001All right, hello. Welcome to the St. Rain Valley School District Board of Education Study Session of December 17th, 2025. Sarah, will you call the roll? Sure. Mrs. Babb? Present. Mr. Berthold? Present. Mrs. Gilligan? Present. Mrs. Horanek? Here. Mr. LeChuga? Here. Mrs. Solomon? She's coming, Lynx. Mrs. Weiss? Here. Okay, we are delighted this evening to welcome former board president Karen Ragland, who is with us to help onboard new members of the board and to share her experience from eight years of service on our board. But before we get into that, I'm going to turn it over to Brendan Willetts, who will discuss enrollment this evening, I think. Or am I doing Justin? I'll go after that. Okay. I saw his slides up there, so I figured we were starting there. Appreciate it. Good evening, Board of
002Education and district leadership. My name is Brendan Willetts. I'm the planning director. I'll walk through a brief overview of the 25-26 enrollment report. A couple things upfront. I would love to entertain questions as we go or at the end. I'm more than happy to discuss it at any point. I love the numbers. And just so we know what I'll cover, I'll talk a brief amount about enrollment history. I'll then go into open enrollment, our out-of-district enrollment, home and private school, some demographics, and then some housing data, and then wrap it up with any questions that anyone may have. And that's all right. I'll pause just a minute to alert itself. Thanks. For the record, Hadley Solomon just joined. So the PK-12 enrollment this year is 32,279, with a K-12 enrollment of 31,040. Overall, our K-12
003enrollment declined 119 kits from last year. Just as a point of clarity, and because we do spout off a lot of numbers between the two of us, I talk primarily about K-12 enrollment. And the enrollment report that you received for this meeting really does primarily focus on K-12 enrollment. There are a few locations where I specify that it is PK-12, but for the most part, I really deal with K-12 enrollment. Justin, with finance, will go right after me. And what I talk about is not funded pupil count. Justin talks about funded pupil count. So when you see a slight difference in number, just know that he's talking about funded pupil count, where I talk about the enrollment and typically K-12 enrollment with the district. At 31,040, you can see we are really stable post-COVID, and
004from the few years before, we are experiencing fewer people moving in, which I'm sure everyone is aware. The birth rates are going down. Some of that data I'll cover here in a bit. But like I said, we are at 31,040, which is a slight decline of 119 this year. And I did miss projections by 28, but we came in over projections, which is always good. That helps finance folks not get me in trouble. Diving into open enrollment, we remain really attractive in regard to open enrollment. I think it's a great thing. Our parents and students get to choose the education that best suits their needs, their family needs, their desires. We are hovering right under 41% of our students within our district choose to go to a school that is not their neighborhood school or
005the school that they are bounded by. So it's great. Our secondary enrollment transfers are increasing slightly. I imagine we'll see a bit of a bump in that when we open up the Godding Hollow High School. That's a few years out, but really 40%. We can go a little bit higher, but I can't imagine it would significantly stay much higher than that for a great deal of extended time, just because that is a great deal of students who choose out of their home school. We are up 2% over about the last five years, but I would anticipate that other than the bump around the new school's opening, it should stabilize around there unless we have major programmatic changes or something like that in the future that would impact student and parent's choices of where they would
006like to attend. I have a quick question. I think you said this, but I was trying to make sure I got it. So are these students that are already in district or is this inclusive of students in and out of district that are going to different schools? You know, that's a great question. This is just students within our district that are choosing to enroll in a school that is within our district that isn't their home school. If I live within the Black Rock Elementary area and I choice my child into Lyons or another elementary, then I'm one of those, you know, 6,000 plus elementary kids who are choosing a different school than their home school. But they are in district and thank you for the segue. Well, I'll get to the out of district in
007two slides. So almost got a great segue out of that. So in the reports, this is an example of one of the mid-level or higher level enrollment reports. It talks about each school. It gives the number of students who choice into that school, the number of students who choice out of that boundary from that school. And then we have graphs and charts that help illustrate which schools have higher nets, positive or negative, for their choice. We also have a great deal of detailed enrollment reports that are in the report you received. There's a matrix that goes through every school where they attend by numbers. It's really handy and we take it one step further, not in a report, but we also send each school principal a very detailed one or two page report that talks
008about where their students are going and coming from by grade level so they can really get a good handle on where their students are coming from and going to and they can make sure that their grades don't have any bubbles or that they're aware of it. So we have a great deal of data on the open enrollment. It's really important to keep track of and there's a wealth of information in the report surrounding the open enrollment. And as we talk about out of district choice, we also have a very detailed page that talks about where all of our students that attend St. Brian Valley schools are coming from, from other districts such as the 594 from Boulder Valley RE2. There's also a map that shows a little bit of a graphic for the adjacent school
009districts surrounding St. Brian Valley schools. So just a visual for those of you who are more visually inclined and there is a fully comprehensive table that talks about history and our nets between these school districts but we remain a net importer of students. We still have more students attending our school district from out of our bounds than we have students leaving our school district. So it's great that we're a net positive. Some of the numbers from the Colorado Department of Education we don't have yet, that's why the TBD, but we have increased our number of students we get from outside of our district this year and we will remain a net importer presumably for the near future. Switching a little bit to homeschool and private schools, really both are supposed are projected to remain flat.
010Should be noted if you look at the red line, the non-public schools, some of that data is unique in how it's reported by those private schools to CDE. So if you see fluctuations such as last year or the 23-4 fluctuation, it really is nothing that should be noted or is worthwhile to note as the collection through CDE is unique when it comes to private schools. This isn't data we collect, this is data that is provided by CDE to us. Homeschool feeders, the only real note there is that there's no real change in the trends for geography. We do track in the report how many homeschool students we have by elementary area, by high school area, but there's nothing significant to note and there's been no change in the geographic distribution of those students and how
011they're choosing to enroll. So that pretty much wraps up home and private school. There's quite a few pages in the report that cover student demographics and rather than painstakingly go through every school by gender, by ethnicity. I'll tell you there's a great deal of information in the report on gender, ethnicity, languages, special education, free and reduced lunch. The only thing I would really point out would be that all of the trends are remaining fairly in alignment with what we would anticipate for demographic changes of the region. The one caveat I would put on that is special education in the district is increasing, that is not unique to St. Graham Valley schools. It is a national trend, it's a regional trend. While I would be someone who can gather the numbers, there are far better people
012on the education side to speak to that, Ms. Laura Hess amongst others, but I can just tell you that we are not unique in our increase in special education needs, but there is an increase in the special education needs and percentages and it really is comprehensive across the board, all grades, all schools, all areas, all demographics. It's just simply a regional, national trend and we're seeing that same thing. So nothing to be alarmed by, but just something BERT data in the district, we are surprisingly and in contradiction to the state, which I've got a state slide here in a second, we are actually at our high since, only I have my numbers in front of me, 2009 which would be the 14th kinder year. So we are actually at a high, it's the red line
013on the bottom of the chart, those are actual BERTs. We get our data from the Colorado Department of Public Health, CDPHE. He's a great guy, he provides it to us by elementary schools, so if you see the tables in the report, we have a great deal of history by students who are born by elementary schools, so we really can map it out very well. So it should be noted we are at our high, which is almost in direct contradiction to the state level, which is dropping significantly. And we do anticipate our birth rates to drop, or our live birth counts, I apologize, not rate, the live birth counts to drop. We may see one more year, this isn't a COVID baby bubble, which brings me great amusement. Everyone thought there was going to be a
014COVID bubble, there wasn't. The increase we had is actually not a COVID bubble, has more to do with migration patterns and housing patterns in our region. We simply became more attractive than the metropolitan areas and MSAs of Denver and those areas that are more urban. So we do anticipate our BERTs to decline, but we are at one of our highs, like I said, the bottom right. We are gaining fewer students. You can see the relationship between the lines above, the blue is kinder and the first is green. Those are aligned by years, so they're different years aligned by the same cohort of students as they progress through. So we are gaining fewer kids and that is due to migration and housing patterns. Again, not necessarily birth rates or live birth counts in this case. I
015told you I'd talk about the state, I didn't want you to be taken off guard. I wanted to ensure, I took this slide directly from the state demography summit, which was last year or last month. There's been a lot of news about declining birth rates. We've had other school districts in our region who have been severely impacted by this. So I'm just telling you that we have this data, we are using this data, we just simply happen through migration patterns and housing patterns have higher births. So we are not ignoring what is happening in other districts. We take that into account. I push it into our statistical models. I just wanted to provide you a level of comfort that we are aware of this. I'm not ignorant to our other school districts who are being
016impacted heavily by this in some areas. So we are aware of the data. I just wanted to give you some reassurance that we are aware of the data. We are using the data. We just, there are pockets of the state that don't have declining birth rates as fast as others. We happen to be in that, which is great for us. So I just wanted to provide a little bit of level of comfort that we do look at this other data. I have a quick question I want to start with, and I'm just expanding wanting to better understand and I understand when you say COVID bubble, because when you think back in history, you kind of think about the baby boomers, like what happened? That was a big bubble, right? A long big bubble. But I
017want to better understand when you talk about the migration and the housing patterns, because I know during COVID, it allowed, COVID allowed for more people to move around remotely and things of that nature. So can you expand on when you say migration and I think housing, I understand, but migration and housing patterns, can you expand on it? Just my understanding a little bit. You bet. So specifically in our area of the state, because of COVID, the increased mobility, right? People didn't have to live in downtown Denver. You could come up here and live in the better lands. But it allowed higher migration. And at the same time, we had a real housing boom. So we were attracting people and we had available housing stock, which was not available in other places. And at the time,
018that housing stock hadn't become obscenely expensive. It was just moderately expensive. So we became a real net importer. And that's where we saw a lot of our import of students. We saw a huge housing, five dollar cover housing in a minute. You'll see that we had a great deal of housing bubble there. So it's really a combination of we had surplus housing or at least available housing in the market at the time. COVID allowed people to move. So it allowed those people to move to our area. And then they had kids here. So if you were downtown Denver and looking to get out of a metropolitan area to have your first child or your second child, and it was good timing, it allowed them to move here. Then they had their children, which created that
019line increase of our net, apologize, not net births, but live births. Also, our population increased at that time. So I trapped live births, not a derived value of births. So it's not per a thousand or per a hundred thousand, simply live births. So our population boomed. And therefore, we had more people having children. The actual fertility rate and the percentage of mothers having children declined. But through sheer population increase, we had more live births. And so therefore, our live birth went up. It did not go up as fast as our population. And you'll see it in places like Boulder, where the population will increase, the K-12 population declines during that same period. So that's what I mean by the housing and migration patterns. We had more people moving in. We had more availability of houses.
020Therefore, we had more children being born because it's a live birth count, not a rate or a derived value. So it really has to do with housing and migration. Did that answer it? Yes. And the best way a nerd can answer it? That's okay, because I was totally nerding out. But I just wanted to make sure I had an understanding of that versus saying the COVID bubble. So the COVID bubble would be if it were a bit more national, if you will. Yeah. And it wouldn't be the live birth count. It would be the rate that we change instead of our fertility replacement rate being 2.1, or our local, I can't remember what state it is, 1.45, 1.51, somewhere in there. It would have been a change in the rate, the derived value, rather than
021the live birth count, which is just a stagnant number, or actual count of live births. Totally nerdy. Thanks. My last slide is residential development. There has been a fair slowdown in residential development. 381 is the count so far. That's the bottom right blue graph. It is a partial count. So it's 381. By the time next year rolls around and we get the final counts from this year, I imagine it will come in about 450 single-family detached residential permits for this year. For comparison, it was 870 last year, with our high in 2021 being close to 1,500, 1,437 houses. So that is the blue line on the chart. So it did come in significantly lower than expected. We were anticipating more in alignment with 700 to 1,000 single-family detached permits. Housing developments have slowed. There's a
022lot of reasons, which I'm sure you guys see. The economy, for starters, interest rates, people willing to take out long-term loans for developers. There have been fewer annexations, which is what I track for my five-year out projections. There's a little bit of stagnation in the annexations that have already been approved for new subdivisions. So as those that have already been approved, I see some stagnation in that. So not only is my five-year out housing forecast going to be reduced with the new numbers that we're receiving, I will also probably be reducing or lengthening the number of years of which it takes to get a new subdivision out there building. We are simply building fewer single-family detached homes in our region. There is a detailed table in the report, breaks it down by municipality, and then
023by year we track all of our municipalities. I work with all of our planning departments, and they are all saying about the same thing. So that will impact us, as we just talked about, housing equals people. Compounding that, we are getting fewer people per house and fewer children yielded out of every single-family detached. The orange lines I just want to point out are multi-family. We don't yield a lot of students out of multi-family, so while you see these great numbers of 1,200 multi-family units, well, 400 of those are one-bedroom apartments where we don't get kids. So our current yield is about 0.22 to 0.26 students per multi-family housing unit, and that is dropping both nationally, regionally, and within our district. So if you see the hot spots, there's a map, that's where the housing is.
024If you think, I don't see new housing complexes there, and you're saying it's a hot spot, think apartment complex. That's likely where that is. So a great deal of additional data in the report, and I love talking about this data, so if you have any questions, I'm always available to chat about it. That does wrap up my portion of the presentation, unless anyone would like any questions. Do board members have any questions? No, it's very good, very thorough. Well, thank you for that detailed report. I'm a data person, so I always appreciate going through the numbers, and I know we're always impressed in the finance and audit committee meeting when we go through budgeted numbers, and we're always pretty close, and it's pretty clear that there's a lot of work that goes into that report,
025so thank you. Next up, I think we have Justin for funded pupil count. All right, thank you very much. It's nice to see you all again and be here. So Brendan provided that great summary of enrollment. He's also providing my technical secondhand here and expertise. He didn't like my computer, so he's projecting the slides for me. So as he mentioned, we're going to now transition over to kind of the financial impact of these changes, of the counts, and how that shapes our funding and plays into our resource allocation throughout the district. And just as a reminder, we all know this, but over 70 percent of our total funding is determined by the state through what we refer to as total program funding, and in the very simplest form, it's a certain dollar amount per number
026of kids in the district, right? And so this has a very, very significant impact on how we're funded in the aggregate. That percentage would be significantly higher if we didn't have the benefit of the millennial override, but be that as a matter of fact, it's a healthy portion. And I'd be remiss if I didn't quickly thank Amber. So Amber Muir is our Director of Enrollment and Data Quality, and so to give you a flavor for how this works, you know, Brendan, well, I think you know what Brendan does, right? He's working on the numbers and accounts and the projections. Amber is aggregating all of that data and actually accumulating it in a way that's consistent with all the requirements at the state level, so doing it in a way that we're required to report back
027to the state. You might have just signed that paper, right, that says here's our final numbers. Tara Cowans, who is our Budget Director, and I work to really translate that into the funding side. So we take it and we apply that to kind of translate the home of the dollars. So with that, now we can move on to the first slide. Thank you, Brendan. So again, just a very simple reminder that funded people count. That's that term that Brendan referred to. It's defined by the state. It's in statute, and it's basically a number that CDE uses and determines as a means to calculate our total program funding. And that is almost always different from enrollment for two primary reasons. We'll get into a little of this, but it relates to the type of student that's
028being enrolled as well as the impact of averaging it. We'll see the impact there in a moment. And when we think about these kind of, and when we think about these differences, this is just kind of a couple of key examples of how a student might not be counted on a one-to-one relationship, right? So if you think about a third grade kid, nine times out of ten, that's going to be one in Brendan's world. And from a funded people count, that's one kid, right? But there are a number of examples where that relationship doesn't really hold up. And some of the most notable ones are Apex homeschool program. Those kids, because they're not physically in our buildings all the time and they have a different program, they're counted as a 0.5 from a funding perspective.
029Students who are, you know, often the older kids who are not taking a full load of classes and they might only be enrolled part-time are also a 0.5. And then there's a handful of ineligible kids that we'll talk about as well. All right, so this is a slide that we've been using. Now we are still on Brendan's enrollment numbers, right? So you mentioned that 31040 number. And we kind of jokingly refer to this, how we are always talking and making sure that we're on the same page, we're not using different numbers, because there are a lot of numbers and it gets confusing. But we're going to stick with his numbers for a moment. But I wanted to put this slide up just to kind of put his work or Brendan's work on enrollment in the
030context of our timeline and how we develop a budget. So the far left is that 31159, that's the final October count number from an enrollment standpoint. And then on the far right is the 3104. That difference is the number that Brendan referred to as a 119 student decline in enrollment. Well, what I want to highlight is that budgeted number. Brendan made one really casual reference to the projection that he does. But that is hugely important to us, because if you think about the timing, you know, we're doing that work and estimating back in February. So that is well before the fiscal year starts, right? But that is what's driving our ability to our process by which we allocate resources. We go through staffing plans on a school by school basis, and we're using those projections
031to staff schools. And we're also using it to develop the adopted budget, which means we're basing revenue projection on those estimates. And that, of course, translates to our expenditure baseline as well. So that number becomes hugely important. And then as you kind of go left to right from there in the light green, what those columns represent are the individual count days. So this is kind of a self-prescribed method. This is our choice to do this. But we kind of go through a mini count several times here. I'm not very good at counting, but that many times about a year. And we do counts, physical counts, kids in seats, every school, every principal, every classroom. And we'll use those to make sure that we're on track. And this slight trend up is not unusual, but you
032can see we kind of start low and then we find all the kids and we get them. But really, the highlight here is that from the projection or the budget of 31.012 to 31.040 is I think 28 kids, which is really incredible. You can imagine what the risk is if, say, 500 of those kids decided not to show based on those projections. It would be pretty dramatic. And, of course, we talk about it a lot, but it's in that August and September timeframe that also allows us, one of the big reasons we do this, is not just to, you know, better off to know, but we actually use it to make course corrections, right? So as you find classrooms or grade levels at a particular school, it gives us the opportunity to really quickly make
033course corrections and move people around and make some changes to meet the needs of students. Justin, is there any, if I add a little color commentary to that chart, I think it's important to note that many of us remember from our math classes in elementary school and middle school is to pay attention to the x-axis, right? The scale that we're talking about over here, you can see we're not starting at zero and going to 30,000. We're starting at 3600 and going up to 31200. So really, we're essentially compressing what really would be a straight line almost if our axis counted and started at zero, right? And so really, this has been artificially stretched a little bit in order to highlight the differences here. It may, to a casual observer, look like there's a lot more
034volatility going on here, but there is not. But the difference between this number, which is last year's count, and this number this year's count is 0.4%. We are essentially flat. It's, for all intents and purposes, when you're kind of doing the rounding, we're flat this year, year over year. So I wanted to be clear that this is not white swings in volatility like a lot of our peers are experiencing in the state. We are doing well comparatively. And in addition, the difference between here and here is a great estimate, as Justin said, to Brendan's projections. This is the number now. This is the number that he called it 11 months ago. I thought that was pretty cool. So yeah, that's pretty neat. But yes, this right here, if you had this at an x-axis of
035zero, would be almost a flat line straight across. So I wanted to just illustrate that, because I think anyone without that context might think that there's more wild swings going on that there aren't. Thank you, Tony. That's great. And the 0.4% was on my notes, and I just forgot. Okay, so I actually kind of hemmed and hawed over this one. It's really complicated to think through the differences between enrollment and funded pupil count. So this was my best latest guess or estimation on how best to do this. But this is kind of like a little conversion. So if you kind of go left to right on the top, it just gives a little snapshot of what those enrollment are, enrollment numbers are, again, 31040, and then kind of translates to the right on kind of
036a conversion basis, right? So this takes into account those differences. So you'll see the most notable difference is that 404, where each of those apex homeschool kids is counted as one, but from a funded pupil count, it's only half that, right? So we have this conversion, ratcheting down effect of 404 enrollment numbers down, so to speak. And then the rest of them really are predominantly what we refer to as part-time not eligible. So these might be those part-time kids or the sort of rare instances of an ineligible student that meets the criteria of being in our enrollment numbers because they are enrolled. They might not have shown up on count day and couldn't be found thereafter. So not a significant number, but that's the way we report them to the state. And then that brings
037you to the far right. And then as you go down, we're kind of adding in the other things that don't really relate. And that's where you see this benefit of averaging. So as we were aware, there's currently a four-year averaging concept built into the School Finance Act. And so it kind of takes our number and it adds in a very complicated math, or at least to me it is, but it adds in a certain number to account for that decline over a certain number of years. And then out of district kids, Amber educated me a lot in the last couple days just to make sure I kind of knew. But these are basically students that were receiving funding for and effectively passing that funding because they're served through another mechanism. I believe it's Centennial Boses
038High School is one where these are kids that are needing kind of an alternative educational experience. They were either dropped out or were close to it. And there's some students that are in a school for deaf and blind that we don't have the capacity to serve. But they fall in our enrollment numbers and our funded pupil count, but not really in our enrollment. Any questions about that? These numbers that I'm reading are according to like the thousands or? I'm sorry? The numbers. So at my eyes, they're like the 12,242. Those are actually the thousands. So when I'm looking at the 47, that's like 47. I'm trying to understand the units where you're looking. Oh yeah, these are a number of kids on a funded pupil count basis, right? So we have 12,000 elementary kids and
039we have 12,230 funded pupil count elementary kids. Does that help? Do you want to clarify what out of district means? Because it may be that you're interpreting that out of district as being those that are coming in. No, I was just making sure I understand units. Okay, so this is just a snapshot. Now we've wandered away from Brendan's numbers and these are just funded pupil count numbers. And it's just a comparison year over year. And there's not a lot to report because the changes from year to year are sort of consistent. You'll see that the biggest adjustment, so our change in funded pupil count, is a decline of 158 and that is really driven by that change in averaging. So if you kind of take that out, you're almost exactly back to the 119 down.
040But that change in averaging, it's sort of a it's a decline in the benefit of averaging if you will. But that's actually a positive thing. That means we're dropping off some of those older years that were bigger declines and we're kind of flattening out as Tony mentioned. In other words, it's great to have the benefit, but you'd rather just have increases and not need the benefit of averaging, right? Because that's only when you're in a decline in the enrollment environment. All right, and so the final, I think this is the final slide, we're really just looking at this now we're looking at a compare to budget, right? And so there's the far right, left-hand column, which is the 25 actual. And we've also excluded charters from these numbers. So now we're kind of getting to
041just the general fund impact, just the district impact and taking out charters and really just looking at it from where we projected on a budgetary basis to where we landed on the actual. And so the first line is that funded people count number. And again, this is excluding charters, so it's a little different, but this is that 27-28 student improvement that we've talked about at Finance and Audit Committee meetings, you might recall, because this hasn't really changed in a while. But so we're basically a little better or by 27-28 students than what our budget was. And then you'll notice a decline on the per-pupil funding. We could probably spend all night on this, but as you might know, as we talked about, this is the first year where we're implementing the new school finance formula,
042new school finance act. And in that, there's some new concepts, right? And so English language learners and at-risk students are counted differently, they're weighted differently, we're receiving a higher proportionate dollar amount for those kids. Similarly, we get additional dollars or a 25% kind of bump from the base for SPED students. And that's kind of what's driving this because when our budget was put together, when the school year started even, the state hadn't even finished its rulemaking on how those students would be counted. And so we kind of just leveraged the estimates that they put out on their runs. And as it turns out, they kind of changed the numbers. Previously, they were reported, but not in a way that would have captured what we needed to. So they made some slight tweaks. In any event,
043the aggregate proportion of students in ELL, at-risk, and predominantly SPED was a little bit lower, and those kids are weighted higher. And so what that translated to was a slight decline in the per-pupil funding or the amount of dollars that we get per student. Does that make sense? So basically, the way to think about it is we did a little bit better on the count and a little worse on the dollar amount per student. But at the end of the day, we were $22,000 over our budget, which out of $315 million is staggeringly close. I don't know another way to say it. We could do percentages, but they start to like mean next to nothing when they're zero, zero, zero, zero. And that's what this is. So again, this is a great testament to the
044work that Brendan does, the projection that he provides. The very last thing is preschool. That's on here, but it's really only for a reference. As you might recall, preschool was taken out of the funding formula, the School Finance Act, several years ago. And these numbers are just as of October 1, but really, we get funding on an ongoing basis based on the number of kids that are participating each month. So it's not really a point-in-time-driven concept anymore, and we typically increase throughout the year. But it does provide some relevance, and the takeaway to me is that 15 kids compared to the prior year is not very significant. We're about flat there, too. And I do think that that's all I had, so I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. Do board members
045have any questions? No. No? Yeah, very thorough. Thank you. It's okay if I just leave one comment. So at the next study session in January, we plan to do a larger, more wholesale session on finance. And so I'm going to take the opportunity to talk just a little bit about an introductory type of thing of overall K-12 funding in the state, how we are doing here at St. Rain, and then Justin and I'm not sure if Tara's coming, but Justin and Tara will do an update on the amended budget. And what that will allow is the board to get a little bit more into the details, ask a little bit more questions, so that we don't have to glaze over it so much during the board adoption at the end of January when you adopt
046the amended budget. And so I just wanted to let you know that's why we're a little light on numbers here today. We wanted to talk about student count, make sure that was, you guys were aware of all that, but I'll provide a lot more information on all of the district's finances in January's statement. Tony, maybe I missed it at the beginning, but did you introduce Amber and talk about her role? Justin. Yeah. Thank you. I don't mind. One thing I was mentioning when we were inviting Amber, of course Justin as well, it's not just that she's here to answer questions and provide support, but also an acknowledgement. I'd love to make sure that we acknowledge all the work that they do. Amber and her team, especially during those counts, like do you, Amber, can you
047just describe real briefly the degree of work that goes into those count days, not just from your perspective, from our registrars? I mean, each count day is a full day of work in every building. The principals designate people to visit every classroom, compare headcount to rosters that's compiled. They enter that into a spreadsheet that comes to my office. We compare that to enrollment in Infinite Campus to make sure that there's no large differences. Every count day is a full day of a lot of teamwork. That data gets translated to Justin and Tara's office. They convert it to some spreadsheets, some analysis. Then we meet on it at a cabinet level and talk about the various impacts that we're seeing, hot spots and things at the schools, and make sure that we're addressing any high class
048sizes or any other needs that we may see from those counts and get those addressed. Because while we do run a systematic process for our staffing plan and work from formulas and work from numbers, we are not beholden to them. We know we need to address things heuristically sometimes and make sure that the human element is addressed. Not everything can be addressed through a formula. We go through and we go class by class and we talk, okay, how's NIWOT do it? How's Thunder Valley do it? We do school by school and we talk about the number of kids in each round, whether or not we need to add another round. It's a long, extensive process and one that I think we're pretty proud of, do a great job at making sure that our schools are
049staffed appropriately. It's all data driven from the counts that Amber and her team does and like I said there's six of those counts that happen for the first few weeks of school. That happens every year and it's really a good healthy process but it's a lot of work. Other districts have asked us about the process and how we do that and how it benefits our budgeting so we do a good job. Thank you. This is how we fund our program so you know a lot of really important work goes into that so thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Next up, so we had the privilege of spending the end of last week at the CASB event and we did a lot of learning and development and we got to spend some time as a board with
050our newest board member Hadley but this evening we are fortunate that Karen was willing to spend some additional time to do some new board member onboarding so with that I'll turn it over to Karen. And if I can jump in here real quick. So Jackie asked that you kind of clear out and once you guys do your thing and so if I could offer that to our people. Thanks Tony. Thanks for coming back. Well I will just jump right in. Thank you so much for having me back. I don't know if you're fortunate or unfortunate. We missed you last week. Yeah I really missed you guys last week knowing that you were at the Broadmoor and enjoying your time together and that's kind of the best time of the CASB convention is just spending time
051as a board and each time there's a new member and another member leaves you're a brand new board. You establish yourself as a whole entire new group and I know they cover that at CASB quite a bit but it's a whole new experience for all of you. Old and new. So any kind of burning questions or anything that came out of CASB that you want to talk about or ask me? Do I need to start calling on people? No. I've never been a teacher so. There's so much to learn so I know your heads are spinning after that usually with all the sessions and everything else. So just before we get started I wanted to make sure you all knew that there's a materials folder in the Google Drive that Christy and Diane set up
052that has all kinds of onboarding and information for board members. Materials, past notes and information about strategic priorities and history and all of that and that's in your Google Drive. It's a shared drive. Also I know you all have taken part at least in some part with Leadership St. Vrain. Has everybody completed the entire Leadership St. Vrain training? No, I don't think so. Or a few times? Yeah. And then there's also in that folder, the Google Drive folder, there are the grassroots St. Vrain videos from a long time ago but containing so much helpful and useful information that Hadley, actually our newest board member, was on the team to produce those and took part in that learning experience. So those are great videos still, true time tested resources for board members. And then of course
053whatever you learn at CASB is there to take with you and each year you go you'll learn more and more different things especially as it pertains to policy and advocacy and other ways school board members make an impact. So I just wanted to give you a little overview. I'll be going over today just the role of the board in St. Vrain and our governance structure, our accountability and evaluation of our superintendent, and just kind of the personal values of a board member. And if there's anything else you want to cover or if you have any questions about anything that I go over tonight just let me know, interrupt me, questions as we go along. So the role of the board in St. Vrain, obviously our board eligibility is not based on what we do for
054a living, our profession, our status, or any experience that we've ever had, otherwise we'd all probably be like PhD superintendents, right? The value you bring is not based on your expertise in any area but it is based on the location of your residence, the voter selection, and your commitment to the mission and vision of the district. Everybody comes from different backgrounds, some similar, everybody comes from different areas, but all of you are are representing the entire district. Many years ago I think it was an audit that was done in the district when there were some real problems happening before even I was there and we were referred to as a district of schools instead of a school district. And because there were so many different siloed things happening, curriculums were different, all kinds of management
055issues, finances were a disaster, and a lot of the work done by previous superintendent was about making the district unified, strong, performance district what it is today. And the board had a tremendous role in that by providing stability and consistency in their leadership. So the structure that we've had in the past is based on the consistency that it's provided to our district and based on also Jackie's tenure and succession planning in the role she's in now. So it's kind of rolled over into the same and it'll be up to you as far as how you continue on with it. Being a united front is a really important component of being on the board because it does not mean that all votes are always the same. There are going to be people that disagree with things
056that come across policies or want to change things or different things will come up, but it does mean that you are all aligned with the strategic priorities, the goals, and monitoring the outcomes based on and basing all of your decisions on what's best for the students. So we've always followed this kind of Robert's rules as most meetings would follow, but it's kind of a loose structure. You know, there can be stress in that structure of a meeting, but it really does provide a much needed format. You can always read about that more in detail, but we're pretty loose about it, or at least I was. And that's just the basic meetings. As you'll notice with our agendas, all agenda items are aligned with strategic priorities, and there's always some area of the district leadership that
057it pertains to. Then study sessions, there's always district general topics in there, and then topics that are selected by Jackie and also requested by board members. So that's an area where if you want to dig a little deeper and learn about something more, and it's in the best interest of the board to learn more so you can make better decisions, better informed decisions, that's a great thing to talk to your board president about topics for your study sessions. And I just wanted to add, I think in our finance and audit committee meetings, we also sort of select or help select topics that they discuss in those, and those are also really helpful to dive a little bit deeper from a financial perspective oftentimes on some of the stuff that's going on in the district. So
058usually at the end of the year, we sort of select what we're going to do for the following year. So if any board members ever have something that they would like a deeper dive on, those are really helpful sessions. Sorry, interrupt. Yeah, no, that's great. And you know, an example of that is we do the, you get the legislative updates, updates from Brandon Schaefer, and that's really helpful. So you can see where our district is making an impact outside of kind of the work that you do here, just so that you can be in the know as far as what's going on outside of our district and stay laser focused on what's happening in. So we follow a balanced principle governance approach in this district, and it's a strategy that blends overarching ethical guidelines, which
059are principles with specific rules and structures aiming to create effective, adaptable, and fair oversight by balancing diverse stakeholder interests, superintendent leadership authority with board oversight and strategic goals with social responsibility for long-term success. So big kind of definition for a balanced principle governance approach, but it's worked really well and it's been developed over the years in alignment with the superintendent's strategic priorities. It's really just about finding the middle ground between that rigid structure, rules, and also some vague principles that foster trust and accountability and sustainability and resilience for the district. As you probably learned at CASB, there are all kinds of different boards and different types of structures, and there's a lot of broken stuff that happens in boards when a structure is in place that is not aligned with the best needs of the
060students and with what's in the best interest of your communities. If I may, just if you would elaborate on where that government structure came from and the fact that if you try to google it or find some a book that you won't because it's something that I believe originated with this board? It's kind of an amalgamation of a few different models. So Stephen Covey principle, um, principal, what is the, I forget, I always mess up the title of the book, but seven habits of successful people? Yes, but it's the principal center of leadership model. It's that and there used to be some other kinds of, this one is actually pretty well known and established for the balanced principle governance approach. It's more established with a lot of districts, a lot of school districts, and it
061comes from a whole bunch of different types of models and then customized based on really what works for us or has in the past. Really the key aspect to that governance approach is balancing the superintendent's operational leadership, all of the things that the gears that are in motion to operate the district with the board's oversight, you know, at that 40 or above foot view to improve student achievement and hold your superintendent accountable for that, for her goals. I think a big part of this, too, is recognizing your own accountability in the role that you're in and one of the main components of that is being informed by your individual communities and in the way that you do that is engagement. I mean, in every way that you can with your communities, whether it's your local
062coffee shops or your schools or just making it out to the games, the football games, the musical events, and other places, the URAs, the rotaries, anywhere you can, and just being available to your community for feedback. Also, as it pertains to accountability, just being really prepared for your meetings. You don't have to know everything about what's on the agenda. You know, it's going to be coming from a department that you, you know, procurement, for example, which is way down in the weeds of figuring out to the penny where we're going to get the best out of our dollar earned by our taxpayers and the process they have is it's amazing and it works and they are constantly monitoring it. It's being monitored with tons of oversight in that operational and that managerial kind of way,
063but when it's on the agenda and you need to vote on it, you're well enough informed that you know that there's a process in place and if you're not sure, you can just reach out to Jackie. She'll be able to explain. She may put you in touch with somebody who can explain it deeper based on your interests. So reading that packet and being prepared and then reaching out with Jackie to Jackie with any concerns so that she's also aware of your question or your need to to know more information and then there may be an opportunity like Jocelyn mentioned earlier to kind of dig a little deeper at a study session or somewhere else in a meeting, but really being an utmost steward of taxpayer dollars in every single way is a huge part of
064your role as well and that includes you know obviously acting as an employee when spending any district funds but also not over utilizing district resources in any way for your own personal agenda or causes outside of the district. You know Tony's great with numbers but you know he's not going to help you figure out your budget for your own personal use or you know there are so many amazing experts and it's hard not to kind of reach out and ask them for help in every single way. I'd love Brian Lammer's help to you know design a pool in my backyard but you know it's just kind of figuring out your lane and also being extremely respectful that these folks are experts in their fields. They're being paid well for what they do with taxpayer dollars
065and any minute of time that we expend not for the purpose of our students is is reckless. So digging a little bit deeper into that management really means that working that expertise that's the staff level where our staff is doing the work communicating and finance and building and it is tempting to let curiosity take over to dig in and say like I want to know more about you know this because I you know what are we doing as far as curriculum for district-wide mental health services. I would be interested in knowing because I'm a mental health counselor right but um but the board level is knowing not necessarily what the curriculum is and having an input into what we're doing because even though I have expertise in that level I'm not staff. I want to
066make sure that when it comes to district mental health programs for our students that they're affecting all students and whatever is being done is in the best interest of all students and the assessment with which we are gathering the information is aligning with our strategic priorities which is kind of my personal example. There's also things to look out for like like what we have a personal interest in first and then also local agendas you know there can be things happening in your own communities that are very different than the views of other other communities in the area and it's that's when you remember that you take it to the next level you pull up a little bit in your plane get to that 40-foot view and realize you're in response to agendas you're answering on
067behalf of all students in the entire district when making your decisions there's activism that happens there's hot topics that happen in politics social and cultural things that are happening happening but but your focus is on the work here in the district for our students that are currently enrolled and that emphasizes the point to always work through Jackie not through staff not through principals at schools there you should have a great friendship alliance with them so they know you and and they feel seen and heard in the work that they're doing but as far as anything that's going on in their schools working through Jackie is is the way to go and of course also through Jocelyn as your board president just to to be at that layer in between to know if you have any
068questions where where you have any questions about your altitude and where you need to be addressing issues you can always ask them oh yeah like there was a great example a few years ago Gino called me about he had a question about something about that was happening in his school with his student so you also sometimes have to divide yourself into different people if you're a parent and and you should also make that clear with the principal or with this the staff that you're working with as it pertains to your student your personal matter and that you're acting on behalf of your student as a parent instead of as a board member you can make it funny and humorous but you know it also takes and i'll cover this in detail a little bit later
069your kind of ability to read the room and understand your role and how you're seen and perceived in your community versus you know how you're seen as a parent and in your children in your children's schools and just to make clear you all know this but the board isn't Jackie's manager either you know we don't manage her time we don't manage her how she spends her resources and what she does it's again another level up she consults with the board and the board provides her a foundation that's grounded in all strategic priorities and then you work in partnership together so i think seeing her as a collaborator instead of some kind of like boss or anything else in another way really enables you to see the work as more meaningful and and it also gives
070you a sense of your accountability so the evaluation of the superintendent we've gotten this question over the years about how do we evaluate a superintendent i'll just i'll just stop for a second does anybody have questions so far on any of that stuff okay so evaluation of the superintendent is really an interesting topic you can google it you can ai it you can find all kinds of checklists and all kinds of things that you can do so you feel like you are crossing your t's and dotting your eyes so that you're micromanaging yourself and in being accountable in that role but essentially it's every single day every single meeting all the things that you're doing it's the big picture of what you're doing you're always kind of evaluating her you should always be checking in
071with her finding out what's um what she's what she's working on she's an amazing communicator you get the updates all week and if you have any questions you just check in it's a broad and complicated process because superintendents play a critical role in influencing culture policy agenda strategic decision making and overall leadership of the district it's a huge job and there is no job like it it's like bigger than a ceo in a lot of ways um and so that evaluation really needs to be unique based on the district based on the needs of the community and it has to be on the continuum throughout years throughout time segments quarters you know school years and and then the assessment really needs to be aligned with the district missions mission and vision and then strategic priorities
072and student outcomes that we learn about at every single board meeting and especially it's pertinent you'll be able to kind of identify those areas that are pertinent to that assessment to that evaluation when you hear the achievement report in the spring it's usually like march or april when when the whole district achievement report comes out and that's a great kind of document to use to to assess the work being done in the district and to make sure everything's in alignment any questions about superintendent evaluation it's kind of vague but it's also kind of an opportunity to be creative and work in collaboration with Jackie both as a board and individually Karen what about evaluation of of us you know is is that okay is there a time where maybe that's that's appropriate to say maybe
073you know maybe you could do this or maybe maybe don't say that and that that yeah i mean i think that's a great opportunity for growth you know i don't really think i ever did that over the years with a few different boards that we had and it would be something to bring up we we did kind of that reframing discussion with the bull and deal bullman and deal work and and and that's kind of a fun exercise to do that kind of assessing yourself and your leadership style and where you are in a group it's a i would love to come back and do that um but jackie also is is so so great with that and carrie of course as well so something to expand on and maybe consider in the future yeah
074that's a good point and i'll go into a little bit of like self-assessment though tonight um and that's kind of where i was going next actually so board members are i just kind of put this together based on some research and also just what was inside of me as i was thinking about it but really professional and committed um so what does commitment mean to you you know it's a question not really if you want to answer it you can but what does commitment mean to you it's um you the expectations are you attend meetings you provide insight from your community kind of in a summary form not all each individual voice but you're able to kind of process information from your community and deliver it to jackie and and exhibit it in your work
075on the boards that you're you're sure that your stakeholders holders are needs are being met and that that you're that conduit um attending casby is really important um and attending you know uh events where that are in your community and also and also district-wide events are a great way to see that the gears in motion the whole big picture of the district and the work that the students all do together and the principals all do together in the competition between the schools and and all of that big picture work um graduations if if not for you for sure my most meaningful day on the board after eight of those three of my own children's um it's just where the culmination of all the work that we do is is visible and palpable um stakeholder meetings
076uras um the the i don't know if we're going to do the committees tonight but the committee the committees that people are on um ways to kind of engage with your communities and then of course um as your responsibility just communicate first and foremost with with your board president with jackie that's really that's one of the best ways you can know that you're staying in your lane when you're making calls outside that's where you might be slipping into curiosity um another kind of role of the of a board member individually is being a chief listening officer of your community so everybody holds diverse perspectives we all know that but i think it's really important to be solid in your values as a board member um those that i thought about for myself that i always
077tried to achieve as my goals were being centered on integrity stewardship strategic oversight focusing on the mission over personal gain um offering wisdom and ethical guidance and ensuring long-term sustainability in all of the programs and and work that is being done in the district and some of those key values i think in general include selflessness objectivity accountability a deep commitment to a cause open-minded listening and a willingness to to challenge constructively when you when you need to do so um i think it's also as a board member role individually to model the behavior that you want demonstrated in the schools in the community so go out as a as a leader in your community the way that you hold the expectation of all the leaders in the district and even your students to behave and
078and act when they're in public you're also the eyes and ears in your community so going to pto's pta school events and really being eyes and ears notice i didn't say mouths because when you're using your ears and your mouth in relevant perspective two ears one mouth that's when the listening is happening where you're able to engage as as a board member who's involved in your community in the way that they need to be involved you're not a problem solver which is big sigh of relief right you're not the one to solve the problem and and that gives you a really easy out of community agendas where you could get pulled in especially if there's an interest there for you personally or an interest because it's something that you or your children are into and
079and then it also helps you just stay aware of the agendas in your community and talking to other board members like hey do you have one of these groups also that's talking to you about this and you know and then talking to jocelyn talking to jackie about what's what what are what's the view what's the view of the district how widespread is this what what's the potential impact and you can always facilitate when you're put in a position to weigh in on whatever an agenda is you know ask more questions than than providing more responses in order to be a non-judgmental open-minded listener in your community and then you know one of the biggest things and i learned this from joey what is is is to read the room you know and read the room
080is kind of another vague concept right but what does that mean to you to me it's the awareness of our perception of the world like who who am i walking into this room into this world and and also awareness of the perception of how they see me how they see me walking into the room and it's very humbling you know and and you're reminded of this at certain times and and you'll feel it but um but it's it's a big role and people see board members as leaders and so going back to that just modeling the behavior that you want to see and the leaders in the district is really key and so i also have a definition of reading the room of course i love ai right so read the room means to understand
081the unspoken mood emotions and dynamics of a group or situation and adjust your behavior accordingly picking up on subtle cues like body language tone and context to gauge if the vibe is tense happy or serious it's about social awareness empathy and adapting your communication to match the atmosphere preventing awkwardness like telling a joke when everybody else is somber and it includes observing actively listening checking dynamics considering context adapting and and the benefit of reading the room is building connection avoiding missteps and enhancing social skills there's no training program other than what you get at casby for the personality of a board member but it is it's a really important thing to think about and obviously now that i'm not a board member it's where my agenda and focus is on just kind of engaging with
082yourself checking in on who you are arriving to this to this position and who you are as a group and your group identity so obviously it's a volunteer position you know there's not a lot of money exchanged in this there's actually none for for your work on this board so i think it's also really important for you to think about the intrinsic value of your work on the board and where and what you actually personally will earn by this experience um whether it's community influence or knowing that you are engaging in civil discourse at a time when that is very difficult taking part in graduations and just feeling the deep meaning of of your contribution and i encourage you to think about that because on tireless evenings or difficult conversations you know it's nice to
083know and it's and it's reassuring to know that there's this work that you're doing is self-transcendent it's beyond it's outside of you and it's work towards going to be you know the absolute best version of yourself as it pertains to psychosocial development your expertise is showing thank you that's right out of maslow's hierarchy of needs which is a huge part of kind of adult learning concept these days and i mean it's always been around since the 60s but that's kind of all i prepared what do you what are you thinking how do you feel do you have any questions about your you know staying in your lane the the 40,000 foot view the details about anything i mean i'll give an example you know i come from the i don't come from this world at
084all right i came from i'm a coach and um i think everybody thinks of me still as a coach and so a lot of people um in the community will still approach me that way which i still am a coach and so kind of what karen was saying sometimes you have to divide yourself between being a coach a parent and a board member and the example that karen gave i i walked in to that meeting so it was with one of my children and i just said hey i'm just here as a parent just wanted to let you guys know that you know and they oh gino we know that you coach i know that you know type of thing but i think um moving away from that one of the things that i struggle
085with being on the board is what do you go to right because we're invited to so many cool things and i get crazy fomo when i don't go i don't know if you do or not but you know and and uh so trying to trying to figure out where you go and where you don't go and so that i think that's probably my biggest struggle is how do i get there at that time on that day and and not go to this other thing you know but so far so good i've enjoyed every bit of it and i've met some really really cool people and the faces i see in this room right now and outside of this room so thanks for taking me in two years ago guys and teaching me everything it's been
086fun yeah and it's important to show your face in those in those places but it's also important for you to preserve you know yourself and and take care of yourself you do not have to show up at every single thing every your calendar if you go to every single thing on it you have no other life and you have no money and so you have to pick and choose and that's a great opportunity for you to reach out to jackie like hey there's this thing going on but i've got a conflict how important is it and what happens if i go late or do i have a certain role or you know and that's a little bit on the micro level but if it's if it's something that seems to mean a lot to you
087and you have a conflict just just check in just check in yeah i agree i think it's hard to find the time to do everything because there's a lot of really great events to participate in i think it's also nice having children in the district you're generally plugged in so you know i think um sometimes i have to give myself grace for knowing that you know i do generally know what's happening at least in my little area but but yeah i can't go to everything yeah and christy and and diane work really carefully with that calendar so um accept the ones you can go to so that she they can make sure sure we're not violating sunshine law and and decline the ones you can't go to that people so that people know not to
088expect you um and and just use that calendar and then just be an effective time manager you know and i do think that christy and jackie were gonna work on putting together a list of the like these are like the key events for the year i mean the obvious ones she already mentioned like the graduations the casby event so that it's really clear like these are kind of like if you had to pick no other these are the ones to go to so that it's really abundantly clear for everybody to know like okay i'm gonna have to clear my calendar this day but then the other ones are more like these would be great and then the rest of them are kind of like as you can fit it in so we're gonna put something
089together for some more clarity on that um throughout the year and we're all unique i mean i empathize you all have children in school jobs and families and i'm just available all the time because i'm on groundhog's day and my kids are grown and my kids are in florida and everything else i do everything else i want to do you know i have so many other stuff that i do but you know to me my especially now going through these shingles and stuff i'm really taking my time off try to get healthy again and uh struggling right now because it's starting to get painful but you know so it's a challenge i can imagine what i can't imagine what you all go through you know just even making meetings on a regular basis like that
090you know there's so much else to do in life and at the same time it goes back to that reading the room and we're so grateful about how much you're able to show up at on our collective behalf yeah yeah and that's that's to me that it had nothing to do with that it was just because when i do anything i i do it to the very best i possibly can at least in my opinion and i know i can't lie to the person in the mirror i taught my kids that you know um but i just enjoy listening to a lot of people because you're right i don't you know i can't talk but i try not to uh because it's um important that we as a board are unified there's a continuity and
091there's a consistency and um because there's enough dysfunctional people out there that will try to put wedges between any organization that they feel could give their plans resistance and that's what we are in this cold war streak you know and just to be able to speak open about it and understand it and always feel that coming at you when someone's trying can just get deflected you know it's developed a lot of ways to deflect stuff i mean none of us are from chickens but none of you are little geezers like me tend to a lot too so uh yeah united in your values yeah what's that you're not the same person you're united in your values yeah as a board member yeah yeah so i mean that's you know i'm i really enjoy being in
092your company and your environment and the way people express themselves freely and you know i think it's i think it's a positive because the most important thing are the children and the education and opportunity we provide to them and that's what our single goal has to be making sure those opportunities keep growing and children get the opportunity to accept them and work with them to convince them and their parents that this is their school district not ours that they own the buildings they pay the salaries they you know that's this is and it's their kids that they're giving to our school district to get an education and the education is more in the abc's the reading the writing it's developing the culture that these kids have and you see it when you're with this donna
093casby you saw how expressive they were and how they're no students they're young adults you know they are so impressive and i tell them all the time because it's true they're my partner of youth and you get to be my age you wonder what's coming behind you and i look at these kids and it's it makes me happy you know my joy as the bible says my cup runneth over i don't they don't let anything bother me and i just don't let other people bother me and to sort of be in a group of people that function you know unanimously and that's that's that's that's great that's what i went to work when i saw what's going on in the district when i worked in the district it was something i wanted to make sure
094it kept going they did so much for my daughter chelsea yeah it's just it's just important that all kids have those opportunities well we can see how much you care yeah and we can see how much yeah and i think i think i tried to um use that energy level with the community you know and because yeah you know so many people know me from theater and other things that i do in the community already get just assist all volunteer work you know yeah so um and i have the time well we really appreciate the time that you spend so i know karen probably wants to get out of here at some point so does anybody else have anything they wanted to add or questions that they have for karen i know she will probably
095not disappear on us no i am always around if you ever have questions and i can talk to you i can talk to two of you at the same time because that's not a meeting so if you want to go have coffee or yeah you're no longer the third yeah right yeah please don't hesitate to reach out you're an extra now yeah exactly i am but everybody really appreciated the time you spent on the board those eight years were thank you thank you i was still overwhelmed with the um outpouring of of gratitude so thank you all for that and thank you for letting me join you today and put a little put two cents back in and and reach out anytime i'm always available yeah well thank you thank you thank you for your
096service to our community yeah thank you before you close do you want to share the news that jackie texted us oh i didn't know if i was allowed to you are okay um as you guys know um jackie is at the district of distinction um and our st. frame valley schools was a winner of culture vision and strategic planning which was proudly awarded to our district i don't know if you want to elaborate on that so it's a it's a national district of distinction recognition from district administration magazine which is a very prominent publication in the k-12 space that's a really big deal we won for the incredible work that our high school principals our area assistant superintendents and our counselors have done with our grad track grad tracker program and the increases in graduation
097rates and so we'll have a report i think it's on the january 28th board meeting um we'll have a report on that program we'll have some principals and counselors here at the board meeting to be recognized um so you can ask dive in and ask some more questions and i'm sure jackie will be including more information in her superintendent update this week but we yeah that's why jackie was in able to attend this evening because the award was given literally during this run that in with tony jose so yeah very exciting news so yeah yeah of the year and for the state that's going to be a real tie-in for that yeah yeah well thank you karen um we really appreciate you spending the evening with us and helping strengthen our collective understanding board governance
098and our role um the next board meeting is wednesday january 14th from six to eight p.m that's just a regular board meeting and then the following one will be january 21st which will be a study session with that i will request a motion to adjourn so moved second all in favor aye