091422 Special Board of Education Meeting

001it was supposed to cure anything everything but it's got a lot more ginger than most gingery episodes there we are up and recording so [Music] the second donation was as things got kicked back in for uh how long do you guys have fences like as long as it takes or i'm just like oh it was amazing and we so well maybe i can pitch that somehow i'm gonna let you figure that out so i think we're about ready to begin folks so i'll call this meeting to order and uh the roll call establishes that we have six out of seven and a seventh one i believe on the way that's john heidemann is still missing and uh so we do have a quorum to proceed and uh we'll begin then with the pledge of states

002of allegiance and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all so at this point i'll turn the meeting over to um our attorneys from bond reason and then yes well thanks for inviting us in tonight uh we'll do a little bit of a workshop an update on different topics current things that are occurring it's always nice from our point of view to be able to come in and talk a little bit more informally but not important things and the kind of topics that we're going to talk about tonight that you get input on talking about are common with a number of the school boards in terms of what's going on and different updates and things like that so it's an informal presentation i said when

003i came in i was really impressed with the number of cars we'll try to keep it interesting but in any event it's informal it's questions and answers and the discussions and things in terms of our goal is what what do you need to know what do you want what can we answer as we're going through either these topics or other things so tony with that yeah thanks jim and again uh thanks for having us here it's a good opportunity uh as we talked about sit down i have a discussion around a variety of topics and uh we have kind of a general overview as kind of jim said on a variety of topics that we see and have seen with boards as well as kind of some more recent uh issues and a current discussion

004on topics we have kind of a general overview that will go through a variety of these things as jim said informal questions come up we'll certainly uh take those as as they come as well and uh we've also kind of allowed a little bit of time at the end as well for from our uh q a session as well and just kind of a discussion so so again yeah thanks for uh for having us and you can kind of get started and and we'll uh move from here so essentially just to kind of start out a little bit of an overview as far as just the agenda of topics that we're gonna touch upon and discuss uh tonight so we've got board duties and powers that have set forth uh in state law uh as

005well as kind of underneath that board relations issues that come up with that and then the certainly the distinction uh and topics of you know adopting policies studying policy and then the administration and implementation on of that policy as well and then after that we'll kind of discuss a few different uh current environmental challenges that are going on uh in the school arena i guess we'll say at this point and a variety of those sorts of topics uh so we've we've got set up here social media related issues that are that are coming up more frequently as well as first amendment speech related issues uh and uh certainly gender discrimination issues as well and then uh we'll kind of wrap up with again a refresher of sorts or just touch upon open meetings with records

006related issues these always can to be uh a topic that are that's always looming and always something that you deal with on a pretty frequent basis as well so we'll touch upon a few different issues that we are seeing with respect to that as well so again just to kind of start out uh we have obviously as i'm sure you are aware we have the wisconsin statute section 12 which sets forth a variety of the school board duties that are set forth in the law as far as what the board is obligated to do we have obviously the management of the district taxation determining curriculum course of study things of that nature as well as just overall general supervision of staff kind of that district administrator relations relationship and chain of command so to speak

007so these are kind of like the main ones that about a very lengthy list that are set forth uh in the law these are kind of the main ones uh just to kind of touch upon that uh and then next obviously a variety of specific statutory powers that are also set on in chapter 120 which contains obviously a lot of the board provisions very specific direction and legal requirements as far as rules suspensions expulsions with the process procedures are that we need to follow when we engage in those sorts of actions again food service another sort of power and authority that the board has real property whether it's managing leasing selling acquiring property in the district interest as well so we have that as a specific power that the district has certainly borrowing again as

008part of the financing aspect of district operations and then certainly to award diplomas as well you know one of the things about the statutes and the powers that you have is you have a lot of power you have through the statutes and the specific aspects and what's a little different than wisconsin it's real specific i mean there's so many we list 50 60 of them by statute others don't do that quite the way we do so there's a lot there so in terms of way and you know this but i mean in terms of what a board is doing how much authority a lot the other thing is the courts have been real clear that how those uh enumerated powers are set forth are they're interpreted broadly which means when in doubt you're going to

009have authority to do those kind of things so it's it's pretty incredible as we've talked about maybe we talked about a little bit earlier in some of the questions if i recall you know your ability to set policies that work best for new london are really important so even though they're listed that way they're geared toward what works best for you here what you do here may not be the same as anywhere else in the statutes and the courts recognize that yeah what's up do our policies have to be within the statute yeah i mean we can't we can't be outside the realm of that but again as i say the authority is interpreted broadly so as you write your policies it's pretty it can be difficult to challenge a policy to say well if

010it's outside the statute you don't have the authority of course not but that's going to be a all right so with that uh again that that broad authority that flexibility that the board has and really we have this this kind of age-old conflict that does come up on a relatively uh routine basis but it balances you know the board's accountability to its constituents uh as well as how does it manage uh the organization and work with the administration as far as uh control and uh letting the administration say implement the policy or engage in those day-to-day operational sorts of considerations and so really that's a little bit of of the discussion point and how to strike that balance and what sorts of considerations that go into that it's important that the board kind of define

011that relationship and set expectations i have clear communication and discussions and direction on what the board's perspective is uh kind of again setting that policy in that overarching uh overview uh and then again kind of establishing those guideposts those boundaries uh again within the authorities but allowing that flexibility and and the administration the ability to to carry out implement the policy depending upon the the needs and circumstances uh individualized circumstances that may arise on it on a day-to-day basis within the scope of the policy and really again what it comes down to is the policy only being as good as its implementation and that's where it becomes key and important for the board and the district administrator to have that dialogue and be clear on what the expectations are and so everyone's on the same

012page and has a similar understanding so if we looked at the board itself as an organization let's talk for a minute about your uh your goal as a board overall workshop a little bit about that then let's talk a little bit about your responsibilities to each other now we're new into working with you i've been sensed uh any major problems but i gotta tell you every once in a while we do have issues where you know what is the role of the board and what's their accountability as an elected official to that board to that organization you are the bolts of the community you get to voice your opinion about that speaking how you feel as as a elected official some say uh my position is kind of i i've been elected so how i

013personally feel about others may say i talk to a lot of people and i i may feel this is the voice of even though i may not feel it personally what the majority of those that's up to you as elected officials and your accountability to your organization as a board then you have that fiduciary obligation each of you to abort overall out to the community as that voice so everywhere we go everything we do you're a school board member we never get to turn that off that's 24 7. the same as our administration the same as us could you define fiduciary in your use of it here sure sure first of all as long as you're acting in your capacity as the elected official and the things you're voting on you're protected in terms of

014good faith efforts to make decisions make votes okay get asked with another board the other other day not a school board but another group to say we're going to make some tough decisions can we get sued individually well there are certain things we can but i don't want people to dwell on that are overly worried about that as long as we're staying within our role as a board member then you have layers of that fiduciary responsibility of insurance protection and other aspects that go to it that go to that but overall we're accountable to the district we're accountable within our authority as an elected official and again as we started with it's pretty broad in terms of what you get to do and what you get to discuss and what you get to decide i

015don't i want to bring that up just that that you have that i don't want people to overly worry about that but we stay within our lanes too at the same time right as far as that goes if we're way off the reservation beyond our authority or beyond our authority as elected officials i can't we can't protect you as much in that so what are we talking about when that might be if you're out and about somewhere else are you talking about yourself as an individual and things you may think or are you speaking on behalf of the district as i say be careful because we're 24 7 elected officials right it doesn't necessarily create liability but we just keep it in mind as far as that goes if we're involved god forbid some criminal

016activity that's going to be outside the realm of what our duties would be just to give you the bizarre scenario as far as that goes but then again we're not going to be able to protect that defendant or other stuff because it's outside the scope beyond our fiduciary responsibilities other fonts and just to add or touch upon that and again the key question ultimately becomes that duty of loyalty to the district and whether you're acting within the scope uh the law also does require essentially that uh provided you are acting within the scope of your duties uh that you are even if you are sued individually if in the event that the something like that comes up essentially the district is to indemnify you and provide that defense uh provided again it's within the scope

017of the duties so we're accountable as a board as a whole to the district and to the community as a board and that's our that's our duty as a group and i'm talking about as a group we're going to come back to individuals in a minute same thing as we're accountable as a board on our committee structure that's up to you in terms of what committees you want to have we've talked about who can sit on the different committees and other what degree do they vote what things should outsiders be able to vote versus you have more authority because you're the elected officials to vote but then what's the power of your committees and how much work do they do to recommend to the board and what's the relationship to the committee to the board

018overall we just need to you just discuss that get a comfort level with that and it's the board as a as a whole as to where the business gets done the ultimate business i'm not saying things don't get decided by policy and recommendations from a committee but individually you don't have the power to do anything as a committee doesn't necessarily have a power to really bring it forward it's the organization as the board at a board meeting and that's why we talk about the importance of that and those meetings of course we're going to finish later about board meetings in the open meeting aspects of that board meetings are a big deal because that's where the real authority comes from and so we talk about where do committees fit in and how does that matter

019so i talk about boards making them meaningful whatever that means for new london as far as that goes we all come and we'll talk about that in a minute of being prepared for those meetings and as much information from an administration so you can make your decisions at the meeting how effective is that so that meeting is really the policy discussion and making the best decision that you can as a whole for new london making those meaningful confidential means confidential a fiduciary obligation we have is we may be working on real estate matters and we may be talking about three or four offers and put the district in the best scenario to get the best bang for the bucket for either selling or buying some property just to give you an example we disclose that

020we may as a board lose not only bargaining power but other aspects of things because it's not confidential personnel matters goes without saying everybody's interested in that i'm gonna ask i don't get asked anymore because people know we're just not gonna talk about it as far as that goes but i used to oh what do you know about this what do you know about that my wife one time said to me she was listening to the news she goes you were working on that weren't you yeah for about a month but even there i'll talk about that as far as that goes and it's tempting as it is to talk about that because everybody kind of wants to know what kind of an obligation is an institution to protect that information so you can make

021the best decisions and we avoid other liabilities that go with that as i said it's 24 7 so the leadership aspect of it never really ends you know and i accept that in terms of what we do if i'm at the badger game and they lost saturday it was difficult to watch my time but even there you know because of the nature of what we do and stuff everywhere we go um we're always the attorneys they're working with schools and others the same as they're always going to be in election and that's okay i'll take that any time and the things that go with that anything else you want to add to those no i mean i think that let's turn a little different to responsibilities to each other talked about the board as a

022whole now what about to each other as far as that and they overlap in a little bit again you all seem to get along first of all let me say this you can differ you don't have to be unanimous you can be a one-vote difference on everything that you do and that's okay be civil be professional be polite that's not the statutes but it makes a big deal to get the difference down and quite frankly if we can't do it at the local local level god help the state and god help the feds but that's their problem and the stuff that we watch and we see local level matters have we had major disputes amongst boards this past year yes have we had restraining orders against each other yes if we had lawsuits and other

023things yes i think we're almost at the restraining order with our board i don't sense it at all i just we don't even want to come close to those watch a monday night watch one of our meetings on the youtube channel i've been asked to watch the board meetings in terms of some of the discussions and some of the other stuff and then we come in and workshop about how do we better than that um how do we put rules of decorum together and sometimes we've done that in terms of how to work together as a group i'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about that i'm just saying those are some of the things we'll get a lot more specific in some workshops if need be or fast to do that

024simple things like being on time being prepared reading this stuff ahead of time getting the information that you can't attend because these meetings are so important and they can last a long time as it is that they're productive and effective as far as that goes so and if i hadn't mentioned before confidential means confidential jim the confidentiality thing maybe this is more appropriate to wait so you get to the opening section as this but it's come up as to whether there's anything security wise but if we're changing security policy there's some security policies where it could be a disadvantage for um for potential criminals to know what you're doing i i read all the time the 11 things that we can do in a closed meeting i don't see black and white on that but

025is there anything that's yes that can perhaps bit in our opinion clearly is there are certain aspects of your safety security protocols what happens if there's a threat at a school board meeting who's going to go where we don't want that out in terms of how we're going to deal with the protection of the public in a meeting or you would immediately well i think you went to school i guess the question to this yes may be are we privy to that information or should we be well to the degree that it impacts you yes to the degree it doesn't but it's the school safety plan you may have to help prepare that but then it's so important that you keep that confidential right because it's the security and safety of other people involved and

026we don't want people so at both levels vote your level for your meetings and then also the school plan some of it is has to be confidential to protect people and it's okay our opinion is all of that can be protected so jim is is that something that our board could ask to go on the closed session and talk about because i have heard that before i think that's what chris yeah can there can there be an agenda posting that takes us in the closed session on that topic and feel good about that yeah 1985 one a and f maybe more if you invite us we can add g does you mean there's a crime detection prevention uh section of one of the subprovisions as well though that helps us but there's absolutely ways within

027the breadth of those okay and need to do it and that's definitely been our opinion you said 85 see it but is one is the closed session provisions okay so the last thing that i would probably talk about here is the policy and versus the administration what's the other tug of war there is no you know fine line as to this is exactly administration and this is exactly our responsibilities okay sometimes we'll put a test together and we'll start a meeting with who gets to decide what mine can do that tonight but some of them are kind of right in the middle as far as that goes from a general concept you know that the board decides policy and the overall aspects within the statutes that we have before the tough thing for a board

028in a multi-million dollar business that this is is to then delegate what you do to your administration to run the business whether that's a public sector multi-million dollar business or a board of directors at a private sector group and i sit on some of those too to make the policy decision and then we pay people a lot of money to run the business okay so our tough goal as the board is to stay within the policy rank and let the administration run the business on the other hand the same goal is true for the administration to let go and not get too involved in the policy decision although they may have an opinion on where they like that goal and that's that's the debate in the the push in the show that kind of goes

029with that when things go out of whack it's because both cross into the others and that tug of war doesn't kick us out okay so there needs to be discussions that's okay to talk about maybe that's a little more policy learner maybe that's a little more administration does that mean that the board cannot have input onto administrative type things not at all you're still the pulse of the community you still overall are going to have the say within the statutory authority but you run better as a business the best you can let administration do their part the administration wants you to do your part okay that's where the smoothest the sweet spot is is to run on the public sector or private sector business as far as that goes thoughts on that tony yeah and

030i think another way to think about it just in the context of say we have the board and the policy which is kind of more the legislative and then we have the administration which is more the administrative or executive kind of function so similar to say the uh the branches of government that that exists that's another way to to possibly think about it as well and and the way that what the the law is going to take a view of it as you know setting policy is almost like setting a new law of sorts and then the administration is carrying out the execution of that law so just a different way to to conceptualize or think about that distinction and i think uh you know just leads into it again a little bit of the

031specifics on the the policy aspect being kind of what and why and then the administrative operational portion is is the where when in all aspects you might determine some curriculum things administration may do some background and make some recommendations for you at the end of the day you're going to determine those aspects of things if i have a really aggressive administration that's putting a lot of some of this debate's going on now some of the social aspects of things into curriculum either from a state level or an administrative level and you're not fully informed of that we get pushed back from the public because we're teaching this right that's part of the debate that's going on within society now is we decided this and how did this get here that's a distinction between a board

032function and an administrative function and a need to have a clear understanding of what is what's being presented to you so you can make the policy decision overall that's the pulse in the community so um if i took the other side of that i'm sorry is there a question if i took the other side of that citizen comes to you and says something happened at the football game between the players and the coach and you decide you're going to go investigate that now you're kind of administrating to go do that and if you're meeting with people and getting information about that you delegated to that to the administration let them deal with dealing with the support and the other stuff do i want you to know if there was a problem with students or the

033football coach and you get ads up so you don't get tackled at the grocery store or what that happened i mean this sincerely that that's where scott gives you a quick polite call to just say heads up we had this issue i just want you to know so you're not blindsided but don't comment on it because it might come to you either as a student expulsion or we might be removing a varsity coach and i don't know if you've all been in the rooms but i sure have been where half are wearing this color and have the other color because some love them some eight of them and that's what you know these can be really valuable scenarios that's kind of working through the respect of the administration working through the investigation and the board

034may be having to make a decision later and stand communicating but stand within our within our realms with that again good communication early may stay confidential means confidential at that point if we haven't mentioned that yeah no but again it plays true so many times it really does but being in the nose so let's talk just just for a second about that is how much can a board know about some of this stuff that's going on that y'all just got huh you have four kids a lot you're gonna know a lot more before you get to a grocery store this is the reality of that but you can know something you just can't know so much that you're prejudiced to make a preconceived decision in fairness okay and the law is really protective about decision

035makers that may hear things later okay you're gonna know i know a kid that's going to be expelled and i hear the case sure kid's my neighbor you can still hear the case may not be good for the kid because he's your neighbor and you know the kid but that's a different thing the thing is and i mean that seriously it matters whether you can make a fair unbiased decision based on what you hear in here same about steps and about a student but if you think you can't you might best remove yourself well the law is going to say if you can't and the presumption is you can't then there's you don't want to put yourself in a position of the appearance of impropriety but that's not necessarily the law that's just sort of

036a rule of conduct we all kind of go by but you know be careful not to always step out because then nobody makes the decisions you know and i know you're not suggesting that but that's that's why i make that decision i just think the safest comment is to say mr blech is looking into it you may want to talk to from right when you get asked about it or but if mr black called you and said heads up i just put somebody out on leave we're on it we're reviewing it then you're in a position when somebody says to you what's going on with the coach you can say we're aware of it and administration is working on it right and then you get a comfort level they have a comfort level when we

037get that back they should yeah that's exactly right so based on that like this spring well see you here for people because your kids are in stuff but it's the proper channel that person's boss to start with the complaint or it's always scott like is it the hierarchy of like photographer talk to the building principal like our policy would say if we hear a complaint we should direct it to the appropriate administrator right and that's what i'm saying appropriate so that's what i'm saying which is always appropriate right but there it also could be like the is there a hierarchy of command of the appropriate state was that person's building supervisor like or do you just let scott handle everything like antennas you know i can i can most certainly like every you know and

038in the past many of you have contacted me you know i think i heard this you know okay great yeah when i talk to an appropriate person you know i think one thing our board does have we've got good communication relationship with our admin team i mean we're we're neighbors we're friends we see each other our kids are on the same different clubs and organizations so but but if it ever in my opinion if it ever comes to something that you know might come to you later down the road look bring it my way let me help make that decision you know and then yeah you can talk to our middle schoolers for elementary principles and that type of thing uh or if that you know because i don't want to jeopardize you and what

039you're thinking and feeling the goal of the board member but if you think it ever could come back to the full board setting in a way in my opinion start with me let's make that let's make that decision together so would it be wrong after like i sent you emails on things if i go back in like two weeks and reach out to that parent and say hey has everything been taken care of or do you need further assistance is that okay or should i just be leaving it because i've been reaching back out i think these people will probably approach you again at some point time to the neighbors or whatnot to do that i guess if it's not being addressed in a way that they see appropriate they're going to reach out to

040you again or maybe another board member within that but i guess tony and jim you have an opinion on that my thought is is i don't think i would make the extra effort to follow up i would kind of wait to see if i get followed up again if i somebody could see somebody in passing socially i might say did everything work out with that i haven't heard anything different i'm assuming all is good because that's just polite right that i would do but i'm not so sure i'm not sure i'd seek it out okay yeah i would i would say that too but another angle that i was thinking of and now as we're having this discussion uh it makes you think back to the various a couple of in-house uh local government positions

041that i was in and that communication that that we're all talking about and then that scott was just talking about uh was always important for me to at least as jim touched upon reach out to you and give you a heads up that x is going on and and whether we're going to be handling it or to to direct uh the individual to me to handle it and again they kind of have that perspective that scott talked about looking out for your interest in the event that that issue is going to come back to the board it's kind of for your protection as well so that was always something that i had a pulse on and then with respect to those sorts of issues in the event that when i would get contacted i'd also

042follow up afterwards and so if it's something that say you know you'd reach out to scott and if scott either takes care of it or delegates it or you know maybe kind of someone from the administration follows up and says we've we've talked with this person uh again that communication aspect to let you know that maybe it's kind of tied off or it's been addressed may not necessarily be how um that individual has wanted the resolution but at least then you're aware of that as well so that may be just another piece of it that can eliminate that potential of having to reach back out at a future point is to say whether he scattered the administrator hey we we talked with this person we dealt with it and that's where things are meant um

043i'll tell you the way i've handled situations like that and tell me if you think this is appropriate or not um i've had a lot of bus complaints over the years that i've been on board bus complaints plus a parent saying the driver is doing this or the driver isn't enforcing discipline and my kid is a victim or uh you know route issues whatever and i always i kind of read them through our policy or paraphrase it and they say our policy says we as a board or a board member can't get involved at this point but you need to first talk to the bus supervisor and if your problem isn't straight away to your satisfaction then you go to the bus super superintendent which in our case is the operations manager and if it

044doesn't get salt there then you go to the administrator and if it doesn't get solved there feel free to come back to me because at that point our policy does allow the board to discuss it at a board and i say that to whether i agree with their issue or not because that's that's the chain of command that's the uh and uh uh and and i also usually say well let me know at the end of the process you know if you're satisfied with what's going on and that's that's kind of the way i've i've done in the past overall within policy yes depending on what the issue is my hesitation with the last part is there are going to be things that you delegate to the administration because they're administrative things to deal with

045but you may not agree with what they did okay the administration but that's their role and there might be 10 different ways to handle a problem and because we feel differently as a board member we got to respect the decision that they're making i know as elected officials that puts us in a little bit of a tough spot with the public and how you describe that to the public so when you got to the end to say if it didn't go to your satisfaction come back to us i don't want everything coming back to the board because not everything should because it's administration we gotta back that again because there might be ten ways to do things that might not be just the way we did it now i'm gonna mention that from a board

046level too if we vote five or four or three on an issue the consensus rules and then we gotta support that as a board too and that's the responsibility with this category to each other and that if we didn't like because we're in the minority where it is and we don't support that policy that's a problem that's a breakdown too the politics is the majority rules and then as a group of seven we gotta support that same thing from board to administration administration to board administration while we recommended this and you did that well yeah that's what the board gets to do and we move on because that's the decision right same thing same thing whoever wins the debate over the authority they have that's what we all support if the business is going to

047be successful and we keep you out of legal trouble which is why we're here today so that's tough sometimes so always if you don't like the way something had happened sit back a little bit and see that it fit within that realm and maybe there's going to be another day that the politics goes another way okay so is that answer so generally yes but not always okay or you'll be administrating and you don't want to be running okay you don't want to do that you shouldn't want to be doing that okay other roles within administration again they administrate that policy generally they're going to do the supervision the discipline unless it's some of the some that come to you and of course communication is key in terms of providing information to the board and the

048other aspects of things so yeah so again just to kind of talk about the things that we've discussed about in in kind of practicality and so you know that clarity that communication really does establish at that level of trust and so that's it's it's important uh to again make sure that we're clear on what the expectations are that communication is constant it's ongoing and then that just helps foster that that trust amongst all uh that are involved and holding ourselves to a high standard again just in how we relate to each other relate to each other uh just creates a an environment in which things just continue to operate well and continues to improve and so you know ultimately uh the board is going to set the tone and and set the standard and uh

049and set and model that sort of uh behavior and uh and really make the individualized determination of what what makes sense for new london do you want to walk through the next pieces as we get into the environment yeah so we'll we'll touch upon again here just some of the uh current environment challenges and factors that that we're seeing uh all over the place again more of the constitutional rights sorts of issues are are coming up more and more frequently whether it be free speech uh due process related matters uh separation of church and state whether it be funding related matters things of that nature any search and seizure issues that that are going on at school and then again student rights issues whether it be student records what exactly is a student record what

050can be disclosed even sometimes we'll we'll see issues say crop up as part of [Music] an ongoing parental dispute and the court system family court system getting involved and how do we handle student records in those sorts of situations uh and then we've got special education considerations uh the additional rights that go along with students with respect to that whether it be expulsions and and the standards as far as any sort of discipline and the variety of very specific rules that come into play uh on changing placement things of that nature and those sorts of situations and then a variety of extracurricular activities or co-curricular issues with uh clubs and things of that nature that are going on so seeing a lot of those issues and then ultimately uh as is always kind of the

051case a variety of disciplinary and exposure related issues that are that are always kind of going on so with that again just to kind of touch upon a little bit of you know act 10 with clarity bargaining uh been say over a decade now but no no bargaining essentially that's involved in districts now they do have the right to to negotiate over base wages and establish a union with respect to that but there are a variety of considerations uh certainly in the current economic climate that may not necessarily work in their factor but again issues of whether there's a union or not how they're being represented what sorts of rules and and provisions are going to guide with respect to that seeing a variety of retirement benefit related issues uh things of that nature uh

052and really with the elimination of that collective bargaining aspect and the traditional sort of disciplinary sorts of situations and things of that nature it's now made uh our policies and handbook provisions that much more important and and that those are in line and and consistent with with what we're trying to achieve and that we're covering the situations that we need to and then ultimately again uh as a result of that we're presented with a variety of situations where discipline may become an issue uh and rather than heading down the traditional kind of grievance arbitration process uh that was traditionally pretty embedded within that culture now we may have circumstances where there are negotiations and separation agreements so that individuals maybe can get the benefit of really being put in a position where they can find

053other employment or additional employment under the circumstances as well so those things are just becoming more important as time goes on so let me give you some specifics within regards to each of these stuff going on across the state within the no bargaining aspect definitely i don't know if you've had it here but a push toward the local union folks to say we want to set up some meetings either with administration to meet and confer or with the board to develop communication rapport and other aspects it's okay to meet with staff but the bargaining laws real clear in the case law following it is there is no right to do anything as a union other than the bargain-based wage it's a period so the more you go down that path the more we may be

054on the statute just as a heads up but i'm never we're never going to advise don't meet with staff don't talk to staff don't deal with a group of staff as far as that goes we just can't recognize things beyond that very limited piece to it in terms of who's represented usually the teachers right but you know what that's going on in some of the places some of the rest of the support staff can organize and bargain based wages with you too and one of the unions is pretty active in trying to recruit some of the other groups to do that too not as much in the schools as we're seeing in some of the counties and cities but we always watch everything as a group in terms of what's going on post retirement benefits

055huge liability in terms of unfunded for a while and nina i worked in a case there were 96 million dollars of liability or retirees that had come through the bargaining agreements and then had some cases post act 10 about if people had it had retired invested they got it the question was could the board change that outside now that we weren't bargaining anymore to say we can't pay health insurance to age 65 for the employee and the spouse or certain stipends so there's case law that's developed that gives the board some authority separate from that where police and fire still bargained wbrc down in a racine case said they can only fire in planned design so retiree benefits other stuff are really more limited so watch what we do because we park on those contracts

056there's stuff still going on within the bargaining realms of things in madison and what's going to happen with all of that do i think action's going to apply back no i don't i don't see that coming in in the short term much less maybe the long term but but there clearly are things still going on with even what can be targeted it will impact schools regarding other folks could we back up um to the to the previous current environment challenges and factors or um to the student rates and the discipline and expulsions yeah actually we're going to come to that we're not even there that's just a page to say here's stuff we're going to talk about and no but that's good but but ask whatever what do you want to talk about we're going

057to talk about so every school has resource officers and could you speak to there's in my mind there's been some confusion i was under the assumption that while they're working in our buildings they have to follow our policies and when problems arise seemingly when it when it gets to the point that the resource officer is involved it seems like our policies are kind of irrelevant and they they kind of do whatever they're going to do and you know is that but is that legal or is that notable no and it's illegal to do it without getting the parents involved all good questions let's walk back for a couple of those things when i said no you'd ask me two questions and in fairness to the second part of that in terms of is that normal

058is it legal there's always two things going on when the resource officers because they're police officers so there's the crime which is burden-approved beyond a reasonable doubt and then there might be a school policy violation right that's not the same burden of proof and it's totally different thing so if they go totally the realm of crime we miss the school aspect of it so what happens a lot of times if the police liaison officer resource officer is interviewing a student an administrator is probably sitting in because the administrator we're going to look at a locker i've probably got both people there okay because one might be dealing with the crime piece to it and the other may be dealing with the school power so if i have the resource out routinely i've done expulsion hearings

059here but it's been a few years but when a resource officer comes in to testify and they start talking about what they're going to do over some municipal charge or state no way that's a different form different burden we don't want that event you tell us the evidence in the explosion case about the policy violations and the facts dealing with that it's irrelevant that the kid may have been charged that's not fair any of us can be charged right so there's two things going on and we've got to have the resources available to make sure we protect each one not definitely not just the crime base okay it's also a little bit of overlay between the statutes over communication between a school district and law enforcement over what's going on and i think the statutes

060quite frankly are better than they were 20 years ago it was much tougher because you want to share information not to hurt people to help people and if we got some harm going on with either sexual abuse or drugs or or physical abuse we got to be able to talk to each other and that's not to charge people wants to protect so there isn't further harm but i think the statutes are better about that anything broken yeah and i think just to touch upon a few of those additional points as well there is what we also want to be mindful of is is a lot of that we want to have well there is the criminal aspect in kind of separating separating the pieces of the school criminal and while the the law enforcement can

061relate to the the criminal aspect we also want to make sure that the school is is kind of taking the lead on a lot of the stuff so then we don't run into issues there are variety of issues but the main ones kind of being that they aren't acting as an agent of the state and then we run into various other criminal issues whether it's search and seizure related issues miranda and questioning and having to provide that notification and so that's where we need the school to kind of take the lead in that aspect as well so that's another kind of consideration that we want to make sure that we're we're square on so it's again back to that broad authority that the school has on those and whether it's searching a locker or uh

062talking to students uh things of that nature that's where we're going to want to have the school take the lead on that uh and they can certainly the the sro or the law enforcement can can be a part of that and present but it's more of us kind of a subordinate kind of a role in that aspect as well uh and again and then it goes back to a little bit like what jim was talking about just the sharing uh of the information i mean there are statutory provisions that as jim said are better now with with sharing information but we also want to make sure that they're designated that as the appropriate people to receive student record information if they need to under both federal and state uh people or student record laws as

063well and usually typically we'll see an agreement that kind of designates them or the board kind of formally does that as well so those are kind of some additional pieces that come to mind on this issue so let's go back to your question about when do we call the parents and can the policy be that administration meets with a student to say what happened and investigates without calling the parents yes that's legal to do that and more often than not you you're going to want to do that because again we may have other harm we have other concerns going on and we can't stop all of that to call somebody who may or may not be available or cooperatively we got to get so that's okay it isn't to keep information from parents it's not

064to exclude parents it's it's to protect the issue that we've got going on at the time in an expedient manner okay i know parents they don't always like that but most are going to understand that we're going to communicate with them over what the what's going on with it but that's the answer as to why it's because we had some safety issues where other people may be at harm and we've got to deal we've got to find out what's going on okay so we would be talking about and i'm not talking about serious like i completely get the safety aspect i'm talking about like minimal things here vaping in my opinion kids should not be going home with citations the parents should be getting contacted at some point to discuss it that's not a safety

065issue that's the parent show involved yeah yeah and could i could i ask related to that i guess it legal wise um is there where is the line or where's the point where um if they're working in our building is it is it still our decision as our administration's decision i guess that's been my question and it it seems like that's not always followed that it's once it's in the resource officer's hands it seems like it's their decisions and now it should be it should be a joint effort as we were saying before it's not once it's in their hands they run with it i don't ever want to do that quite frankly and worked on some pretty some pretty interesting cases with law enforcement when they're both uh i'll give you an example well

066let's talk specifically about what we're talking about student at the end of the school year we meet with student and teachers saying there's an allegation that there's sex going on between the two of you this is an adult reminder that's very serious enough student and teacher vehemently deny it and they're going to sue us because we've slandered them labor day weekend right before school is starting a student comes in and says last year when i told you this wasn't going on it is going on okay so now i have a situation that might be a crime but i also have a witness that at one time either then or now isn't being honest okay one of the stories isn't true but i also may have a criminal matter i don't want to bring the police

067in and just say you guys deal with it because i got a personnel matter and i don't want somebody charged sitting out there for six months where we're paying somebody for six months of disruption in the classroom so i'm never gonna turn it over i'm always gonna have two things going on so more often than not it's good communication between the district and the police department we in that case call the police department said let's work together on this you want to look at this as a crime we're going to look at it from a school district aspect but we don't want to be out or i'm not calling them in what you're not going to let them know a crime is going on well i don't know i want to work with them right

068so the rest of the story is we do with work with the police on that we work on how evidence is going to be investigated as to either what's happened in the past by talking to the student different dates different things what was said to friends but also what communications are going on between this teacher and the student now okay i don't want to get into all how evidence was collected but legally in terms of communication monitoring communications and other aspects of that police involved because they got the technology but they're sharing that information with us okay they meet with the teacher once they have all that information teacher says you got the goods on me i'm done they walked that teacher from that meeting into our meeting with administration and we say we understand

069you just confessed to that they said yes i did none now i'm not on hold for four or five months but that's communication between good communication between the police piece to that with with personnel and we can we work also police departments not that we're going to get a break but usually they're going to respect we're going to respect them and they're going to respect us and i will never ever just say you take it and run with it and then we're on the sidelines there's no info our cost no way only two times in 40 years has that happened one was a vehicular homicide where we had a way to put somebody on hold because it was so complicated based on the accident scene and the other one was they had a drug deal

070on an employment thing and and the feds were involved and we're working on the higher the chain aspect of it with the big fish over the drug deal i mean big time stuff we're done millions of dollars for the airports really interesting we had to sit on hold because we would have jeopardized that part of the investigation to the personnel just two times we'll always get in and try to get them all done there i want to follow up on john and general and we misrepresent what you're asking but i think the situation we've encountered and to me it's kind of do we have a right if a police officer is aware that a violation has taken place do we have the right if there are in our buildings to say you can't charge that

071person you're going to know better than me as a prostitute past prosecutor they're talking about it's mostly been disorderly conducts okay and i think technically i would say the answer is no but i think what it comes down to and what i have seen actually from kind of that law enforcement perspective is that um it's really about the environment and you kind of dictating that as far as you know it's your basically your property your building your premises things of that nature and they're there on behalf more or less of the district uh and it's more about setting i think the standard from your perspective uh that you know not everything is just going to result in some sort of a formal law enforcement action i think what you're talking about well we're speaking that's

072socially event citations right and so i think you know what happened what i have seen is that there was um a department that took a pretty strict uh approach as far as yep a lot of disorderly conducts were going on and the police were issuing tickets almost like gumdrops and the district was like whoa time out we don't want that kind of environment from the district's perspective we understand we're coming from but that's just not the environment we want to uh to have because then it's almost like law enforcement is over overriding and being the kind of the primary driver as opposed to an educational type of environment and so really i think it comes back to that communication with law enforcement technically we may not have authority but then what happens is that maybe

073they end up getting marginalized where situations might come up from the district's perspective and they'll be like maybe we aren't going to communicate as much with law enforcement we're going to take care of it from our school perspective because we know how they're going to handle it because they haven't necessarily respected our perspective on what kind of school environment we want to have and that where every everything isn't just an automatic law enforcement consequence so to flip that around if you in your dealings with school would you say getting the kid launched into the juvenile court system is more of a last resort instead of a first especially with smaller interactions like 12 years is it more of a coaching thing i'm like let's work together i mean i would say generally yes i mean

074even from my perspective i mean when i did uh municipal court and this kind of i think goes to it a little bit even when i think of the municipal judge and if uh cases came out of the school system the judge was actually always very deferential to what the school would want it would be a little bit of that last resort aspect it's it's kind of the final piece of the consequence puzzle uh and so even and that was something that both the judge had that perspective and that law enforcement would know that as well and then law enforcement i think also i think that's ultimately what it comes down to yeah i think the biggest challenge i see for myself as a school board member and having done one for a while is

075i know that we never see everything because we at the end of the day could be sitting in an expulsion hearing and we're supposed to be able to be neutral to that so there's a pretty steel stiff high wall between what we ever hear about an incident what really might have occurred or how many times it has occurred and it may come to us so my my child got this citation i don't have any idea if this child had been worn 12 times or once or no warning at all and quite honestly it's not my job to know that because if i'm going to set an expulsion hearing potentially i shouldn't know that that's his job to know that but it's not my job to know that i need to be a neutral arbitrator and

076so i'm always a little hesitant to say geez i got the whole story here that i know exactly why this you know it was a one-time thing and they gave him a citation what a horrible thing i i don't know that as a board member i think we can have that dialogue where the board can ask them to have that dialogue with the with the police department say what are you trying to achieve i mean we just came off a report from artist harlems we had 30 citations issued in a year in a school that holds 600-something kids i don't know if that's a lot or not i don't know what other schools are doing i have no idea so i'm this to me is a really tricky place because i i i didn't believe

077we had the right to tell police you can't cite somebody we're not a legal entity the school can deal with it as a school right you've violated our policies this is what your discipline will be if if there's anything but i don't we don't have any legal authority i think i think what um like when to get them involved in administrative maybe acting first because we're treating a lot of children 30 year olds like like i don't see the papers that are being served and i think we have a chance to be a reformative place in redirecting rather than hitting them with all of it at once two distinct things the citation piece to me is a totally different thing and i think at the end of the day if they want to be aggressive

078and they want to charge and they're going to do it i think they get to do that in that realm i agree with tony that then how it really works is communication between us and them or let me give you another example it's a little different but in the private sector if an employee was taking a little bit of money do we call the police and charge them maybe not we might work it out with the employee that they're terminated we might get some restitution that they pass back but we may not want the black guy that we want some big publicity that we had this yeah i'm not talking yeah you know so i don't think we get that luxury as much in the public sector because they got to be able to do

079their thing and that's the accountability to the taxpayers so it's a little different but i know by discussions with them that they got to have a pulse about what we want and if they're just running and charging everybody we're not going to have them without them we're still going to deal with their discipline that's why i say it's two separate things and ours is was there a policy violation the kid that's selling drugs during the summer that has nothing to do with school and during the summer it's frustrating it may be something you may want to know but we can't expel or discipline for that police are going to do what they're going to do now if i get an expulsion hearing and i got an issue that did happen in school and i get

080to the point in the meeting to say what do we think the you know what else comes into play not the statutory violations of the repeated refusal of the health and safety property but separate of all what might go just does this want an explosion that might bring in some evidence about here's some prior information that might be relevant to you not cited but actually paid the time maybe depending on what it is i don't think i've ever been in an expulsion hearing where outside information has been brought in such as civil crimes it's always been what's happened in our facilities usually not and i gotta tell you we hear a lot and it is frustrating to be a board member to say i need to know more i i never get the whole picture

081so usually in fairness that's true it's limited there may be some more heavy duty issues that happen that we might make relevant to that second question but you're right typically by the time we're sitting there this is pretty much a done deal they've created a scenario within our buildings and within the school policies that have put them in a very difficult place one of the things that's incorporated again we haven't done these for a while and we need to catch up just on but there's a piece incorporated into these hearings now about what remedial efforts have happened to date before we ever got here whether it's prior discipline or other stuff and i assume you add that to your aims if not we'll work with you on that piece to help you more say okay

082here's the other stuff that has been done and you probably are doing that that's pretty routine it shall be so given your experience in working with different districts and 20 years specifically can you look at our statistics as far as the number of citations that are given out versus the number of students and and so forth and give us an idea whether we're like you mentioned before they're dropping like gumdrops or no this is this is the norm that you know and um may not be information that i think would be would be helpful with this yeah and not even so much like a number but review like is this verbal that we issue a first morning and they have to go to court and they're 13. i mean i think there's more than just

083a number right and i yeah and i agree with you it's more than just a number i i think it's very abnormal for parents not to be involved whenever a citation is being issued and that's the biggest complaint i am hearing is they are so unbelievably unbelievably frustrated because they're not even phone calls one of the students phone was seized and they were sent home with the citation and the parents knew nothing about it until they picked them up see to me part of it's us but i mean that's a real police issue and something we got to talk to the police department to say you got to communicate yeah because again that's their forum you know that's not the district yes citation now we're saying site inside himself one more buy into that right

084i'm not suggesting we are but ours is the disciplined piece not the citation piece and they really are different things if my 16 year old gets a speeding ticket nobody calls me they just send it home with the kid and he either figures out how to pay himself and not tell mom and dad until the insurance company comes and says they tell me what are you doing yeah so i'm not sure where that is with your remedial steps i wrote that down because maybe you have a chance to redirect before right maybe we don't know that maybe we just call and say please handle it but we should be dealing with some more first it is not calling the police and say please handle it that is not that is not the i doubt that's

085the scenario here because it's always true things it's always two things is there a situation where the staff can't share that with us what they've been trying to do with that that student uh yeah this is not with the board and not in closed session you should be able to talk about that but again the information student records stuff student behavior record stuff so it's confidential the reason i ask that question is as we're working through this issue can we set up a closed meeting session where we can look at specific examples of where okay this student got got this citation for disorderly conduct but here's all the steps that we went through because there is record of it in in one of our one of our systems and also possibly talking with the municipal

086judge and um and i can't remember the name of when us a minor ghost municipal court they're represented by it it kind of depends uh in yeah i was gonna say it comes into there are a variety of things that are at play because it may be if it's a municipal court uh it's really it's more viewed as a civil offense or they may be in juvenile court which is more of a i'd say a criminal but it's it's a minority criminal so there's kind of there's a distinction in that sense so they aren't necessarily uh entitled to have say a guardian ad litem or someone that they may have in other sort of formal uh county proceedings but at the same point you know that's going to be confidential and you know as i'm

087listening to this i think it's all there are a few moving parts that go uh into this which includes you know how the police department's gonna handle it the municipal judge even the municipal prosecutor because i'll say just from my perspective if i saw a citation come through for a minor especially one that was say 12 13 the first call i was making was to the school and it was what's going on here what would you like to see happen what led up to this point why did they actually get a citation because the system was set up in a way in which it was if the citation came through you knew there were a series of steps that had already taken place to get to that point where i would see it then as

088a municipal prosecutor were all steps delineated uh with each school policy it wasn't it wasn't anything specific as far as kind of written down i think it was more like it was really an understanding i think that goes back to that communication aspect um with the the sros and the school district representatives as far as what the expectations were and so it would be really a three-part discussion between myself the school representative whether it's the principal or whoever it may be and the sro and we would all make sure we were on the same page and then we would also factor in what the municipal judge's perspective was and what we what we knew that he was going to get so and you know when i was uh in fact this the municipal judge most

089recently dealt with on this issue the district actually ended up giving him an award because of how closely he worked with the district on these sorts of situations so tony that's kind of what i've seen and comes to mind with this were you given direct information on the student discipline record or were you given more of a summation of what had happened uh a little bit of a general term both depending upon the circumstances so as that judge you were entitled to see the student i mean discipline records it was it was such in that uh because of that sharing of information between law enforcement and the municipality and the district and was relevant to the the underlying citation that that information would be available uh to again kind of get a picture of that

090so you had an idea as well as a discussion that this is the fifth time this has happened where it's escalated to this point so you had a better understanding of the history that brought the citation that's correct did that happen every time pretty much yeah i mean i really can't i can't think of a reason i can't think of an example when i was in that position for about five years where i remember a district when i talked to a district person they'd be like this citation was was issued like right away without kind of our knowledge of it so did to going back to mark's question if we were [Music] having the board was was taking on this issue of trying to figure out the sro in our discipline that could be conducted

091if we brought student records in that could be conducted in a closed session is that correct or am i wrong in whatever that was that was that was my question like a board workshop yes you know we're we're sitting down with the administrator of that building let's say um and you know or all the buildings and we and we do have some examples that have brought and brought to our attention where um we want to look at those on on an individual basis we're going to have an open conversation with the administrative team of that building what led up to the citation being issued and if there are and there should be records of previous discipline that might have led up to this that we can we can look at that that's why i was

092asking the question could even even the the the judge or um somebody from the municipal court be a part of that that conversation so we get a clear picture of all the things that went on versus only knowing maybe ten percent of of what real really happened and then you're saying that would be in closed session right that would be an absolute session so yeah yeah so we'd be i guess basically we would be able to talk freely and and look at the information without worrying about you know like you know ex exposing that student's record for the public and and so sure um if we're in the middle of an explosion case probably not okay in these cases so the best way is tony and i did a workshop on another school board just

093on expulsions and this was part of that discussion over let's get a good handle on what kind of direction does the board like to go with these kind of things what kind of recommendations does the administration make and when and then what what do you kind of know and that's what i would come in and you can look at that specific student information from closed session has to be in closed session is it but is that on the basis that they're going to be expelled for expulsion because none of these none of the examples that we've been talking about it is remotely close to expulsion we just want to see what the path is yeah and is that a closed session yes well i think it would have to be that's what i'm asking i

094guess i think it has to be yeah because it's student confidential information anyway what gets you into closed session is it the reason for doing it is that we're going to um to program the evaluation well the program evaluation versus we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna make a decision whether this was the right thing that was done for this particular student or not because i don't want to go down okay right yeah that's the way i'm reading your question it's more of an education piece moving forward right yeah you can't do anything about it right you know and and you know and it's really just uh it it really sounds like it's just the disorderly conduct citations that there's this there's this gray area because of their if they're if they're if they're um bullying

095through sex text through texting you know that's a they broke the law you know if they they they brought a gun to school they wrote the law right you know um and it seems like disorderly conduct that maybe maybe i'm wrong maybe there's more areas that are just as gray as disorderly kind of conduct because that's usually yeah but to me that that's a different thing i mean it's a different form that's different decisions for you it's taking those facts to say how did that violate policy how did that violate school rules well if it was a case of where they where another student hit another student you know right so it could be a school a violation because you can't fight and it may or may not be disordered a charge you know it's

096a different form that's why i'm saying it's always two things and our focus is on the policy thing regardless of what the police do we don't want people to run around charging everybody but again what they do and that's what i say when it comes to you if that's pending because they charge the kid i don't want i don't let that into the hearing because that's not fair because he hasn't been convicted okay i thought he's charged does that make sense it's a different form it's a different burden of proof it's a different thing same facts fight in the cafeteria might get charged battery you know worst case scenario maybe seriously hit somebody we're just dealing with the school rule aspect and whether that violated the health saving property at school i think from the

097board's standpoint if i'm kind of following where this discussion has gone amongst us is trying to determine if our sro program is being over aggressive or if it is in fact doing what it should be doing when it does it right and so i think that's kind of that's the question of if we decided to you know how do we evaluate that without having more background on what's happened before the citation was issued because when i look at it the numbers alone it's less than five percent of our population have been issued a citation that's high or low i have no idea because i don't run around asking people but i also don't know as i was saying earlier i don't know any of the previous circumstances so if we were trying to determine if

098our program was being over aggressive or was about where it belonged or without having the ability to see at least some of the cases where we see a record of behavior previous to it that this is built on it don't you get that exposure we're not talking about talking about the citation process got it yeah and so okay and also explosion i know is this this would be do we have the right to hold a meeting in closed session to where we're reviewing citations against behavior records to you know what was the what was the build of discipline until they got to that and we're let's say we're looking at 15 citations and we're trying to see the students and maybe it's student x so we don't actually have a name oh sure but here's

099the records to say it looks like our our people are doing the police are doing a reasonable job of not issuing a citation until they feel it's the next level of discipline that might be required i think i think the idea of meeting with them with the sro the police department and the municipal judge would also be a great step forward i don't necessarily know that that can be in closed session though because we wouldn't necessarily be talking about but maybe we're out of that maybe we're out of that at that point well now the board has to give direction if we want him to do it right and we've got to say we think you should have a discussion to me i think the communication as you've defined is the biggest key how do

100you three work together and are you as a municipal judge contacting the school to say hey what's up with this because to your point they can hear what what the previous record has been what the discipline issues have been and decide this is a child who apparently isn't learning a lesson because they've had opportunities or this just looks like a kid who did the wrong thing at the wrong time and maybe there is no you know the citation is dismissed or it's what is it left open i believe which means there's no there's no fine and just don't muck up again or you'll be back here and there will be right at what point like do you have you guided any other districts or maybe other administrative levels on when do you get the sro

101involved when it's not like you just said personal safety um is that just the personal discretion thing and a coaching thing maybe amongst like you just said maybe it's a call with everybody it varies from district to district the bigger districts the appletons of the world are going to have an sro in every high school at least one right there's a specific contract with them and then there are meetings to talk about how do we kind of want to work together both statutorily and communication and and then also board theory of where we in administrations or where we want to be going with something those conversations like they're almost part of the school district's staff this is well and that's how we look at ours that's what ours are yeah you look at their job

102which is part of our policy their job description is pretty clear that if it's a legal issue not a school discipline issue if there's been a law broken they have the right to make whatever charge they feel is appropriate correct but at what point is that we can't tell them that because they're 13 you can't charge them and nobody's saying that terry no i know but that i'm just saying that's pretty clear there's some there's some leeway in the reformative ways that i was going on like the remedial steps that maybe is a conversation about right i think if we don't have a better background on is this is this just oh you broke the law or you violated the law here's your citation where whereas this well this is the fifth time you've been

103talked to and so far you haven't learned anything right i don't think unless we have that information we're really prepared as a board to say we're doing the sro is not doing their job or the sro as well i don't know i don't think everyone's saying that they're not right so well i think we're considering it because we don't have to have sro officers that's a choice we make as a district whether we choose to follow that route that's a board just doesn't matter that's a boarding ship we have basically one full-time sro in high school one halftime sro in the middle school and one half time sro that circulates now that's a little bit fluid because if there's problems you know they do it they're bringing it with each other that's your size kind

104of sense the fact that yeah would that make sense we had basically double the disorderly contract in the part time of the middle school versus the high school in last school year yeah when you compare those numbers that's where i was kind of like yeah well and and having a conversation with the sros they made a really good point high school kids are of age and certain things once you hit age 16 are treated differently than when you're 12 and 13. and so a the kids know that they've got something that could end up on their record permanently where the kids here don't and i think that has a lot to do with the discrepancy between the numbers because that's that's what i i saw too what i've gotten from what i've gotten from this

105conversation so far is there's two things that we can do so we can go ahead and we can schedule a closed session to review this process and we're we're legally able to go ahead and do that and ask the questions that we want to do and then the question about uh communication from the school to the parents we just have to revise a policy or write a policy that states that one of the administrators in the building has to make contact attempt to make contact with the parents and record it somewhere because we all know that not everybody's parents are home during the day and a lot of times we could be dealing with four possible guardians and i called terry but you and terry don't live together anymore and terry didn't share it with

106you right right yeah and that and i think more often than not he doesn't live under the rock that you live under but i mean i think i think a lot of times that that's what happens from an administrative standpoint and i know the police department sends a letter out to every citation recipient within within 24 hours but that's just what that's what we're doing i just want to address the answer to the legal question the meaning that you're talking about the part that you're dealing with specific juvenile records is closed some of that same meeting might be open that's general policy aspects of how you may deal with the sro business and then an open session say based upon what we discussed this is this is what we're going to do it's kind of

107like when we're approving a a new height or when we're negotiating on on real estate based upon what just happened in the back room so to speak in closed session now we're going to make this make this offer i just i just wanted to be careful that we didn't come away just say we can do that in regards to your communication piece though like i have picked up on your piece of like are we all on the same page and hard to move forward like that's the biggest thing i've taken away from it because maybe that's an easy i mean it's not in closed session but it's maybe it's an easy policy and you bring all the affected parties in like you just said and like what direction do we want to go how do

108we want to yeah yes i'm not talking about like us meeting with anybody i'm talking about scott is in the office with the municipal the cro was having them sit down and be like what is the direction i agree but i think if the board like i said has ultimate control over whether we have an sro officer right and if we don't think it's working the way we want to it may be changing officers but it also may be saying we're not going to do this right now or is it just a communication to start with on like are we already doing this it could be i like the idea of getting also together though with the municipal jokes and anybody who's involved so we all have a clear understanding of how that process works

109after that citation is issued they open that was one of the things that i learned from conversation is that about 90 of the citations that flow through municipal court for situations we're talking about they end up as open and that's the way it ends because the student has they've done so they didn't have to plead well they no i can't remember what the specific process is and um i think they have complete but there's community service that is offered to them yes yeah there are there's a number of rights yeah just my experience through the juvenile court system i'm just kidding i just got you've had more communication with families on this than any of us do you do you have any additional questions on this sure well i know that sometimes you know when

110a citation is issued you know you think the the progressive or restore of actions that you're always going to think of first all right you know student a did something right we're going to talk to him or her we're going to bring him in we're going to try to grow them as a person so they don't do it again all right for whatever reason that same action has again and maybe there's a consequence that's established within as it continually elevates up to a point all right we've had this conversation parents have been informed our approaches aren't working that opportunity or that person gets a citation that's warranted through municipality ordinances that could be an end result but i just want to put out there sometimes there's actions by students that kind of supersede that from

111zero to ten and it might be a fight and it might be uh something so egregious that has to be acknowledged in a way that this is so untolerable that this is the solution now based on that situation with intent and purpose that yes we want to take a person through a growing and learning process to try to stop that so it doesn't get to right away but sometimes that that happens and i think that's where subjectivity of the environment is placed on that administrator okay perhaps that sro officer that's probably a little more black and white you know because this happened disorderly anything can be disorderly contact if you look at it a certain way you know but it also takes that subjectivity of that admin team to say did it affect anyone else

112in a negative way did other kids have to jump back step aside a teacher intervene run the risk of separating and intervening those all play and i think to that decision so that that adds into that first time person versus you know an event where okay i've been talking with you for how many times we're working with you and this is my only choice so and there is no playbook on that at least in my opinion so that's something we just all have to be conscious of and that doesn't always sit well with that first-time family because hey this student was never in trouble never had an issue but for whatever reason on that day something didn't go the way it should and so and i think so that's where that challenge is being able

113to see through that and understand and learn and move forward in a way that is that behavior continuing well if it's not whatever that process was that was deemed appropriate has made an impression that child is now doing what they're supposed to do we accomplished our time we probably beat this topic today we're here to talk about what you wanted it was yeah you know tony or jim you know with that and then i guess that scenario there that i presented or no i think that's all helpful and that's why i say the discussion is good because when you get together to talk about just what we just talked about that's really important but add to that even beyond the citation the sro communication communication with parents that's critical but then also how do they

114expose and what happens from an administrative point before we ever get to that it's okay to have a workshop on that someday to talk about that what kind of recommendations are made and why and what goes into those you know you don't get that you get a hearing that's not sometimes that's not helpful right so you can do a workshop on that and talk about those kind of who goes to those workshops well that's that's plus so i know but i didn't know if you can you invite other people in to that specific topic like i just think i'm back to this communication the collaboration part like i mean we do do that and i don't know or are we and is that helpful maybe it'd be a great tool well i think it would

115be you know something to talk to ann about it's her building you know yeah i'm even back to like him talking you know being you you were not you were the prosecutor but the prosecutor actually like like is there an open communication they feel like they can call laura shaw do they feel like they can call the sro would they like they call a building the conversations i have that you're talking about the parents can they call no no i was talking about him when he said hey how do you want to handle this like what's oh like are we already doing that i'm the judge yeah the judge was calling you you were calling the school yes and then he has the prosecutor as a prosecutor the prosecutor was calling the school and then

116bringing in the sro for perspective and i'm like well maybe that's do we do that i know you is that helpful i don't know and that would be part of that conversation i said getting together with them yeah and finding him getting some answers to those those maybe our expectation is as a board what i'm hearing is one thing that i've heard everybody agree upon is we want to make sure that there's an overabundance of communication between yes the parties involved that's where i keep one actually i think relative to notifying the parent that may be something we could do in a handbook i don't believe it's policy necessarily required yeah as far as the citations like um that officer said they're very low citations that's not what i'm hearing the grumble on it's there

117is no communication the parents aren't being told anything they're they're getting a letter from the police department within 24 hours i want i would want to call from the school but the school that's the school right but they're getting the sro involved that's their getting them involved what i was of the told the school has already called before the the the police department has attempted to make a call went forward sent the letter that's why i think maybe what we need to do is make sure if school is calling we're recording that and maybe we are maybe and and then again that challenge and basic 50 of the families out there are split families the challenge of making sure that that communication is happening after we've communicated with them yeah and uh well and i

118i think potentially a little bit of of reinforcement of the idea you're working for the school district and if that isn't if that part isn't what we want isn't working well then maybe terry's idea is that the way we end up because there seems to be this separation that they pass it on that they that they are still just working for the police department and they're working on our building but if we're paying their wage they really need to adhere to our policies and not just be doing the same old as if it happened in the outside world that's kind of where i was at with the collaboration part like we want to get out of this let's all be on the same page well and just uh that did remind me as well this

119is kind of that point i've seen places where they'll change law enforcement agency because of these sorts of issues uh or i've also seen uh circumstances where even in the school district is involved as part of the selection process in the department for who is going to be that uh and that's even into the collective bargaining agreement i mean all sorts of circumstances correct we pay we don't pay their full weight no so they're technically not just working for russia and they also still are being paid by the police department it's like a contract employee we have a member of the later standing with experts as i recall we have a contract with the police department they work for the police department but it's under the contract specified by us and when we went to

120that there was no reduction in manpower in our building we just we did that and what i get my in my mind the question i always run into is okay we we're we're offloading duties to them and they're taking care of this obviously duties that used to be taken care of by either the principal the vice principal or the dean of students and you know this is on top of that yeah this my frustration lies in okay we've taken that duty we've turned it over to our sro our officer and all of a sudden that that blend where they don't really work for us anymore i guess that that's my frustration in the mix no i don't think it works that way from the conversations i've had with our administrators is that they are there

121go ahead scott because you're you know i would i would say that it's if we did not have an sro working for us on the campus some of the incidences would still be making that call after the admin addresses whatever those situations i would be calling the the pd to come over and to address that situation from their eyes as well so having that sro on campus that admin person had better be doing their responsibilities to triage it out and insist and know where they are and what the circumstances are process through it and if it is something that warrants that support from the sro okay they're there to come in and that makes sense do that type of thing but i but i don't know if it's okay man you're the sro we have

122uh whatever the case is it's yours that shouldn't be happening that there should be that yeah oversight triage process collaborate please come assist because of a b and c yeah that type of matter yeah that should be the bottle so i don't think we want to throw the maybe out with the bath water because it's working extremely well at high school at least i'm not saying there's no problems i'm just saying from a standpoint of complaints that go above the principal level um we're not seeing them come from the high school which is a bigger invite slightly bigger environment and has a full-time estrogen we're seeing you know personally i've had five parents complain and have passed them on or you know ask them to contact scott and go from there but i mean that's

123i've never had that in all the years that you know and i i almost just say i appreciate their presence and i think the kids really like them and i think they're a positive influence i do think it's when do we refer and let's get on the same page what do we want out of this agree i can take that information and start to collaborate with an opportunity whether it be with chiefs leader and members of the board or admin team to start looking at them or mou and we're i think we have one more year left of that you know so that's a a starting point and incorporating in lori shaw and the city attorney but i believe from what i hear is part of that process let's tell you what's going on what

124do you want my biggest from this is maybe maybe we're not doing that and that's a nice starting point you know maybe we are i don't know i agree good discussion you guys [Music] were that we're seeing and obviously uh one of those is the transgender uh issue and so really when we look at it we've we'll kind of consider what the terms uh that are involved uh and just so again to kind of understand the different terminology that's being used we can kind of understand uh what the claims are what we need to look out for things of that nature we've got uh gender dysphoria which is really a person's geared towards their uh that is being a psychiatric condition that's uh in the diagnostic and statistical manual five uh so that is a

125a particular disorder that is listed in there so so we're seeing that and we have gender identity which is essentially uh say i'm i'm born as a male and i identify or feel like a female that would be my gender identity aspect and then we have gender expression which is say if i was uh choosing to dress as a female so to speak so again just a little bit to make sure that we're on the same page as far as the terminology that's being used and that factors into a little bit of the the legal analysis as well and how courts view what is ultimately uh viewed as sex discrimination and how is the term sex defined is it gender is it that sexual uh stereotyping the the traditional rules male females things of that

126nature that's what the courts are looking at and then the ability to again express uh the gender and then so looking at that and considering this parental notification aspect that that is involved and so we have here for example we've got the madison school district lawsuit and then now as of late last week i believe it was friday the eau claire school district was sued with respect to their transgender policy and the eau claire policy in which uh that they were sued over it is pretty similar as far as the parental notification aspect as was in the madison school district and ultimately what that involved is really kind of keeping parents out of that process or not notifying them and so these are just kind of some of the the issues that we're seeing out

127there and what has created litigation with this aspect and again trying to really parse through that and then understand and how to balance uh you know keeping parents involved informed as well as providing an environment for the student and then considering things such as where where is where are we in the process you know this is really kind of a case-by-case uh evaluation the two degree is it what's the the age of the child how far along are they in this process have they taken initiative to say change their legal name or are there specifical medical issues that have come up or psychiatric issues so those are all kind of parts of the factor that kind of go into this issue and again just to touch upon the terminology that's being used where some of

128the litigation we're seeing on this issue and why at this point so let me talk about one of the other cases and why is this even in schools can we get to the point to just say we want to teach reading and writing and not get into the social issues okay so there's a case out of kenosha several years ago and there were two legal pieces that came into play and then i want to mention those first and i'm going to fold back to the facts okay the legal implications when we take federal money for any purpose we're kind of biting into the poison because the title nine pieces to those and the federal laws that you take our money you're gonna abide by these rules and these rules through title nine say you're gonna

129abide by the transgender issues and some of the other social policy issues put forth by the department of education and others i'm not saying i agree or disagree i'm just saying how does the litigation get tied into our schools all the school districts take federal money if we had a way to budget where we weren't taking federal money we wouldn't be into some of those requirements that get forced upon us so i'm just answering the question how come we get we get this that's one of the major reasons and that's part of what happened in kenosha the second major legal tie in the school districts is the equal protection clause under the constitution is the argument that gets used and we all got to abide by that meaning when government makes decisions it has to

130treat people equally well why don't we just go to biologicals you know as people are born and we'll keep it very neutral and say boys go hear biological boys go here and biological girls go there that's neutral and that was the position of the kenosha school district and unfortunately the courts including which is the seventh circuit court of appeals okay and that's us okay they say that's an equal protection issue so it's beyond just getting tied in because we take federal money what happened in kenosha is that some of the facts is um a female student uh felt they wanted to be a guy and associate with both gender identity to be male and then dressed as a male went beyond the norm in terms of just saying i want to do this but had

131a psychological treatment and a medical background to say based on the gender dysphoria piece to say this can be identified as a medical condition psychologically so had the medical support to say this was the way this was also in other medical conditions to say that if not associating here and forced to go here was potentially suicidal and had other physical impacts to having to do other aspects the district said we're going males males females females but they couldn't demonstrate that there were any privacy concerns that any students ever raised the facts described that and it had to do with bathrooms at the time that the bathrooms had privacy pieces put into that that the transgender student said i just always use one of the stalls if they were going to sit down and go to

132the bathroom as opposed to one of the urinals some of the districts have the privacy things within even the urinals so that there's no the court's talking about this to say there isn't any privacy issues in the bathroom as the facts were developed and so the district couldn't show impact so impact was important because it's kind of like the gun cases got cases going both ways with a shirt that shows a gun one of the cases we had and we were able to show impact because there had been a threat of a shooting a couple weeks earlier in other aspects another district couldn't show some of that and that court said you don't have to show our court said you don't have to show as much impact the other side you did there's a split

133in wisconsin over some of that kind of stuff so the court kind of put us in a position to say unless you get substantial complaints and show actual impact the student could show medical impact the rest of the students couldn't and actually never complained and they had done it for about six months without any issues okay for that case the courts also said and there clearly is a split it's going to go to the supreme court at some time is they say that under the analysis of sex discrimination and equal protection the gender piece i'm cutting through a lot of the analysis but the gender piece in their mind is protected i'm not saying i agree and disagree i'm just saying what the seventh circuit court of appeals has said some of the other court

134of appeals and some of the rest of the country say no it's not it's not protected under sex discrimination that's why it's going to go to the supreme court when differences in different parts of the country it eventually gets to the supreme court historically sexual preference was not protected under sex discrimination until a couple years ago and wisconsin clearly is in the statute and the feds it isn't that went to the supreme court a couple years ago and the court said oh yes it is okay at least from that analysis but they have split in courts court of appeals for the country and they found that it is will it shock us if they decide that transgender is also sex discrimination eventually at the federal level i don't know because the court has changed since

135the other decision so i don't know the answer i guess i may not be shocked either way quite frankly it's a little bit more conservative court right now so maybe they won't go where the other court did okay without federal legislation okay state law kind of suggests that they'll cover that so then we're tied back to state law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex 118.13 there you go you're right and you know we have a broader state statute again i'm not saying what's right wrong i'm just telling you how the analysis gets done and where some of this stuff comes from but that doesn't mean you've got to adopt the model policies that are all coming through and we're working on it with you a number of districts to sort of say you

136know we're gonna we don't want we don't want to harm kids we don't we just don't want to be a social experiment that's coming from other areas that's what we're hearing from a number of boards as well as just though bostock versus clayton was the supreme court ruling in 2020 i believe correct that's the one that said sexual preference will be covered as sex discrimination if i'm understanding that right because i believe it identified it was again a bathroom issue the complaint was a person called ash i'm sorry that's the that's exactly the kenosha you're right that's pasta so boston went to the supreme court and their decision as i've read it was you can't talk about bathrooms without talking about sex and said that in that case this was again i think sexual identity

137gender identity and i think i don't remember the other term was covered under sex discrimination and as such you had to follow the federal laws right well and this was the supreme court in 2020 i believe is the case um when it comes to sports we have a policy right now that basically we haven't finished in our policy committee yet but i think we left it saying we will not discriminate in in sports but we will follow the guidelines of wiaa which basically has a fairly robust process for a male a bio male to claim to be gender identity and participate in a female program i don't know if we have anything going the other way but have to participate in a fairly robust process uh take hormonal treatments for a certain amount of time

138and then you are allowed now we can we can follow that because wiaa basically has set the terms for participation and we belong to that association i would think any case would be brought up against them and not against the schools because we're just saying hey this is the association that runs sports in wisconsin they've determined what requirements are made but i guess my question is we we have no we have to follow the laws as they exist today is that correct so we have to align with 118.313 because we're in wisconsin school and that's the state statute which cover which is a law regarding nondiscrimination is that correct well of course you've got to follow the law and then you've got to follow the laws that's interpreted by the courts when there's confusion under

139what that statute may be like i was talking about has the state statute been contested it's it was not talked about in pasta it was not rough that was a that was a federal analysis right so i'm trying to think of well it's being discussed in eclair and madison but there's different nuances of what we're talking about okay one might be the use of participation in sports one might be use of a bathroom one like the use of shower rooms one might be does all your emails have to say what everybody's pronouns are okay so it depends on what that all means and that's where we're looking at each of these nuances in policy because we're not convinced that either the statute or the federal law suggests that your email policy has to reference pronouns

140okay yeah so at this point you know it's being chunked into pieces from the sounds of things yes today the bathroom locker room issue seems to be at least have been decided in federal courts and at bostock in the supreme court now until another case goes supreme court does bostock stand as the law it does but again it depends on the facts that we're dealing with to what degree and what we're working on as to what degree does a policy say as does the court it takes more than just saying i'd like to use the women's shower okay i agree with that i mean we've talked about is there some process of for lack of a better word affirmation that in fact right because nobody that i know wants to see this process become well

141boys are showering with girls so and so forth i think the affirmation process is critical because i can guarantee you we'd find one one jughead in school watching one day and says hey i'm a girl today i want to use that how do how do we prevent that while still abiding with the laws well that exists based on that do you remember like a policy committee maybe like a year ago and i brought the wiaa policy and i requested everyone to read it because that did have the steps for an affirmation right no i'm just saying like right i i think we've actually i believe you you've started to look at how we implement that in two weeks we started working our way through the that process so we still align with 118.13 we still

142align with the civil rights act we still align with the [Music] title nine title seven but put a put a reasonable process in place that says this this is about a very serious process of going through a series of i don't know what you'd call them they're certainly not tests but a process of consulting and identifying so that this is about a person who really is having this situation and that's what we're working on and we'll work with you on is what's that level of affirmation that's going to be upheld is that why you brought the wia policy yes i mean i think it's just kind of part of all of this discussion is that what a lot of schools are basing their policy off of no not not standing alone okay because it doesn't

143cover all the nuances and it's really different from district of district there are two policies one is relative to interscholastics and parties participation in and that's the one that has wia attached to it and because they are the i guess the organization the association that governs participation in interscholastic sports in wisconsin the other is 411 which is our policy of non-discrimination they're two separate ones as a policy committee i think we've come to a agreement we haven't gone back to it that in interscholastics we will follow wia guidelines which has a like i said a pretty robust process that the persons have to go through if they're trying to participate as a transgender in a different sport than bio the 411 is discrimination 1 is harassment and bullying those are the ones that i'm that

144i think are the challenge because the laws to date say you can't discriminate and they have called out about 15 things we can't discriminate on and they'll probably be more as we go forward but so far the courts not everywhere the appellate courts are going different directions but the standing court so far from supreme is bostock versus clayton which says this is covered under sex and you cannot discriminate is that correct right that's right that that is correct the amount of could we just take the wia policy and put it into your school policy for other purposes probably not right because that standard is lower than the robust one for sports is we're looking at it but that's the challenge because there's definitely how much is enough i'm not sure how legally we could force

145anybody to take hormone treatments at 15 years old i mean i don't want to go down that we're not forcing them we're just saying if you you know the policy of the w but w-i-a-a w-i-a says if you want to participate this is the process you have to go through but that's different than using a bathroom right absolutely there are two separate things that's why it's a difference very different gym yeah in the community there's four areas that are controversial and and i think i've discussed those the the first and the biggest one is no transitioning without full parental approval not just one parent in a divorce family but full parental approval um and that's that goes to that case of of madison madison and eau claire right now i think that's where the courts

146will be that's where the restraining of the injunctions are so far the second one um uh is pronouns um you know i don't think people want us to have a severe disciplinary policy against people that accidentally use the wrong pronouns either for staff or for students and the other pronoun piece goes more with one because uh we do we do not you know the community i think and parents do not want their kids asked what pronouns should be used without full parental ascent so that's the pronoun piece the third thing is um bio males on girls teens and the last one was the one you've already talked about the bathrooms locker rooms and showers and i think we've always realized that's going to be the toughest one but on the bio i want to go

147back to the bio males and those teams there's at least there's about 10 states i believe that have laws that say no bio no bio males on girls teams florida is one south dakota is one correct me if that number is wrong but um uh and none of those have been declared null and void by the courts as of this point so can't we um have a policy that instead of the wia policies is basically no no no bio mails on girls teams well a couple of things you're talking beyond transgender issues no bio males and girls so we're not saying nonsense the biological male took the last spot on the 12 roster volleyball team but why wouldn't you just follow the directive of the w-i-a and again i'm not arguing with you because it's

148simply just to say no bile meals and it doesn't apply the other thing well it would have to then i'd have to say you if you're if you're talking male female why do they get to compete on well because i think you would have created two standards which and they wrestled with the boys to prepare for it yes yeah yeah but you know that title 9 is going to suggest that we may not be able to do that as strictly if we don't offer a comparable alternative for the other we left boys and dance we'll say say girls basketball boys basketball you have a vile male that wants to play on the girls basketball team can we have a policy with basically i think the wiaa would support that example that you're talking about within

149the policy that they had what was that situation you have a really good female basketball player that you put on the male team but you say we're not gonna who wants to be let's say okay i think the w.i.a policy if i understand that right says you gotta play with your mom the florida law doesn't address the other way around it simply addresses no bio meals the genetic it's the genetic superiority or whatever they went through and they're basically saying the title ix across the country and they're basically saying it's a title nine thing it's it's it's kind of a bullying thing you know that swimmer that right at the university of pennsylvania right basically that they're trying to protect against that type of scenario and i haven't seen anything out there where any court

150ruled that law wrong you know or a violation of any would we want to go there if we already have a sanctioning association setting a rule for participation i have to ask them that but i think you know i think that would be a popular rule in this in this city i think we'd have to look at that a little closer because i don't know if those states have like the equivalent of a wa standard where we do and to the ix it's going to be more difficult to step away from that i think successfully legally but we'd have to look i'd have to look at that what are you seeing other schools do in regards to that or they just don't address it unless it comes up like i don't know i feel like

151that's what everybody's doing yeah wow i think most i don't know anybody that's doing anything different than the wia as far as the wria standard just so you know okay and i and that's just for the athletics yeah but the wia isn't coming in and saying you must allow that bio-mail they're just saying that if you do here's it has to be on this standard so um and so that's that's what that's what i have in in discussions with different different other you know athletic directors and other districts i mean that there's no enforcement on that and especially now the diocese of green bay has said absolutely no males bio males and girls teams no bio uh girls and male teams you know a boy is a boy a girl and they're part of the

152wia and many schools are part of the wia my feeling is the wia isn't gonna walk away from that much dues and say we're we're ex-communicating because of you don't you don't allow this but the different issue they're going to get there that they've got to respect is the religious component that we don't similar to get health providers that either produce certain drugs now or not based on the ruling the other day but they get to participate within the wia umbrella right they had to because they couldn't support themselves without wia didn't have know schools competing i know that but i'm just saying the wa doesn't have anything right we're a public school yeah but we we could say why why are you treating xavier uh high school this way and we don't get to

153that religion constitutional religious issues that overlay that we don't but the wia policy doesn't say anything about that it's just i'm sure i can't speak for them but i'm sure they're walking that tight rope too because now they've got you know sex discrimination the title nine pieces and the religious peace constitutional stuff with that so they're i i don't know what though i can't speak for them yeah but they're boy that's an issue waiting to happen i don't know i'm just saying i'm just saying if we did that if we had that policy here can you defend it we'll look i want to look at that a little closer let me ask this question would we be more susceptible to being sued if we had that policy versus going and then our job as the

154board is to make sure that we don't put ourselves in a position to to endanger the school district a lawsuit and that would be that would be my reason for not for not putting something like that in our policy chris we've got protection that through the wiaa plan but we go out on a limb by ourselves we are we're we're a target you're a lightning rod there are such thing as suits by parents of girls that say this is wrong and i'm suing the school for allowing this to happen you're you're liable either way so you might as well do what is the right thing it's an opinion of yours it's the right thing right now the the statutes just say we cannot discriminate against these children that that's pretty straightforward that's not discrimination anytime

155you you separate one person or a group of people from the others and say you can't do this but these can you are opening up discrimination i think those laws would have been struck down if you were right about that boss stock boss stock still stands chris i i think there are ways one of the things that concerns that i know but one of the things that concerns me if you want to know why we don't hear a lot about transgender because these children tend to hide in the shadows they have a tough enough life they don't need to come out put a spotlight on themselves and say i'm a transgender 40 years ago gay people were doing the same thing they hid in the shadows they didn't come out and say i'm gay somewhere

156in the decade of the 90s they decided they were going to make a move and say we're going to live our lives the way we want we're gay people wonderful we're at a stage now where these people have chosen to exercise their rights at least as they stand today under the constitution the laws of the country and laws of the state we take an oath to follow federal and state laws i don't think we should be the test case if the laws are here and our attorneys say these are the laws i don't want to be the test case we don't owe that to anybody well that's why we're asking the question well i've asked the question our estate statutes 11813 is non-discrimination it's pretty clear what it covers now somebody will take it up

157i have no doubt but i don't think i want to have him take it up we all have a fiduciary responsibility i don't want to spend a boatload of money on lawyers lose a case and get fined a lot of money that's not good policy it's not doing our job in my opinion as board members if we're following the laws whether we agree with them or not that's our job and relative to the private schools i gotta believe somebody's gonna start going after them they're taking voucher money that's federal money that's state money somebody's gonna sue guarantee it we are a country that loves to sue well it sounds like jim you saying you can research and tell us whether this is defensive what we can do is is the best we can predict when

158the law is unsettled in some of these areas some of it's worked out some of it it's clearly not like i said earlier there's a split amongst the court of appeals some of it's going to go to the supreme court eventually on some of these issues with it is is you decide policy why where you want to go and our job is to say what are your chances of success if a majority of you want to go a certain direction because you're right but what kind of opinions what layers do you see as still on trouble like you just said like what categories is it the sports is it some of the sports stuff is not and again keep in mind even the the kenosha case that under these facts the transgenders protected but these

159facts pushed it over to protect the suggestion is that there's no threshold you know there's no somebody who comes in and says i just want to use the shower with the girls this afternoon the court didn't say that that's protected because they said i relate as transgender um so something so there's a fact differences to where's the bright line gonna be where a policy like the wia says to do this you got to do a b c and d we don't have that a that's not set in stone to say that's okay that'll get litigated but then in schools it's a different threshold kenosha facts nobody really argues with that so much because the facts were way up here in terms of the threshold with no impact okay the privacy concern was just using a

160closed door bathroom in a stall versus showering with no wide open group shower scenario okay those are two that's not all clear yet in terms of where's the shower thing isn't clear the bathroom because of impacts um because of impact and privacy concerns of others as you weigh these interests so what's happening practically as you're remodeling as you're doing other things we're setting all the privacy issues to make it a non-impact well okay let's go back let's go back to the the easiest one because i think we have universal uh buy-in for the board on this correctly from wrong board members but the parental uh the parental rights thing in other words uh can we have a policy that says no transitioning within our schools without full parental uh or guardian approval there's there's an

161issue of illness and there's issues of approval barring a court order or something like that that has to do with it that's where it looks like it's it's definitely heading as far as that that you're not going to do things because the student just says do this that's madison eau claire we took that position before even these cases just don't do that there is the argument was well if i go home and say something i could get beat up or in harm's way well we have laws that protect that if we have reason to believe that there could be abuse at all we have laws that protect that earth and we don't need to use that wall right right so the status of the madison thing right now the last i heard there was a

162temporary injunction against the school district for uh doing that policy is that still on and is the case still not settled or what was the policy allowing that a child to transition approval or notice so and the court said now we're going to put that on all but it's the pending year yeah that that case they issued a decision i think it was in may it might have been june but it really was a lot of really it was a technical legal argument about who we had standing and uh because of the confidentiality and who were the students that were involved did the parents have an actual claim so it was a lot of procedural wrangling um and then who the that all applied to so that kind of all went away um and i

163think it's kind of still working its way through i think it was sent back down to the lower court to make some additional kind of specific findings on this uh that sort of issue so it's been a lot of legal procedural stuff that's been going on and nothing else new has come up on that case as of late in the last couple of months but then the eau claire one is now the more recent development so is there a statute or a law that allows a student to change their pronoun at age 15. there's not a statute that i'm aware of yeah the only thing i can think of is just it would that would be this the effect or secondary effect if they went through the court procedure to uh to formally they could

164informally change that if that's yeah so they do have a legal recourse they can take to legally change their pronouns and did in my country case and that that was another fact that they did that but would that be without parental approval yeah would that be with trent it's without i believe chris that's why there's a that's a year 14 15 when i get started it's somewhere in there yeah it's somewhere in there and then it's a formula it would certainly give a parental notification because court records are public right so in other words at least the parent would be notified i don't know not necessarily because i think it's under depending upon the age and there may be a minor so when we try to think of what those dead shorter requirements are getting

165off the top of my head but can we go back to just i want to make sure i heard this right so if i am [Music] a dad of a 16 14 year old girl whatever and i tried out for basketball and there was a biomala tried out and we went in the same shower together after practice that's still a gray area like an open shower um like there's nothing we can do about that sure yeah there is a facilities thing right you were talking about facilities and privacy i'm just saying you just said i think you said showers were a gray area because i tried out for the girls basketball team i get the shower of the girls right or you could use gym class i guess too i'm trying to understand what you

166just said was um your bathrooms are pretty cut and dry based on impact but then you said something about showers oh wait let's yeah let's go back a step at a time because there's a lot going on with this stuff the bathrooms are less of an impact because there's less privacy they have disarms she had the stalls and under the facts of the kenosha case there were no privacy issues okay nobody could show that they were embarrassed or felt funny because somebody was in there who was trans okay right so what i don't know yet is where that threshold will be as it gets litigated more as to if somebody starts to say there's impact as to where that is i'm saying bathrooms are worth saying bathrooms are less of an issue because there's less

167privacy issues with that so it's unsettled when it comes to showers are more problematic because a lot of the districts were set up with community shower aspects years ago that's changed a lot where now there's a lot more privacy curtains and individual showering areas anymore that there aren't even communal bathrooms anymore they're all individuals bathrooms you know throughout new so as bui as the facilities change so does the issue become less impact because it doesn't matter who's in there or not they're all private anyway shower areas you go to a campground for example there might be seven shower areas in the building and they're all individual people going on it doesn't matter because there's no privacy issue right versus 10 people showering in this big open area that's that's not a given thing but he

168could just do that without some threshold okay that's what i was on yeah you said it was unsettled yeah that part it's it gets getting resolved for privacy practicality versus litigation so if we drew the line at showers versus bathrooms that might be more defensible or a facility to upgrade our facilities and that's what that's cheaper to do that than to pay us yep we can hang courageously curtains and rods i mean that that's that's to me that's kind of the common sense approach that's what's happening that's practically what is solving it versus some of the others and part of our job will say you may be able to do this we can defend it we got a reasonable chance but realistically here's the other aspect of that that's part of the arrest so risk

169board absolutely yeah this has been fun okay can we are we already i didn't know if you were trying to move ahead but like one of my things i wanted to talk about was the social media aspect because i think it's an evolving part us when you first came to your video has anything been done because when i look across the spectrum the schools they pretty much are email only is what they're covering i mean they all tell us to stay out of open meeting laws and violations with in quorums with your email but i don't know anybody's given us a lot of direction on social media right now and that to me seems to be where the game will be played next because email's kind of figured that all out but if i had

170an email page and i posted something relative to the school board issue as a board member i've allowed an opinion if three of my comrades jump on and say i like this have i created a quorum possibly yeah i won't because i my life's not nearly interesting enough to have a facebook page if they want to know about me hey what if you have terry's example but you have a disclaimer on the page that says um this is this is this is my opinion this does not represent the opinion of the board um does that does that change it at all not really because what he's getting at isn't that it's the fact that three other board members have commented on their life and that that's more the point i think he's i mean it's

171it's kind of that that kind of falls into the category of um we're going to attend katie's son's graduation party we're all invited and actually six and six there are events that we can attend that are not related to board business and we we basically say you can't we couldn't actually conduct poor business there either if some citizens saw us talking about a board issue they could file against us to perform right through state point is don't talk about school business well i'm saying could you like mark just said could you be there right yes let's let these guys answer it well i just was creating an example for them to be all the questions the answers yes i'm just kidding at a chance gathering or even a wsb convention there's another kind of notice

172we do this we have one event we post a quorum that the board linked to supposed to throw our business we go down there post it as a quorum so what if you're all in the dining room with the golf course for pizza thursday night do you haven't posted the question no even again it's called a chance meeting just don't talk yeah end the story you can do it you can be there go oh my god we're all here it's okay it's a chance meeting it's called okay so if we all go take us back to these social media evaluations yes if we all go to kck's kids graduation and we're all there that's not a violation the only time it would be a violation is if hey guys come over here we got to

173talk about that exactly exactly right yeah we got an opening on the school board would you like to see a point yeah yeah we're doing this does it matter if you invited him this is social media social media as far as that goes so social media kind of brings up a few issues and just to kind of stand the open meetings issue i think the analysis uh say for example like liking the the comments or really what it's going to look at just like it would with email the law is going to take an evaluation as far as does it does it resemble some sort of an in-person type of a meaning or the ability to kind of engage in those discussions that we're talking about and so i think that's ultimately what the analysis

174is going to be it's just kind of that more um kind of close in relation in time uh and kind of building upon each other uh and kind of being portrayed in that fashion and it doesn't resemble something that can be viewed as something where you're coming to a consensus on an issue that you would normally so do you just opt to not even start with this is what's going on or do you want to say i'm a board member i'm not engaging one thing is here's what's going on another thing is it's my opinion or here's my position on that the business of the board needs to be done at the meeting going back to what we're talking about first so when you start to say my position is x or here's how i

175anticipate voting you're getting closer to doing your meeting outside the meeting okay if you're just saying we're going to talk about selling a building yeah that's just informational doesn't say and i fully support it that was my question that was my question are you allowed to put because um i had a pretty robust um campaign page and everyone's like are you gonna update on like what's going on with the word not so much what i was going to do but like here's what we talked about come speak next monday okay so i haven't touched it because we had a member get censored under i'll see 165 whatever it was over unwarranted communication so are you opening yourself up to unwarranted communication by even enlightening anybody on your update page or you just say i'm going

176dark and then what about if you run for office again and you're currently on the board so what's your relationship back to the discussion and saying um each other are we are we doing the communication as to what's pending through notices of a board meeting and through administration or are we all going to do communicating as to what you think the issues are going to be versus what you think what you're you know are you completing it well i know i'm just saying how it's perceived okay is this perceived as you're competing against each other and politicking against each other outside of the meeting over who who can get faster on the facebook as to the big issues of the district that's your relationship issue amongst yourself as i see it i'm not so sure

177it's a legal issue that's more your relationships so like if you were currently on the board and you had a campaign page last spring or whatever and you are doing that quick to the gun to get everything out there it's not a legal issue it's more of a where i've had a problem with it exactly what you're talking about where it's not quite right it's great if it's precisely right but more often than not it adds to opinion and it's not thorough or it's not fully informed and then it's a problem okay and it's usually a problem that was my campaign page now it's just that i'm on the board the only thing i put on there is what uh mary dickel puts up well that was gonna yeah i don't i haven't touched my

178hands again so all i'm doing is i'm just i'm just sharing sharing that that that information and there's nothing in there that that like just what's going on yeah i might say you know yeah i like this but that was not the case in last spring's campaign which is what i was trying to clarify like for sitting board members like there was a lot of discussion going on and but they were also campaigning but they're a sitting board member i'm just saying like if that were happening to us again do you stay away from it and don't thanks i think to be safe you set up a new campaign page and then you just have your i'm a i'm a board member yeah yeah and again and now you've separated out you've separated one from

179from the other well that was a great area last spring so what i've what i've kind of heard out of that as it relates to what we're talking about is it's not necessarily illegal but it not first practices i think that's right about the information i know it's got to be right it's got to be correct or it's going to be then then it's a problem but that's right and as long as it's not a position you're going to take on something right that's really probably that's clearly wrong i would recommend anybody who wants to have a facebook page as a board member label yourself as board member please don't label yourself as board representative because that by its nature implies you're speaking for us a representative speaks for a body a member is just

180a member and i think that that could get you in even more difficult places if you say i'm a representative so what if you're a current board member but you're running a campaign a quest hypothetical question all right right now we ask all of our community to communicate with our board members with their school email that's best practice and open records and we can pull push and pull and if you have a whether it's a seated board member mostly a seated board member that's now campaigning and the public is used to pushing communications through their school email but they're campaigning through is it appropriate to have their school email anywhere associated with it that's a good question or is or because that is their current mode of communication with the community or does that use

181resources inappropriately because we're using uh a district resource to advance a potential elected position they're seated they already have an email but you have it on their campaign page correct you know those are things that that i've heard is that appropriate best practice or as terry said create a new email for that campaign trail if you will but that that's going to emerge because people though we're going to get older mandy you know and will's at london.com you know so i think that's an insight there might help you answer that first yeah i would say you're going to want to do everything that you can to keep them separate even just so you don't want to campaign uh legal issues as well um you know they aren't using other resources for the benefit of the

182campaign so just to clearly uh draw a line and stay separate from that that would be certainly the recommended path i'm feeling pretty safe right now yeah you're not on social media legally wise with to avoid all of this with just sending because i prefer my communications verbal is there anything wrong with with anybody contacts you say call me we'll talk and keeping away from all of this is there anything illegal about that legitimate anything no no no is that most of it has to do with either campaign rules for public records and the voting rules the walking corner yeah right yeah because that's that's the other aspect too when if you're you if you are a current elected official then you're also the custodian of your records and so then you have record retention

183issues that's subject to the public records law you know there are all sorts of kind of landmines that go along with that so just you know verbal that's all kind of incorrect right right one day terry i'll be there one day i uh as an example i think this was all right but you tell me i for there was a two-year period that i had a monthly column in our local weekly newspaper and the paper wrote you know chris martinson is a member of the new london school board but the opinions expressed here are not necessarily the opinions of the school this is like newspaper nobody's liking so i i wouldn't matter i'm just saying you can't you can't like interact like how do you have a walking part with the paper he couldn't he

184would take a position interview all of you and say six of the members feel this way and one feels different it was a it was a column and it was on many different topics but maybe one out of every five was one would have been okay if it was just chris but it was on general education uh policy like this is the bill that's working its way through the state legislature and this is what it means well first of all the vehicle with which the message ends up on doesn't matter of course i've said that whether it's your phone whether it's whatever it is so even if it's in the newspaper if you say here's how i'm going to vote on something no no it's not going to be a public record so i don't

185have that i don't have a finance issue but i may be acting about what i might do at a meeting before i'm at the meeting okay and maybe it's not a walk in quorum but it's still not at the meeting in terms of and it still influences the rest of you reading it to go well now i know chris is going to vote and maybe the person doesn't take a poll to get a majority from the newspaper but you're not having a meeting in the meeting so you're still in a meeting issue maybe okay yeah so but you can have opinions you can have a you know just be careful as to how far you're going with that and that your meetings are occurring your meetings okay at the end of the day so as

186long as it isn't talking about items that are going to come up before the board you know anything come before us chris unfortunately i mean am i wrong because as my lawyer explained it to me over the years the flexibility is pretty wide on most of this stuff to avoid litigation as long as you're not slandering and as long as you're not sharing confidential information is that no i don't necessarily agree with that no no if you're given opinion here's what i think about the sale of the school you've given your opinion on how you may vote outside of the meeting and you may create a walking quorum you may influence some of the rest of the board i think you've got to be careful with that i don't think it's as simple as it

187can be because you're an individual you can have whatever opinion you want depending on how that's framed or where that that could influence all these other things we're talking about i'd be more careful on that i think kristen your example just the fact that you're bringing it to people's attention if you're writing an article about something that's going on in the legislature people could interpret that as you're either in favor or against it and then that would that that could be construed as predisposing the vote yeah yeah you know the purists on our team will say never talk about anything else you have a boardwalk clearly that's not practical either it's not life it's not practical it's not the law but i'm just saying the real purists that's that's not us either so anyway those

188are all really good scenarios and good but also good to have the discussion as to where the landmines are and what to avoid i may have missed this when i stepped outside i apologize but like if some if somebody's re-running and i'm giving them my support can i do that on social media am i personal just not on my school board can i do that yeah that's not going to be a position of a vote of the school district um yeah i can't i can't think of a problem with that yeah okay i've seen that become an issue before it's relationships but i mean but that's that's politics yeah and politics is legal last time there aren't really i mean time-wise we're at your disposal it really isn't other things we talk about we hit

189most of the major things not everything that's in the outline but um is there anything else you'd like to talk about you cleared up a lot of stuff oh i have one question i'm sorry i'm like to go back to page four and i had circled this but we already moved on to the next one and it was under practical thoughts and it was like realize could be gets better never forget governance it means excellence because and then one size can't fit all can you use that in a realm what did you mean by that in what realm one size can't fit all well is that at a city level state level board no that's at all level individual levels it's it's consensus is going to rule okay and that you don't all have to

190agree and that that's the only way it's going to work it could be a 4-3 vote but the consensus is going to rule the other thing is what we've always said is what is legal and what you want to do as a policy in new london doesn't have to be what other school districts yeah so like what's going on ellie is irrelevant here no i mean what discipline maybe for a student was another example we gave is the administration may have 10 different ways it's going to do it and with this student because of everything it knows it's this you may look at it and go i don't agree with that well one size doesn't fit all there's lots of different ways but it may not be your decision either okay because we always got

191to remember who gets to make the decision and respect that consensus or administration or school board president or whatever it is there's lots of ways to look at something god there's so many scenarios here i could ask everybody tell me what this is write it down and everybody wrote something different i mean we know it's a bottle of water but how you describe it or how you see a situation everybody views differently i can't tell you many discipline scenarios are that way we investigate cases okay so one size doesn't fit all in terms of what a solution might be going to keep that mind as a board that's what makes a good board is having lots of different ideas having different debates coming up with the best and then respecting it that's kind of what

192that said okay if that makes sense if that helps any other pieces to that there's a lot of pieces to that but you kind of answered this by giving us a proposed policy rewording on our committee structure but only the policy committee heard that so i wanted to just ask that question while you're here is it acceptable to invite citizens onto committees as long as the full board votes on it it agrees that this you know at a consensus that this is a good idea to right and what we said is it's it's legal to do that with some exceptions because there are some statutory committees there might be some standing set board committees that you only want your board members on but we have a lot of places where a lot of citizens then

193they may not have the same voting rights as your board does yep right just to draw the distinction but you get a lot of input a lot again back to the idea that you may get a lot of good ideas and committee that's back to the committee structure versus the board the ultimate stuff is mike funnel for that but comes to the board to make the ultimate decision which is back to the elected officials the elected officials get the final say and you can't delegate out that you can't get your decisions out to somebody right right just getting into it so how do we decide who gets to sit on a committee that's up to you okay unless the statute tells you that i got a certain committee that's going to realize the board president

194can form a committee on a specific topic but do you know what why that is because of your policies so your board decides how you want to structure that how you do agendas how you do other things and that varies a little bit from district to district okay how about as far as allowing the public to interject during during a open board session great question i never heard that no we gave a statewide presentation all over the state on open mic i'm sorry public forum i feel better you're reverend him a new call at that because of all issues so there is nothing absolutely nothing in the law that requires that you ever have public comment on the board period there is no right it's a meeting in the public not of the public so

195let me come back to that yeah everybody has them because practically you should have them okay now you've created what's called a limited public forum meaning some uh free speech rights once you open the door i'm not saying you shouldn't of course you should okay but then there's different rules you can have about having those things so not everybody gets to say whatever they want and rarely ever accepted some town meeting do you allow comment on every issue that's coming up okay so there's eight or nine categories of different things we can limit how much time people speak you can legally say you got to be a resident and identify where you're from i'm not saying you can use it though i'm just saying where they are you could say we're not going to have

196comments on personnel matters because there's different forms for that different liabilities and we've got to refer that to a different section than public forum you can say we're going to take public comment on only things that are on the agenda not just anything or anything i'm just making suggestions of the typical kind of things that come up you might have a public forum thing that's in the beginning on agenda items and open session later you definitely don't want to get in a debate where you're answering questions or debating with people about or answering you're just listening is because it keeps you on agenda and not being accused of expanding the meeting beyond the agenda issues that's why that's there okay so i'm sure i'm missing a couple of them as far as that goes but

197about when though we get into the actual meeting usually not we're not that's my question because it's a meeting in the public not a public meeting not a meeting of the public it's in public but not from the public but you said that's for your policy to decide yeah but i we don't recommend it right it's only twice we had to carry somebody out if you have what has happened if you have a specific agenda item where a specific topic is discussed and say um there's members of the staff in the audience that might uh it's acceptable to ask them to comment it's totally that's common that's not like yeah or if or you mentioned a number of things in in public forum and i i i think that's another area of that i can

198send you this isn't it new stuff on outlines and other stuff on the programs we've done with it suggestions they're all backed up by kids i did a lot of the work on that presentation give some guidance for our board because i've seen them being put in positions when we have public forum where the individual will ask a question and i think all of us probably want to answer the question if we can't you know but the appropriateness of just saying thank you yeah you know what you've got to say is we have certain agenda and public meeting agenda issues that we can't do that but we'll refer that to the administrator well i think mark is referring to one situation where i allowed a uh citizen uh to comment on an issue that we

199were discussing and i i take your advice well and that that shouldn't i shouldn't you know i wouldn't i shouldn't have done that we don't recommend that he had he had spoken in the public forum time uh and you know raise his hand during the discussion felt he had some extra information that might have like and i allowed so yeah and then i officially apologize for this yes then you get equal protection issues of that person but not on all subjects and not other people and you can it just goes slippery slow you like men but not women you know it just no seriously are you the cases the more you open the door the more you get all kinds of everybody wants to kind of comment but you're the elected officials corrected that's nice

200and i'm a little bit confused on the on the public forum aspect of it if somebody if if there's an agenda item and somebody in public forum comments on it then are we allowed to comment back to them on it because it's on the agenda or vice versa i wouldn't recommend it period we don't recommend it okay all right i know it's uncomfortable but you gotta let gosh i was at one the other night at a village board meeting there was lots of public on everyone's commenting on everything and i had normally not been to these village board meetings and at one point and they're debating this between the board and the folks and i'm just sitting there listening and eventually i can't raise my hand i said you're having the meeting before you got

201the topic right because everybody was talking about the debating and it was coming up later in the agenda and they said my god you're right you know and you don't know for that reason but our annual budget hearing is different comment right that's right that's been effective too is for the public comment agenda item it will list out and the things that jim was talking about that um and it's does anyone have public comment for items that are not on the agenda and then if you are you can speak for this amount of time and then it also specifically states that the board is to listen but not respond to any questions so that's actually even built in right to the agenda item and so that kind of sets that expectation and the very rare

202time that someone would would present and ask a question it then gives you the ability to respond with the agenda clearly states that the board is not to respond or answer any questions so it kind of gives you a knowledge as well so if we have something on there that says you're allotted three minutes of time all right regardless of the number of people that have signed up for public forum we should stick to the three minutes because the next time 10 people show up at the meeting and we stick to the three minutes but the next meeting after that two people show up and we say well you can there's not not a lot on you you can talk for 10 minutes that's that's okay i would say be consistent all right yeah the

203other thing and the other thing too i was just going to say is another uh method that i've seen is that to make sure that comments aren't repetitive so that people aren't getting up and just continuing to say the same thing over and over again take three minutes and do that our performance is five minutes but there have been meetings where we've had you know 20 some people wanting to speak and terry was present then and i think i did correct me it was wrong called an audible to say well make it three minutes each because there's so many there's nothing wrong with that courts let you do that you can also have also seen it to say we got a lot of people interested in you keep that in mind we're going to set

204an hour hour and a half yeah a couple of comments but then we got to get into our agenda so you're not stuck with saying everybody gets five minutes till three in the morning you really do that and you can believe the policy is written says up to which says we can adjust it to one minute depending on the number of people who wish to speak i do think this is an area that we could probably have a little more guidance from you to help us format that a little more tightly a little more defined because it you know boards change pretty regularly and there's a ton more i've been at this 20 years and i still learn a ton of things every day because laws change the community has changed there's everything is up

205in the air i think that would be an area again that we could probably have a little more clarity and definition to that would help like you said it's not required but i do think an issue of transparency people expect it oh right i see it because we're at we're joking and we're having some fun i i hope i was clear to say of course you gotta do it and of course everybody does it and when i set the rules it's not to cut anybody off you want us but god it's great to have people come to the meetings and give you input you know so we you know to me we'll give you the guidelines and what you want to do like i said on everything i'd like to go back to citizens on

206board committees how do we prevent that from being something that we suddenly have an agenda and we have five people appointed in this committee that have this perspective and we've really not allowed the other citizens in this community to say geez i'd like to be on there how do you deal with that because in my opinion to your point we are the elected people it is our job as board members to do board policy to do board uh curriculum to be involved in that certainly we can take public input and public forum than those but when i allow somebody to sit at the seat at that meeting i've given them a position that they can sway and move things in a direction they prefer they've not been elected they can also present information that they're

207not held responsible for because they haven't been elected but it's only a committee they aren't voting on the committee so they can't move it forward to the full board the full of above anybody else in the public but that's what you decide as a consensus of the board as to what you want to have and what you want to do it's got to be in a way though that the board has the final say how you get there that's up to you i mean i we don't have a legal position on that i mean those are decisions your majority of the board got to decide is this valuable or not how you want to set your policy we've got afc that's i don't care disagree you know it's what do you guys think i guess

208i would see rather than having people engaged in the discussion who come there with some predisposition if you have public forum before that committee why would we want need to have people sitting on that committee it's up to you that that's a policy decision you as the majority have to decide because you might i don't know off the top of my head you might have experts you might have a special committee that's going to work in your sports complex with really specific expertise or bankers on fundraising or others as president he can create that committee for that specific issue i'm just saying it's kind of up to you no i understand that but he there's already a mechanism if there's a specific issue to be resolved building referendum you can create a community committee around

209that issue and they can do the exploration the full thing and bring forward a recommendation but when i'm setting it i'll take an example of policy we're governed by state lab state statutes and federal laws now citizen comes in and says jesus we should be doing this because i think that's the right idea and we've given them a position to basically advocate from without really being elected to do that or would you recommend that that person isn't voting at all though right they're just no but they're still giving recommendations well why would they be set there without somebody else well that's up to the board the board appoints the board so does the board appoint the people to the committee too majority we have a policy on how the board members have been appointed yes

210so should we have a procedure i'm we're probably off legal but should we have a procedure too single question it's it's up to us whether we think it's a good idea am i reading that right yeah yeah but it's not illegal to have non-voting members give be on your committees within reason of certain committees as we've said before but that's legally up to you whether you want to do that or not okay so are committee meetings different than board meetings and that they are not a meeting they are not a meeting in public but they are a public meeting no they are subject to the open meetings law are noticed and the whole other aspect of minutes and other pieces to that so it's still a meeting in public the supreme court in the case

211over the book challenge wasn't necessarily any board members now there was a board member to want it but there are lots of committees that may not have any according to the supreme court if it's a if it's a committee established by the board it's going to follow the open meetings law regardless of whether or not any board members are on that committee that's wisconsin we only have one committee right now that has somebody out of it and it's a non-voting member and it's the union president for the teachers association did you still notice those committee meetings as soon as you still take minutes you still record votes she doesn't yeah and she doesn't vote she gives her ideas and whatnot you know so if it's a meeting in public then how is that different than

212having citizens set out our board meeting they haven't been appointed to that position i mean if they're both meetings in public and not public meetings well one is sitting on a board and one is a committee well once well what would prevent us from appointing somebody to set [Music] terry i talked to a citizen out there that said when she was in high school she was a member of the school board unelected but didn't have a vote because that was humor too i did that as school board president not school board president the student council president yeah sanders i was on the board of representatives on it there we go they couldn't speak but they couldn't vote they almost never spoke oh they were and all too many times the times that we were having

213our meetings i'm not saying it's a bad idea i i'm just saying what i found in it is they often didn't attend because our meeting times were often in conflict with something else they either were working a job after school involved in activities after school or the evening or got willing doing homework but even when they were there it was it was very difficult to even pull them into the dialogue and they felt quite uncomfortable and they were that wouldn't be two young ladies that i recall specifically they were both quite capable and very intelligent very involved students i wouldn't say it's a bad idea i would just say don't have very high expectations of what you'll get from it yeah well and i would i you know i'm going to add that i think

214structure would be a big help um i have i'm on one of the committees for mrs anderson on his son and i love her i think it's great asset but with terry's i mean it was sprung on us nobody knew we were going to have community members sitting on the board or on the committee so i think and how do we pick them and you know i think we do need to have something that we all agree on collaboratively some procedures some procedure and i could very well see if if the wrong personality was appointed right you know but let's say let's say mrs anderson for instance let's say a few years from now um a rep a union rep was going to be put on that committee as as we did with her and

215we found ourselves dealing with a really loud activist type there needs to be a mechanism that we could say well this really isn't helping this isn't working yeah yeah or do you just invite them on occasion i i like i like that idea yeah and i don't have a problem with that either please do you may be discussing an item for board discussions yes yes so we stopped anywhere okay yeah okay so who's the journey are we making a motion to adjourn are we ready folks to adjourn any any other issues any other questions any other issues let me just comment to say this is really a pleasure for us because we get to meet you and talk to you and hear you know a pulse of the board and that so i hope you

216found it helpful and let us know i mean we work we work for all of you and we won't set policies we'll support where you want to be as a consensus and respect that and i really we really mean it when we say what you want to do here it doesn't matter to us what other people may want to do okay i'm not going to tell you what this group does this give you ideas what do you want to do and how do we keep you legal and out of trouble but i appreciated you shaking your head yeah a few times it's like no tell us i mean that's that's part of what we're paying you for also because otherwise it's not doing us any good you're going to get that from us and we

217know sometimes it's not going to be popular but we want to be right yeah that's probably why i'm open to a motion to adjourn okay thank you guys oh