can see some healthy trends for your district here. Um we'll move forward. Definitely a big increase uh 11 to 12. Uh that might be different programs that you're doing for your seniors there as well. So, that's what we're capturing. The bottom line is we're doing this for each one of your elementary attendance areas to get an understanding of what trends may be occurring within different pockets of your district, which is why we do this residence-based approach once again to get an understanding of what's happening at the neighborhood level as close as we can get. Isaac, can we pause here for clarifying questions as well? Absolutely. Thank you. I have one clarifying question. Um thank you for taking the time to kind of further explain this. Um, so

052when I look at the all of the in the blue where there's a cohort of students from make that transition from 11th to 12th, it looks as though folks are getting kind of that that final year and and getting ready to graduate. And so I I would under that's how I'm seeing that like that they're there's more blue because students are going from 11th to their hopefully their final year of high school. But when I look at the preceding year of sophomore year to junior year, I can see that there are some there's some yellow. And what I am wondering is have you all also looked at mobility as students who may be choosing some of our alternative high schools that aren't that weren't originally routed in the cohorts like in a feeder pattern. Like

053do we know if any of that mobility from 10th grade to 11th grade includes some of the other options we provide or or not? >> It will if they are still within MMSD options because our data accounts for those students, right? Because if it's OFS and if it's our students that are at OFS, they're still rostered and they're still accounted for in our data with our the data that we provided to MGT. Now if they chose something outside of the district and it's not where we are still counting for MMSD students, then that might Okay. >> The other thing for the 11th through 12 all those are 18 and here and plus and our fifth year students and you see some some go up Got it. Okay. cohorts growing because of that. But Isaac, I

054don't know if there's anything else you would add to that or anything or maybe if I didn't say anything No, that was spot on. There is the you know, there's different programs that you can offer seniors that will show up and you're absolutely right. If they're your schools, it's accounted for here. What's what would show up in yellow is that they're choosing a school that is not under the umbrella Metro Nashville. We have a couple more clarifying questions. I'll go up board member Bander Meulen and then board member Mosner Folsom. Um now I know you said that these are students that they have to special 4K we keep a large number but some leave. How do we know which are the students we're getting back and which are new students? Do we separate them out?

055How do we tell which ones we're retaining? Were you able to hear that question Isaac? How do you distinguish the students that were ones in MMSD versus new students coming to MMSD? Is that what you We would have to get into the individual student records to come up with that research for you. That's something that can be done. But what you're seeing here is the net result and net totals of everything that's happening all at once here. Okay, thank you. I appreciate it. I didn't know if it was too in the weeds or not so I thought I should ask. I think we have one more I have one I have one clarifying question. Um for each each number relates back to that 100 number at kindergarten or it's related to the year before? The

056ratio gets applied to the current grade. So K through one would be what we apply to first grade. Uh 1 to 2 is what we apply to second grade, second to third, so on and so forth, is what we're applying that to. So, it's the ratio that gets applied. In fact, if we go back a couple of slides, we actually illustrate that there. So, if we go back one more slide, you can see that example here. So, if we take a look at uh the previous slide, there we go. Uh we can see that if we have 100 kindergarten students and we apply uh the mobility rate of 1.04, that's going to give us 104 first grade students the following year in our projection. And then, in the first to second grade, we're going to

057take that 104 and multiply it by 1.03. We're going to take the 1.03. Yes, exactly. You're you're right. That's exactly what we're doing. Understood. So, so for schools that are like um Okay, so like if I look at Emerson, that's my kids' school. Between kindergarten and first, you're losing some. You're losing some from first and second, but then it goes back up from second to third. Um but it's still in the yellow. Can you help me under Like because the the we're adding students, right? Think of them as percentage declines. So, if you just subtract from 100, think of them as percentage declines or increases that we're going to apply to the class cohort that shows up that year with the projection. So, of the second graders that are there, Mhm. we we see 93%

058of them come back the following year in that in that particular year. Correct. Right. I appreciate the clarification. Thank you. Any other clarifying questions before we move to the next data set? And again, this is giving you a snapshot of lots of different data that goes into Yeah. Um I know they don't separate, but can they in the future? Can we find a way to find out which students are new and which are else are are old so that way we could focus on which retention strategies really are attracting new students versus the ones we're getting back so then we can focus on what new programs we need to attract more people. Let me follow up and move you back to the board on that. Thank you. >> Cool. Anything? Oh. Is Madison Promise included

059in here? Yes. I'm sorry, what was the >> The question is Madison Promise included here and yes, Madison Promise would be included but it would be based on their home school that they are assigned to since Madison Promise is not an attendance area. So, the students that attend Madison Promise are accounted for based on their their home attendance area. How are they identified in here? I guess it's like They're just part of the count in here. Correct. And then you'll see just like for example, when you saw the slide before where we talked about where students are going to and sometimes students choose to go to Badger Rock or choose to go somewhere else. But because Madison Promise is not a school, they show up in their assigned home school attendance area. Students are basically

060double double enrolled in the district. [clears throat] So, they're still assigned their home school and then they're assigned secondarily to Madison Promise as a program. Okay. Sorry, I took that one cuz that's probably uh the program that is our school. Thank you. Yes. Not a problem. Your hand is up. Your hand is up on the Oh, sorry. Nothing. President Nichols, are you ready to move on? >> Yep. Yes. Okay. All right, Isaac, I will Anything else on this slide or you want me to go to the next slide? I think we're ready to go to slide 10 here. Thank you. So, we talked about residential development and we approach that by two ways. First, we'll go out and we'll see where all the developments taking place. That'll be our next slide, but more importantly, is

061to take a look at how many children have come out of the most recently constructed homes throughout the district is what we're going to apply to the number of units that we're going to add to our forecast. So, what we've done is we've gone through and we've looked at homes that have been built over the last 10 years to get a good sample size of how many students of each housing type that we expect to be built in the future and figure out what that ratio is. So, you're seeing the results of that analysis. So, remember, we're able to go in and mark with precision where all of your students are actually living, right? We know what units they're actually coming from because we're able to overlay that to come up with an exact count

062of students that are coming out of the existing housing stock. Uh and so, we limit that study to units that have been constructed over the last 10 years and we break it down by the four housing types that you're seeing here. Single-family detached, single-family attached, apartments, and then affordable units. So, we have those four different classifications that we're applying yield factors to. And you'll see that the ratios are listed here as well. So, if we skip right down to the bottom, which is the one that matters, is the actual total here. Uh we can see that we have a ratio of .203 for single-family detached homes. What that means is that for every 100 new single-family homes that are expected to be constructed, we're going to add about 20 students to the projections for that

063year. Okay? So, we'll take 100 homes to generate 20 students. For K through 12, uh for single-family attached, that ratio falls to 12, 0.125. It falls further for apartments, dramatically so, where we're getting just one student for every 100 apartment units that are constructed. And then for affordable, we see that it increases to 0.38, so we're getting 38 uh students for every 100 affordable units that are constructed throughout the district. These ratios are important because this really helps us understand how many kids we expect to actually come out of the number of total units that are going to be constructed throughout the district moving forward. All right? So, let's move to the next slide and we can show you what we're going to apply these ratios to. We took uh great care in speaking to

064planners, developers, checking records, uh looking at permits pulled, and speaking with planners uh to get an understanding of where we expect construction to take place, and what type of units were going to take place. And while we look at there 120 active projects that are currently planned, and by current, we did have a cutoff date of January of 2026, uh the beginning of January 2026 as where we stopped our analysis. There may be projects that have been added since then, but it's important to understand we're capturing a snapshot. We have to have a cutoff point at some point there. So, that's why we make sure that we always recommend that districts constantly revisit these uh projections to make sure they're capturing the most recent information. But to move forward, we are accounting for 120 projects.

065That amounts to 12,214 units that are in our forecast. And we're going to apply those ratios by housing type that you saw. So, about 24% of the new housing uh will be within the Franklin Randall Elementary attendance area. And then about 81% of all of the units are apartments. But that's really important. I want to go back just to make a point of emphasis here. 81% of the go back to the the previous slide here. 81% of your units are apartments. And we know that the apartments are the lowest yielding uh housing type that is being constructed. Okay? This also backs up some of the other information I shared with you earlier about falling birth rates. There are just fewer children uh in the area to occupy some of these new homes. And this is

066going to validate some of the data we're going to share with you as far as the trend that we're projecting moving forward. So, that's an important thing that I always like to point out. Yield factors are not what they have been historically. Uh and so, while we see there is a significant amount, we have to keep in perspective the unit type and what has come out of those historically. Absolutely. And uh the analogy I The thing I like to point out when I talk about this is think about the types of units that are being built, apartments, and think about what those look like often times, too, right? So, a popular trend that we're seeing across the country is mixed retail, where you have apartments on top of coffee shops and gyms and different things

067and amenities like that. Um but they're not surrounded by parks and jungle gyms and things that attract families that want to have children being there as well. And so, that's just where we are as a market right now with 81% of those apartments being there. And we just see that as a low yielding uh housing type. However, it'd be important to watch how many affordable homes are being built is that is something that could change moving forward for you. That has the potential to generate almost twice as many students as the next popular one or most highest yielding one, which would be single-family detached homes. So, keep an eye on those ratios as your community continues to change uh moving forward. There are other opportunities uh to retain students and to see an influx of

068students into the district moving forward. Uh so, that's how we go about capturing the different factors. We've got it mapped out here. We can see that it's kind of spread uh throughout the district here in different pockets. Uh we're kind of breaking it down by region for you on the next slide. If we just pan to the west of your district and then move to central and then move out to the further east to give you a little bit more detail and see if you're eyeing a specific project. And once again, there's a full accounting of this in our report as well that breaks it down by project, the number units that are going into each study area, and the number of units that are going into each one of your attendance area as well

069to give you an understanding what that looks like. We've also graphed it out here on slide 13 if we skip ahead one more slide. Just a quick clarifying just so it's important for the public too. We We stopped the data in December, so not January. And so just so as people are looking, the last data pull for developments was early December. Just wanted to make that point for the community. Thank you. The resident development by elementary and middle school attendance area chart which you're seeing here. So we're giving you an understanding of where all of the development's taking place. You can see that if we look at it by middle school attendance area, uh we see that Hamilton Middle School has the majority of development. Once again, you have to keep in mind the ratios

070that are applied to the total number of units, right? We have more apartments being constructed throughout the district, but it's also the lowest housing type in terms of student generation rates that are expected to occur across the district as well. And you get a breakdown by elementary attendance area as well. So how your feeders uh fit into that is what we're accounting for here on this chart uh to give you an understanding of where the development is most concentrated. So that leads us to finally our district forecast, okay? Uh what you're going to see is a breakdown of what we're looking at historically on the next slide, where we stand currently, and then what we have actually uh as forecasted as well. So, you see that the first columns there are going to be what

071has happened historically, where we see um the total number of students that went into mobility factor, right? And then we advance further to where we are today or in our current snapshot, which is 2025 uh from that count day in October, and then we have projected the next 5 years for you moving forward. The most important thing to look at in terms of how this breaks down is the different ways that we talked about our factors, right? You can see that the red line here, the stairstep red line that goes down here, just shows you how students progress from one grade to the next and how mobility is uh affecting your projections, right? So, district-wide, we see kind of this declining trend till we get to the high school grades where it starts to pick

072back up again. Uh we also see um the impact from housing is going to happen each year of the forecast, depending on when we expect those projects to come online and how quickly we expect them to become occupied. There's a chart that breaks that down in the report as far as the development schedule or the occupancy schedule as well, and we apply that ratio of student generation rates against that, and so we're adding students each year of our projections as well. And then we also have this green shaded area, probably will animate if you hit the the button again, where we look at what's happening in terms of your kindergarten students. Uh that is a direct result of the birth rate chart that we showed you before of how we're introducing smaller incoming kindergarten classes

073based on that following ratio, going back to uh data from 2020. So, what we're looking at as a whole is uh some decline over the next 5 years. But, that is based upon where we know things currently stand. And uh in terms of mobility, in terms of what's happening with your housing development and how you expect that to come online and your birth rates. There are different things that can affect this as well and I know Cindy has is tuned into what those things are and before I show you the next few slides here, I'm just going to give her an opportunity to talk to you about what that is and how that may counterbalance some of the decline that you're seeing here over the next 5 years and what can happen there. But we

074base our work based upon what has happened currently and but we don't dismiss what can happen programmatically that can counterbalance that. Thank you Isaac. So just to that point, the whole reason why the building for the future plan not only includes the data that we're looking at here in our attendance areas, but an enrollment strategy. So if we do nothing, right? If we kind of stay status quo, as Isaac pointed out, the data showed that there is a slight decline. So the enrollment strategy and the opportunities that we have around expansion of 4K, understanding what families are currently choosing for schooling starting at kindergarten, what we're learning about transitions at the middle school level and the types of programming and or school options that families are interested in such as families that are open enrolling

075out are where opportunities are really here for us as a district to increase enrollment. The students and families live within the attendance areas, it's upon us to start to think about that enrollment strategy more proactively over the next 5 to 10 years in order to increase enrollment. President Nichols has a question, so I'm going to pause Isaac. President Nichols. Yeah, just really quickly, just so I'm understanding what I'm seeing on this screen in comparison to the attendant attendance matrix. So, first of all, I I appreciate that forecasting is you're bringing in a variety of variables and applying ratios and um so I I I understand there's a um nuance to this. But, I on this screen right now um I'm I'm just focused on middle school. So, kind of at the bottom of the screen

076where you show the grade bands of 6th through 8th. In 2025 you show 5,017 students with a projection in 2026 of that going up just a little bit to 5,033 a little bit up again in 2027 and then down again um in the following year. Correct? Correct. Okay. Now, I I also have the other sheet that was printed to us that we looked at earlier and right now that sheet is saying that our third Friday count in the fall of 2025 has a total middle school enrollment of 5,102. Does it include the inter or the open enrollment Correct. Right. And then before those open enrollers, it was 5,017. So, that that this is the that would match the current 2025. And then you're saying you've applied all the other things about mobility, about cohort change,

077about all the things and that's what we're seeing as the projections moving forward. Okay. Thank you. Your question is perfectly timed because it leads us to talking about where we're going next with the next slide, which you're looking at here is the resident totals and the totals that you just pulled were from this chart here, which factor in actual enrollment. Uh and that's where you see here the total students. We've got a number of students that are not included in your forecast. Those are students that we were able to match for whatever reason. Those are students that actually are living outside of the district boundary that we talked about. So, that's where the 85 number is coming from. And when it comes to your middle school uh students that are not included in the forecast

078because we're projecting your resident student population. We're not projecting enrollment. We're projecting how many kids are going to be living in the district boundary and where we expect them to be living because policy can change what your actual enrollment looks like and we want to help provide you with data to make informed decisions about where to place special programs and how you can shape policy based on where you have capacity for and where you do not have capacity based on what how your boundaries currently look and we can draw them accordingly to account for that. I think that's really important. Can you just restate that again? Cuz I think that's going to get into a lot of the discussion not just today, but as over the next year. Absolutely. So, what President Nichols was uh

079pointing out was the difference that she saw versus the resident student population versus the total enrollment and uh she was right to do that and it highlights our point of making sure that we're projecting by residents, the total number of kids living in your attendance areas. So, that that way we can assign capacity to where the students actually are to help you make informed decisions about where we need to place special programs and where we have capacity to locate those programs to make sure that we're not overloading your schools or underutilizing schools based on where those programs are actually located. So, that's inefficient. Which gets back to the capacity definition at the beginning of how we define capacity and where students and babies currently live and where they're situated to how our school attendance areas

080are that can impact underutilization or overcapacity. So, thank you, Isaac. Are there other clarifying questions on this slide, President Nichols, before we continue? I don't see any others hands raised. Do you want me to go to the next slide or stay on this slide, Isaac? We can go to the next slide at this point. What you're seeing here is just a bar graph representation of where the trend has been historically, stable, stable, and it starts to take taper off slightly um moving forward. Uh but, uh Sydney mentioned the different uh initiatives that are taking place to counterbalance that. And it's right to point out where those opportunities are. The 4K, especially with middle school, and that really stands out when you take a look at where your students are distributed Excuse [clears throat] me, across

081your grades. 4K through 12, you see your smallest class sizes being uh the 4K class size as well as your middle school uh grades are currently where your smallest class sizes exist. So, it would make sense that if there are policy decisions or initiatives to take place to counterbalance that, it could help offset some of what you're seeing here as the slight decline over the next 5 years going through 2030. Uh I'd also like to point out that we've been talking about the residence-based approach for projecting where your students are actually going to be living. So, on the next slide, you're going to see how we've done that at the study area level. And this is important because as we get into changing school assignments based upon boundaries, these building block These will be the

082building blocks for that. And I want everyone to understand that we've actually gone into detail projecting each one of these little polygons that you're seeing here. And there's different trends that are occurring in different areas of your district and different neighborhoods that make it up. The areas in green are where you're seeing increases. The areas in orange and red are where we're going to see decreases moving forward. And that's just a function of a lot of the factors that we talked about, obviously, but mainly, more importantly, the current class sizes and how they're distributed across grades 4K through 12. If you have higher larger class sizes graduating out being replaced by smaller incoming kindergarten classes, that neighborhood is likely set up to see decline. There are other neighborhoods where that would be the opposite, and

083we have an a concentration of development where that will cause it to grow as well. And so, the reason we want to do this by residence is because we can't wash out the trends by looking at it district-wide or looking at it through a spreadsheet. We want to make sure we're looking at what's happening at the ground level in each one of your neighborhoods. And so, you have that level of detail that the teams are going to be looking at as they go through these scenarios and take a look at that. So, there'll be a projection behind each one of them that shows what the attendance area would look like today versus what we expect to be projected to hold in the future. And our software allows us to take that approach and to support

084you in that respect. I'd like to go to the next slide to highlight something else that we just mentioned and the importance of looking at your capacities and looking at the resident student forecast as well. The big blue graph that you're seeing or bar that you're seeing in this chart here is the actual capacity of that particular elementary school attendance area that we're looking at. Their actual facility itself. We expect that be able to house for like Stevens Elementary School, 546 students is the capacity that was given to MGT by the district to do our analysis with. And we've projected out what we expect the resident student population to be. So, you can see that there's a big gap between the resident student population that lives within the Stevens Elementary attendance area, and what we

085expect that should be living there moving forward. We broke it down into 5-year intervals uh into intervals here. I have to I'm sorry. I apologize for that. It shouldn't say 2035. It should be 2025, 2027, and 2030. I'll make sure that change gets in there for you. I apologize for the oversight there. Uh but the bottom line is what we're projecting for you here uh shows that there's adequate capacity at Stevens Elementary's current attendance area, right? So, we can add students to that. Let's take a look at the opposite uh situation here when we look at Thoreau Elementary School, we're over capacity in terms of the resident student population versus the capacity that is there. Keep in mind once again, the totals you're looking at are resident totals, it's kids living in that attendance area,

086not what's actually going to school there. We won't dismiss that. We do take that into account, and you saw that level of detail in the matrices that you're looking at. So, that will support our work as well as we make sure that we have that accounted for uh moving forward. But this helps guide us to where to look and where the district needs to begin uh looking at that analysis in more detail to start solving capacity issues that may exist in uh different areas of the district, and which areas can be called upon to help provide relief to other ones as well. Uh so, that's really going to be an important thing uh that we'll look at moving forward. The next slide will show you some of the other attendance area as as well. Uh

087and this is where we look at the enrollment versus capacity, right? So, we talked about what it looks like by residents, but what does it look like in terms of enrollment? So, we saw on the previous slide that Thurgood Marshall School was over capacity in terms of its resident student population. So, everyone wanted to go to school there that lives within its attendance area, you wouldn't have room for them based upon the current capacity. Policy has been changed in such that allows the enrollment to be different as well. And here we've taken into account what we expect the enrollment to be at the schools in this projection here. So, I want you to know that we're taking a look at both angles, but the resident-based approach helps us know where to look first, and then

088we complement that analysis by taking a look at what's happening at the enrollment level as well. Isaac, can I just pause here for a second? I want to go back and I just want to restate and give everyone a minute to orient themselves to this. So, again, a sample of the current state and future state of schools based on our definition of capacity and for students that are pointed to those schools based on attendance areas is this slide. And then this slide allows for where our policies and our programs come into play that changes our schools' capacities based on internal transfer opportunities, open enrollment, and dual language immersion, etc. that can that can impact capacities based on programming. Okay, I I just Can we just I need a just see if I can get one

089concrete example. Let's just go with Can we go with the row? Sure. Because on the chart that you gave us I'm so sorry. Hold on. I'm going to go Okay. Okay, what I see right now on this chart is the number of students that live in the thorough area is the 493. Correct. Okay, and that matches the that matches the gray bar that says 2025. >> Yep. Okay. Now, but also on that same chart if I go across, I see of of the 493 students that actually live in the thorough area of them actually attend the school. And then we see that there is a number of students, like 49 of those thorough students choose to go to Leopold, which was on on this other data chart. Mhm. So when I'm looking at this bar

090graph how am I understanding So this is capacity and how do we take that 371 of the 493 students are not going to You know, I mean, like how do you measure that capacity in and knowing that I'm not sure I understand how to read this graph. >> let me Isaac, are you okay if I stand up and walk them through this again and then you chime in? Does that work? Absolutely. Okay. So So first of all, we start with the capacity total capacity at thorough is 439. If we are at full capacity, 100%. And that was based on the rooms that are 500 square feet that are well ventilated that you can use for instructional space. >> For example, thorough has one classroom space that we can't use even though it's 500 square feet

091based on the configuration made many many years ago. So you can't even count that classroom. So it's based on the number of usable classrooms. Yeah. You get 439. Okay. However, this year if every student Thank you. This year if every student that was appointed to Thoreau in their attendance area attended Thoreau, we would be over capacity. They would have 493 students. Which is more than the school can handle. Under our current attendance areas. Right. Okay. And and but Cindy, we also have data that says not everybody who's appointed to Thoreau is going to Thoreau. >> Correct. This is resident. Okay. This is based on the attendance area where students are appointed to attend. Okay? Okay. So I'm just going to flip for a second. This is our actual enrollment. Okay. Which policies impact this. Choice

092from families impact this. So currently for Thoreau this year based on third Friday counts, Yeah. they had 399 students. Yeah. Okay. So that's the number of students that attending now. So one of the things we have to think about that Isaac said is if we start to plan for the future around residential and where students live, we would say we don't might not have enough space based on our current attendance areas the way Thoreau students are assigned. Okay. However, it's working out for us. It shakes out okay because we have policies that say you can internal transfer. We have policies that say dual language immersion and if you're in this area you go to Leopold for dual language immersion. Okay. >> But what we're also seeing on this slide, I'm just going to stick with

093this slide for enrollment to the work that MGT has done, they're projecting in 5 years that Thoreau, even just based on enrollment, not based on residential, just on enrollment, they're saying Thoreau is is slated to increase. And so we're getting close to that number. Okay. And Cindy, can you state to the top of those solid bars is the 100% capacity? Yes. What is our desired capacity? >> Thank you. That's a great question. So the question is, what is our desired capacity? For our schools on the border of the district, around the border, our capacity we want to see around a 75%. And that's because that's where we're seeing the greatest amount of open enrollment levers. It's also where we're seeing some of the development. For all of our other schools within the attendance area, 85%

094is a like the sweet spot of where we would like to see capacity. So to that point, I don't know that we, and I'm going to go back a slide. Sorry, Isaac. I'm going to go to Shank, for example. If you see Shank instead of Thoreau, Yeah. Shank is their capacity is 421, residential is 482. So we can hold 421 students if we're at 100% capacity at Dr. Gavin's question. And if we were to have every student that is assigned to that attendance area show up at Shank this year, we would have been at 482. That is beyond 100%. Bob probably knows that percent real quick. I don't cuz I'm not good at math, but it's more than 100%. And you could see as we continue, based on the growth and everything that's happening in

095this side of town, the far east, we're seeing that Shank if every student continues to show up in that attendance area, they will be over capacity. Over utilized. And even with enrollment, I'm just going to go to this slide to just uh further make my point. Even with enrollment in the current state under programming with policies, Shank is close to 100%. And so the question is, if we want to be at that 75% sweet spot for our schools to give them that flexibility to be able to take on more students if families choose to come, we're cutting it close. Mhm. Does that answer your question? Uh and does that help clarify, Michelle? President Nichols. Yes. I mean, I think there's a difference between our actual enrollment versus the residents who are pointing to a school.

096And what I'm imagining is it's it's like or at least this is my first time looking at you're kind of toggling between the two. Cuz you have some data that's telling you some families are choosing not to go to their the school that they're pointed to. >> Mhm. They're choosing to go elsewhere, and we have policies that allow that. So, how confident do we feel about that trend? And then you have um Yeah, and then you go back to if everybody were to go to the school that they pointed to, like what would that mean for the capacity in the school? And it's it's a it feels like a little bit of a dance, but I have that's my interpretation, but I appreciate seeing both. Yeah. It's just a a to kind of wrap your

097head around. >> Yeah. And And you know, there's real uh key symmetry to this as well. Our students do not travel around our city in section groups. Yeah. You know, so you might get three and five and six and seven and two might leave. Yeah. So, it's not it's it I think it's another reason why also we want we do need to leave some room for capacity because of that. Yeah. Isaac, do you want to talk about why you all use residential versus actual enrollment kind of I don't know if that might be helpful for the board. >> Yeah. Absolutely. And the main reason is as stated previously is just we want to make sure we're getting capacity to where the kids actually are. Uh that's the best way to plan efficiently from our experience

098of 30 years in doing this work. Um and you were correct to say that there's a dance that we do go back and forth between the enrollment versus residents and seeing it here on the slide is why we do that as well. But we can't dismiss the enrollment piece as well. Uh but ultimately policy decisions can be made based upon what capacity you actually have based on where kids are actually at. And if you're planning efficiently, you're taking a look at your resident totals and saying, "Hey, we have capacity in this community to add special programming where we may not have it based on the way the boundaries are currently configured in other neighborhoods." Right? So, we take that into account and uh can't dismiss it as we know that there are special programs like

099the dual language immersion programs may be at certain facilities and driving enrollment up. So, we'll have to treat that boundary a little bit different and make sure there's room for that program to continue on there uh based upon the the current trends there. So, that's really why we do that residence-based approach. You're seeing the other uh things here. Uh projections reveal true view rapid demand, and that's another way of saying what I said, the capacity where the kids actually are. And we've already seen that your resident projections really uh are just taking a look at where they're actually living and not where they're actually going to school. But we understand by looking at that attendance matrix and these two charts, there's a difference there. And your policy and decisions are what shows up in that

100attendance matrix, as well as the chart that you're seeing here on the page. So, just want to emphasize that point to you. Uh and so that you guys all have that understanding. It's very important for the public, as well. Oftentimes, when we get into our first community engagement session, people will point out, "Hey, your numbers are wrong." The numbers aren't wrong, they're just being presented in a way they're not usually presented on websites. So, we're presenting your resident totals and not your actual enrollment totals. And then we bring them into that process by going over a lot of the analysis that you're looking at. The first community engagement session is pretty heavy where we get really into the data. It's almost overwhelming, but we go into great detail to help them understand the kind of

101data that is going behind this to support them in making an informed data-driven driven decision. Isaac, before we go into the steering committee, which I think is the next slide, can I just uh share They have a the data set of every individual school then map, and I just want to orient them to that so they know what they have when they walk away, and then we can talk about it. Afterwards. Afterwards. Oh, I'm sorry. Uh President Nichols, Ali has her hand Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm going to pause it. Go ahead, Board Member Maldrow. Sorry. I'm sorry. I thought we might have been at the point in the conversation where we're asking questions about the entirety of the presentation, um because I've had a chance to review it in its entirety, and also my

102uh computer went offline for a few minutes. So, I was going to ask questions about kind of the last two slides related to the process, um yeah, in involving getting the community involved and what the steering committee looks like, but I guess based on what Cindy just said, we haven't done we're not in that portion of the presentation. Correct, we're almost there. I think we're getting ready to get there. Uh before we go into the last part of the presentation, a lot of the data that we have shared is also summarized in your packet individually by each school. So, I just wanted to call this out. Each school, you will see the attendance area drawn. You will see where they are in terms of capacities since we just talked about capacities, over capacity, under capacity

103based on color range. You will also see both the residential enrollment and the actual enrollment based on programming and policy. And then you will see two charts at the bottom that show you both the transfer ins and transfer outs. So, it's just another visual by school to be able to see a lot of the data that we've talked about at an individual level visually with a map. So, you have this for every school, elementary, middle, okay? For our schools that have an assigned attendance student. Anything else, President Folsom, or we can go back? Okay. I just wanted to make sure, Isaac, that they uh individual the individual maps were So, I will keep us moving. Thank you for that. Uh to talk about uh actually, I think we skipped a slide here, and this is

104where uh we talked about how we've organized the roles and responsibilities of the steering committee process. And I think it's appropriate for Cindy to take the microphone back here to talk about what that looks like. I'll speak quickly towards what MGT is responsible for here, and we're going to continue to supply you with the data. Data that you're seeing now that is going to go into the forecast. We'll help you understand and visualize actual scenarios moving forward are going to be supported by this data and information as well. And we go into the level of detail that you've already seen here by understanding what your open enrollment patterns are and where there are actually options for parents and getting an understanding of how that income impacts the actual scenario in terms of resident versus enrollment

105count to make sure that we have both accounted for so that when you actually show up 3-4 years down the line, you still have capacity. And that's why we support our work with an actual forecast that supports the boundary scenario so that you have staying power with the boundaries and you're not going through what is a difficult and challenging thing to do. Changing boundaries are can be highly emotional, and it's not something that should be done lightly, and it shouldn't be something that is done often. And we try to support our clients with that moving forward. So, I'm going to turn it back over to Cindy to wrap things up here by talking about how we structured your redistricting process, and then we have some scenario modeling that we do with our actual software that

106is proprietary to MGT that allows us to take a look at even further data. We're taking a look at your individual education plan students as well. We'll have an understanding of where they are and what those ratios look like so that we're not upsetting the balance and we have accommodations made to make sure that they continue to go to their school of need. We'll take a look at the ethnic and racial makeup as well to make sure that we're not upsetting the balance there and changing that dramatically and understanding the impacts that this will have on the the demographic makeup, free and reduced lunch that may be impacting different areas of community and the language issues that not issues but different languages that are spoken that need to be accounted for to make sure that

107we are taking a holistic approach to this and everyone is included in this process and the needs of everyone are examined and so we can don't overlook that and we can have a true understanding of what those impacts are going to be as we take them into consideration and they fit within this role of guiding principles of all the different things that we want to accomplish for you in terms of creating neighborhood schools and creating balance in terms of enrollment and and resident student populations and capacities and all these things will compete against one another but we do our best provide scenarios that try to take all of it into account that you will have a clear understanding of what things will look like moving forward with this type of analysis and that's what you're

108seeing here scenarios to the left and the level of detail and analysis that people are going to be looking at in terms of the demographic piece that goes into this to help us make sure that we're making informed decisions for all of our community members and stakeholders. So with that being said, I'll turn it over to Cindy to talk about the makeup of this process and who's responsible for different those different roles and what community engagement will look like as well. Thank you Isaac. Before I come off of this slide, I just want to reiterate what Isaac said. So what you see on this slide is a sample of what the scenario planning actually and a sample of what the community input is going to see. So how we think about potential recommendations that will

109eventually come forward to the Board of Education where we're seeing imbalances or underutilization or overutilization, we start to play around with what changes might look like for our city to account for the 20 years out. And then after we make some changes as Isaac indicated, the example shows the impact of those changes. Did we overburden a particular group of people? Did we overburden a demographic group? Did we create a school that has higher than we wanted concentration of students and families from low-income backgrounds, etc. So we look at all of that information to see what that potential scenario might look like. So that is the work that the community will see in a really big picture idea of some ideas that we want to react here at the community react to. So let me walk

110you through what that looks like in real time. Jessica, can you go back to the other slide deck? Okay. I raised my hand. I'm sorry, I didn't hear you. I raised my hand, okay. Michelle, I think Ollie Okay, guys. Give me a sec. Y'all, I can wait until the the until we're at the point where we're asking questions. I can wait for the presentation to be done. Okay. Uh thanks. I think Cindy, you're going into like the community So yeah, I'm going to talk a little bit about that now. So as Isaac just mentioned, we've outlined the different roles and responsibilities of the stakeholder groups. So he just talked through kind of the responsibility of MGT. MGT takes all that data, looks at all that. MGT doesn't have local context and doesn't have the content

111expertise that we have here, right? We know a lot more about each one of our communities. So, that's where the district comes in. Pulling together our subject matter experts, thinking about the guardrails, thinking about what those capacities are, the definition I shared with you earlier, the programming, current programming, potential future programming. Our steering committee are those ambassadors, local experts. We have transportation on there. That steering committee is holding tight to equity and thinking about the decisions in terms of what we might put forth as a scenario and what that means and the impact for equity. And the steering committee is ultimately responsible for putting forth that final set of recommendations to Dr. Gauther. Our community are the primary stakeholders. They are going to provide feedback on our guiding principles, on the current challenges and complexities

112we have, and around the draft scenarios. So, the community is going to give input and I'll talk through what that looks like on a couple slides. And then you all, the Board of Education, you have two liaisons to the committee, Board Member Pearson and Board Member Castro. You ultimately are the decision makers. We will bring forth recommendations that the board will have to decide upon and or vote on. And also as part of board policies, you all the policy experts around some of the decisions that happen with impacts on enrollment. And the board also staying engaged throughout the process, which is why it's important for the board to to join us at our community input sessions. So, what are the goals of the steering committee? So, in addition to everything I just outlined, the goals

113of the steering committee are really to provide informed community grounded input to guide recommend and to ensure multiple perspectives are considered. We have a very diverse group and that group brings both their individual group experiences, they bring system level experiences and then also thinking about the community as a whole in terms of what changes may need to be considered and what might not be. They have been digging into this data that you all saw tonight for the last few months. So they've been looking at this data, they've been considering it and starting to think about where we might want to put forth a scenario for the community to react to. And then they're serving as ambassadors for this entire process. This is when the steering committee has met. This is kind of the work they've

114done to date. They'll have one more session before we go out to the community. And then we'll have additional meetings to refine scenarios after this first round of input. So it's important to note that anything in these community input sessions that is shared is draft. I talk about it like writing process. We're in the graphic organizer stage. We're in the just draft thinking. No decisions have been made, no final recommendations will be made in this first round. I tried to outline it a little better here for when those input sessions happen. It will be the first of many opportunities for the community over the next year. It's a chance to really learn about the work and the data behind the work similar to what happened tonight. And as important it is the opportunity for the

115community to share their perspective to help us build another better draft. We want to hear from the community of what we're what showing as ideas, what they like, and also what they don't like or what they think is a bad idea. We want to know both good ideas and bad ideas before we then draft the next What those sessions are not at this point, we're not sharing anything that's final or near final, and it is not the decision. So, we have many first round input sessions. We've been really intentional about thinking about where to host those sessions and how to go about this to get representation from our entire community. So, you can see the first week we're holding them at our comprehensive high schools, and we'll also have virtual sessions. Our second week we're

116doing a mix between some schools that have lots of things to take into consideration, as well as community centers. The community centers were really intentional based on some of the data and what we're seeing as potential considerations as well. We want to hear from those families. Week three, so we have approximately 18 sessions. Week three, we're continuing in the community. So, we're doing the north side, we're doing the south side, and we're doing Centro as This won't be the only opportunity. We're recording our sessions, and we are going to push our recordings out with the survey as well. For people that aren't able to join at all, they can respond through our recordings, and it'll be available on our website. So, what does this mean? This means that we're still in the drafting phase. Um,

117you've seen this timeline before, but I'll call your attention to the blue box that says February 26th through January 27th. That is where we are now. Between now and January of next year, we're going to continue to draft scenarios and get input from our community. After this first round of input, we'll take all of that data and the steering committee will look at that and the steering committee will help us craft a new scenario that will go out to the community again in the fall based on the input from it. In the fall, we'll get another round of input and then we will go out to the community a third time and we'll continue to get closer to what we think will be the final set of recommendations that will come to the Board of

118Education in February of 27. Those recommendations may be some considerations of what we start with in May and may be very different based on what we hear from the community as well as the conversations we have together in terms of where the board might be really interested in uh the direction we go. So, February of 27 will be where we bring forth a set of recommendations and that could be multiple recommendations that may take multiple years to implement but that the first time that we'll bring forth something for decision making will not be until February of 27. So, I'm going to pause there. This is takes everybody the community as well as the board to our website where we've been keeping um update information. We have some reportings. Uh we will also have the full

119report that Isaac was alluding to on our website. It's about 179 pages. The board will get it and then the community will have it too where they can have an in-depth look into all of the data that we will be using to uh make considerations. So, Isaac, anything else you want to add before I turn it over to President Nichols for conversation? We look forward to supporting you and your community through this process and supplying you with the proper data to help make an informed decision. I thank you for your time tonight and if you have any other questions, happy to do that and I'm sure we'll have more as we move throughout this process. Happy to be a part of the team here at District Fortune. Listen, here to listen to the question. President

120Nichols, I will turn it back to you. All right, I'll go with board member Mulroy. Thank you for patiently waiting and then board member Mosner Felton. I really appreciate the orientation to this plan. My questions are specific to the community's ability to participate in this conversation and and how we kind of cultivate the school district that attracts, you know, our entire community and beyond and maintain a a standard of universal quality across our programming. And I I guess I'm curious if any of our findings relate to spaces where the standard of of quality in terms of education at any given school is something we really need to take into consideration. So, if we're seeing a a variety of exodus from one school to another, are there indicators that we we really need to make some

121some significant changes in this immediate moment? Yeah, I'm going to start with that. Board member Mulroy, I think to begin with I think we will learn a great deal from these sessions. There's 19 of them as I counted planned. Send Donald if that's accurate. You You so those are that's data that we're looking to gather. We we also may find ourselves uh having to do some, you know, very specific and targeted focus groups as well. You know, if we begin to recognize that we're missing voices and um there's additional information that we want to learn. I think that you know, ha- having said that, the the goal of this process is for us to strengthen MMSD as an enterprise. Uh you know, to make sure that we're you know, try to try to take the

122interests of the community as as best we can to make sure that, you know, I've said many times to be everything to everyone everywhere um comes with some, you know, real difficulties at times. If we have more interest in a program or space at a school, then we can enroll students in and that's when, you know, we have to look at how can we intercept some of the choices, some of the options that that families may choose. Um so so again, we have to look at this holistically. I think uh in the past there is So this is far more than than looking at how do we adjust boundaries. I think this will get at the question of how can we establish what excellence means to our community and are there ways for us to

123increase capacity uh in doing that? I really appreciate you speaking to that. I think, you know, we have a wide variety of young people who have a wide variety of needs. We serve over 25,000 children currently. Um and I I hope we're taking this opportunity to be as student-centered as possible. Um and I also think there's just a real balance between what it means to listen to our community um and what it means to uh really be guided from a space of equity and and um you know, the idea of excellence for all students. And so, I think excellence for all students is not the same as one size fits all. I think we have a a lot of really diverse communities across Madison. Um and I really appreciate that I think so much of

124this approach is about honoring, you know, our young people and their families and and creating a school district that serves children um with with a real sense of excellence and a real commitment to their growth and their potential. Um I guess my my last question is about the board's role. So, this is a really thorough update and orientation to the plan and I heard Cindy speak to how we're going to check in over the course of the execution of this plan. Is there feedback you all are looking for from board members specifically this evening, particularly board members who are not involved in the steering committee? Yeah, thank you for that question. Um I can start if that's okay. Um I I don't know that we have a specific question, but I think as we continue

125to hear from the community and bring information back to the Board of Education and the Board of Education hears from the community, we're going to have to grapple with um some decisions. Well, you all will have to make the decisions, but we're going to have to grapple with um where the board is interested in um considerations and what the board is not interested in um over the next six or seven months before we get to a decision. Um grapple with uh is there ever a chance where we need to think about the repurposing of a school due to underutilization and we'd like to do something different with that school. Grappling with the staying with non-contiguous boundaries and or making our attendance areas contiguous with the idea of we have optional zones right now and should

126we consider assigning students to a single school based on what we hear from the community versus sticking with optional zones. Those are just examples because those are things that we're learning along the way. But I think um any of that that the board wants to talk about tonight, I think is great, but if not over the next 6 or 7 months, I'm looking forward to those conversations to get a better sense of kind of the desire and direction the board will help us go because there's a lot of different ways we can think about this set of recommendations based on even just what you saw tonight. Cindy, if I could >> Yeah, I I'm I want to chime in here. I really appreciate optional zones as an example of like we we're doing that with

127you know, um I'm sorry, I just forgot Southside's new name. I feel I feel so bad about >> Lori Mann Carey. Yeah, Lori Mann Carey and New Ester Mundo I think of as having that kind of um expansive relationship with where you get to send your your young person to elementary school if you live in that attendance area. Um [snorts] and I I really appreciate thinking about how board members can can think about what is or is is or is not more or less consistent across our district in terms of our offerings. I I do want to say I think that the the process you all have outlined this evening seems like there are really significant access points for for board members to participate and I I greatly appreciate the orientation to that um and

128and understand that tonight is more of an orientation than a space to give feedback because we're still, you know, gathering feedback from the community in order to inform our decision-making process. Um, I'm sorry, Dr. Gothard, I know you wanted to chime in. Before you do, I just want to ask that the materials that were pretty uh meticulously explained this evening, um obviously I'm not there in person and I would love to have those set aside for me to get next week on Monday, if that is all right with you all. I have them for you and apologies. Just >> One thing to keep in mind, Board Member Moldrow and members of the board, that these data are very dynamic, too. Uh what you see tonight have already changed. As Isaac said, there was there was

129kind of a drop where they have to present the materials. Yeah. In addition to that, as we begin to create scenarios based on feedback, now it's up to Isaac and his team to force the data to change based on what those recommendations are. So, the new looks at it will be if we did X, this is what Y would look like. You know, so that's, you know, as you in uh Board Member Moldrow, when you said what will our role be in this, I would imagine that there will be quite a few scenarios for us to consider. Uh perhaps even get to a place where we can have some live scenario planning on the screen as well. Mhm. Board Member Moldrow? So, that um wrap up your question or comments? She good? She has a

130thumb. >> Yeah, she's good. She's good. Oh, okay. All right, thanks. All right, I'll go to uh Board Member Mosnar Feltham next and then Board Member Vandermuelen. Thank you. Um thank you for the presentation and thank you um to the team that's put in all this work on it. I have two curiosities that um I don't need answers to right now, but I'm curious about how our birth rate analysis and how our student yield factors compare to other places. Um are we way lower than similar cities? Are we way higher? Um is it typical for um a university city of our size or a capital city of our size to be um yielding this number of students from this type of housing? Or are we Are there places where we're really outlying? Great question. Um

131in comparison to districts that I've had the privilege of working with throughout the country, the birth rate trend is very much in line with what we see. It's more drastic in uh different parts of the country, especially near uh the coast of some of the larger cities in our country. Uh that tends to be exaggerated a little bit more as far as the decline is concerned. Um but that is a not just local national trend, it is a global trend for much of the advanced economies in the world. Uh we're seeing just people making different family planning decisions. They're having them later in life and they're having fewer children. Um and those of us that have children or those of us that have grandchildren, we can kind of look back at the generations and kind

132of look at that and just think about it personally how family sizes just are not what they are before. And it's not the advice that we give our young people most times. We kind of put in order things for them to do to have success. And if you follow that advice, you find yourself um starting uh that process of uh creating a family at a much later than previous generations have had. And there's extra pressures that they're dealing with. I think that you brought up a valid point about being a uh community that is very closely associated with the university and having a younger population there, Um you're going to see the lower yields uh in the apartments especially. That was something that jumped out to me as yield factors are have been falling. I've

133looked at districts where they were getting 100 kids for every 100 homes. But that was prior to the Great Recession uh 2008 and it has been a steady decline since. And uh what jumped out to me was the apartment yields being so dramatically low of one for every 100. That's something that jumped out to me. But I think that there's something to be said about uh the high concentration and influence that the university has on your student population in and around that. Uh we've got a lot of younger people who are focused on their education and that's going to give you a lower yield coming out of your apartments. Um so uh that was something that jumped out, but as far as how that ratio is spread out amongst your different housing types, that's very

134much in line. Affordable housing in parts of the country that have a concentration on uh all the units within a development being affordable, that tends to generate more students than single-family homes. Parts of the country that don't have that emphasis where they may mix them into existing housing developments like a percentage of them will be uh don't generate nearly as many because they're uh set up in you know single bedroom, studio, maybe two bedroom at best type of buildings and we just don't see that happening there. Uh but your single-family homes typically generate more uh with the exception of affordable and then multi-family attached and then apartments kind of uh go on that downward slope there. Uh so those are the things that jumped out to me in looking at your analysis with the birth

135rates and uh as far as the student yield factors were concerned as well. So and the the part where fully like half of the babies born here don't end up in our kindergarten, is that typical? It is. It is. It's not unusual uh to see that happen because there's not everyone stays in place for 5 years. People will make different decisions and it's not an indictment on anything the district is doing necessarily. And one of the other pieces that we can supply everyone with here to take a look at that is because of some of the plans that you guys have is taking a look at what the census estimates are currently at 2025 for your area and rectify that against your student population that we know is enrolled in the district. And that will

136give us an understanding of an important ratio that I think would be valuable for anyone to look at here is what is the difference between what we expect to be living here and versus what we are actually seeing show up at our schools here as well. And then that can help inform some of the decisions you guys are making in terms of policy that can help boost retention. Can I just add one thing board member Marva to what Isaac just shared is that in addition to that there are a lot of options within the city of Madison especially at the early grades, right? Whether it's Montessori, private, etc. And one of the fortunate things that we have is we're working with an ethnographer that is at UW. She's like nationally known and she started to

137do focus groups with families that have chosen to go somewhere besides MMSD for kindergarten and starting to understand why because again to the point of our enrollment strategy, we want to better understand what is it that families are choosing and where are they going? So in addition to all of this data that we've been getting from MGT, we're trying to get some qualitative data from families as well to help inform our future enrollment strategy. Great. That answers my next question. Oh, excellent. I think thank you. Um Okay. Um Cindy, could you remind [clears throat] me where I could find more information about the makeup of the steering committee? Yeah, absolutely. So, on our Building for the Future website has information about the steering committee. Um, it's a little bit of what I shared today, the

138dates and all of that. Great, I appreciate that. This this committee is doing really important work and I'll I'll look forward to refreshing my memory on who's who's doing that work. Um, one more question Well, I have two more questions. One is about um, I was surprised to see in the first slide that um, as part of Building for the Future, we'll be evaluating our programming. I was under the impression that that was happening in our strategic plan. Can you talk a little bit about how those two are related? So, I think it's uh, board member Moster Pollmann, members of the board, I think it's first important for us if we're going to be Well, they blend together. Uh, there's no doubt about it. Just like our enrollment strategy is blending right into Building for

139the Future as well. And we knew that, but we do hold intentional space for that because again, MMSD excels together. We're measuring, you know, long-term outcomes and sure that we're moving in a way that demonstrates progress. The goals and objectives of our Building for the Future are very different, but related. They're informed by a lot of that work. Um, so they're so they're related. Uh, there will be, you know, some a lot of overlap, but there will be some separate work as well, okay? On both of those plans. But, it's important for us to first know what programs have those desired and what are gaps. I am Yeah, that's helpful. Um, and my last question um, is for Isaac. Um, since you're the expert and have done this in districts across the nation, do you

140have any advice for board members or for community members who are listening as we continue on this process. Uh all the board members especially encourage your constituents that you represent to participate in the process. Um we I believe that we're recording uh all of this as well uh for people that may miss it. Um but you want people to stay engaged throughout the process moving forward. Uh don't expect to show up to just one meeting and get exactly the same uh information every single night cuz people will have different questions and it will lead to us taking different action as we react to the feedback cuz we do take it seriously. Uh and so while no individual will drive this process, um the feedback is something that we do consider and take into consideration in

141this that you will all take a look at and helping you inform your decision. So it won't just be district staff says this and the community's is is saying this. It's all going to be a consensus and a compromise of trying to do what's best for everyone as a whole and not to isolate any particular area or any of the constituents uh to make them feel all targeted throughout this process. So continue to have everyone participate on ongoing process uh that will be iterative. Uh don't overreact to anything you see on the first night. Uh that's just draft to get you an understanding of where we're going and it's going to change and evolve. And even me as the uh demographer that's going to be helping you create the scenarios, I have no direction where

142we're going to end up um but I'm looking forward to the journey and doing it with you on it. Uh thank you so much. That's it for me. All right, thank you. All right, before I um call that's board members, this isn't directed at anybody. It's just more of a time check. So just remind us all that we're at 7:00 p.m. And we still have policy and then going into closed session and we do have some staff waiting for waiting to engage with us on policy read. So let's just try to make sure that we get our are asked and then we can get moving into the next section of our meeting. All All right. Uh board member Bender Mullen, then board member Suriano next. Yes. Um thank you. Mine is a question that I'd

143like you to to add to it is how long the bus ride is to that when we do the boundary changes, to consider the length of bus ride, especially on students with disabilities, because oftentimes specialized transportation is needed, and oftentimes that is not included ahead of time. That is almost seen as, "Oh, we didn't realize that." So, I wanted to just put that out now. Additionally, >> [clears throat] >> before we consider streamlining and closing schools or modifying schools together, remember there are certain people who can't move. There are certain groups that can't always, due to topography, due to disability, due to a lot of factors, not be able to just open enroll as easily as others. And Can I comment on your first two things? >> Yeah, sure. So, first, transportation is one of

144our guiding principles. You might remember when we came in in November, we said that >> Yep. And and Vanessa um and Scott are part of the steering committee, and so we're looking at ways for shorter uh opportunities and efficiencies with transportation. So, thank you for naming that. And then just your second comment, I just want to be clear that uh at this point there has been no discussion or anything around closing schools. So, at some point that will be a conversation for the board, but that that has always been our goal to not uh consider closing schools when we started this one. So, I just wanted to make sure the community I I 100% know that. I just wanted to state, even when you combine buildings together, that to me is sometimes that change can

145be very detrimental. Additionally, my uh last comment is just to let as many people involved in the process. I think this is great. Um also maybe having a section at some of the community centers also might be helpful. And just so that we could increase the numbers. And sometime and if there's a need for sign language or other interpreter just to contact our website, those kind of things I think would be great. That's all I need. So I will cuz I want the community to hear this. Every session will have Spanish interpretation, Hmong interpretation, and sign language. So thank you for naming that. And we when you check out the dates on the websites, we do have community centers kind of situated across our city right now. And as we continue through the process, if

146we need to add more. So thank you for naming that, board member. No problem. Thank you. And that's all I have to share. Yes, board member Van Der Mullen. What I wrote down in my notes is that I heard your your comments as kind of like a future decision-making criteria might be the board really thinking about impact with transportation and impact for students with disabilities. We're not at that place yet, but something to bring forward in our conversation later, right? >> That's exactly what I was going with that. Okay, great. Thank you. All right, board member Rava. Thank you, President Nek. I'll make it just really quick. I haven't done a lot of talking, but there's been lots of really good input. So just kind of the things that I was that I was thinking

147of through this is that I was just I'll be really interested to know like the demographics of the people who are participating in the sessions and like what they came in with, I guess. You know, like why they considered you know, why they're there. And I appreciate um uh Mr. Johnson, that you were talking me suggesting that people go to multiple uh sessions when I was not on the board and I was in the community. I went to four different sessions where we were looking for a superintendent for here for the reasons of doing it directly to hear what the community wanted to say and then a very specific stakeholder experience and stuff like that. So, they were all really very different and it was good to be able to have discussions in front of

148other community members that might be looking for different um things and to see where those values intersect uh and feed into each other. So, that's something I'll just be really interested um in seeing where those lay out. And then I was wondering, is there ways that you guys are looking at to know if transfers between schools, you know, when when students opt out of not going to their home school. Not when when when a student is in those mid years, is it student-driven or is it like parents looking at programs driven? Like, is that something that we can learn? So, we don't know that yet. This work is not telling us that, but we're trying to think about both exit surveys from families as they choose to go to different districts, why they're leaving, and

149then some of this work that we're going to be doing with the ethnographer. She's starting with the early grades, but I don't know, maybe we'll consider middle school and other places as well to start talking to families um from the from the system level. Or member Suralfo, were you Did you mean internal transfers, though? I thought I heard internal transfer. When we're looking at here of like where you would default go to school, but when you get and when you're in your kind of middle grades, kind of have a little bit more of like what drives you, what you what you like about your school, what you would want to see in your school, so then parents might look elsewhere. Or is it the parents looking at what the programs are like we're talking about

150the LA programs and things like that? Which is something more adulty and that you would look at and want to put them in? Cuz those are factors that kind of show up from my perspective. Things that I've seen of what drives a student to stay within their residential area or look elsewhere for different um experiences at school. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. To your other point about understanding who is showing up, one of the questions that uh the survey that the people in the community input sessions will engage in asks for some demographic information, so we'll be able to collect that. What school family attends. So, some of that information we'll have. So, we're excited about uh that. It's it's going to be like in the moment in those survey that they'll be completing. Awesome. Yeah,

151absolutely. So, Thanks. Thank you. That's it. Thank you. Yeah. All right, I don't see any other questions. I think to wrap this uh um many thanks Isaac and MGT and um Cindy for all of the work tonight. I really appreciated the orientation and I appreciate my board colleagues letting me ask a few more detailed questions about the data charts just so I made sure I was understanding. Um at least a few weeks ago, I know that Jesse was passing around the com- the building for the future community input session sign-up sheet. So, for board members, just as a reminder, if you already signed up, the dates and the locations were added to your calendar. If you haven't signed up yet, um please connect with Jesse because there's >> on the table. Right, but we have

152board members in a virtual so I'm just saying please reach out to Jesse. There's lots of spaces and opportunities for board members to be out and hear how people are reacting and thinking and sharing their thoughts about these different scenarios and I am also looking forward to being at a couple of different sessions in a couple of different settings just to hear how different people are taking it in and yeah I really appreciate just getting the detailed kind of methodology to forecasting and helping us think through like what this process will look like. Dr. Rutherford anything for you before we close it out? No Isaac thank you. Great job presenting it and uh members of the board this is really good conversation so I look forward to continuing the process Cindy great job leading this

153this started as an idea that began with enrollment studying how our schools enrolled and where our students going and um I I think another key point in this I think it's important for us to be on the record as well. Remember a lot of this is also influenced by we're growing community. Um the question came up about birth rates and types of housing and that I think one difference we have is that interest in people wanting to live here. That's why it's so important Cindy mentioned the partnership with the city. I can't tell you how important that policy formation city is. Yeah. >> In terms of us having a role in how the city builds and develops so it's an exciting time and I just thank you all for supporting this work. Thank you so

154much and Isaac thank you again. I appreciate your time tonight. My pleasure. Appreciate you all as well. Thank you. All right then. Okay. Um as we get ready to thank you and welcome to all of the policy connected folks coming into the room. Um or member Saravo, did you have a one a question as we get ready to make the transition? You had mentioned that um there's sign-up sheets for for board members to try to get those to ask questions. Do we Do we have someone for all of them as a Um or member Vandermeulen has the sign-up sheet and it it come around and I just wanted to double check on that cuz I think it'd be great if we had someone. Yeah. I I believe yes, we do. Sorry, didn't want to All

155right, we're going to get ready to make our transition to the next part of our agenda, which is we have two policy um two policies, wellness policy and then the medication administration policy. Board member Maldra. Yeah, because both of these policies have been reviewed multiple times already, I'd like to move that we discuss {slash} debate these pending motions regarding these policies um and we limit the conversation to a total of 35 minutes at least at first. Folks can motion to um extend that time, but I I would love for us to stay within within a specific time parameter given the amount of time and resource we've already allocated to these two policies. I second that. All right. Yeah, all right. So, we have a motion to limit discussion. I did you say to 35 minutes

156per policy? >> 35 minutes per policy. Per policy, it's been seconded. Um any discussion? Just roll call vote. Okay. Uh I'll do a roll call vote per board member Van der Meulen's request. Board member Maldonaldo. I. All right. Board member Castro. I. All right. Board member Van der Meulen. Nay. All right. Board member Saravo. I'm still trying to understand. Uh the motion is to limit this like open discussion on the which policy to 35 minutes. I. Okay. Um board member Mosner Felton. I. All right. And myself, I. All right. Thank you. So that those that motion is passed and so we I will run the clock for each um discussion. Um we're going to start with the wellness policy. Is that right? That's the first one up and I Okay. Ashley, you're just trying to

157Okay. So Ashley, you're going to Thank you for coming back again. I know you I know you got some feedback from us on the last read and I can turn it over to you. All right. So thank you all for your continued feedback um and for the superintendent's wellness advisory last year at this time providing feedback and then the ongoing support of the internal school wellness lead implementation team of providing their feedback as well. Um so there are just some small minor edits based on feedback from last time. Um the first section that had it is the physical education. It would be six uh physical education and physical activity if you look at B. Um we kind of reordered the structure so it made sense in the big paragraph of um of the physical or

158that section B. We moved so we even though it's struck out at the top, it's actually moved down to the bottom. And then we enhanced it to say physical education teachers will receive annual professional learning opportunities, and this part added in specific to physical education, which includes specially designed physical education. I like that. So it just explicitly calls it out and aligns with what we're already doing in the district, but it kind of obvious stand out. And then the second one is in that same category, the physical education and physical activity under F, co-curricular activities and out of school time. Um, we or added in um the and adaptive sports and or exhibition exhibition matches and meets. And I believe there's a hyperlink, but I couldn't tell from the Yeah, there's a a hyperlink to

159the IAAA website. And then once, you know, we go through the approval process, I just want to remind you all that then the resources, the implementation guidance and materials that will support schools will be created and shared and then put on the public facing website. Cuz right now the old policy is up. Okay. All right, the changes. Those are the changes from the last time. All right, let me see if there's any questions or comments. >> okay, I forgot one thing. And we capitalize disability. Mhm. I was going to thank you for that. Okay, thank you. Or member Bannermuller, I believe I saw your hand. Yep. Just want to make sure cuz I missed it the first time, but I just want to make sure that on recess it can't be used as a behavioral

160punishment still. Correct. Yep, there's a line that says that physical activity cannot be withheld due to behavior and or other I remember that coming up when a few people testified that I get a little nervous Mhm. because that that worries me. I'm really glad that's in there. Otherwise, I think it looks excellent. I really appreciate you taking concern my concerns at the question and thank you. Yes, thank you. Feedback. Nothing further. Thank you, board member Van Meulen. Any other questions or comments? Board member Mosner Belton. Do you mind giving a really quick like elevator pitch of who who works on this and with what kind of attention? Yeah, so um the current policy is written that every 3 years this policy will be reviewed. Um so uh couple different aspects to the superintendent's wellness advisory

161every 3 years reviews um and has over the years that we've had the wellness policy. Um so that's like a big portion of it of around getting a lot of stakeholder input. So students, families, community members, community organizations, and then internal um MSD staff. Then there is also uh we had done a actually uh like a community input survey. Um actually we did another one this year, but each time we do the policy as like a broader group as well. And then the internal school wellness lead implementation team um is made up of So the different components of the wellness policy is anchored in the whisk model, which is the whole school, whole child, whole community. And in each of those sections, this work lives over multiple departments. So on that lead implementation team that

162meets monthly is different representation or representatives from each of those teams that come in because we want to make sure policy length is also connected to different goals and um areas that we're moving as a department as well. Beautiful. Thank you so much for reminding us of that. All right, board member Suravo, Sawyer, and cool. >> [clears throat] >> Uh absolutely. I all the work that all of you did. It's really been great to be able to attend some of the sessions that you've had with the community stakeholders and everyone. That's I appreciate the additions that that were revised in here to talk about special ed and adaptive sports and curious to see where that kind of programming will take place or be experienced and or offered and things like that. Just as a soft

163place to have some of that spoken to you in here. We talk about physical education um and the kind of access that we give people who have different needs and how we can share those experiences together. Thank you so much for joining as well. All right. Thanks. How was it? All right. Thank you. I don't see any further questions or comments. So just as a reminder, um this policy, will we be voting on this in April at the regular board meeting? Is that the the thought? I see your hand, Board Member Malgrove. Oh, okay. Board Member Malgrove? It sounds like we're prepared to vote on this policy this evening. So I would like to motion for us to do that. Um I think we've given this a good amount of time and it would be

164lovely to you know, feel really good about where we're at and move forward. Um I'm going to move or hold on for 1 second. My apologies. So I move that the Board of Education formally adopt the revised wellness policy as presented forth at its third reading on April 20th, 2026 incorporating the changes that have been made. Second. All right. Board Moses felt them second it. All right, sounds good. All those in favor, I. I. I and that looks unanimous. And so that has been uh passed and adopted. Thank you Ashley for working with us and incorporating all of the feedback. Okay, thank you all. Yeah. All right, let's move on to the next policy and then I'm going to restart the clock, y'all. Um in just a minute. Uh and we're going to move forward

165with the medication administration. And I'm not sure who I am handing that over to. Is that me? All right. Hi. Thank you for having us. Um for those of you who do not remember me, I'm Sheena Lewis. Um I work for Renning, Lewis and Lacey, a law firm that the school district periodically taps to do a variety of things including provide legal opinions regarding issues that come before the school board. I have with me my colleague Ella Martin who is an attorney in my office who has assisted with this particular project. She's going to go over some of the information that was shared with you in a memo form and we're prepared to answer any questions about that memo, but I wanted to make sure that that um we kind of uh explain what our

166responsibility was and what we were asked to do. First, I want to make sure that you know we do not represent the administration, legal services, the nurses, anything like that. Miss Nichols, I believe there's Miss Trejo has a question. Oh. Can she finish her introduction? Or we supposed to put the memo somewhere? It's in here. The memo's in here. It's just on the next page? Yeah. All right, thank you. Um, so I just wanted to make sure that that you guys knew we don't represent the administration, we don't represent the nurses, we don't represent legal services. We represent the We provide legal services to the district and we, um, in this particular situation were asked to provide a legal opinion with regard to three of the motions that were considered by the board relative to

167the amendments to the board policy 4113. We were not asked to support a particular cause or position. We were not asked to, um, to reject or to to find support for opposition to a particular position with regard to the amendments. We were asked for our legal opinion regarding the amendments, the three amendments that there are identified within our memo. And I just wanted to make sure that that you had that information as you were reviewing the memo and as Ella is going to go through the the substantive uh, the substantive, um, context and in addition Okay? So, I'll turn >> Okay, I'll turn it over to Ella back. Great, thank you, Shayna, and thank you all for having us here tonight. Like Shayna said, my name is Ella Martin. I am an attorney at Fanning

168Lewis and Lacey. Um, I understand you all have received our memo. I'm just going to go over it a little bit to provide you an overview of our, um, our concerns and our legal opinion of certain amendments to board policy 4113. Uh, first I will go over the motion one amendment, uh, which was to amend the term contract to agreement throughout the policy regarding students' authorization to self-carry and or self-administer prescription drug products. And like so my question is is that I just want to look back at the record to remember which ones passed, which ones didn't pass cuz for some reason my notes say that one passed. And if it already passed and the board already accepted, we would have to do a re-vote and I didn't know the procedure following. So, I just

169wanted to be clear on that. >> Mhm. I appreciate that, Sharon, and I appreciate your latitude. Yep. I believe that one did pass. I thought the board was affirmative in that one. Correct. Okay. So, you still provided some analysis on that. >> Yes. Okay. And you're going to continue explaining why. Yes. >> Okay. Appreciate it. I just wanted to make sure that I would >> Yeah. not doing it wrong. Yes, thank you for that clarity. So, the amendment was to amend the term contract to agreement throughout the policy regarding students' authorization to self-carry and self-administer prescription drug products. Um I understand that there were some concerns about minor students entering into contracts. However, just changing the name of the contract does not actually change the nature of the contract. So, parental consent is still required

170for the student to be allowed to self-carry and self-administer prescription drug products in school and regardless of whether the contract is titled contract or agreement, students must still adhere to its guidelines. Um contract and agreement really are synonymous, especially in this situation when none of the substantive parts of the actual contract are changed. Um while there is no legal issue per se with changing the term contract throughout the policy, there are some concerns because school nursing documentation currently contains the term contract in regards to this type of agreement. And um all of this documentation will have to be changed to include the term agreement, and that will take a considerable amount of time, which the school nursing staff could be using to care for students. Um Yes. Are there any questions or comments on our

171opinion on that? So So just to follow up, I will come to you. So the board already voted affirmatively on the word change. And to your point in your analysis, you're saying although legally um they're they're pretty synonymous terms, but it would be perhaps an undue burden on the staff to now have to change everything to replace the word contract with agreement. Um Are you Is your analysis proposing that the board undo? You don't need to. We're not suggesting that you do So So we're not here with a recommendation. We weren't asked for a recommendation with regard to to the next steps. We can certainly address that. We're What we're saying to you is that there is no legal implication by virtue of the amendment to change it from contract to agreement. It does nothing.

172Okay. >> So you can either keep it the way that that it is as a result of the amendment, which will just simply have some administrative burden in order to ensure consistency. Mhm. Or you can take action in order to amend the contract a second time. So there are two different ways you can do that. We can go through the rescission process to rescind the amendment that was passed in at the February meeting. Or you can simply, because the Robert's Rules of Order don't apply strictly and we don't have to necessarily adhere to all of the parliamentary procedure nuances within Robert's Rules of Order, you could simply make a motion to amend the policy in order to change contract back to agree. Got it. Okay, thank you for your clarification. All right. Board member Van

173Amel. Okay, um I understand that it can be burdensome. I think it's necessary on the language. I think if we're going to change it, we I think we should do a revote if we absolutely had to at the uh meeting on the 27th because I think it's necessary cuz the board did decide and did make a decision. So, I think we should formally recede it so we don't if we're going to do that. I would rather we don't. But, if we are going to do that, I'd rather not create precedent that would that we would handle this solely as an amendment and do it that way instead of at the formal board meeting like any other motion because technically was decided. Okay, thank you for your opinion. Board member Sarabia, did I see your hand?

174Yes. I don't even know why we're And this is just on this particular amendment cuz there's others to cover. So, if you want to wait until we get to some of the other ones that they reviewed, you could do that, too. I mean, probably I'm still trying to figure out why we've reviewed this why you guys reviewed it and asked to review the first one when it's really more I'm not understanding why we're doing this this particular one since I would already pass it and means the effects of it Did you know did you all review all of the um proposed amendments? >> three of them. Three of them. Okay, three of the amendments. So, Okay, so the one that was also tabled was not reviewed and so we're not going to hear on the

175other one that was tabled today from my understanding. I I not sure what what Okay, then let's talk about I mean we reviewed the ones that we were presented with. Okay. I'm saying reviewing the things today still leaves something on the table. Okay. I I'm Yeah, I would have to go track which ones made it for an additional review and which ones didn't. Um and what I would feature What was that? If there's a way to track that, I don't know who Okay. I'm going to go with Are you board member Maldron? Thank you, Board President Nichols. I think we can use the word agreement or the word contract interchangeably. Um I I guess I'm wondering right now well where well while there's an inconsistency for the nursing staff between the word contract and the

176word agreement, what's happening? Like what what's what is what is happening that necessitates um one that we can't treat these two words as you know, interchangeable. Um and two that you know, there's nothing we voted on that said we're requiring all language to be updated to align with this. So I'm just curious um what necessitates that update and and what's happening in the interim where we have this policy but we haven't updated that language this language yet that we as board members should be concerned about and really like lean into spending time and resources on an external counsel to figure out. Yeah, I I don't know if you all have access to >> think that we question. That that sounds more like a staff related question. There Yeah, so there was there was feedback from

177the stakeholders who drafted the policy following some of the motions. There were concerns about administrative burden. And so of the the tabled motion that was reviewed, there were two other ones that had passed that there were concerns from the stakeholders who drafted the policy and a request to have that reviewed in order to ensure continuity, um, you know, between documents and all services for this one. And then for the third, uh, point in the memo, um, one that there are more serious concerns about. Okay, so but thank you for that. >> Yeah. Board member Malgros' question. >> sorry. That just doesn't address my my question in any way. Right. So the the the question is whether you're using the word contract as it currently stands or agreement as the board voted. If the words legally

178are are pretty much synonymous, are you what's happening now with all of the documents that say contract? Are we still using them? Will can you still use them? Or are you feeling like you have to go through and replace every word with agreement? Cuz I I think we're hearing legally there's not a substantive um, issue. And so if if some of the documents still say contract and and it still means an agreement and you still need parental consent, what is the Like why are we not able to move forward with it? So we are still using the same the same, um, documents and, um, as long as the understanding is is what we've heard today is that it's interchangeable, I'm comfortable doing so. Okay. Did you hear that, Board Member Mulrow? Yeah, I appreciate that.

179So, I think that eliminates the issue of the additional burden, and I would love to move on to the other amendments, but I respect other people's, you know, interest in speaking to the the terms agreement versus the term contract. You know, I'm going to bring up one issue, one thought. Um, I don't like the idea of having two different complex words for two different things. We serve a number of families who um, might not speak our language as a first language. I think it just adds a layer of confusion to the way we do business. So, to me, let's settle on a word, and let's make sure that all of our documentation, all of our training, everybody who's onboarding has the same um, access to that information, and let's stick with one. That would be

180my strong recommendation. Okay. I appreciate that, Dr. Gothard, and I I guess, you know, the board voted on this amendment, and we did vote affirmatively to use the word agreement. Yeah. I So, I, you know, I I understand that like we did hear concerns, and I I don't want to invalidate people that are out in our schools doing the work every day, and in this case, it seems like we're not hearing a major legal concern for the change in the word. So, I I don't know how to reverse the order. Yeah. Okay, Board Member Vandermeulen. Basically, if you want my opinion, is that because it wasn't raised at the time of the hearing, it could be seen as moot, and therefore, since the board has already taken action, the issue is technically dead. Well, in

181this case, Board Member Vandermeulen, we did we did receive a lengthy email from staff about the implications of our votes. And so I I After and I know, but I'm just saying. So, I I don't know if we can move forward to the next cuz there's other things in the memo and we did agree that we were only going to limit discussion to 35 minutes. Are you okay if we move forward to other parts of the memo, board member Saravo? Or were you going to I address something with this one? Since I I was going to give a comment since I was the one who had to put all the amendments Okay. >> word in the first place. So, that I find it kind of insulting that we're suggesting that we're taking nurses away from

182the students. I don't think that is a fair analysis of saying you're making us do this big thing and you're taking away the nurses' time. In other um some of the other uh things that we've had discussions on here and when there's been changes being made, there has been implications of we're going to need another person to step in and take this extra time to do that. I didn't hear that at all. I would have expected like maybe we have to put some extra time put into making these changes or coming up with you know, changing things over into backing the reasons the board that collectively agreed on that. Mhm. So, let me let me just get us moving forward. I think I think one of the other ways that we can approach this conversation

183even though we've already voted on this, but I'm going to keep us moving forward is what are the big wins? The big wins for young people and the big wins for their families through policy amendment. Because I don't know if the biggest win is that we replace this one word with another if they mean the same thing. I'm not saying we reverse order on anything. I'm just saying, let's try to stay focused on the amount of work that you put into the amendments, what's legal and what actually helps strengthen what we're doing for young people and their families, right? So, I I think we've already discussed the first amendment and I would like to see us move on to the other analysis. Okay, before I remember Benjamin. Yes, two questions. One, are we keeping agreement

184because that is what we would voted on. And my second question in response to your statement is I don't want to be able to change a vote afterwards in a different manner than any other vote is changed. I think it cause confusion and precedent issues, which is why I worry about switching it back to contract. I think we the board voted and they made that decision. They have the ability if they so wish, but we haven't. So, technically the issue we should move on. Yeah, well, I didn't hear anybody opposing right now or suggesting any other direction. Okay. >> So, right now and and and then respectfully to Dr. Gotcher's point said, let's have continuity. That's fine. Um, right now it it seems like we're sticking with the word agreement. So, that was I I

185haven't heard anything else proposed. >> Yeah, I didn't get the sense that there was any motion to me take any action. Right. >> At all. Yeah. All right, let's move on to the next one. Okay. All right, thank you for that. Um, the second motion I will be going over is one that was tabled after the February 23rd board meeting, uh, which is the motion 5A amendment regarding the medication administration error or incident part of the policy. So, the uh, the motion 5A amendment reads as follows. In addition to the same day telephone notification, a written summary of the incident shall be provided to the parent or guardian within 48 hours of the discovery of the error or incident. The written summary shall include a factual description of the incident, observed student response, actions taken

186by school personnel, recommended follow-up if any, and contact information for further questions. There were a couple of uh just legal implications that we wanted to raise with this uh amendment. First, this amendment would require the school nurses to violate their statutory obligations under the peer review privilege. So, the district has a robust peer review process in place where the director of health services investigates any errors or incidents and provides appropriate training or corrective action when necessary. Wisconsin law provides for the peer review privilege under Wisconsin statute section 146.38. And that peer review privilege is designed to promote transparency in the health care setting and uh when reviewing errors or incidents to ultimately improve the quality of patient care. And that is what happens here in the school setting. The health director would then review any

187medication administration errors or incidents and take any corrective action and follow-up if necessary. Health care professionals, including school nurses, are not allowed to disclose any incident reports, which this kind of written summary would be. Um or they may face legal liability. Requiring the school nurses to violate their statutory obligation under the peer review privilege may actually endanger student health because it may incentivize school nurses to withhold certain details of an incident and um just for the fear of losing their license. And a written summary created within 48 hours after a medication administration error or incident may not include all of correct or relevant information because the peer review process may not have had time to uncover all of that information yet. And this can cause confusion for families, for the student's parent, and potentially for

188the student's physician, um which is a critical issue when student's health is at stake. Additionally, this amendment would unnecessarily expose school nursing licenses to risk. So, under the peer review privilege, um incident reports cannot be used in any civil or criminal action, but they can be used in administrative proceedings. If a written summary of a medication administration error or incident is sent to a parent within 48 hours of the incident, the parent could then use that written summary, um in an administrative proceeding against that school nurse, uh and this could include a license revocation proceeding through the Department of Safety and Professional Services, which is the agency that licenses nurses, or through DPI. Again, this amendment would further impact student health and safety because it may disincentivize school nurses from staying in the district or

189prospective school nurses from coming to the district if they have a fear of their license being revoked simply based on an initial summary which may not have all of the relevant information. Additionally, the absence of a strict timeline in the policy allows for that thorough peer review process and fact-finding investigation. This is consistent with health care practices. Um this also allows for the school nurses to ensure that health care records are accurate and complete, which is again extremely important when the student's health is on the line. The amendment would mandate the creation of a duplicative student record. So, under the current policy, um a notification to the parent or guardian is mandated right away, and that is usually the phone call that the school nurses will make or an email if phone call is not

190available. Additionally, every student visit with a school nurse, which includes medication administration errors or incidents, is already documented in Infinite Campus, which the parent can access. Um, creating a duplicative record may risk introducing inconsistent information into the student's health record, which as I mentioned, um, is an issue when the student's health is on the line because that could create further confusion for the student's parent or for the student's physician. Finally, this amendment mirrors language found in Wisconsin's seclusion and restraint statute, which is Wisconsin statute section 118.305. And that statute mandates a written summary of the incident of seclusion or restraint to be sent to the parent or guardian within 3 days. However, there's no legal basis to impose a similar requirement on, uh, school nurses following a medication administration error or incident. There is no

191statutory basis for that. There simply is not a statute that exists that imposes that requirement. Additionally, medication administration errors and incidents are distinct from incidents of seclusion and restraint because school nurses are highly trained healthcare professionals, and they are bound not only by school board policy, but also by healthcare guidelines and regulations. Are there any questions on that? >> I'm I'm glad I'm glad you brought up the, uh, seclusion restraint statutes since I helped write it. Um, and the reason why, um, nurses aren't in there was because I had two votes that would not allow it in uh, 2009 when it was first created 2004 excuse me when it was first created. When it was recreated in 2012, we had one vote that wouldn't allow that particular situation. So just providing you with background of

192that legislation that the author's intent as I was one of the co-authors was to have it in there. Whether or not it passed is irrelevant. Going back to the original, you stated that if phone is not available then it's by email, correct? Notification is by email, correct? It does not state in the policy currently how But it said if the first contact you said in your statement in the first contact couldn't be by phone, it could be by email. It could be. I'm just stating what what the school nurses could do. Which is a written statement. Is what I'm saying. So if we can't have a written statement, how can we have an email describing it if we can't have a statement in writing? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Yeah, school

193board member Vanda Miller, what um what she is mentioning is an email that is not as detailed or required to be the amendment requires a significant number of of categories, a factual description, the observed student response, the actions taken by school personnel, recommended follow-up and contact for further information. >> But you you did state in writing that the main issue with the nursing staff was things in writing. And I'm just I that's all I'm asking. In all due respect, I think what she was saying was it is in writing but in writing within the the framework of the amendment. Additionally, my last question on this is phone um phones in this day and age do automatically transcribe, correct? For see uh close caption and other hearing accommodations, correct? >> I we're not experts on telephones.

194My question is this, is if it can't be used criminally and it can't be used civilly and the fact that administratively I don't think it's ever been used, I don't see the precedent argument on it when we are simply requesting it to solely be there as a notification along with the phone call because often times that's not enough. It's not saying that the nursing staff isn't doing their job. I love my nursing staff. I think they do a great job. That's not the issue. The issue was to make sure that it's as safe as humanly possible and that's why I wanted to ask it regarding the policy. I understand what the law states. What I do also know that state law states we can include certain things. I don't see the liability argument, but I

195appreciate you raising it and that's all I have. Okay, thank you. I saw um board member Saravo uh real quickly, board member Saravo. Um I Let me I just want to ask a procedural question real quick before I come back to you. So, because this amendment was tabled when we were voting on all the other amendments in the policy and now we're discussing tonight would we be voting on each amendment that was tabled like separately or I I'm I'm just trying to get clear on the procedural? That that would be my understanding. Okay. Thank you. And I'll come back. Yes, board member Saravo. You know, the fact that we're actually back in this discussion is really frustrating because the reason it was written in the way that it was is cuz I could not get

196a meeting with anybody. Team figure out how to simplify our parent notification. Right now, we send pieces of paper home when students fall, when they scrape their knee or something like that. There's something in writing for the day of something that I have. And the simplicity of letting a parent know uh that there was a medication incident of varying levels that happened at school could be incredibly simple. Did I have the opportunity to have that discussion? Nikki and I were supposed to be part of it. We did not. So, that's that's why it's in this form that it is right now. There was no opportunity to have it reframed any other way. And can you state where an IC a parent is supposed to see such a report? Where is that? I do not have

197access to Infinite Campus. Is that something you guys can access? Absolutely. So, um in order to get information from the Infinite Campus, um you would uh Can you speak louder cuz I can barely hear you. So, within IC for every time we see a student, we put in a student note um that describes the care that's provided. Um and a parent does have access to that information. It requires a written request um which is >> not readily available on IC. The the notes for that day is I mean, when you request any healthcare information or any healthcare um summary, it normally we need to confirm who it is that's requesting it in writing, and then we will send it to you. That's that's the process. I also want to speak to the communication. If we

198do have somebody a student who is injured in school, our very first thing is to contact the parent. If we cannot get a hold of the parent, we will either um try another means of communication either by text or by email. Just We don't provide the details in that email. We ask them to contact us as soon as possible. So So I just wanted to clarify that we're not providing typically the content of the the situation in a written format when we're first contacting the parent. And so the goal when putting this together, I just wanted to state was to contact the parent and give them some substance of what happened because I don't think having no access to it and having to do all the retrieval of the information of such an incident should

199be completely upon the parent. That was the goal. Thank you, board member Saravo. Board member Maldrone? My question is a point of order for you, Board President Nichols, and I'm curious about where we're at in the 35 minutes related to this part of the conversation. Are we at the limit? Yes, thank you. We have 4 minutes remaining of the 35. Uh that isn't pure discussion that included some of the time for the attorneys to share um their analysis, but it's all all inclusive. And uh where what I'm also trying to ascertain is So if there was this one particular amendment that had been tabled, we're reviewing it now, would I be calling I guess I'm looking to Manka or would I be actually just going forward with like a vote on that amendment right now,

200or should I be going to the next analysis? I'm not I'm not exactly sure with 3 minutes remaining how we're proceeding. It's >> Because right now the the the policy as I understand it because we tabled some of the amendments it's still like an incomplete like we approved some of the policy and then tabled some of the amendments and so how do we close the loop? Right, until it's ready for a vote but it's not my understanding that it's ready for a vote right now. My understanding was that we were just here um as part of a >> reviewing the memo and answering questions not that we're voting on table item right now unless someone were to move to do that. Okay, okay. So we've heard um the analysis on this particular amendment and then

201how many cuz I know we only we only have a couple of minutes right now. How it looks like there's one more amendment. Okay, so board members um do we can we extend potentially by 5 minutes to get through the next amendment that's in the memo? I'll second that. Yeah, I'll move I'll move to extend for 5 minutes. Okay, thank you. So that will give us a total of 7 minutes and I know that sounds very technical but we're trying to we've had a lot of discussions about these so thank you. Great, thank you so much. The final amendment I wanted to touch on tonight was the motion 6 amendment. This was passed during the February 23rd meeting and this amendment requires school nurses to approve students readiness to self-administer non-prescription medication. Under the previous

202policy students in 6th grade and above could self-carry non-prescription medication if their parents gave written permission to do so and agreed that the student would adhere to the self-carry guidance. Now Wisconsin law only addresses the requirements for students to self-carry medication in two instances. This is for asthma inhalers and epinephrine auto injectors or EpiPens. Um now these statutes only require that the student's parent gives written permission. It does not require that a school nurse determines a student's readiness or approves a student to self-carry these prescription medications. Since there is no requirement in Wisconsin law for um the carrying of non-prescription medication, it is somewhat hard to imagine that the legislature intended to um impose a higher requirement on student on student self-carrying non-prescription medication than it did on prescription medication like the asthma inhaler and

203the EpiPen. This amendment would also impose a significant administrative burden on school nursing staff because they would have to go through readiness assessments for each pupil who wanted to self-carry uh non-prescription medication. Um I did put an example in the memo. Uh the uh at a school the size of Memorial High School, that would require uh readiness assessments for 200 students if only 10% of the student population wanted to self-carry non-prescription medication. And that is simply not feasible with the current nurse staffing. Um additionally, it's not clear what would be required in order for a nurse to determine a student's readiness to self-carry their non-prescription medication. Any questions? Okay. Uh Board member Sarauer, I can't tell Board member Vandermillen, did you just put your hand up? That's from brief order. >> oh, I forgot to

204lower it. I It's my fault. >> member Sarauer and then Board member Okay. Okay, or we'll reverse. Um I just suppose that when when I voted to approve that amendment, I was imagining that accepting the parents signed thing could function as approval. Like, yes, you brought in your paperwork, or yes, you signed the thing. I acknowledge that I received it. Done. Um is that Which to me is not a major um and I could be wrong, so I would I would deny that. Um is would that be Does that meet the like approval threshold legally, or is that something Am I not understanding what the Yeah, so it was our understanding that the the amendment was to create a a system by which the nurses determined readiness. Like, so the nurses were making the determination

205above and beyond just a parent authorization. >> I see. And so that's the concern. Yeah. >> Is that additional step. If that wasn't what you intended, that's that's not what the >> I I had sort of imagined that the approval would be done by accepting the parents authorization. And then that would provide a situation where if there's a student who actually like for whatever reasons, I actually don't want that child carrying this stuff. Um parents said it was fine, but it's not fine with me as the school nurse, so I I won't accept this. I don't That was what I imagined. That is what I imagined as well, per the approach. And I I would be curious if the thing I imagined feels like a major administrative burden as well, or if um Did this

206one Are you just saying Yes, that it would be that the parent would authorize carry, and there would be no other Correct. I I imagined that the school health professional says, yep, got the got the authorization, and that that functions as approval. That would not create an administrative burden. Okay. And I think that would not be That's not something new. Um the amendment doesn't The amendment creates something new as we understood. Right. We'd have to go back and look at the split. Thank you. Okay, but sorry about that. Again, this is one that passed, so we're just doing a review for some reason. And I don't understand the confusion because it literally just says readiness shall be determined by the authorization of parents and guardians, which means that the parents and guardian parent and or

207guardian has already authorized the student in order to do that. And the approval of the school health personnel to make sure that they know that the kid that that it's been approved by the parent. Which seems like a really simple check-in. I I just don't really understand why there is a confusion over the language cuz I think it's pretty straightforward as it is, and I can't imagine what an undue burden it is. This was also trying to get out of that a grade does not determine readiness. Because not all students have the same uh Grade six just a like a grade. That's That was my whole thing. Uh why I was discussing this amongst my other board members is that grade six does not determine readiness. Developmentally, students can be in many different places at

208that point in time, and the parent is going to be the one that's going to determine readiness of carrying things, you know, medication while at school, while also making sure that they're there in um discussions with the school health personnel so that they know and if the student has it on them or with them that there's that shared understanding that it would be okay for them to have it on there. Again, this could have been a discussion that could have been behind the scenes and talked out. There was some confusion. Okay. So, the the sentence that that Ella was referring to was the last sentence. They were readiness shall be determined by the authorization of parents and parents guardians and the approval of school health personnel. Yeah, I think I don't think that that's as

209clear unfortunately as as maybe everyone had hoped and it certainly wasn't clear to the nursing professionals who then presented this and elevated this issue to your legal services who then asked us for our legal opinion about the the of the amendment. You were referring to the word and use the term assessment. I don't see that word anywhere. Readiness shall be determined by the authorization of parents guardians. So determined, assessed. determined But when you use the term assessment, you made it sound like they're sending out this big old assessment done by the household personnel and that's not the point. I think this could have been done in a different setting. You So May I just make Let let let me just say this. I think I think part of what is and we we are at

210time, but I think part of what's coming up um board member Saravo is sometimes when we're using words in policy, it might feel clear to us, but it also has to be clear to all the people who have to actually implement it, right? And so you may have meant one way by assessing the readiness and the nursing staff are like, I see the word assess and now like, what does that mean? >> But the word >> having to implement. So I think policy as is The word assess isn't in there. That's the problem. Word determined. Okay, determined. So it it it So on on starting this policy is as good as it can be implemented and clearly, right? For the folks that need to do it. So I think we're learning some things based on

211the language that has been reviewed. Um what is not clear to me cuz we're at time. What's not clear to me is what we're actually doing after this now reviewing conversation. So That makes sense. Yes, please. >> is that we will work with legal services to draft a No. Now, hold on one moment. I would like to hear what the proposal is because we we we tabled some amendments and then others were reviewed that we thought we that we had passed. Correct. And Okay, I misunderstood. I apologize. Let me let me say something to Dr. Mercedes, okay? We did pass some things and in my opinion, although I didn't know exactly what the attorneys were going to review, it's it is good governance for us to be going back and saying, "Oh, when we're policy

212makers and we're approving policy language, we should hear about the implications to implement." I'm not saying we're changing anything. I'm just saying I think that like this kind of analysis and this discussion is worthwhile, okay? So, what is the proposal to move forward? To work with legal services to draft motions for those policies for those amendments that have been tabled. So, those that did not pass. For the ones that we kind of like deferred, right? Okay. And any board member, technically, given the memo and given the discussion, if a board member wanted to come back with a motion to change something, they could. >> They can work >> They could, but you would have to work with the board members that already voted yes. Or and if if that's the case, if there are board

213members who want to make an amendment based upon any of those Nikki, I'm I'm just not going to do it tonight. That's my face. I can't do anything on autism facial expressions. I've talked to Gothard on this. I'd like to know why my disability and my facial expressions. Oh my god. tonight. >> Board member Van Dyke Uh it's my face. Okay. I can't >> I'm not sure. I don't know what just happened. >> facial expression. I don't know what I did. Oh no, I just want to make sure >> I don't. Okay. The statement was if any board member would like to make an amendment to any of them, you can just work directly with me and then I'll work with legal services to work on whatever that amendment is so there's not a whole

214lot of back and forth going on the floor. Okay. If there is I'm just saying >> Wait. Point of order? Yeah. So, I do believe we've come to the end of the time we allotted for this conversation and we're over by a few minutes at this point. And so I do hope that we're getting to a space where we can motion to adjourn. However, before I think we get to that space if we're going to bring this back for a fifth reading, um I think we should have an agreement that is, you know, we're we're going to do the work offline that needs to happen um before before we reconvene as a group. And I think that's what I'm hearing from Dr. McCray, so I appreciate that. Yes, and thank you board member Maldrow. I

215mean the the only reason I was asking what the path forward was is because there were a couple of amendments that we didn't vote on. And so I was also trying to figure out what's happening with those amendments from that was it February board meeting? Correct. Right. So, it sounds like moving forward we will um legal services is going to work on the amendments that we took no action on. Getting them to a place of being a formal motion so that the board can take a action on them. Right. And then if there was any board member, I'm not saying there is, but if there was any board member given tonight's conversation that wanted to entertain a different kind a different action, that work should also happen offline. Correct. Okay. And then the only other

216thing is that there will be a memo that Sarah did draft addressing the other amendment with the Narcan that will be shared with the board members shortly. So it was not reviewed by legal services because it was more technical, so the nurses staff reviewed that and put together a memo for that. Okay. >> And so I'll share that with you. Okay, so additional information is coming forward related to one of the amendments that we had not voted on which was related to the Narcan. Correct. Okay. All right, board member Saravo. I would like the process going forward to be not siloed as I feel it was last time because there was no collaboration outside of board meetings which is really frustrating when you have a lot of very technical things coming together at one time.

217So my expectation coming out of this this particular conversation is that the next opportunity for someone like myself who is supposed to be directly working behind the scenes never got the opportunity that there will be that opportunity between now and next time. Is that my assumption because that's what I am hearing of what what it possibly might happen. I had to express interest in working on this behind the scenes and then connect with someone. I want to know that process before I head home today. I guess is what I've been saying. So I I believe if if we the best way to do this is if there are meetings that need to be set up, work directly with me so I can work with the team to have them set up so I can streamline.

218Cuz if I don't know, it's hard for me to kind of streamline live stream streamline those needs. Though Okay. Um I think there are some other things that are connected to how our policy committee is functioning or or not right now, but I don't I don't want to go into all of that right now. Um so we do have a path forward and we can talk I'm expressing direct interest to be part of any conversation and seeing that it would be preferred of any input that helps construct these so that it's in a more collaborative >> productive and collaborative manner. Got it. All right, thank you so much um for all of the work on these amendments and analysis. I'll entertain a motion to adjourn. We're not adjourning. We're just moving it. Oh, I'm sorry.

219We're not adjourning. Thank you, Jesse. I I've done that in the past. We um are going to transition to our closed session. So let me read that motion. Okay, we have a couple of board members who are not in the room. Oh, and I'll I'll wait for staff to be able to leave here. Our staff again. Um Is it possible for Well, we've got we've got quorum, so I guess are you hoping, Board President Nichols, that we go into closed or are we thinking about recessing between open session and closed session right now? Well, Board Member Mosner Belton just asked if we could recess for maybe what 5 minutes? Yes. Are you okay with the 5 minute? I I think it's for the better. Okay. We will recess for 5 minutes. Come back at 8:15,

220please. >> Mhm. >> Get ourselves into closed session. All right, let me just make sure I see or a lot of you. Do we have quorum? I'm going to I got to Yeah, we got quorum. Um and I know Board member Savion, I mean, Board member Castro, Board member Maldrow, and it looks like uh Vice President Pearson are also online. Thank you. All right, I'm going to read the motion. I move that the Board of Education go into closed session pursuant to Wisconsin State Statute sections 19.851 a, f, and G 118.125 and/or 120.13 1E for the purpose of reviewing disciplinary proceedings and decisions involving individual students. Second. All right, thank you. It's been seconded by board member Vandermuelen. All right, we'll do a quick roll call vote. Board member Saravo, your vote to go to

221the closed session. Aye. Board member Mosier Beltram. Aye. Board member Vandermuelen. Aye. Uh board member Castro. Aye. Board member Maldrow. Aye. Um Vice President Pearson. Aye. Okay.