001Good evening and welcome to the St. Spring Valley Schools Board of Education meeting of September 10th 2025. Please stand and join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Christy would you please call the roll. Sure Mrs. Babs? Present. Mr. Berthold? Present. Mrs. Gilligan? Present. Mrs. Horanek? Here. Mr. Lechuga? Here. Mrs. Ragland? Here. Mrs. Weiss? Absent. Thank you and are there any changes to the agenda that you're aware of? No there are not. Okay great. This meeting is being streamed on our website where a recording will also be available. If anyone in our live audience would like a Spanish translation, headsets are available. Please also be
002sure that your device notifications are silenced. We greatly appreciate that. I will begin tonight's meeting with our district's mission statement to educate each student in a safe environment so they may develop to their highest potential and become contributing citizens. This mission is especially important today and provides clarity of our purpose and our focused leaders make all decisions within its context. We will begin our meeting with visitors so I'd like to invite Dr. Laura Hess up to introduce our visitors this evening. Thank you very much our Board of Education. Tonight I am thrilled to recognize our school to work alliance team so I'm going to ask them to come stand. We are missing one team member. She is on a family vacation right now so she could not be here but she sent a text earlier
003recognizing the team as well. So our swap team this year was awarded the 2025 transition impact award initiative. This award, now I have a very long list of what this means. They were recognized as the most transformative provider in the area of communication and social skills, counseling and post-secondary opportunities, instruction and self-advocacy, job exploration and counseling, job seeking training, work-based learning experience and work-based soft skills as the most transformative provider. And what this means is that they were recognized nationally for the work that they do here in St. Frank. Each year I get a report from the Colorado Department of Ed letting me know how great our team is and how often they've not only met their goals that they've exceeded them which just means that more students aged 16 through 23, right? 15 to
00424. 15 to 24, I was off on a year on each side. 15 to 24 have received services and support as they enter the job force and workforce. And so we are just really thankful for this small and mighty team that they do all of this work because the amount of reach that they have and the impact they have had on our community is just phenomenal. So I'm going to let Ryan introduce the team members because he's their leader. Thank you so much Dr. Hess for just a little bit of time to recognize us. So first of all, I want to just go ahead and introduce Swap Specialist Heidi Fischler and then also Swap Specialist Carla Williams. And then not able to join us tonight is Swap Specialist Kim Sinia. And I'm just so proud
005of the work that this team has done. It's definitely taken a team effort and we were able to accomplish this through our use with the Transition Readiness Toolkit which provides students with a pre and post survey measuring their student growth on just a lot of the objectives that Dr. Hess shared. So once again, thank you for this recognition and also just thank you for having us tonight. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for joining us. What an incredible accomplishment and I'm sure there are a lot of logistics that go into the work that you do. Thank you. Do board members have any questions? Yeah, I was wondering if you could maybe share a story, a success story that kind of sticks out in your mind if you wouldn't mind. You got one? Come on
006up. I have a student that he barely made it through the high school program with like, we had a team behind him at Longmont High School. And then he went on to do the CDL Class B and he struggled with that. He had to take the test about 8 to 10 times and so he finally passed that. Got a temporary position with the Department of Transportation and they finished his training and now he's a permanent member of the CDOT in Boulder. Wow, that's amazing. Thank you for sharing. I had a Niowat High School student who I got him when he was in the 10th grade and his original goal was to be a firefighter. And as we explored that, he kind of panicked and said, I can't pass all these classes because he had specific
007learning disabilities in many areas. And so we did some exploration and talked with people and we found the wildfire program. So he and I traveled up to Ames Community College in Fort Collins. No, I'm sorry, Front Range in Fort Collins. And we went and we talked to the instructors. We talked about is it more hands on and we learned everything we could learn. And he is now a hot shot. Yeah, so he he is living in Fort Collins. He has his own apartment, his own car, and he is just thriving. And that's that's what makes me personally keep going. So that's just one of many of one of our students. Thanks for letting me hear. Yes, Raglan. Dr. Hess, can you outline the awards that you all received? Do you? I have a list of
008them here if you don't have it with you. But I thought it would be nice for the board to hear the different areas in which you all were recognized. It is most transformative provider in communication and social skills. Most transfer more transformative provider in counseling on post secondary option opportunities. Most transfer formative provider in instruction and self advocacy. Most transformative provider in job exploration and counseling. Most transfer formative provider in job seeking training. And then most transfer provider in work based learning experiences and most transfer provider in workplace self skills. I know here in St. Brain, we focus a lot on trying to help students into that next step. And in special education, we have to do that by law. And we've always had to do that by law. And so this team really helps
009make that come to life through that one to one. And it really is a lot of individualized work and support to make this all happen. And so they're recognized for things that we I think have already known all along. But it's nice to see this national recognition. Ryan, Heidi, Carla, Kim, Dr. Hess, thank you so much. Phenomenal work. Congratulations. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. Ms. Raglin, can we get a picture? Can we get a picture with you? Yeah, can we get a picture with all of you? Thank you so much. Next up, we have audience participation. I don't see that anybody has signed up in advance. Is there anybody in our audience that would like to address the board this evening? OK, we'll move right along to our superintendent's report
010with Dr. Confucian. Great. Thank you. So we have started our community meetings. We had our first one on Monday evening and a really good turnout of both staffing. And community members at Silver Creek High School. And we have our second one tomorrow evening at Mead High School. So I look forward to engaging with all of you and with our community to hear feedback, to answer questions, and then just to give some good relevant information. Our fall sports and activities are in full swing. So if you're loving the fall weather, especially in the evenings, there's probably something going on some evening, Monday through Saturday. And you will not have difficulty finding something to participate in. So I invite you out tomorrow after our community meeting. I'm going to try to go to Skyline. We have a
011couple of our teams playing against each other at Skyline High School in football. And then our first Leadership St. Brian meeting is on Friday morning at Thunder Valley. Would love having our board attend if you can make some time to be there. It is an incredibly important program. We have over 150 parents that start in Leadership St. Brian, and many of them go the whole distance through the year. It allows those folks to really understand the operations of our districts, the complexity of running this big business and this big beautiful school district and all the schools and activities and the curriculum and the budget and all the things that make St. Brian go. And I really believe that those parents and community members who participate in Leadership St. Brian go on to be really great
012ambassadors for our school district. So thank you to Dr. McDermott for putting that work together and facilitating those meetings. We also have our first Student Advisory Council meeting next Wednesday. We'll meet with our students from each of our high schools, about three to four students from each of our high schools that we work with throughout the entire school year to get feedback on different topics and practices that really support their work and really involve them being on board with things. For example, last spring we worked with these students on our cell phone policy. They were incredibly instrumental in shaping that policy, and we'll check back in with them on that topic at this first meeting just to see how things are going. Our hearts go out to the families and to the staff at Evergreen
013High School today who experienced school violence on their property. I want to assure our community that we pay very close attention to these kind of incidences that happen in our state and nationally, and we always look for opportunities to improve our practices and to keep our students as safe as possible, both psychologically safe and physically safe. We have a number of barriers to school violence on our properties. Some of those are very visible to our community, others we don't talk about because keeping those practices kind of under wraps helps with the security of the school, but I will address some of that in the community meeting tomorrow evening and, of course, will reach out to any families who contact me either via email or on a phone call to discuss those things one-on-one with families.
014So with that, we've had, again, a great start to the year, a great start to all of the fall activities, and I continue to get out in schools and things are going really, really well. I'd like to thank the board members that have visited schools with me. It's been very productive, and our staff have really enjoyed seeing all of you in their schools. So thank you. Great. Thank you so much, Jackie. And I know that Homecoming for Niwot, I think, is it the first, is next weekend, so it seems so early, but Homecomings are already kicking off, so... Oh, was it? Wow, really early. Yeah, that's great. Well, everybody's having fun. Okay, next up, we have reports. We're going to hear about community schools, and Dr. Hess, you're welcome up again. Thank you again. I
015am going to introduce our speakers for tonight. We are here to talk about our community schools program, which is our before and after enrichment and child care program that we have within the district. I'd like to bring up Susan Zimmerman and Martha Clemson. Make sure this is going to work. And I am going to hand it over to them because while I support them, they are the true leaders in this area. Thank you, and hello, everybody. I am Susan Zimmerman. And for those of you that haven't heard about community schools, unless you're a parent, a lot of people really haven't, our primary goals, yep, thank you, are offering reliable solutions for our working parents. So our programming currently runs from ages three. We have preschool programs from three to four, and then we also offer
016before and after school programming for our elementary students ages five to 13. And our ultimate goal really is how do we provide safe, reliable, fun, and exploration programming? Okay, which one do we do? So basically, I mean, I'm not going to read all of that, but we are, we consider ourselves a vital and thriving partner with each school, which gives us the opportunity to work really closely with classroom instruction. By doing this, we're able to offer what we call invisible learning. So whatever students are learning in the classroom, how do we tag onto that and make it really fun so that kids are having a good time? There are also, it's tying back into the classroom whether they know it or not. And we're able to do that through both the childcare program and then
017the enrichment programs that we offer. Additionally, we really place a strong emphasis on fostering the social-emotional learning for our students. We think that's really important to help them learn the skills that they need to be able to thrive both academically and then also personally. Throughout the history, we only have numbers from the early, well, we know we started back in 1980s, we think earlier, or we think early 1980s, offering a variety of what that community, what the community needs. So we really started as a half-day kinder enrichment program, back when St. Vrain only offered half-day kindergarten. And parents needed something to do on that other half-day. So that's really how community schools got started. We then started with some preschool programs before the district moved to adding that to their PK-12 education. We have also
018done middle school clubs at one point before there were a lot of middle school opportunities. And that also includes during COVID, before teachers were back doing front-facing, we stepped up and opened up in every single elementary school and offered both before and after care and then school care. So our staff learned how to really teach and help the teachers so the students could attend school while parents were working. So the earliest numbers we have are in 2010, where we served just over 1,100 through all of our programs. Up to last year, just under 4,000 students is what we've got. Now we've got, as I mentioned, our pre-K programs. So in six of our locations, we have three and four-year-olds in our elementary schools and our PK-8 schools, five to age 13. We offer non-school day
019care as well. And then we also offer a plethora of enrichment which is not under the child care licensing but really is tied with what parents and schools and communities are looking for. So. Okay. Hi. I'm Martha Clemenson. I'm the assistant coordinator for community schools and I oversee our budget and so I have the joy of talking about our fees and where we have been with that. We're very thoughtful in our fee schedule and we evaluate surrounding districts for what they charge for before and after school care. We also look at what child care centers are charging in the St. Vrain Valley and then we try to ensure that our fees are going to be mid-range and affordable to our families. As you can see on that table, I show pre-pandemic fees and then what
020our fees are right now which we just recently increased and those fees we're not even looking to shift and increase them or evaluate them until 2028. So our goal is to cover our costs and we pay for our staff, we pay for our supplies, we pay for our technology and then we also look at the cost for our technology and then we also give back to the general fund. So ultimately we do not look to make a profit, we just look to cover our costs and support our families. We are currently serving a large number of students and as Susan said, it has increased. In the pre-K wraparound, we have 191 right now and K-5 care, 1,982 kids. We're on track to exceed our numbers for last year. We have certain times of the year
021that we know students are being enrolled by their parents. First is when we open enrollment in the spring, then over the summer, then we have a hit in October where we have a lot of parents who realize that sports has ended or their life has shifted and they really need stable care. That's one of the beauties of coming to us is we are open every day that the school is open and we offer non-school days. And so then we also have a bump in our enrollment with our pre-K families in January. Pre-K, these are generally that bump generally is parents who have never looked at the school calendar and they don't yet follow the school calendar. And if you follow the school calendar, August is like the first day of the year. So these are
022parents that are just beginning and so we actually do take kids that are not enrolled in preschool and we take three-year-olds and this is an entrance into Saint Rain and they get to know what the school is like and the schedule and they love saying, when can I go to lunch? When do I get to go to the gym? So we work really hard to do that. One other thing about this, we are poised to oh, that's too far. No, children's service, sorry. We track where our enrollment is based on what school enrollment is. Our goal is to ensure that our childcare enrollment is supportive to the school environment. So we set a goal for all of our schools and we are currently, our enrollment is currently 20 to 25% of all of our elementary
023school enrollments. So we're very pleased with that, but our goal is much higher than that. So now we can go. Now we can go. Enrichment. So we offer, in addition to our licensed childcare programs, we have another part of our house, so to speak, or our department and that's enrichment and that is our out of school time classes. That's an opportunity for parents to do an hour class or an hour and a half class to support some of their additional educational goals or support an entrance into sports or another different arena. So we currently have 421 offerings last year. We start collecting this data about mid-September because that's when we start offering and 22 schools and last year we had 6,000 students additionally enrolled on top of that 3,900 of licensed childcare. So we offer,
024our first goal is to work with the schools and the staff in the school. We want to give teachers, paras the opportunity to express their creativity and then we also have vendors. So we have, we offer chess, we offer language classes like German, Spanish, we even offer sign language and those are all things that are done from a lot of school staff and then we offer sports. We also last year had the opportunity to work with Silver Creek and we had high school students teaching cheer at our Title I schools. So we really look at it as a collaborative effort not just hiring vendors but a collaborative effort of our community. And on that really quick pre-pandemic our enrichment numbers were in the tens of thousands and so as you can imagine it's taken quite
025a bit to get that built back up but we anticipate that happening within this next year. So the other thing that we look at is so we set our fees but the other thing we look at is how are we supporting our families and one of the biggest ways that we support our families is through financial assistance and that can be county financial assistance through the Colorado child care assistance program and in the last few years those funds have been scaled back by county and they have been on Boulder County is on their third year of a freeze Weld County is on their second year of a freeze and there are other counties that are following. So we have an internal scholarship program and they fill out an application it's reviewed by the department and
026we track how much money we don't collect and last year we didn't not collect $275,000 we've set a budget for that but we don't cap it so I budget that between $250,000 to $300,000 a year we anticipate we'll hit that goal our highest year to date was during the pandemic and there was $500,000 that we did not collect part of that was from St. Frank Valley teachers and then the other part was from anybody that needed their kids in school and were unable to pay care fees and we have dropped our care fees by half So the future plans one of the fun things as I mentioned earlier with community schools is that we really do fluctuate so this coming year as you all know we have a new PK-8 opening up in Mead and
027so we will be opening a new preschool wraparound program and a new K-5 program but we're also really excited that we get to start our pilot program for infant care and our toddler care for our district employees so we've got about $620,000 set aside to be able to open up those programs the following year we've got the new elementary school in Erie that again will open up a preschool wraparound program our K-5 program and then we are looking to add an additional toddler room as well which is just over $300,000 that we've set aside for that and then whatever else happens to come along that people have a need for that we can assist Anybody have any questions? This is a great presentation thank you for all the information about community schools our family took
028advantage of the enrichment programs often they were much better than going home with mom We like to hear that actually We like to hear when a kid says can you come back at 6? Why are you here so early? There was a lot of that in my house Do you still offer the late start day movies? Yes, and they're not always movies we do offer late starts in all of our K-8s and K-5s We are coming back to our Title I schools We started last year at one and our hope is to be back and forth the Title I's with late start soon That's great I really liked those when I forgot that it was late start day and I could put a deposit in for the day of Yes One of the best parts
029of community schools when you look along the front range we're flexible and so again our goal is how do we help parents and how do we help families? So a lot of districts you pick either five days you pick AMs only and whether you're there or whether you're not and our schedule really is if you need one afternoon if you need drop in on late start if you need five days a week you've got divorced parents that need different care and so we really focus on how do we help them? Well, our experience was excellent and it seems that the work is continuing in a great way Do board members have questions? I do Thank you so much for this I know I've utilized community schools a couple of times when I've had to go
030in or the kids had to be I had to be at work during the holidays or something like that and I couldn't get off so thank you for all that you do and especially for our families who are not able to necessarily afford the full cost So with that a question I have how do you make up for I noticed in some of your charts you had the shortfall that you have when families are not able to pay how do you make up for that shortfall? Maybe I missed it if you stated it We actually budget for it so we anticipate that we're going to set aside this amount of money and we're not going to collect that and so it's anticipatory just like we budget for the new rooms that we're doing it's something
031we budget for and so right now we're a very healthy department and we were very fortunate when we entered into the pandemic we were very very healthy and we were able to our department pay for all of our staff during that year so we budget for that and we have some money in our fund balance to assist with that So Tony's helping you out Yeah he is Thank you If I might add these two have been exceptional partners with finance there's a lot of times that there's a lot of turnover or some special attention that finance wants to help backfill for different departments and these guys have been rock solid and all the information all the financial data all the budgeting that comes out from community schools has been very reliable and we have a
032lot of confidence in them so they're really running a tight ship Thank you That means a lot for me He doesn't say that often Any other questions? Thank you so much for the presentation Thank you And your great work Thank you Next up we have consent items Do board members want to pull any consent items? Then may I have a motion to approve all consent items as listed in our agenda? So moved By Mioccia? Second And Gino? Mrs. Babs? Yes Mr. Berthold? Yes Mrs. Gilligan? Yes Mrs. Horanek? Yes Mr. Lechuga? Yes Mrs. Ragland? Aye Mrs. Weiss? Absent Okay thank you Christy Next up we have 8.1 recommendation approval of first reading and adoption of board policy JKBAA abbreviated school day schedules Tim O'Neill, general counsel Thank you President Ragland Members of the board This is
033another board policy that is dictated by state statute changes to state statute Two years ago the legislature passed a legislation requiring CDE to come up with a policy for dealing with abbreviated school days and specifically abbreviated school days and as they relate to the use of abbreviated school days with students with disabilities Our special ed department has worked with our outside counsel to craft the policy before you now It's also been reviewed by CDE to make sure that it complies And so we're asking the board to approve JKBAA new policy for consideration Thank you Tim and thank you Dr. Huss for your work on this At this time I'd like to ask for a motion to approve 8.1 By Sarah Miosha Mrs. Babs? Yes Mr. Berthold? Yes Mrs. Gilligan? Yes Mrs. Horanek? Yes Mr. Lechuga?
034Yes Mrs. Ragland? Aye Thanks so much Thank you Okay last action item 8.2 Recommendation approval of accreditation recommendations for district schools Welcome Jamie Ball Good evening board and Dr. Capuchin I'm here to make the recommendation that the Board of Ed approves the accreditation recommendations for schools within the St. Brain Valley School District A little bit about this process Our district accountability and accreditation committee which we call DAC is comprised of parents, community members we have an elementary principal, a secondary principal as well as a charter school representative on that committee and then I work directly with that committee and I'm the liaison to work between them and you We meet regularly throughout the school year but this time of year our work is really around reviewing the performance of our schools and then making the
035recommendation to you to approve the accreditation levels We follow the guidelines that CDE put out which is basically using the ratings that the school performance frameworks provide as our guide to the recommendations for accreditation In the framework it considers academic achievement academic growth and post-secondary and workforce readiness data and those are for the regular school performance frameworks and then we have New Meridian High School and St. Brain Virtual High School who are approved for the alternative education campus designation and they use a different framework that allows us some flexibility to include additional information that is more fitting to the populations that they serve So we met in September and we are making the recommendation that the district learning services personnel continue to meet and support schools who fall within the improvement plan rating During these
036meetings schools are asked to answer questions about performance their improvement plans that they've created and any other additional data that the school might collect and to really find out what types of supports that they need to move them from improvement to performance ratings And if you take a look we've got several celebrations this year In our ratings we have, these are the highlights, three schools that moved up to a performance rating this year So we had Northridge Elementary, Rocky Elementary, and Sunset Middle School all hit performance We're proud to see that Timberline has maintained their improvement status for two consecutive years and have exited the accountability clock All of our schools are in the top two performance categories while we also have one with an insufficient state data rating We anticipate that we will take
037three schools through the request for reconsideration process and we are confident that those will be approved And once all of this process is finalized we anticipate that 87% of our schools will be in the performance category 9% will be in improvement, no schools in priority improvement, no schools in turnaround, and two with insufficient state data ratings This is the first time that we have successfully had all of our schools completely off the accountability clock and in the top two categories And it really is a testament to the work that we have focused on systemically And with that I ask that you approve the accreditation recommendations that are listed on that second page Do board members have any questions? I don't have a question per se but I do have a comment Because I know maybe
038now about two years ago we were talking about, we had a study session, I believe it was Timberline that we talked about and we asked many questions on strategic plans on how we were planning to get them off of the, what was it, the rating It was priority improvement And I'm so ecstatic to see that they are off of that and they're doing great So that's a testament not only to the staff but the teachers the administration and all the hard work that you do that you're looking after these programs and these schools to make sure that we are performing above level, I would say So thank you so much for all of the work you do And then to the teachers, I have to give it to them because they do the work on
039the boots on the ground, if you will, all the time Yeah, absolutely I'd also like to just thank Ms. Ball and Ms. Lauer and our area assistant soups They all meet regularly to review district-wide data and individual school data and generate plans for support for any schools that need additional assistance And they're often in those schools monthly checking in with teachers ensuring that they understand and can interpret their data and that they can translate that data to action for improvement And so, to your point, Ms. Babs, there should be congratulations because there is a lot of hard work that goes into moving a school up an accreditation level and certainly a lot of work and support for schools that kind of fall below that line into priority improvement We're very proud of these results And
040again, it's all by design Anytime we see areas for improvement, we dig into that data We spend a lot of time with principals in early August and in September understanding their data, updating their unified improvement plans becoming very strategic about and surgical about where improvement needs to happen and then offering the personnel and the support and the resources to bring that about So I appreciate the work of our entire team And I've probably left people out because we have AAA that also contributes to that after school tutoring and support We have e-credit strategies We have the summer school work that's done by a whole team of people And I probably can't point to one strategy It probably is that whole mosaic of support that leads to these results Thanks, Dr. Capuchin And I know that
041you've taken a huge role in all of those programs and putting this all together and this proactive plan to get these to get the ratings we have And it must feel so good not to have that accountability clock running Yes Then you can spend your resources with doing the great work that you do Yes, absolutely, thank you Thank you so much, Jamie, and please pass our appreciation along Do you want to say something? Okay, please pass our appreciation along to your team and everyone that's done that work Thank you Thank you At this time, I'd ask for a motion to approve 8.2 So moved Second Mrs. Babs Yes Mr. Berthold Yes Mrs. Gilligan Yes Mrs. Horanek Yes Mr. Lechuga Yes Mrs. Ragland Aye Mrs. Weiss absent Thanks, Christy Well, that's it for tonight We have
042a study session on next week, the 17th And then we have a regular meeting on September 24th So at this time, I would ask for a motion to adjourn So moved All in favor? Aye What did I do? Oh, motion to adjourn What did I do? Oh, who did? Sorry Jocelyn Jocelyn Have a great night