001thank you for being here and thank you for joining us either in person or uh via video we did the bulk of our work this morning i mean this evening uh beforehand with school improvement program plans and a customized pathwise pathways so that was um took us a little bit over the first thing we do is approve the consent agenda can i have a motion please i move to approve the consent agenda well second is there comments or questions or something that needs some further discussion no excellent thank you missy we take the vote aye so we'll begin with the report of the superintendent if i'm not jumping ahead but you'll notice now on the board docs we actually have it as an attachment and that makes it easier to search so any topics that
002we have come up in the superintendent report we can access with the search function on board docs i'm starting to get nervous as we're rolling this is my last year and i'm thinking oh my goodness what is it that i need to make sure that everybody else knows that i've now learned and known for so long that it seems second nature so if i start going back to the beginning forgive me or make sure you're asking questions because the years go by pretty quick quickly all right superintendent qualman thank you madam president uh so we are three weeks away from our last meeting normally it's two but we did have fall break in there so we pushed this meeting back a week and i'm pleased to report i did take a little vacation over that
003time so that was good to get out of town relax with my kids get re-energized for the remainder of the winter here so also pleased to report that last monday we opened the edwards early learning center uh so congratulations to sandy mutchler and the facilities department and all their crew and getting us eight new preschool and infant toddler rooms and all the requisite tiny facilities that come along with that so that took a lot of work but we're pleased to have those new facilities up and running i also wanted to share that the rise grant application has been submitted to cde uh we were seeking 1.3 million dollars to use for extension of our mtss program we'll find out by november 6th is when announcements come out which is very exciting so we should know
004by the next meeting whether or not eagle county has uh has won any of those dollars from the rise grant we do have positive news to report on the concurrent enrollment expansion grant uh katy jarno and her team in cooperation with colorado mountain college received fifty thousand dollars to use towards ensuring that we we get more students to enroll in current enrollment classes and that uh our students experience more success when they're in there so we're looking at expansion of that program and improvement in the success rate of kids who are in it so dr johno congratulations to you and your team for success on that grant up next i've been able to help out in some schools uh as everybody is well aware we've been short substitutes so i've uh taken the call at
005edwards elementary school also was at ges gypsum elementary recently and gypsum creek middle school so whenever we're uh we're tight on on providing supervision or instruction i'll try to be in schools to help out as much as i can i also wanted to point out that i took calls last week from joyce rankin and k ferry joyce rankin is a state board of education member and k ferry is a as a local republican party leader here in eagle county they were calling me because there had been some concerns about teachers and students who were advocating their political beliefs in the classroom so uh i did quite a bit of research to try to track down where this problem existed and it turns out it was in schools in eagle county but not in eagle county
006schools if that makes sense so the the incident was not occurring in in any of our schools but i did want to address this because i think it's important to to know that um we did have a political rally in the high school parking lot down here in gypsum over the weekend and i think it's important for folks to know that that happened without knowledge or approval of the high school staff and that we're willing to work with groups who want to access our school facilities but we ask that they go through appropriate channels and appropriate protocols so that we we understand who's coming and and for how long and for what purpose and i think everybody is well aware that we are uh in the middle of an election cycle and mercifully that will
007come to a close next tuesday i don't know that we'll have all the decisions finalized at that point but in an election season it's not uncommon for political action to occur in our schools so i think it's important to remind uh board members and to remind the public that students are permitted to express their support for candidates and their political beliefs as long as their expression and communication is not offensive or disruptive to the learning environment and this goes back to uh supreme court case tinker versus des moines if anybody wants to pull out their civics books i'm happy to nerd out with you on that staff however have an obligation to provide instruction that's objective and balance i i spent many years in the classroom as a civics and government teacher and if i
008could finish the year without my students knowing my political beliefs i thought it was a successful year and it doesn't doesn't mean that we don't cover controversial topics uh i think we have an obligation to cover those in school but we have an obligation to cover those in a balanced way uh if you're going to invite one speaker in who supports something you better invite the speaker in who opposes that same thing so that kids can hear both sides of the story our staff are welcomed and encouraged to advocate for their own political beliefs but outside of the work time and not with eagle county school district resources when they're in school they're reminded not to advocate for their political beliefs so even though the impetus for that was the call from joyce rankin and
009kay ferry and it turns out the incidents were not happening in our schools i think it's important that we still discuss that in an election year i wanted to mention again the mcguffey award that our board president received since we mentioned it at the last board meeting but since then we have received an official certificate of excellence here you go we received an official mcguffey award pin from casby and then on our behalf we've got some flowers for you to celebrate your honor so we appreciate the commitment to the district and honor your dedication to students and staff with all the time that you've put into to being a board member uh you're an outstanding leader of this board and we hope that in the next year with your expertise you can continue to train
010train everybody up so that we can continue with your your passion and dedication thank you thank you very much i really appreciate it and we will be focusing on training for the whole next year [Applause] and lastly to report to the public since our last meeting we have had seven new incidents of positive covet 19 cases in our schools those seven incidents have resulted in 112 students and 15 staff members being quarantined which means that 98 of our students remain in school remain in instruction and that remains our primary goal safely keep as many students in school for as long as we can we'll give some more updates on this later in the meeting when we cover the covet update but i think it's also important to know that there are other students and staff
011members who are quarantined and i don't include those in this count those other folks are quarantined because of exposures outside of school or in community related or or home related exposures and if we were to count those it would be an exhausting process and more than we could manage so we're in charge of managing the ones that were that have cohort impact in our school and we manage those we manage those quarantine orders and all the communications therein and public health manages all of the other ones so that's it for my update madam president thank you thank you very much and that brings us to board reports lou shall we start with you please sure um i visited with um eagle valley middle school last week i got to talk to the teachers and just
012tell them how much we appreciate them and how how we thank them for everything they're doing i asked them if they have any comments or concerns and overall i would say everybody's very happy to be with the kids and pretty much everybody agreed that having wednesdays to uh to plan and um for the rest of the week is totally necessary and they're also very thankful of the smaller cohorts obviously that's something that we're going to keep hearing how teachers want to keep that going so everybody's enjoying having smaller groups and today i went to brush creek elementary and same thing just happy to be at school and everybody's doing great and just the same just enjoying the small cohorts um we are happy to have i'm happy to have my kids at school and i'm
013still volunteering for recess and playing with the first graders and sometimes the older kids they don't want to play with me but i watch them and that's it here i also went on vacation which was great i attended battle mountain high school school accountability where we had sort of their covid update also an update on ap courses from jason spanagle who runs that program and one of the counselors kristen carey talked about the colleges that students who graduated last year are now attending i also have attended the casby preparation session for the fall delegate assembly which is on friday to learn how to vote and do that and the best committee meeting which is about school insurance and it is definitely not the best um i wanted to give a shout out to joanna bott
014who is moving on from the school district but i having been here for seven years appreciate all your hard work and you were always the person i called in a panic when my computer didn't work and i couldn't get into something so i'm sad to see you go but good luck in your new endeavors dr long thank you i just have a couple things i did take a little vacation to my family and i and our dog drove to illinois to check on my mother i haven't seen her in a couple years but illinois is more locked down than we are they're not most of their state is not back in school they're mostly online had a college visit also my son is going to be graduating in about a year and a half from
015battle mountain so we visited a western illinois university there that campus as well was almost like a ghost town there was very few students it was a beautiful fall day when we were there as far as being local here i had my first virtual parent teacher conference last night with my daughter tori's teacher at berry creek middle school and i um i think it was handled very well they emailed or they mailed us the materials that we were going to be covering and then we just were able to cover those things in the on the online you know in the virtual forum it took about 30 25 30 minutes and we got our questions answered and we had some good resources that we were able to share and uh it it was a lot less
016hassle than having to go to the school really and wait around and see if someone was late or whatever and i think it's a pretty efficient pretty efficient way to do it i have the similar similar meetings tomorrow with my two sons both who are at battle mountain and my understanding is those i think we're meeting with every single teacher it's going to be like a two or three hour process uh is that similar for you to shelly yeah i mean you could you could sign up for any teachers that you wanted to meet yeah so i mean if you wanted to meet with all of your students teachers yeah the slot seemed a lot bigger that's what i thought really it's pretty amazing i mean it's all going to be done through google meets
017and you just in your little 10-minute slot okay go to each teacher so i'll be curious to see how it works too but yeah it should be interesting so i'm excited about that at the college we are putting together the spring schedule and we have a lot of different things that we need to discuss um one of the things we're going to be discussing in the next few months is our de program and how we can interface that with high schools and their ap classes i think there will be some big changes from cmc um faculty hasn't been in as involved in that process from the cmc side as as many of them have liked have wanted to be so we're trying to find ways to incorporate that and provide more student options more student
018rigor and that's all i have thank you since we met last dr long and i had the opportunity to do a staff meeting at avon elementary school so it was really great to get over there and hear from their staff about what's going on needs support and and what they're proud of we i also had the second part two of the ecca staff meetings with the lower school students or teachers of lower school grades um so again great opportunity to get that direct interaction i participate in a local diversity equity and inclusion effort with a number of community partners and um have been meeting periodically our most recent meeting yesterday was great to kind of take a step back and just discuss all the different similar initiatives going on in the community and ways to
019pull that work together and engaging voices that were not at the table that might be valuable um i also got to listen into the symposiums event recently sort of a state of eagle county that superintendent cullman spoke on along with will cook and beth howard jeff schroll it was really interesting to hear how each of their systems are are doing and what they're prioritizing moving forward and then i serve on the statewide healthy kids colorado survey advisory group we had a meeting this week talking about crazy enough the 2021 fall survey administration and that tool getting finalized and then also discussed the interim 2020 survey that some of our schools are will participate in i'll speak more to that later tonight and then on a personal note i too got to do my first virtual
020parent teacher conference this week and uh just like dr long i was really impressed by how well it went super smooth great to use those virtual platforms a highlight for me was it was for my son who's in kindergarten and seeing his self-assessment of where he thinks he's doing well and where he thinks he can grow adorable i'll save that one and then yeah just with my kids getting ready for halloween and it's going to look so different for us this year but still trying to celebrate in a way that's meaningful and until the snowstorm squeezed in some last couple summer summary type adventures um i attended a staff meeting at homestead peak um it happened to be the morning that uh after i think they'd had their first covid cases and i will share
021the principal gallegos was very appreciative of she said the district just swooned in she felt super supported and she was just really really pleased with the response and i think the staff was made very comfortable and you know i think aside from the cohorts that were uh quarantined i think it was sort of business as usual so she was again very appreciative um she also had when we walked in i guess the district website has a coming sort of room now with different videos and she had one of the coming videos up um and she's been sharing with her staff and they've apparently been very much enjoying that and i didn't know that it existed but again she was very appreciative and when it looked like norway or something like the fjord or something and
022she had it up and yeah she said she's been uh calming down to it and really happy um so that was a good meeting i think in general the same sentiment that we've been sort of hearing which is those wednesdays are really great it's great to be back in school with the kiddos i think everybody's sort already feeling you know more comfortable as as the days go on and the weeks go on that uh you know that the systems are working um so that was good um i did attend my first district accountability meeting last week so that was sort of the kickoff for the uh i guess 2020 2021 school year um and that committee then comes to the board in march with some recommendations um so it's kind of intro to that um
023and uh what else oh oh and can't forget last push for uh 5b um there is a facebook page up um you can go to it and like it i think it's just for eagle county schools 5b or something again if you google it you'll find it or if you look for it on your facebook page but like it um 5b everybody yes hopefully probably most people have their ballots in already but uh final push so we don't want to be uh complacent so that is it great thank you um did you find the in the district where is the calming room i think it's in the district information there's an actual calming room and you go on the website and it clicks and it takes you to several different things and some meditation apps
024and it's a place if you feel like you need some support with peace and calmness employee section so it's live animal baby cams stuff like that it's uh um so that brings me to me i went uh to visit my kids who are both in durango and i'm not sure i'd call it a vacation but it was just enlightening the a little bit of everything a lot of excellent intellectual stimulation and laughing and hearing what the young people think and then a lot of it knowing why you're not supposed to be hanging around with them because there's a lot of questionable decision making going on on all levels from dog walking to dishwashing and all the way on up to the serious stuff but it was a it was it was really beautiful and and
025then i found a book on their table of course that because they had a lot of great stuff called borough genius written by victor villasenor which inspiring always you want to read the inspiring story you know that it has a good ending because the book was published but then he talked about his rejections so i'm hoping if i ever get a good book published i'm not going to have to go through 265 rejections to get there that's quite a but it's a story of a young hispanics journey through the education system starting in the 40s though in california and i had to keep stopping as i was reading the book to remind myself that this was a long time ago in california and that we're not allowed to hit students anymore for sure that's over
026because he was the res on the receiving of a lot of corporal punishment throughout his whole young elementary school life which is very traumatic but there was also that underlying message that he was not good enough at all times and that the mexican kid should be somewhere else and they shouldn't come to this school and just you know wanted to be optimistic to know that's changed and to know that things have gotten so much better for all of our kids you know that nobody's getting taken out and smacked by their teacher anymore but and even if we have any of that very subtle racism that's we're working with the the equity i'm hoping that we can open our hearts and minds and just to read that book and see how bad it was and then
027also see maybe some of the residual stuff that's still lingering across the nation i'm not trying to single at eagle county schools i'm talking about across the nation and i'm sure we'd have the same story if it was written in the south by an african-american you know person who succeeded in despite of his education oh and but the most rewarding thing was the the young he was brutalized by teachers over and over again and then the substitute teacher three days somebody cared about him for three days changed his life and he could remember that so you know as that we can make a kid's life miserable or we can make a difference in three days that will last them forever if you can get that message that they're loved and their work matters and who
028they are matters and that they have a chance in the future you don't have to be in the business forever it can happen in in shorter increments so just that was the i wanted to leave with an inspiring message it was very well written but that was the inspiring message on that one i was able to join a virtual staff meeting with red canyon high school such a great staff and the work they do and they're able to take advantage of some of these coveted changes to improve their practice and i know that's the theme across all the staff miss staff meetings is staff working to improve their practice through this and hoping to bring the silver linings through when we come out on the other side the you reminded me about the meeting see
029yak i see this i can go i will rsvp i have a future meeting coming up that um i can report on next time and i think that rolls me into the old and new business which from today i would like to uh get on the schedule at some point in the future just a discussion about iep and alp percentages because i think when we have to talk about things to bring them up and that's some numbers that we need to work on making sure we're not under identifying kids that need their services whether they're remediation services or advancing services um we're going to talk about the staff meetings and their work session next time and during our board self eval and we'll do some retreat planning so i'm going to ask you all to
030think about what it is we want to accomplish that day so what we've done in past retreats is get to know each other better which is out which happens when you spend a whole day together working we've had great debriefs on legal issues all the way down to the flag we've had we've you know we can hit some really dry stuff if anybody's interested in that but what what is it that we want to learn that's not the dry stuff or what discussions that you all think would move us forward as a team and that's what we'll lay that out next meeting because then the next time we meet after the thanksgiving holidays will be our retreat at battle mountain high school so go ahead and send you have something right now let me know
031and if you don't you can send me an email oh i just had two other topics for the retreat or just for old new business um one is there is definitely um a lot of discussion going on right now regarding reading resources and i just wondered if we could um get a full list of the reading curriculum or reading resources that are used at each of our primarily elementary schools but i think middle would also be helpful i know some boards have been criticized recently for not um knowing that information or not being on top of that information and i know the state has taken a look at uh sort of which programs they think are scientific or science-based versus i don't know what you would be otherwise but that there are those curriculums that
032they promote or are anyway you know what i'm trying to say um so that would be one and then the other and i was looking for that sheet of paper but along the same lines we had a spreadsheet last year that dr jarno brought and it was sort of you know in a perfect world we'd have these resources and it was three levels of if we had this money to spend what we would do and i'd like to revisit that and just look at where we are and what things have been purchased and what things we still need or have changed our mind on or just sort of where we are on that and then one other thing is the seal by literacy um seems to have been put on the back burner um and
033i know that this year's seniors were not able to do it in time to use it on their college applications so i just wondered if we could get an update on when that would be resumed and resuming and uh sort of the timing on when kids would go through that process or if that's something that is a casualty of covid or just where we are that was it all right we took notes on that and one other piece that we'll add to exact session in an upcoming meeting is preparation for the negotiations process all right great so let's get longer we'll have more self from school improvement plans all right we're getting close to the end though i think getting close two more meetings and we'll be done and then the cove planning and the
034combinations comprehensive annual financial report looking forward to that review of an approval of early childhood human resource policy which will probably be on consent some monitoring reports and then if we ever have any questions what we like to learn do we have any questions do we want to hear from do we need to know more about something it's good to give the staff the team a heads up beforehand anybody have anything else they want to add and you took you got that all written down so all right amy we're going to recognize national disability employment awareness month amy kandorsky presenting though we're at the end of october um october is national disability employment awareness month so as we were talking about special education earlier the governor makes a proclamation each month and i want to
035just remind our community and all of us that we celebrate wanting all of our kids with disabilities to have college career and employment opportunities we host the climb program which is our program for 18 to 21 year old students who get that extended time and eligibility in our district we partner with cmc so the kids are on a college campus and getting community experiences both in the employee employment college and community readiness so always want us to remember that community support for kids with disabilities across the ages and really welcoming that community involvement in our kids world so along with the governor celebrating 30 years of the americans with disabilities act and the opportunities for our kids so those partnerships of college and career and job awareness for even kids with most more significant disabilities
036so it's my honor to celebrate with all of you you know about the climb program and can't be thankful enough for our partnership with cmc to give those kids those extra years of partnership within the district and then a selfish plug if you really want to know more about gt and special education it is a dac presentation item for next week so kelly you'll probably hear all about it and get kind of first hand but we'll definitely share whatever you guys need to know across the school and across the district so thank you and you have the governor's proclamation in your packet thank you all right thank you and since it's a proclamation already issued by the governor we don't need to vote on it to accept it as we do with some other resolutions
037i just looking back at my notes here there was someone who approached me about uh scholarship resources a compilation of them or all different i know before we've had a resource book about just different resources available in the county and it's been published in english and spanish but if we had any scholarship resource information consolidated is it available and is it available in both languages our counselors produce those every year at our high schools uh so they could inquire with our high school counselors and they can show them where they talk to the high school because they should be she should be able to that's what i thought it's like you should be able to get this information it's there they have consolidated lists of those all righty then superintendent qualman we turn it over
038to you with covid planning and accommodations thank you i covered some of the new incidents and uh in my board report i'll reiterate those in the last three weeks we've had seven new incidents of positive coveted cases in our schools none of them were from transmission within the school i think that's important to point out we have yet to have any student to student staff to student or student to staff transmission so face masks social distancing all the cleaning protocols that we have going on in our schools those layers of protection are working but we do have seven new incidents and it's resulted in 117 students and 15 staff members being quarantined so we'll continue to work on that but it's i think great to announce that we have 98 of our kids still in
039school i would like to talk a little bit more detail about the key performance indicators that we've migrated to the the state now has adopted a metric that has five colors our previous model at eagle county had three colors so we had to redesign our thresholds at which we make decisions about what model of instruction we provide our previous key performance indicator we we would switch to 100 remote in the red zone we're going to maintain that same threshold to move the whole district into remote i think what we are seeing though is uh the addition of the new orange zone has has caused some question we didn't have that in the old kpi but now we do in the orange zone we would subscribe to the same philosophy that we've had since august safely
040keep as many kids in school for as long as we can but we anticipate that in orange we are going to have a few more teachers in quarantine we'll have a few more students in quarantine and there's a tipping point in each school where it becomes unmanageable if you have too many staff members that are out or too many kids that you're trying to balance with at home remote learning and in school learning at some point it just becomes easier to manage for everybody if you switch all the way into remote learning so we'll consider that in the orange zone that decision is made by me as to whether or not we're going to close down a school for uh for remote learning but i would make that in collaboration with the building principle with
041public health and and with a union representative at the table as as well so it would be a collaborative process i do think it's important also to mention that there's been a rumor going around about switching to remote between thanksgiving and christmas as a cautionary measure that that's really not congruent with with our philosophy of and our goal of trying to keep safely as many kids in school for as long as we can we'll continue to monitor the kpi and adjust instructional modes to align with the epidemiological data and we can consider transitioning to remote when it's when it's necessary based on that data one of the things that we we have done with our return to school plan that i think has worked really well for us is we haven't set arbitrary dates at
042which we're going to do something in which we're going to make a switch we were intentional about that we've seen so many districts around the state and around the country that set arbitrary dates that are are disconnected from the epidemiological data and then as the data changes and they approach that action date what they've said is of no relevance they have to change their plan and that just puts the the community on a yo-yo emotionally and logistically people are making plans and scheduling for things that never happen so uh i we are our our goal is to remain open uh through that three week period between thanksgiving and christmas we will watch the data and if we have need to close a school or two then then we would do that but again we will
043remain open with as many schools as we can for as many students as we can for as long as we can additionally from my end to report on an update with eagle county education association i i've pointed out in a couple of venues lately that i think our success in keeping schools open in is due in large part to our collaborative relationship with the union um i continue to meet with them monthly with adele wilson uh to share their concerns and for us to to share our ideas on how we might resolve some of those and we've really moved towards them being more engaged in district processes for example we have union representation in the district accountability meetings out we also have uh union representation at ad team union representation budget committee so really try
044to find a place and a seat and a voice for them in a lot of different venues so with that we'll move to uh a sports update from dr journal sports are rolling right along i am proud to say i was at the battle mountain high school game last friday their home game and everyone was masked up everyone was behaving it went really well i'll be at the eagle valley game this friday night as well our ticketing system is working really really well we're not actually charging there is a fee to purchase the tickets but that works exceptionally well because it helps us to make sure we're within the 175 person limit and we could use it for contact tracing we're even talking about using it for other events um and uh one of our
045middle schools barry creek middle school is also using the ticketing system so things are going really well i think that it's tough because we didn't have the practice and the preparation that we ordinarily would since we sort of jumped to the football season in the middle of the fall but i'm pleased that we have have not had any major injuries that was a big concern of mine in moving to the a season for football that we wouldn't have had that practice and conditioning but i feel like that has has turned out to be pretty well so everything is working well in the sports world thanks dr jono for fifth day activity update melissa ruelthun is unable to be here tonight but i can share that we are seeing a slow increase uh not only in
046student participation in those activities but in in activities available so on our school website you can see all those different uh different activities that we've added and the different partner groups and again a big thank you to all our partner groups who are making those activities available and last week hi i just wanted to let everyone know um one of the developments that has happened is we did find out um through our providers for fifth day that's c-cap funds so that's that the child care assistance program that families do not need to pay a co-pay like they always have in the past those have been forgiven for the school year so that applies to fifth day programs and for any child care needs if they already qualify for the rest of the year if we
047do go into remote and after school programming so families have no um no co-pay with the c-cap dollars got it excellent good news all right thank you so much great news thanks for being tuned in melissa so with that we'll move to adele wilson uh director of hr adele can you tell us about how efforts are going to secure more substitutes bus drivers take it away food service food service um so we'll start with the lower and go to the yay bus drivers we are still in need um we had had a few applicants but unfortunately um things did not pan out with their application process so we are still in order to really be fully staffed and have some allow routes allow trips etc etc we need about seven to nine more drivers we
048have implemented a bonus system um and we're working on submitting advertising to bell daily and right on our facebook page with some additional boosts with that that you can pay to get that out to more people than just our facebook followers um then cooks i believe that we said at our last meeting that we have increased the hourly rate for cooks um if we did not we have done that and we've increased that for all employees by two dollars and sixty-seven cents an hour that makes us more competitive with like wendy's as an example and great news we did hire two new cooks and they were in orientation today one of my team members brenda does a spanish orientation for for some of our employees to be fully staffed we do need a couple more
049cooks and a float manager and i have in my queue a float manager to actually offer a job too so i'm working on that today and then our really great news is with our guest teachers we've been working in conjunction with the communications team and also with bell health and bell valley partnership and youth power 365 and those folks have been able to assist us with some of the uh costs of actually becoming a guest teacher you're having your fingerprints taken care of getting your substitute authorization so they will reimburse up to 96 candidates for those costs so the communications team put an article in the trail market that went out yesterday i believe and that hits about ten thousand people between staff and parents which is a great marketing tool and then here dan
050and his team are working to do a press release to say thank you to our partners and then we did run ten new um guest teachers through training last monday the 19th and we have 19 in the hiring pool so which is like fantastic thank you for that we'll continue to work on that i think those hiring incentives are helping out for sure so well end of the done that's it for that one okay so next on the agenda is an update on the uh final october count yes and i'm on the agenda for that as well so i've been keeping you updated on this for the last several weeks and our final october count is seven students under projection that's seven seven uh that's within one tenth of one percent of our projections probably
051the closest that we've been in a long time i think that's due to several factors i think first of all we were conservative in our projections and worked closely with our principals to make sure that they understood what we were anticipating this year and i think secondly our schools including our teachers and our principals have really been increa and incredibly flexible in the service that they're able to provide families to accommodate a lot of different requests with blended at-home support in school learning remote access from home so they're really bending over backwards to to make sure that kids stay enrolled in the district and that they're provided services from the school district i think of interesting an interesting note to add is that we did see more mobility this year it's probably not surprising we
052saw higher numbers of students coming into the district and higher numbers of students going out of the district as compared to last year last year was the first year that the board asked me to examine those numbers and this year we had a slight increase so as an example in 1920 we had 400 students enroll into the district new to us and this year we had 427 new to the district enroll with us and last year we had 376 students leave the district and this year we had 442 students leave the district so increased mobility not surprising in this environment with what the economy uh like it is and housing challenges that we have in our community but i got to say i'm excited to know that we are within uh within that uh that
053one percent for enrollment that means that this will have little to no uh implication on our budget for the school year questions on that way to go it's always nice to have one last thing to worry about all right so michelle is going to present us with healthy kids colorado survey data all right thank you so much for the opportunity to be here from a slightly different viewpoint than usual michelle stucker i serve as executive director for mountain youth when i'm not volunteering with the school board here and appreciate an opportunity to share some of our results from the most recent administration hard to believe it was almost a year ago november of 2019 as a little bit of background this is the largest local youth behavioral assessment and we've been conducting it with mountain
054youth in partnership with the school district this is our seventh administration in the past 15 years and was a really a huge foundation for why mountain youth came to exist in the first place to make sure the community had a current honest look at youth needs strengths and behaviors we surveyed almost 4 000 students grades 6 through 12. this was the first year that 6th graders were included and that was super helpful for us because otherwise it's in every other year survey and our middle school data would be really hard to compare administration to administration if we had 100 student turnover at the middle each particular middle school of note we are the only community in the state of colorado that has had 100 of our middle and high schools opt in to the survey
055so many communities it's maybe one or two of the schools that participate and only because they're asked to to be part of the state survey we're an opt-in community so our schools our district our community has found enough value in this data that we commit to participating and uh we are i said 100 of the middle and high schools that includes our our partners that are not district schools which is extremely unique for a community to be able to really have that reflective data of the whole community i'll mention too that beyond the healthy kids colorado survey the school district also administers the gallup poll and student perception survey and so together looking at a couple of those different assessments really helps the district better understand where students are at and how we can best
056support them with services and the data is used in a number of different way different ways it's really helpful at the building level and then community level to understand where students are at so we can prioritize resources this data is also incredibly valuable for non-profits and other partners in the community to raise funds by being able to prove the need for different services so i put together kind of a highlights reel of a few areas i want you to know that at the high school level there's almost 200 questions asked and at the middle school level close to 100 and so this really is just kind of those a couple of key highlights that we pulled out and the full reports are available on the mountain youth website mountainyouth.org in our work section i also
057want to give a shout out to phil and the whole district for enabling the community to have access to the aggregate level data there are many districts throughout the state so at the end of the day the schools and the districts own the data and there are many communities where they own that privately and for us to be willing to share the aggregate level so the combined data from all of the schools is so helpful in many of the mechanisms that i just shared and as we walk through some of these areas i'm going to also point out how we're comparing to some of our regional partners so neighboring communities as well as statewide so first we're going to take a look at substance use areas and what we've noticed with high schoolers and middle
058schoolers alike is that we saw pretty consistent substance use across most of the substance areas for many years 2017 we saw a bit of an increase in much of the use and then back down in 2019 so a little something to celebrate in that we're back down to kind of where we had seen historically um so here you can see high school use for a number of different substance areas alcohol binge drinking which is drinking five or more drinks in a short period of time with the intention of getting on being under the influence marijuana use and prescription meds we are at comparable rates to our regional and statewide partners slightly above where our counterparts are in binge drinking and pretty much smack dab where our counterparts are in the other areas or doing slightly
059better and one other area i want to note on high school substance use is our impaired driving we did see almost a double the reported use in marijuana impaired driving by student drivers as i mentioned at the middle school level we saw similar increase in 2017 and then decrease close to where we were for years prior in this last administration our local middle school students are using marijuana about half the rate of our statewide counterparts so something to celebrate there moving us along into some of the mental health areas that we take a look at um this question that we look at here is the number one uh indicator for depression so the question reads have you felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in that you stop doing
060some usual activities so your behavior changed and as we know through conversations with our school partners and with young people directly we need to keep prioritizing their mental health and their wellness so we did see a pretty big increase in this area we are at about the same place as our statewide and regional counterparts and then looking more specifically at suicide attempts we were happy to see that we have seen decrease in both middle school and high school attempts however we really believe that any number is a bad number here we don't want to see any any young person reporting that they've attempted suicide in the past year we did see 15 percent of students reporting uh that they considered suicide about 14 percent making a plan and then as you can see here the
061actual reported students who have said they have attempted suicide got to give a shout out here to the great work of our partners at speak up reach out and the hope center and mine springs as well as our school-based clinicians for often being that that front line that first point of contact with students in crisis moving into some of the positive areas and i purposefully went from what's not looking so great to what we have to celebrate we use this term protective factors and assets interchangeably when we talk about what's going well for our students and what can help set them up for success or help create resiliency trusted adults is one of the primary factors when we look across the community and so this could be a student going to either a parent a
062coach a teacher a pastor any adult that might have a positive influence and has a strong enough relationship with that young person that they would go to them if they were needing support or afraid for themselves or a friend and there's some great programming that's happening in our classrooms particularly at the middle school level within with instigating these conversations with students who is that for you you might not need them right now but let's identify one or two people who that could be for you so that you have them at the ready when you might need them and research shows that having one or more caring adults in a child's life increases likelihood that they will flourish and become productive adults themselves that's reported by child trends so our again our rates continue to be
063really high in number of students that say they have this type of trusted adult in their life you can see about three quarters of students at the high school and middle school level say they have that person they know who it is they're ready to talk to them and another big protective factor in our community is engagement and pro-social opportunities so i've showed a couple of pieces here first at top at the top we see engagement in volunteerism and community service we've got about half of our high school students reporting that they're involved in those activities and then secondly we've got engagement in extracurriculars and this can be clubs sports or any other activity that they're involved with as a productive use of their time and so even though we saw a little bit of
064a drop at the middle school level we're still really proud of how we're looking with students engaging one interesting piece in the prevention field is often if something's going well it stops getting the attention it stops getting the funding it stops getting the support and so just like to remind folks that in this realm these assets are strong and we need to keep focusing on building those relationships and building those opportunities for all students in order to help support them i pulled in a couple of slides specific to academic engagement and relevance which i haven't spoken to other partners or groups about yet but there were some really interesting pieces here so looking at a number of students that think their classes are interesting and stimulating we had about three quarters of our students report
065yeah i'm interested in what i'm learning about i think the things that they are learning in school are going to be important later in life we saw a little bit less of of the amount of students reporting that that's the case um and so for me thinking through that you know if there's half of our students this past year that said they they see a connection between what they're learning now and later in life i really appreciated hearing dr jarno's presentation earlier about careerx and other customized pathways for students and we're really focused on building those opportunities and excited to hopefully see that number rise in the future and then trying to do their best work at school we did see an uptick there this past go around with about three quarters of students say
066they consistently are trying their best school climate do you enjoy being in school or not i was surprised here that we didn't see higher marks the blue line here is number of students who say they almost always or always hated being in school and then the orange line is often enjoyed or always enjoyed being in school so it was really disappointing to see the blue line higher than the orange line um i compressed the percentages so that we can see where we moved from 2017 to 19 this was a new question in 2017 so we don't have a ton of history on where we've been in the past but an area that we can definitely look to improve so just looking back a couple of the key highlights again we saw many of the substance
067use areas increase so negative movement in 2017 and then coming back down in 2019 we continue to focus on mental health supports as a concern for students in our community and everybody in our community some of those strong protective factors or assets that we need to keep putting attention towards are around trusted adults and pro-social involvement and then we kind of have a mixed bag with how students are reporting academic relevance and engagement so that sums up what we recognized in 2019 again there is loads more data and i would be happy to pull anything that anybody would like to see uh again the reports are available on mountain youth's website as well often when i give a presentation like this the question comes of well this is great but this was a year ago
068and quite a lot has happened since november of 2019 where are we at so while this is typically in every other year project the state did put together a condensed option this year so 2020 which is typically an in-between year a non-survey year and locally schools had the option to opt into that one if they wanted to gather some more data on where their students were at it's only about 50 questions long same questions at the middle school and high school level of those about half the questions are the same as the typical healthy kids so we can see where movements happened in the past year and half of them are new and more specific to covid and stress and coping here locally i was very pleased that battle mountain high school took advantage of
069participating and the participation window for the state goes through the next week or so we also had eagle county charter academy and vale mountain school participate we may have others but i know at least those three are partaking so very curious to see what comes of their results questions feedback comments it's really fun to be a data presentation at the end of our full agenda tonight this uh this data does make up uh the lion's share of our holistic indicators so it's uh it's quite valuable to to the district to know where our resources need to go you did mention earlier in the presentation that gallup and the student perception survey have also been part of our holistic indicators and and this year we're we're seeing overlap in what those two uh survey so we're
070asking principals if they want to continue to do both or is there one that they would prefer to do just trying to find a way to lighten up the load on our teachers and students right now but still get relevant data so we are finding most of them still prefer one over the other and we'll be able to share more about that later on this this fall thank you for these numbers appreciate it thank you and again just want to express our gratitude for the district this is a big time commitment to give a entire period across an entire school in many other parts of the state where like i mentioned maybe one or two schools in a district participate it's typically a small sample of students we've just realized that this well-oiled machine runs
071best to have the full school participate and it really does help boost our confidence when we can say that this data reflects where the whole community is at so thank you so much for being an amazing partner throughout the years um and also thank you for being willing to have the that aggregate report available for the whole community to utilize it really means a lot in boosting supports and resources for students and families thanks yeah thank you very much for that the the full report is easy to access on the website so if you want to look into it more there's plenty there is a five-year cisco telecommunications contract and i see dr jarno coming up to the to the plate so we're gonna stick with our baseball metaphors i guess um so essentially this
072is a contract that um the systems that allow all of our phones to actually work so i'm here with my technology hat on instead of my curriculum hat that i wear earlier so we own the hardware of all our phones but this contract with cisco provides all of the services that go with those phones it is a a locked in rate for five years we pay it annually over the course of five years the total is 232 thousand it's 46 thousand dollars per year roughly um and again it um just provides all of the services that make our phones work if we don't have this side of the contract then we basically just have some hardware that doesn't do anything and jason butters did a great job in negotiating this with cisco to get us
073on a plan that keeps the rates steady year by year um and is a little bit less expensive than the plan that we were on previously so we're just asking for you to approve us to move forward with the contract dr jonah we don't have a copy of the contract in the board notes at this time when is that contract due um it is due by the end of november so i could provide that for the next okay i'm sorry i thought that was included on there that would be my fault i apologize yeah we can uh we can get that added in and move it to november if that gives you enough time still to get it yes it does should we not approve then until we see the contract okay yeah yeah it's
074it needs to be on here so we can have all reviewed it um okay we'll look at it next time okay as long as we have plenty of time otherwise we could have copy we have we have went fast through some of our presentations we have we have time we can do it at the next meeting which will be on the 11th yes you got a calendar right here we have um it's my birthday so i won't be here next time but i'm sure i can have jason come and answer any questions that need to be answered delegate that to somebody sure it is veterans day yes okay thank you i apologize didn't realize that wasn't in there um so here we are if i i'm not jumping ahead as i have done to the
075end of the meeting evaluating the meeting in terms of governance policies and advancing the goals admission of a district um anybody have any comments on these evaluation i'd say it was a real gift to be able to see some videos of students at schools and in classrooms and and what their highlights are of learning so far this year that was that was a real strong point of the meeting for me today i was going to say too i think that we it's not quite time to pat ourselves on the back but i think certainly a round of applause should go to phil and the district leadership team in the in the planning process it's it's not no one wants to see an incident happen at a school but within hours of learning about the incident
076the fact that parents and can be contacted and staff can be notified teachers can be notified everyone knows what's happening how long it's going to happen for that those things don't happen on their own they happen through very careful and methodical planning and i think that's what the community expects of us they expect us to plan they expect us to think of every contingency and then they expect us to be consistent with the implementation of those plans and uh while we can look at other communities and say this community they didn't do it right you know they're scrambling there at the last minute that's exactly what can't happen in a community you can't look to your school board and your leadership team and say why didn't you guys think about this you should have planned
077for this i don't hear anyone complaining about that and i know it's because of the good thorough work that was done months ago in in making up these plans and then consistently following the plans when something needs to be changed we weren't afraid to say we need to make a change especially with the changing of the of the tracker but um i want to say thank you to everyone on the leadership team and phil and just say i think at this point job well done uh making the plans following the plans and communicating the plans to everyone it's it's really what i think is expected of us and i'm very grateful that that we were able to do that but mostly you doing the hard work so thank you very much i appreciate that thanks
078dr long i think it's important to recognize that uh that everybody's been at the table for this planning uh parents teachers principals the district leadership team uh the board's been informed the whole time and collecting your input so what i've told everybody that asks is it's been collaboration and relationships that got us to this point and uh we got to keep those in mind and help us get through these hard times but but thank you for the for the acknowledgement yeah i'll echo that too and then to the families and that are just rolling with it as well you know and the teachers who are working extra and the our leadership team really continue to be impressed and proud that we're on the forefront of this and i've only been hearing words of gratitude for
079having kids back in school and i know that some people have struggled and it's not working out for them and there's it's definitely in any situation 100 percent satisfaction isn't going to happen especially with the pandemic it's it's tricky and so we appreciate those people who've had to make sacrifices or had to make changes and you know we hope that they can come back and be part of our team in the future or we know that they wish them the best of luck and and just going to continue to do the best we can and i'm glad to hear so many people got some time to rest here in october and soon it'll be thanksgiving anyone else i feel like we're uh missing something here dressed because it's only 7 30 but i don't think
080anyone's going to complain if i pick this up now and say meeting adjourned see you next month