04/11/2022 MMSD Board of Education Operations Work Group

001um still letting people in okay we are on all right thank you bob hello everybody and welcome to the april 11 2022 meeting of the operations work group have no public input today and we have no minutes to approve today so i'm going to jump right into the meeting um today's meeting has two agenda items or two major business items the first one is our final budget conversation before the budget book is released at the april regular meeting later this month um we're kind of on the cusp but a shift in our approach to the budget at this point we're moving from providing recommendation into how the budget is built to a phase where we're gathering public input and tweaking the budget according to the things we hear so tonight is really important because it

002is the night when we can provide additional input into the content of the budget and we're going to do that with a focus on excellence and equity items after that we're going to have a short update on the employee handbook and that is the business we're going to cover dr jenkins before we launch into this conversation do you have anything you want to say to set the stage yes most definitely first of all thank you uh support member carrozzi we are all going to be definitely uh missed by you and your presence at these meetings and these fun tasks and just really focus on our children our children are always at the center of the work that we're trying to do with our budget and you see that reflected in our discussion tonight but we

003continue to be open we try to make sure that we can do whatever we need to do our scholars but also for our staff and give the best to our community each and every time i'm very proud of the fact that we've been able to focus on some of our key items uh looking at whole day 4k as we have been class sizes as we have doing those things to continue to assist us in being a state leader in terms of when we talk about our graduation rates and students i mean continuing on to college as well in this budget we're focusing on those equity things knowing our own history and trying to just be better each and every day and i think uh when you hear from our cfo tonight you'll be very proud

004of the fact i'm completely proud of the fact that we're trying to continue to accelerate learning to be fiscally responsible as we do it but also take care of some of those things that we know historically just have not gone well for us in our district so thank you for giving me that opportunity thank you dr jenkins um good comments and um good way to help us stay focused as we discuss excellence and equity in our budget um before we launch into the budget conversation i just want to set the stage for that conversation um first of all decision points that the board should be aware of as we talk the first one is that at the end of the month at the regular meeting we're going to be voting on um debt defeasance and

005our referendum bond issue so those are some votes we're going to be taking soon we are also at the end of june of course going to be voting on the draft preliminary budget and the conversations we're having tonight will shape that budget so please be aware of that cadence as we as we move ahead with these conversations to structure the budget we're going to begin as we often do with a conversation about revenue and our revenue forecast we'll talk some more about our strategy for closing the budget gap and um we're going to dig a little bit more deeply into our future funding outlook because given the the state of what the state is doing for public education we have to be cognizant that the decisions we're making now are going to impact budgets two

006three four years down the road when they could be difficult so that will be part of how we set the stage we're going to break there for any questions about revenue we're then going to move into a conversation about our excellence in equity projects we're going to do a deep dive this will include both um repurposed operating funds which is honestly right now a very small part of the excellence in equity budget and then we're going to talk about esser two and three which is non-recurring funding that we are in many ways dedicating to excellence and equity um esser is the biggest investment i believe that mmsd has ever made into equity projects um we're tonight considering 39.8 million in investments that's a lot to cover in one night keep in mind that esser is

007federal grant funding and the purpose is to prevent prepare for and respond to covet 19. so this is restricted funding this is not unrestricted funding this is a grant with a purpose and how we spend that money has to be in alignment with that stated purpose for code for us or funds and finally to reiterate it is one-time funding um it will expire in september 2024 and it will be supporting us through the next two academic years and then it will end so those are all things to keep in mind as we talk about esser not unrestricted funding and it expires 20.4 school year ends during this conversation there are several things for the board to consider the first one is do these equity and excellence investments towards our vision values and goals as a

008district um i'd like for at this point for folks to raise any concerns they have about the proposed spending that's being put before us as well as any ideas you might have that aren't reflected in the proposal that we're about to see this is the time to raise those things because as we get closer to the june budget vote it will get harder to make changes um i'd like everyone to try to keep in mind that we did do extensive public input on how we spend esser and the proposal that's being put forth today reflects what the public told us about their priorities and finally we need to think about when we are being asked to fund ongoing expenses with esser funds how we're going to continue funding those expenses beyond the life of the

009sr grant so that's a big chunk of information we will pause to talk about equity and excellence investments and then we will finally go into budget allowances the stock do list and the tax levy forecast for the coming year before we cover final discussion ross that was a lot and um at this point i will hand it over to you and thank you so much for putting together this um extensive presentation and taking everything i just outlined which sounds incredibly complicated and making it both understandable and streamlined thank you for that chris um you took most of my talking points we could just stop there but i know we're not going to but let me get my slides up here and we'll follow the outline that you very generously set up for me okay everyone

010can see this all right okay let me get my screen set up here so as we do with all of our operations workers meetings on the budget we want to ground ourselves in our three goals that we use when we're setting when we're doing all our budget discussions that every child is on track to graduate ready for college career and community the district and every school in it is a place where children and staff and families thrive and african american children and youth excel in school our budget planning approach is a cyclical process where we establish our goals and guiding principles we create our revenue forecasts assumptions and projected enrollment and use these to create a develop and develop a base baseline staffing plan which we then use to determine our compensation strategy determine how

011we're going to fund our district's excellence and equity projects and finalize our health care and benefit negotiations as items in this list change we revisit and circle back to the start of this process to make sure that everything is still in alignment as we move forward so our objectives for tonight uh is a lot to talk about we were going to finalize our development of the 2223 proposed budget i'm going to give everyone a brief overview once again just to ground ourselves on the 2223 budget factors and future revenue outlook given state factors we know and have been living through for the past couple of years um a overview of the excellence in equity project investments for 2223 a review of our required budget allowances and our stop do list for the next year and

012finally tax impact projections in our budget timeline we are nearing the point where we have are about to release the preliminary budget proposal at the end of the month uh we're currently putting the editing and finishing touches on that books to make sure that we have everything ready for that meeting to have all board members digest that information as much as possible for that discussion and shortly after that on the 25th in the beginning of may we'll start the community feedback phase of the draft budget and start the amendment process with the board internally our goals and guiding principles are what we've been developing for the past couple of months to distribute our equity distribute equitable use of resources to support our students with highest needs utilize our equity tool for our decision making uh

013and for our guiding principles our allocate resources in line with our district core values aimed at our greatest impact on our district's strategic framework goals maintain a multi-year long-range perspective on all of our revenue and investments and work to operate and maximize our operational efficiencies to ensure stability in schools during a time of great uncertainty and of course build on our practices that are showing data supported promises for the future so i want to start tonight by going back over some of the information we've discussed at previous meetings identifying that the last couple of years we've seen a significant change in our enrollment at um and our three year rolling average is in a downward uh decline at this point for next year based on the enrollment projections that the board saw last november we're

014projecting approximately 150 students uh will be down again for the 22-23 school year but as you can see that three-year membership average is going down at a much higher rate than 150 because that average is based on the changes over three years as you would expect and that in the year we're currently planning for we have just about six million dollars to do some intentional planning around how we fund our district priorities and continue operations uh the important thing on this slide that i want to keep reiterating with this group is that annual changes in revenue limit is tied directly to the operating referendum that we passed in 2020 and the non-recurring exemptions that we've been forced to utilize for declining enrollment and hold harmless again these are one-time exemptions that the um the state

015budget allows us within our planning purposes but each year those one-time exemptions are removed and they're not they're not able to be reinstated so we're using a lot of one-time money not only because of esser but because of the operational resources and the funding formula that we're given uh we will continue to experience uh declining enrollment in and these fluctuations in our enrollment is going to continue to have a significant impact on our exemptions and our planning purposes until that number starts to stabilize thinking long term we know that back in as early as december and january we identified that in our first pass of the budget planning for next year that a gap of 2.6 million dollars was identified just operationally for our planning purposes and one of the strategies we're using in this

016budget that'll be coming up at the end of april is a debt defeasing strategy for some of our non our non-referendum debt which is also called fund 38 in school finance we have three years remaining on an issue about nine point or nine million dollars paying off this debt early will allow us to balance some of our budget priorities for 2223 now and we'll also affect the operating revenue for the next three years i want to spend a little bit of time also uh doing a deeper dive on our future funding outlook as you've heard me state several times over the last couple of months the current state budget produced a zero dollar movement in the revenue limit our primary source of revenue is a wisconsin school district when we combine this with significant downward

017shifts and enrollment our future revenue outlook is very diminished because of non-recurring exemptions being generated for declining enrollment and hold harmless unfortunately on top of this we've been using a lot of one-time resources for inc out of increased investment from state and federal resources and that's uh the question is now before us as as we move forward with this budget book about how we sustain programming under with our operational dollars while also intentionally planning with a lot of these one-time resources that we know we only have for very limited time as we go through the excellence and equity project list tonight i want to acknowledge that this is a very long list and there's a lot of information that the board some board members are seeing for the first time tonight um which is why

018as we go into that discussion later on this evening i want to highlight that the executive summary that will be in the april budget book we accelerated the formatting of that document for this discussion this evening so that we weren't just looking at lists on a slide and that you have some more um kind of executive summary level information about where as respondent spending has been for the last couple of years what our spending to date has been for our first esser one two and gear awards that we've already received and how our planning is affected for 22 23 for esther 3 and beyond but i also want to highlight in this discussion that as we think about how we're using these one-time investments to move the district forward and put a lot of services

019in the hands of our students and our staff to recover from what we all experienced during the pandemic that everything we're putting forward in this plan tonight is designed to be a surge strategy to get necessary resources in place as we wait for more information on the 2325 state by year budget process another thing i want to keep bringing back up with this group is how unstable public educational funding actually has been over the last decade almost more than a decade at this point since the beginning of uh implementation year of act 10. the current biennial budget process for as you can see from this graph has had a zero zero in change in our per-pupil revenue limit and per people categorical aid changes these have been the primary sources of revenue for school districts

020for the last 10 years and having another year tied for the lowest increase in the last um 10 years has made planning very difficult and finally i want to give you a little bit of a crystal ball look into the future uh the last six years uh so we pause for a second what you're looking at here is a very simple graph of what our revenue limit total has looked like over the last six years and potentially over the next four years over the last six years trajectory has been very positive in a period of growth for msd because of increases in enrollment and revenue limit authority due in no small factor to the fact that we've had two successful operating referendums one in 2016 and one in 2020 uh however due to the pandemic

021and the experience declining enrollment for this district what this is showing is that our revenue limit even with what we have in place today is going to slow down considerably even if we have a modest return to what we would normally call regular revenue limits in future state budgets so the line here begins to diverge after the 22-23 budget year which we're planning for right now the orange line shows the history and the potential future if we had a revenue limit per pupil increase of 150 dollars per pupil based on projected enrollment we have right now and existing investments in the revenue limit if we were to get a zero dollar per pupil in the next two budget cycles we now have to look at that blue line the reason i bring this up is

022because the the landscape of k-12 funding has changed considerably during cobit and unless we see some consistency from the state in regards to future state budgets either one of these lines could be real and the growth we're seeing or decrease we're seeing in these lines would show considerable challenges in our abilities to balance and plan for future state budgets [Music] so with that i want to pause here before we go into our next discussion to see if there's any initial comments or questions about information so far i'm still muted okay for everyone and out there as well as in here what exactly is our current blood balance at sorry i was telling you um the fun balance we ended up last year um going for memory i don't have my notes in front of me

023is approximately 16 17 and what is our limit just curious our current board policy states that we are striving for a fund balance between 10 and 15 that's all i have to ask okay other comments or questions at this point um if not ross i have one um and that is actually i have two the first one is um based on the the two curves you just showed us do you feel like at this point you can give us like a ballpark of what our dollar figure of our budget gap could be next year um under either those scenarios either with a zero dollar people increase or people increase sure so in year one of those curves um it's again we're talking a little bit of a crystal ball dependent on what could change drastically

024in the next state budget we don't know but either way the growth in that first year is one of the smallest increases we would ever see in the revenue limit even if it wasn't under declining enrollment we would have significant challenges not only funding our existing operations but any ability to plan for new or differentiated operations that would not be part of one-time funding uh would be considerable i i don't want to put a specific dollar amount out into the the room today because depending on what could happen over the next 18 months about um just i we know that there's a significant staffing shortages in education right now already we may be looking at significant strategic budget realignment just to um plan for 2324. so really under either scenario either we get more people

025funding or we don't we're looking at difficult budgets is that correct and safe to say that is safe to say my second question is just about the under levy um last year did that under levy end up helping us this year yes and no because we have such considerable non-recurring exemptions in the last couple of years due to not only just declining enrollment but other state required payments for things like voucher schools under levy does not carry over automatically until you exceed the total amount of those non-recurring exemptions last year we under levied about 2.5 million dollars mostly because our change in enrollment generated that double exemption for declining enrollment hold harmless i've mentioned several times and at the time i did not think it was prudent or responsible to ask the board to levy

026for funding that we hadn't been balanced in the budget to at this point so while it did provide room under the tax levy last year to certify our with our existing budget it didn't create carryover in the strict sense of how we normally call it carryover what we got this year though was a repeat declining enrollment exemption that coincidentally was similar to what we under levied last year it was still a one-time exemption though that makes sense thanks anything else before we move on chris did i see your hand yep yeah thank you and thank you ross for um these slides kind of bringing it all together for us i'm just wondering if you can explain a little bit more the whole harmless and declining enrollment um and how it works to allow us i'm

027thinking about it in a different way that it allows us in a controlled way to contract our budget if needed so that we're not having to do it it's not so volatile year to year without being pre be able to predict that is that an accurate way of explaining or can you explain it a little more sure so in a nutshell the declining enrollment exemption is given to school districts whenever your change in your prior year three year average and your upcoming three-year average shows a decline in students and in a quote-unquote normal situation where school districts would be able to plan their revenue limits around these changes a declining enrollment exemption would be a signal to start reducing costs elsewhere in the budget because you know that that exemption won't be available to you

028next year that would be one issue we could solve for without a lot of you know pain what the doubling up though is happening is that the hold harmless exemption specifically is given to districts whenever the entirety of the revenue limit calculation the base revenue limit calculation shows a reduction from one year to the next and because we're looking at a zero zero those two exemptions end up looking almost identical on paper so it should be triggering another discussion to do a reduction in operational spending that's true right now though with the state putting more money into one-time investments outside the revenue limit we're almost being forced to entertain doing a lot of operational work with those one-time resources but it's definitely fair to say we need to be paying a lot closer attention to

029how these one-time exemptions are going to affect our future budget planning right thank you for explaining that and um back to that slide the last slide that you had in that graph with the the orange line and the blue line um just looking at that i mean to me when you when you look at not this upcoming budget we're working on right now but the next one where it's it's not that much of a difference even if we get that per people increase um it just it really makes me realize that we really have to proceed cautiously with what we're adding to the budget that's going to be recurring going forward that is fair thank you oh roz we've talked about declining enrollment for a while now particularly given decrease in birth rate 2019 was

030the lowest birth rate year since 1987 and those students entered kindergarten in 2024 um so this trend isn't going anywhere in terms of increase in enrollment i'm wondering if you can talk through how an expansion of full day 4k or a renegotiation of resources uh to expand you know who all we're offering school to shifts the the conversation we're having about decrease in enrollment basically i'm asking by adding additional 4k students do we push in some of the blow that we see um in terms of loss of enrollment and is that part of how we navigate our loss of enrollment long term i would say it does i mean i can't speak about the academic uh importance of full day 4k there are much more people that are qualified in this call to speak to

031that piece of it but i do feel that our existence and you know pushing forward with a full day for pay program is not only innovative it is also a valid strategy to identify where we could try and get some of these students back maybe not the students that have already you know proceeded through 4k are now in our higher grades but to make msd more attractive especially to younger families on how they can not only get us into a full day full-day program in msd but uh allow the parents to do some better planning during the day too knowing that their children have a full day program to come to and ross this is a question that i think might take a little bit of time and teamwork to answer so no no worries

032if you can't answer it right now like as we see a decrease in enrollment particularly at the elementary school level do we have space for full day 4k programs that maybe we didn't have when we uh initially started to pursue 4k as an option for families so yeah that i'm sorry i didn't interrupt you go ahead no is there greater capacity within our buildings um to support full day 4k and what does that build out and strategy around that look like anecdotally i can say yes uh due to changes in enrollment and shifts in our regular grade level sections some buildings that were struggling to find a full day four day class full day 4k classroom has been a little bit easier this year but um if we do return to enrollment numbers from prior

033years it would be become a capacity issue again not just for full day 4k but for all grade level programs at those schools and it would need to be part of a much larger discussion about how we do facility planning going forward thank you so much for speaking to that and i think you know really looking to what we're doing to support bringing students into the district um especially as there's nothing we can do about about birth rates although i have three kids and i feel like i've done my part rossi of four so you've done yours i do i think you know really looking at how how we both expand up opportunities and bring students into the district but also strengthen the integrity of the academic supports we're offering to students um i hope

034are the are the solutions we're looking to and i appreciate the investment we've made again this year and full day 4k i want to thank dr jenkins for his leadership in this board um for your leadership because i do think a strategic way to address so many of the issues we're confronted with right now thanks ali that was actually an excellent segue into excellence and equity but i want to make sure nobody else has questions or comments before we do that nikki i see your hand again yes um one more question on the fund balance i know for as ali just explained um we've had aquatic enrollment for a long time is there a way to get a list two questions one to get a list of which schools are facing the biggest drop in

035enrollment and how and how much of a drop that is that we're predicting is that possible and why oh sorry go ahead please my initial answer to that would be the best source we have is the enrollment projections that the board were given back in november which signal kind of the trending in those areas and they are by building in grade level okay i uh do you have the data i'll find it i'll find it i'll find it i save everything um and my uh second question is i know we're not supposed to use one-time funding on staff but being that we are five percent over and i understand the need to be conservative budget wise my question is this how long can we be conservative budget wise and still keep our teachers our staff

036our sca's who are leaving for other districts how do we remain competitive okay i'm sorry nikki can you clarify which question you'd like me to answer um one can we start using some of our fund balance or to benefit our tea our schools school school teachers school working environments school seas behavioral assistance and those in the classroom one and then two how are we going to stay competitive in this market my initial reaction to that is i think a lot of when we talk about use of one-time funding for things like compensation we've done a lot this year to show some appreciation for staff and uh regards to some of our bonus structures and we can certainly have discussions about future bonus structures again i would still exercise caution about using any one-time funding for

037recurring purposes as i know we've discussed many times as a board in regard to appreciation and retention of staff it is an ongoing challenge for not just madison but multiple school districts across the entire country to keep people in the profession i don't want to put ourselves against our neighbors in regards to which organization is better to work for but it is certainly a focus of this district to try and show appreciation to our teachers and focus on our retention strategies moving forward i appreciate that thank you ross yeah thank you so much nick for your question i think we did we have talked a little bit before about um the reserves and so i wanna i wanted to get back to that ross a little bit and we might remind us again we are

038at 16 percent and our board process is 10 to 15 is that is that right that is our current policy yes uh and we are at 16 correct i don't have the exact numbers in front of me but i believe it's between 16 and 17 based on last year's final yes um [Music] in a scenario that we use let's see if we're 17 in a scenario that we use three percent to still be within our policy and be able to to be flexible with that three percent to move into other areas of our budget uh what is what does that look like what are some of the benefits and what are some of the risks and i don't know nikki i i i'm trying to pick back on some uh your question i'm trying to

039also formulate a question that can kind of give us a little bit of a scenario so if i understand the question correctly what would three percent of our fund balance look like and what what dollar amount would that be to for consideration of other uh priorities yeah i mean not only just the dollar amount necessarily the mathematical perspective but more of also like what are some of the the implications the the unintended consequences to be at the limit for the limit of our policy so i'm gonna i'm gonna answer that question i i might add to it if that's okay um based on our current totals for year end last year three percent of our fund balance would be approximately 2.5 million dollars when we talk about fund balance though it's it's yet another source

040of one-time funding you can call it leftovers you can call it a piggy bank i don't like either of those labels but as we're talking through what phone balance actually is what we're doing is we're actually reducing the cash position of the district at a point in time a lot of people when they talk about fund balance think that it is a school checkbook that the district is sitting on that can be accessed at any time during the year for a myriad of purposes i think we all understand that this is one-time funding i'm not suggesting we don't but i do want to go back to what fund balance is in in an accounting concept versus what people perceive it as fund balance as we talk about it in the budget book and in our

041year-end financials is a point in time specifically the end of our fiscal year on june 30th of a given year and it represents the um uh cash position of the district at that time what's not on display though is that that that value does not mean that that that dollar amount is available on july 30th august 30th september 30th etc because as you may recall every year or on september we do what's called a short-term borrowing and when we do that we're borrowing money on a 12-month basis because of the way our major sources of revenue are generated as a district we have our tax levies which we levy to the municipal clerks we all pay our tax bills at the end of january so the primary source of revenue we receive we don't get

042in our fiscal year until seven months into the year on top of that you've got state aid other districts that are more state aid heavy versus tax levy heavy might receive a portion of their eight payment in the fall but they're still not going to get their tax payments in january reason i bring this up is because when we talk about cash position we talk about fund balance we're really talking about one point in time in a year because we know that we're always behind by the time we get three four months into the school year we are essentially cash poor before the school year even starts and if we were to do those short term borrowings we would have nothing to work with so yes we have high cash positions we have low cash

043positions but we're federally and state level required to report our fund balance at a specific point in time at year end i only bring that up for context because i want to make sure that when we talk about fund balance it's not perceived as a dollar amount that sits in an account somewhere no i really appreciate you adding on because it really illustrated uh the mathematics of it and how we position ourselves for the upcoming budget always from this place of borrowing i feel like i can translate a lot of that to my college student daughter that does not understand that the cash that we have in the bank is not to be used uh extensively so thank you so much appreciate it sure so ross i really appreciate um your explanation of fund balance

044in this conversation um one piece of our fund balance policy says that when our fund balance goes above that 15 or below the 10 floor um it's the board's role to actually have a conversation about how we're going to get back into alignment with the policy and we haven't had that conversation yet so i'm wondering when that discussion of strategy in this current budget the 20 um 22-23 budget in terms of fund balance and trying to like get our fund balance back in alignment with policy when are we going to have that conversation i don't think we have it on a future agenda yet we can certainly start that discussion in may if the board prefers uh some of the strategies that we're employing um each year when we talk about assigned fund balance is

045one way to do that type of intentional planning but if there are other areas in project work that we want to highlight as a group we can certainly agenda is that in a future operations work group that's that's totally fine i think it would be super helpful in may to um both get an update on where we're at with assignment fund balance and then also talk a little bit about you know for a couple years we've been out of alignment with the policy and it is the board's role to try to figure out how to get back in alignment so i think having a conversation about that in may to start that discussion i know the final decisions about fund balance aren't made until the october budget vote right but i think we need to

046get thinking about this early given that it's a trend that's been continuing um for a number of reasons including covent for a few years so right all right ali i do want to acknowledge that we're not necessarily noticed to have that conversation about our current budget but i do think it's relevant to consider the rate of inflation at this current moment and how we manage um kind of an unprecedented kind of unprecedented level of inflation um budget that is basically staying flat and how fun balance plays into that looking to next year um so ross i am curious is our fun balance currently part of our strategy in terms of addressing some of the reality of inflation and i know when we talk about inflation you talk about the recurring costs of labor but it's

047also you know the cost of materials and supplies um and a series of other you know one-time purchases that we can look to push in using fund balance i guess and so i'm curious how that factors into this coming budget sure so there haven't been any specific callouts for inflation uh using one-time funding in this budget in our required allowances we have some allowance some considerations for areas we know are likely to be significantly increased in future budgets namely cost of district insurance cyber security a lot of liability and property markets are going through the roof in addition we have transportation costs that are accelerating i think everyone can see what's happening at the pump right now and uh so operationally there's plans around that but historically this district has not given inflationary non-supply but

048i'm sorry supply budgets increase each year we reallocate based on resources that we've carried forward and we monitor if those resources are capable of sustaining those departments and school-level budgets with those amounts and if we determine in a year one year to the next if there is a significant adjustment needed we would bring those forward either as a strategic equity investment or as a required allowances depending on which area the budget it's in but to answer your question more specifically no i'm not putting anything in a signed fund balance today that addresses inflationary costs for next year thank you ross just a follow-up to that question um is there a difference between um addressing inflationary costs for ongoing expenses versus one-time expenses and is it appropriate to use fund balance for the latter but maybe

049not the former um yes i mean if there was a situation where we knew we had to uh upgrade a facility i'm trying to think off the top of my head upgrade a facility component that we know in a year from now might cost 20 percent more we could certainly do some investment to make that happen today as opposed to next year we may have to plan for a 20 price increase yeah that's exactly what i was thinking was facilities so thanks for that clarification anything else before we move into equity items all right ross thank you for all those great answers and let's move on all right so moving into our equity discussion i'm going to talk kind of while we go through a lot of these because i will warn everyone here this

050could be a very listy discussion if we were if i went through and read every item on this list but i do want to highlight first some of our operational change or operational adjustments in this budget that we did during our workbook process and purposely for reinvesting in our schools given our declining enrollment challenges we did do an expansion to our full-day 4k program providing additional five fte for classroom sections at our elementary schools we have targeted instruction supports for library media avid expansion at two of our high schools and credit recovery specifically at our high schools through repurposing of existing allocation in the workbooks we're also increasing social worker allocations through repurposing by adding another 9.4 fte in social work which i believe equates to about 0.2 at every school building during the workbook

051process and then planning for the future we made every attempt uh following discussions in in this board about uh establishing 10 additional fte for unallocated resources for needs for enrollment and programming fluctuations between now and the start of school and that's tied directly to another item later on in this list about our strategic budget realignment stop do list discussion so that brings us to um probably the one of the longer discussions tonight about our excellence in equity project investments for 22.23 i want to highlight in this discussion that since the beginning of our budget planning this year we knew based on the number of times i've said 0-0 to you all in the last couple of months that the majority of our project work is going to be accomplished and initiated through one-time funding and

052uh the administration has been engaging with the public our during our world cafe sessions and with the board some of our initial framing of how uh sr-3 and our other federal awards are to be planned for the coming years and tonight as we go through the schedule of excellence and equity projects um for consideration between now and the june vote i want to highlight two things one in the lists that are to come we have everything organized in the major five categories of the s or three award which is how we're supposed to categorize things in our grand application but um to make sure that there was a little more clarity on the number of projects the number of items we're looking at tonight number almost a hundred um i did want to highlight again

053that we provided the um a draft version of the executive summary for esther spending that will be appearing in the appendix of the budget book that we'll be receiving later this month that gives not only the same dollar amounts and investment pieces that's going to be in the following slides but kind of a brief description of each item as we as we go through this list so again i want to reiterate that everything we're looking at here reflect a surge strategy in staff goods and services that we have to plan for now to be expired at the end of the esser awards we have two esser awards that we're going to be including in our planning for next year and for 23.24 we have the remainder of esser2 which we started utilizing in the current

054school year and the entirety of the sr3 award for 2223-2324 to clarify this is the second and third major federal award for covert relief that we've received as a school district uh the first couple awards were esser and gear those those spending on those grants have to be concluded by september of 2022 this year sr2 must be concluded by september of and esther three must be concluded by september of 2024 then so the following schedule is going to be presented by major astro grant categories for organizational purposes and again before we move on i want to highlight what those five areas are i don't have them on a slide for us to discuss although i can peek at the next slide just to get us started i do want to go through a brief overview

055of what the five buckets are again and kind of give you an explanation of how we've been asked to categorize these in the grant application alphabetically uh the first is addressing long-term school closure so this is probably a bit of a nebulous descriptor when we think about how to categorize this in a grant application but it was initially used when esther first came out to categorize any cost generated when a normal in-person education system is interrupted such as temporary closures temporary virtual programming or dedicated hybrid models since the pandemic went much further than any of us expected addressing long-term school culture has really started to mean and be inclusive of activities to develop implement innovative approaches to providing instruction accelerate learning and mitigate the effects of unfinished learning for students most impacted by covid so

056it's it's fair to say this is kind of the catch-all in this organ in this grouping but it's certainly still important when we talk about how we're going to address the needs of our students under cobit the second is educational technology this one's a bit more self-explanatory purchasing educational technology and resources to to students for students who are being served by the school district for facilitation of again either online lurking or learning or discontinued learning in general third is mental health services and supports that's fairly evident for mental health contracted services staff and support services fourth is outreach and service delivery to special populations this is also somewhat evident in that its activities to address the unique needs of low-income children or students english learners racial and ethnic minorities students experiencing homelessness foster care youth

057etc and finally preparedness in response to covet 19. this is more of a preparatory categorization in the grant application but this is more tied with how do we keep the buildings clean coordination response efforts to prepare for and respond to what would happen in the event of an outbreak purchasing ppe health education services staff etc while we're on this one i also highlight that we have the ability to have a other category in the grant application for either project management or indirect costs associated with running these these grants as chris mentioned at the very beginning this is the single largest group of federal awards the district has ever had to manage and as you you may recall from last month when we talked about our early approval strategy there are a number of services and

058positions that we're looking to fill for the coming year to make sure that we can not only adequately continue to plan for esser awards but spend them appropriately within the grant guidelines so that brings us back to what's on the pages before you again i do want to highlight that in the company with the board materials tonight we did provide that executive summary and first i want to go through what investments we're planning on sr2 or there i should say the remainder of s or two for 2223 many of these projects are projects that we initiated either this year or at the very beginning of covid back in march of 2020 and as we go through these these slides i've identified where possible anywhere there's a project on this list with an asterisk indicating that

059it's either a continuation of a project started in 2122 or that it was included in the march approve early approvals from last month so for sr2 under addressing long-term school closure we have our continuation of big ideas campaign our new teacher mentor project and the summer arts academy for educational technology we are looking to do some additional assessment chromebooks for some of our planning for ap coursework and continuation of our digital navigator position and our plan for data plans and hot spots for students and then finally continuation of the building services project manager to assist with items through reimagined classrooms and our big ideas campaigns under outreach and services for special populations we have continuation of a multilingual program and service coordinator this is actually half the position that we established during the current year

060and for preparedness in response to covert 19 again continuation of some of the custodial and cleaning supports we enacted this year as well as our health services plan that we discussed during early approval last month and the continuation and finalization of our reimagined classrooms campaign from the current year next moving on to sr3 these are where there's going to be a significant number of new investments that that either we discussed in brief and through some of our early approvals but many of these are going to be new for us to discuss tonight this includes a number of assessment opportunities for things like achieve 3000 i know over the past several months we've had discussions around act and academic preparation we have some additional mental health i'm sorry not mental health supports that's coming up later

061we have additional investments in building level credit recovery to go beyond was already authorized in the school staffing workbooks and again as a surge strategy there's some additional opportunities for secondary programming for culinary arts spaces which is an accompanying piece to our facilities referendum as part of our cte department some creation of some surge positions for experiential learning and transportation for students to attend off-site programming some of the discussions we've had in the last couple of weeks especially an instructional work group around our kfi literacy adoption as part of this plan as well closing out the remainder of the addressing long-term school closure there are some secondary program offerings going through office of u3 engagement our madison promise acceleration for um additional positions and coursework for the coming year um there's going to be emerging

062discussions around some middle school literacy and social studies curriculum adoption that is forthcoming that we're going to be discussing as well as some communication efforts for getting some of our students into some spaces to do podcast and live stream video production work as part of additional not only mentorship but potential internship opportunities under educational technology we're continuation of some of the software platforms we're using extensively including right now for things like seesaw for some of our younger grade levels as well as zoom and we're making some reservations for technology replacement for all the new devices we've been using under virtual instruction and ongoing zoom usage to facilitate anything that may have been broken or damaged during that time leading into mental health services at supports many of these items um were addressed in some of

063our discussions last month on early approvals around bhs and um other programs that the district has already been utilizing for things like bounce back and we're doing some expansion into things like violent bilingual health mental health specifically a navigator position an expansion of social emotional learning and sel curriculum and also some other positions and services and supports tied to mental health for this summer for professional development for staff and specifically things like a mental health program manager and a psychologist floater that we're going to be using for to address some of the vacancies that we have throughout the district rounding out what's on this list for mental health we have again some more early approvals from last month but additional tier 2 sel developers for the coming year restored us more restorative justice coordination specifically

064for capital and shabazz and under the other project management category some these were all items on the approval from last early approval list from last month some of the project management and grants account and compliance issues that we are looking to secure for the next year under outreach and special services for special populations we're going to have specific focus on bilingual recruitment of staff mentoring programs for high school girls language screener outsourcing to do some more of our onboarding for staff and students some translation support opportunities for some of our existing materials as well as facilitation of testing etc and finally under preparedness in response to cobit 19 we are making a reserve of 15 million dollars for targeted hvac remediation for those buildings that are on the lowest tier of our building condition report

065that we've been working through for the last several years before we move on to discussion i do want to highlight two other areas that are other ones one-time sources of funding that we're doing planning around right now the first is the governor's award that we received after budget approval this year that amount was around 3.5 million dollars that was given to madison metropolitan school district other school districts around the state received a similar award but it was all proportional to the size of the district so one of the items that we're going to be assigning out of fund balance this year because we have not planned for the money we've already received for the governor's award is approximately 1.68 million dollars of that award at this time specifically for work in caroline stanford taylor's department

066around equity diversity equity and inclusion i'm sorry equity diversity i i'm going to try that one more time engagement diversity equity and inclusion and other programming for things like multicultural student summit and additional black excellence funding and finally there's a specific call out in the american rescue plan for homeless funding working with their state and federal department right now for additional housing navigation for homeless students as well as contracts for unaccompanied youth engagement so that was a massive massive list and i know i went through that very quickly however i know there's a number of my colleagues here tonight that we might want to have a dialogue about some of the items on this list i strongly encourage you to refer to that executive summary for any high-level information about some of those projects but

067at this point um chris we can open it up for some initial discussion about the information that we just went through can you stop sharing for a second so we can yeah thank you thanks ross um yeah let's open this up for discussion are there questions comments ali yeah so i want to talk a little bit about how we're using sr funding to support uh assessment evaluation of student skills and also high stakes testing um one of our largest investments is about a million dollars in act prep um i've been really clear that i think that we're going to invest in act trump we should be investing in our own workforce's ability to provide it in our schools to students for academic credit i have listened to folks talk about the things they're really concerned

068about over the last few months in terms of the pandemic and mental health rises to the top and yet our greatest investment um doesn't seem to be located there and so i am you know curious uh in terms of the the research i've been exposed to high stakes testing is not beneficial to the mental health of our young people um people have been really critical of the amount of assessment our students have experienced after returning um from you know virtual school why why is that investment our priority who's advocating for it and how have we heard from the community and if i don't have a student who is looking to take the act soon right so for our elementary school students our middle school students how does an investment that large benefit our entire community

069okay i could start with that and then ms green can come in and talk a little bit about our plan first of all i think that's a great question for us to be happy here at the table this is why we want to talk about some of these critical investments we have and we have been talking about the act and other high stakes testing more that still get a critical mass of our students will to continue to participate in these high stake testing knowing that through the pandemic we have had two degree some of our losses in learning in terms of preparation and it's caused an increase in anxieties from a number of students regardless of their socio-economic background um their race or whatever experiences out in the schools and helping the staff talk with

070students and just knowing and looking around us knowing the local levels are also national level that students have a great anxiety when it comes to test taking test taking preparation has also been uh shown to reduce anxieties from students even testimony from our own students who have been participating in the initial uh preparation and the screen can talk a little bit more about it because she's been working on the ground with the students with the staff as we're doing this and our whole goal is not the students we're going to become great test takers but it's a matter of fact they're going to be exposed to this level of assessment we want to do everything that we can to reduce the anxieties and giving the best opportunities possible to be up under these being exposed

071to these assessments and reducing anxiety at the same time so mr sure thank you dr jenkins and thank you president mulder for the question i uh we'll just add on to what dr jenkins already said um i think the the point that you asked first about our own workforce that is part of our plan and this summer we have uh well actually let me back up right now this spring we have staff that are participating as learners in uh the courses that are running after school and virtually in order for those individuals to be um potential teachers uh moving into next school year where we can run this course during the day we simultaneously are offering that as an opportunity for our own teachers this summer uh through the um offerings that we will have

072both under the summer school structure as well as at um some identified community sites so i hope that addresses kind of the staff piece we definitely want to build um our own internal capacity so that this is something that we are taking on and that we are running on our own um in the future in terms of the part around test preparation i think dr jenkins mentioned most of this but the one thing that i would add that i think is a very important component is that uh for about half of our students that attend post-secondary immediately they attend madison college and one of the criteria for students to enter into credit bearing courses and programming at madison college that does not require kind of those uh what used to be called remedial courses or

073prerequisite courses is that students have a particular benchmark score in the areas of english reading and mathematics so while uh this preparatory program is um about uh not just academic skill building reducing anxiety it is about uh preparation in order to have students perform well on the assessment uh whether they are going into a post a secondary institution that requires it or for those that are going into madison college and based on those scores as you know students sometimes have to pay for courses that are non-credit bearing courses and the research also tells us that the more non-credit-bearing courses students take the less likely they are to persist through and have a degree completion so i feel like that is a very important component of why we see this as a strategy that is beneficial

074for our students and um an opportunity to see where we can embed this into our regular school day um as a more universal approach for students moving forward that's one last thing to add to that we are looking at other alternatives outside of just assessment as we realize our society colleges are looking at blockchain performance which are not necessarily based upon students with acts so it's some kind of mix happening even amongst the college community and we want to respect that as well so we're looking at other alternatives for our students applying for college and what we can look at the local level i just come from a conference and this was a part of our discussions how do we continue to use act and yet prepare for some colleges looking at the opportunity through

075this whole pandemic piece of how they can begin to look at other criteria other donation team so both yeah so i am a fan of moving away from the act that act has been a gatekeeper to education for a lot of students for a long time and i think i really appreciate cindy youth keeping to the sustainability of this investment in terms of empowering our own teachers to provide act and sat prep within our schools i think that um you know to me that is is a major factor in my ability to vote for this kind of investment and so looking at that i'd like just a little bit more detail about how many of our teachers um will be able to go through this training um and how many of our teachers will be

076providing act or sat prep during the school day yeah so um i can't give you details on that right now what i can tell you is our teachers um for summer semester overall are in the application kind of phase right now people are signing up for summer based on the interest there will be kind of our first guesstimate as to how many staff will be able to train over the summer if we don't have staff through that process i think there's other ways we can think about the training of staff we have right now currently going through it with our after school opportunities about four staff people that are learning alongside for next school year we've talked a lot about kind of thinking about second semester as uh the place to run this course knowing

077that some course scheduling has already happened uh we've also had conversations with a few people in terms of thinking about where it might be better to do first semester but we're just not sure that um based on course scheduling and everything else that is possible um so i know that's not a direct answer but some of that information is coming in right now as we see who's signing up for summer semester um and once we have those numbers i can give you a more accurate account to answer that question yes what i would say is what i'm hoping for is that we have specific goals around providing this and having educators provide that um and that in making this investment we are moving towards achieving those goals um i feel like having kind of a

078we'll wait and see like the interests that teachers have in this and then see whether or not this program is sustainable or is available at all of our high schools um is is hard yeah i guess that creates an additional need for for information moving forward so hopefully we can be updated on that um and then i think the thing that hasn't really been spoken to is how the community or students themselves have advocated for act prep as one of their priorities because i'm just going to be pretty clear here that's not what i've heard from community members i've talked to a lot of people over the course of this pandemic and a ct prep has not come up as something that people are really hoping to invest in using us or funding so where

079is the community voice in this decision in this direction i'll just say again it's i've been involved with this whole discussion around activity for parts of time in our particular community coming in now knowing just taking on the pandemic and some of the anxieties of our students learning this is a big part of our re-engagement just in any assessment and learning altogether is something that we're having to try to figure out so many schools i'm talking to students i'm talking to staff quite regularly i try to put myself and be very available throughout amongst the community i am there in the community talking to people before we did this uh whole notion of trying to come back with the act prep that was kind of like the impetus of my discussion as i was leading

080up with our staff and talking about what can we do to make sure that our students are on par with their peers and not having these level of anxieties so i've sat with students that were fathered i've sat with students at west i've sat with students at east and talked to students at memorial about what are their future plans and what are the things that they're most afraid of and what things that they just don't feel totally clear about and they were just college a lot of students are not feeling the whole part students we typically felt like yeah college but they are afraid of taking their next steps so is that an exact science no throughout the years i try to get a pulse for what students are what staff are and i do

081know in my conversations even on a national level this is a huge issue for us for children accusing if we look at the data some students have opted out taking gap years and going to college they were not comfortable with taking this test and feeling like they would have had the appropriate spores which creates anxieties again right uh to go to the college of the choice so they're taking gap years and trying to be more prepared from that understanding so that's about the most and i talked to the staff and so i would say i have been wanting to be out right within leading it just giving our students every opportunity to be on par and be okay about their next steps in life is it perfect i don't think so that's why we also

082talk about looking at alternatives for students and looking for colleges not necessarily acquiring their act which in many college suspended basically during the pandemic for the class of 2020 we look at class of 21 we still have some colleges who have suspended it and as i'm talking to college rep it's coming back in many places but some places are still saying they're looking at other ways to um i'll say this i i i'm like and this will be my last comment on this issue is i i took act sat prep at east high school with doug fuel and one of the things he taught me about the acc is that it's created in iowa and the primary benef primary beneficiaries of that exam are the people who write it create it and sell it it

083is not meant to benefit the the learning of kids and it has had a detrimental impact particularly on students of color because of the cultural lens that is embraced within that test and so i i struggle with this level of investment um i i appreciate you know talking to the sustainable aspects of it um and i also hope that if we're you know using the act on one hand that we're also letting our students know who do not do well on this test or do not do well in high stakes testing period um that there are colleges that are looking for more than your act score um and so i hope that we're we're emphasizing that just as much and investing in that just as much as we're investing in this prop that's it for

084me for now i really appreciate your comments on that and there are students who are afraid of this whole act piece and we all uh from empirical evidence know that it is biased period and i think we have to acknowledge that but it's the bias that our students experience when they go off to universities as well and we're having our students participate throughout but i think start with your last comment uh students have value beyond nact and i always say that we have to take these assessment but the assessments are not more important than our students but we want to do everything that we can to make sure our students have the right frame of self-worth about them and their bigger tasks so thank you for raising those questions if you're able to include california

085state schools all right um ananda followed by chris thank you so much chris and thank you our president mojo for um both your sharp understanding around the impact of a ct and and highlighting uh the contrast of our our investments to uh something that's supportive of our students my comment uh i don't i don't know maybe dr jenkins maybe it's a question for you and and um you know as i'm looking at um ross's slides we have a pretty big list of uh strategies uh curriculum um new pro new typing new types of programming staff encompassing in this presentation for today what does it look like for us internally to be able to manage this gigantic lift in many many different areas and how are you envisioning the accountability to our community on those line

086items and i know appreciate cindy mentioning a lot of this is best estimate so you know we're the board and the community are gonna still get some updates but how are you envisioning this overall system of accountability of uh this large you know sort of really expensive and also broad buckets of work that you're trying to lift up at the same time yeah i think that's an excellent question when it's a part of what we've all been trying to respond to this whole idea of uh we've got this unprecedented situation of this pandemic trying to respond to it as best as we know how with these dollars that are one-time dollars in such a short period of time trying to get up to um the level of responding from everything that was listed from social

087emotional to the academics to the operations side of it because we're in the midst of this pandemic right and so we've taken our time to really say how do we pivot to address what we know have been historical academics how how do we take time to increase our mitigations uh and when i say take time we all know it hasn't been time you've been pivoting on the mark you know in the moment and still be very responsible not only just with your local and your state but also your federal dollars and so and as we've been going through it in any organization which has this flow everybody has to be involved with the decision making and setting the structures up to ensure that what we're anticipating and what we're hoping to come in terms of

088outcomes and first of all being very safe as we've been with endeavour and you ensure that learning there's a recalibration of the outcome so we've involved everybody in it and i think doesn't get time just different even in leadership where it's not top-down and it's not just bottom-up it's everybody in it co-creating it together and taking some responsibility uh i think we look at it from the student side of it the parent side staff the whole community we're all in this together so when we talk about the accountability piece it's a shared accountability at this particular point at the end of the day i think uh we have a role here in the board that's a little bit different in terms of kind of this back to the community i think the community understand as

089the world does we're really in a kind of shared accountability so in order to do that we have to change and we are trying to change the way that we get information in how we disseminate information out how we hold ourselves and how we hold others accountable yeah in a larger sense i mean this is a very complex question that you're saying in our response is much bigger than just money uh it's humanization that we have to bring into this community this level of complexity because too much of taking an approach at least has been like it's been in the past causes more social emotional mental health concerns we can't be so concerned about speed as we are carrying everyone safely to some degree of norms i think dr jenkins i was hoping for a

090little bit more of and it doesn't need to be flushed out because i know this is all fairly new and it's incoming is that what does it look what is your vision for looking at uh you know where there's some very small investments for example the sel mental health pd that is you know 15 000 and then the middle school literacy and social studies curriculum which is three million how how are you how are we balancing that from an accountability what is the accountability could look like for us uh in regards to the community i i get the philosophical aspect but is that coming through you know is there an accountability committee or is there a work group that's going to be looking at different parts are you embedding uh this sort of shared accountability

091throughout the different departments so there'll be uh the you know folks are responsible to be making sure that those investments are are relevant and they are yielding what we are intending for them to yield what is what is that how are you envisioning that accountability looks like and then how we then from that place are sharing with our community from from the zoom accounts that we use from the pd that we have invest all the way to the uh literacy and social studies curriculum this is this is how we are actualizing that okay and that's a great question thanks for that clarification too and i think for each one of them as you know this is because i'll take the ones that you're throwing out in terms of just one with the three million dollars

092we'll talk about the social studies and we can also look at our right now textbook adoption that we're going to go through our process first is as we've set out trying to make sure that this aligns to our mission and our vision of what we're trying to do we begin to accumulate our committees to begin to assess what is it that we need to do in terms of our next steps and in each one of those committees just like when you're talking about the textbooks it's going to come forth with recommendations we're hoping to get out to here at the board level and then we have to look out and say how we're going to go from everything from how we find the internet how are we going to roll it out the academics what

093we're going to do to communicate now and then how we're going to evaluate it at the end of the day and each one of those evaluations will have benchmarks how should we look you know two years now how should we look four years out how should we look six years out and continue to bring that back to the community through the community to the board reporting out in terms of where we are and each area that becomes it the hvac i think it was like 15 million dollars that we had only after that going through our plan the same thing doing all of our fees making sure that we have that that was a huge concern independently the air quality in our buildings and making sure that we get it implemented it as you heard

094when ross presented he said in our buildings based upon the ratings where we're starting at to ensure that we have quality that we need to have in those buildings that were rated at the high as the highest needs we started talking about the social emotional piece we had talked about our social workers adding social workers i think it was like 9.4 uh that were added on there and that's been a part of the conversations that we've had start the same way everything starts at what are the things that we need to do to address various things start at the community level start with our staff hearing from our community hearing from our students about things that they're saying we've heard students a number of times say addressing the mental health all those things like that

095start with the involvement of all the stakeholders getting the voices and it comes back and formulates itself in a plan it's not every day that you get 43 million dollars to do something like this and then to be told it has to be spent in a couple of years yes and you're really doing this and i would just have to say here honestly too when you get that kind of money and you say it's one-time money that's tough because the issues are beyond the one or two to three years that you have so it puts you in a position of your planning trying to combine these additional dollars without local dollars and what's going to happen between the two to three years so we're trying to look at how we change mindset how we shift

096our culture to be able to address some of these things beyond the time that we have but those one-time things let me say i'm not complaining about being able to afford 15 million dollars in hvac i'm not complaining about being able to buy textbooks eight million dollars textbook i'm not complaining about some of those things that we're being able to do and adding staff to address some of the things that we've been talking about uh but i am saying that we're going to have to continue to shift as we move along and i think accountability will come as we move out we all want to collectively look at it and see if we have to pivot again once these dollars rolled out with a local level and i think we started pivoting before uh the

097dollars run out we have to do that as a part of our plan right now yeah no thank you so much for the thinking and i i know it was a really big systems question i think my recommendation is to continue to think about how are you when is the pause to kind of really think about the massive undertaker that is taking in our staff and you know in in uh in the in their bodies of work uh so that they can they can reflect analyze on what is the what is the three-year you know uh thinking around that the investment but also what is the hard evidence that we have that this investment is um is the investment that we you know we're making this decision or we're making this plan that you know

098at the end of the year that's too a good idea um and then my last comment is i'm 100 mental health i really wish that you know at some point in the next year or two we get to the to the place where we have a very comprehensive mental health support for our students and that our staff actually feels like they are not picking and choose which students that they they're going to see based on whatever crisis they're coming um i know that we are uh oftentimes celebrating spring is coming some of us are you know wanted to be without mask but i honestly think that we still don't know what the consequences uh the emotional mental and physical consequences of this trauma that we have all some of us survived thank you so much

099dr jenkins thanks for the staff in particular uh the staff that is being impacted by this funding that can be such a blessing but it's also going to be an added uh and very different way to do to do work so thank you and i'll pass it back to you uh chair thank you um chris yeah thank you and um ross i just wanted to comment and thank you for providing the the executive summary that that does have these huge lists that will eventually go into our budget book um in the appendix to explain where all of this funding and what the projects are um i really like the idea of explaining the after funding as a surge strategy um that we are really working to get the services and things that we need in

100place to react to and address the pandemic related issues that we are facing um a couple of questions that i have are did we get the summary of the sr3 engagement sessions that you all did i know you spent a fair amount of time going out and talking to the community um did we receive those um i know we did an update to the board um after our world cafe sessions uh we can certainly get another update together and put out to be a weekly update i know the rni team has been compiling ongoing responses i can check in with them to see if we have another update we can provide okay that would be great thank you very much um and yeah just any type of feedback we can get from what the you

101know community is saying as we as we gather that ourselves um i i think one of the comments that i had to was um and questions is there are a lot of investments in the sr3 funding in curricula um there's four million for the early literacy curricula the k to five um but there's also three million for the middle school literacy and social studies curriculum and 500 000 for ell language supports and curriculum um when will the board i i guess one of my questions is is this is this going to be an instructional conversation with the board um and not just a budget approval through esther three so will we get a chance to talk to you all about i i haven't heard a whole lot about the middle school literacy and social studies

102curriculum yet and i'm very interested in in what we're doing because i do think our middle schools need a lot of attention um and i see you popping on there cindy um so i guess timeline wise and process wise um what is this discussion going to look like sure dr jacob do you want me to go ahead and answer that yes please okay uh chris yes you uh will definitely uh see this information in an instruction work group this is a plan for us to do an rfp starting next school year uh we're gathering some data and information from our middle schools now we'll think about uh what we're going to begin writing over the summer while many people are taking a break and then begin to launch that process next year we are going

103to bake into our instruction work group kind of calendar um once we have conversations with uh the instructional the instruction work group chair in terms of the cadence for that but we're thinking more thoughtfully and intelligent intentionally sorry intentionally about uh when we come back to the board with um our large material purchases so we're hoping to have kind of a year-long calendar for you going into the next school year and you'll see that so in short yes you'll definitely have opportunities to engage in the conversations before you will see it come forth in a formalized consent okay thank you i guess yeah the clarification i was curious is is this new curriculum something we are writing because i know that has been happening this school year or is it something that we are actually

104looking to purchase we are similar to how we are going through a process for k-5 we are going to go through a similar process for middle school and looking to purchase okay and then when we also see the el language supports in curriculum because i know that support has really been needed in this area for a while with our hmong dli program i i don't exactly know what this is focusing on um but is there any back any we don't have to dive into it right now but will that also be coming to us yes yeah all of you all of the um instructional curriculum um expenses will come back to discuss i think basically for the purposes of um showing that these are possible investments um in a budgetary sense um that will possibly

105come along for the before the close of the year and for next year i think that's that's why we have it here so that we can kind of know ballpark what we are spending possibly okay thank you very much for that appreciate it um and then just looking at the the investments in assessment and other programs like that um one of the things that's on there is a continued investment and achieve 3 000 and i'm really curious if we could get an update on how that has worked at the high school in middle school levels what we've seen and how it is benefiting you know how an investment such as this benefits our teachers for teaching and our students for learning um and so is is i think we've used it this year for the

106first time is that correct uh no okay yeah it was a continuation of it and and i know the screen you probably speak to it as well but we have been very intentional because since i've been here we've been talking about achieving three thousand cut down on it being very intentional and working with the buildings and how we're gonna use it going forward as we're continuing with the assessment department too to look at just all the assessments and uh of what we're doing but achieve 3000 is one piece of it so the spring humans we did [Music] yeah i think dr jenkins answered most of it we expanded our use of achieve 3000 this year we used to only use it in our dli settings and so we've expanded it to more of a universal

107we are in the process right now of collecting input and voice from our school staff and from our principals in terms of from an implementation standpoint how it is going this year and using that to make adjustments for a more targeted approach for next year so we're happy to give you an update both in terms of implementation as well as data um and then as we have a more fleshed out plan of exactly what we are going to be utilizing it for next year that will come forth uh through consent and we can provide a more detailed update and work with maya on what that might look like sounds good um and then just a couple of comments um on on the act prep um and the questions that um president mulder had which i

108think were very good questions about our investment um i sort of see it um from the perspective that i i don't think students are necessarily begging to do act prep but i do think that what students and families ask are asking for is college readiness when they finish high school and being ready to move on to either college or career and one of the things that taking an act tells you i think miss green as you explained is that if you are potentially going to need remedial courses if you enroll in college and that is something that i i just find that we should have our students ready for college and i'm i'm thinking of it from the lens of how can we use this information to actually make sure that our teaching at the

109middle school in high school is robust enough to actually have an impact on our reading spores like a lot of times if kids are struggling with an act or with testing it's because the skills that they need aren't there to support that and i i guess i'm interested in you know tomorrow we have our 9th and 10th graders taking a spire test um that sort of gives an indication along the way so we have a number of things that are indicators along the way and whether you argue they're they're biased or they're not good indicators or whatever we do have these things that we're using and investing in and and how can we use that to inform our instruction and what we're doing for students earlier to make sure that they are ready for college

110and that they are ready for a career i i sort of see them as indicators and things that we can use to bolster and improve our instruction can you just speak to that a little bit i absolutely can i appreciate your comments on that as well as i appreciate what uh president mulder lifted up um and i've said this before i think kind of the access to the content of an act prep is is one of our strategies for a comprehensive approach to ensuring students are college and career ready i think there's an opportunity to think about also exactly what you said chris in terms of uh indicators to help us refine our teaching and refine our curriculum that is both at uh before they take that act as well as what we need to

111do before we release them out into post high school life um so i definitely see that as a piece of it um it's one of the other reasons why we've thought about that access of focusing on reading and writing skills as a component versus the the more direct uh focus on act for an 11th grader but what we might be able to provide for students at the younger grades as they matriculate up to continue to bolster their uh reading and writing skills which while that is um components of act is also life skills that are critically important so i think your points are well taken and i think they um are things that we need to figure out how we package them together with some of our other um both instructional strategies as well as

112our assessment uh moving forward yeah one one thing to that thank you to cindy you know to board member uh collette smith let me say if i go back to the comments by chairman and we ended on the test being very biased you're not really preparing individual for knowing their self-worth by being ready for college i'm saying this to everyone at the love of great this stars prenatal pre-k full day 4k getting students ready to have a sense of self-worth about themselves these act preparations the anxieties that students feel uh has been shown to reduce some of that but i'll go back to that it can't just be about college readiness a test score cannot tell you you're ready for college or not and we also have to be honest and acknowledging the damage that

113has occurred for many of our students before they get to 11th grade so what we're really doing here is giving a meaningful environment to encourage them to let them yes you can go on the score itself may not necessarily dictate uh if you're college ready per se the work that we do and this is why we adopted the early literacy uh philosophy that we have it's early literacy and beyond recall and we collaborated with uw on that as well early literacy and beyond the more we can capture our students early and change their mindses the more we can change the expectation for our students in terms of how we believe that they can learn the better prepared they're going to be then when they get to this point of any of these successes they would

114not only be ready for the assessment but they'll be ready to thrive in life and i just want to make sure i point that out too it's not just about assessments for our students this does still come back to self-worth and how one another see our how adults see our students how students see themselves right thank you and and again i i see this as one one point in time and one thing we're investing in and we have to do a lot of work on the front end to get more students prepared and on that note i guess one of the things that you asked us for is if there are things that are not covered in this that we might have suggestions on and one thing that i that i've seen sort of coming

115out in the research that has been possibly shown to be beneficial for students as high quality high dosage tutoring that can significantly affect academic gains for students acknowledging the challenges the challenges that are out there with scaling any type of initiative like that but i'm just wondering if we have thought about that at all as another investment that we could do with our essa funding thank you too for that when you see the investment would make it even an expanded avid which has also been proven to high quality strategy there are other things i'm just using that as one because that's what we've chosen to engage with uh as well but we've got to continue to look at those things in terms of high quality tutoring that is out there in terms of in the

116literature the high quality what we're doing in school aligning with the tutoring that we're receiving from the outside too that does make a difference so that you're not teaching things differently in mathematics or even from a grammatical standard yeah and if there's more opportunities to either partner or scale that um i think we should take a serious look at what that might look like going forward in the next year um if that's possible and then my my last comment and then i'll be done is um i'm finding it difficult ross and it's to kind of decipher in here what is going to be recurring funds that we're investing in for the astr 3 funding and what is truly one-time funds um is there a way to kind of tease that out and see where we

117might like total dollar amount need to be keeping that in mind for future um future budgets so i'll say i'll say it like this uh nothing in the sr2 or three plan that we're talking about tonight is designed to create a cliff if there are items one two years from now as the money starts to run out that we need to either discuss as a group or continue funding through strategic budget uh repurposing we will have those discussions in those future years but everyone who submitted a project on this list and everything we put together on this list we sit up front that nothing on here can be dependent on in two years which is why we're calling it a surge strategy because we were hoping that a lot of the services and positions we're

118creating we won't need in the same quantities two years from now than we want now that might change but at this point i'm not signaling that anything on here is designed to create that cliff if it was um i'd be concerned i mean there are certainly services that we're going to be creating over the next couple of years with this money that are going to be beneficial to students i'm not saying that we're being bad stewards of this money but um we have to recognize that with unless we have a better source of recurring authority to work with either from the state revenue limit or other recurring sources we must be prepared for these programs to end in two years okay thank you for clarifying that all right thanks chris mickey followed by maya and

119then sabian yes um i voted for the act budget solely for financial reasons because there are some individuals who can't afford it but i would like to make one thing clear as someone who had to take the test three times to be able to get into college once because um the company screwed up my disability accommodation so badly that they were non-existent i can realize the idea of putting your entire hope on one test i don't want to do that to our students i want to build confidence but i know that the tests have biases for black and brown students i know they have it for disabled students because anything that's based originally off the iq movement was based out of the eugenics movement plain and simple which was created in 1890 1890s by by

120a french doctor on who can go to school and who could be institutionalized this isn't measuring our students worth it's measuring their deficits however as long as scholarships are needed i don't see another way and i wish i did and i hope we could create a program and grow your own that won't require the use of that but until scholarships don't require it an entrance doesn't require it i don't see a way of facing it out as much as i want to and as much as i hate it thank you nikki maya thank you um thank you cindy for um stating earlier about making sure that we're having staff i know that that was last time we had this conversation that was kind of one of my concerns of how do we make it sustainable

121and utilize the funding and invest it back into our schools and teachers um similarly to um [Music] remember meulen um [Music] voting on it was more so around how do we allow like how do we invest in the students that need to take it now there are schools that need to that require the sat and the act i know that more schools are moving away from it including some california state university or state universities and schools that basically got rid of them um and so as we are making um ways i'm thankful that uh where president mildred also mentions like how are we also making sure that students know the options if there are if they're not able to take it i think one thing is um that i that i wanted to ask is

122how are we right now it's the million dollars as we are projecting in the future are we looking to possibly um continue supporting at that level or how are we kind of thinking about it in the future i want to make it more sustainable like how much investment are you looking to do yeah so i can um start with that answer and i'll uh allow dr jenkins to chime in thank you uh uh board member pearson um one uh if you remember um to the board we provided uh in the weekly update and evaluation plan in terms of how we want to continuously learn from our students and learn from their experiences to reflect and adjust and also closely pay attention to who is taking advantage of this opportunity so we are using that as

123we continue to go we still have our first survey out for our first cohort that's going to be a critical component and thinking about how we continue to adjust to the funds we're allocating for this uh moving forward whether exhausting all of them or um reducing it based on what's happening uh so that's the first thing second thing is uh these funds uh portion of these funds will definitely be supporting transportation food and other components as we think about the community spaces that we are providing for students to have easier access or even sometimes more um access to places where they um have have better relationships and better connections so we're thinking about that as well um and then in terms of long term uh again we want to bake this into an opportunity that

124exists within our school course offerings as well as within our staffing plan so as we're continuing to have our teachers learn alongside some of the vendors they will then be able to take this on on their own which in turn creates sustainability and also reduces costs across the board we used to run act courses during the school day and we kind of shifted from that and so again this is an opportunity to see how it can be built into our staffing plans and our course offerings moving forward again using that evaluation cycle and reflecting and adjusting is a critical point to how we'll make decisions yeah thank you for that i know i mean ellie and i were in school at the same time um i i remember them being offered by our teachers and

125um one thing that i would just caution is that when that was the case the equity issue was definitely there um and so to be honest i didn't even know that they were having classes for a ct until like after um i took act like twice um and so um i would just you know make sure that you know it is equitable across the across the schools and that um students have access to it no matter what and that we're making sure that we're telling folks about it so i do think that is that could be an issue thank you i think that's a really important uh component to mention and to be paying attention to i think all this uh that's a great question to uh pearson and the explanation uh is spot on

126one of the things i think we all need to keep in mind and this ross has been doing his presentations about where we are with the essa dollars and what could potentially happen because of the fact from the joint finance committee we had a zero and zero and what we anticipate is going to happen in the future we have to make sure it's known in public education if we want all these great things to continue to happen there has to be some support at the state level when you were in high school and those classes were cut we had to make choices between what we want to offer and not offer because of the funding what happens from school which impacts a local level which impacts individuals considering whether or not we want those services

127to sustain them through referendums which is becoming very costly so we have to start this discussion and take a long view for where we are and what we're going to do uh so when we talk about sustainability it's a harsh reality and we do have to think about that but i think these courses have to be during the day and we have to communicate to all of our families about this that wasn't unintentional that was intentional some students receive certain services and some students don't so that's what i would say we have to have an activity as as we're thinking about this and anything else for accelerated learning thank you thanks maya i'm savion and then gordon thank you so much uh so i have a roughly uh three group questions this first one is

128around our 2.93 million investment and investment and mental health services and support so i'm wondering um if we have any projection in terms of how these investments will decrease our uh psych to student and counselor to student ratios in our schools let's have dr get y'all she's on here uh speak to that and they've been doing a wonderful job and it's been trying to make sure we respond to that here dr esther is here as well sorry i was just going to ask if you could repeat it because i heard psych and social work but i didn't hear the connected aspect of the question so if you wouldn't mind i apologize no no worries um can anyone speak to how uh the mental health services and support uh investment will decrease the uh student to

129psych and student to counselor ratios in our schools yeah i'll i think i i think i'm probably best to take this one right now but sarah kennedy please don't hesitate to jump in i'm throwing my pen around over here um right now we are um adding 9.4 fte in social work to our school-based staff um that has been um dispersed on a needs basis looking at a variety of data points that still leaves our site ratio or i'm sorry our social work ratio um at about 50 social workers um under what is recommended by the national association uh we are not adding additional sites with the exception of the floater site and the floater psych is intended to serve some of the um staffing related shortages so if there's no psych at a school we

130need to send somebody to do an evaluation or to sub um so it won't necessarily it takes our ratio down overall but um it's not necessarily like uh our school-based ratio is going down um our sites are about 9.3 i believe fte away from their ratio of 1 to hundred and then lastly we are almost at a ratio of one to three hundred or three fifty cindy jump in here if you can think of if you know the concrete number i just can't remember for our counselors we have a couple of middle schools that aren't quite there um but um we're very we're much closer that being said the ratio um that is recommended is one to 250 so we still have um work to do throughout the disciplines in our district thank you then

131my last question related to this is that i see the investment in mental health summer professional development is that so our school-based staff can be prepared to have trauma-informed care for students yes and again sarah kristen please don't hesitate to jump in um but there are some very foundational practices that are critical for our student services team members so thinking about assessment for example how to conduct a suicide risk assessment how to conduct a violence risk assessment how to support and safety plan as a result so we want to ensure that our school-based staff have the opportunity in the summer to get those foundational learning opportunities that being said because they're foundational the options or the um the training it will also be available for folks during the school year um but we we hope

132to get as many people trained in the summer as possible we will also have additional strands when you think about professional development that allow people to go deeper into areas of interest and expertise as well so it's both foundational and um to grow a diverse uh diverse group of practitioners that serve our students across the district got it thank you so much uh my next two questions are related to the homelessness funding um the last comprehensive study that i'm aware of was from 2019 from wire patch which is that around 300 young people in dane county any given day are are homeless i cannot find a study since then and i can only assume that the number has unfortunately gone up and so i'm wondering what this investment how and if our if and how

133are we coordinating with the county um and then what services will be available for those students and how can they access those services i can take that question good evening so what there were two projects under the arp homeless funding that we had proposed and so are you talking about the unaccompanied youth project i uh both the housing navigator contract i guess that would be engagement with families and then the uh youth engagement one as well right so let's talk let's start with the housing navigator project so i know you're aware of this and many people on this in the in the meeting is aware as well that we have um the majority of our families in madison experiencing homelessness are doubled up so they're living with others due to economic hardship and we also

134know that the housing and urban development definition of homelessness does not recognize our doubled up families so we wanted to look into a way where we could provide some resources to our to the predominantly doubled up families in madison where we know our homeless homelessness as the majority of our homelessness so doubled up families and families self-paying in hotels they are not getting on that housing prioritization list like other families are who are seeking shelter so we have families who could be brand new to madison coming from other states other cities and if they stay in shelter they're prioritized for housing while are doubled up and self-paying homeless families in madison or not so we really wanted to make sure that we had a resource in place um to provide some housing navigation supports for

135those families so more to come on that we are still investigating but we wanted to definitely set aside funds and get a project in place talking about the numbers um with briar patch you're right i mean there are i don't think there's been uh significant studies when we're talking about our unaccompanied youth numbers but we do know in madison that we are extremely under-reported our students who are unaccompanied for a variety of reasons are afraid to self-identify because they're not aware of what their rights are or what that could mean for them and we also know that re-engagement back into the school setting due to the pandemic has been very difficult for the majority of our students and families let alone our students who are unaccompanied so we wanted to make sure that we had

136engagement strategies in place for those students um just to and and we're we are we have been in conversations with fire patch about what that could look like um so we are working with them on a potential project but again more to come on that as well again this is just a way for us to make sure that we were setting aside funds in areas where we knew we needed those additional supports for our students and families all right thank you so much and i really appreciate your expanse of understanding uh especially if families doubling up um homelessness looks uh very different for a lot of people so personally it was eviction to eviction or uh staying with a friend for a few weeks or a month or so um and so things are things

137are complex and i'm glad that you've taken that expansive holistic um approach to that um uh one more question and then a comment um i see that the department of engagement diversity equity and inclusion is getting uh some investment here our activities under that department really describe what we heard from in our last instruction work group meeting with dr sanford taylor thank you so that's exciting to hear things like grow your own projects like grow your own or the neighborhood builders things like that are really good to hear um and then my last comment is uh partially related to our last discussion with uh revenue sources and with all of our concern about the sustainability of all of our investments is that um you know when we think about making investments that the community wants

138and you look at the history of mmsd it's been about every four or five years that we look at a referendum and i think that um you know those things are not off the table in the next decade and so i think those are things that we have to think about when we are making investments that we know that our students need and deserve as well as our staff so um thank you thank you sadie and gordon yes um i have a comment then i will go into a question for miss green uh with my comment is that i think with daisy it's re it's regarding act prep course um i just have to say is that like i why i understand the history behind you know acting and other standardized tests you know when

139it comes to college submissions i do see the value and uh still giving our students the option to partake in the service um i mean at the end of the day you know still there are still colleges to who may require it or even scholarships and i say just giving them the opportunity doesn't necessarily hurt especially since there's still a requirement for meeting those services um i would just say that it's just important that we just continue to remain um you know very effective in the way that the you know the course is being taught and how well it is integrated into the students um you know school day uh one thing i will submission is that um i in a lot of places where as they might not have access a lot of extracurricular

140activities or any other support jct can actually help weigh in on the application more um i do know with the option of testing it there's a lot more weight in regards to your essays and everyone might not be as a strong writer or have any very substantial circumstances that can help them stand out in their essays and that can be a time where you know standardized test score can help make up for that um the same as if they're in they're in an area where um maybe they can't you know do a lot of extracurricular activities and they have to just work to provide for their family um i would say if the sec prep course is dependent into their school day and they have time to really study and do well on the test

141that can also make up for the extracurricular portion that may be lacking in your application so again honestly i don't see a problem with and not giving a student as a choice if they want to go ahead with acc and get the you know the course a try then you know so be it um i believe that a lot of students can actually benefit from this i know there are a lot of students um who who i know who i'm personally friends with who spent a lot of money on you know these prep courses and there are still people throughout this nation who are spending you know a lot of money to do well on those courses and the fact that our district is trying to offer it for free and uh and the vendors

142have proven to be credible in this area then i fair to see the benefit in offering this course to our students um but my question is that how can we ensure you know that when students are enrolled in the course that they continue to remain very um active with you know in the course like we can retain their engagement um and also that you know there's like it can get it can get kind of challenging sometimes i do i mean when i do my htc prep course so how can we make sure that they stay engaged and ready yeah first thank you uh so much for your comments gordon and i think that um part of our evaluation plan of that continuous reflection and adjustment along the way is going to be really important as

143i mentioned we have a survey out right now for students to understand their experience both from that actual course experience as well as how this course did or did not support their mental health their anxiety and test taking and all of that that information is going to be used as we uh continuously adjust our plan moving forward so i think that's one way i think the second way right now we have a check-in every single week with all of our school points of contacts and the individuals that are directly at the school supporting this work so we're learning uh each week kind of what's going well and what's not and so those points of contact have been really critical for us to kind of uh understand what the experiences are on a day-to-day basis so

144i think those are two things i think in addition to that when we have our own staff that will be running this i think just like any teacher does you have to make adjustments in the moment and kind of uh pivot based on what is happening with your students so i think that knowing your students well and knowing what their needs are is going to be something that will definitely play into it going forward thank you that sounds good thank you thanks gordon um i will jump in with just a couple things first of all i want to um take a little bit of a step back from act it's a million dollars of an almost 40 million dollar plan that we're talking about tonight um and i want to acknowledge the the challenge for

145this district of coming up for a plan for 40 million dollars in one-time funding when we are struggling with recurring dollars when our per-pupil revenue is flat and the curve of that and the best-case scenario is going to stay flat for a while this is hard and i really want to thank the administration for taking on this challenge and coming forward to us with a complicated and comprehensive plan for how to meet the needs of our students at a difficult time with i mean that's not going to continue past the next couple years um with that said i want to hone in on a couple of areas of the plan we've been presented and just a little bit more information um the first one is instruction the our instructional responses to long-term school closure and

146resulting learning loss again i don't want to delve into the ect here but rather step back and my observation of what's been going on in classrooms this year and mmsd we have a lot of kids who are experiencing learning loss because they weren't able to engage with school last year and a lot of what has happened to address that is teachers taking extra time to meet the individual needs of students who need to catch up it's not paying any company or any consultant to do any work for us it is paying our own staff to do the work of helping all kids get caught up and it's hard hard work you can talk to any teacher in this district about how challenging it is to work one-on-one with students who need that extra attention not

147only to catch up because but also because they need the human contact and the relationships in their lives at a really difficult time so one idea for spending this money that i brought up that i don't see reflected here and i think we can still do at the elementary level would be to take some of this esser money and actually invest in some either long-term subs or lte teaching positions to temporarily both reduce class sizes and also train up some teachers who could then step into the ongoing vacancy problem we have so if we use some s or money for those teaching search strategy to perhaps especially the elementary level reduce some class sizes address give children more opportunities to get that one-on-one help they need because their teachers are responsible for fewer kids particularly

148in sections where we're looking at 20 plus kids in a section and then those teachers who we've hired whether it's long term subs or ltes almost certainly would have a job because at the elementary level it's not specific to a subject and because our even if our teacher turnover rates get better they will have a job like we are losing staff and that would be a great strategy to get people ready and it would i think do the best job based on what we're seeing right now of helping to get kids caught up after you know a year or more of missing out on classes and instruction because of the pandemic and because doing elementary instruction was so difficult over zoom like you know especially our youngest kids who are learning how to read like

149you can't learn how to like where you're gonna focus for eight hours a day over zoom when you're six i feel like that kind of a strategy could have the most impact at the elementary level although if you look at high schools like our classes are getting way too big there too and i think you know maybe we use some of our um i'm allocated to try to address class sizes at the high school level our class size policy does not have written for coved it was written for times when kids did not have needs as extreme as they do right now and i really think we should take some of this essay money and use it to invest in staffing so that we take some of the burden off teachers who are putting so

150much time into helping kids catch up in classes that are maybe you know maybe would have been an okay size or maybe a little bit too big in regular times but are way too big in the years that we're using to try to get our kids caught up after coca so i just want to put that out there i'd love to hear responses i don't think it's too late to to look at how we can maybe allocate some sr dollars into doing that well for remember garucy let me just tell you first of all thank you you started out about students and about us even this pandemic you know i think all of what was here to acknowledge this these have been unprecedented time people are hurting in a whole lot of ways students are

151and then uh without that human contact and staff even miss that human contact and we do and we haven't had in discussions about how could we reduce the burden coming into next year and even moving beyond i think it was important the relatives dropped about we don't know the full impact of this and when we talk about these one-time dollars we have to think in our budgets now locally about way out because no one really knows after these two years and these quick dollars but we're anticipating it's gonna be longer so yes we are considering what you're saying and i don't think it's too late we can continue to have further discussions we're just kind of concerned about as when we hear um we've all heard from uh from ross about where we are the

152local dollars and then the impact we're trying to avoid anything that's legacy in a way but i do think we need to have this discussion and what does that mean we're really going to service uh provide what our students need and what our staff need moving forward so that's kind of where we are and i know cause you may have some thoughts on it as well we've been kind of in this conversation about long-term cells and talking about for this fall i mean it's spring hiring people so that we can be ready so that they can go through the training with our regular staff coming back in the fall so where else do you have any thoughts as well uh similar uh points you've made dr jenkins uh we what we really need to focus

153on right now is um making sure first we can get our staff back up to capacity not only in our permanent staffing but in our sub-capacity staffing as well so i understand your point chris we definitely want to try and keep our class sizes within our policy as much as possible um i do think though we have a little bit of more work to do to ensure that every position we have advocated for not only in our staffing process but in our sub pool are adequately staffed before we look at adding additional sub positions at this point uh if we had the capacity to do that now that would be wonderful but again with the lack of operational resources uh turning to esser at this point might create an additional legacy burden that we would

154not be able to sustain after those dollars are going away uh you may already know that in the in the or you may already be able to tell from some of the fte identifying the executive summary that we're trying as much as possible to identify any surge positionings that don't directly affect the building level not to keep the dollars out of the building that's not what i'm saying but to ensure that if and when or when these dollars do leave the district that the most minimal impact would be on building level staffing as possible so um i very much appreciate your comments about not wanting to create a structural deficit or invest too much in funding that would become legacy funding but i honestly think that if we were to hire 20 additional teachers on

155esser dollars we will have 20 teachers who leave the district in the next two years and we would be able to absorb those positions through attrition and we would have teachers who have msd experience who've been in our classrooms prepared to step into those positions as people just naturally retire or leave the district so i don't think legacy funding is as big an issue with something like hiring teachers then um honestly i think you know the new positions we're hiring for um the madison promise academy are positions that are going to be harder you know their their position is where you have to figure out where we take positions out of our regular schools to cover madison promise in a couple years because it's going to be very hard to say oops no more online

156program if we have a lot of parents who love it it's going to be very very hard to do that and those 10 decisions are going to have to come from somewhere not essa so i think you know in some ways stuff in classroom positions is easier because you're just saying okay now you can move into a permanent position in this district if you choose to do so at the end of the two years those positions will be there um that also takes me to my second comment which is about um you know kind of builds on what chris was saying about really needing to understand which of these investments could become ongoing or recurring expenses over the next couple years ross i really appreciate your clarification that we're trying to keep um possible recurring

157expenses away from the classroom so if they can't recur the impact on our kids is minimized at the same time like you've already committed to almost 1.1 million dollars in potentially recurring expenses just in our early approvals and looking through the executive summary like i see somewhere you know this includes the early approvals but somewhere between 13 and 22 fce it could become recurring expenses that's 1.3 to 2.2 million dollars that we'll have to absorb somewhere if that comes to fruition i'm also seeing lots of programmatic things like madison or you know the madison promise academy um our partnership with madison college for early college stem academy they're getting put into esser that are going to be very hard not to continuously fund i think the board needs an accounting of things that have been

158indicated for sr funding that may need to be put into the permanent budget so that we can start thinking now and start planning now for how we might shift or adjust to absorb things that are going to be hard for that goal because they're not just a short term you know for their hvac system masks like it's it's things that are going to be hard to let go of like mental health investments i don't think in two years we're going to have a whole lot fewer kids with mental health needs like we've never been able to meet the needs of our kids who need support and help in that area it's going to be hard to let go of those positions we have to i think the board needs to know now what might need

159to get absorbed into our budget so we really know how to plan for the long term and how to make this sustainable the board has a role in doing that so we can get some kind of a just a breakdown of which of these ielts might need to become permanent i appreciate that chris um my initial response to that is not that we don't want to continue the work that we're proposing as good work that's that's not what what i'm trying to say in my earlier comments what i i do think is important to recognize though is that i'm not making the assumption that the desire to continue these projects pass covet means they automatically will be absorbed in any future budget that we're going to create there's certainly things that we're doing on here

160that are are great things for students and great things for our district but as i said before we do need to be prepared that we may not be able to continue at the same capacities operational or otherwise so we can certainly work on those that we think are most important in this plan that were we to get a i don't even want to say that were we to get another 10 million dollars tomorrow recurring authority what we would save but uh we can certainly try and do a justification of items that we know we would love to continue if given the opportunity i'm just saying that for purposes of this budget and the short-term planning one to two years out we are not making any guarantees about anything we're putting forward on there right now

161we simply can't we don't have any other assurances from the state legislature that we're going to be able to do everything we want i appreciate that i also know that when staff put in their applications to use their money they were able to indicate if things were recurring or not recurring and if staff did indicate that something was to be recurring i think the board needs to know and hopefully we'll get those those applications so we can go through them ourselves if needed and um identify which items might be disappearing all right um ollie and savian and nikki and um please keep in mind we still have the whole section of this to go through and we also have another agenda item and a closed session meetings let's keep really quickly i just want to

162say i very much agree with the priorities of making sure we have teachers in the classroom and in schools and i really appreciate you emphasizing that that's so much of where the work of recovering from the pandemic is happening is with our our teachers and our students in classrooms and so part of my curiosity is how much of this represents you know an investment in staffing our schools in terms of you know the the things we've already talked about and how do we increase direct support to schools and ross i think i heard in part of your answer that you're saying we're having enough of a struggle fulfilling our regular positions that that adds additional complexity to bringing on more um educators and so i want to be mindful of the kinds of vacancies we've

163seen this year and how that dictates our approach to staffing next year but overwhelmingly i very much agree with with what you're saying and i think being strategic in in that effort is really important um the other thing i think is that we as as a board have established that we want to have an anti-status quo approach to education because the status quo has created the achievement gap it has created a series of systems that we don't agree with that haven't benefited our entire community appropriately and so i think you know we're investing in things that we haven't invested in before and that we haven't utilized to support um the vast learning capacities of our young people is is something i really want us to be able to emphasize in this conversation moving forward thanks

164ali i'm nikki oh um you guys want to say i definitely support adding as many teachers or as much support to the classroom directly as possible and would to that point would want to highlight some of the initiatives that would be funding in the department of education diversity equity inclusion particularly the neighborhood builders and community builders and really trying to embody schools in the community and you know what it is uh schools in the community and the schools and how that can translate to our grow your own programs too in terms of bringing those individuals into the classroom and helping them get their certification to be lifetime teachers i think when it comes to the reoccurring expenses i think you know the administration could certainly bring us a list of the high priority items but

165i think the board is the ultimate decider of what we want to see reoccurring or not i think at the end of the day the board is going to have to decide what we cut to add these and it's going to be our final approval at the end of the day here um so that's it i want to oh sorry i wanted to amplify chris's comments i think it's essential we use esser dollars to put more teachers in the classroom one two if there are documents from the public that administration is seeing that the board isn't seeing i'm kind of having a bit of a problem with that because i can't see the people's priority and they believe that i have the public who believes that the board is making decisions how could the board

166make decisions if we don't have the information to make that decision and so i really think it's necessary to see not only those answers but to see the survey results when we do those for our teachers to see i'm still looking for the november email saying i've been looking down through the meeting to try and find which schools have the enrollment numbers because i can't particularly find it instead of getting an extra copy how are we expecting a parent to get it if the board can't it just doesn't make sense um nikki i will respond to that but barb has been sending us let's talk updates periodically that's right i forgot so but if there's additional information we haven't received yet then it would be great to get that all right um let's move on

167to the final part of this presentation budget allowances text levy forecast and the stop do list all right let's get this back up on screen here oops except it's not letting me sorry one second all right for the last part of our discussion tonight i want to go through some of the required allowances that we've built into the proposed budget we're going to be um looking at later on in this month uh specifically areas of the budget that we know we need to plan for whether we really would like to or not specifically the increase for 2x independent charter schools every year the portion of our enrollment that is credited to us for 2x charter enrollment combine that with the per-pupil increase that those programs get each year we'll have an estimated impact about 314

168000 on this year's budget our open enrollment estimate net impact is about 140 000 um at least estimated at this point um the only good news on that front is that because of a relatively low escalator on open enrollment payments this is a relatively flat impact that we've seen in previous years it's something i'm going to be continuing to monitor over the summer as we see those applications come through but the big ones that we we know we're planning for right now is that we're anticipating a rather significant renewal for our district insurance especially liability and property as i mentioned at the start there's a number of concerns around cyber insurance many of our colleagues across the state and the nation frankly have been hit with a number of cyber attacks that have crippled district

169infrastructure and i know that dr mcrae as well as our hr team has been working with m3 to make sure that our liability prop policies for cyber security are up to snuff but that's still going to likely result in a significant renewal cost to us mostly because of the way the private market for these insurances are going we also know that our transportation renewals for next year are going to be um roughly closing in on four percent we're still waiting on some final information there but also our fuel costs for the fleet that we maintain for all of our routes is going to cost us considerably for next year again i'm going to be continuing to monitor this with cedric and his team to make sure these estimates are going to hold but i have

170to hold this money at this point for these purposes um finally through some of our earlier discussions on last year going in for the second year of mscr seasonal staff adjustments not to mention some of our new space leases that we're going to be working for after a lot of the building movements out of hoyt and into the olin park facility as well as other mscr locations in regards to our stop-do list we previewed last month that the administration is working on identification of cuts specifically out of central office to increase additional unallocated resources the accounting of that list is is here we've cut approximately 6.5 fte in vacant positions throughout doyle to secure some funding for this list as well as programmatic budgets out of pathways and our operational renovation resources additionally pulling some

171costs out of our long-range facility planning contractual services uh we will be using a building services budget for this going forward instead of having its own budget item and some additional non-personnel dollars out of the student and staff supports professional learning and other central office budgets for additional overtime costs and finally i want to highlight where we're headed right now for a tax delay forecast for 22.23 before i launch into the the numbers of that i do want to highlight something chris mentioned at the very beginning tonight in march i indicated that we're going to be bringing back two debt defeasing recommendations to the board um in addition to the second issue of the 2020 referendum that we're going to be looking at i had originally anticipated separating these discussions into two separate regular meetings

172to not have it be completely dead heavy however i do need to highlight that i'm moving these debt resolutions up to the april regular meeting for one very important reason if you've turned on the news recently you may have heard that interest rates are starting to climb and considering the amounts we're looking at issuing bonds for for the referendum i wanted to give us every opportunity to mitigate the what interest rates are doing right now and i'm going to be bringing forward the referendum borrowing at the april regular meeting yes and some of the additional strategies we talked about last month um which i'm showing here on the slide is prepayment uh additional referendum debt out of our existing resources to not only reduce future tax impact but to address some of the decisions around

173other topics we discussed tonight around our existing fun tent equity those two issues are the olsen facility there are four years remaining on that debt issue approximately 5.3 billion and the 2015 maintenance referendum for 41 million dollars there is one year remaining of that issue at about 2.4 million combining this with the other non-referendum debt we're using for a debt um i'm sorry for a budget uh balancing strategy is one of those three of the pre-payment opportunities we're talking about um later this month i issued in the board materials for tonight an updated memo that i gave the board last month outlining all of these just so that everyone is aware of where we're headed for the april 25th discussion so for next for this upcoming year this is still a very early estimate at

174this point i must indicate that but we're looking at an approximately 2.22 total levy increase across all funds this includes the issuing of the second issue of the referendum the prepayment of all the other debt resolutions we talked about tonight and um the inflationary increase in the referendum that we are able to secure in our budget balancing efforts to date so right now we're anticipating utilizing the max revenue authority available to us at this point i'm previewing equalization a loss of approximately 10 percent uh this is a conservative estimate based on a couple of things one we know that there's a potential for our equalization aid to rebound after a rather unexpected reduction last year we know that the mmsd enrollment is estimated to be done about 150 per enrollment projections from last fall and

175all things combined uh that's going to generate today with even with that 10 loss actually a 20 reduction in the mill rate at this point which would have an impact on the average home over approximately now i want to make sure that people understand this is a very early estimate for a number of factors one i i'm going to be working on an update to the board that better explains some of the equalization aid changes that happened to us last fall and what that could mean if we get an adjustment on that from last year going forward to next year um also in terms of spending one thing in that we've noticed during the pandemic is that spending across the state of wisconsin has been anything but consistent and that when we go forward into

176the july 1 8 estimates we get each year for what we plan to expect come october we know there's been some significant deviation from those estimates to what we actually receive in the fall so i think at this point we can only improve from that negative 10 percent i'm estimating here but i'm waiting on some rather key pieces before i move that number in a different location different place reason i say that is because if we do move north from the negative 10 percent i'm previewing here the total levy increase impact will be reduced and the mill rate will go down even further so at this point i'm trying to put a potential scenario on the table based on what we know now but many things could change between now and october 15th uh the

177graph that's shown here is showing an estimate of what increase in our 2.22 increase in our levy looks like right now that includes an estimated increase for voucher payments again voucher payments is not the same as 2x charter voucher payments is a dollar amount that we are given right before we set our tax levy that the district is tasked with levying for and distributing to private institutions uh increases for community services programming tied to our required allowances from the previous slides as well as significant investments for our seasonal staff and lease costs for the coming year and the balance of which is coming from our operating budget under our revenue limit authority and approximately 6.8 million dollars keep in mind that when we talk about total tax levy increase and the revenue limit itself the

178change in the tax levy is dependent on more than just change in the total revenue limit it is dependent also on the change in our equalization aid as a whole so at this point with that negative 10 percent some of the operational increase is coming from that aid loss not just change the revenue limit uh very quickly i want to go over next steps so as we find ourselves in the middle of april we're going to be working this month on final budget balancing and documentation preparation for the april budget book we're going to continue to have conversations in a public session as well as questions directly from the board if needed on any equity projects we discussed tonight at the end of the month we're going to be talking about all the debt resolutions

179that i indicated in the memo that we supplied with board materials this evening and uh we'll release that draft preliminary budget to the public on april 25th looking forward to the next couple of months in may and june we're going to start our community feedback process as well as our board amendment process as this is the first year i'm going through this i'm going a bit from memory here but i know that shortly after we release the budget book we're going to make materials available to the board to submit questions on the budget book as well as any potential amendments we may want to entertain before the june 27th vote and we'll use the similar process again this year to collect all those questions to make sure everyone feels comfortable moving forward with that time

180frame that leads us into the end of june where we will hopefully be putting forward our june preliminary budget book for board discussion and vote that evening so with that i will turn it back over to chris for any final questions on the presentation tonight thank you ross um nikki i see your hand yes just one is there i didn't hear right is there tax levy mine negative 10 or or 1.0 i could not hear you i'm sorry so no the tax levy projected increase today is two point two two percent the negative ten percent right now is on our general aid for the state general aid equalization sorry they're usually used in a similar discussion um but in the overall revenue limit uh the estimated tax impact right now is an increase of two

181point two two percent which includes a ten percent reduction equalization aid thank you that's it [Music] um ross i have a one question and that is last year between june and october we had two surprises when it came to the the tax levy one was a radically different valuation of property in madison and the other was more um declining enrollment revenue and hold harmless aid than we thought we were going to get um so to address you know if we were to run into another similar situation with hold harmless and declining enrollment last year it seemed like a good strategy to under levy is that kind of the plan for this year if we find ourselves in that situation again and i honestly hope we do not uh that would be my plan is that

182i i would not be looking in the last final weeks of budget preparation to find a way to spend one-time money that really happened without any planning for four o'clock thanks for that i agree with you completely and i also hope it doesn't happen um also do you think there's a chance we could have a similar surprise when it comes to equalized property value as we had last year because that was a shock not only to our budget but also to our taxpayers it was and as i mentioned i'm going to be working on an update to go back over that situation um while it was very frustrating it is something we had absolutely zero control over and if i point to the resources i have available i will work to help illustrate to the

183board how this came to be and why i think that an error was made uh frankly uh i i don't want to get to the point where i i can't say we're going to get to the point where a resolution is going to affect anything we did this year because honestly that's not possible but in short the valuation we're given in the fall we must use that valuation right or wrong to set our tax levy and what happened in our adjustment to the city of madison was a negative one percent in our equalized value for the city of madison where every other municipality in our footprint went up from four to six percent so it didn't make sense it was our largest piece of our equalizer supplies value to see is such a drastic reduction

184and that didn't add up uh the discussions i had with our state partners not only the city assessor's office but the department of revenue identified that a flat 10 reduction was made in commercial property in the fall that um really could not be explained to me so i i don't want to go too far down the realm of conjecture but i do think an honest error was made in that valuation that resulted in that one percent reduction overall because on that same form you see the same level of uh average home value increase that we saw from the study assessor's office so my understanding is the average home value of medicine has been going up the last five years not down so what we we encountered was seems to be a rather frustrating correction on

185commercial property that affected the municipality as a whole so i'm going to work to summarize this just so that the board is aware of what i was able to find on this and if we do get a correction on this valuation it would appear in our may statement of values that we would be using for eight projections for next year which is another reason i'm still at negative 10 percent that adjustment could tank the july 1 8 estimate but again too early to tell at this point i don't want to catastrophize this too much but that adjustment will affect our aid projections for fall it will not affect anything in the current year nothing about our aid certification can be changed for this year at this point it's simply an update or a correction if

186one is made so another way to phrase that would be that if our equalization aid changes it doesn't affect our budget it affects the tax levy correct that is accurate so it initially affects our aid appropriation in the fall which we would then use to set our final tax levy so it's a dependent variable upon a dependent variable thank you for that that's really helpful as we um approach the the very important question of the tax levy moving forward um my final request is um i'm wondering if you could just give us a little bit more detail about the um amendment process moving forward one of our goals with the budget is to address potential amendments or changes early on so there's no surprises at the moment we're taking the budget vote so um what's

187the time frame for proposing budget amendments and what do board members do if they have an idea for a budget amendment you bet so uh looking into notes i was able to find from last year the budget amendment process we will launch shortly after the april regular meeting proposed amendments we can will be submitted from board members after may 1st and ending at the end of may to make sure we have the ability to process any potential amendments the goal of that will be to to try and address any potential amendments before they actually get made on the floor so that we can adequately plan for them and incorporate them into the budget vote based on that discussion we do want to request that any amendments that are submitted are as detailed and specific as

188possible so if we are proposing for example uh large new spending areas that we're able to identify how we can pay for these instead of just identifying um a new area in the budget to just add we would need any amendments to be worked collaboratively between the board and the administration to identify that something can be funded and that we have a way to do so before we incorporate into the budget document um i'm going to be working with dr jenkins over the next several weeks to clarify how these are going to come in my goal would be to make sure that the amendments come through my office as well as dr jenkins and dr mcgregory just to make sure that we have the ability to spread any questions on as much as possible and

189um we do want those requests to be given to us in a way that we can investigate them and adequately respond to the board in a timely fashion so that we can incorporate that into that june planning thank you so much ross for explaining that process and um you know the board has the right to amend anything at any time when we're holding on it that said i think amendments are going to be better and have a much better chance of getting worked into the budget if people put them out early so i would strongly encourage board members who are thinking about budget amendments to get them out during the month of may during that window so there's time to actually think about how we can get them in the budget and make them happy

190is there anything else no hands ross i want to give you huge thanks not only for all of your work for this meeting but for the fabulous work we've done together for this past year i'm going to miss working with you it's been great you as well chris thank you for your partnership all right let's move on to the employee handbook good evening hello everyone so just want to be quick um the handbook review committee has been meeting uh every month since june 2021 um our agenda is fluid in there i've put in a couple of uh thoughts that we've been looking at um the one thing that we have done we've had a lot of good discussions using a collaborative process but we've also we're also having to work under the confines of act

19110 so it kind of stalls a little bit but other than that everything is going well we're moving right along we have some um points that we're looking at and so we're trying to move towards starting to put those um ideas into place so um this is an opportunity this is just an informational item at this point there's no imminent action on the handbook but we wanted to make sure the board had the opportunity to ask questions particularly since we have had staff and mti contacting us about the handbook process and i wanted to make sure we had a chance for a public discussion that i'll get on the same page so nikki i see your hand up um multiple things um juan can we please get a a list of the priorities from both

192sides and what exactly that were uh being discussed two can a board member attend a bargaining session i know mmsd i know that it had been asked by mti i never got an answer of like if i can or can't and i've looked at the board rules that have looked at the statute and said neither are clear so i'm curious if that is allowed and um three um i don't understand some of the uh canceled uh meetings is that due to scheduling changes because of covid nikki before tracy jumps in with her answer i want to clarify that the work on the handbook is not bargaining we actually can't bargain on the handbook it's just collaborative planning i said the wrong word that's totally myself i'm sorry no worries okay so to answer the first

193question i did put in the recommendations that we have so i put in the mmsd recommendations and i put in the mti recommendations and these are the things that we discussed during our meetings to try to come up with a plan the other piece is for the board now i'm going by what's in the handbook so if the the first paragraph that i put in there is that we make um revisions on which the review committee can reach consistent consensus will be forwarded by the superintendent to the board for final approval so that's the process that we're trying to work through okay i but it doesn't say i can't sit through correct if i don't talk you probably could i'm not sure i'd have to um look into it it doesn't say that you you

194can't but it also doesn't have in there that they we have a board member on the committee but you probably could depending on what we're talking about though too that's the other issue thank you so i just want to weigh in really quickly that i am comfortable with a board member participating as long as it's a collaboration between our union our administration and us as a board and so i think defining what that looks like is something we have to come to to come together to do um and i can follow up with you about that nikki i i'd love to yeah i just want to sit there i've never seen one i also would like to ask just a couple questions about this process so i i very much appreciate that you're engaging in

195this process chris i want to thank you for making sure this is on our agenda um you described the process as going well so far can you talk to us about where there's kind of common ground between the administration and mti in terms of the handbook and where our areas of tension may be in terms of how we're coming together to talk about the handbook um i won't say there's tension i just think we have come to there are some impasses that there are things that i can't talk about as i said before um we are working within the confines of act 10 so there are certain things that we just we can't talk about and so we're trying to use a collaborative process to get around those issues and to come up with pulling

196it all back into the handbook and where their changes can be made because the current handbook has yellow highlights so from what i was told that that is the changes that were made and so we're looking more into the wording as opposed to um having the discussions on what we're looking to change so for instance if you look at the what i put in there for revisions like section 18 looking at that because when you look at section 18 it says you would come together every two years or as needed and so that's the question that's come up is is it as needed and where we are in the process for where it left off uh before coke before it stopped so um i won't say his tension like i said we're using the collaborative

197process so i want to be clear about my question i was asking specifically are there areas of common ground within our handbook areas in which the administration and our union our educators are on the same page versus areas of disagreement or areas of tension and i guess i kind of missed um any specific area that you would be kind of referencing so i understand i'm not asking you to talk about anything you can't talk about because of act 10 i'm simply asking you to describe the process that you've engaged in um and where folks are on the same page and where folks are not on the same page in terms of our handbook so the process is this is that we come up with some subject matters they come up with some subject matters we

198come together and we look to find common ground on what we want to look at and change and work on for the handbook so that's the process that we use we talk a lot about equity um we look at what would be equitable where can we make changes um can we consolidate some some areas or some areas like a one one off that we can use so that's kind of the collaborative process that we're using and those are the common grounds that we do have i think i i'm what i'm asking more specifically is what are the areas that identified as common ground so like we got together and agreed that this needs to shift in terms of our practices around seniority or this needs to shift in terms of you know how we can

199have more equitable hiring practices and that's an area in which we're on the same page versus you know here's an area where the administration thinks where we will take this action we would be able to advance this work uh the union doesn't necessarily agree with that um are there kind of salient examples of areas that have been defined through this process um that goes back to what you're looking at as far as what is needed for instance like for each positions or each work unit we're looking at what each work unit is looking for what equity what what is equal equitable within those work units so we have to be careful like i said that's where you get into the whole act in so we want to stay away from wages wage schedules but talk

200more about uniformity in how the handbook pertains to each of those units and so when i talk about section 18 the handbook revisions in review looking at that so we're looking more at the sections making them more equitable making them more equal and that's where i'm talking about when i said before uh with your question is that making it one handbook for everyone and then if you have uh some of the sections but you don't want because to me this the handbook is you have parts of it and then it goes into all the different units what we're saying is bring it all together and then if there's certain parts that may need to come out that's what we're looking at so that's where the equity comes in to make it one handbook without all

201the sections put together if that means i don't have any other questions all right um dr jenkins yes uh thank you so much for having this topic here so we can just talk about it in the open but then there are some things i thank you too miss kirito because there are some things that we talk about in the group as a part of since i've been here what we've been trying to do is have a collaborative problem solving process even with the handbook and everything we do and mike jones and i uh have a cadence when we meet a lot of fighters he typically meets with dr mcgregory too a lot of fridays but there are things that are happening in the handbook that are not um necessarily moving forward i'm hoping to expect

202that mike is going to have these conversations and then we can talk about it and we just raised amongst the administration about it's time for us to have another collaborative problem-solving workshop together with the union to make sure how we go about having a cadence of having these discussions i do not expect that we will agree on everything and we have to know how to respectfully disagree but i do think that we can find common ground on things just as when you're asking the question chairman one thing i was very proud of we both talked about moving forward and being about our children that we want to be this whole thing of an anti-racist district but a discovery of what does that mean to be like an anti-racist district for real and i think that

203there are some topics in terms of wanting our staff to have a great working conditions in place but what does that mean to mti what does that mean to us and how do we get there together now it is my hope that through our collaborative problem solving we can find more things that we agree on that we disagree on in that ultimate team knowing that we all are here for our students so i'm interested in it i think uh i would um myself um go to one of the meetings as well but i'm looking to go back and have this conversation with mike jones first and see what he and i think needs to happen uh collaboratively but there needs to be some additional discussion between uh you know he and i as we move

204forward i'm going to be having this discussion here too because it's great to hear from the boy are there things if you i'd much rather be with us or not everybody having to come to you for something that we agreed that we can have some real discussion about thanks dr jenkins chris yeah thank you um and miss caroline please stop me if you have already explained this i had to step out for just a minute but i am curious with the timeline on this so looking at this is this just an ongoing process or is there a stop a start time and an end point to this so what i see here is recommendations from mmsd and from mti on your memo is is there an ending point that you are hoping to get to

205for one of these years and then a new year would start yes okay yes yeah we are looking to once we figure out uh which sections we want to focus on and look at language and agree on language then yes there will be a stop time and then we want to do like a full year where we don't touch the handbook we use it for one full year and then if we have to start another year or that's why i talk about um section 18 because what is in there is that there would be a a repository where people can put in suggestions for changes to the handbook and then so that would be the second year you start looking at those and then start working on it and then you go through this process

206all over again but there would be one year where you would just leave the handbook as is and go through one year cycle so the collaborative process you're involved in right now are you expecting that to go through may through june through july where where is the end point that you're expecting for this year and what you are working on right now so the end point would be we would make suggestions in may to work on it for june if i'm not mistaken from the handbook yes okay so you're hoping to have the this resolved by june and then moving forward on from that would be a new collaborative process right okay um one of the things just because we just got done talking about budget if um you end up wanting to act on

207any of these recommendations it does seem like some of them are attached to pay or budget um things like the co-curricular event pay that i see on here um and i and i do understand that that has been an issue over the past year just due to staffing and covid and and getting people to be able to to do some of these things in our schools um if that were to be addressed and i'm not saying what the decision is going to be but where where do you see that fitting into the budget process for next year i can't answer that i'm not sure okay is that something we can't answer just because we're still discussing it or i'm just thinking planning wise um we're releasing a budget for next year in april our preliminary

208budget and then the final budget in june at the end of june yeah i can't and like i said again i can't really answer that oh i think well i think we have to differentiate um if if if i may um address this um board member and go expect in the handbook committee typically we um can't address the issues of compensation so if you're talking about the handbook piece um the um other budgetary pieces that that have to be addressed through the budgetary process so i don't think typically the handbook committee which i'm actually not on um can address those types of things because those are to do deal with compensation okay so then i guess i'm i'm curious the ones that you have listed here is mti recommendations why are these coming to us

209through the handbook committee then if that isn't possible well those are um subject matters that they would like to talk about that they want us as the handbook committee to look at and work on so i wanted to be transparent and put those in there because those are recommendations that they want us to talk about okay is this something we cannot talk about though in the handbook process is that what you're telling me well right now i can't yeah but are you we can look at it what we're doing is we're looking at it we're discussing it trying to get an understanding of what they're looking at and what they want to happen and so that's where we do the collaborative processes we're listening we're getting an understanding of where they're coming from with that

210so we are doing that much okay and then through the process do you provide them feedback on on the district's opinions on the things they're suggesting and then they respond to that feedback i'm just trying to get a handle on how the whole process works so that's for our next meeting that's what we're looking at but for right now i can't give them a definitive answer but we are listening they did give us some um ideas of what how they want that to look and how they want it tied to different areas within the handbook as well and so we are looking at it we are meeting we do breakout sessions we come back and they kind of give us an understanding of what what they're looking for and how they want that to um

211be fleshed out and chris i just want to talk just mention one additional piece we have to be very careful when we're doing we can do collaborative problem solving however as uh miss carodyne has indicated in these meetings she cannot respond to a request for example to increase payment for a particular group of employees all she can say is i hear your request and so there is no back and forth it's i hear your request and that's about the extent but that's because of um the strictures of of act 10. so i the focus should not be on really compensation it should be on everything else that's in the handbook gotcha thank you for clarifying that because i think that is important as to what is negotiable and what is part of a collaborative solving

212problem-solving process that we are trying to engage in um i guess one of the things i would comment is i do think it's important um to figure out the the time frame um to me three years seems like a really long time um when we've been working on a yearly cycle but i guess i i would want to know more about how that would work um and then my question is is um what do you need from the board at this point um in the process how can we i'm glad i'm sorry no that's that's my question for you and so on in the handbook it's every two years it's every two years in the handbook but from what i understand they've been doing it every year but technically it's every two year cycle to

213look at the handbook um and what was the second part of your question i'm sorry oh just if if there's it i i know you're i i appreciate the update on the handbook process i'm just wondering if there's any like decision point or anything coming up that you would need from the board um at this point not yet but soon because what will happen is we'll do the write up and we'll give it to the superintendent and then take it from there okay thank you thank you so much chris nicky i see your hand quick question and this is for sure i want to ask sherry to make sure i could legally ask it so sherry could come on screen that would be wonderful and that is this can we please explain why we cancelled

214multiple meetings was it due to covet was it due to that i have the list of dates it was the union on meetings that were cancelled is there are we allowed to ask why they were canceled and who canceled them and the reason for the cancellation well i can answer those two sherry and then you can jump in if you want so the two that were cancelled was one was a signing day the other one was a another uh career fair that we had and then the other one i was dealing with a um issue a work issue so those are the only ones that have been cancelled and thank you um and the first one is just about the um in the memo the list of um items that mti has brought forward is

215much shorter than the list that was in their memo that they shared with us in march so i'm wondering how we got from that fairly long list of things that they're interested in talking about to the list of four items in the memo they pared it down because we were like that's it's it's monumental i mean that's enormous and so we were like can you pare it down to um specific ones let's just focus on maybe four so we brought four things they brought four things and then we got to pare it down yeah i hadn't heard from mti that they had teared it down so that's clarification and then my other concern is that um the pro i firmly disagree with the proposal to extend the collaborative handbook process to a three-year cycle instead

216of a two-year cycle um just as a board member this two-year cycle is really important for us to stay on top of what our staff are thinking in terms of their working conditions and changes they want to see if we extend this to a three-year cycle that's less time that we have to get that important feedback from our staff in an established process and a structured process so i really think just in the interest of making sure that this board is on top of working conditions in the district and what our staff are thinking and saying as well as the need to continuously collaborate with our staff hope some of these things we should keep it as a three-year process i know collaborative planning or clogged problems three years keep it at two sorry i'm

217like i'm tired of language my body is saying two and my mouth um yeah i'd keep it at two i know that um collaborative problem solving is an ongoing process and i very much appreciate that but the board is not engaged with that process at the same level as we engage with the handbook because the handbook processes we have to engage so i think we need to maintain some kind of a formal structured process for the board to be hearing from our staff about what their concerns are and what their interests are and their excitement is around the handbook and know how the administration is responding to those things thank you for that other comments on the handbook all right move on to our next thing we want to agree that i think if we're

218in a three-year cycle just based in the board's terms that it's almost impossible to have a continual conversation and i'll also say that the last time we as a board took action around the handbook it was a really debated area of of action that we took and we took that action expecting for it to create specific results and i think if we don't have this conversation on a regular basis we don't have the ability to determine whether or not our decisions are having the impact we intend for them to have um and so i think you know being able to examine this conversation and re-examine the decisions we're making within this conversation is incredibly important all right i love that yeah i just i just wanted to agree with both of you uh and thank

219you again for remember cruising for for making sure that this item is in the discussion okay moving on um for our next agenda item i'm going to hand it over to board president gonna pass it to uh castro he's got that he's got the jacket thank you so much and this is a resolution to recognize departing board members chris carusi and ananda whereas chris carusi and ananda marilli board of education members for the madison metropolitan school district have successfully served on the board since 2019 whereas leadership of chris and ananda during the unprecedented time of the coven 19 pandemic have demonstrated their perseverance and humanity in countless ways over the past two years and has helped the district keep our students staff and families safe whereas the support and outreach taken on by amanda and

220chris to help pass the 2020 referendum has put the district in a place where all students will benefit from the massive upgrades to physical spaces and bolstering of mmsc's finances could not have come at a more opportune time whereas their fierce dedication to highlighting racial disparities that must be addressed both in k-12 education and larger society continues to uplift our students whereas ananda's leadership on the city of madison education committee has brought together city county and district for collaborative problem solving whereas staff was honored to work with ananda as chair of the instruction work group and chris as chair of the operations work group fostering positive relationships and mutual respect and support of high quality instruction whereas both members have kept equity at the center of the conversations prioritized educators honored our community and centered

221our students whereas their service will shape education and our community for generations of young people and inspire the leadership of both the board members they leave behind and those who will follow in their foots steps now therefore be it resolved but the madison metropolitan school district board of education recognizes and greatly values the contributions of chris carusi and ananda morelli and their dedication to mmsc students their work and legacy will continue to have a lasting positive impact in our schools our students our families and the community be further resolved the statement be permanently imprinted in the board of education minutes for the meeting of april 11th 2022. a couple of plaques that we usually give to outgoing board members it's a wonderful thing that we get through our association of school board organization has a

222little inscription on it for each of you oh the funny thing is that you would think this is the end but you have another meeting after this meeting and on that note uh board president mulder um do you want to take a recess between the two meetings so i need to continue to learn this yeah i just want to ask you like if like pre-planning oh yes we can we all right all those in favor donna gordon can i get your advisory bill hi all those in favor we are jordan thank you everybody we'll come back at 805. six