Board of Education Operations Work Group 1-19-21

001we have some beautiful snow coming down i had to make myself i had to run out there and do a facebook live as if we've never seen snow before but for some reason it was just beautiful today okay we are ready to go all right well thank you and everyone welcome to the january 19th meeting of the operations work group we have no registered speakers tonight and we did not receive any written comments so we're gonna jump right into approval of the minutes um i moved to approve the minutes from the operations work group meeting dated october 12 2020. can we get a second second nikki vandermeen all right all those in favor raise your hand say aye any opposed motion carry 7-0 um we will jump into business now we have a full agenda

002tonight um our main agenda item is to launch our budgeting process for the coming school year um following that we will be looking at an attachment detachment proposal with the deforest area school district and then we will be getting an update on handbook negotiations particularly regarding the surplus process before we launch into our budget discussion i want to um say hi to dr jenkins and point out that this is his first full budget with mmsd which we're really excited about and in honor that dr jenkins i'd like to invite you to um set the stage by saying a few words okay thank you so much chris for doing that and you're exactly right this is the first budget uh full budget cycle i'll go through and i am just so pleased to have a team

003that we have as we are looking to build upon the good work that we've already started here in terms of trying to make sure that we are fiscally responsible uh we're so thankful to the taxpayers uh once again for the referendum the historic 350 million dollar referendum and as we go into the budgetary cycle we're going to be looking to a whole uh study on the promises that we've made to our community to continue to be fiscally responsible go through the budgetary process with a lens of equity in mind to do the best that we can for all of our students here in madison metropolitan school district so i am really excited and i have to say that our cfo has started with our team uh making sure that we are all well aware of

004where we are with the budget timelines but also being very open to the things that we need to do to be bold as we move forward uh to kind of rethink some things so i'm looking forward to that and working with you an operational work group as well as uh working with amanda and the instructional work group as we move forward with our instructional piece knowing that our instruction will lead our work everything else is to support what we do for our children so thank you so much for giving me that opportunity to open up thank you dr jenkins for um hoping to set the stage in a way that really captures the the both the responsibility and the opportunity of each year's budget cycle um tonight's presentation and everybody's feedback on that presentation is

005going to provide the foundation that um kelly's gonna use to build the budget so tonight's presentation even though for the most part there are no immediate urgent decisions we have to make about what we're going to spend on stuff we need to give kelly some guidance so that she can go and prepare proposals for us to to consider over the next three months so the feedback you provide tonight is really important and also the questions you ask for clarification will help us set the stage for a smooth budget process moving forward um so in tonight's presentation there's going to be a few pause points and i thought i'd outline those so you know where we're going to stop and ask for feedback um the first one will be following our discussion about goal or kelly's

006presentation of the goals and the principles that we're using to build our budget on we'll take a second pause after kelly's presentation on revenue and enrollment um a third pause after we talk about strategy for the coming year specifically around compensation benefits and equity and finally we'll pause at the end of the budget presentation for any final questions or comments and then we're going to move into a presentation and brief discussion about title one for the coming school year so that's a bunch to keep in mind um but please try to hang on to your questions until we get to those pause points all right and with that i will invite kelly to um start a presentation thanks kelly thank you chris and melissa if we could pull up the powerpoint slides we'll go ahead

007and dive right in that would be fantastic and thank you superintendent jenkins for kicking us off um we are all here and excited to start the 21-22 budget cycle it's hard to believe it's january already and we'll be working together on this budget between now and october with the majority of our work happening between now and june like we would in a typical budget year melissa i don't think i have access to drive the slides that's okay just tell me when to go ahead okay so i'm gonna ask you keep pace with me i'm gonna cover the first couple ones pretty quickly um so we always kick off our budgeting process by really putting the strategic framework of the district first and foremost and that is because in alignment with our educational equity policy we

008intend to spend all of our resources in line with achieving academic outcomes for students as a mission every school will be a thriving school that prepares every student to graduate from high school college career and community ready in this means we look at every investment that we make in line with our core values belonging excellence creativity racial equity social justice voice of our students of our families and potentially some of the most important work is focus identifying the priorities of which we have together in order to move on our racial equity and social justice initiatives and moving accident accelerated learning forward for students so i want to take these slides a little bit slower tonight because it's important that you re-digest the strategic framework as we think through the focus areas and the guidance that

009you might give me tonight in the next slide in our strategic framework we have three goals and on our website are where our metrics are and our data that track our progress to these goals aligning our investments with where we've seen proven results for students and where research supports investments for students such as our early literacy strategy is key to moving the district forward and aligning the resources according to our own policy on the educational equity policy together we also work through our investments and our tools on the senior leadership team and with our principals using our equity tool so unless i'll have you scroll forward to the equity tool slide for me the next one you will all remember the work from last year last year we went through all of our past strategic

010framework priorities together kind of in a culminating event of our equity projects of the past we reviewed them we validated what was working what hadn't yet achieved the objectives we were looking for we made adjustments and shifts in order to really relaunch the budgeting process and any new investments that this new board and this new superintendent make moving forward particularly with their new operating referendum dollar so kind of starting with this clean slate as we talk through our new investments moving forward and making sure that those that continue from the past um have the proven outcomes and or on the trajectory that we would expect to get to those outcomes so when it comes to our educational fb policy the questions you see on this slide are what we ask ourselves when we go through

011all new investments on our budget these are the questions we have our department leaders review answer validate with the stakeholders of the projects of whom they're intended to focus on and in the next slide muslim these then are our objectives for tonight keeping all of that in mind as we go through the overall review of the budget we'll cover our approach chris just mentioned we're going to pause on our goals and parameters to make sure they're in alignment with the direction of the board we always do our revenue projections probably one of the most important pieces of our conversation tonight to make sure everyone understands the assumptions we're making which thereby lead to our expenditure strategy and our overall need to balance this budget by the time we hit the june budget book so your

012discussion tonight there's a guiding for me and my team who are all watching this meeting tonight at our budget team we'll digest all of your feedback and work through it by the time we see you again in february the timeline on the next slide is a timeline similar to what we've done in the past sticking with some of the approach that has been successful for us in the past so tonight if you could go to the next solution we're going to be doing our budgeting goals and guiding principles and creating that revenue forecast with enrollment those top two bullets are incredibly important to us tonight and then we'll we'll touch on the four other bullets going deeper and validating the staffing plan compensation plan new investments in healthcare in the next two or three months

013the timeline on the next slide is a similar timeline that you've seen before taking ourselves through a deliberate process of revenue tonight staffing workbooks our summer semester planning will be more very important for us this year between the february and march um to lock that in summer the summer semester will be a more of an investment for us this year to make sure we get students what they need in light of our impacts of covenant 19. by april we'll get a draft budget out to the community that budget will have been built based on the feedback we have received to date through all of our feedback sessions whether it's coming from the operational referendum feedback sessions our virtual learning survey results and any other piece of information that we've received from our community and our

014families in the last year we are building into this budget process and this thinking today and will revalidate that through the community through april and may before you finalize this budget in june we will have additional work to do which will probably come more in the april may time frame that's new for this year and that will be what we learn from the states and the feds regarding any new covid19 funding will receive additional guidance in the upcoming months and by april and may we have a better understanding of what our school year will look like when we start for 2122 so we'll hold for some of that work but i will address kind of some of the things we might expect are coming towards the end of this presentation probably most importantly as far

015as our timeline goes would be a goal to get a pretty solid budget in place in june in the last two years due to kind of unknowns at the state level whether as an unknown around our biennium or unknown around covid um we've had a budget in place in june with a lot of open items we've had some if then statements filled into our into our budget approvals in june this year i think the goal is is is not to have to do that but to do our best to lock this budget in with what we expect to hold pretty tight through october um in the june process we have a lot of work to do this summer to get ready for students and kids and it'll i think it'll be good to have this

016budget really put in place with not as many open items as we have had in the past the next slide melissa so looking at the budget goals these are similar to last year and have been updated based on the feedback we've received from the community and you through the budgeting process so continuing to distribute our resources um with a lens of equity through our equity tool and our equity policy but putting it an even more intentional focus on our focus set of priorities and what we heard from the community about focusing on early literacy in particular as a major support coming out of our community through that operating referendum total compensation and we always aim to be equal to or greater than um what is cost of living or otherwise thought of as inflation this

017year um our best estimate that that base wage to the max number is 1.2 percent it hasn't yet been finalized at the state level but we're pretty sure it's going to come pretty close to that 1.2 percent so using that as a working assumption and we'll do everything we can to get to that base wage maximum to the number we'll talk more about that in a minute we know how important that is and also in line with much of the feedback we've received through the operating referendum as well so the budget goals are what we aim to achieve through the budget and on the next slide you see our budget parameters and principles so the principles are like parameters they're what we work within right the goal is what we aim for and the parameters

018or principles are what we work within so we work within a strategic framework that has been vetted by the community and approved by the board a focus on early literacy as a key priority coming out of the referendum we know we have to maintain multi-year long-range perspectives so we always look at the beginning of each year by thinking about multiple years in the future what's to come and this year maybe even more than ever we need to con continue to think about kind of right sizing the district in alignment with art with our enrollment it'll be a theme for the year that we'll work through together safety measures and reopening efforts will continue to be a priority within the parameters of the budget that we work within knowing that we are still deep in a

019coven 19 pandemic of course that conversation and that work will will be part of this budgeting process um stability in schools during a time of kind of loss of enrollment and a lot of unknowns um just in the world that we live in today will also continue to be a parameter of thinking of which we operate within and we always build on practices that we've seen promising promising results from our own schools and within the research community so moving on to the next actually you wanted to pause here chris i'm sorry so uh let's take a look at those goals and the guiding principles and see what feedback you might have or any any changes we might need to make melissa can we keep down the park thanks i'm not sure um nikki like someone

020is either watching youtube melissa are you watching youtube and on the meeting at the same time i am not mine is off completely wow oh it got better now it seems like it's better yeah i saw your hand did anybody else have a hand up at this point i thought i saw these but i'm not sure if that was correct or not go ahead um um i really like the focus on the early literacy i think it's a game changer i've agreed that it's a game changer our kids aren't aren't reading underpass strategies i think that's an excellent absolute goal i also like the commitment to staying as close to war or reaching cola as much as the cost of living and inflation as much as possible i like that for our seas our bas

021using our equity tool especially when our security assistants our bas and our seas are primarily hispanic and black they often are the last two get promoted they are often the last two get raises and i think they need to be recognized for their work and i always advocate for the teachers i always will but this is a way to spread the wealth at the same time and i think this is a good idea to have a strategy and just put it out there and probably my favorite part is the is the going through the equity tool and seeing how it applies and how it doesn't prior to this year we sometimes used it actually prior to last year's budget we sometimes use the equity tool we sometimes didn't i if we're going to use it

022i think we should use it on everything personally and so i think that that's a pretty good step so i'm cautiously optimistic thanks nikki ollie ellie i want to thank you for your agility in moving through um the last several cycles of our budget but particularly our most recent cycles and the cycle we kind of anticipate um i do think often that it is our job to kind of be the stewards of doing what we said we're gonna do right we asked for a referendum and now our job is to deliver to get to work to to fulfill the promises we made in pursuit of those referendums um and i think what you just spoke to very much speaks to to the promises we've made as a district into what we've committed to um i

023agree with uh nikki the emphasis on early literacy um is a really exciting thing to see an exciting thing to move towards i think the the question i'll have will remain similar throughout this process which is how are we maintaining kind of a consistent relationship with our goals um and adjusting appropriately for covet right so it's easy to imagine the emphasis on early literacy in kind of our normal classroom environment but if we're emphasizing the outdoors and meeting the social emotional needs of students um especially our early learners like my kiddo who you know missed a segment of kindergarten and now has done first grade online um how are we going to meet kind of those wrap around needs of students and fulfill our promises to the community um i think is is really about

024flexibility so can you speak to i guess both how we you know really move along through our plan and also maintain the agility we need um to respond to the ongoing nature of this pandemic yeah in response to the kind of the ongoing agility it's one of the main reasons i start every presentation when we kick off the budget with a reminder of what our our cycle of work is because as you might all remember i'm sure you do we went through that cycle like four different times together last year um certainly more than i'm ever used to and more than you're ever used to um and i think that's the way we will continue to just need to work together through this budget cycle and going into the fall um we'll put our best

025you know minds together um to put the right resources um in the forefront for kids when we draft that april budget and things might change for us and by the time we get to the june budget that you're voting on we might have gone through that whole cycle again and need to revalidate where we are because of covet or who knows what else in the universe might change guess what and then we're gonna have to do that again by october um and maybe we've got to do it again in july because something surprising comes out in the state biennium and we do it again in october because something else comes out right um so i think as long as we're all um flexible with each other and but remain in this kind of like disciplined

026way of working that we'll all stay in the same path the same page even if we got to go back and revisit some previous decisions along the way we'll keep using the same cycle because it keeps us all on the same page and one thing i would add to that is that our continued focus is going to be on the health and safety of our children and as a part of it it's also that social emotional and mental health and you heard kelly speak to the fact that this summer we're not just looking at expenditures for summer schools but we're looking at investments those investments go multiple ways in terms of what's going to be good for our children socially emotionally and creating those other opportunities as well as the academic piece lisa and her

027team has just done a fabulous job of pivoting many times and with jay in there with his department and the things that we're trying to do out uh in our schools we were lifted up in new york times about the work that we're doing at the high schools but we know that it's a lot more work even after this covet 19 is over that we're gonna do gonna have to do to capture our students where they are and take them where they need to be based on a lot of the research that you're reading is saying that students gonna have a learning loss of about three years three and a half for some but a social emotional laws is going to be serious and so lisa's there if you wanted to speak more into that

028piece lisa that's a serious question and that means our budget and what kelly is saying we are going to have to pivot at times the more we learn so lisa yet thoughts on that carlton thank you for saying that um i do agree with everything that you commented on and would just add that we think that the summer semester strategy we're calling it summer semester rather than summer school will actually be an investment that will require a different way of using funds a different way of staffing and a new focus both on academics and social and emotional support and we'll really be counting on our own high quality staff to work with with us on that and maintain the relationships that they have with students thank you all so much for speaking to that savion

029and then ananda and then gloria thank you i want to thank kelly and the finance team for maintaining a level of strategic flexibility during the last budget cycle to be able to adapt no matter which way our unknown variables fell through our whole budget process last year and i anticipate we'll have to do that this year um throughout this process i'll just echo something that dr jenkins has consistently said you know as far as a budget is a reflection of our priorities and morals um we're trying to be an anti-racist school district will our budget reflect that so in terms of investing and anti-racist strategies that will improve outcomes for students whether it's early literacy at the early level or restorative justice at the secondary level and this social emotional piece throughout last week we

030heard from our public health experts dr greg mentioned that in terms of students just recovering from the social emotional trauma and isolation that they're experiencing right now will be significant and so we will have to invest significant resources into the mental health piece for the well-being of our students as well as compensation um in terms of our black and brown staff being compensated fairly you know this discussion is also related to another topic that we'll be discussing tonight and so those will be some consistent themes that i'm looking for throughout this whole budget process and i'm looking forward to it thanks ananda yeah thank you so much chris so i want to start by applying the gratitude to cali and the team on the uh fantastic job on on navigating really challenging uh financial landscape

031and then uh just doing that with with such uh amazingness sharpness around that work and getting us through a really complicated referendum so thank you so much um my thoughts i i really uh i wanted to just elevate things that nikki has said and ali and sadie and i really appreciate saving grounding and the anti-racism piece of it because i don't necessarily see it highlighted here um what comes up from me kelly is that for for for far too long our district had used poverty as an excuse uh to really address some some systemic racism and we use proxy as we use poverty as a proxy to like everything that was happening in our district even though we had plenty of evidence that although poverty was a significant uh data point that impact many of

032our students it was not the sole driver uh and not the most the only salient uh data point and what i'm worried about is that covet becomes the new proxy for us to not addressing the things that we need to address so um i know we have talked about how technical equity policy by the way i really appreciate you grounding on the goals and equity policy that was extremely helpful um i know we talked about like how to you know to ex you know just just to get a little deeper on our equity policy and the technicality around it for me what i'm going to be looking at uh for the next year is really understanding how we're going to address you know the systemic impact of another you know another pandemic right like we're

033talking about racism as one of the pandemics and now we have um i want to i want to figure out how we're going to get in and when we talk about systemic racism we forget that systems are made of people right and so when we're trying to address you know or become an anti-racist school where is racism manifest you know when uh those manifestations are happening who in our district uh is is driving those manifestations right and we have a pretty comprehensive data data set or data tools in our in our district different than five years ago or six years ago to really look at and be really courageous about how are we going to address those manifestations uh very courageously and and unapologetic about it um we you know part of my i get

034a you know i think part of the anxiety around the budget for me is those allocations of resources um for pro you know in a program or programmatic way but also uh in in in continuum strategies or continuum of you know educational opportunities where those those manifestations of of oppressions are happening for our students um so thank you so much cali for giving this pause and this time because i thought it was it was extremely helpful thank you chris thanks ananda um chris did you have comments at this point i do i think gloria and oh i'm sorry you were nice yeah i'll be after thanks that's okay chris thank you um so much of what i was going to say savion and ananda um uh talked about um and that was the it was

035focused on the educational equity uh tool um i'm glad to see um that it's on here um kelly and that you've um you know grounded us in this um i know when i first started um on the board this was something that i really continued to ask and so thank you for listening and um and adding this to uh and preparing us for the the budget i just want to um just make sure that we uh continue to use this tool um throughout the process um and recognize um and showcase when we are using it uh during the budget process every step of the way i think that um the frustration for me and no fault to our administration um is that when we get to finalizing our budget we somehow seem to uh forget

036a lot of times you know that we have grounded ourselves in this equity process and tool um granted we have many things that we have to consider uh in our decision making process uh but i really want us to uh when we come down to making these tough decisions that this board will um come back to this um equity tool and force ourselves to make to ask ourselves these questions um you know what data's gathered um you know who does it who does this decision benefit or burden uh and um when we are deciding right what we're going to take out of the budget and what we're going to put in the budget and so um i understand that you know we have many other things that you know is really important uh in setting

037our budget but we have to come out of this budget this time around since we've made it this far and now that we haven't it's just we have sacrificed equity based on other decisions that we've had to make and so i just want us to continue to ask those questions that are in our equity tool to ground us and to make decisions uh moving forward so thank you savion and ananda for bringing that up i think that is something that we will have to continue to do and um i think kelly i think it is um and dr jenkins it is their your responsibility to uh to make us accountable for that uh when we are making final decisions on our budget make us accountable and remind us and that we need to center ourselves

038back on this equity tool and we also have to remind our community that that's uh right we need to by us talking about it and by you talking about it it reminds our community uh where our efforts um need to go and um so thank you very much uh kelly and your team uh for this and uh look forward to future budget discussions thank you thanks gloria and um chris you're up next thanks chris and thanks everyone for for the comments and for the work that you're uplifting here kelly again like everyone else echo just the tremendous job that has been done over the past year to lead us through some very unpredictable times um i would just like to to highlight that i i think it was really helpful to to talk about how

039we are working within certain parameters with our strategic framework goals and appreciate the focus on early literacy um and i i think the keeping in mind the multi-year long-range perspective is really important for me um you know we do these year-long budget cycles and sometimes i think we don't um have uh you know keep the the long-term picture in view as as much as we need to just because of the pressure of doing these year-by-year budgets um so that would be important along the way for me and then um highlighting the the stability in the schools and figuring out how to maintain that when we talk about our enrollment numbers and just talk about the the um fact that we're operating you know in still uncertain times and in a pandemic and how we're going

040to make that work um dr jenkins i just want to say i appreciate you talking about how the instruction is going to lead our work and trying to figure out how we really connect that as we look towards you know in-person learning what that will look like when we go back and how we may maintain a virtual model as we move forward too in years ahead and what investments are going to be needed to make sure that our instruction is strong with an equity lens um i guess this is probably not the right time to bring it up but just to throw it out there i think we some somehow need to connect this to our cycles of review and how we are looking at how we're reviewing the work that we're doing in these

041different plans and how that connects with our budgeting thank you chris i really appreciate that um i want to echo much of the gratitude that's already been expressed both for um the challenges that went and work that went into the the prior year's budget and um all of this foundational work for this year's budget um there's you know like many people have said there's a lot to be excited about already just in this short presentation um particularly the focus on early literacy for me the um explicit focus on equity and um the the the commitment to try to work towards full cola i'm excited about that based on what i've just heard i do have a couple of suggested tweaks to the language of the the goals and the principles um on the slide about

04220 21 22 budget goals i wonder um let's see is that the one i was thinking about is the goals of the principles yeah i wonder if in line with these board approved policies and our commitment to being an anti-racist district i wonder if we should actually call that out in the preamble um there i think that might just help us every single time we sit down to work on this budget hold that at the forefront and keep that in our hearts um i really really appreciated what ollie said about agility i actually think in the coming school year um our ability to to have stability is gonna depend on our agility if that makes any sense like we're gonna need to go back in person and at the same time we're going to have

043kids who are going to need us to be able to provide them with a virtual option we may need to do more stuff outdoors at the beginning of the school year like we have to be able to respond to whatever the world throws at us so i'm wondering if we need to put the word agility into um the statement about stability um you know to ensure stability in schools through agility during a time of great uncertainty um just to capture the need for us you know not only our internal work but also um in our schools to to be agile and responsive and um one other tweak i just thought about in the um guiding principles i really really appreciated your lifting up um the fact that we value focus in mmsd and i wonder

044if instead of building on practices that are showing data supported promise for the future we might want to say that we want to focus on practices that are showing that data supported promise um i don't know what do people think about that any concerns nikki i see your hand i like the first two not sure on the last one could you elaborate slightly on the last one um to me saying focus instead of build actually um communicates a bit more intentionality about choosing not only just building on practices that work with being thoughtful about making decisions about which practices are showing the best results so that's why i suggested um that change just to like indicate intent on the part of the board in the administration working as a team to really invest in what's

045working best for our kids in alignment with our goals around equity and anti-racism that does make a lot of sense but i don't want to be the only one who weighs in on that one uh chris yeah i think it's a yes and i think you have to intentionally focus on those strategies showing results instead of just focus because we want to build on intentionally continue to build on things that's showing results because if you just focus on them we don't want to have a budget that's not connected chris mentioned earlier about having a loan view and that's our hopes we want to take the loan view and each year we should continue to build on things but be very intentional about it so intentionality that was great to bring that piece in have to

046intentionally focus on those and that's just my thought on maybe what you want to say is intentionally build instead yes focus would that work yes for me yeah yeah i was going to add that so thank you superintendent jenkins um when a build was meant to signal um programs let's say like mental health our mental health vhs in schools have been working very well right have proven results and we know we couldn't implement it in 13 schools overnight so we've been building over time towards our goal of having clinics the bhs clinics and schools that that needed it the most as a targeted equity strategy so building over time our 4k strategy um will um over time look and feel that way too right we're building um so i'm totally on board with the change

047in wording just thought i'd kind of add to why we why we originally used the word build thanks i feel like intentionally building absolutely captures our value of focus so right you know just one other thing on your words when you're mentioning and i've been saying since i've been here we say we're anti-racist district right and i continue to ask are we i don't think that language that we're adding is intentional enough i think people are saying it cliches pretty much now we're going to be anti-racist are we are we really and then i think we should signal that we're going to be continuous learners and doers you know something it needs to become stronger than just we're going to be an anti-racist district or we're not and uh so i think as i think

048that was great to add it in but if we're going to add it in let's be real about it and not just talk about it what are we committing to when we say anti-racist because that's deep work that's serious work and that's also policies is where it happens we're going to intentionally take our policies and ensure that they are anti-racist as we're implementing them you know that's that was just my only thought about anti-racists otherwise i don't know if there's anything other than just another word yeah i'll add if the document is anti-racist it'll be inherent yeah i'm comfortable with um you know not adding the words anti-racist and just trying to ensure that everything that's in our budget reflects that value as well so i'm not saying to take it out i'm just saying

049we need to reinforce it if we're going to do it that's all yeah i agree with you like by putting it there i hope it forces us to be constantly thinking about that how do we actually put those words into action in the budget and in our policies anything else on um goals and principles before we move on to revenue gloria gloria yeah sorry i'm sorry i'm like trying to it's okay yeah like this um so just to go off that i mean i think you know and kelly maybe you can help us uh or somebody on the staff like there has to be a um i really want to drill this down right because i i think how practice how do we practice this right as dr jenkins says right it is like we

050say anti-racist right but like um what is it what does it look like in our budget like and how do we um cut like just really drill down to this right um in our budget and so it's so easy to say that you know we're gonna we're gonna we have this equity tool and we're anti-racist and our budget is gonna be you know reflect that but i just what does that process look like for the board in the board process right like unknown i just want us to um to really um drill that down to our work as a board because you know like i've said before something will come up right something will come up in our community where there our community is asking for this but it's contrary it contradicts where you know

051where we want to go right so that we can become more of an anti-racist school district and using our equity tool right so i want us to like how do we compare that to make sure that every time uh we are in a budget uh discussion about something that we directly with that process forces us to directly look at the equity tool and what does anti-racism look like and i think that we need to as a board anytime we have those conversations around budget uh we need to we need to ask ourselves that like there has to be a formality worked in within our process um because otherwise you know i'll be gone you know ananda ali sabian may have gone someday you know chris is you know chris carusi nikki may be gone someday

052right it is how do we how do we practice this and how do we um put it in place as part of our process so that when we leave for the next generation the next you know that it is fixed obviously things will change right i mean it it you know hopefully we won't have to talk about being an anti-racist school district because we have arrived but um you know it's just i know i'm talking too much about this i just feel like i don't want to lose sight in a of this process as we are um as we continue to do this work so a formality in process um to force us to to talk about this stuff during particularly during budget because we always talk about um you know how do we make

053sure that our budget reflects um our values right and this is one of our values and we need to make sure it's reflective i happen to agree with gloria on this but i think it's being taken care of with ali's and what we did with the agility of the budget the fact that we're being nimble and willing to go back as many times as needed in the fact that the statement is in there with the equity tool before we did openly state we would use the equity tool every time and when we did we were not specific on how it was used and that was our biggest fault i think now we actually have a way to do that the fact that we can be that agile combined with the fact that we have have

054the tool and already committed to using the tool i think we'll be a reminder i'm not saying it could solve 400 years of racism nothing to do that except for hard work hard work hard work but at the same point i do believe it helps us live our values better by allowing us to pivot when we need to say okay these this is what the community says they weren't new they weren't shiny but these are the goals we're committed to by just looking at reading what our goals as written are when we're openly saying we are intentionally going to do this i mean that says i got to do it it doesn't say maybe it doesn't say if there isn't a problem it says i have to do it in law we have shaolin we

055have may shall means must may means you can to me this is shao we have to kelly um i guess i have a commitment and a potential proposal um for your consideration of which does not need to be decided tonight um the the commitment that i will make is as we go through the new investment process um which will be that march and april time frame in particular um that our departments have done um and are finishing up on some very good work as it relates to filling out kind of the equity tool for for any of the the new investments um we'll be sharing that with you um and bringing that into the course of the conversation around why are these the right investments for this time and in line with our um anti-racist

056commitments my proposal um to you is potentially one way to get at what you're thinking gloria is when we go through what tends to be the amendment process um or looks and feels like the budget amendment process in the may and june time frames that we ask board members to complete the tool um you know i we can support with data along the way but that the board members themselves have never completed the equity tool as it relates to budget amendments potentially that's my proposal is that that's a something new we could try for this year if the board is in sport savion yeah one parting thought on this is that it's great that we have the equity tool but ultimately a process is a culmination of human decisions and if we get to a

057point where someone's advocating for something that isn't anti-racist it's on us as leaders to say no yes um in a perfect world yes but the budget decisions that i have been a part of um not so much i mean i think we have to um i i think what kelly is proposing i think is a really good i think it really does force us savion and and others um you know to really build it into our process um and so that um you know as we um as we rotate out of our terms or we change i mean we have we this board has um you know set some precedent around using a process um just like any other process that we have that have been sort of um you know um given to us

058um and so we're just tweaking it a little bit um so yeah i mean i think as leaders we have to make tough decisions right but i think that as we are making these tough decisions i think making our community understand where we stand on on the on these issues um and and ha and have a transparent process about how we make these decisions i think will help us in our community understand just have a quick question gloria if i may to glorious chris good and that is i'm fine with that as long as i have access to the data i've had a lot of times prior to this where i couldn't get the data because i don't want to overwhelm cali i don't want to overwhelm the system if i can get the data

059to do it i'll be glad to do it but sometimes i don't always have it as long as we can commit to that i'm good with it i would add on the um the notion of the equity tool for budget amendments i'm supportive of giving that a try i think we need to evaluate how it goes after we give it a try and um you know part of me thinks that sounds like a really great way to um maintain a focus on equity and part of me worries that the tool itself might be cumbersome enough that it might prevent good amendments from coming to the table so um i would want to make sure that that's the right tool to ensure that our amendments are in line with our equity goals and if it's not

060then we need to start thinking about what else we might do but let's give it a try and see how it works chris and i was just thinking that that amendment process is at the very very end of the budget cycle so the bulk of the budget isn't necessarily done through amendments at least from my perspective if we're doing our budget correctly we shouldn't have a lot of amendments at the end and so whatever we can do and figure out to operationalize what gloria's saying in earlier in the budget process i think will help us all right well i think what we should do now is move into revenue and um holly i'm sorry go ahead ollie and then we'll move into revenue you're both on mute you're all hungry i'm sorry i want to

061uh acknowledge something that gloria was saying which is that you know we have to have a long-term commitment and i think uh what to what kelly was saying i think using that tool um and embodying these approaches as a board makes that tool transparent um and relevant to our entire community right it's the kind of the way that we elevate our public our process publicly um and examine not only the entire district but ourselves as board members and i think that uh we have to push ourselves selves to do that i think that's part of what uh savion was speaking to in saying that our budget is a moral document right and part of the ethics of engaging with that with that document is doing so transparently so if we're gonna you know pursue anti-racism

062um beyond kind of the rhetoric of anti-racism but really you know where the rubber meets the road and what we're investing in um i think you know kelly you're giving us a great opportunity to utilize that tool and refine that tool and also give our community a chance to give us feedback on on our approach to equity um and anti-racism so i i'm excited to to tweak the process in this way um and i appreciate this conversation deeply all right let's move on to revenue all right well if you can pull the slides back on up thank you very much for that great conversation um i can't tell you how much i appreciate hearing your voices and your deep thinking early in this process so we can keep coming back to it through each iteration

063of the budget so moving on to revenue now is the pretty key time to understand what assumptions we're operating for revenue from the year as that's what we need to balance to a couple of big moving parts with our revenue that require some pretty big assumptions the first one is that we are entering a new biennium at the state level that will be a budget for 2122 the budget which we're creating now and a budget for 22.23 because the state gives us a two-year budget that budget is due in june from the state really by law however we've seen through the last two budget cycles coming out of the state with the kind of really deep bipartisan um divide at the state level that we have not received our budgets by june um and we

064were into july before we received those budgets so um to lee's point around kind of remaining flexible with the unknowns our revenue is very likely to stay truly unknown through and until july meaning the board will very likely need to vote on this budget without those revenues um truly being known um so that needs to be something we're kind of all comfortable with if we're if we're not going to be doing budgeting over over the summer and if we want the june budget to be our main budget so keeping that in mind um our revenue limit um is probably going to be pretty limited this year um and we see that coming from multiple different pieces of evidence which is the reason why we're putting a hundred dollar per member kind of estimate in there

065an assumption for this 2122 budget um for one being in a covet environment and kind of inflation really being hampered down this year there's not going to be a ton of data support behind a large revenue limit increase in addition to that we see a number of state entities really signaling for a lower revenue limit this year the dpi requested for 150 per member in their budget that they released um and and almost never right does dpi get everything that they want so we know we're going to be south of 150. that's a maximum um and what we know is that the republicans are going to work to negotiate that down robin vos is already on record um saying that that's never gonna happen um so coming out with a hundred dollar per member estimate

066is probably about the highest we're gonna we're gonna get out of negotiations could come in a little bit lower um but coming in at this estimate gives us a little bit more flexibility for this year um we saw a 179 um in a pre-covered um world so 100 is probably about about where we'll be it could be zero and it could be negative um during act 10 we saw a negative number and had to take severe cuts over august and september after we received our budget so so no option is off the table and what might happen in negotiations at the state level but putting in a 100 per member estimate is is um probably the best we're going to do um and a state per pupil categorical aid as a reminder on the difference

067here the revenue limit is property taxes it's what we're told by law we can increase taxes above our base multiplied by the number of students that we have the state per pupil categorical aid though is different that's direct funding from the state this is a tool that governor walker put in place when he wanted to limit the revenue limit and keep property taxes artificially low that has not really been a tool used since the beginning of the walker administration and or in an election year so we're likely expecting to get zeros out of the categorical aid pool we're not expecting that the state's going to have a lot of extra funding that they're going to put towards the categorical aid versus generally categorical aid is really an equal investment into schools it takes no account

068for equity versus the general aid pool which has a little bit more um sensitivity into the formula to be a little bit more equitable than the categorical aid is so we would assume that if there's kind of money to be investing in education we could potentially see a general aid pool increase um which i'll talk about in a minute but probably not on the categorical aid side which is a per pupil formula coming out of state funds so putting a zero dollar estimate in there and then we have our revenue authority thank you to our local taxpayers um for the 21 22 year would be the 8 million or the second year of the revenue authority we were providing key to all of this when you see per member what that means is multiplied by

069a member which is a student a member is a formula that's built into the state law with a lot of adjustments it's relatively a student so when we look at the next um table or graph here in the slide um i'm sorry i skipped ahead one side i did just mention the per pupil categorical aid has been incredibly unstable and being that we're not in an election year right now and with covid19 continue to expect to see the lack of stability in the revenue limit in the categorically in the next slide is the membership average i was just referring to so what we see are some compounding factors on this three-year membership average so this means the number of students we have here in madison that are pointed to madison metropolitan schools averaged over the

070three years is the number we get to charge for the revenue we have seen declining birth rates here in madison for a number of years now and this board has talked about that well since coven 19 that our incoming classes have become smaller due to fewer houses holding a larger number of kids here in madison just due to lower birth rates coming out of the last recession that have been in our elementary schools and moving up through and into middle schools then you compound that lower birth rate with our 2x charters um that we are now three to four years in to those implementation cycles the good news is because we're three or four years in it's now affecting the full three-year membership count which is which is good news for us and but we've

071had a new 2x charter join the school district um so layers in additional student loss to the 2x charters and you'll you see that in the orange bar there then you layer in coven 19. so where we would have seen slightly declining enrollment in 2020 2021 and again in 2122 we now see bigger loss of enrollment due to the effects of coven 19. we have pulled our second friday accounts they are not finalized yet dpi finalizes that through a process that data was just submitted a week or so ago and what we're seeing is no major shifts in enrollment from second friday accounts no major increases in a relatively stable loss of a few students kind of across the district since the september count which which means our assumptions kind of going into the revenue

072calculating process for next year really can heavily rely on those second friday counts and on the third friday september accounts into our enrollment projections since there were no kind of major new news coming out of second friday moving into the next slide you saw this slide back in november this is a slightly different look than the membership count at our students and see seats projections this is what andrew takes to project the number of students on a school-by-school basis where the membership really looks over district three-year average projects revenue out this really projects our staffing file that we need based on our projected enrollment for last year so when we met back in november and when i break in a minute andrew is on in case anyone has any questions but when we met back

073in november we agreed to make some assumptions around 4k and k that assumption was that we will likely be getting many of those students back because kind of thinking of that they were more red-shirted versus in other districts and then we adjusted the enrollment projection grades first and up based on a new trend not assuming that the full kova 19 effect was in play but that some of that effect would continue and all of that was predicated on the assumption that we would be back in person for 21 22 and not further drive loss of enrollment doing due to being in virtual learning so with those assumptions all in play we then went and did a survey to our families who have left the district for the 2021 school year andrew's team did a great

074job and our school secretaries did a fabulous job of reaching individual families and asking them about their individual decisions there are slides in the appendix regarding that survey but the main point i will touch on here is that what we're hearing from our families is that most of them have moved and they're not actually in madison anymore and therefore are not likely coming back those that who are in madison are largely either undecided at this point in time or may not be coming back to the district based on what they're telling us um today they've found a new home and they may not be coming back so at this point sticking with the enrollment projections that we put together in november for the budgeting process is what we plan on doing without making any assumption

075changes about more families coming back because of the data that we receive from our lever survey so if we if our projections are within the kind of one percent accurate that we're used to being and we're calculating in our three year membership this is going to affect our overall revenue estimates and on the next slide you'll see that okay so i'm going to walk you through this so bear with me and i'm okay if i have to you know repeat this multiple times through multiple presentations overall we're projecting a revenue limit increase of zero dollars how that is calculated is we now have 26 000 kids in the district instead of 27 000 roughly enrollment loss of that 1 000 students at our rate per pupil that we could put onto property taxes generates a

076loss of 7 million for the school district however if we get a hundred dollars per people back out of the revenue limit that's going to give us about three million dollars back and at that point we believe we will trigger at the state level what's called the declining enrollment exemption of about four million dollars so you add those three things together and it becomes kind of a zero dollar no new revenue coming out of the revenue limit categorical aid i just discussed a minute ago assumptions coming in at a zero dollar change and then we have the eight million dollars thanks to our local taxpayers coming from the revenue limit really tied to those discussions we had with the community around investing in excellence and equity overall for the school district so in all that's

077an 8 million dollar new revenue which is is less than we certainly would have predicted back in july at a mill rate assumption i like to put that out there now so we're kind of clear and transparent through the community we're making an assumption at this point in time that we'll be using our entire revenue limit due to the constraints uh uh coming out of the enrollment loss that we would use the whole referendum to exceed of eight million dollars if our eq if we continue to lose on equalization aid at about 10 percent this year um and if property value growth slows down due to covert 19 you could see a mill rate of about 11.36 to 11.48 cents kind of being the range of where we might be by the time we hit

078october and there is a lot of things that can change between now and october including our equalization a could look much better we know that dpi is asking for a larger pool available to school districts that might help us and as a reminder we actually got some aid last year so we could potentially reverse trends and get more aid this year and that'll bring that mill rate right down in addition to that madison's been trending five to eight percent of property value growth so a one to two percent uh is a pretty conservative estimate here in madison um so if we outpace that mill rate will will come right down as well so looking at this as is it would it should be almost a worse case and start to improve if some of these

079numbers start to move in our favor so that is revenue um did you want to pause at this point chris sure we could use this as our pause point um so feedback that i think is important to get to kelly at this point hopefully from everybody is are you comfortable with the assumptions that kelly has made about local taxpayer and state support enrollment and probably to a lesser degree equalized property value but um the big thing is um the the assumptions about state revenue and enrollment because if you're not comfortable with those then kelly might have to change path a little bit so nikki i am comfortable with it i think that being conservative here happens to be for the better because frankly there are things we don't know i still believe we need to

080fund our strategic equity and i still believe we need to fund our staff but on the assumptions i'm very very comfortable with that because i don't think we could guarantee on the state revenue on anything with the way this this uh government is currently and with the amount of changes that are occurring plus covert i don't think anyone could predict it thanks nikki savion would you like to go next or yeah um i am comfortable this is something we discussed last year with the budget is that it's much easier to build up and commit to new things rather than decommit to things so um i'm comfortable building this up kind of from the ground up or from the lowest possible assumptions chris and then ollie yeah i had a kind of a specific question um

081kelly i'm wondering is the decline enrollment funding um that you explained is that a one-year adjustment or is that something that happens over multiple years well um it's a one-year adjustment um for the total seven million dollars um we received a couple million of that last year as the first kind of trigger of the declining enrollment exemption this four million dollars is the first time of of this four million dollars it is probably the largest will receive into the future we could trigger um a million or two next year depending on how the numbers all look um so it's one time and that you only get this four million dollars once um you don't get it you don't get it multiple years uh but when trends continue you can kind of layer a little more

082but it will get smaller and smaller and smaller and that's the purpose of it it's not to protect the district forever it's to gradually help the district resize itself over a three-year period okay that makes sense and i obviously would like to not have that be a continuing trend um the decline in enrollment and i guess that's one of my questions is you know one of the assumptions this is built on is that covid will not have an impact on the enrollment for 2021-22 and i'm just sort of curious if you could explain a little bit more what that assumption is built on yeah andrew do you mind jumping in here if not there we are so i would uh first of all say that yes we share the value that we are conservative in

083our projections for enrollment because they do have such severe impacts on the budget when you go way off track so we have definitely baked that in as as uh as a value now uh making assumptions around uh the impact of kofi 19 as it relates to in-person instruction um unless there is a strong signal that something like this would continue um we have gone with the assumption that that the disincentives that were present as it relates to covet 19 um are certainly not worse for later grades um i think the real question is how it plays out for 4k and for kindergarten uh because we are making an assumption that the one-time reduction for 4k in kindergarten is driven by covet 19. so what we're hearing uh anecdotally from some of our uh families with

084younger students is when it is safe to reopen we will join you so there's definitely a willingness of that community to enjoy join us for in-person instruction so that's the assumption that we have built in is that we would have a one-time event since we first made that that projection and built that kind of assumption in we have then had emerging evidence that younger students are less likely to transmit the disease or experience severe symptoms from the disease so it does remain within public health recommendations to phase in earlier grades first so that would then still suggest that 4k in kindergarten would be joining us at similar numbers uh similar historic numbers the only other thing i'd add to that thank you andrew was super helpful um is that our 4k enrollment process is earlier

085um and so we will have uh data on um our 4k trends by the time the board approves the june the june budget okay i guess i guess for me i would just say that that to me looking at this and how it fits into the the budget picture and looking in an enrollment just underscores the importance of providing instructional options for families as we looked at that survey where families were sort of split no matter what demographic we were talking to on in person versus you know just that basic first survey in person versus virtual instruction and what families wanted just continuing to communicate and find out that information for families and being able to provide instructional options for families as we continue to move through the pandemic all right thank you oops i'm

086sorry um is this uh how related is this to our expectations of federal one dollars from the federal level um for covid funding well uh federal so federal dollars are not in this analysis um two reasons one is actually it's actually a very small percentage of our overall revenue um maybe three reasons two it's a declining uh revenue stream um putting covet funding to the side for a minute um all of our title streams are shrinking so it's tends to be a conversation of what are we not going to do um because our we haven't received new revenues on the title side as it relates to covid well the third reason is that federal funding tends to be very very targeted towards very specific projects or students so it's not available for general budgeting purposes

087um we certainly talk through title one we're going to talk about that in just a minute and some of our other titles and how we use those resources across the district through the budgeting process and as it relates to kovid we just don't really know enough um at this point um but it is a fund that when we receive our 2122 allocation coming from the state through dpi um we'll be eligible for covid related expenses so we can't just spend it on anything but to the extent that it will and can align with for example our summer semester plans we will absolutely use covet funding as a way to help balance that overall budget and overall need where we can and where it aligns chris yes dr dickens yes one thing i just wanted to

088make sure that everyone is well aware that we know where we are now and trying to predict where we're going the future some of our families have also said that they want an online option so chris to your point a minute ago we know this from our family so we're planning for both as we go along but how much we plan for that's going to be based upon the surveys that we actually give back with our families but that's a viable option some students who are medically fragile and some students who are excelling doing online the families are really looking at that as an option thanks for um that reminder ollie you've been super patient so much chris um i want to start by just highlighting kelly's point around um doing the exit surveys and

089really looking at what has has driven um some of our decline in enrollment um and i think looking at moving as a major factor in terms of folks leaving major metropolitan areas during covent is something we're going to see the long-term effect of and reality of um but i don't think has to you know define our next decade necessarily or that we have um that we're in a place to determine that will define our next decade for sure at this point uh i think asking if we're comfortable with the numbers is such a complex question chris because i think there's like a existential crisis i had around like school funding formula when you said comfortable i was like not the word i would say but do i think that kelly's um assumptions are accurate and

090you know prioritize our our ability to make sound decisions and and really balance this budget um moving forward absolutely um i i think looking at the the folks who did the exit strategy or the exit um polling i want to thank andrew's team i also really appreciate kelly that you gave a shout out to our secretaries um for reaching out to individual families i think so often folks are like what are people doing during this pandemic who were doing um you know really specific roles and i think it just highlights that we are utilizing our entire team to meet the needs of families to inform our district um and that there's so many people going above and beyond the normal expectations of their role to allow for us to make sound decisions and so i

091want to thank folks for for doing that work um i i think that there's going to be a lot of factors to take into consideration as we move through this through the spring and i do think it's important that we we really um have have our our fingers on the pulse of i guess the worst case scenario and so i think that this being a place to start hopefully not where we land um but being a place to start is is the right thing to do ananda yeah i um thank you so much kelly i think uh the projections make sense and i really appreciate you uh walking us through very detailed and um appreciate the the narrative that is going around the conversation as well thank you gloria did you have anything to add

092no i don't okay um kelly i would affirm that i feel pretty comfortable with your assumptions um i don't think there's a chance that um evers would not he wouldn't let through a budget that had a zero dollar revenue limit increase i think he would veto it so i think your 100 assumption is pretty safe um i am curious um if you could give us an update on what has happened with um the special education aid that was built into this year's budget that i think we went ahead and assumed in our budget that we wouldn't get it and we didn't um okay so it's a it's a tricky um conversation um certainly from a political standpoint a percentage increase sounds fantastic so you are seeing in the dpi request and and you'll see continuing

093through the budget negotiations at the state level increasing pushes for the percentage in um for special education reimbursement to increase however you only receive that if you really spend the money and a good portion of our um special education budget goes to transportation um so because we didn't um have any special education transportation expenses um kind of coming through the spring there was zero way to collect on any additional percentage and that's that's statewide right so um when we see our budget start to move back to looking a little more normal in the next year or two you may start to see some increases but at this point i don't think we'll see those until 22-23 even if we get anything through in this budget cycle which i should i hope we do right i

094hope we get those increases and eventually the funding will start to come to us but it's like a year leg increase um in uh really low uh transportation expenses for the special education um with just our revenue reimbursement for last year and for this year it just isn't going to be there but by 22 23 i'm hoping things will be back to normal we'll back back to a trend and we'll actually start to see some of the revenues that were anticipated thanks i also just wanted to echo my appreciation of the lever survey that was really helpful information and i'm hoping that that can become part of the new normal like not just be a cova thing it would be great if we could do a similar survey every year to get a better understanding

095of why people are out leaving mmsd and the strategies we can take as a board to try to increase our enrollment like what are we looking at doing to keep families here and maybe attract families to move here so thank you very much to the team for doing that and sharing those results all right um kelly i think we can move ahead all right well so if you could pull the slides back up um we're gonna start to dive into some budget strategy side of the house so on the next slide that eight million dollars in revenue is the eight million dollars we just talked about in the previous slide so that's our kind of anticipated new revenue entirely coming from the referendum at this point um so with that revenue projected and if we

096were to you know invest in uh what we all know are our priorities including including investing in our staff um who we know are very working working very hard during virtual learning now and will continue to serve our students next year a full and compensation plan with steps and base wage for the max at 1.2 percent would give you a 7.6 million dollar investment employee benefits health care 2.6 million dollars based on the projections from what you all approved for a three to four year health care plan and last budget cycle our equity and excellence investments um a four plus million dollar um kind of working goal at this point with the team and then every year we have required allowances um is uh 1.5 million we usually budget 2 million um there but um

097we're gonna get try to stay within a 1.5 million dollar range um limiting only what we really must do by law uh which then altogether would produce uh what we'll call a revenue gap by 7.7 million dollars revenue meaning we don't have enough revenue to fund um overall with it with the needs and the wants of the school district and the board would be to invest in all of our areas of interest so we are not in a budget crisis we have strategies available to us what it means is that if these are our priorities and of course there's priorities within priorities particularly as it relates to our new investments we'll spend a good amount of our time looking at how to balance this budget over the next couple months to make the left side

098of the equation work and so that will include um kind of restructuring the district in alignment with our new size so as enrollment moves so do our staffing plans both at schools and at central office um so we'll be looking at some enrollment shifts at the school level in line with our class size policy and its central office to a tune of four to five million dollars so that's a lot of work to evaluate we've got a principal advisory group in place that we've started to work through those estimates with that comes back to you all in february and in addition to that just like we always do sweeping our budgets analyzing what's working kind of what's not working to identify the remainder of what we need to balance the budget so that includes those

099interest rates i talked about with good news just last week we're finally starting to see some savings out of utilities for our environmental sustainability investments that we've made so there'll be a little savings there we can take um considering the year that we're going into i think it's safe to look at like food and travel budgets since i don't think we'll be back to a normal way of working being in kobe 19 still in the school year so we'll look at those always looking at central office department budget staffing and we're going through a process with superintendent check-ins of what we're calling kind of the stop doing list and whether it's things that we can stop doing to save time or whether it's things we can do to save resources kind of a new way

100in a new process that we're trying out this year so we have strategies to balance this budget we'll be working to balance the budget and all of that will come come back to you in alignment with with funding um all of our potential investments on the other side of the paper um the next couple slides i'm just going to go through really fast because i know chris wants to have the conversation in whole we always look at multi-year budgeting and so i put the two kind of orange boxes in the revenue limit this is what anata just asked me about and the effects that the enrollment will have um last year 21 22 and 22-23 on our budget um which does uh start the cycle of lower enrollments uh well into the future um until

101or unless we start we do start to gain enrollment back um we add in our referendum authority and then just our expenses assumptions of what base wage might look like what healthcare might look like and what other investments might need to look like over the years just to put a projection in place for the next four years as we think through multi-budgeting nikki chris has asked me to get through the next couple slides and then we'll open it up but i do see her hand so the next slide dives into at a deeper level salary our total compensation plan so steps of course the board has available um kind of not doing steps we had that conversation last year all the way up to fully investing in steps um and that was uh that would

102be attitude 4.5 million dollars similar for base wage the board always has its disposal um to not do base wage this year if you went to 1.2 percent it'd be a 3.1 million dollar so looking for your um kind of guiding direction on this but at this point as i mentioned we'll keep the 7.6 million dollars in there as our repurposing goal to get to close that overall um seven plus million dollar gap that i mentioned a minute ago on the next slide in the healthcare world you all voted um back in last spring for a 4.5 percent maximum increase for ghc and a 6.9 percent maximum increase for dean um so that's our starting spot um to attune us to 2.6 million dollars um deirdre uh rochelle and team are still going through the

103negotiation process with the healthcare providers and we'll do everything they can to bring that number down as that number decreases that would then help to fill our gap that i just mentioned so that would be a gap reducing strategy that is certainly well underway and we'll have good news hopefully for you by march um but at this point this is our operating assumption until negotiations um is over and we can come up and and tell you how it went not anticipating any major changes um getting back to our conversation around stability in schools right now we just we fully recognize that we don't have um we don't need to rock too many boats around healthcare while we're in the middle of a pandemic right now um deirdre did you have anything to add on these

104two slides before i move on on the comp or the health care side thanks kelly no i think you nailed it um i think we're uh moving forward like you said with the the health care negotiations and we only anticipate it um being positive for us going forward all right thank you and then the last two areas that we're really looking at for budgeting strategy around equity and excellence actions this is where i mentioned earlier kind of a commitment to you that will bring forward the department's really good work around using the equity tool for any new asks on this budget areas of focus remain early literacy kind of and beyond looking at the secondary reading as well our mental health investments social emotional learning ali mentioned earlier and accelerated learning is a heavy focus

105for us summer semester being one of the large larger items that's likely to come forward for new investments for this year and using copen money where we can for that as well welcoming and safe schools goes to this board for discussion um coming up here in a meeting soon coming out of the safety committee but this is where the restorative justice piece would be savion i know you mentioned that earlier as well so it would fit into that that fourth area so these are some of the bigger focus areas um again trying to remain really tight and focused with our investments and trying to keep those required allowances as minimal as possible but this is where your open enrollment effects come in at the required allowances this is where the 2x charters and some of

106those impacts that are at this point largely out of our control that we just need to fund we'll go so that's really where we're at with budget strategy chris if lisa do you have anything to add before we open it up no kelly i think you hit it on the head thank you kelly that was great um dr jenkins before we launch into this discussion um i'm wondering if you would be willing to um help us kind of frame the conversation we're going to have i really don't want to dive too deep into the weeds at this point because we have time on the agenda over the next three months to really dig into budget strategy and where we're going to invest and at the same time i'm wondering if you might be willing to

107say a few words in particular about the stop do list that kelly mentioned as well as your perspective on compensation and equity investments just from a high level to kind of frame people's questions and discussion as we move into this uh yeah first of all let me just say thank you to kelly and to the team they've been working hard behind the scenes to get us to this point when we think about the whole idea in terms of just equity we really as a team i feel like we feel very strong about that and we're going to push hard with our anti-racist work as we continue to try to define it but make sure we actualize it as we're going through this particular work and i think when we're looking at our organization we want

108to make sure we're showing uh strong value for our staff so when you mention the part in terms of uh looking at the budget and how we're coming we're looking at that too as recognizing when we can and how we can and i think there's been a lot of strategic thought into how we could push forward understanding where we wind up this year but also taking a long view of where we're going next year so i am one i think that we come right out knowing that the uh it's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood about 1.2 pretty close to that estimate and i think that's uh showing value for our employees our staff they have worked incredibly hard and and i know just talking to all of you you all value our staff

109as well i think let's start off with that and then get to the other uh discussions that we need to have in terms of moving our district forward that gets to the stop do list and the stop do list if you're reading good to great and uh you go in and you're looking at uh page 143 it's talking about the stop do less we always talk about we need to uh do next but what about those things we need to stop and that goes back to our whole alignment discussion in terms of building on things intentionally that are on those practices that's showing results versus continuing to just put things in our budget because we've always put them in our budget this is give us an opportunity so you're looking at good to great and

110i know all of you have your books and you've probably already read it uh through that chapter but we have to stop do come up with the stop do list and i mean this is a process where it's very collaborative we sit and we look and we say are we getting a return on our investment for our children for our district and are we upholding our fiscal responsibility in which we said we would do to the community so that's what that's pretty much about thank you so much dr jenkins um so with that as our frame um do people have comments i see nikki and savian nikki go ahead um kelly the only thing i was gonna say was i couldn't see the light blue type i was having a hard time seeing it okay

111noted thank you very much i'll get that fixed for you yeah it was it's just a vision thing but to answer your question i agree with dr jenkins as close to 1.2 or one point it was possible because our staff is doing above and beyond and i think that's necessary additionally i don't want to cut anything in mental health and i don't want to and i do not want to take advantage right now i think we expect so much from our staff that i'm afraid they're getting burned out i don't know if we can do mon monetary contributions they break data some meal something because sometimes i can't imagine in a pandemic trying to teach 10 hours a day on zoom for eight hours a day on zoom and working and being socially isolated so

112i just want to somehow show we appreciate but i don't quite know how to do that especially i don't think with our security assistance and our behavior assistance we say it enough we just but to be done and so i know i forget it a lot same with their janitors kind of bad at liking people so that's just where i'm getting at so i'd be as close to the one thanks nikki i'm savion yeah thank you uh for those words dr jenkins it's certainly a commitment that i believe this board shares um just a quick question um i know last year we embedded the all-day 4k pilot into the budget uh it's safe to assume those levels are consistent with what we approved last year out most definitely they're consistent and we're having different discussions

113about how we could even expand that commitment and uh lisa you want to talk about that that's pretty serious yeah thank you dr jenkins we are thinking bigger than what we thought before savion and we are finalizing the numbers on that we are really excited i knew that you would be too i saw that smile and we will be bringing it forth to you um over the next couple of months but we are very excited and committed about that work i am excited and looking forward to seeing that come down the pipeline let's see chris yeah i guess one of the questions i had is how we reached that four million dollar amount for the equity and excellence actions i guess one of the things we talked about when we went out into the community

114and talked to them about the operating referendum we really highlighted all of the equity projects that we were going to be doing and so i guess i would like to see if we have eight million in operating funds coming in that um investment in equity and excellence actions be over half of that and i'm not exactly sure where that number would fall but i guess that's something that i would like to see us prioritize because the things that we had on that list we know that we need significant investment in all of those and especially the mental health we have talked about that a lot in a lot of different areas and what that investment is going to look like and how much we need i think should remain as part of our discussion as

115we move forward so i guess that's one piece of feedback that i would have um the other question i have in going back to our cycles of review i know that we did a number of adjustments at central office this past year to fill gaps that we had in classroom teacher positions and um other things that we needed in the schools i guess i would like is is there a way to have some assessment of the departments that lost staffing along the way and how that is getting replaced or how we figure out when we're in a sort of a pause in our cycles of review for some of these departments how we make sure that we have the staffing levels that we need going forward how do we even assess that um i'll dear

116joy and lisa maybe jump in on the assessment piece i'll just say that my assumption as we're building this budget is that for the 21 22 school year we're not back filling uh roles in schools from central office um since we have will have a lot more time to plan for 21 than we than we did for 2021 um with the enrollment law so we've got lots of time to plan for it so i don't i don't see the need um without you know other other people weighing in that that that would be the way they want to go okay uh so lisa you can chime in if you'd like but i think the the big piece to to really take into consideration and understand is this is the point in time where we're doing

117the full review of staffing positions across the district right so we're getting ready to move into workbook and allocation and we have a similar review and process where we're taking a look at positions in central office specifically so lisa and i along with other team members are really doubling down and thinking about with a specific focus on where we want to place priorities reading specifically how do the current positions we have really support that and where do we need to make some adjustments so that that's happening right now and lisa i'll pass it off to you if there's anything else that you want to add but this is the timing it typically is going to happen between now and the end of february so we're sort of in it right now having those discussions i

118wouldn't have much more to add from what kelly and deirdre had to say except that we are looking at the positions that were frozen where the vacancies exist adjusting because of enrollment and not changing any staffing levels that have been outlined in the past for specific categorical or compliance areas okay thanks that makes sense i just i keep going back and this is the first time i've been through this entire budget cycle with all of you but when i go back to thinking about when we review the plans so when we review the special ed plan when we review the ell plan when we review the advanced learner plan a lot of the implementation questions seem to come back to staffing levels and if we have adequate staff staffing levels and so just trying i

119guess to to keep that in mind um as we move forward i appreciate it thanks chris does anyone else have questions or comments ananda um i was really excited about the stocking dealing list um i'm curious on where are you getting information about what should stop yeah so all of our departments are working with kind of their teams we also have principal advisory groups who certainly give us feedback as far as uh where the supports they have are high valued um and where where ideas they might have for um maybe some stop doing items just because maybe they're not hitting the value at the school level um that they might need so it's it's a little bit of both here's what i was thinking kelly and just mostly because of my my past experience with

120msd is that often is the secretaries the custodial folks the ssas the cas the the va's the the the vrs's those are the ones that know so much around like you know how implementation or how like high-level decisions end up impacting or not impacting at all uh their work so i'm curious if if there's a way to run uh for for for a few weeks some somewhat of a campaign and maybe we don't need to create any new um uh platform maybe it's through the the current uh let's talk uh platform that we established that we will seek out you know information or target information uh from from different groups that and i don't know i would have really i just i think in a place like madison you know again to the language around

121being an anti-racist but acknowledging how racist our district is is to understand that like how the hierarchy of racism and um um and mayonnaise and uh uh heterosexuals you know all those isms play around the ability of people to speak their truth and so i'm curious if you if we have you know we have a platform that people can share things anonymously and if we want like i think we also have a problem that is a collective problem around uh you know covet and recovering from covet and this long journey ahead of us uh plus low enrollment i do think that we may want to use this really um you know serious opportunity to say like we really wanted to hear from our staff and then encourage supervisors to do that as well you know

122what what should be in this you know what are some of the things that people wanted to see different around how they perform their work i think would unearth some either communication things internal communications things that we think that everybody knows but people don't know and i think it might also uh unearth like how and where like racist practice is to really prevalent in our district thank you ananda um ali or gloria any comments i just want to echo uh the appreciation around um full day 4k and the potential for expansion and i want to thank dr dr jenkins um for really centering us on the possibilities and and you know hope that we have for next year um and also grounding us in the reality of this current moment and so i i am

123so thrilled that we have you as our our leader right now guiding us through this process um and i i think you know this conversation um although i think deeply grounded in reality i think it was so great to hear the exchange between lisa and savian around full day 4k as kind of this uh highlight um that we're still moving forward and we're still you know marching in in the direction of our of our goals and our dreams for this community so thank you all so much for emphasizing that this evening thanks ellie i will um echo those thanks dr jenkins i really appreciate your grounding us in a very solid strategy to move forward on this budget um your your words to to introduce this section of the conversation i thought were powerful and

124i really appreciate your drawing attention to things that we value such as our staff and um 4k and ensuring equity for all of our learners by starting in the early grades with literacy in 4k um ananda i really appreciated what you had to say about bringing in the voice of our staff especially staff of color and creating that stop do list and i'm wondering if the collaborative problem solving process that we have with mti could be part of that i think that might be another really good way to bring um staff voice to the table particularly when we're looking at um collaboratively solving problems around equity um i love that idea so thank you for suggesting that um i also just would like to bring up that i personally think it's important for us to

125start base wage negotiations early this year because we're going to be going back to school potentially in the spring at least with some of our grades or earlier and we need to be able to focus have our staff focusing all of their energy on returning to school and i'm thinking that if we are able to start based wage negotiations early this year and get those done then we can just 100 focus on getting everybody back to school safely as we move into you know early spring or whenever it makes sense and it's safe to start returning um so those are my comments thanks again kelly for um laying this out so logically and making it easy to discuss all the different components of the budget dr jenkins yeah just one thing and that i really

126appreciate thank yous but it's really been a team all of us working together chopping this up and saying what are we going to prioritize based on your vision as a board you have laid this out and i appreciate the space that you're giving us uh work together on this i think it's a yes and what you had said about the collaborative problem solving that's one piece but i think hernandez piece is a a different kind of piece and another love on that and i really appreciate you making that comment amanda and we we're going to do the job and we'll go back as a cabinet and talk about that and i'm not trying to give a hierarchy to anything but those individuals whose voices don't often wind up in the final decisions i think we

127need to be very intentional about including them and particularly as you said our staff of color we need to make sure we get them at the table individuals who may represent positions that on a hierarchy which i think when we're doing this we're all adults we have to drop the titles and whatever we can do to make it better for our children so i want to thank you as a board you guys don't often get a lot of thanks sometimes but thank you because you're creating this space to give us the courage to be as bold as we're planning to be so thank you all right kelly let's move on all right wrap this up um the last slide in the presentation oh chris just i'm sorry just real quick um to something that dr

128jenkins mentioned one of the really intentional and important moments during my tenure was when ellie and i met with the security staff we had msd staff in there we asked them to just be there to support the space and take notes and listen um but we were able to create a very supportive space where we were able to listen to a lot of things that the staff said so i thank you dr jenkins for for saying that and i i think a lot i'm just also following like how you are leading our district with a much greater level of transparency and and wanting to really hear from folks i think that speaks to the tool that is implemented and so now we needed to elevate this tool and make sure that people know that this

129tool is for real all right thanks kelly thank you melissa if you could pull the slides back up um there's just a kind of a final statement we've kind of alluded to or mentioned a additional funding coming from the federal levitt level it's kind of being dubbed s or two at least in the education circles at this point our estimate is um really a 10 million dollar kind of floor could be anywhere between 10 and really 20 million dollars so we'll look to get more information out of dpi in the upcoming months um but the good news is um it'll help us with uh funding needs that we'll need for 21 22 school year such as covet testing ppe supplies needs that are directly related to covid are items that would be eligible all funds

130must be spent by september 22 meaning it's meant for the 21 22 school year um but it would be available for summer school this year and um next year um so with some careful planning um kind of doubling down two summers in a row could be could be an opportunity for us i've provided some areas for potential funding that are stated in the um in the laws themselves which would include food service we do need to continue to watch our our fund 50 balances which at this pace will probably finish in the red at the end of the year so we'll have to continue to work and look at the food service line along with mental health summer semester programming we'll have ongoing technical uh technology needs particularly with any decisions or rollout of any

131online schooling that may happen 21 22. so those will be areas of focus for that additional money that our team will be working on but like i said the majority of that work will probably come to this board more in may and june after we get some clearer guidance from the state and after we have a clearer picture of what 21 22 school year will probably look like based on the movement of covet over the next few months too so it'll be an area to remain flexible and agile in but do know that we will have some relief coming from the federal government that will help us with our overall needs and we couldn't be more more thankful for that so as it relates to next steps which is the next slide we'll be coming

132back to you in february around staffing strategies um and if our summer semester strategy is ready we'll try to layer that into february or march if it's not quite ready for you yet march will be healthcare and really a deep review on the excellence and equity project proposals in light of the community feedback and in light of the conversations that we had today about our focused priority areas and then we'll aim to get that draft preliminary budget book done by the end of april for public consumption and deeper feedback so those are our next steps i look forward to kicking off this big process with you um this took a little while longer but i thank you because it's just critical um that we start these conversations this time of year so with chris that's

133that's what i have for tonight i don't know if anyone has any other questions are there any final questions before we move into title one and um you might need to speak up because i can't see people's hands um kelly i just had one quick question which is in addition to sr2 um could you remind me how much money we had in sr1 that we were um going to be spending in 2122. yeah it was about five million dollars okay so we're potentially looking at 10 to 20 million and s or 2 plus an additional 5 million from sr1 which is great news like that could actually provide you know the accelerated learning the mental health supports as well as ppe and health and safety investments that we desperately need to yeah a good portion

134of the sr1 will likely be spent by the end of the year um and certainly by the end of the summer um so i don't think it will be cumulative by the time we hit september i think most of us are one will have will have been spent by that point um but certainly that'll be balancing as part of the the april may kind of work that we're doing together you know probably not enough to actually deal with the pandemic but still very good news so yeah yeah thanks so much all right um let's move on to title one all right i'm gonna invite uh jen walner and lisa to join me up here i'll put myself on mute and let jen take us away okay hello everybody um good evening and oh actually lisa

135i just jumped right in i didn't know if you wanted to talk first or not so i apologize for that jennifer take it away my dear all righty okay um it's good to see everybody tonight i am jennifer waldner i work in state and federal programs and one of the larger buckets of work that i oversee is title one so i wanted to start um this evening just talking about a review and a grounding in what this is um how we allocate how schools become eligible and then current state um and then what we're thinking we're going to be seeing for 2122. so if there we go thanks melissa okay so i always want to start with the definition of what title one is and it's a federally funded program designed to close achievement gaps

136and ensure that all children have a fair equal and significant opportunity to obtain a high quality education so title one um there's a lot of compliance that comes along with this we'll talk a little bit about some of it this evening but the program components the main program components are a needs assessment and program plan design for use of funds family engagement we'll talk about that in a bit appropriately licensed teachers equitable participation by private school students not many people out there understand that this is a public school's responsibility so we have 30 private schools i will talk about that in the next slide and then coordination with early child care providers so next slide okay so i um borrowed this slide from dpi it's um one that i think explains a lot and it

137uh helps me always kind of reframe where the money is coming from so funds are coming from the u.s department of education and they're distributed across the state so each state receives money based on census data so right away if there's large swings in poverty across the nation that could really impact what madison receives each year through our title allocation so again census data is then used by each state to distribute funds to the districts so once we receive the funds in madison we have to take a pause because this is where the private parochial equitable share comes in so we need to make sure that if there were children that were part of the census count that brought the allocation to madison who then choose to enroll in a private school then the funds

138need to follow them in the form of services and this is all defined through law so we work very closely with our 30 private schools within the madison attendance area but then we also have private schools across attendance bar across district boundaries where some students do attend and again funds need to follow them wherever they go so while we are working on that equitable share figuring out where private schools students are if they reside in a title 1 attendance area there's a kind of a lot of underground work that's going on there we are also working at the same time to figure out which of our schools are going to be receiving a title one allocation so if you can go the next slide melissa so i like to say that madison works a little

139backwards when it comes to allocating out our title one award but backwards in a good way because most districts get their award and then they take money off the top for district level title one initiatives and then what's ever left over goes out to the schools but what we do in madison is we take the absolute um most that we can and we direct that out to the schools first and this is done during budget and staffing we are right at that start of that cycle right now so when the workbooks go out to the principals title one funds go out at the same time and then our award comes in in june and we are assuming that we are uh we would hope our award comes in higher than expected um if it does

140we can add to that allocation that goes out to the principles but quite honestly things have been pretty lean and we haven't been able to do that in a couple years so this year for 2021 we had 5 million that we were able to direct out to the schools and then we took our reservations so we have to take a family engagement reservation because one percent of the top is required if a district receives more than five hundred thousand dollars in an overall award and we received about a five point eight million dollar award so our one percent we actually took a little more um which is about a hundred thousand dollars and that's directed straight back to the title one schools so each title one school receives a title one budget and then are

141a title one budget and a title one family engagement budget and then we have some other reservations that we take melissa if you could go to the next slide okay so i just pulled this straight from the budget book details that outlined like what happened with title one this year for 2021 so this is showing that we have a 5.8 million grand award 5 million went directly out to the schools and then we have about 1.3 million in reservations and i know the math doesn't quite work out but we do operate on carryover each year so we do have un unspent budgeted budgets from last year that carried over into this year what i want to point out here though is the reservation detail at the bottom of the slide there the question is raised

142many times throughout the year um what how what's the percentage that we're taking in reservation versus what's going on in the schools and that's a very valid very good question to continually raise because that's something that we always want to make sure that the funding is going where it needs to go which is to our kids out to the schools but it's difficult to answer reservation percentages because there are reservations we take that actually go straight out to the schools too so administrative costs we do take a reservation there to run the title one program that private school equitable share that i spoke about that is a required reservation a family engagement we spoke about that but we also now um we take a homeless reservation and we have historically for years but now it's

143actually required of us to take a homeless reservation when a child is experiencing homelessness they're automatically labeled as title 1 so we want to make sure that we are prepared to serve all of our students regardless of whether they are in a title building or not so we are funding our tech program through title one and then we have centralized services we have about 1.9 fte right now because there was a vacancy in cni staff that provide direct services out to title 1 schools okay i'm going to go on to the next slide and talk about so now i'm going to kind of shift into title 1 school eligibility we have our money and we know how much is going to go out to the schools but who are the schools that are going to

144be receiving funding so title 1 eligibility is based on the number of children ages 5 to 17 in poverty in a school's attendance area on second friday in january i know we have some second friday counts um already in but we don't have the exact final numbers that i need for these title uh calculations so we are not ready yet with knowing exactly who our 2021 title schools are this year but i do want to speak to this this poverty count we said that we use census data to bring the allocation to the school district but then when we the the data that we use to determine who is in poverty is actually a direct certification count and i know um some of you have been with us for a while where um you can

145recall that years ago and this is this is quite a few years ago now when we were bringing on the sub schools so the community eligibility provision schools the schools where children ate free we lost track of our free and reduced income information which is what we used to use for this data set to determine which schools were title eligible and losing the data set was actually what was intended i mean this was designed to reduce paperwork load on parents and so that their children could eat free in the schools but there wasn't an understanding that there were still poverty-driven programs in the district that needed this this data so dpi stepped in and quickly uh assisted us and guided us to use this direct certification data so this is a label coming to us

146directly from the department of workforce and development and it categories categorizes a child if their family is participating in a variety of welfare uh programs so we technically aren't using free and reduced counts when we're determining our title eligibility we're now looking at our free counts and then schools are title one eligible if they meet or exceed the district poverty average so i'm going to show you what that means on this next slide okay so these are my i know it's a little small so i apologize for that but these are my exact calculations from this time last year when we were calculating who was going to be title 1 for 2021 so what happens is i take a rank order a list by direct certification i'm rank ordering by poverty elementary schools middle schools

147and then towards the bottom of the slide you'll see high schools we come up with a district poverty average and then if a school meets or exceeds the district poverty average they are title 1 eligible so historically we have always served our schools that have come up as title 1 eligible and that includes for 2021 these 19 elementary 10 middles and then capitol high we serve we we serve in rank order of poverty like i said and then we also follow a tiered model which directs funding to higher poverty schools so if you look closely at this you will see that marquette is uh poverty or poverty is at 36 percent but then lindbergh has a poverty of 65 percent so when we are talking about equitable based education it doesn't make sense to and

148i know there are other factors that we can measure when we are looking at student need um but here it's always a question if we direct the same amount of funds to a lower poverty school versus our upper tiered school so we don't we really make sure that our higher poverty schools are receiving more title funding we do stop serving at capital high and that's really because the monies run out we have to be able to show dpi that we are serving a school with enough funds for what they consider an effective title one program and if we can't do that we're not allowed to serve so that's why we kind of put the stop there at capital high the last thing i wanted to point out with this slide is i keep referring to

149rank order of poverty we cannot serve falk and then skip shank glendale mirror and then serve gompers and then skip a couple more schools we have to literally serve each school in that poverty order we can stop at any time but we can't skip schools okay so if we can go to the next slide so this slide is just showing that once we figure out who our title one schools are we then are working to come up with that title one school budget that's released to the schools during workbook time and really it's a very simple formula of direct certification counts or direct number of direct certification students multiplied by a per pupil amount and that per pupil amount is what is changing when we're crossing those tiers that four-tiered approach when we're serving our

150schools it's important to keep in mind here that the funding to each title school can fluctuate wildly each year even in a non-covid non-pandemic year so we can have changes in the overall grant award like we mentioned earlier if poverty changes across the nation or the state that impacts what madison is receiving we've had 2x charter enrollment state level contributions actually play a part in how much money we receive at the federal level changes in the school enrollment which we are definitely seeing this year changes in that rank order like where the school falls in that rank order what tier they're falling in depends on what type of monetary support they'll be receiving and then also increases or decreases in the number of title one eligible schools if more schools come on that list or

151some fall off that really impacts that overall pool of funds that five million that went out to the schools this year as to like who receives what um the last thing that i did not put on here though that i was um thinking about is we have the principal's budget off of average salaries during workbook um for title one so they receive the funds and then they have an average salary that they can work with to assign fte so depending on our salary or insurance changes throughout the year that does impact too how much or how far a title budget can go for a school so the title 1 school level budget projections for 2021 like i said i don't really have those calculated out yet we do have some projections though based on january

1524th so i'm assuming it's going to be pretty close first all entitlement grants are predicted to be flat funded so we're hearing this from dpi this means that we should expect the same amount of funds being released by the feds and going out to each state again um how poverty plays into that that's something that we need to wait and see award is usually released around june um we have lost over over a four hundred thousand dollars um from last year to this year with our overall title one grant award and things are getting really tight our carryover is smaller our average salaries aren't going as far and we are bringing on where we have the most uh title one schools on our list than we've ever had in the past so we are needing

153to um for 2122 bring that back down to 4.85 million going out to the schools that's a pretty historical figure that we have uh been comfortable with um for quite a few years but again we had some increases which allowed us to go up to that 5 million we definitely can't do that this year so we are predicting changes in that title one eligible school list due to just overall changes enrollment changes from the fall due to covid so we are seeing projection wise two schools coming off the list and one school coming on again we will confirm that hopefully by the end of this week um and as far as school is coming off the list this is kind of that last bullet there that i want to talk about we have the ability

154to offer a one-year extension to any title school that does not meet or exceed that eligibility or that average that poverty average when we put them in that rank order so we removed that well let me back up years ago if a school became title one they knew they were title one for two years because we always offered that one year extension we had to pull that back last year because we started bringing out we did we brought on so many title one schools that we didn't have the funds to continue serving all of those schools if even more came on so we shared with the principals that if this happens um if you fall off this list we can't offer that one year extension but now with covid with the potential changes with the

155the changes that we know are happening in enrollment we need to revisit this in order to keep our schools as stable as possible i did say i'm seeing two schools fall off that list but we are definitely having conversations to put that one-year exception back in place um just to make sure that we're keeping our schools stable through this next year interestingly january now drives what happens next year so that's i know next fall is a long ways away but unfortunately that's how these counts work okay and i believe that is um what i have for title one so lisa i didn't know if you had anything to add to that before we moved into the discussion no jennifer i think that you covered all of the highlights i know this is a really very

156busy time for you as you're looking for final numbers and getting information out to schools i think it is important for the board to know title one is a dollarized budgeting process um and we do um use average salaries so um that is a different process than the workbook which deals an fte but no jennifer i appreciate um i appreciate your presentation as and as i say all the time jennifer you do this job a lot better than i did eight years ago and i'm so glad that you're with us thank you thank you so much jennifer for that um informative presentation um i saw savian then nikki then ollie thank you so much for that thorough presentation um i guess i have a series of like three interlocking questions um one did we see

157any schools that are newly titled on schools um for our title one schools was the lack did the decline in enrollment um was that proportionate with the district-wide average or the um the average for whatever type of school they're in whether it be elementary middle or high school um and related to that did we see a percentage of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch within those schools so like did their enrollment decrease but their needs increase okay so i will try to answer all three of those questions new title 1 schools i saw changes just with regards to the elementary schools so i am seeing that kennedy is projecting to be a title one school again i can't confirm anything because i just don't have these final numbers this was based off of um

158our numbers at the very beginning of january so um i can you i'm sorry can you ask the next part of your question yeah uh four schools that qualify as title one was their drop in enrollment on par with the district-wide average and then the percentage of like students who qualify for free and reduced lunch increase you know because i work so closely in the private parochial world um i can't say that there was an overall uh perce overall drop in percentage across the district we're seeing pockets across the district certain areas where we know children then went and enrolled in the private schools so that's going to impact specific schools whose um so their percentages were off so enrollment actually savion might have may have stayed the same but that low income percentage uh

159decreased so it just it was nothing in general it was so school specific what happened with title yeah seven i would say that the the trend district-wide is that it's really cool specific um we had very different um effects covet effects at different communities on enrollment up and down and low income leavers and high income leavers at very different schools and there's a slide from that november presentation um that's in there by school that's kind of worth looking at that um but that i didn't see because of title one there was just a lot of movement at individual schools right so so going back i could private schools and then the 2x charter enrollment i did see impact our title and school enrollments got it and then a final question for kelly or deidra do

160we have comparables for the average teacher salary serving in a title one school versus non-title one school i don't think i have that um not definitely not at my fingertips yeah i i would agree kelly i think we can savion we can probably get that but it would it'll just take us a little bit of time to put it together but we certainly can work on providing that information thank you a number of years ago we changed the roles in title one funding in our district not on the funding part to allow funding for a third assistant principal are we still comfortable with that assumption or are can we revisit that at some time because i know some principals have chosen to use that to fund a third assistant principal and i'm wondering if that

161money could be better spent on providing an extra ba sea librarian et cetera yeah nikki i don't think we have three um aps um leopold had purchased a second ap out of title um correct me if i'm wrong i don't think we have three aps anymore right leopold purchased a second yeah and the assistant principal position is an allowable position on title one so that is something that's coming from the state okay so that's not our rule that's the state allows that the state does allow that i would also add that there is a strategic staffing and budget approval process that happens every year with the chiefs of schools and as they design strategic staffing plans for schools based on data and student need that plan including the use of title 1 funding is examined

162and approved through that final presentation process so there are checks and balances in there to make sure that the use of federal funds aligns with student need and the student excuse me the school improvement plan great thank you that was helpful ollie thanks chris jennifer i really appreciate the presentation i think you know drawing our attention to the the structure of the funding and the reality of where we're at but also um just if i could take us back to the slide where it breaks down where every school is at we're a high poverty district even our schools that are not title one schools um you're talking about how about 20 of students live in poverty right so one in five kiddos who attend even our schools who are are have the smallest percentage of

163kids living in poverty i think it's also hard not to notice especially at the elementary school level where there are more concentrations of poverty and really looking at what that means for kind of our attendance areas and strain on unspecific schools and communities related to poverty and how we can be sensitive to that as a district i do really appreciate highlighting the needs of our students who experience homelessness and housing insecurity the average age of a homeless person in dane county is nine years old we serve over a thousand students who are homeless and as our community continues to be impacted by coved as we see unemployment rates skyrocket we're seeing more people apply for benefits and need support than than ever before in history um and so i think that having a a real

164sense of how how to create stability and equity as as we distribute title one funding um is is relevant as well as the guidelines um around how how we do that are there innovations around title one that are specific to where we currently are positioned um that you wanna highlight or emphasize for us as a board that that's a tricky question because we are i mean there are things that we know we want to do but we have to align with law so that's always going to be something that is has to be in the backs of our minds as far as how we allocate um looking at that rank order of poverty so lisa i don't know if you have any other i i actually appreciate that question ali and um i think that

165in many spaces and places were pushed to answer that question are we you know what is the what are we getting for our dollars at these title one schools and what are the best practices that we're seeing i think if we really are an anti-racist district we need to dig into that and be more intentional about looking at the data to be sure that those dollars are being put to their best and highest use which is our focus on early literacy our focus on social and emotional and mental health as we come out of these pandemics and we are still in the pandemics so i do appreciate that question and i want you to keep asking it because we need to keep digging into that are there any other questions chris yeah i'm just curious

166where the the reporting for title one flows back does that go through our essa plan does that go through the schools um my understanding the schools have flexibility in how they use their title one funds depending on their goals and i really appreciate that part of that because it's really setting the goals at the school level and the schools get to decide where the needs are how do we measure that or how do we look at that or how does that come back to the board to show how that is working year by year especially to look at those fluctuations that you talk about um and and see where those occur so compliance wise i can speak to that piece and then maybe lisa can jump in with that question as well principals are allowed

167to spend to in align with their needs but they need to be able to demonstrate through a needs assessment that that is a need at their school so we are always going back to the school improvement plan so is it a need that's defined through their sip um that's going to determine whether an expenditure is allowable or not anything that a principal spends on there needs to be an agreement with me so we have budgets that principals are working on so they can't they can't make any expenditures without a prior approval that's just an automatic audit trail that is something that dpi is looking at as well we have a wise grants application every expenditure that is made on title 1 needs to be entered into this this grant application with dpi there needs to

168be an approval and then we can make claims to get our funds back so these are not funds and i think that's maybe not something i hit on these are not funds that we receive they're making claims we're spending and then we're making claims and we're getting these funds back from dpi so there's a very tight communication process between the principles between myself and between hr and budget and accounting to make sure we are all on the same page when it comes to these grant expenditures i would also just add thank you jennifer i appreciate that that the expenditures and the way that the funds are targeted this year in a different way towards early literacy and acceleration that's something that is discussed in the final presentation as well and chris if there's anything that

169aligns with any federal i guess federal improvement efforts that are happening from the federal level down to the state that's something that we would get through our district assessment coordinator tim peterson or caroline and if and when that comes down that's something that we would make available to the board for further discussion thanks that's helpful are questions or comments on title savion i just want to elevate the point that ali made particularly around students experiencing homelessness do we have alignment between title one schools and community schools like is there a priority that as we continue to expand the community schools program that you know they serve the schools with the most need that need the most wraparound services we we definitely do we are making sure that principals are aware of first of all aligning

170their budgets to meet the most need at their school when it comes to the community schools and title one so we are definitely keeping an eye on that i am also the homeless liaison for the school district which is very helpful when it comes to making sure that our students experiencing homelessness are having their needs met um with them being automatically title one that is something that we need to make sure is happening at all of our schools across the district not just their community schools or just our title one schools so yes we have we definitely have an eye on supports for our students and i say the only thing i want to add is when we selected the community schools we used a list of metrics and our the same data set that

171would uh select a title one school was one of the pri uh main data sets of the community school so kind of by nature of the two kind of formulas for selection um they're more than likely going to be title schools at our community schools yeah i was going to ask jennifer to speak to it for everyone's benefit the is the needs assessment it's a comprehensive needs assessment and just if you could describe who all participate in that jennifer context sure so there are there's two levels of the needs assessment um that and i'm going to speak for uh to what dpi is looking for for us to meet compliance with title one so the district we are looking at we are constantly um reviewing our data reviewing what our needs are at the district

172level before we even look at the at the title one schools that's something dpi comes in and they audit us every three years on our title one initiatives and what that first question is lay out your needs assessment what does this look like and our needs assessment is our strategic framework work there is no um there isn't another uh i think that was something that we all had to come to an agreement on years ago that there is no other work there is no other big plan it's our framework that's what everything goes back to when we then dig a little deeper and we talk about school level needs assessment again we're talking about our school improvement plan that's something that each school we we know about that i i'm not going to present on

173that all too much um but interestingly dr jenkins the school improvement plan the needs assessment plan at the school level the big piece that dpi is looking for is that is their parent input and is this shared with our families i mean that is the key to everything really when it's coming to needs assessment questions and i'm not sure that we do the best job that we could in that area right now i'll just put that out there that goes that goes back if i may to ananda's question about getting the voices there are structures in place but are we actually executing them at the highest level and i've been in a lot of places and have also been a part of audits the parent engagement piece with the title dollars and you're supposed to

174sometimes lack so as a team we're going to be intentional about ensuring our schools are getting the voices of the parents and that's when you mention community schools that's definitely what should be happening too parents voices should be a part of it so that's why i wanted you to say that jennifer thank you um i just wanna chime in quick with a question um chris and i see your hand um i'm one you know just to follow up on that dr jenkins have we considered asking our title 1 schools to include a parent on their school-based leadership teams to help ensure that voice in needs assessment at the school level go ahead someone was good schools have to show demonstrate to me through compliance that they are providing void that there is voice from their

175parents um when it comes to needs assessment and their school improvement planning so i do see that that's happening to what level i i'm not the one to comment on that i know some schools are doing an amazing job and i think other schools need a little more support and that's the key for us in central office making sure we're giving support to the schools and this goes back to our collaborative problem solving that we're going to be doing throughout we will speak to that as well but that's a trigger that we do know works when the parents voices are involved you can too see some increases in your schools yes i saw your hand so and then ananda yeah it was just a last question as you were talking about the needs assessment and

176referring that it's really our strategic framework is it the same thing as our essa plan because i know our essa plan has components of title 1 in it and it's required for any school that receives a certain amount of title funding is it right chris sorry for interrupting you it's required for any district that received title one funding so we have an essa plan um we're working on updating the essa plan there has been so many changes this year it feels like we get to a version and we need to revisit that again the essa plan is something that's required if a district's going to receive entitlement funding so funding across all the titles so it's not just in reference to title one we're talking about title one two three one d um our homelessness

177works so anything that's coming from that essa law is being referenced in that plan and what the plan is it's something that um we complete through our wise grants through our dpi wise grants application and its narratives that we're completing um when we're going through and building each grant under each title so yes you're right though um when you said is it our strategic framework it absolutely is it absolutely is yeah it just brings me back to thinking about how this all fits together and if we can have a conversation at some point about our essa plan i think that would really help us bring a lot of these title um initiatives that we're taking in different schools and and just getting the bigger picture so thank you for this presentation and appreciate it thank

178you ananda yeah thank you so much chris it's great to see you jen um i i appreciate the way you framed the conversations to us it was i think it was really illuminating um what uh i have a couple of comments that came up for me a couple of things that came up for me one is um you know sort of the purpose of title one like the goal of title one was was really to to bring some sense of equalization of of educational outcomes so my first question is has title 1 in madison worked that's a really big question i lisa i'm probably going to need your help with this but first i'm going to say back in the day when madison would allocate the straight amount same amount to every school that qualified

179as title one i don't think that was working and we shifted to equitably reviewing our schools and looking at our schools with the most need and targeting our funds to those schools so i can say we're getting better i'm not sure if we're all the way there yet ananda i would also offer that question similar to what elite questioned a bit earlier i would encourage us as a district that is anti-racist to really think about as we move into next year is the way we allocate anti-racist from our schools that are highest poverty to our schools that are actually much lower in poverty than some of our top schools is that actually an anti-racist way to allocate and then what measures are we using um i you know we've all been talking about um we

180need to do better our reading scores um are not where we need them to be we need to do better in all of our schools a few years ago if some of you will remember we actually had a targeted strategy through title one for our highest poverty schools we targeted a strategy around literacy and foundational skills and actually saw growth in those highest needs schools above that of those in really those second tier schools what happened we we um expanded that strategy to more schools we lost the targeted focus and and we tend to do that right without keeping keeping that really intentional focus on schools and students that need us the most so i think it calls on us to really think about what's what strategies are targeted um what do we mean when

181we say in rigorous instruction and anti-racist teaching and learning i think we have to take a new and fresh look at that and as schools work with their sip plans and identify their student focus groups and their data what are they doing to reflect on that at the end and how can we make that more public and transparent so more work to be done on that i look forward to working actually with andrew and his team to determine what exactly the metrics are that give us the best information about how those how those title one schools are faring or not yeah thank you lisa and thank you jen um it wasn't meant to be a true question i'm really seriously thinking about all of this uh the mechanics of the allocation of funding and how

182it shows up at the school right like i think that conversation is not something like parents are like i can tell like so many parents they don't know like this what you just presented to us like even if they go to a school that is a title one school like my daughter attended uh title one schools and i learned that there was an allocation for family engagement like when she was in middle school and so i think that there is a disconnect in how um the classification of title one and and then making that very explicit right there is an investment in the school that is extremely explicit how is that showing up and i appreciate lisa bringing up the the targeted strategy how is it showing up in a very targeted way um i

183think something that you both said made me think too it's a really good segue um to my next question around as you know i'm very familiar with the compliance requirements for for the department of public instruction and i think i can say this really freely the compliance is a it's a it's a baseline all across the state for schools with varying degrees uh i have really high expectations for madison and what we know about um madison plans what i know about madison plans is that we do a fantastic job in our plans we speak really well about things we articulate things really well we have really good matrix our struggle is is somewhere else um so i'm really curious on how are you seeing in particular sip typicals of our schools title 1 schools and

184i'm i'm really i'm even more curious at um like our top 10 elementary schools there how how are you how have you changed like the way i know sip is also something that has evolved significantly over the last few years how are you seeing that evolution and what is what is the horizon for for you thank you ananda i am going to turn that over to our chiefs um as they've been developing the sip 2.0 process with schools oh cool thanks thank you for that question part of what we've been doing with sip is to be more intentional around prioritizing specifically around the students that we will focus on and so their schools use their data to select the focus group of students and then match the specific strategies that will be used in order

185to make improvements around academics and social emotional goals mike did you want to add anything else no i think that you have that i also know just part of the other strategies for for the high schools is that we're using the the 90t data as well and that doesn't necessarily align to the question that you just asked ananda however we we do use the act with with reading the reading and math as well dr clark were you going to add something or nope just letting you know it's here if you need him i wasn't sure you came all like all illuminated i was like okay he's ascending somewhere so uh thank you um um and i know i see dr pryor um anyway so thank you for that um i think there's a part of

186me that really is looking for what is beyond compliance that that we can really lean in what is next in particular around the challenge that we have we're going to continue to be around virtual hybrid and the the the impact of of covet in our children um the other things that that we're doing in the department that's been really interesting and definitely we don't have it figured out is the the collaboration between title one and special ed uh both from a compliance strategy um but also like so much of the intersection uh and the way in which investment can really highlight our commitment in particular our commitment to the goals that we laid out uh and so how do we how those things get connected and elevated so um i'm not looking for any particular

187answer but would love to hear from anyone around anything well i can say that i have been part of those conversations with dpi um and i am in student services i work very closely with john harper we know that idea and essa cannot cross paths i mean that's just not something we can do but you're correct our children do across paths we do have title 1 students who are also identified so we need to make sure that we're keeping an eye on both of them with our resource alignment that's really important i am really appreciative that dpi is finally taking a look at that intersection between essa and idea so hopefully more to come and more good direction from the state as well it's interesting that you asked that question and i think this just

188this morning i'd sent jennifer uh an email um i had a question about title 1 schools and i wanted to look at what staff what schools were using their title ones for through staff because i was looking at a correlation between whether if they're using it for a family engagement coordinator if they were using it for a reading or a math interventionist i know that some um a school i've been talking with is looking at a math interventionist but didn't have it so i wanted to see if there was any trend data within the district as well as some of the schools using them for student and or family engagement just to see if there is a tie-in with attendance um engagement as in both in class not in the hallways and or behavior um

189i i think somebody mentioned earlier i think nikki mentioned a bea i i wasn't able to find anything like that but it's just something that in my mind as i'm entering back into the middle school and we're going into the in the allocation season i wanted to make sure i had that information as we were problem solving or being top partners together to see what's the biggest bang for the buck with title one so i don't have that answer yet but we're hoping to have that i really appreciate the investigative approach to that um thank you everyone and thank you chris all right so um before we move on to our next agenda item um jennifer i wonder if you just had any um concluding words about um how the feedback you've gotten tonight might

190be reflected as we move through the budget process into june are there things we should be looking for are watching for our next steps so my next steps are again to get those calculations finalized and then i start projecting scenarios of what that tiered approach can look like so this conversation i think is going to be very helpful in guiding our chiefs who are going to be the ones that are going to do that final review of the allocations that go to the schools along with links as well just to make sure that we're on the right track i mean i think this conversation was get very confirming that we do need to be looking at our allocation process a bit differently and there are things that we can change i will be honest i'm

191not confident that this is the year to make great change i mean i think this is the year that we need to hold our schools as stable as possible when it comes to budget and allocation um but that doesn't mean that the discussions can't happen and we can't start uh preparing for for just using that um equitable lens and and that anti-racism looking for that anti-racism work i mean that's um something that i'm going to take with me from this conversation chris and then um title always comes back to the board through the budgeting process as a check-in um in april before we finalize our draft budget book and then it always comes back in october um certainly when we get our final numbers and final adjustments so um title will remain in through the

192course of the budgeting conversations thank you so much and um that concludes the budget portion of tonight's program um i know that we've been sitting here for a while but i am hopeful that the next two discussion items on the agenda will not be lengthy and i'd actually like opt to just push ahead um the next item on the agenda is um the proposed attachment detachment agreement with the deforest area public schools and if kelly and sherry are you guys going to be talking about that yeah let sherry join us up here chair you want to start us off sure i can um so typically it at least since i've been with the district we've had at least one attachment or detachment each year to look at adding areas to madison's attendance areas this year

193we are bringing this to you in the work group um primarily because this is a new one and it is not subject to an outside agreement with um the deforest school district whereas the prior ones that you have observed are been advised on are subject to an agreement that we have with the middleton cross playing school district essentially we kelly was contacted by a number of um alders about the possibility of essentially doing a land swap um to more strategically aligned school districts um and i'll let her give you a little overview of what it'll be but essentially what we're doing is we're gonna uh switch um properties such that it will enhance our school district and also provide better transportation pattern um for both school districts so that you know no student is will

194be adversely impacted and that is one of the goals of attachments and detachments is to you know ensure that none of our families are adversely impacted when we decide to either add property to our district or detach property from our district so with that i'll just let kelly go ahead and give you the overview if you have questions i'm here to answer any of those questions yeah thank you sherry um yes sherry's right um it's very kind of rare in this world that we get a win-win when it comes to a land swap with another school district but this is certainly one of those cases and is in full alignment with the direction of the board in an attempt to align boundaries so the analysis is all attached here what you're seeing in the analysis

195attached is that the two green rectangles um that are in the map are just north of lake view they are currently undeveloped farmland that would be the property by which we are proposing we attach so it's currently part of deforest um is about to be um kind of built up from from the farmland and turn into a number of houses um and apartment complexes on that property in the future the city has yet to go through its approval process uh waiting for us to take our first step and then the city will move through the rest of their processes for the future of development of that property and in return we would trade back to deforest what is the red triangle space on that map it is over in the sandberg elementary area so overall

196the reason why we are um kind of calling this a win-win um is in the two green boxes which are yet to be developed um we really gain um quite a bit of acreage in in this particular trade um and it has yet to be developed so it's yet to really get to the land value and improvement value over time um which would increase our tax base um over time um whereas if deforest were to maintain those particular properties in the green rectangle space all of those students would need to be bussed to the deforest elementary school which is on the other side of the airport and looking at a 45-minute plus bus ride for those low-income families whereas if they're in our school district they could walk to gompers elementary which is our proposal

197of where these particular plots of land route to which i'll come back to in a minute the red triangle space just north of sandberg is part of city of madison and part of town of burke but the really almost the entire neighborhood surrounding that triangle is already deforest and you can see that in the maps one of the maps has a little white dots those little white dots are students that are enrolled in mmsd so there is not white dots then they are going to deforest and that particular property is a lot closer to their elementary school and would produce fewer students so between the two properties there's also a lot more students that is going to come out of those green boxes reason number two why this is a win-win for us we can

198use students in that particular attendance area routing into gompers you'll see that analysis as well there is room and gompers for the number of students that this property would develop into um whereas lakeview would not be able to hold all the students that are being developed out of that land and gompers would both are walkable schools for this particular area on the other side of town the property of which we would trade away when it's fully developed would route into sandberg and sandberg's enrollment and capacity are not at maximum but they're certainly at the higher end and that entire triangle routing into sandberg would put it at or over capacity so it's a really nice trade for us because we're bringing students in to an area of town of which we need it we're gaining

199acreage and we'll gain tax and land value as it's developed and it's a nice deal for deforest it's right in their neighborhood in an area where they are in need of schools and as their students and is closer to their their elementary school um so in the short run a little bit of loss of taxes um they're tax based to the school district but as a reminder we have a 31 billion dollar tax base um so the numbers in the in this trade are very very immaterial to our overall tax base so but the idea of adding more students in areas of town of which we need them in particular for lower income families that are likely to live in this neighborhood and giving them a walking school seems like the right equity strategy for

200us as well um so i think i've covered the main key points probably as fast as i could considering the time tonight um so let me know if you have any questions but we're certainly excited so before we launch into questions i would really like to encourage you to focus your questions on any additional information you need to be able to vote on this next monday when we are scheduled to vote so police clarification questions or additional information you might need before we take that vote ananda you may have said this before kelly um what um and i know neither of those pla those places are currently developed are they are there residents currently on are there students currently in neither of those properties there are no students on either one of the properties today

201um there's a handful of farm houses um some of which might have um a few older adults but no no families or um school-based children and you can see that evidence by no dots in there from an msd standpoint and deforest has done the same kind of look on their end and there's no students okay thank you for that and then the the segway is that is it are there any concerns or comments from community members yeah thank you for i missed that in my talking point so i'm glad you asked um we met with both alders um and we also met with the north side planning council to make sure that um we were in alignment with their their overall vision um before we we move forward and they are um in complete agreement

202um that this is is the right move for the north side thank you so much anyone else have questions um kelly i just wanted to know um since there are no students living in these areas um and we do have to provide demographic information as part of the um you know our requirements for doing the attachment and detachment did we just um develop that demographic information by looking at the surrounding neighborhoods yes so that's the information is attached and um where are our estimates of student numbers coming from the property analysis which is built into the pdf that's attached and that's coming from the city and their best estimates based on what they know today but like i said a lot of those plans haven't been approved so it's based on the best planning information

203that the city planning department has i actually should use this as an opportunity to thank the city and their planning department this is actually probably the best example of city and school district partnership where we both have like information that can come to the table between rebecca kemble and our the city planning department themselves um this is a really great example of of partnership and teamwork all right any other comments or questions before we move on you so much kelly and sherry for bringing this forward and if people have any questions that come up please reach out to kelly um or dr mcgregory during the week and let them know so that we'll be ready to vote on monday thank you all right our final agenda item tonight is an update on the handbook process

204and i believe deirdre is going to provide that yeah thanks chris uh i have heidi tep here as well if there are any questions and before we jump in i just want to express uh my sincere gratitude to the board uh and appreciation for this evening the conversation uh it really is inspiring and affirming and hopeful uh to listen to the dialogue and have such specific intentional emphasis on anti-racism and equity in education so i just wanted to to be able to express uh that appreciation um uh we're here to just share a really brief update i want to share some key points uh with the board and then i'll turn it over uh for questions so as a reminder uh the district brought a recommendation to the revise the handbook language specific to surplus

205and layoff to the board last july the reasons for that recommendation uh for the language changes was really premised on establishing meaningful criteria for making these decisions where seniority is not the sole decision point uh this obviously is more important now than ever and it's highlighted by the recent increase in our teachers of color being hired within the district in the last few years in addition to the understanding that seniority is not an indicator of qualifications or performance and particularly in service of good outcomes for our students as we noted over time the current language has come to serve as a structure of racial inequity that runs counter to our commitment to dismantle these very structures policies and procedures that interfere with our progress on fighting inequities and racism within our educational system at the

206workshop in july the board directed us specifically to go back and have the handy handbook committee really continue meeting on three very specific things and that was creating a rubric um specific to the surplus and layoff design an appeal process for layoff and remove the 30-day layoff notice as it was written at that time so since july we've been working collaboratively with the union on this issue working to keep the focus of the board's directives within the discussion it's important to note that both mmsd and our union partners acknowledge that surplus and layoff that particular piece of work is certainly a small piece of a larger collaborative effort that we want to continue to engage in specific to recruitment selection and retention of staff of color and this has really become apparent for us as

207we've progressed through this work in the last several months we're definitely committed to making taking a more global view of this work and examining current recruitment and engagement efforts and working on retention our overarching goal in this process is to improve staff composition staff stability improve satisfaction and maximize retention of our staff of color while still prioritizing surplus and layoff language as our first deliverable in this broader more comprehensive work it's also imperative that we obtain input from a broader more diverse uh group of teachers and we want to be able to prioritize that um we know that a long-term comprehensive plan is going to result in better outcomes and with that said it's also important for us to acknowledge that in the area of surplus and layoff we may not come to full agreement

208we are committed to continuing the conversations uh particularly prioritizing diverse teacher voice when we finalize the surplus and layoff language and we want to bring that back in march so in summary we've drafted some agreed-upon temporary surplus language for the 2021 school year to support the current hiring timeline we're going to continue to meet discuss and find our way through the complex discussions specific to layoff language and we expect to present that to the board in march we acknowledge that during this time we'll also begin the work to focus on recruitment and engagement as well and we want the board to know that although we're committed to finding a path toward full agreement specific to surplus and layoff language that we just may not uh we've had six months of discussion and there is a

209point where you know all points of discussion will be exhausted and we'll have to move we'll have to move forward but we're definitely committed to continuing the discussions and finding a path to get there we really appreciate the opportunity to work collaboratively i believe that we've learned a lot a great deal from one another and we look forward to the continued conversations and we really want to again prioritize the voices of our teachers of color so when we think about the timeline going forward we are going to ask that the board approve the temporary language to surplus specifically for this hiring cycle and now through early march we will continue our discussions on layoff and the broader topics that i mentioned early to mid-march we will share our language recommendations with the superintendent at that

210time the superintendent will decide on whether or not he will put forth the recommended language to the board and if so the recommended language will be shared at the march operations work group and then a final vote at the regular board meeting in march so i will pause there and see if there are questions or comments for heidi or myself nikki um so the board still gets to weigh in on it either way or not necessarily confused on that yes in march we will bring the language back the superintendent will bring a recommendation and the board will have an opportunity to to discuss that in march and we would have a vote or we're not sure on that you will have a vote in march as well cool thank you i really appreciate how well

211everyone has been working and trying to get along and actually make some progress i'm really really impressed with that and i i'm glad that things are going well this is better than i've seen since i've been on the board so i really commend everyone involved thank you nikki i think i saw ollie and then ananda i think that this is an area deirdre in which i want to show you a great deal of appreciation because in some ways you're acting as the ambassador of truth and reconciliation around this specific issue um we have to acknowledge that you know seniority benefits certain demographics of our community in part because you know we have articles like mmsd just hired the first african-american librarian in the history of the organization right so we know that if you've been

212here longer you're you're more likely to be white that we have have a system that has created a dynamic in which people of color are the last people hired and the first people fired but also in which retaining our folks of color is a challenge and that surplus adds to that challenge if you have a school that's really thriving and prioritizing making sure they have a diverse staff and then that staff is disassembled through surplus um we've we've seen that a road folks desire to stay with the district um and so reconciling some of the things that you know really are are staples of our history of a district in terms of who we've hired um and who who we've retained long term um and in addressing that we have to change uh how we

213do this in order to shift that dynamic and i don't think that that is easy work um but i do think that that requires a level of honesty from all of us about what longevity has met historically in this district and continues to mean unless we do something about it so i look forward to continuing to have this conversation and i greatly appreciate the time um and and diplomacy you have put into this work thank you ananda and then cdn actually uh go ahead steven i didn't have my hands on i'll wait for a savion yeah i want to echo elise comments and really show immense appreciation for the patients you have engaged uh through this uh for this work um and you know related to our conversations earlier um sometimes doing the anti-racist thing

214you won't always have consensus on and so i think it is our duty to push forth anyway and i'm looking forward to the recommendation come march i can go now chris um it's really nice going after savion because he sets up out really well so echoing the the immense gratitude and like also uh the just not just the patience but like the the level of skills to be doing this type of uh engaging just type of conversations and negotiations i think one thing and that's coming up for me and then it came up uh when in our conversations earlier around the the equity tool um is that when we're trying to create uh or undo policies that we're supporting status quo um there's always a lot of exceptions right it is possible it's very possible

215uh almost a guarantee that we'll be we'll have unintended consequences happening here the majority of them if at all we won't know until the policies are actually in place i really i just really commend my colleagues to to to engage in those you know in just having the space for this conversation because it is it is a big change for our district it is it does mean like saving said that we are really saying that we need to be doing something different because everything that we have done or so much that we have engaged uh thus far as far as high-level policies and ways in which we have operated indicates the level of racism are in our district and so you know we can't just say we're going to be anti-racist and continue to do

216the same thing we really needed to be uh making some significant policy changes and i think uh this is one of the examples that uh you know it might not be the most popular it might not be the thing that people are you know sharing or or are celebrating to the degree that uh we all we would like to see but it is you know i think it is a really important piece of work uh and i really appreciate you did and and your staff for for engaging and i really appreciate our uh the uh our teaching staff they engage into some really courageous uh discussions around doing things differently and really uh trying to make some significant changes in our district so thank you chris yeah deuter i just want to echo the thanks

217to you for your really hard work on this and um just continuing at it and i know you probably were not expecting this long of a process but i know that you were dedicated to making this work um and making sure that it was given the the the collaboration and and the discussions that um that we thought and that i think you also thought were necessary so i really appreciate the work that you've put into this um one of the questions that i had asked um a while back the last time we talked about this is if we had found any national models from other districts who have also done this work because i know that we're not the only district discussing this um the questions about you know retention and recruitment of staff of

218color and so are there other districts that we have found that are doing this work and and might be a good model or we might be able to learn something um from from that yeah we have we've been looking chris we haven't found anything in particular at this point which is part of the reason uh why we want to sort of continue um focusing on this work i mean we want to do our due diligence and make sure um that we're exhausting all of the options and and opportunities um that we have so our team is still looking um and sort of searching to see if there's something that um uh really is uh an example of what we might be able to use and and offer um so i appreciate the uh the the

219question and just know where we're digging into it and um hoping that we'll have something that we can work off of for sure all right thank you so i also want to echo the thanks um for this process um i i really i commend you for the work that you've done so far and the the solution you brought us in the short term which is the one year language around um uh surplus um i'm a little bit confused so we're voting on this temporary surplus language that will last for a year and then in march you're bringing us layoff language is that also going to be surplus language or will there be a change to surplus language further down the road so if we have the opportunity to bring both chris we'll bring both um

220but i think it's just really dependent on how far we're able to get i mean the goal is really um uh and i think the the place where we've had more complex discussions is really specifically in this layoff area and we want to be able to really shore that up uh knowing that we haven't gotten as far on that and we have the surplus language sort of as our fail-safe for lack of a better word so if we if we have an opportunity to um finalize both of those we absolutely would bring those back for sure okay um i very much appreciate your putting this in the context of like this is just a piece of a much bigger strategy to recruit and retain teachers of color and with that in mind i'm not sure

221if the district is doing exit interviews with staff and if you are it would be really interesting to get some data on why teachers of color are leaving mmsd and how much of that attrition is related to surplus and layoff policy and what else we need to be working on to keep staff of color here yeah thanks for that chris yes we are doing exit surveys and you know i think part of uh the challenge that we see with that is is very specific to our cultures of engagement at our building levels right and so it's sort of sometimes a chicken and an egg kind of thing where if staff are not feeling like they have a sense of belonging and there's this this level of engagement at their school building they may choose to

222exit the district and not complete the survey right so that's always certainly optional but we're definitely pushing that out and um engaging in one-on-one interviews so we have core group core group on our team that is always wanting to have a one-on-one sit down to really learn about that so um the the data is coming in it's probably not as robust as we would like it to be uh for the very reasons that if staff are feeling like i don't belong here i'm i'm out and i'm i'm not gonna provide any feedback um because they're exiting um without you know the sense of belonging or wanting to really provide that feedback so and see again i saw your hand but based on what you just said about differences at schools in terms of culture one

223concern that i have heard from staff as we move to potentially using educator effectiveness as all are part of a rubric to make decisions is that educator effectiveness is not being implemented equally at all schools we have some schools where it's being done really well and some schools where educators either aren't getting evaluated or they feel like their evaluation is more focused on the paperwork than actually on good coaching conversations and good feedback so i feel like part of moving toward a new way of working is also making sure that we're doing educator effectiveness right very consistently across all of our schools and i think that in particular could maybe be a piece of helping to improve the culture at our schools for educators of color and making sure they're getting the coaching and support

224they need to feel like they belong and feel supported i don't know if you can comment on that yeah no i appreciate that chris because we we were having the same discussions in uh in our meetings and uh really the um the importance of us as a district you know when we talk about uh fidelity of implementation i think this is one of the areas where we do need to make sure um and have a level of accountability where every teacher is getting the opportunity to get that support and when we think about the evaluation process it is very much a growth and development process and many of our teachers appreciate want to and really value that process and everyone deserves the opportunity to be able to go through that on on their cycle and

225so we have been having conversations within our handbook committee team specifically about that we definitely know that it is a concern and we're working to to address that and we know that that has to be an area as a district that uh that we get better at we just we just have to to do that and our teachers deserve it um uh and and we expect uh expect that i mean if if we're going to see improvement um in instruction we need to be able to support teachers being able to grow and develop in that area um savian and dr jenkins steven won't you go ahead yeah um yeah you know related to this conversation um i think this relates a lot to the professional development work from both the union and from the school

226district in terms of particularly young black professionals black professionals in general feeling welcome in this city the microaggressions the macro aggressions are real the belittling of black intelligency and agency are real and we need our partners at the union to step up and us at the district have to step up on this piece to improve our cultures i i promise i did not just text him that those are my words but anyway uh but to add to that i just wanted to say uh deidre publicly you and your team you have uh some other individuals working with you around the language um as well i know the chiefs have been working with you closely as we meet every friday uh with mti and i know that uh ed and andy both uh we've been talking

227about what does it mean to be anti-racist in the union themselves or hiring someone to talk about anti-racist uh work and to collaborate and we're all being there together but i think the collaborative problem-solving uh discussions we've been having and some of that work is going to lead to our better relationship in truth uh because when you start talking about doing anti-racist work you have to talk about it in truth and we and i had said earlier in one of our discussions about it's anti-racist work it starts in policy you know where are we where are you guys going to lead us that's what it comes to and then you create the space so anti-racist actions can be taken and so deidre your uh ability in my short time to just see the growth between

228the two groups we shouldn't be against one another administration and teachers and parents we're all one entity that is true entire racism when you can stop doing that but i wanted to tell you this has been a journey 1993 i came in the district this district was wrestling then with racist ideology that was playing out in truth and so when you ask the question chris about exit interviews um there are two interviews that need to happen those who leave and those who choose to stay and continue to face the microaggression but what about the macro aggression which we can control um ourselves at at particular levels so i just think this is a conversation on the eve of the first female in the united states of america sitting in the white house as a vice

229president and she happens to be of african and asian persuasion this couldn't be a more needed conversation and evidence that dr king on his day and weekend said about us in terms of progress i think today he would be proud that we even having this discussion and is real is real so thank you sorry so long on that but it's just thought i had you so much dr jenkins for those words i think they're a beautiful way to close out this conversation but if there are any last questions or comments please go ahead and ask them all right well thank you so much everybody this was a long meeting although better than last week um i appreciate your um everybody's thoughts and comments i think we are well positioned to move through um our budget

230cycle and to move into the decisions we need to make over the next weeks and months so um on that note can i get a motion to adjourn don't move dolly moldro a second and i did not know we were in competition chris i'll get you next month [Laughter] i felt that burn all those in favor aye aye all right we passed it unanimously we are adjourned thank you so much and have a good evening thank you chris and thank you everyone bye