001{Music} There we go. We will call this special board meeting uh at Wednesday, January 28th at 4:04 p.m. Miss Olsson, roll call, please. Director Baka Bartlett present. Director Kerry here. Director Hayley here. Director Johnson here. Director Jorgensson present. Director Mel Pekham. All right. We have six of seven board members in attendance. Director. Oh, I'm sorry. Present. We have six of seven board members in attendance. Please join me as we observe a moment of silence. Director Baka Bartlett, can you please make the motion to adopt the agenda? I move that the board of education adopts the agenda as presented. Second. moved and seconded. Miss Olsson, roll call, please. Director Baka Bartlett, I. Director Kerry, I. Director Hayley, hi. Director Johnson, I. Director Jorgensson, I. Director Rule, I. The eyes have it. Uh, the agenda has been
002adopted. Chief ODM would be you'd be so kind as to lead us in the pledge of allegiance. I aliance 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. The next item on the agenda is public comments. Miss Olsson, do we have any public comments? We do not. Okay. Uh moving right along. Um so we have two action items tonight. Both of them are related to financial issues and therefore we'd like to kind of keep both of them moving in a timely fashion so that uh money can be made use of efficiently. And then we have two non-action items that we are doing uh just to kind of keep a good operational cadence. After that we will
003probably pause for a quick break so board members can grab some food and then we will roll right into the work session for tonight. So, the first action item, uh, and seeing as director Malpacam is not here, we're going to get Director Rule to do this. Director Rule, would you please make the motion for action item C1? I move the board of education I move the board of education approves resolution 2026-24 to contract directly with One Medical for primary care services beginning February 1st, 2026. Second. Moved and seconded. Um, this is new information for the board. Superintendent Gaul, uh, what information do you and the team have at this time for us? Team, go ahead, Chris. Thank you, Superintendent G. Good evening, board. How are you tonight? Um, I would like to introduce part of
004this team, the most important part is Jessica Ryers and Joseette. Joseette. Joseette, I can't remember your name. Phil, I'm so sorry. Uh they are the benefits team right now and collectively we're presenting this item. I do want to point out that this is a contractual transaction. It has no plan changes. It has no price changes. So it is seamless to the member. Secondly, this is an opportunity that was offered by our incumbent Kaiser Permanente in response to a recent healthc care benefits recompete that Jessica and her team pre that we'll be presenting to the board on February 4th. The resolution before you tonight simply authorizes the district administration to pivot to a direct pay contract with one medical who provides our primary care services in order to realize financial relief that has been absorbed by
005the district over the last year. This has been caused due to the increase in claims exceeding the ceiling in the current Kaiser contract. The estimated cost savings over this fiveyear fivemonth period is approximately $375,000. Not only will this solution offered by Kaiser Permanente allow us some immediate financial benefit, it will enhance future employee access to care, expand preventative services, and reduce downstream medical expenditures within our healthc care benefits portfolio that Miss Ryers will present to you on February 4th. Upon the board's approval tonight, the procurement office will execute the direct pay contract with one medical effective February 1st through the end of this fiscal year. This agreement has been reviewed by our benefits team and our consulting partners with USI. This concludes my overview of the purpose of the resolution and next steps. At this
006time, I turn it back over to the board for any questions you might have for myself or for Miss Ryers. So, board, you may recall that in executive session, we gave approval for staff to uh explore a contract of this nature. So now that we have seen the uh version that we are considering, what questions or discussion do you have for the team? Director Jorgensson, just to recap, I think in even more layman's terms what we're doing. We used to pay Kaiser and then Kaiser would pay one medical and we are finding cost savings to the district by now going directly to one medical and kind of cutting out that middleman. Correct. So for everybody else watching that's what we're doing here. There you go. All right. Um, one just quick procedural thing, uh, both
007for the board and for the community is one of the things that we've talked about before as a board is just the, uh, cadence of special meetings, you know, kind of as they were slipped into regular meetings and work sessions. And, uh, the number that I received from Dr. Comfort is that the, you know, you cited a number for kind of a longer time period of savings. Uh, the number that I received from Dr. Comfort was something on the order of $75,000 a month in savings. And so that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this in a special meeting so that we could hopefully grab some of those savings for the month of January. So seeing no further questions, Miss Olsen, roll call, please. Director Baka Bartlett, I. Director Kerry, I. Director
008Hayley, I. Director Johnson, I. Director Jorgensson, I. Director Rule, I. The eyes have it. Uh the motion to approve resolution 202624 has passed. Uh next on the agenda, we have a midyear modification. Director Hayley, can you please make the motion for action item C2? I move that the board of education approves resolution 2026-23 midyear modifications to the 2025 2026 adopted budget. Second. Moved and seconded. So, this uh the board was presented with information regarding mid-year modifications during the regular meeting on January 7th when it was non-action. It is now up for action and a vote. Superintendent Gaul, do you have any new information for us to consider at this time? No, sir. Uh questions for Dr. Comfort and the team from the board. All right, seeing no questions, Miss Olson, roll call, please. Director Baka
009Bartlett, I. Director Kerry, I. Director Hayley, I. Director Johnson, I. Director Jorgensson, hi. Director Rule, I. The eyes have it. Uh, so that is approval of resolution 2026-23, mid-year modifications to the budget. Those are the two votes that we have scheduled for tonight. Um we do have two additional items that we are bringing for non-action. Um first we have a policy and then second we have the calendar review. So starting with the policy, this is policy JC. This is the first non-action item. School attendance areas and school building capacity. Um this is a bit of a strange item in so much as the previous board actually approved this policy to go to consent uh back in December. And uh some of our board members m may remember we pivoted to an online meeting and I
010think kind of in the logistical confusion consent items were dropped. So given that we have a new board uh the clock for this is reset. So we're no longer bringing it to consent because we have three new board members who you know need eyes on it. Uh and so we are starting fresh and bringing this back as non-action. Um superintendent G who from the team is Dr. Comfort. Yes, sir. Dr. Comfort, take it away. Good evening, board. Uh, for the new board members, uh, what this was was really an update to our school capacity model timeline and process. We did two things. We updated the capacity model, uh, that's available for the board's review. It resulted in a much more accurate uh, capacity report at each school in terms of utilization reports. Um, but maybe
011most importantly, it adjusted the timeline for when we need to bring this report in front of the board to allow us to use actual October count data, which makes the entire capacity model much more accurate. Uh, prior to that, we were using estimates that were coming in August and September, and there can be pretty large fluctuations between enrollment in school in August and actual October count. So now with a a later window of bringing it to the board, we're able to use October one count uh which will allow us to bring you the most accurate information. And the other point that I would add is um one of the things that the board has been doing generally with policy is trying to kind of remove some of the really in the weeds operational details and
012elevate them to the senior governance level uh that we are. And so back a few months ago, uh, one of the intentions of this rewrite was to kind of bring it up to that high level of governance. So, uh, I will open it up to the board for discussion or questions on policy JC. All right, seeing no questions, uh we the a previous board moved this to consent. Is this board comfortable with also moving this to consent? So just for our new board members, what that means is when an when an item comes non-action action um right, we have a discussion when it's non-action, it's then voted upon action. Consent basically means at the start of the meeting in February, we will have a list of items that we had consented. We'll take a single
013vote for all of those items. So we won't separately move through each one. So if we don't anticipate there needing to be any more discussion on this, this is kind of a way to keep the agenda moving in February. So uh can I get a show of thumbs for moving this to consent? All right. Uh so we will bring this for consent uh next time we have a regular meeting. Uh the final non-action item for tonight is the 2026-2027 school year calendar review. Um just a little bit of context here, right? Every year there is a pretty thorough process for working through the calendar in committee. We get input from key stakeholders. Uh Chief Otmer can certainly tell us in more detail what that conversation and the history of that looked like. Uh but it
014does fall to the board to ultimately approve the suggested calendar uh coming out of that process. So Superintendent Gaul, what information do you and the team have for us? Uh first of all, I just want to acknowledge the work that uh Chief Utner and all of the committee have put into this. It's been a very thoughtful conversation uh in ensuring that we can continue to deliver on the board priorities and our shared goals. Um I'm super proud of this calendar and I'm super proud of the process. There's been a lot of changes in this district over the last year and in those changes there had been concern of muted voice or we're just going to do it one way and not listen. We come here with the recommendation from the calendar committee on what we
015should have for next year for our academics. Um that actually give us the opportunity to be more engaged with our students and our adults and the learning that needs to happen to ensure that we can deliver on better than where we are right now and continue the progress that we've had. Chief, absolutely. Good evening board. So the committee convened a little bit differently. Rather than a series of meetings as we've done in the past, we used a design sprint process and we had two groups working simultaneously. The first group was coming up with ideas based on the calendar we currently have and places we want to move forward with. And then the second group was like the logistics group who would go in and count all of the days, do backwards design alongside the contracts
016because we need to make sure that we're getting exact amount of contractual days depending on what type of calendar our employees work. We started that framing from the board priorities. Of course, that improves student outcomes being number one. We framed up from the data and the outcomes we're currently getting and started to think about ways that we could engage with our teachers and our students across the school year to maintain the progress that we have been making academically and then also hopefully expand on that. You can see that across the design and logistics teams, we did have 14 members this year that worked on this. They could go back and ask questions. We went through multiple iterations. I think we saw 13 calendars in total um before we landed on the one that's before you
017tonight. And I'll tell you about some nuances and changes this year. It does look very similar to the 2526 calendar that we're proposing for the 2627 school year with a few changes that are really going to help in the system us to look at some things differently and maybe expand upon those um in coming years. Basically, as we sat with the objectives, we looked at these kind of initial um considerations as we talked about minimizing short weeks, making sure that our students have routines in their classroom across the weeks of the school year. Um that our quarters and semesters get to similar lengths. That's especially important in middle school and high school to ensure that you keep those classes kind of around a similar um conceptual understanding that you're working through. And then stay attuned
018to the realities. We had some uh beautiful things that just happened in the calendar. The way dates felt this fell this year, especially around um the winter holidays and the fact that there are five Mondays in May gave us some extra days to play with before Memorial Day comes in. So those were uh super nice factors for us just the way the calendar fell. Um there was emerging consensus. You'll recall um if you've served on the board for a bit a couple of years ago when we put in fall break there was a lot of angst around that and the changes to conferences. This year feedback was completely opposite on do not take that away, keep it in place. We love the way conferences are going. We did check data. We've been doing that routinely
019and calendar changes we've made. Um parent teacher conferences are well attended still. Um what I would tell you from the elementary level for sure the goal is 100% meet with every parent. Ideally we do that on the days that are set aside but if a parent schedule cannot make that happen um principles work with their teachers to say come in at any time and make sure that we prioritize the meeting and the time with the parent not the constraint limited to a single day. Um PD time and teacher workday time. This last year calendar 2526 had more teacher work days up front which was something that we were asked to continue with because teachers felt that time to prep their classrooms was very helpful. Um when you look at it by the numbers across the
020two years you'll see this year to next year will be very similar. We maintained 172 student contact contact days, 187 teacher contract days, six teacher work days, five PD days, and one day that will be a district and mil uh building meeting day, which will be the first day back. You'll recall um many board members were able to attend this last year. We did that. We just called it a PD day. So, we're separating that one out when we have the event at Robson and calling it what it is, which is a district and building time to have a meeting day. Um, changes to the calendar adjustments that you'll note. One that's really helpful is new teacher orientation. You'll see it in kind of a maroon color on the calendar. Melissa, would you switch over
021to the calendar while I talk through those? Thank you. Um, is happening in the end of July rather than overlapping when teachers report back in August. That's very helpful to the system because some of the feedback we've gotten when teachers are in that launch area. It's our new to district 11 employees. Some of them attend all of the days depending on if they've had teaching experience in the past or not. But being able to back that into July 29th, 30th, and 31st means that when people get to their first day in their building, as do the returning teachers, all of them can come there together as a staff rather than having overlap between the two. That also helps us look at contracts a little bit different. Most of our contracts for teachers usually start on
022August one or the first business day of August. So being able to have a test bed as we bring forward the new um employee resource management system um the ERP which is moving from um peopleoft to powers school that you'll hear more about in coming weeks. It helps us test in that system as well in new ways on contracts. Um, another change that you'll notice is the fall break in in October, the week of the 19th to the 23rd is all coded as a break in that green piece. In the last couple years, what we've done is coupled it with a work day, a teacher work day, or a teacher PD day. It'll probably come as no surprise that that teacher PD day, the week of October, fall break, has been less attended than the
023other PD days. Um, it's a day that people were taking off anyway. But I want to clearly explain how we got to that fall break for teachers, that is that three days that they've normally been getting is trade time. So in that week, three of those days are still trade time because the week before, you'll notice teachers are going to work long days for parent teacher conferences. So we're going to give that time back to them by trading them three days of fall break. The other two days in fall break, instead of being a teacher work day and a PD day, are just a break day. They're counted the exact same as when we're on winter break or fall or I mean Thanksgiving break or spring break. It's coded as the break, but three of
024those days are contractual days for them because it's trade time. That is limited to school-based staff that does conferences. There are a bunch of employee contracts in the system. For example, if you work year round, you're on a contract called 260 days. That is not a week off for everyone in the system. It is for teachers who are getting trade time from conferences. If other employees want to take it off, they can use their leave days, but that is the tradeoff um for parent teacher conferences. You'll also notice kind of a uh orange outline around October 13, 14, and 15. Students will be in session those days, but that's where evening parent teacher conferences will happen for the most part. What we do there is set aside those days so that there's a clear window.
025uh so families can know what to expect. But also our high schools do a really proactive thing. Many of them midway through September. We'll do an evening parent teacher conference in September because especially targeted to students who have D's and Fs at that time, they want to intervene and talk to families earlier and sooner rather than later. So what we will do is leave it to schools to schedule their evening parent teacher conferences or their outside of contract time parent teacher conferences. Sometimes those are mornings as well. And we will give them a minimum number of hours to make sure they've scheduled outside of contract hours in order to earn that trade time that teachers are earning the very following week. We tried to balance quarters and semesters as much as possible. It tends to
026be in the calendars that quarter 2 in particular because of the squeeze of the number of breaks between Thanksgiving break and winter break ends up being a little bit shorter than the other quarters. But otherwise um they are relatively balanced. I also want to mention that we will produce a separate calendar for prek this next year. Um prek will have additional staff development days in it because they are subject to the state um prek rules and the minimum number of hours there. So the beauty of that is we get more time with our prek teachers to do some professional learning that helps set them up for the most robust pre-k classrooms which when we brief data later um tonight I know Dr. Fry will talk about this but that's really important for the early literacy
027skills that we're developing in our students. And then um yeah the conference dates will be determined by each school. Everything else is very similar. We do have, again, this is the first year we're doing this this spring, a parent teacher conference day in the spring. Um, it is one of those pieces that often um people want it before spring break and then some people want it after. We strategically put it where it is this year to make sure that we were not um taking away from the testing window or days before state testing occurs. April is our heaviest month for assessment with our students. And then you can see in May that gift of Memorial Day being the 31st, we we finish well before that. Usually we're coming in right before that ends or we
028have had years where teachers have to report for the workday after Memorial Day and that won't be the case in this proposal. That's all I have for you. So I can take questions. That's all. That's all. All right. Uh starting with Director Hayley. You ready? I'm ready. Okay. Um first of all, I want to thank you guys. teachers were on this committee. Yes. I want to thank you guys for um giving teachers an actual fall break, five days. Um that's nice. It it's for for people that have not been in the classroom and have not taught, it is at the by the end of the first quarter, you are exhausted and that that five day break is very necessary for teachers, especially the older ones, um to get their feet back underneath them. So, it
029was that I appreciate that. Um, I also appreciate the fact that you put in parent teacher conferences in the spring. Um, when I taught, I had semester only classes and when you start a new semester class, second semester, there's no parent teacher conferences. Um, I never liked that. So, I'm glad that you put that in there. I just have um one maybe two questions. The solid orange on the 16th of October is that that's not an evening parent teacher conference. No, it will be a full day of conferences. So students will not be in session that day. Correct. But it'll it'll stop at a reasonable hour. So people won't be stuck at school on a Friday night. Absolutely. Because they will have done their night conferences prior to that evening. Is there any reason why?
030I'm sorry. I was just going to say we always give the the school the ability to manage that themselves. But you're going to ask me the next question, which is if you get them all done, can everybody have Friday off, too? Actually, that wasn't my question. And the answer would be no. It would still be a work day because we have contractual obligations of days that have to happen. Now, a school can be creative and use that for work for their teachers during that day if they had all their conferences done. But the balance of evening and day allows us to meet the needs of all families. Um and then if if it plays out differently at a school school near you, that's fine, too. So, is it possible then for that um second full
031week in October where there's no parent teacher conference box on Monday the 12th? Was that deliberate or it was just in thinking that you don't need to run four full nights? So, that that's just shown in that way to say that you don't need to run conferences that entire week. But to superintendent's point, schools will be able to meet their community's needs by scheduling those conferences. Again, our goal is, especially at elementary, 100% of conferences, if that means 7 a.m. one day and then you're not there until 8 that night, we will meet the parents um at the times they're able to meet with us. So, three evening conferences, 13, 14, 15th, all day on the 16th. Yes. And it may be that a school says we're going to do um 4hour evenings two days
032instead of threehour evenings. They can have that trade-off with what works in their community. Again, it's just the time frame in which we expect those to happen after we have quarter data back. Two thumbs up. Thank you. You're welcome. Director Rule. Thank you. And mine is simple. It looks like the gray boxes are holidays. Can we add that to the key? Yes, we will. And I should name too that when I when we publish the final one, we'll also add the days the district is closed. That will be denoted as well because on a holiday it's closed. And then on some of the breaks, yes, students and teachers may not be in, but central admin is still in. So technically, the district's still open. So we will distinguish on the final published calendar dates that
033it works. Perfect. That was my second question. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. Um, director. Oh, there you go. Thank you. Um, I apologize for being late. Um, I just was handling um some family commitments and I didn't expect it to run longer than uh it did, but uh here I am. So, um looking at the calendar again, I appreciate all the work that has been put into it. uh looks like that February to make portion of it you have that CD SD all in that and that's logistics I think it can be cleaned up it is yeah those will not stay in the final published calendar but we just wanted to be very transparent of where we're counting contract days versus student days and so that's just the numbers and it will all add
034up to that final total that I spoke to before 187 contract days and 172 student contact days yeah I don't see it in the first part of the calendar, but then the CD and the SD starts in February. Uh, as long as you guys clear clear it up. And so I understand October 16th and April 30th are not student days. Students are not present. It's it's parent teacher conferences and depending on hours at each level, CDE does allow that to be counted as a student contact day. Great. But it's not an instruction day where right no students will be in session for a regular instruction. We'll put in the legend on the full orange day. No students next to it does say that but we'll make it more readable in the final uh publish because
035I do know with the additional noise of the counts of the days on here it's harder to read this cleanly. So, I do want you to know when we bring the final version, we'll have a cleaner version that's easier to look at at a glance and makes those uh monthly calendar boxes just a little bit larger. Okay. And then um there will be no parent teacher conferences during that fall break week. Correct. Exactly. Correct. The reason I mentioned that is this last year there were there was Yeah. one day that was scheduled as parent teacher conferences and um my schedule allowed me only to go on that day but the school was deserted pretty much nobody was participating and teachers were like parents didn't show up because they're on fall break so I'm glad that
036that has been removed um going to July you have new teacher orientation those are not going to be contract days for teachers who are new to D11 they have a separate piece that they fill out when they onboard and hire share with us and there is an additional stipened pay for the teachers who attend new teacher orientation that attended. Yes. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that's all I have. Director Jorgensson, thank you for the fall break. I know we had spoke about a draft um we were going to have to work some magic with HR uh to get that tradeoff working. So, so happy to see that. Um, and then as a a teacher, I'm more removed now from the classroom, uh, after all these years on the board, but, uh, having a break in
037April, albeit at the end of April. April's were always long, so it's nice to see a little break in April there. Um, and for the benefit of what Director Hayley mentioned as far as being able to have that touch point with students before the last, you know, three and a half weeks of of school. So, um, I'm over overall very well pleased with this. Um, I think it's already been mentioned, but you mentioned this is not the final draft. So, getting this to be very reader friendly for for folks. And this is a calendar for all grade levels, preK through uh high school. What? Correct. Except preK will have a separate calendar because of those additional release days for the teachers. Thank you. Okay. So, so I would just request that we make it super
038clear for folks looking at this like director Mel Pockham said to um have the legend nice and easy to read, bilingual, all the things. Absolutely. I'll make sure that happens before we post for next week which is when this would come for action. Okay, perfect. Thank you. All right, good discussion everyone. So, this will come back for a vote uh in a week on our regular meeting on February the 4th. Uh, and that concludes the items on the agenda for the special meeting. So, my intention is to uh take a quick five to 10 minute break, let everyone have a chance to kind of stretch their legs, get a little bit of food, and then we'll pick up with the work session at 4:45 is my intention. Uh, so seeing no further business, if there
039are no objections, uh, we will adjourn. So, we will adjourn at 4:35 p.m. See you in 10. Hey,