001so i've gained or we are where i'm live i won't talk about my weight gain okay all set thank you thanks barb so welcome everyone to the february 8th 2021 meeting of the operations work group um we did not receive any written comments for tonight's meeting nor do we have any um registered speakers so we're gonna jump right ahead to the minutes um i moved to approve the minutes from the operations work group meeting dated september 14th 2020. can i get a second thanks ali um all those in favor raise your hand any opposed all right i moved to approve the minutes from the operations work group meeting dated november 9th 2020. second gloria thanks gloria um i'm sorry julie i missed your advisory built last time um your advisory boat julia hi all those
002in favor all right motion carries thanks everybody um so we have three discussion items on tonight's agenda we're gonna talk about the 20 21 22 budget including summer school tonight we will talk about community input into the facilities projects that are being funded by the referendum and finally we're going to get a brief update on the employee handbook and before we launch into any of those items i would like to invite dr jenkins to set the stage with us with some brief remarks thank you so much chris uh this opportunity just to give some brief remarks about what we are on those particular three items and definitely leading out the way with where we are with our budget uh planning process i just want to remind everyone that we are definitely committed to uh living
003up to our referendum promise as we have said that we would and you see that reflected in the comments as uh both ms roof will get an opportunity to speak tonight and also ms quist said also joining in on that but before we get there too uh i would just like to say to everybody i'm very excited this week as we continue to see the metrics in our community are going down and for us that means a number of items uh on our dashboard and getting to turn green so we're very excited to do that but and keep in line with the budget as we were talking about it's a lot of work that has gone into it looking short term uh looking at summer semester looking at the fall and just really leaning forward
004what we're trying to do to keep the commitment on our children and as i said you will hear a little bit more about that a little bit later and then about the facilities too so having said that our cfo has done the job of really trying to get the voices of all the people on our team and we really do appreciate that and sure articulate that as you do a presentation tonight so thank you thanks so much thanks so much dr jenkins i appreciate that um so our discussion about the budget tonight is going to be focused on staffing and summer school which we're calling summer semester and we'll hear more about that um over the past few years mmsd has spent between 82 and 87 of our budget each year on staff salary and
005benefits um given that this is most of our budget it's really important for board members to be clear on how we're investing that money um so for that reason um our presentation tonight while we don't have any immediate action on it it's really important for board members to be clear on the staffing plan moving forward and to get your questions answered we will have three pause points during the budget presentation the first one will be after the slide on the internal allocation process we'll have a second pause at the end of the budget presentation and we'll have a third pause at the end of the summer school presentation um and keep in mind that um discussions about base wage negotiations will happen through the collective bargaining process which um we will work on in closed
006session so we won't be talking about base wage negotiations tonight um i think that's all the remarks i need to do to set the stage for kelly so kelly thank you so much for all the work you've put into tonight's presentation all right thank you chris and thank you superintendent jenkins barbara if you could pull up the slides that would be fantastic so welcome everyone you are in the february of operation work group meeting um as chris suggested where we will be focusing um on staffing um largely tonight and the summer semester so barbara we can go ahead and dive into those slides let's see if i actually have the ability to okay all right so we would not be in a budget presentation if we didn't start off with our guiding light which is
007our strategic framework and our vision as a district which is that every school will be a thriving school that'll prepare every student for college career and community ready and we drive that work through our core values the core values that you see on this page is what our team puts forward as we discuss kind of negotiate and ultimately make decisions that we move forward for your recommendation in the budget process itself there's three goals of the strategic framework are focused on thriving students thriving schools and making sure that every african-american student excels in our school district so i know you know all these i know you know the goals and i know you know the core values but it's important that we say them out loud in the front of every meeting so that they're
008first and foremost in our mind when we make these important decision makings the next slide is our educational equity policy as chris laid out for you the vast majority of our budget is in our staffing plan 82 to 87 of our entire budget is built into our staffing plan and we'll be focusing on the school workbooks today in the school workbooks themselves almost 30 million dollars gets distributed in the school workbook process so this is first and foremost one of our key investments our key pillar into our budget in any given year so it's absolutely critical that we think through this allocation process through educational equity and lisa and i are going to do our best to highlight and pull out those areas where we've put equity forward as it relates to our investments in
009staff in this current year and the next sidebar so tonight we'll be focusing on the staffing plan and the workbook process in particular as mentioned with summer school being a key time of year that we talk about that because you will be asked for an early budget approval vote on summit summer semester in march so it's important that we start this conversation tonight we'll have deeper conversations again in the march operation work group but you will be asked for an early vote with the summer semester plan in the march regular board meeting next slide so we do our budget for a similar approach every year last year we went through it three times hopefully we won't have to do that this year um and we'll uh have a pretty stable budget by the time we
010get our biennium coming out of the state in june or early july but tonight we're going to revisit bullets one and two we dove deep into them when we met last month goals guiding principles and revenue forecasts and assumptions we dove deep last month so tonight we're just going to revisit them make sure everyone's still on the same page and we're going to dive deeper into bullet number three that staffing plan and the next slide then overall timeline hasn't changed just a reminder of of where we're ticking away before we get to that june budget vote and next month looking at health care our equity investments and doing some early budget approvals as i just mentioned in the next slide then barb this is at the budget goals we discussed these together when we met
011last month when we met we discussed them and i largely saw support across our board members for these budget goals so no no changes have been made since the last time you saw them with one exception since the last time we met the state has confirmed the final base wage number so if you look down in the blue on the bottom corner there one point two three percent is the maximum base wage allowed for contracts starting in july 1 such as us so that is now an official number and not just a draft as i had in here last month i want to make sure everyone is aware of that on the next slide we have our budget kind of principles or guiding guiding principles guiding parameters for our work together we did make some
012changes when we were together last month adding language around flexibility and agility particularly in light of covid19 we fully understand that supporting students and the whole student and maintaining flexibility and agility in these times is more important than ever so we've highlighted that we've also reworded that last bullet based on your feedback where it now reads intentionally building on practices that show that are showing data supported promise for the future so these have been updated happy to take more comments if there are any but based on the direction we were heading in last month it seemed like we were all pretty much working together and on the same page as it relates to the overall goals that's where we want to reach and then the guiding principles which are the parameters of which we work
013with it so diving kind of right on in as a reminder we talked last month about our revenue forecast so in total we are projecting eight million dollars of new revenue this year driven entirely by the operating referendum passed by our local taxpayers in november and that is because of our enrollment loss due to covet 19 both from the 2021 school year that we're in now and also a combined effect for the 21 22 school year we are in a declining enrollment state due to covet 19 which will mean that our revenue limit itself um will drive a loss we'll see some declining enrollment exemptions a little bit of student revenue but at the end of the day we're looking at a zero dollar increase to the total revenue limit so if needed i can
014go back into the details of how that how that's calculated but we didn't cover that quite a bit in january so in the next slide so if we have eight million dollars of total new revenue authority from that operating referendum we also need to look at what are all the things we want to fund in this budget if we want to fund salary with the steps fully funded and base wage to the max our health care plans as negotiated and approved by the board in the last budget cycle key investments into our equity and excellence actions as we discussed with the community through the referendum and then of course the things that the state tells us we have to fund we're looking at generating about a 7.7 million dollar gap now i know that seems
015like a big number but we have a lot of strategies that can help us get there and this budget is not a budget in crisis we can get there tonight we'll take the first step which is we're going to start to talk about staffing we are 4.2 percent enrollment down from 1920 to the 21 22 projections 4.2 percent down in enrollment so what does that mean it means we do have to resize our district in alignment with the students we have so we have to take the students that we have and make sure we get them the supports that they need so the decisions that you'll see and the recommendations that you'll see in front of you tonight are in line with that kind of thinking we're in line with the class size policy but
016we're also putting equity strategies first when it relates to where we reduce and where we don't which is one of the key strategies i want to make sure we're highlighting and if lisa if i miss it i need you to jump in and make sure we hit all the right points because our decisions of where not to reduce are just as if not more important in this particular budget cycle so we'll get to that as well so we'll be talking about that four million dollar kind of adjustment um to help close this gap tonight and you'll start to see that in the upcoming slides go ahead bar so again compensation and staffing they go together if we carry a large amount of staff in comparison to the students that we have we have fewer revenue
017available to fund compensation but as we re-adjust for the staff the students that we have and the staff that we need it can give us more revenue to pay people so you either take a lot of people and pay them little or you take the people you have and you pay them and you pay them which a lot are you paying what you can that's kind of the goal that we're talking about here today we're talking about balancing this approach of staffing and compensation we want to pay the staff as much as we can which means we need to find other ways to close this budget so looking at the next slide this is a really important grounding slide especially for any of our new newer board members okay or newer staff members in general
018it helps to explain where all of our staff are so we have approximately 4 000 staff in our overall allocation pool here in madison of those staff 72 percent are distributed through the process lisa is about to walk you through or the school workbooks these are all the people direct and staffing directly allocated out to schools these are your teachers these are your support teams of those 72 percent about 50 percent are regular education or dli teachers and about 20 percent are student support systems these would be your cc teachers seas psychs social work pbs nurses etc those of which who are directly reporting to the principal and operating in a school 72 percent so that's what we're focusing on today as i mentioned it's just short of 300 million dollars in our budget all
019of the other staffing about 28 is what we call central office staffing but they're not all people who sit in central office 10.5 or 11 are allocated from central office into schools that's that first bucket you see right there the 10.5 doyle flam-based but allocated to schools these are going to be your advanced learning specialists they work every day in the schools but they're allocated from central office they'll be your special education psts they're also your safety and security assistance they work in school every day but they're allocated from central office in the way that we work and the way that we allocate the far side the flom and hoyt bucket those are going to be your food service workers maybe your carpenters your plumbers your electricians they work out a flum in support of
020schools every single day keeping our buildings up and running and food service and these are our cooks that are cooking that food in that kitchen it's also all of mscr that sits in that corner so when you typically think of kind of central office those who work in doyle it's about seven percent of the total um or approximately 250 people just to make sure you're putting this all in perspective it's important to think about how important these workbook conversations are and that the vast majority of our people are allocated through this process so with that i'm going to hand it over to lisa who will talk to you about the workbook process itself thanks kelly i feel like we're getting kind of a routine with this every year since we've been together so this is
021our internal allocation process that we have been working on since december and on february 12th our electronic workbooks will be released we have worked really hard to make this a transparent and robust process beginning back in december what we do is we take a look we do sort of an after action review of the workbook and allocation process and we reset school workbooks based on enrollment we reset conversions and we make any adjustments based on enrollment trends that we're seeing we look at as we run the workbook model we look at projections again we were using with our class size policy optimal plus one that's the same as we did last year and we take into account agr which is former sage funding and then we also look at the categorical positions of special education
022and brt brs and esl teachers we take a look and we review what happens with the schools when all of those elements are moved into schools and we actually look beyond just the formulas that are in that workbook model we actually look and we check with our eyes there's a human piece of this and we look at year-to-year changes we look at class sizes where they're on the bubble we look at title one funding and how schools are impacted and we take a look at continuing program implementation and the cost and the staffing to run but just a few of those programs that are listed there then what we do and actually kelly and i and the team have been the last two weeks has been heavy work around review with teaching and learning review
023with the chiefs review at the superintendent because all of the pieces have to come together and feel coherent for schools so we're looking at february 12 as the release of the workbook we have already had one meeting a couple of weeks ago we had our pre-meeting and presentation we also had a new principal meeting to support them as they moved through the process with their hr analysts and then on february 12th those workbooks will go live and again commend the budget office for the work that they did to get that out of paper pencil years ago and into something that is far more user user friendly next slide please so this is the board approved class size has not changed since we last approve it again we have maximum optimum and minimum sizes as well
024as special subject classroom sizes and just a reminder i actually reminded principles of this a couple of weeks ago these are not hard caps there is some flexibility that principals have within their building um in approval with chiefs and the teaching and learning department to go above or below based on flexibility that their buildings may need next slide please lisa um chris i think this might be at the time you want to pause do you want to go back to that process slide for us barb two slides back i think right there is that right chris you wanna yeah um and we can talk about the class size policy as well at this point since we've seen that slide thank you lisa i appreciate your flexibility um barb could we um take the slides down
025for just a minute so i can see everybody and nikki i do see your hand um just uh one one thank you to the um team for doing this it's much more streamlined much earlier than we normally see the budget i really appreciate that i know that's a lot of sacrifice on your part and number two just curious um on custodians are they out of phlegm are they out of soil are they not in the mix how does that work yeah in that bucket they're out of they're out of phlom that far right hand blue box got it that was my only uh question thank you all right you're welcome um before we take questions from other folks and i do want everybody to have a chance to answer questions kelly i'm wondering if you
026could um talk a little bit more about the workbook reset that's happening this year and why it's kind of unique this year like i know we didn't do a reset when we got our code enrollment numbers and so yeah you just explain a little bit more about how that process is working and how it impacts staffing decisions yeah so i think it's important good point chris it's really important for everyone to know that um lisa and i were in front of you in february um of 2020. with a similar presentation and we would have explained to you where our staffing all was and where it was going and then about a month later coven19 hit our workbook process is such that we released the allocation to schools in february of 2020 before anyone knew covid19
027you know was going to hit and certainly not the impact it was going to have we did not pull allocations out of schools in september when we were down in enrollment we may have moved some around and we may have frozen some as as you all know but the allocations themselves exist in the budget and exist today still pointing to the schools as tied to the 1920 enrollment assumptions so that matters because today we know more right today we know um where the kiddos um are where they're appointed to in september the third friday in september and we know where they're appointed to the second friday in january so we have a lot more information so when we go into the next phase of this conversation regarding kind of resizing for the students that we
028have it's important to realize that we actually have two budget years that we're making up from the 2021 cycle where the enrollment was down and the 21 22 projections that are based on what we know today so in a lot of ways we're resetting um for two school years we could have reduced staff entirely and cut them out of our budget in september now we didn't do that because there's still a lot more um of the year to go to no we didn't know if we were coming back in person and when so we froze some positions we didn't reduce them and so it's an important distinction um really to be made when when we start to move into the next part of this conversation chris i hope that's helpful that's really helpful thank you
029kelly i appreciate that um are there other clarification questions at this point stadium with the drop in enrollment is that still concentrated at the early levels like we heard in september yeah 80 percent of the reduction is at the elementary level at this point wow our high schools are actually remarkably stable chris i think did i see your hand chris yeah i i guess in in just listening to you explain that my question was so are the budget books that are going out they're responsive to the the different losses of enrollment between schools because it wasn't evenly spread across the district so that takes all of this into account it does correct okay there are some schools that gained enrollment um and and not only gained enrollment this year but are projected to gain more
030enrollment next year so we do sort of a barbell effect across the district we have some schools that are really gaining students and then some schools that are hit really really hard okay um then my next question is so the school workbooks are going out and that's basically 72 of our staffing model we have this other staffing that was shown on that slide and i found that slide to be really helpful by the way to show how the buckets are sort of arranged um when do we talk about the other staffing and where does that fit into the budget discussion largely march and april um as it relates to kind of a counter-balancing strategy to the strategic and the new investments in the equity investments themselves okay and then is there a way that we
031can get more of a breakdown the the staffing the other staffing that come from central office but are allocated out to the schools can we see that broken down into you know which departments they come from or how they're allocated um it always seems a little confusing to me as to where those staff go and how it's connected to the plans that we have and how it's connected to the school staffing too we've got um there are there are staffing tables in the budget book chris that largely point to that but i'll um i'll happy to elaborate more yeah that would be helpful um looking through the budget book um to prepare for this meeting it just like especially the teaching and learning that's in about 10 different sub-sections and so it's it's a little
032bit hard to to tell where it where it goes and how it all fits together sure so that would be helpful yep and then we know we did some rearranging of staffing um this summer based on the the freezes and staff from central office being reallocated to other positions um to be classroom teachers to fill the gaps that we had are all of those staffing going back to the 2019-20 levels from those central office allocated to schools it is assumed that they will not be filling teacher positions um and that teacher allocations will be hired for going into the 2122 that is assumed whether the exact same you know levels exist would be that conversation that's in the march and april time frame okay that that would be helpful yeah that would be helpful to
033have and just understand you know i'm just thinking of you know the three major plans that we have you know the um special education the ell and the advanced learning and how the central office allocated from those um flows into the decisions we're making given that those plans and the trajectory we have for reviewing them are all kind of on pause so just figuring out how those decisions are being made along the way okay sounds good thanks other questions kelly i've got a couple um and actually the first one isn't for you it's probably for our peo i don't know if anyone is here from there tonight but i'm kind of wondering when the board might expect to get a class size report maybe richard probably would be best to jump in on that one
034or we can get back to you in a weekly update either one yeah we'll be getting back to the board with the um class last report and connected to the weekly update so i mean you can expect it real soon yeah that would be really helpful to have as we move forward with decisions about the budget so thank you um my second question kelly is um especially given the uncertainties around enrollment in the early grades um do we are we moving forward with an unallocated pool of staff that we would be able to allocate to the early grades if we get more students than we are expecting we'll cover that on the next slide chris that's exact next topic yep excellent and um my third question is just um do we have a timeline at
035this point for moving into um collective bargaining negotiations i know we're not talking about the actual numbers right now but um what is our timeline for moving forward with those negotiations i know we wanted to try to get them done earlier this year so we can really focus on um reopening schools as this semester goes on um did you do you have anything to add on that one or um otherwise i would suggest we bring that back for of the future meaning hey kelly um i think we can bring it back we don't have a specific date set yet but i know there have been some initial uh check-ins behind the scenes so i think we can just we can bring it back to the group when we know a little more all right thank
036you and um i think that's it for questions at this point so let's keep going thanks right thank you all right so we will move into the um projected staffing levels so as barb pulls up that slide um as a reminder uh what lisa just told you when she walked through that process was that the workbooks will go out right there you see it february 12th so that's this coming friday so a lot of work has already been done and sort of a confirming exercise we've been through the cabinet superintendent teaching and learning side of the work so barbara if you can go two slides forward for me then there you go right there um so we are down as i mentioned 4.2 percent in enrollment from the 1920 to the 20 122 year projection
037however our staffing projection itself is down 1.8 percent as it relates to the school workbooks so what we're what we're kind of here to tell you is that we aimed for stability in schools and we aimed for um kind of continued support structures for students and you'll see that in the upcoming slides so while we did reduce at the elementary level in your kind of general ed categories as it relates to the class size we could have reduced a lot more the reason why we didn't is because we want to maintain stability in schools and we want to give schools flexibility to be able to move some of the staff around not entirely knowing what the rules and regulations are going to look like in the fall right they change weekly at this point so
038while we are down in allocation we're really only down really what's less than one point fte on average at the elementary school down um less than 10 at the middle and and really incredibly stable at the high school level to show you that this is um while we're down really still stable at the school level as it relates to the students we have and the supports they need we added those staff ratios at the bottom so you can see that we've been incredibly stable as it relates to the student-to-staff ratios at elementary middle and high over the last three years in in next year included even just a slight bit bit down in the staff to student ratios um with what we're walking into for the 21 22 year so you'll see that we actually
039left quite a bit of staff in um so we're we're not closing this budget on the on the back of schools we're not closing this this budget on the back of needs of students we've actually put the needs of students first and we're just resizing where we can within what we expect to be a traditional kind of retirement year we're not looking or projecting any major kind of layoffs or surpluses at this point this is well within um kind of a standard ratio of year to year changes um lisa dear did you have anything else on this slide before we dive into the into the details i miss anything no okay so on the next slide we'll start getting into the strategy themselves um so we allocate um at the class size policy that lisa
040suggested to you um and we work on on the the two ends of the spectrum trying to minimize per our budget goals together minimize the number of classes that are below the class size policy so less than 15 to one teacher ratios we also aim to minimize anything above the maximum our class sizes anything that's in the minimum or maximum at this point in time remains on a watch list meaning we watch what happens with enrollment we add where we need to or in the worst case in september we might pull a teacher and move them to a new location but a lot of really great things happening at the elementary level that we want to make sure we highlight including the full-day 4k rollout so lisa if you want to um kind of talk
041to the board and everyone about the exciting full-day 4k built into the workbook that goes on on friday that would be great well i get to talk about that kelly thank you for handing me that one yes we have six sections of full day 4k we have some sections in spanish and some in english and we are very excited about that um colleen is currently working on enrollment she is working on hearing a lot of voices from our 4k teachers so we are very excited to see um full day programs um at now keep me honest kelly yeah leopold mendota sandberg and i think that's it that's it that's right um two two and two um at those schools so really excited about that and can't wait to share more um with you about that
042as well anything else kelly you need me to go into here no i think let's go on to that okay so an overall general allocation standpoint on the next slide you got your secondary schools continuing to staff at the middle school at about 23 per section and what we're really excited about at the middle school level um is the world link the daily world language instruction for their seventh and eighth graders this was a goal um that we heard from our feedback from our community when we started to talk about the referendum our middle school parents were looking for access to daily world language because it opens up opportunities in high school and opens up opportunities for credit and secondary and college experiences so i'm really excited that this workbook process is such that every
043school every middle school will have daily world language instruction at seventh and eighth grade with the exception of badger rock because they have a waiver from you the board for doing that but badger rock has added an avid coordinator for the very first time also in line with their board approved plan so a lot of exciting things as far as where we've been wanting to move our middle schoolers in the overall instruction lisa anything else on middle school at this time okay going on to high school um we maintained our same staffing allocation for this year at the high school level i'm always paying attention to outliers where the chiefs need to review i'm scheduling at the high school level to make sure we're maintaining the class sizes but have allocated such that we're well
044within the class size policy and we're sustaining those allocations in the college and career readiness areas as it relates to experiential learning our pathways coordinators credit recovery and our acp coordinators so maintaining those positions and really protecting them through the budget process in order to support the students and and the needs again high school remains pretty incredibly stable so not a lot of shifts were really needed at the high school level going into this workbooks sorry lisa about earlier anything else to add on the site no the only thing i would emphasize is is kelly what you pointed out this is a big win we should be proud of the fact that we have expanded access to middle school world language to daily world language it is a key equity strategy for us we know
045that as students participate in daily world language they have greater opportunity as they matriculate into high school to go into higher level coursework for world language if you remember a couple of years ago we expanded access to fine arts as well so students would have more opportunity to go into higher level fine arts courses and then we all know what happens next is that when students go to college or post-secondary right they have an opportunity to bring with them some credits from high school that they have earned um during during their time so that is a real investment that we have made and um i know that the team is really proud of that um increasing opportunities for students yeah thank you some really good exciting things happening at the secondary level now those are
046kind of our universal strategies and on the next slide what you'll see is we're going to start to look at um the equity staffing strategies and really building from the um investments that the board made in 1920 in 2021 to lead us into where we're headed for 2122. so over the course of the last two years we've invested over two million dollars into the special education staffing and non-personnel structures in the special education world we've made psych counselor social workers almost a million dollar investment into those student support strategies in just the last two years and we've made a 400 000 investment into the advanced learning um realm as well so we've really moved a lot of ways in our equity strategies that were built into the the plans over the last couple of years
047of which are all kind of retained and sustained um in the going forward and the staffing strategies for 21 22. we also started our work around 4k this last year you'd remember that you voted in some planning money of which colleen has been using to get ready for these full day 4k sessions and we also made some good adjustments as it related to or a routing of our 4k kiddos that worked really well for us and we'll really sustain going into this next year kind of being the virtual learning year that we had we'll continue to work on that 4k routing strategy as a key equity strategy in itself for those for those little ones moving into the 21 22 year like i said we sustain all of those investments and we build on them
048our next slide lisa mentioned the full day 4k investments that are built into the projections using the referendum money should we we've mentioned the daily world language at middle school and the avid coordinator but we've also in looking at an investment into our counselor positions at the middle school level so we'll bring those back to you next month as part of our overall equity investment strategy using some of that new referendum money so more to come on investments into counselors which we think are needed as it relates to supporting the overall covid19 kind of whole student environment that we're going to need when our kids come back to school but above and beyond that what we've really done is focused on retaining all of those student support structures so you'll see a theme going through
049the next slides which include maintaining our sites maintaining our social workers maintaining our nurses increasing our counselors and maintaining all of our ell staff and student ratios even though enrollment levels are down and we saw a significant drop in our ell student population what we are not doing is we are not reducing any of those budgets that i just mentioned what that does it has the effect of improving our staff to student ratios which allow for smaller environments and better supports and more more supports for the kiddos of whom we have by retaining the staff that directly support those students so hand it over to lisa to explain that a little bit more and maybe talk about the instructional coach kind of philosophy moving forward as well you've got it um i think this is
050a big slide for us as a district and i think oh could you go back to the uh yeah to this one thank you um these next two slides are really important for us as we actually put into action our anti-racist strategies and that um at the top the instructional coach position is being much more focused and a priority around that work with early literacy and beyond and um the phased-in approach that we have with letters training and high-quality materials is really going to be the work of our instructional coaches and we've already started that work with gloria ladson billings and it is it is powerful it is powerful work i talk with gloria every week and it is it is moving us it is moving us in terms of how we think about what
051children can do the potential that they have and um the wonderful qualities that they bring to our classrooms every day and how having all of our children as readers it gives them all of the chances and opportunities that they need to be productive citizens so this is a big slide full day 4k continuing the investment in our coaches we have improved the staffing ratios which we're going to talk about in the next slide and then that daily world language this is really something that the board can be proud of these are concrete actions that we have taken to really make a difference for our students and on the next slide what kelly has prompted me to talk about are the more specific ways in categorical areas that we are leaning into this support so as
052kelly talked a little bit earlier around supplemental staffing for ells this allocation process that we used really tested us and it was a really um it was a deep conversation that we all had in the budget office about the needs of students and the right decisions to make we are down about 700 english language learners in the district had we run that same old formula right if we had ran the same formula with the same ratios you would have had a lot of fte drop out that could have been done and over with right the technical side could have been done but we paused we waited and we asked ourselves the question about if we're really an anti-racist district if we really want to support these children who have been disproportionately impacted and need more
053social and emotional wrap around and support and language support we went back and we ran it again we ran the formula again right they can only take you so far you really have to have the conversation about this so we re-ran it at a different ratio and put over the amount of staffing back into classrooms that we had last year so we can up our communication with families so that we can really get to know these children so that we can really help them with the social and emotional needs that they're going to have when they come back in so that is something that we feel really good about we have a little in reserve we always have a little in reserve for unallocated but we really loaded front loaded this to support our students
054who need the support the most so we talk about formulas we talk about all the technical work that goes into the workbook this was a real anti-racist strategy that um we really feel strongly about and i'm so happy that um really this came out in our budget process this year and we're able to talk about that brs allocation boy we have all heard um that there has been such a great need for translation right during this virtual learning time and different kinds of communication our brs staff know our families in many cases more than even the principals or the teachers know them so we feel really good that we were able to really as i said front load that supplemental staffing based on student need so we're just really excited that students will have that
055additional support yeah and it's a really good example of how the resources follow the student right really paying attention to where our kiddos are at um and where they're moving to this tends to be a more mobile population generally um but particularly during covet 19. so the team did a really good job of of tracking monitoring where kids were third friday september where kids are second friday in january and adjusted all the numbers based on what we what we learned and what we know from second friday so really as lisa said really proud of this work and i we think it'll take us a long way and where we've been wanting to get to for years and our ell supports now as kids start to come back the goals in the budget will be to
056maintain this level of ratio in this allocation location but i will have to continuing to support the kiddos as as those numbers do hopefully hopefully grow back to where they where they were just two years ago the next slide is our special education slide a similar philosophy which is uh we're down just a little bit and our special education counts for our second friday counts but we're not going to reduce the allocation in this side of the house we're going to maintain the allocation that we have follow the students through our weighted student formulas and adjust with the students allowing for what is a 4 to 15 student cushion that means putting front loading in schools more allocation than we what we otherwise would need with the exact number of students we have today because
057it's a lot harder to move and to get the supports in place in september for these kids these kiddos so we put the allocation in schools so that schools have the allocation if and when they exceed the allotment itself we've been doing that for a couple years now it's been working really well but we're bumping up that ratio a little bit based on um the decision not to reduce in the special education site even though we might have had some a little bit of drop in our second friday accounts lisa anything else to add on this slide sure i'm missing something no kelly um thank you the only the only piece that i'm thinking about is you know last year when we implemented the wayden student formula we filled every cc vacancy we had before
058the school year started so um the the weighted formula allowed us to get our high quality staff in place early to promote stability in schools and then i just wanted to again acknowledge and thank the board for continuing to support and fund the transition planning project as you know every summer in august there is funding from john harper's department and schools have i want to say up to four days to work with their special education team sca's and psts to actually do some service delivery planning and um and communication planning with families yeah so chris you asked about unallocated so we'll be carrying an allocated in general education as we always do um i'm aiming between a 10 and 12 but we're also carrying a allocation um for the ell and an el an allocation
059for the special education um so kind of all together that's an unallocated much bigger than normal but maintaining supports in each one of those individual structures so that we can adjust as special education needs arise adjust as our ell learners arise and then our general ed pool is about the same as in previous years um so that with that said as far as next steps go in the budget and we'll open it up for chris in your comments where we're at is we release our workbooks that are staffed within the numbers and the equity strategies that you've just heard on friday that moves into barbara if you could go to the next slide for me that moves into what we call budget labs where our principals look at their allocation look at the students that
060they have the needs of the students and from an instructional lens they really build up their staffing plans and they work closely with lisa all of lisa's team and their chiefs with chief's final approval at the end of february the very beginning of march and then that ultimately starts the hr process of making sure we got the right people in the right place in march so those are kind of our next steps um for the actual workbook and staffing process for our overall budget next steps you'll see on the next slide we'll be back to you in march where we will again revisit our budget strategies make sure we're on the same page um we'll go through healthcare and we'll review our excellence and equity project proposals and some of the reductions we'll start to
061talk about some of the reductions that'll be needed to balance the overall budget but that's where we are we'll get that budget book drafted by april so with that chris those are our slides for this part of the presentation tonight and before we move on to the summer semester stuff thank you so much kelly and lisa and um barb can we take the slides down for questions and comments all right i see nikki and then savion so nikki go ahead um first i want to answer uh one of chris's questions according to the union facebook page they have a base wage mediation session scheduled for february 15th i don't know if that's just with them or with us of the district so therefore i think that could be answered um real quick that session is
062not for the 21st okay and then i misunderstood it appreciate then could we get the dates because i'm thrilled at how everything is working out with the union you guys are doing one heck of a job i think it's going actually really really well so whatever you're doing please keep up do we get that makes sense um but my second question on special ed and i don't know if you could answer this i know the board didn't vote on the funding formula and i'm not trying to be nitpicky my question is how do we justify the funding formula with the iep with the iep says a student needs a certain number of minutes and the weighted formula says an autistic student gets 40 minutes or 30 minutes how and the iep says they get an
063hour how which which trumps the iep or the weighted formula how do we make that determination nikki um let me try this we've talked about this i think a little bit in the past and what we did on the weighted student formula is we looked at our own ieps as data rather than looking at another district district's ieps and to your point when we looked at the weights by disability area we took what was an average number of minutes of service to your point that is not right minute by minute that that is not going to be accurate and and it's not always going to be perfect but again what we do is we take a look at those weights and if there are some children right because our assistant directors look at those john
064harper looks at those if there are some children that have greater needs than what the quote-unquote average is we may we may need to actually make a human adjustment to that so that that child has the resources um that he or she needs so there is this there is the formula that is the base but there is also this human piece that we want to make sure that we're taking a look at and remember john builds in um some additional allocation and some cushion um and and we we take a look at that and adjust as needed the other piece i was going to share and nikki i think um you know you'll you'll appreciate this i hope you will um one point in time right this workbook is one point in time and it
065is very early we're in the beginning of february we know that there are children who will um continue to have initial evaluations we will have other children move into our district and if there's one thing that we've promised ourselves is to be flexible and responsive to student needs so i rece i i like to share that with people so that we know that um right we are a human organization we need to adjust when needed and the average number of minutes nikki is is never we're never going to strive for average we always need to be thinking about that that you know me well lisa and thank you very much that's really helpful i just wanted to make sure sure i appreciate the question thank you nikki savion so um really thank you to the
066whole department for um actually improving those ell ratios given this budget environment that that really means a lot um i guess a request or comment and then a question um will it be possible to have the kind of just have an overview of the instructional strategy for the full day 4k pilots at some point in the future absolutely we can we can share with you a project plan on that savion thank you um and then so looking at the mental health school psychologists numbers um if those levels stay level from where they were in previous years can we assume that the ratios will probably be level as well so as it relates to overall psychologists because enrollment is down and psychologists would be staying the same the ratios would get better okay in general at
067the at the highest levels it'll differ per school because as we said the enrollment you know shift varies across schools um it's the in the counselor investment that um we're looking to make quite a substantial investment into um particularly thinking about where our middle schoolers are kind of coming back into in the year and where we think we can kind of best support in that area but in addition to that when we come back next month we will be talking about the mental health investments as it relates to the behavior health in schools which is the clinical psychologist so if that's what you're if that's the piece you're referring to we'll be coming back in march as an investment um in that program along within bounce back itself um in light of kind of covet
06819 needs um for the mental health program yep yeah and then you know it just across the country especially in wisconsin and dane county there's definitely a shortage of child psychologists but depending on the need do we think it'll be possible or necessary that we might have to contract with an outside agency depending on the need or um for mental health yeah right right now we're we're already contracting with um journey mental health and children's hospital um through that program and um i don't know if jay's on but certainly he will be next month when we talk about it so we can talk more than um all kinds of conversations happening across the city and how to how to best support um our students and our families um like considering the year we've all had
069so it's certainly high on everyone's mind got it thank you gloria thank you chris um and thank you kelly for this work um just have a question on the the safety and security assistance um how does that play a role in um our uh recommendations coming out of the um the safety and security ad hoc committee i mean um and then also like um moving forward elevating their positions at all have um are we thinking anything um in this budget i know that you know we've uh given some uh pay raises um and elevated some positions to supervisory positions i'm just wondering if there's any uh anything that we're going to consider moving forward um as we are removed um sros out of our high schools so when we come back in march the response
070to the committee's recommendations will be built into the march presentation as it relates to kind of the overall strategy multiple multi-year strategy of implementing those recommendations so jay and brynn will be here for that presentation for in march as it relates to the safety and security assistance specifically there's no current recommendation on the table as we're really still implementing the safety and security assistance plan of which the board approved um they've all received their their salary increases of course but we haven't had school in a in person in a day since that but last budget vote right so we're really still implementing um that new job description that we talked about so at this point we don't have a current plan to move any recommendations forward with that group um being that this will really
071be the first school year that the new job description and all the things we talked about last year really start to take take foot and take hold and so we'll be kind of moving through that plan in upcoming years but the overall response to those recommendations will come in march okay thank you ali yeah i want to first say that it's exciting to know that we're going to work with a singular budget this year versus our multiple upon multiple budgets last year um so i already feel really relaxed i'm like this spring reading is going to be super chill um so i'm excited to go into this process um and grateful for our community support in passing the referendum um because i think what we're talking about in terms of coming up short would be
072deeply exacerbated had our our community not stepped up to support public education um this past november so thanks y'all um i want to emphasize full day 4k i am so incredibly excited by this not because of just the six sections and the three schools that we're gonna have it at next year um but also because of what it means for 10 years from now um and i think that is also true for the middle school expansion on uh uh daily um language right and i think that means you know what it looks like for us to really dream big and think about what it means to offer multiple languages throughout a child's education and really connect the dots between dual language immersion at the elementary school level all the way through a young person's high
073school and academic career um so i i am so excited by that work and it's um i think really uplifting especially given kind of where we're at in the moment i have two pretty specific questions that um hopefully lisa and deirdre you all can can speak to um if you need to get back to me i completely understand um but i think given the the nature of covet and where we're at as a community and some of the things we still don't know um folks are anticipating that we will be engaging with kind of a virtual in-person hybrid um long term and so what does that mean for the shift in job duties for our staff and how do we compensate for folks for that the other thing i think that you know we're having
074a conversation about as a nation is hazard pay for folks whose jobs have not usually required a risk to their health what does it mean to now say hey we're gonna we're gonna ask you to do this work while navigating a global pandemic um that may may pose some some risk to you um and like i said i know i know those are our broad questions so folks want to get more more specific answers and follow up i understand i can start ali with um just the the comment about about staffing and flexibly using staffing in buildings based on student need either virtual or face-to-face i'm not sure if anybody caught it on the slide but kelly and i were very intentional and deirdre was very intentional to call this a strategic staffing and budget
075process right we know we are in um unprecedented times and we're really working with principals to be strategic about where where people are in classrooms to make sure their best teachers their best reading teachers are in kindergarten in first grade to make sure their teachers are very flexible and able to lend their talents to multiple environments i was talking with some principals today and they were talking about flexible ways to work with specials teachers um in virtual and in face to face so it's this notion of being more strategic versus just doing what you did last year to fill out a person's contract right this you've heard me say this it's this this this nature of the tenths and workbooks it makes me absolutely crazy um but it's it's trying to think more holistically and
076being really intentionable about intentional about where staff are our best fits for the work that they're doing and then where people can continue to grow to support in either virtual or face-to-face so that's a little bit on mine um deirdre do you want to take um the next piece yeah at least i was just going to add to what you were saying is like obviously we've learned about virtual learning and virtual programming right and what that looks like and we believe obviously that that's going to be a part of who we are going forward so it really does beg the question for us then to be thinking very specifically about job descriptions and what that might look like and how we might have our teachers moving back and forth between uh a in person and
077virtual environment so ali we've been thinking about that we've um we certainly have some pieces of what we think that would look like and some of our next steps are really building out a job description that that would really support that um so i appreciate you raising that i think we're we're moving in that right direction i think what i would say about the hazard pay um very specifically when we started out um on this covid journey we didn't know what we didn't know right and we didn't know what it what it meant exactly how to keep people safe what that what that looked like um so we did early on um look at hazard pay and and compensated those that had to be in person until we truly understood what the science was telling
078us how to keep people uh safe what those mitigation practices uh would be and and how people um can keep themselves safe so i think that that when we are navigating this this coveted world we're certainly open to um being able to use all of those levers and things that we have available to us to support our staff and we did we did that early on and there may be you know times when we go into the future we'll we'll have to do that again um so i i appreciate uh you raising the the issue and and there's a little bit of language that we're looking at refining as it relates to that so um that's that's where i'll leave that but i appreciate the question thank you all so much for speaking to those
079questions yeah thanks thanks for all the work on this budget i like echoing my um board colleagues here on the investments that are being made in the reduction of the ratios for ell students the investment in the middle school world languages that has been lisa i'm i'm thinking like five six years of discussion and trying to figure out how to get there for that so that's really exciting to see the investments in all day 4k um i would like to just ask a question about the counselors so very excited to see the investment in counselors at the middle school level i want to say it was maybe five years ago there was a report to the board on counselor ratios and where we stood with the national average and um not sure we actually ever
080did anything with that so i'm sort of wondering can we get that coming back to the board to sort of look at where we stand you know at the high school level too and what we might need to be building towards you know as we holistically look at mental health supports and and what we need kelly that will be coming forth in um the next um operational work group we'll talk about those investments and clear anti-racist strategies and give you the information exactly the information you're talking about chris the next time we meet okay that sounds great and then just in talking about um the strategic budget and trying to maintain the flexibility that we need this year to adjust and thinking about um you know building off what ali said about um needing to
081adjust to a virtual learning environment that may be with us for a while and we may even take parts of it and continue to build on that as an option for students um do we need an investment in upfront in the ability to do that like to work towards that just not um investing like we have maybe one technology person who's in charge of all of technology like do we need um more people working on this part to really think and build creatively what we're able to do virtually chris that is a really good question i think that we will continue to talk about as um as we talk about our equity investments moving forward as you know carlton works with the team um dr jenkins works with the team to set up central office
082right for the future we want to be sure our organization is responsive to what we have been through and the places that we want to go and um certainly have been looking at where right things might need to shift or be adjusted um based on the obligations that we have um to learn from what we've been through but i will dr jenkins is there anything that you would add to that i think i may have have spoken too soon here and i want to let you speak actually you did uh in terms of just leaning forward we're having to think uh long term as well as where we are and how we go through and how we're going to be prepared on the other end and so yes we're having some of those conversations i've
083talked to you guys about like a stop do list repurposing we're thinking about that right now because i do believe the appetite will never go back to just straight traditional school as we once knew it we're going to have to have some other options for um our families simple as that and so the virtual world i believe is here to stay and we are looking ahead thinking about what's the capacity to susp uh really support and sustain those efforts and chris you went right there on both sides of it uh the leadership capacity on one end and then also the technical side of it that we have to do have to be able to support all of the district yeah so that's that's where we're headed and we're having those discussions right now we're going
084to come back to the board with some of those discussions in march specifically how we're looking at that all right thank you julia did you have any comments or questions um i would just like to say thank you i think i mean i'm very passionate about mental health and also world languages i was able to learn um world languages from a young age and that it's given me such an advantage in high school level um with being able to do that and other students i've seen who have also been able to do that are so thankful that they had the opportunity to start younger i think that just gives such a huge advantage especially with the subject so thank you so much for that and then also i'm looking forward to learning more about mental
085health investments especially at the next meeting because i think that's something definitely focus on so thank you guys thanks julia um so i've just got a couple questions to close us out um i would actually like to dive a little bit deeper into the questions about instructional models as we move forward with the need to provide both virtual learning and move back into like hybrid or face-to-face learning um i've heard concern from parents about the possibility of a concurrent learning model where kids are still on screens and classrooms and i'm wondering if our budgeting for the coming school year um provides us with the flexibility to look at instructional models where either we have the technology in classrooms that concurrent learning doesn't require that people be on devices or that we're actually looking at having
086some classrooms be virtual classrooms and some classrooms be um in person classrooms i'm wondering if there's been some thought put into that given the parental concern i'm hearing around concurrent instruction and screen time for their kids so i have a couple other questions but i'll start with that yeah chris thank you um thank you for that question we're actually working with tj mccray and his team and jorge and his team to provide some models for families so that they can see what the student experience looks like um whether it be virtual or whether it be face to face there are naturally some um right some um some platforms that students are continuing to use um for literacy and math but there is not you know there there has sort of been this conversation that students
087in the face-to-face environment are sitting looking at computers all day long and are increasing screen time um so i am very hopeful that the resources that we um will have available soon we're actually mocking up a classroom and having children very safe of course um so we'll be able to share those resources to dispel some of the worries and the myths that i think that families have out there it is important um to realize and i always have to be reminded of this myself that this is um a return to school and that school is always going to look a little different from here on out and that you know when you think about going back you think about morning meeting you think about hugging the kids you think about helping children take their jackets
088off and moving believe me we've done it all where does the hot lunch go where does a cold lunch go and so we've been working really hard to get a picture of what that experience will look like to allay some of the fears so that families know when they choose either face-to-face or virtual that they're making an informed choice we've also had a conversation and i just had it with principals again today that the current concurrent model um with teachers um essentially beginning right teaching the same group of students virtually as face-to-face was also built to maintain stability and coherence for children and families and what we talked about was it will be really important that we invest equally in this model for our children who are face to face as well as our children
089who are virtual what i have talked with folks about today is you can't create a cadillac face-to-face model with lots of different adults coming in and out at the at the expense of our children who are still learning virtually there is a real equity um equity imperative in this that we are still providing high quality instructions either virtually or face to face so i i think we just need to what i've been hearing and what i've been learning to people is right this is there's trepidation around this you know how do we do it we've never done it before but once people get in it and they have models and time to prepare the grown-ups are going to feel better about it that said we also know that we have to spend as much time
090taking care of the educators as they come back into the building as we do of our children coming back into the building so we want to be sure that we provide that support to the educators as well as the children but chris went and and school board members when we get those resources available and when we have those to share we will certainly make those available so that you can all see them as well and chris i would just like to add to that yeah in talking to my colleagues in the region around the country those are some real concerns that parents had going into that's some those are some real concerns that even we had as superintendents or as administrators and as i've talked to them all of those things kind of work themselves
091out initially it was tough but it was just getting used to something or pivoting as we say right we have sent out some of our chiefs right now to visit other spaces and other districts are offering opportunities for us to come and visit them and um earlier when lisa spoke about jorge he's going to be working alone with uh i've just lost my training thought who's he going to be working with lisa in terms of with the videos we talked about uh dr mccray teaching dr gray dr mcrae we're gonna be actually showing some of the other footage that we can get having people explaining how it's really working but in the beginning it'll just be something different than they can pivot and it'll be fine from what i'm hearing from all of my colleagues
092thanks so much for that um lisa i appreciate what you said about informed choices for our parents and i want to thank the communications department in particular for the work that they're doing to make sure that our families do have the information they need to make well-informed choices so um thanks so much for that much appreciated um just a couple of other questions um shorter the first one is about um staffing at um particularly the elementary level where kelly you mentioned that we'd be losing roughly 1 fte per school and as we know that fte you know it's not going to be like second grade lost in fte in terms of kids like the number of kids we lose is possibly going to be spread across multiple grades at different schools so it would just
093be helpful to hear a little bit about um how we're giving schools flexibility to be able to figure out how to do allocations at the school level when enrollment losses probably aren't even and pretty and tidy and easy to work with and on a similar note um you talked a little bit about how ratios are going to improve for counselors and psych and other student services positions which is great news however given that our high schools um are have not lost enrollment some have even gained enrollment are we um i'm wondering if like the the improved ratios are really just gonna be at the elementary and middle school levels and high school will be pretty much steady or are we looking at shifting allocations so that we actually see improvements at the high school level
094because we know we don't have the student services we need you know particularly in terms of psych um at the high school level so um flexibility to deal with um you know what's not going to be like smooth enrollment changes at the elementary level and then um what's happening with um student service ratios at the high school level yeah well as it relates to um the the model itself um we we allocate based on the projected number of students in elementary school such that we can ensure that dependent on the principal's strategic staffing they would have enough to be within the class size policy and then the principal does their strategic staffing and have the flexibility to really know the teacher the grade you know might have a tough class coming through um principals are
095who best know um their building and best know the teachers and the kids in the mix in between um so they build their model and then um what they build goes to their chief for review and approval um and and that is how they they will will adjust based on where the kiddos are are showing up and and who's in person and not in person they'll make all those decisions um both in this workbook process and then they'll make adjustments within their own building as september is closer too so the process is built for that kind of movement and flexibility already kind of irregardless of covid it's just they're going to need those tools more now this year than than ever at least anything else to add on the elementary side okay and obviously they'll
096use their title resources as well um at the schools to adjust at the high school level so you make a good point um in that most of uh the ratios and their improvement will be at the elementary level um with the you know with the exception of the ell students i mean there's um we put the ratios in the slide here so you can see it you'll see the ratio improvement at the high school level as well um but you're gonna you'll find stability in the high schools and this is exactly where our principals have flexibility to your first question our high school principals have more flexibility than any of our other principals in our in our system and they have the ability to flex back and forth each year between psych kind of social
097work your pbs coach and they work with jay and their chiefs to kind of make those adjustments based on the kids that they have so they certainly have a lot of flexibility to move at the high school level um so it's really hard to predict those ratios until the actual strategic staffing is um thanks kelly i appreciate that and um this is probably a minority opinion but i'll just throw out there that i i do think that mmsd should consider looking at mixed grade classrooms if it makes sense in this new normal that we're moving towards if it makes it easier to do staffing at you know class sizes that make sense um ananda thank you for joining us um did you we're about ready to move to summer school did you have any questions
098about staffing in the budget before we move on thank you for the opportunity you so much kelly and lisa that was a great presentation got a lot of questions answered um i think we're in a good position to move into a conversation about benefits and strategic equity investments in march as well as some of those early budget approvals and um with that let's move into summer semester all right we'll have a lisa and um nicole and i'm not sure if caroline's joining us today but certainly if nicole could come on up and then barb we'll move into the summer semester slides thank you kelly i'd like to introduce nicole shafer she is our director of summer semester and summer learning so we are happy to have you here we have been doing a good amount
099of work and strategizing around how we can utilize our summer days as an intentional strategy to get after some of the gaps that have been existing and nicole has put together a plan for what we're calling summer semester that she will walk you through and we are excited to actually be looking at this very differently and looking at this um as a a way to really support students social and emotional needs and also really target some academic priority work during the summer so nicole i'll hand it over to you great thank you lisa and welcome everyone as lisa said my name is nicole and i will walk us through a higher overview of summer learning or summer semester as we're calling it we are excited to think about starting this summer really rebranding um and
100thinking about summer as an opportunity to continue learning a time for kids to really accelerate their learning and get on track for graduation and to become college career and community ready we recognize that due to disruption in learning when schools closed in march of and then the ongoing virtual learning um challenges that most of our students and families missed instruction which really highlighted the need for us to think about this in a little bit different way if we can go to the next slide great so again thinking about summer school and thinking about it in terms of summer semester so some of the key program issue or program ideas of the next slide so i'll highlight some of these so thinking about a program that is for rising k through 12th grade and then just
101breaking it down so elementary looking rising k through fifth grade the program would be six weeks in length beginning june 21st through july 30th running programmatically from eight to noon roughly and obviously if allowable we would be in person um with a focus really on the science of reading as well as math instruction with some social emotional supports and then offering that afternoon programming through mscr for the majority of our students or who are opting for that full day program at the middle school level again a similar kind of focus around the science of reading and math with social emotional supports with additional focus and attention around that transition the critical transition years of our rising fifth graders or fifth graders becoming sixth graders we have a pretty strong curriculum that we began last year
102and we've used in previous years to really focus on the transition topics that lots of middle schoolers have questions about and so we try to capitalize on that with students who are in summer programming as well um high school we would be looking predominantly at a virtual learning model and we would be looking at predominantly credit recovery with some limited first-time credit options and again that would be um a four day a week or monday through thursday program and we know that we have several students in high school who virtual learning is challenging so we also have not abandoned or forgotten about the fact that having some face-to-face or in-person instruction for a limited or subset of students who we would need to prioritize that is still a possibility as well and we're excited to
103be thinking about that uh next slide so how do we make this happen in terms of priorities what makes this different we've had six weeks before we've focused on these grade levels we would be looking at some green rated curriculum and changing that up and really focused on using some diagnostic tools and strengthening our assessments to really drive the instruction and really looking at those pre and post assessments start of summer end of summer as we mentioned earlier we would be beefing up the social emotional learning with designated time support and staffing there is a strong need we learned last summer and continuing to move forward around family outreach and family engagement as we move ahead in supporting students as they continue their learning and supporting teachers right so teachers are really tired they're exhausted
104and so we're saying come on let's teach summer school and continue this work for another intense six weeks which our kids need and so we also need to then support the teachers and provide them with some high quality pd and then also looking at potentially increasing the pay for pay rate for certified teachers to really attract that high quality teacher who's going to be there for kids to really do their their very very best and to grow them as learners and to really get results and then the next slide is just going to highlight kind of our initial planning and thinking around our criteria so we know that summer school is voluntary and we don't have the ability to look at enrollment from previous years kind of all the budget stuff that has been talked
105about thus far so we do a little bit of a guessing in terms of geez how many kids will enroll and we can look at previous years but the previous years have been so very very different than this year or this anticipated summer so our rough estimate is to target 25 of our current enrollment grades k through and then to use the criteria that we've outlined here in this slide knowing that this year it's been unique the grades and grading programs have changed in the elementary before we used assessments and many of our assessments are different this year and i'm not exactly confident that our assessments are the best place to be used as criteria this year potentially in years to come so we will look at this criteria to kind of identify students for
106those initial invitations and predominantly using school recommendations as that big key because schools know students better than anybody all right um questions at this point bob can we take down the slides to do questions please thank you um nikki i see your hand go ahead nikki one comment one question i'm loving the emotional the focus of social emotional learning i think especially in middle school some are not it this is absolutely essential and i'm really thrilled to see it that's my comment my question is every year and i don't want to sound like a broken record asking all these special ed questions it's just relevant for this issue namely that every year students with special needs argue for extended school year and almost every year madison has a high rate of rejection of students who
107want to take esy extended school year and are denied is there a way under this that we would be able to take more students under this model because some are seriously regressing yet being told that since they made progress now they no longer qualify anymore for that even though they need the constant repetition so what i can say for sure nikki is that school-based teams have been reviewing um individual education plans and new this year due to covid and due to exactly what you were mentioning about loss of learning that there is in progress now and could potentially be extended through summer that notion of addition needing of additional resources and services and that would be written into the iep and so i've been working closely with john harper's office um in terms of trying
108to get um really targeted that particular support um that you just named i really appreciate that because with coved any kid could end up with falling behind learning wise because this is a lot of trauma and a lot of things to deal with and not everyone learns the best virtually thank you other questions chris yeah my my question was around the decision to do virtual for the high schools and i'm wondering is that tied to the construction that's going to be starting at our high schools with the referendum or what is that decision tied to yeah so it is a little bit because three of our four high schools will be fully under construction with a best of statement abatement but also that we know that we can serve a lot of students we find
109that at high school that students who have jobs they have lots of other things that having an 8 to 12 course time can sometimes be a barrier so last year when we did do virtual learning 3 through 12 that students had a far more flexible schedule with virtual or online learning and so they could do it at different times and they were able to complete coursework in a much more efficient way so that also was another reason as well did that get us to have more students participating and actually completing the coursework if we did it virtually or we actually see outcomes by offering virtual yes we had i mean it's a little bit of both right it's kind of like a double-edged sword we had you know kids who virtual learning um they are
110successful and it is something that they can do and they are learners that thrive in that environment many of them were able to complete several different courses and then on the flip side of that there are certainly learners that we know where virtual learning is not been the best for them and so that's why we want to definitely leave that door open to create a face-to-face environment if allowable right and i appreciate that flexibility and would encourage you to continue to do that going forward and maybe not in person just for a small number but if there's ways we can figure out partner with organizations in the community for spaces that we need to you know provide in-person instruction if we could look in maybe to some options for that i just think you know
111providing the flexibility around the student and not necessarily you know we can only do it for a small number because of our capacity maybe just some creative thinking along that as you continue thank you thank you um two quick questions um have we exp explored the idea of outdoor classrooms and then in terms of switching the conception from summer school to summer semester um what does our outreach strategy look like uh so the families who um you know have you know um so the students who may need it most their families are hearing word of this opportunity so in terms of outdoor classrooms that is always a possibility within the summer school site but we know that due to weather either heat or rain that that can't be the sole source of a space so
112we'd always need a backup and that is pretty typical when we've worked with any of our agencies like stem stem academy and things like that so certainly looking at that as a possibility um but probably not the sole classroom space would be for outdoor i know that mscr does have a number of different camps and they do use outdoor space and then as it relates to your question for communication and outreach to families we are now right now in the process of working with schools to work on their recommendations for summer summer semester lists and then we'll be um sharing out information in the next week or so about kind of this larger program for summer semester so that should be happening there should be initial communication going out next week in the family newsletter
113and then even more in march thank you so much you're welcome thank you ananda hi nicole thank you so much for leading this work and uh grounding us in this presentation uh maybe this was covered before or will be covered uh soon but i'm i'm curious about our protocol um around uh covet and tracing or is it gonna anything different than we have established now how are you anticipating um you know closuring closure and quarantining and things like that that's timely that you ask that question because that is one of the things that i'm going to be meeting with jay and sally about um knowing that they are leading that charge right now in terms of preparing for when we go back to school in the very near future hopefully and then we would be
114learning from them and then following suit based on what we learn from that so really working and looking at the metrics that are currently being viewed and then building off of that and just probably getting just getting better in terms of how we go about that and uh what uh what are we doing so basically a little bit you tell us a little bit more once we know a little bit more basically thank you and then my second question is um regarding uh mental health support what what does it look like uh either in a hybrid or in person so mental health support so there would be there will be staff that will be available at every across every grade level in terms of either social work psych or counselor and they will be supporting
115in particular we do have even a stronger hold for our rising ninth graders working with uw school of psychology to do a little bit more intense work and mentorship and partnership with students at that critical stage or point of transition so there will be supports in place and then the curriculum will be available and used and built into the schedule k through eight in a really strategic way thank you so much you're welcome other questions i've got a couple um my first question is specific to high school credit recovery do we anticipate um a higher number of high school students needing to take advantage of credit recovery this year compared to past years and can you quantify that difference if possible we are um anticipating yes a little bit bigger but we i don't have
116a number for you right at this time but i certainly can bring that to the table um potentially in march or at a later time we are in the process of gathering that data now um the grading period ended just about a week or so ago so gathering some of that information and that will help also for us to kind of guide some of the work that counselors will be doing with students and families and making sure that they have a credit recovery plan in place my second question is about the middle school curriculum at summer school in particular all this relates to elementary school as well i'm wondering why the decision was made to just focus on math and reading knowing that um middle school science and social studies are important for success in
117high school and particularly thinking about eighth graders who either have low attendance or didn't engage in virtual learning this year going into us history nine without having had us history up to the civil war um are we gonna be addressing social studies and science in the middle school summer semester so at this time we it is not in our current plan um and i think in large part due to the fact that we really want to have a targeted approach um to what we're doing and to get really solid on the core um content areas of ela reading and math um i've we've found that if we really focus um tightly on a couple of things and do them really well instead of broadly trying to do a lot of things um things don't necessarily
118go as well and the outcomes aren't nearly as strong i would just add nicole i think that answer is is spot on um you know years ago when we were planning for the former summer school we did have actually um you know content areas that were represented we had elective courses and we didn't see the results that we wanted to see and i think there are ways to get after right the academic vocabulary that comes with social studies and science there are ways to get after that within um the reading work of summer but we took a look at really where we thought we could make the biggest impact and we're really hoping as nicole was saying that this is a very different experience for students and they see it as a way to get
119to really strengthen relationships and build those connections as well as do academics i'll be honest nicole and i we talked about what would it look like if you had a full day of academics and we we just we had to put like and do more of that and we said who are we kidding you know these children need that mscr social emotional experience just as much as they need the focused academics in the morning so um yeah tough decisions and tough trade-offs i find that a little bit concerning i am worried about particularly 8th graders going into 9th grade that 9th grade transition could be really rough if we're not being intentional about science and social studies and the fact that if we don't make sure that they've had the curriculum before they head into
120high school they're starting off a year behind and it's going to make high school that much more difficult it's going to make that transition that much more rocky if we're not going to address that in summer school i think we have to have a plan for addressing it in 9th grade um so i would just put that out there like science and social studies particularly in eighth grade are not fluff those are core courses and losing for students particularly who haven't been able to engage or who have um lost missed a lot of school they're going to be behind and it's going to be difficult for them to transition into 9th grade without that learning so um i hope we're if we're not going to cover it in summer school i hope we have a
121plan to make sure that students get um taken care of in the fall so that we're not failing them in terms of their being caught up and able to learn in high school classes oh go ahead okay i'll wait my third question is just um you know this has been a really great presentation on summer school i appreciate it and at some point these ideas need to get translated into budget decisions and i know we're paying for a lot of the additional summer semester learning through sr2 i'm i'm it's assuming probably march we might get some better numbers but i just wanted to confirm that yeah thank you that's a good segue i was waiting for the right time to jump in um certainly it is part of this conversation because it will lead into
122the march budget discussion but as you've already heard we've already punted a couple conversations for march counselors for example the safety committee's recommendations for example and the summer semester is a pretty large substantial ask coming forward to you in march so we wanted to make sure you had an opportunity to have this side of the conversation we had some assumptions that the instructional kind of programming would take up some air time so we wanted to make sure that part of this conversation was out vetted and you understood it so when we come back to you in march we can talk more specifically around the budget itself thanks kelly and lisa i i think i cut you off so um did you want to add anything i apologize for that no no no no um the
123only thing that i was going to talk about was um [Music] was this notion of thinking about acceleration of students through contact content versus thinking about students being behind right um the strategies that we have of moving children through the curriculum and getting after the big ideas right all students you know could you know maybe could benefit from another year but what we don't want is to make summer semester feel punitive or make students feel like they are behind and have to catch up you know we know that as as a school district um you know we have we have some some lost schooling that has happened and we need to figure out how to continue to support students and keep an asset based approach with students knowing that students have to read first and
124really build that academic vocabulary to really understand grade level vocabulary moving forward so just some thinking about that that i know nicole you and your team have been keeping at the forefront of your mind um as you plan definitely he has one more comment and then um if unless anyone else has questions we should move on so mickey um i want to elevate what chris said because i'm a i was a history major in college and i've seen through my work with juvenile students complete and under lack of understanding of how the us constitution works how the u.s juvenile justice system works and we have students who are making decisions on their future that they do not know the background and how to make it and if they get a public defender if because unfortunately
125the school the prison pipeline is real they get a public defender that does not explain those things and those rights to them and i they will end up on probation and end up re end up reoffending and that could change the entire course of their future i've done this for 16 years in criminal law and i'm frankly getting kind of terrified i do explain it i have several african-american colleagues with thank god explain it and i have plenty who just say sign here and don't even tell students what their rights are so if there's any way we could build it in the ninth grade or in the summer heaven knows as much as i hate the school to prison white blood and i want to destroy it i think one of the ways to destroy
126it is to educate to educate people on what their rights are and how we can protect those rights instead of what they can learn i want students to read and understand but i also have to realize that these will be life decisions and i don't want them coming back and harming them in later years i know that sounds probably tone deaf coming from a white woman in this situation and i normally wouldn't speak on it except for the fact i've done it for 16 years and keep seeing the same thing over and over again of i can talk i i can talk i can do this and it harms them and i don't want to offend and i don't but i don't want anyone's future limited because of lack of understanding and that's the major
127thing i see that's just my one love y'all are there any final comments on summer semester before we move on julia yeah thanks i know we're kind of wrapping up here i'm just i don't know if it's been addressed exactly but i think it kind of relates to what chris and nick have been talking about is summer school intended as i mean there's the question of is it punitive is it supposed to be catching up is it remedial or is it excel like accelerating is it who is it intended for and is that going to be different this year than it has been in the past that's a great great question julia so um certainly summer school is i mean anybody during summer wants to be outside playing and having fun with their friends right
128or when you're older you have a job and you're doing things but there certainly is a time for not only continuation of learning but also digging in deeper and helping support that learning loss and i think this year in particular is so unique and so unusual that we know um due to circumstances beyond our control that students have missed a lot of instruction so therefore i think in particular this year it is going to be about really accelerating the learning um catching up um earning and recouping credit that we i i may not have had on the last year so i think in particular we want to create a program ultimately that is such that kids want to want to come to summer programming it's amazing it's great um and i can do a lot
129of learning there but this year in particular i think to your question is really about um making up for for lost learning and instruction or maybe a style of learning that just didn't work the best for myself thank you gloria oh no i'm sorry i don't have a question all right anything else before we move on what's up elise hand up oh ollie thanks sabian thanks samia thanks chris um thank you all so much for speaking to summer semester i think you know it's one of the more important conversations and urgent conversations we can have at this point um and and going into it i i think there's an incredible opportunity to partner with and learn from mscr in this moment and so in terms of play-based learning in terms of how um kind of
130the the beyond academic supports the academic i am wondering how we're partnering with mscr and if we're looking to what we're offering through mscr are we offering you know things like coding are we offering things that really um enhance the the skills that our our kiddos may need or really enhance kind of some of that social emotional stuff that we've all missed out on deeply i know talking about summer camp um brings so much joy to my soul i feel like one of the saddest meanest conversations i had with kelly last year was her telling me on my birthday that summer camp was not gonna happen i was like really i would love these two kids to go somewhere um so talking talking through how we're how we're utilizing and uplifting the work of mscr
131um and how we're what we're offering through mscr is supporting the the academic strengths of our young people great yes we will we right now i've been working extensively with mscr just to name our sites and kind of um really arm wrestle a little bit around who goes where and that kind of thing and the next conversation or the next level of conversation is exactly that around what is the programming look like how can we connect how do we make sure that we are coherent in our practices things that they've learned and then again for the enrichment opportunities for kids so thank you yeah and i'll just add to that elise so there's the piece that's the mscr that's the afternoon of the summer school and that's what nicole's talking about like that direct connection
132and and this year more than or this summer more than any other summer making sure the morning day and the afternoon day connect with intentional planning is certainly a goal and mscr has all the other camps right that serve kids in their needs outside of just summer school and so we're actively planning that too and it's going to look and feel a little bit different in the past but it's going to be also really intentional with what we think kids need this year to your coding example being a perfect example um so yes both and are high on our radar and lucky we have uh janet leading leading that charge um she's all over it all right well thank you so much nicole this was really helpful um i appreciate you taking the time to
133answer all of our questions and i look forward to continuing to discuss this as the budget evolves and um let's move on to our update on community input for the facilities projects that were approved in the 2020 referendum and i want to preface this by saying that we are deeply deeply grateful to the madison community for passing the facilities and operating referenda last fall we touched on the operating referendum in the budget discussion we just had and this coming presentation is really going to focus on the facilities referendum we are also very grateful for the community members who thus far have given us feedback on building projects at our four comprehensive high schools capitol high and the new south side elementary school i was able to participate in one of the many meetings that have
134been held that was focused on sustainability um it was a meeting of both students and staff it was on january 14th and i was blown away by the the questions and the ideas that our students had for um green building as we move into these building projects so this is just one small example of the many engagement opportunities that are taking place and um chad and kelly and donald are going to fill us in with more details about that community engagement effort um there's no board action associated with this update it's just an update um the next actions we will need to be taking are um really going to be things like bills and the consent agenda and contracts over the next few months so um on that note i would like to invite chad
135kelly and donald to give us their update thank you and if barb you could pull up the slides superintendent jenkins do you want to say anything before we jump in want to make sure we pause i just want to say real quick publicly thank you again to chad and to kelly the way he led the referendum efforts and chad has been like the king of the country in terms of going out and engaging our community getting the voices of our students our parents the staff and i just wanted to thank him publicly here for his work and you guys are about to hear an amazing update in terms of what's going on so far so thank you yeah thank you a lot of exciting work and it is it is true uh chad wheezy probably
136has not not been to a corner of this city um since november um working hard to move this forward um and before i jump into the presentation i want to introduce donald donald if you want mine i can't actually see everybody now um but if donald could give a wave donald's new to our research team thank you donald welcome um so this is first his first time presenting to the board so we'll all be nice but donald's new to the research team um and is kind of arm in arm um with chad marcy and i as as we embark on this next phase of what is really detailed feedback around the climate and culture and how our how our facilities can can build climate and culture as we re-envision our five high schools in our
137elementary school so sorry about that barbara if you wouldn't mind pulling the sides back up donald it's been a minute good to see you good to see you as well we um so here we go um chris said thank you to the community but we can't say it enough so we'll start off by looking at the next slide and saying thank you yet again um we passed both of our referendum questions as you all know by nearly 80 percent uh for really both questions both the facilities and the operating referendum questions the purpose of today is to focus in on the facility side of things as we go through the budget process we'll keep reiterating the operational side and so tonight's our opportunity to focus on facilities we have a plan of coming back to
138you about once every quarter more if needed um to keep you well in the loop but we'll continue to do kind of weekly updates and constant communication as this work moves ahead because there certainly is a lot of it ahead of us if you look at the next slide today we're going to be looking at that that feedback and the input gathering process that'll get us to the design phase of the architectural renderings we'll be talking we have been talking to the community about our five high schools as a reminder that's an entire remodel of our four comprehensive high schools but it also includes moving capital high out of those two separate locations on the far west side leased space in the third floor of lapham into hoyt element into hoyt the entire hoyt will
139be remodeled and as a reminder we'll also move sapar and the sapar program into hoyt as well um as a candidate as our child care program for our our some of our students who have little ones um and so that our students and our staff can our students and their students their babies can be in the same location at hoyt so that's a part of that goal as well and we kind of often just kind of brush past it thinking about cap high but it's a key part of that strategy and important as we get feedback on the hoyt school itself also on the elementary school before we dive in i want to kind of ground everyone in the elementary school work there's actually two phases of work happening around rimro the school in rimrock
140road one is the instructional focus and that work is really being led by tremaine and chelsea and our chief of schools talking to the community our parents through our principle that will be leading the school around the instructional visioning process that work we're really taking the the forefront and the leading the effort with our facilities questions following behind so it's an intentional kind of separate timeline and separate separate group of work we're still doing all the facilities input that you're going to be hearing about the high schools but we did do the high schools feedback first so that those projects could get up and running and then the facility feedback on the elementary follows much more in like an early march late february early march phase because we wanted the instructional team to get off
141the ground uh first so so know that there's kind of intentionally two different timelines for that work um but with that said i'm gonna hand it off to chad to really dive in to the fantastic work these teams have been doing thank you kelly yeah thanks barb uh and good evening board members yeah we're here tonight to talk about kind of the work that's happened over the last few months and timelines related to all the work moving forward our input process and the way that these uh have these designs have been impacted by all of the wonderful things we're hearing uh from our community so to reiterate you know and we can go quickly through this what chris and kelly already mentioned um we're looking at for the four main high schools having some capital
142maintenance work done but most importantly what we've been hearing feedback around is how we want to modernize the learning environments in these places additionally we're bringing capital high to one building the hoyt building and that project's really coming along and exciting and lastly we're we're just starting the input around what that new elementary school is going to look like next slide so kelly mentioned the amazing rate of support we had during that referendum in november i think a lot of that came from the fact that we did so much work on the ground hearing from our community around what they needed in these projects and the main reason we bring this up tonight uh is that this work is just as important post referendum uh where uh we we got the scope set we got
143the project set we got a budget set uh but there's still so much to learn around what these these projects actually have to look like uh when they're actually built next slide barb so i did want to remind the school board that we we sent a an rfp out just prior to that the referendum um and made the decision to uh to take a look at the possibility of a new design team to help work with us um all all the way through uh this project until we lay that last brick and made the decision to do so knowing that there was a chance we might have to change design teams to get the right team uh to serve our schools post-referendum and we've done that next slide so tonight um i did want to
144make sure that the board was aware of the fact that we are fully engaged with now what i kind of consider the dream team in terms of southern wisconsin uh k-12 construction uh we have epstein ewing on board to to work with us in terms of the school design and again we've got findorff on our team as far as a construction manager and all the work they did for cost estimating to make sure we keep these projects on budget and on schedule and i did bring one member of the the eua team tonight to just introduce himself talk very briefly about uh the the work he's done so far in the last few months with our schools um and then he'll be available at the end if there are any questions so av cachetorian i'm
145going to turn things over to you with a quick intro intro of your team and and obviously yourself chad board thank you very much first off congratulations on passing this referendum and getting the community support uh secondly exemplary effort to continue the engagement as chad and kelly and others have said this is really unusual this is not the norm and we really applaud you for doing that i think you heard from some of your board members that they've been present at a number of the meetings that chris michaud and the rest of our team have been running we're excited to have this team in front of you it consists of project managers architects sustainability experts historic preservation staff engagement staff and so forth so in a nutshell we put together a team to respond to
146each and every school and their unique opportunities but at the same time to communicate across the board to make sure that district standards are met and lastly i'll say that we are very excited to hear from each of these community groups because in real time we are taking this information and we are putting it to good use shaping these buildings so chad is absolutely right everything we're learning is shaping and further refining we're getting down to that granular level once again congratulations and i'll stick around till the very end to answer any questions that you might have thanks a.b so i did want to walk uh the board through and the community through again barbara we can go to the next slide uh through our timeline and our approach to the post-referendum design process to
147av's point i think our district's approach to this work is fairly unique in terms of the amount of community feedback student feedback uh and then the amount of punch the back and forth we've got going on with staff to get these projects right but we've got a schedule we've got to stick to we promised the the community that uh pre-referendum this is what it would look like and we're sticking to it so if a quick overview on our timeline uh kind of big benchmarks as we work our way through this we've got about the next year to continue this uh back and forth with our school communities to make sure the plans are exactly what we need them to look like about a year from now we'll be putting together bid ready documents that we
148will put out on the street for a competitive open bid and then the summer of 2022 will be the first summer we start large scale construction at our four high schools and hoyt will just follow a little bit after that and then we'll be just off the ground as well just following that with a new elementary school and then we'll be under construction at our four comprehensive high schools for two full years uh and we will not finish up until the fall of 2024. these are big complicated projects that will take a ton of coordination in occupied schools we know we've got the right team to pull it off but it will take us a while to do the work we will have both hoyt and our new elementary school in the rimrock road neighborhood
149move-in ready the fall of 2023 so they'll be a year ahead of our four high schools next slide so um one thing that we continue to tell everyone we're meeting with is that the pre-reference random work was so essential to make sure that we got the scope and the projects correct in terms of what the community our school board and our schools were telling us what really was the most you know pertinent work and the most pressing work that was needed to happen and we got budget and timeline and big ideas set pre-referendum so the budget set 317 million dollars is it we've got an idea on the timeline and we've got conceptual ideas in terms of what we have to deliver post-referendum uh but there's still so much to do all the input we're
150taking is around classroom design common space configurations we were just looking again today um that's some exciting slight changes that are going to happen at la follette uh we've got interior design concepts that are just starting starting to take hold and then the final design before these things go out to bid there's ext exciting opportunities every step of the way and as we get closer and closer to more and more detailed design we get closer and closer to needing feedback from our end users so to a science teacher where does an outlet have to go where does this thing have to go where's the best spot to have an accessible science lab station in those settings and all of that still has to come and still ahead of us next slide so i did want
151to just update the board and kind of what we've been up to uh over the last couple months we've had uh eight large community engagement section sessions kudos to dr jenkins who has been there every step of the way uh listening to the community feedback that we're getting we've had well over a thousand views on on many of these uh we just had west last week thursday and next time we update the board west will be added to this slide as well next slide we've also been really busy and getting to work in our schools so the design team alone who keeps track of their hours we've already had 500 hours of feedback session just with students staff and and our teachers at the buildings and we've also held 21 individual meetings with many small
152groups in the community and individual kind of key stakeholders around around the madison community next slide here's my chance to kind of turn things over to donald uh uh and you know donald i i wanted to compliment on you on your bow tie um i decided to put on a tie tonight and you had to show me up uh with that bow tie so donald uh at this point uh welcome to welcome to the facilities team uh excited to kind of get an update on things related to our research team and some of the exciting things and trends we're hearing uh from all the input we've been receiving sounds good thank you chad uh and by the way the tie does look good tonight so you are looking real good it's good to have you
153on the squad thank you thank you um good evening uh board everyone thank you for allowing me to be here this evening and present some of these preliminary findings to you all as chad alluded to a lot of there have been several sessions that have been conducted thus far and as of 128 we've senior leaders have met with about 22 community leaders and various other leaders and then there's approximately about 20 more sessions that will be scheduled or are currently being scheduled um some of those groups that have been some of those sessions that have been completed are below and it's important to note that uh as we are as we go along and we move and as i show some of this data that some of the themes are very preliminary um the themes
154that some of the things that we're going to show are just from our the kickoff survey that has been analyzed and then also um just the google survey that you all have on um that that's on the website and then some the ones that were sent to families as well however i'm taking feedback from uh initially when the before the before the referendum when we were when communities wanted uh individuals to come out and just stop surveying them to death and kind of come out and have more conversations with them and kind of talk with them more we have adhered to that process so there are a bunch of these sessions still coming in and that are still being analyzed and there are more themes to come um these are just preliminary and i just
155want to kind of preface that by before before i show some of these things next slide please so right now based on uh the the google survey that we initially kick off survey and then the survey that is on qualtrics right now that the link is below the post referendum facility survey here is the demographic breakdown of the response rate right now so we can see that uh responses are very um kind of disproportionate disproportionate and heavily white however again kind of going back to my original point we still do have a lot of those community conversations with leaders and other community groups that will definitely highlight the voice of underserved and uh historically underrepresented populations to provide their input on these various projects also there's a breakdown of kind of the post-referendum adult survey
156and some of the numbers that we've sent out um i will adhere and say because of the the nature of this survey um responses were a little low so it is definitely imperative that we paired this that we paired this survey with the community input sessions because it's sometimes a lot to ask um several open-ended questions especially around things with climate uh social justice race and ethnicity those type of things in a survey and not have someone there to kind of qualify and really kind of get at the nooks and crannies of what we're looking for in some of those questions next slide please so some of the preliminary findings that we have thus far um around school culture and climate we have uh preserving the unique character of a lot of the schools and
157the community creating very comfortable and inviting spaces and recognizing a school as a community center um and not just a place of learning but kind of a holistic building that encompasses many facets it for not only students but also community members to users with communities and families to use as well under the racial equity and social justice bucket we have ensuring representation honoring origins of the land and also respect for identity and creating equitable accessible spaces and then kind of lastly around the kind of some of the positive learning and the environments we have fostering collaborative learning and fostering alternative classroom instructional designs to facilitate more co-collaborative learning and peer-to-peer learning next slide please so at this point um if there are no questions for me i will be trying to get back over to
158chad and those were kind of some of the findings the preliminary themes that we've pulled out thus far again as we dig more into the student survey who we surveyed students as well around their post-referendum input and then also the input from the community leader sessions i'm sure those themes will be involved and we will be back again with the update with uh probably with more encompassing data all right donald thank thank you for that and all the hard work of your team to catch the board up kind of on our process all of these input sessions we're sending the notes related to what we're hearing to both the design team and our research team and it's our goal that when donald brings back his comprehensive report here in a couple of months that everything
159we're seeing in that report is reflected in what we're actually designing in the buildings and some of the things that we're seeing in these one-on-one sessions with staff members smaller group sessions and even community-wide sessions are certainly falling in line with some of the things that donald's mentioning so each school has continued to say we've got unique needs and you got to make sure that these schools are not cookie cutter they cannot all look like sun prairie high school when we're done east high school will better feel like east when we get these things done students and staff are again and again telling us warm and inviting school environments are important as important or more important than the safe and welcoming piece they have to feel like the buildings are meant for students and then
160lastly celebrate diversity cultivate racial equity and make sure these things are accessible to all students when we're done next slide we're certainly hearing from our schools that these things have to serve our broader community our high schools are already almost 24 7 facilities and we have to make sure we design them around making sure that uh our community has access and they meet their needs again let's make sure we get school pride involved in what these final designs look like and i can tell you that everyone is excited uh you know i i always have dr jenkins voice in my head around his entry into the built into his position and memorial high school looking the same as it did when he was was here in the 90s and i think we have so many
161long-standing madison uh member madison community members that feel the same way like this is a long time overdue and they are excited for what this could mean for all of our students next slide we are excited about the fact and you know ab mentioned i think our process in terms of who we are trying to engage with is pretty unique and we want to make sure that we elevate student voice all the way through this we've already had many touch points with our students and many more to go and here's just a small list of some of the students we've student groups we've already met with we've certainly surveyed all of our students and we will continue to re-engage these students along the way uh to make sure that we're getting this right their voice
162in many cases they are the users of these buildings it's the most important in terms of making sure the design reflects their individual needs at each of these in each of these settings next slide things we're hearing from our kids again welcoming inviting uh they are super interested in making sure environments celebrate their diverse backgrounds uh we're hearing things like murals flags art ethnic food design music where can music be more readily incorporated into this design we're hearing kids don't use lockers much anymore i know my experience as a building principle lots of students carrying your own big backpacks and not using lockers we're going to incorporate that and then really the desire for small group and collaborative spaces that students can grab a chromebook in a high school setting three of their friends and
163collaborate in kind of a niche or a nook that we can make sure we can create through these design process we're hearing that from our kids a lot next slide also hearing this idea of making sure we're open we're flexible more natural light the desire for comfortable furniture we've heard from lots of our students and we're starting to see this pop up in many of the high school designs is there a way for a coffee shop cafe more of a starbucks feel to our schools again making sure that you know the students think you guys built this for me to support what i need as a learner and i can feel it when this thing is done so we're hearing all those types of things from from all of our students next slide all right
164just to remind the board in the community we've continued to try to update our website along the way an easy way to find it just google mmsd future ready the survey is still open let's talk has been working we continue to make progress updates on everything we're doing and we'll probably likely post tonight's uh presentation on our on our website uh master plans have continued to be updated and we're always taking general feedback next slide so next steps we've got really a next a busy another month in terms of being out in the community and then our work will really start to turn to students specific parent groups and staff to make sure that we get these designs right as we get them more and more detailed heading into uh you know kind of the
165the second part of the year here our process for input gathering we can continue to work back with our design core team av leads that meeting it's a it happens every monday for three or four hours as we build into these designs we're going to continue to communicate with constituents it's our promise to post the summary of donald's work on our website keep the website updated as we make progress anyone who's emailed us and wants those updates we'll promise to get them to them um and then we'll probably see the board i think we've built it into the calendar about every other month to keep all of you updated in terms of what these projects are going to look like we are probably two three months away from some 3d tours of what these facilities
166will look like some updated exciting drawings and art to really get the community excited to kind of see this feedback actually taking life in terms of what the design looks like so that is it for us tonight we're certainly kelly myself a b and donald we are all available folks have questions we wanted to make this as brief as possible to see if people have any had any questions or comments for us thank you so much chad and kelly and donald for that presentation it's great to get caught up on where we're at with work on our building referendum um as we move into questions i would encourage the board to focus questions and comments on outreach more so than um like actually getting into the nuts and bolts of building design um so with
167that um i see nikki's hand mickey go ahead my one uh actually i have two comments one can we please add mad town mamas is one of the groups on disability that we have a presentation with they're really starting to increase the number of individuals with disabilities in that group even more so than the special ed uh equity task force sure and my other one this isn't a design thing as much as an accessibility thing please please please have someone with special needs check it out before you make any major decisions on buildings whether beyond lighting or accessibility so that way we don't do the mistake my high school did of building a brand new school in 95 only to find out there was a poll in the middle of the first wheelchair student couldn't
168get in after they spent millions on a new school yeah nikki we have talked to the special education advisor group and i'll reach out to you to get mantel mama scheduled again i was hoping a b could just respond real quick um as far as the expertise um that we have brought on the team regard regarding your your specific concern yeah elizabeth watson is with bw whitewater and she is a universal design frankly an expert so to give you an idea of what happened the other day as we listened to the special education group and i took it from i i have a long history with the americans with disabilities act all the way back to 1990 when it was enacted and i went to washington to learn about it and i was in charge
169of 400 facilities that needed to be brought up to the title three accommodations and i took it to heart i mean we spent as architects time in wheelchairs understanding ambulation issues and how to get around and those challenges but elizabeth really opened our eyes to something different she talked about as these parents did the other day about needs of autistic students how they perceive their environment and what the challenges are with wayfinding and the need for small group instruction and appropriate colors and other stimuli low harmonic lighting fixtures and all of your lighting fixtures are going to be led which are low harmonic they'll have dimmers to allow students to have a calming effect so in a nutshell i invited elizabeth to speak with chad and our core team today and again the first time
170she mentioned all this was exciting and hearing it again was exciting as well because we're hearing in real time what your community groups are telling us be sustainability be it whatever group has an interest in in weighing in and we're taking it to heart and we are incorporating those thoughts through our team and our experts and then circling back to say have we heard you properly does this make sense and then it creates a sense of validation in that feedback loop so we are super excited about the voices and we intend on following through with these voices thank you from an autistic adult personally being on the spectrum this is something that's incredibly important to me then the hearing the lights and the sounds that the lights make with something that was one of the
171hardest things i'd get a good education and because no one else could hear them elizabeth opened our eyes to that world and we thank her and we thank you for this input thank you so much and thank you again savian yeah thank you so much for this presentation tonight and um you know in terms of capturing communities that we haven't heard from frequently you know the intentionality and um quite frankly you know being dogged in our approach to um trying to get engagement will be really important uh something i'm hoping that we can do and something ali can probably speak to better than i can but how we incorporate public art into these spaces especially led by students and how that physical environment can you know how physical design and public art can create an
172environment of anti-racism or celebrating black and brown culture in our school so that'll be something that i i hope that we consider and can incorporate savion i can speak to that really quickly because i've been on board with every one of these input sessions i can tell you that already i'm hearing the design team start to even mention uh places that art can you you will be greeted by art when you enter the welcome center at these at these schools common spaces will have art displays that we can rotate by the month or by the quarter to continue to make sure that all of our students are reflected in these design processes you know it's our goal that even from the get-go the second you step set foot in these buildings that it's not a
173welcome center that feels like you're entering the city county building it's a welcome center that you know who goes to school there the instant you the instant you enter the building and i can tell you we're picking up on that every step of the way so we appreciate that feedback and you are the thousandth person uh we've heard say make sure you get the art piece right um and and we're excited about it yeah and especially the uh the the opportunity that students can have to contribute to that um as young people and you know being able to physically affect their physical environment is powerful without a doubt um gloria and then ali thank you chris and thank you all for this presentation um i have a question in regards to engagement um obviously surveys
174um you know historically for us have not really given us a good representation of the of our diverse communities and i think what worked really well um pre-referenda was bringing together community stakeholders right that were really wide representative in our communities really diverse who helped us along the way um we built them with the information um and they spread the information out into our communities and wondering if if we are considering that same process and format of really getting um you know diverse communities involved in the engagement to come back to us to provide us with the information um yeah um gloria i can i can get this started and i want to kind of hand it over to kelly who is uh in many ways our engagement and political strategist the whole way through
175here uh and can tell you that we're doing that we're almost taking the exact pre-referendum input strategy and and kind of juxtaposing it post referendum so uh we are we're all in on that kelly maybe want to speak a little bit more to the fact that we're we've got sessions that we're doing that we're trying to cast as wide a net as possible uh but to your point gloria we at where there's some special invites going out to make sure we get a diverse set of voices um post-referendum as well yeah absolutely and that includes um pulling the referendum advisory group back together uh which we did and we met with uh last week and kept the open kind of hope that they would continue to meet with us really throughout this process as well
176um so i i think we're we're doing kind of what what you're asking and frankly a little bit more um we're actually going deeper into some of our community organizations for example um and in the upcoming weeks we're not just meeting with you know vanessa at ywca she's on shrek we've certainly met with vanessa and but we're meeting with the people who work in our buildings who work for vanessa right we're not just meeting with michael johnson we're meeting with our partners in the boys and girls club who physically work in our buildings same thing with mscr so we're we're actually hitting also intentionally a different level of the partnership group of those in our community who physically work day in and day out in those high schools because they know the flow of the
177building just as much as any anyone else so we're certainly taking that work really seriously and as it relates to the elementary school tremaine has started a advisory group himself which we'll advise on the instructional side and also a lead when the time is ready into the facility side of giving us our feedback for broader outreach into the community as well as getting the parent feedback so there's certainly a lot a lot going going on thank you um no i think that's that's right i really do think that that worked um for us before uh and really an opportunity for us to go into already established community groups who are already meeting and and talking about this and getting their feedback in in those spaces in the spaces that they belong to right rather than
178having to attend another zoom meeting or another meeting right it is already um embedded and sort of on their agenda to get feedback i think that that would be really helpful and that's what you guys did right and so i just replicating that okay thank you yeah i mean gloria i meet with the southside neighborhood resource team tomorrow uh we're not bringing them to madison we're going to their standing meeting to engage in many of the level of conversations we had pre-referendum so a great example and that work is happening thank you thanks gloria ali yeah i want to thank you so much for this presentation and i also want to join the team in welcoming you donald and thank you abe for being with us tonight to to speak to this particularly uh speaking
179to the work of elizabeth from uw whitewater and the work on universal design um and and the nuance in which you were able to address nikki's question which was just a really great question thank you so much nikki for bringing that to to the table tonight um i have a few questions and i i think that they're gonna fall um heavily in chad's realm um although they may be kind of connecting the dots between chad kelly and lisa i i want to ask about you know inclusion in terms of our lgbtq youth our gender our kind of approach to gender inclusion and how that's showing up in terms of community feedback because um you know our trans community is is a smaller community our young people who identify as trans are progressing through that journey
180and it can be really complex and really intimidating and having a school that reinforces your right to exist is really really important to our young people so i want folks to to speak to that and how we're gauging information around that from our community um i also want to talk about as you hear kids say stuff like we'd love a coffee shop in our school we'd love kind of this expansive relationships to opportunities and support within our schools how are we connecting the dots between that and academic and academic success and cesario um you know are we looking at things like culinary arts and work studies things that would be offered on campus things that make our school mere um you know higher ed or college uh to kind of get us to that career
181college community ready like how are we utilizing this moment and this robust support from our community that we cannot be you know more grateful for to really propel our children into the future to really make sure um that they that they have the skills they need and get credit for those skills and then my last question uh is is specific to how you know we're we're moving and along in terms of timeline and what our community's perception is of our current timeline and and how we're negotiating it as well as um our our current relationship to the budget so far it seems like we've gotten really good news um and and we're coming in on time and under budget and does the community know that and how do they feel about it all right ali
182thank you for all that i took some notes and will try to get my way through this uh number one on gender equity and you know av you can feel free to chime in here but you know i ali i can tell you um i could not be prouder of the student voice we're hearing uh and for that matter this staff voice we're hearing around gender equity in this school district we literally cannot go into one of these planning meetings that one student wants to bring up a bathroom and then there is not another student who's right behind them saying make sure it's an all gender space i can tell you that we meet with groups of athletes that may you know maybe i don't care if my binary locker room exists but they're advocating
183for another student that they go to school with saying you also need an all gender changing area to make sure all kids uh feel welcome so i can tell you that uh that we're not only talking about uh you know ada accessibility but every part of these projects we're talking about gender accessibility as well and feel great about the work we're doing with that all the way through all of these projects um uh number two uh on the coffee shops certainly um that continues to come up you know i think i'm proud of our principles uh as they're hearing students maybe say some of the things that would be nice to have uh bringing this back to student learning um you know i even think of a conversation we had at la falla just last
184week where we heard from some students how nice it would be to have a coffee bar and then had our culinary arts teachers bringing it up again in a different light around how it could be integrated into the actual curriculum um and we you know we're even we've got some things going on behind the scenes with a very vocal culinary arts uh program at la follette where they're advocating for you know kind of some additional features in their space that can kind of turn things into real life learning experiences that our high schools can in some ways almost build their own business uh at la phallis so we're certainly hearing that um and could you know and the principal's been huge as busy as they are our high school principals uh during this you know
185time of virtual instruction they are finding time to make sure student staff voice uh is meshed into this work all the way through as far as timeline in budget ali you are correct that we are on time and we are on budget right now um and uh you know i'll certainly take a note on that on ways we can continue to work with the communication team to make sure the community realizes that the projects are going as promised right now i think myself every day that we made the decision to go with one design team who knows what they're doing they live and breathe k-12 instruction and it's almost like you have an educator in the room when you're talking to these teachers and that we've got fendorf on our team to keep us honest
186i can see quickly how a design team that maybe lacks a little bit of discipline and doesn't have a construction manager it locks step through this these projects can come in over budget in a hurry because you head into bid day blind and then you've got problems and we are not there we're the opposite and we are very disciplined in terms of our timeline and the scope in these projects and our principals and staff members hear that again and again as we worked our way through so i hope that got to most your stuff ali um yeah i don't know if i need anybody else to speak to it on my behalf although i do think that these are you know important areas that are that are worthy of discussion so if folks have things
187to add um i'm excited to hear the conversation chad i just want to say that it means the world to me to hear our students and our educators um coming forward to speak to the needs of our non-binary students our trans students and that that robust kind of level of commitment to equity throughout our district because we're talking about uh the basic dignity of our children um and so it can seem like a small or or uh very granular thing to to those of us who have never felt excluded from access to a restroom but for folks who have um this is this is about you know your basic human rights and and i appreciate that we as a community are engaged in in standing up for our entire community and through this process ali
188i echo that i'm proud of our staff and students every time we get together with them um and you know i i i can tell that it is a it's it's really the product of all the work our district's done the last three or four years in this area that we can we almost can't get through a meeting and we don't have a prompt in there uh that someone's not stepping in and asking about gender neutral bathrooms gender neutral changing areas um and as he av nodding his head i don't i really think it may it makes madison unique um i guarantee some of the other school districts they work with um they're not hearing that in such a repetitive way uh because our staff and students really believe that it is that important and
189it's amazing to hear that and we're going to get it right when when the buildings are actually built ananda did i see your hand thank you so much chris and now echo my colleagues uh welcoming warm welcoming to to uh donald and evie thank you so much for for staying with us uh late at night and uh eliminating such important um work and i also really appreciate your um your answers to the questions so far um i i have a question first maybe this is for chad and kelly around what are some of the opportunities that you all noticed reviewing the outreach for um for the referendum what are what are some of the areas that you thought we could have done better in in those areas some of the areas we could have done
190better during outreach yeah for the referendum yeah and you know i think uh dr jenkins has been along for the ride on a lot of these um i think they've gotten better uh each time we've worked through a few technical glitches um i think the you know the participation rates ananda uh you know i um certainly wish they were higher i think people are taking advantage of the fact uh that um these are recorded and they can watch them uh after the fact so it's you know we might have a session with 40 or 50 people and then that sessions watched a thousand times on facebook after we record it we reiterate in those sessions that uh the live session is not the only way to provide us feedback uh and that we even have
191two separate ways even on our own website uh for folks to provide us feedback um after the fact you know i um i i guess there's a piece to this that you you always want more um and that uh you know i i think we are doing um everything we can we're certainly open to feedback from the school board if you've got ideas to do more um i um you know between ab and myself uh you know i um i've had every week essentially booked past eight o'clock uh since the referendum passed virtually and there are only so many hours in the day to continue to elicit feedback uh and i feel like we're the eua team is almost to the point that they're blown away by the amount of effort we're putting in to
192take feedback to inform these designs and that it's important for us to continue these feedback loops but at the same time keep these things on schedule so we could take feedback for three years before we started putting pencil to paper and we can't do that either um so uh i guess more is always better we wish we had better participation um uh we wish we had more diverse participation in lots of cases and we're certainly open to ideas if we think we can make it better so i should add i should add very quickly that the fact that you're recording the chat sessions has been really instrumental uh chad and his team kelly and others have been wonderful marcy in getting us all the chat notes we're listening to the sessions but they're also using
193that we're taking notes at the same time so we're getting tiers of information and it occurs to us that this unfortunate covet situation has allowed for a broad engagement for parents that may not otherwise have been able to come to a meeting they're now able to listen in they're able to type their questions so we're excited about this hybrid approach of engaging and again kudos to chad and the rest of the the operational team and providing us with absolutely every single recording whether we attended that meeting or not we take that information and we add it to the repository to respond to yeah another i was going to say what abe just said and then add on to it which is i actually think having the zoom is working better for us um than when
194we were back in person in october of 2019 um i think the chat function has made for live notes and real direct people word for word um and it's also opened up a way for a broader conversation and people to bounce off of each other in conversation in a in a way i never would have anticipated i i think that's it's actually something we'll need to keep when you know we get to the other side of covid um in addition to that i don't think chad nor i will say that we hit the you know we hit the a home run on um some of our communities of color feedback sessions for the referendum right chad and i will openly admit that some of those didn't go as well as we would have wanted them
195to go um so we've certainly adjusted um some of that as far as far as like question prompts how we talk where you know and the good news is as it comes to these questions um everyone is is excited um about these projects so it really helps that it brings this like natural dream envisioning into the room the energy is high in these sessions the feedback is fantastic and so we have that working for us in this particular phase whereas before you know a lot of concern about money and taxes and the pandemic now that we're on the other side of that people are just excited and they're dreaming big and that brings a lot of energy to the conversation so the sessions themselves have just all gone like incredibly well totally agree thank you
196all for your answers i really appreciate you all's reflections both of chad and kelly your factions comparing to um pre-coveted outreach um i don't have necessarily like a solution to this it is something i think a lot about my experience enriched mundu and organizing the families there um and really noticing afterwards of the reason why we were able to um to mobilize folks and and and provide opportunities for folks to understand the current situation and shimonga uh 13 years ago and then um you know advocating for a new building it was a lot of work uh from families from parents from parents talking to parents and and educating other parents on what was happening and also uh motivating parents to organize because it was worth it something and when i was when i was um
197when i brought dr jenkins uh shirley after his arrival we we went to the south side and we were talking with some of my neighbors about you know if if these are families from north shore you know if they knew what had happened to the bully they they didn't right they you know so we still have families that didn't have didn't know what had happened and we still have families that may not understand exactly what's you know what's happening uh pose referendum um or even that there is a possibility of a really amazing school in the south side or or having some questions around that and i don't honestly don't have um i don't have a solution to those things other than you know it really takes a lot of organizing grassroots organizing for the
198communication to disseminate and for us to gain some trust um i know one of our missed opportunities was with pastor allen um and and the community uh that he serves and this the rimrock area is a really uh interesting area because there are folks that are connected to monona there are folks that are connected to the east side because of lafollette and senate um their folks they are connected more to this you know deeply rooted in the south side and there are folks that are connected to the west side and a lot of that is due to you know so much uh gaps that we have in the south side and so when we talk about outreach outside on the south side we're almost talking about you know a much broader uh outreach than perhaps
199when we talk about in other communities so just i just wanted to to share that really sensitive sensitive and mindfulness around um you know how do we do better to our families that because of our systems already feel so disengaged in our schools and really i'm not sure that we can we can we can do better we can be better for them so thank you so much for all your work and and for the great thinking and i'm excited for for all the projects to come to fruition um chris did you have your hand up yeah i'll just make um a couple of quick comments and my internet connection is unstable can you hear me okay okay um i just wanted to like everybody else say thank you to the team i think this is
200amazing work going on i i know people knew that we were going to do this post-referendum outreach about the facilities but i don't think people in the community understood to what degree that was going to happen and i'm just you know impressed with um really engaging people in this conversation about what our facilities are going to look like because i think it will give the community ownership um in these buildings and in our school district going forward um i i just wanted to highlight um as the board representative to alice elementary just the excitement around engaging in the instructional design part of the building as a precursor to the actual facilities discussions so um i've heard some excitement around that and just wanted to thank tremaine for bringing together the community groups and doing the
201engagement piece on that and i'm just looking forward to hearing how that goes as the work progresses so thank you everybody thanks chris julia did you have any comments yeah i just wanted to thank you especially for all the work reaching out to students a lot of student groups um i know student senate had the opportunity to um discuss this facility's referendum really recently another thing i just wanted to highlight is i think a lot of students are especially concerned and i'm sure you've been hearing about this about um green infrastructure and making sure that facilities are environmentally sustainable um so i was wondering if you could just maybe speak a little bit to what you might have heard from students about that or any possible plans yeah um so julia board member carusi kind
202of led us off with the fact that she actually has attended one of these meetings and certainly think we have heard uh from many of our student groups that maybe you know even a session that wasn't specific around sustainability uh how important this is to integrate into the projects so we heard uh you know we had groups that i i literally had a debrief with a couple of the students afterwards because i had a couple follow-up questions they met before they met with us and scripted their comments and were amazing uh so they had comments around uh around a solar array they wanted to know about our healing cooling system they were really interested uh in ways natural light could be incorporated into these projects we wondered about our outdoor spaces we wondered about bike
203parking uh they wanted wanted to know how sustainability could actually be integrated uh into the the the learning and how some of these improvements could maybe land in a physics classroom or an engineering classroom so students can actually learn about how a building works and measure it and learn from it i had several follow-up meetings with students around recycling programs and wondering how students could be more involved around educating their peers on more responsible uh you know the the use of trash and the use of recycling they wondered about the receptacles that would come out of these projects signage related so i i can tell you students have been super engaged we've got a budget built you know per the feedback we took pre-referendum to do some amazing work any kind of in addition to
204the stuff that was already built into the project and student voice is going to just make it all that all that much better as we work our way through so we we already promised the sustainability group we're coming back for another round because they were so good we have to show them kind of what we got at 50 plan sets so they can give us more feedback in terms of what we've already built into the projects thank you so much thank you so um i want to express my gratitude to everyone for this presentation um it's again it's really great to get up to speed thank you donald for joining us today it's lovely to meet you um just a couple very fast comments that you don't need to respond to the first one is
205as we're reaching out to high school students please don't forget about the artists the thespians and the musicians and as we start to get more concrete renderings or videos where people can actually see themselves in our video in our buildings please make a concerted effort to especially reach out to the elementary and middle schools with that because their kids are going to be the ones especially fifth graders to walk through those doors as freshmen and enjoy that experience for four years and i think it's really important that families who are currently in elementary middle school understand how the high school environment is going to change for their children in particular and if chad did you have a final comment nope that was a thumbs up from me and could not agree more with you we
206we are exciting for the the the 3d walk-throughs and we're going to make sure uh you know i i think a fifth grader should be the most excited the thing will finally be done and that's my school in three or four years so yeah it's it's gonna be pretty cool couldn't agree with you more all right well thanks again and um really appreciate it and let's move to our final agenda item um deirdre is going to talk to us about the handbook um quick update but it is tied to an action item on the regular board meeting agenda for this month so deirdre take it away yeah thanks chris uh well i i realized that uh my update is not going to be as nearly exciting as the referendum update so um i will i
207will try to make it uh a brief here um but i i wanted to just um come in and let the board know obviously we're continuing to meet around handbook updates and i know that uh in some of the last conversations that we um have had as a team that um the educator effectiveness portion of the rubric that we were creating as a group raised some questions and concerns and so our team has had an opportunity uh to to meet um and share what we think is an option of a more specific teacher-driven portion of the process which is incorporating the slo and ppg piece into the overall draft rubric so we're hoping that you might see that in march but we wanted you to know that our our discussions are continuing um and to
208be very transparent with you that there also continues to be dissonance between whether we should be including a performance-based measure into this process or not as we've stated as an administration seniority is not an indicator of performance or quality and so when we're making decisions about who will continue to serve our students we really do feel like it's important to have performance as a factor in the overall criteria so at the last meeting we had a really deep conversation about what is really getting in the way of us being able to come to agreement and move forward some of the discussion led us to examine the question what does it mean to be an anti-racist organization it let us think it led us to think about historic inequities of the district and it continued to
209illuminate this culture of privilege and the difference between what is equity and what is equal and fair so we agree that this is a really difficult and complex issue that's intertwined with many things uh including really just basically this fear of of moving forward or the fear of unknown the team also had some really good discussion and also agreed that continuing to provide our teachers support to grow teacher quality is really important that retaining our teachers who have growth mindsets and providing supports and accountability as a priority we agreed that we have to improve our consistent implementation of goal setting teacher support and accountability of our building leaders we discussed the need to begin to change the conversation to deal with systemic racism bias and inequities head on we have to be able to deliver
210on our promise to educate children and right the wrongs of many children that haven't been served in our district so it's my belief that we really cannot pick and choose the areas of inequity and marginalization and call ourselves anti-racist we have to be able to address it address it all so i wanted to share with with the board that we've had some really very passionate heartfelt conversations i want to thank the team for leaning in and challenging each other we've been asking questions and really seeking to understand as i shared at the last update we might not come to full agreement but it will certainly not be for the lack of an engaged dialogue on this topic so we're going to continue to examine what the other districts are doing we're going to build out
211a rubric and we're going to finalize this work for a vote in march uh chris gomez schmidt asked us specifically last time if we were looking at other models we've done some research in that area and the way that we're sort of modeling out this work there is not really any other district that is doing it quite the way that we're we're thinking about doing it and in looking at whether or not we have districts that are looking at seniority solely as an indicator for for making these decisions and the districts who may be moving to a more performance based uh based on what we've looked at and what we've looked into it's about 50 50 at this point so i just i wanted to to be able to share that little bit of information
212back with the group and then i'm gonna i'm gonna let heidi tep uh just jump in here and talk very specifically about the the temporary language for surplus chris which is what you're asking about in terms of vote action at the end of this month so i'm going to turn it over to heidi um just to share very quickly yeah so um last month we gave you a sample of the language that we were that we have agreed on with regards to surplus for this upcoming cycle and so basically the big change is that we are it will still be surplus based on the inverse order of seniority except that probationary teachers are going to be exempt from the surplus process unless the principle determines that the surplus of a probationary teacher best meets the
213instructional needs of their school so the reason behind that change was our concern of um principles higher you know our our most recent people coming in are often our staff of color but also principals are really busy trying to recruit the appropriate people for their building and what we have heard from staff as well is not having a sense of belonging when they're the ones who are going to get bounced around from building to building so we agreed to this temporary language with mti while we're still looking at this overall process with regard to surplus and layoff but that's the language that we bring that will be bringing to you at you'll be voting on at the end of the month any questions nikki end of march or the end of the month i'm kind
214of confused end of february this month okay because i've heard march will be the layoff language but the surplus is and this is yep gloria yeah heidi what's the um what is the criteria or have we developed the criteria of um a probationary so a probationary teacher is a teacher in their first three years with mmsd right but what's the criteria in um in surplus you said that in that language that there's a cert there's an option for the principal to determine if it's a what academic right in the best needs of the of their school okay so what's the criteria under that like what how does the principle uh determine that and you know what are you know what's the accountability factor around that is what i'm trying to say so for principles i
215mean we the way we like to give principals autonomy over their building because they're the ones who best understand what their students need so they may have just so they may have just hired a person who has a background you know who has worked in urban areas who has taught kids that are i'm in the demographic of the students in their building so if they're in their probationary period they don't they can basically hop over them to somebody else but let's say they don't they have other people in their building who are critical and they might then say okay i might have just hired somebody but i have somebody else in my building who is the head of you know various teams they have a leadership role within my building they would have been the
216next most senior person and i can't lose that person so then they might choose to let a probationary person be surplus okay in their hands to make those decisions because they know their buildings best and that's new language that mti is in agreement with correct okay because we haven't talked about that here so okay so i mean what are i mean yeah so are we really this is getting to where are we really getting to where we were concerned about anyway right because the reason of for looking into this language was the not losing uh staff of you know the seniority issue of like moving teachers around um yeah so gloria if i could just jump in here really quickly just to to help you understand sort of the distinction so we have we have
217surplus surplus language and layoff language the the the time that we've been spending having this conversation um and really coming to a place of agreement on both of those pieces in the handbook two separate pieces of language we're continuing to work on that because we are moving forward you just heard kelly talk about workbooks getting released and this process is moving forward and so what we don't want is an unintended consequence where within the surplus process the old language remains the same that is why we're asking for this language for surplus specifically we continue to work through the the layoff process in developing a rubric etc and that all of that will come forward for a vote in march okay so we're we're trying to to address a short-term issue here where we don't want
218to have an unintended consequence so hopefully that helps explain the two different pieces of language we're looking at yeah that helps uh deirdre thank you and heidi other questions sadian yeah thank you for moving forward and engaging in some really important conversations and negotiations um i'm curious uh so you talked about teachers on probations what about staff on improvement plans um and how are we you know ensuring alignment with school level sips so heidi do you want to just talk a little bit about the performance improvement process right so if you if a staff member is on an improvement plan that is not they could not volunteer for surplus but they might be if they were actually it's fairly rare that they would be in the line to be someone who is surplused though i
219mean based upon my experience i can think of one instance where i've had someone on an improvement plan actually be the person who ended up having to be surplus but we don't let people who are on an improvement land voluntarily surplus from their school as an attempt to get out of being on an improvement plan got it you're on mute you did and i just i said something so smart just now so um so you know uh dear joe and heidi where where the board is at right we've been we've been having these conversations um for the past you know few years is this um the direction that we're heading um is do you recommend us moving towards right i mean it i mean i i think what we wanted to do right was uh
220come back um have conversations with mti uh really get to some consensus around this so that um we can come up with a some common sort of um you know acceptance with moving forward do you think that this is the as far as as far as we can go is this one of the best situation scenarios that we can get at at this point yeah so gloria when i mention the dissonance about performance as an indicator i really do think that is the area that is going to be challenging for us to come to consensus on i can just be fully fully um transparent with you um about that and i think the the last conversation we had it was a really really good deep dialogue on for both sides to really understand where each
221uh were coming from um and i do acknowledge and recognize you know the the the um the the fear of the unknown the anxiety you know what this might mean um and at the same time we have really good conversations about not being able to pick and choose when we're talking about inequities that we have to we have to be able to go within the organization and really disrupt and dismantle and if we say that we're about anti-racism then we actually have to deal in every area where we're seeing that show up um and so it was good it was really um a very good dialogue very heartfelt um but if if if i think the the one thing that may um not get us there in terms of agreement there are other areas of
222criteria within the rubric that we can all agree on i think the the i think the seniority piece in addition to um whether or not there will be a performance indicator within the rubric is is really the sticking point thank you thank you i just want to provide one quick clarification um i know the majority board may agree on certain areas just want to state that um regarding seniority and performance plan um i am not for the performance plan being included i am for the seniority i've stated that before i'm just stating the record i'm not insulting any of my board members i respect all of them but where they sit and where they stand on the issue this is an individual belief thank you nikki yeah i continue to be deeply impressed and appreciative
223of the nuanced dialogue that is taking place and i think you know there this this is a multi-faceted conversation right because it's easy to say we're against discrimination it really is and it sounds so good um but the truth is is when we are addressing issues of of disparities within our workforce within within the realities of our young people um that we're also talking about privilege we're also talking about who gets preferential treatment and what history has taught us over and over and over again nikki and i so greatly appreciate you earlier speaking to this sister has taught us that people don't give up privilege easily it's a hard thing to part with it's a hard thing to acknowledge um and so the complexity of this conversation is is not something i think anybody on
224this board takes for granted um and i i appreciate the the work you all are doing to have this conversation and the boldness and frankness and candor you're bringing to this conversation about race this conversation about equity this conversation about inclusion um i think it is a necessary conversation and and worthy of the challenge it presents i'm so glad you said that ali i really appreciate you i appreciate the comments i just worry because in the past the only people i saw some of the improvement plans were people with disabilities that are wheelchair that multiple people in wheelchair staff and we didn't have that many we're all a lot of performance plans and i'd want to avoid that i just want to include it for everyone because we got to find a way to work
225together the only way that's going to win i i appreciate that nikki and i think it's an important thing to acknowledge that a system that we move towards may have its own biases in in with within it and that that is something that we don't get to ignore either um thank you yeah thank you for that dialogue ali and nikki um with regard to the performance review i'd be interested to see if we're just tying that to test scores um i think that that's something that we have to dissect um but you know otherwise i understand that there's a fear of the unknown or there's anxiety over the unknown what gives me fear and anxiety is fear of the known the status quo um that's something that we cannot tolerate and so we have to
226go forth um and you know using our best judgment make change um and you know that's a humbling feeling but it's something that i believe we have to do you know straight up black and brown folks have been excluded from the profession of education especially since brown v board and that's a broader conversation but this is one area where um i believe that this is a inequity so um thank thank you for the team and um our colleagues and partners at mti for entering into these conversations chris yeah um thank you jira and thank you for looking into the the models and examples we might have been able to find from other districts so i appreciate you looking at at that and if there are pieces of things that seem to make sense for what
227we're doing in the work we're doing i i trust that you're looking into that and i do appreciate that work um my question is around process again can you clarify that you're coming back to us in march with this um you know the educator effectiveness portion of the rubric or this rubric that includes that includes maybe educator effectiveness piece in it and you were saying that the teacher drone part was connected to the student learning objectives in that piece that you're working on um so timeline wise when are we going to see this in march and how much time are we going to have to react before we're expecting a vote on this yeah so you'll see it at the operations work group in march which i believe is the eighth if i'm if my
228calendar counting is correct um with a vote at the end of the month so we will present it to you on the eighth there will be feedback and discussion there um if there are tweaks or changes that we need to make between then and uh the end of the board meeting or the end of the month we'll do that for the the vote uh at the end of the month and again i just want to remind the the board that the way that the process works is uh this gets presented to the superintendent first uh this is this is his decision uh as to whether or not he will put forth a recommendation to the board uh if the decision is to move forward with a recommendation then that is what we will present and
229um then it'll it'll go to the end of the month for vote march is a lovely month with five mondays except what is the start of spring break so um but yes yes i agree um thank you for that clarification and um we'll look forward to the information that you present and um thank you for working on the surplus language too that is the temporary that gets us um through basically the step where we are in the budget process so i appreciate that too thank you ananda i think myself and and along with many others around uh this table have have heard of um the issue that we're discussing for quite some time and i'm gonna be honest everyone i i have felt hopeless around uh being able to be at this very moment several
230times and i just wanted to say i really appreciate your courage deidra and your teams and the persistence and the research um thank you so much dr jenkins and really establishing a new leadership around change this is what we're talking about i think you said it really well save the end right like what we have it you know we can no longer accept uh and so i really appreciate all my colleagues i think this is a this is a really critical uh move that we're making i don't think there's no guarantees uh that everyone is gonna be happy that everything is gonna be fantastic and it's gonna solve all the problems but this is a this is a great step in a really great direction and i really appreciate the team's courage and resilience and
231persistence on bringing this uh so thank you so much i'm deeply grateful for for your leadership thanks did you have any comments nope okay um i just had a couple of comments ali i really appreciated what you said that um a system we move toward may have its own biases and i think that's something we have to be conscious of as we evaluate whatever gets brought forward to us on one hand i completely agree that if we're going to be an anti-racist district we have to be bold about policy that's where it's at we can't settle for the status quo if the status quo is perpetuating injustice and racism and mmsd and at the same time i i do worry that um you know if if an unintended consequence of a policy were not sufficiently
232thoughtful about is that it is over-reliant on test scores that are potentially racially biased we might have a problem likewise if we see staff of color staying with mmsd for a few years and then leaving for other districts where they feel they have more job security because of seniority we're going to have a problem so i think we have to be really conscious of what the equity goals we're trying to achieve are and make sure that what gets brought forward to us moves us towards those goals and um part of doing that is i would really like to hear from staff of color particularly staff of color who've been in mmsd for a while about how the proposed policy impacts them personally how it would make them feel about their job i i feel that
233those voices need to be at the table as we're considering change um because this is really about making sure that we have staff in our district who reflect our students so um and likewise i would like here from mti leadership of color about how they're perceiving the proposed changes before i vote ananda i saw your hand um i'm trying to think a little bit about your request chris i i i see the value i'm trying i'm remembering a previous conversation that we had on this a few meetings ago and and here's what happens with communities of color and teachers of color uh or latinx community or black community we don't all think the same thing and i think i you know if we're looking for all black and brown teachers to reach consensus on this
234i can guarantee you that that's not going to be the case um similarly to the white community we also have uh different of opinions so i i you know i just feel like we have had this conversation before and i think that there's folks that at times use you know one person or this person said this thing or this person said that i'm i'm i'm just saying something to for us to caution on um this outreach and also to say i can guarantee you that there won't be a consensus on this yeah i'm not interested in putting of quote unquote pitting staff of color against each other in a public fashion as individual board members we all have our own autonomy to reach out to people privately as well as these meetings will have public
235comment and they will have the opportunity to present them should they feel they want to um so that's that yeah if i can thank you go ahead and yeah yeah i just wanted to just quickly chris address your your concerns about unintended consequences because we've had that this conversation about that as well and one of the things we talked about is is really not falling into the trap of perfectionism um and just knowing that we really have to move forward on this and that we have built-in opportunities where we can and we should um i think because historically we have not been looking at how to dismantle and disrupt it's part of the reason why like we're trying to get after some of these things right now right so being able to really leverage our
236handbook process that gives us the opportunity to review things in cycles to be sure that we're not perpetuating um unintentionally but really pushing the team to not fall into the trap of perfectionism because we it is not going to be absolutely perfect and not everybody is going to agree but we will still need to move forward dr jenkins yeah thank you it's been great listening to this discussion and i respectfully disagree uh miss uh hargrove i think you're bringing a very exciting conversation to the table and it's long overdue i think we all can agree that we say we're on the journey to becoming an anti-racist district or we are an anti-racist district and the fact of it is when there are any kind of isms on the table they either are or they aren't
237and we could take it to being about race we could take it to being about sex we could take it to be about whatever it either is or it isn't and if there are practices and policies that this board is saying we just changed something the other day they said we're going to be anti-racist we have to go deep within ourselves and say are they are they aren't they do they uphold barriers for an individual or individuals and if that is the case then we must do everything to dismantle it um i'm inspired by this just starting up a conversation and i don't know if as wisted churchill said why do we hold out false those things that we know will soon come to be swept away if if it is what it is if
238we're saying we know that we have practices that's bringing harm continuing to perpetuate not bringing the historical wrongs that have happened then we have to have self-examination if and when it comes to my desk i will be bringing forth for recommendation it's not maybe i will and i i don't think temporary solutions to something will bring us the best game for all of our children for all of our parents for our community or everybody who just voted on this referendum i think they want the best and expect the best of us so just please know uh and i was just listening because i i do i always want to collaborate to the furthest end of the earth but collaborating doesn't always mean that you're going to agree on everything as well so thank you so
239much and uh ms hargrove you did a you you are you're doing a fine job this is tough work to collaborate and you're doing it so i'm i'm admiring you from afar i'll just say that now wait my turn till you bring it to me thank you can i just add to that chris um i think you know dr jenkins i just uh really appreciate your work um and your leadership through this i i recall as having these conversations before you got here and because of your uh experience and your history we were like you know dr jenkins is going to bring in that leadership that's needed to convene and bring people together and make these really hard decisions together and so um i seriously don't think that we would be in this space today
240um to make this significant impact if it wasn't for you coming in and and taking this on um as soon as you came on board so uh thank you for your leadership and um yeah uh this is this is great thank you deardra and heidi for your work gloria i have to say to you guys it's not just me it's been all of us and i will tell you this i have found great friendship in working with mti they have been the whole way partners and i have learned from them and there are some things in our district that have not been right historically that it came to me by way of mti and when i verified it it was it was it was the truth we have a lot of hurting going on in
241our community not just our district and i think we're poised because of all of us this isn't an individual this is truly collaboration at the highest level where it's going to take a lot of people and to get out of our pain we may have to stop the pain it'll hurt temporary but forever it should go away so thank you to all of you and for your leadership that this is an amazing place to be for me so um thanks so much to dr jenkins and to gloria for those closing remarks um unless anybody has any final comments i think that leaves us in a really good place to um to close out this meeting um take a five-minute break and then we need to come back for closed session there is a different link
242for closed session so um you'll be leaving this meeting and coming back um so are there any final comments before we move on all right all those in favor all right motion carries i'll see everyone at 8 35 in closed session