Board of Education Meeting: March 10, 2026

001All right, we will call our meeting on March 10th to order. Thank you for joining the board of education this evening. Please mute your cell phones as we begin this meeting. Today is Tuesday, March 10th, 2026, and this meeting is now called to order at 5:38 p.m. For those attending this meeting in person, live captions are available on a TV in the boardroom and in the lobby. To access the live captions in a language other than English on your own device, please scan the QR code on the screen or on the table near the entrance and select the language of your choice. The live stream of this meeting is also available in English and Spanish on YouTube. For links to these live streams, please visit the board of education page of the PSD website or

002PSDTV on demand on YouTube. Thank you very much. And next we have our pledge of allegiance. Please join me in reciting the pledge. >> To the flag of the United States of America and to the stands one nation indivisibley andice for all. Thank you. Okay. All right. Uh would any board members like to make any changes to the agenda? Seeing none, we'll keep rolling. We've got recognitions and reports. Brian, I believe we have some recognitions and reports. >> Yeah. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. Uh this evening we are honored to highlight an important partnership between the pter school districts and the pter fire authority. Leading the celebration is John Cop our executive director of communications. Welcome John. Good evening President Zamora Superintendent Kingsley board directors and everyone joining us tonight. Pudra Fire Authority has partnered

003with the district for many years to provide comprehensive instruction on CPR protocols and emergency safety standards to our students and staff. At this time I'd like to introduce Dr. Julie Chaplan, assistant superintendent of schools to come to the podium to speak a little bit more about this partnership. >> All right. Good evening, Superintendent Kingsley, President Zamora, board of directors. Thank you so much. I am super proud to recognize our partners at Pter Fire Authority um for bringing all the life-saving skills um that we need um within our community to into our schools. Um, so I'd love to ask um our fellow partners to join us up here this evening. So this evening we have division chief Sam McGaffen. Uh, we have our education manager Caitlyn True Love. Uh, we have the assistant fire marshal Kevin

004Sullivan and our public um, information officer Annie Beerhouser or Beerbower, sorry. Um so under their leadership uh pter fire authority has been in instrumental in providing CPR and AED training to our high schoolers um ensuring that per they're prepared to help act in critical moments and in addition to their support of our high school programs. PFA also offers engaging activities for our younger students, including fire prevention programs, um, which include, uh, interactive lessons for elementary students, um, and, um, some engaging opportunities such as a firerevention poster contest. Um, they organize a youth fire camp, um, which is an experiential camp for students uh, to learn about the fire service and earn some certifications. And then ongoing community outreach. So, they're continually supporting all of the classes um friends and family and friends CPR courses within

005our community um and um throughout our district. So, um just want to thank them all again and I will um allow our the division chief who's also our fire marshal um Sean McGaffen up to the microphone to say a few words. >> Good evening everybody. Uh again, my name is Sean McGaffen. I'm the fire marshall with Pter Fire Authority. uh somebody who's been with the fire department here for Collins for 25 years now. Um there's something that we have that I've had for 20 years of my career where it was reactive, right? Everything we did was to react to the emergency, go out and put out the problem, take care of whatever the issue may be, you know, stuff out the fire, assist the people. Um as I moved in my career farther into where

006we're at now, uh I became the fire marshal and everything we do now is proactive. So it's a different mindset in inside the fire department. We do things through education, through code enforcement, um through different different ways of getting to the community long before the 911 call ever happens. Um in order to be successful and PFA is very successful in these programs, it's the people that are behind me that that run these organizations and these different programs. Um Caitlyn runs our outreach and education. Um she is the one who is the mastermind behind most of the educational components that you guys see in Pter School District. um she either puts it together, builds it and presents or one of her people present for her. Um but she 100% is the is the brains behind all

007of our outreach and education with Pter Fire Authority. So special accolades to Caitlyn and this award. So thank you. >> Thank you. And on that note, we'd like to say thank you to the administrators, teachers, and students who welcome us into their classrooms because the work that we do could not happen without them receiving us. Um, specifically with the CPR, AED, and stop the bleed program that we've done recently, we'd like to thank Nina Whitmire, who's a student at Rocky Mountain High School, and Sophie Williams, who's a student at Fossil Ridge High School, for helping to organize training for over 600 students. Okay. Well, and that would be all. So, thank you. I think um we'll um have your award here by director. >> Thank you. Thank you, Julie. >> Yes, we'll have you guys

008take a picture with us after we have our uh resolution. So, our first action item of the evening and only action item of the evening is a resolution in support of Women's History Month. Can I get a motion? >> Oh, sorry. I move that the board No. Right. >> Yes. >> Okay. Sorry y'all. I move that the board approve and adopt the resolution in support of Women's History Month, March 2026. >> Thank you very much. Can I get a second? Thank you, Carla. And I believe we also have some folks here for this. >> Yeah, we sure do. Joining us this evening to introduce the student who will speak to Women's History Month is Leslie Smiser, Fossil Ridge High School teacher. Welcome, Leslie. Okay. Um, thank you, Superintendent Board. Thank you for honoring and acknowledging

009Women's History Month. I think it's important that we show our young women and girls in our education system how we value them. So, I appreciate that very much. Um, the honor to introduce Addison tonight is not lost on me. I very much appreciate that as as well. I was thinking about what a wild time perhaps this is to be growing up as a young woman and then my mind went to when has it not been a wild time to be growing up as a young woman. So um to all of us who are still growing and starting that journey. Uh my only hope is that we can lift each other up and support one another. And I know that Addison is already well on her way to doing that. So I'm going to let her

010speak to you guys. to thank you for the opportunity to introduce you tonight. >> Hi, my name is Addison Bean. I'm a senior at Fossil Rich High School. Before I begin, I want to thank President Samora, Superintendent Kingsley, members of the board of education, the PSD cabinet, and Jenna Altamer for give inviting me to give the resolution for National Women's History Month. When we reflect on women's history, we honor the women who made our present possible. Because of them, women today can vote, lead, innovate, and dream beyond the limits once set for us. At a love lace pushed open the doors for women in STEM, Hovita Adar fought for Mexican-American rights, women's suffrage, and education. Rosa Parks and Saherna Truth stood unshakably for freedom and justice, while Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony carved

011a path toward equality. There are countless others whose names deserve to be spoken. And to those I can't, for the sake of time, thank you. What all of these women shared was simple. They refused to let anyone else define the type of women they should be. Because of that, I get to define mine. I'm heading to CSU to study biomedical sciences. I have a burning passion for the microbiome and the brain gut connection. But I also want to be a mom one day more than anything. For a long time, I thought I had to choose between those two women. Then I met the teacher who introduced me today, Leslie Smiser. She's the first female STEM educator who showed me that I don't have to choose between ambition and love. I've heard her say, "I understand

012you're human. So am I. I'm here for you. Just talk to me." More times than I've heard the word ukario. My second science fair project was testing which type of pan makes the best cookies. So yes, someday my kids will probably grow up with a mother who runs a controlled experiment in the kitchen. A scientist, a mom, and apparently a very experimental baker. When I think about what being a woman means to me, I don't think it can be narrowed down to one definition. Society has always tried to hand us its own how we should look, act, and what we're capable of. In the 2023 Barbie movie, America Ferrer's character wrestles with the same contradictions. being a career woman who also loves being a mom. And her monologue written with Greta Gerwig captured every fear

013I've had and every struggle I've watched women in my life navigate. We're told to succeed but not ask for too much. To stand out but not be too loud. As Tahari P. Henson once said, "If you want to discount performance, go get it, but you're not going to get it from me." And as Alexandria Aassiocortez reminds us, justice is about making sure that being polite is not the same thing as being quiet. The most righteous thing you can do is shake the table. I've listened to many powerful women execute and talk about strength, ambition, and resilience. But the woman who taught me those things first never gave a speech about it. She just lived it every day. I love you. I want to make things happen for you. I don't know how I'm going to

014make it happen, but I will. I have to go to work. Kirsten Espinosa. Or to me, mom. When I was first asked what being a woman means to me, I realized I had never actually slowed down and stopped to define it. I still don't have a perfect answer, but I know the type of woman I want to be. I hope to become someone well spoken, nurturing, honest, and someone my future daughter can proudly look up to. The question isn't what kind of woman I'm supposed to be. It's what kind of woman I will choose to become. And if someday my daughter is proud to call me her mom, I'll know I became the woman I chose to be. Thank you. >> I'm not crying. You're crying. Uh, does anyone have any comments they would like

015to make? See, you're crying, too. It's real. Very moving. Well done. I don't know if I don't want to speak for everyone. I know that I am nervous to speak because I feel like you like wrapped that up with a nice bow and there is nothing I can add that will add to it. You I think you nailed how I have felt throughout my lifetime as a woman. um and how I aspire to show up as well. So, I thank you a lot for how you showed up today and charging us to be who we aspire to be and not just what we're supposed to be. Okay. On that, does anyone else have any comments? >> Okay. >> Uh speaking about mentioning it all, it is a day. Um, I just want to say I

016appreciate it. I just everything you said. I was sitting here like I feel uplifted. I was like that's something I think for me I needed to hear today. And so I thank you. Um, and it just made me really think about all the people you named and what it means and that balance and that choice and um, hearing you talk about being a mom and um, you know, having kids myself and what that has meant in terms of things. Um, so thank you. Um, but when you finish in my head I was really like mic drop and um, I was trying to figure out how I might get a copy of that speech because um, it really touched my heart. So, um, if that's possible, I would love that. Thank you. >> You can send

017it to BOE at PSD schools. >> May I just add a quick comment? I just wanted to say that was so inspiring. Thank you so much. Your courage is amazing and I just felt I felt all your feelings and um yeah, thank you. Thanks for that today. >> Thank you for sharing. Uh, Addison, I said it correctly, right? I am so proud to be your superintendent. Your voice, your presence, it is so powerful. So, thank you for representing our entire district, not just your family or your school, but our entire district community and all women that we represent and hope to support in the way that you have been incredibly supportive. You have brought us a motion and I will definitely be calling my mom on the way home tonight. So, thank you for that.

018All right, with that Jill, can you please call the vote? >> Carla Baze, >> I. >> Connor Duffy, >> I. >> Scott Shoenbower, >> hi. >> Dr. Andrew Spain, >> hi. >> Jessica Zamora, >> I. >> Dr. Kuronda Ziggler, >> I. Motion passes. 6. >> We'll take a photo now. All right, we will keep rolling with our meeting. Next on our agenda is our superintendent reports. Superintendent Kingsley now has remarks for the board and the community. >> Yeah, thank you again. How do you follow Addison? Just the answer is I think you don't. You just do the best that you can. That was so incredible. I'm so grateful for that uh rec recognition and resolution. So, thank you uh members of the board for for doing that tonight. I also want to acknowledge just this

019room and you probably can't see it if you're watching on YouTube, but the energy of this room has shifted since the last time that you have been here. And I believe it has shifted as a result of this beautiful, incredible student artwork that graces the student gallery wall in our boardroom as well as out into the front area. and we'll have an opportunity to recognize incredible artists uh from our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools in April uh and have an opportunity to do that. I do uh want to invite the board to the super art exhibition that's over two nights. It's one of my favorite events to recognize these special artists and I know we have a board member here that is really especially proud um because that is part of their

020family and so I won't go into specifics just out of respect uh but just really think it's really beautiful. I want to thank all of our supportive teachers, encouraging families, and all of our school leaders who are really prioritizing and supporting the arts in the best way that they can. Um, if you'd like to celebrate art in a different form, our elementary and middle school honors choir will be performing tomorrow night at the Lincoln Center from 7 to 8:30 p.m. I will be the MC of the evening. It's another great event. Uh, it will be my second year in a row to have an opportunity to MC that very special event. and the talent uh in a very different form of expression is equally as great and would love to invite any member of the

021community to the Lincoln Center tomorrow night from 7 to 8:30 to hear our wonderful and amazing elementary and middle school honors choir. Uh members of the board, over the past two weeks, I've had an opportunity to visit seven different schools across the district. Really proud of that. There's some incredible work that's happening across the system. I do want to take a brief moment to elevate two of them. Bamford Elementary School, our newest elementary school, was super impressed uh with various forms of academic monitoring that I saw on my school visit there. If you remember, we saw a video a couple of weeks ago with different teachers from different schools, trying to fa find ways to encourage student participation and mastery through just continuing to not only monitor, but encourage and elevate what they're learning and

022providing them quick feedback. I saw that at a great level at Bamford Elementary School with various teachers um and their leadership is just doing an incredible job and it was so proud to hear that their data, their dibbles literacy data and math data is like rising through the ranks as a result of their teachers and pair of professionals contributing to really brand new teaming practices and very supportive leadership. So, I just couldn't be more proud. I then had an opportunity to go to Bacon Elementary School, uh, another great school in our district. And I happened to be there on a Monday morning and witnessed firsthand a six-year-old having a very difficult time with it being Monday morning. And what I could share with you around this special moment is I saw a teacher, a paraprofessional,

023an assistant principal, and a principal working in partnership with each other to take a six-year-old who was having probably a very difficult day and take such a compassionate, human- centered approach to helping them be regulated, reflective on what they needed to do to get back on track and how to be compassionate and and just empathetic in that exercise and it just it was so graceful to watch all of them in action. It was very impromptu. It wasn't staged or anything like that, but it uh it was just beautiful in action. And I know that those things are happening in all of our schools across the district on a daily basis. And I just want to give a special shout out to uh all of those special teachers at Bacon Elementary School, PAR professionals and uh

024leadership staff. Uh tonight we have important topics to discuss at your request. As you know, uh, the board and community will hear an update from our integrated services division about their child fine processes as well as our identification percentages and our work in that particular area. Not just to improve uh our identification numbers, but to make sure that they're accurate, to make sure our students who have needs get those needs met uh by caring, supportive staff and community and partnership with their respective families. And we'll also hear a very important update on our district's marketing campaign, Choose PSD, which is designed to both raise awareness about the district as well as our individual schools. And we look forward to sharing that with you. Uh the thing that I want to close with tonight is that

025we know that we've continued to provide district updates around our comprehensive planning uh updates and our engagement processes and sessions that both I've been having, the board's been having, our comprehensive planning committee has been working behind the scenes diligently to continue to make sure that we're moving our district forward in a very thoughtful and elegant way. I want to signal both to the members of the board as well as to the community that after spring break, please pay attention to special updates from our district regarding more community engagement opportunities to have your voice heard in that process. We will have different engagement opportunities for all members of our comm community, but we are also in the process of designing three very specific engagement opportunities just for our employees. And I really want to give a

026special shout out to all of our labor groups uh and their respective leadership for being very supportive in that process knowing that we have to do this work together. And I just I know we couldn't do it without you. And I also want to give a very special thank you for the leadership that's been presented in the comprehensive planning committee. Uh so far uh we have a very special video that we I will close my remarks with tonight to just kind of orient everybody uh to what the comprehensive planning committee is working on. So thank you. PSD enrollment has dropped from over 27,000 students to about 25,000 in just a few years and projections show a continued 2% annual decline. Fewer children are being born. This decline is especially evident in our elementary grade levels

027where we have fewer kindergarteners districtwide than we have students in upper grade levels. Rising housing costs make it harder for young families to stay in our community. These factors don't just impact PSD. This is happening locally, statewide, and nationally. Every 2% decline means roughly $6 million less in funding because Colorado funds schools on a per pupil basis. Because staffing makes up approximately 85% of the district budget, reduced funding directly translates to staffing reductions. These reductions at schools and the central office directly impact the services and programs that the district is able to provide to students. Over the last few years, reductions have already been made to student supports, including the number of pair professionals in the district, counseling services for students, gifted and talented programming, and specials like art, music, and PE, among others. In

028PSD, we believe that all students should have access to robust educational experiences. Increasing enrollment in our schools would help to stabilize school budgets and staffing, expand specialized services, and provide more opportunities to students. You may be wondering how this connects to this year's state and federal budget challenges. They're related, but they're separate challenges. The comprehensive planning committee was created to support the district's planning efforts as we respond to long-term declines in enrollment, not because of this year's budget. The committee's charge would be the same even with the current budget pressures being generated at the state and federal level. You may also be asking about the debtfree mill levy override or ballot measure 4A that passed in 2024. This mill levy is designed to address deferred maintenance and capital needs, meaning building repairs and infrastructure. A

029smaller portion provides support to stabilize the budgets of small schools, ensuring that they can offer a basic level of service to students. And that support matters. But with the number of small schools growing due to ongoing declines in enrollment, it's not a long-term solution to the structural challenge we're facing. After analyzing these data, the comprehensive planning committee has reached unanimous consensus. PSD has too many empty seats and that number will continue to grow. The next step in the committee's work is developing clear, transparent criteria for how possible school closure and consolidation decisions would be evaluated. This criteria will be presented to the board of education in May 2026. We want to emphasize that no decisions about consolidation or about specific schools have been made. To inform the next steps in this process, the comprehensive planning

030committee, PSD leadership, and the board of education are hosting community engagement sessions, which are open to all members of the community, parents and guardians, students, and staff. These sessions are designed to gather feedback about how best to move forward as we address this challenge as a collective district community. Pter school district will continue to provide updates and information about upcoming engagement sessions and this process in an effort to inform and engage our community. and we encourage you to be part of this conversation. >> Again, I just want to close by thanking the comprehensive planning committee for their very important work. And I also want to give a very special thank you to our communications team who continues to produce such incredible content and do so such so quickly, which is really important in helping our

031tell our story in a very transparent transparent manner. Members of the board, thank you for allowing me to address the community this evening. >> Thank you, Superintendent Kingsley. And next on our agenda, we have community comment. Uh this opportunity for public comment is for members of the community who have registered to speak by the designated deadline. Those people will be called on to make remarks in the order that they signed up. Each each speaker will be allowed three minutes to address the board. All right. First up, we have Danny Lawrence. Bring it down, man. >> Oh, that's way high. Yeah. We have to do it on the fly. There we go. Okay, that sounds better. Cool. There you go. Thank you for the opportunity. I won't lie. I am underwhelmed that it took four months

032to get to part two of a conversation that I've been trying to have for 5 years. To see the 11 slides that don't address the questions you all raised on in the November 4th meeting infuriates me. For anyone interested in the observation of a mom 74 days from the finish line, I wanted to share that it is my opinion that most all of your problems with integrated services are due to how school sites implement what Mr. Dr. Kingsley and Dr. Raml feel like a standard PSSE policy and practice. It is not happening the way that you it is not happening that that way and you are being misled. In my short time tonight, I want to illustrate that by giving you a personal example. Perhaps the best question that was asked on November 4th came

033from President Zamora and she was inquiring about the involvement of adult services planning and when that starts in the district. The answer was ninth grade from Dr. Raml. And I want to give you a true picture from two different schools in our district as we experienced it. For my family, Jess, I had to beg for the transition IEP meeting to occur in nth grade. I started asking as early as 8th grade, but no one in PSC would answer my questions about the expectations of that meeting. In fact, when the IEP meeting was held in May before we left for 9th grade, I was told to shut up by PSC staff with my son present. I'm happy to provide the recording for proof. We were told from 9th grade to 11th grade countless times over two

034years that we would be provided a contact for DVR and SWAP, which is the district's school to work alliance program. It appears to have several employees. I went back and I counted the number of times that I asked in those emails specific contact information for individuals from my case manager. It was eight and it was never given. We have never been given to this day any contact with SWAP and contact with DVR happened outside of the district by my own initiative. The wait list for DVR is based on disability severity and qualifying for a waiver. For a student like my son, that is anywhere from 2 to 10 years. Nationally, 75% of disabled adults are unemployed. That's 75%. It is not a joke. It is bleak. With the discussion November 4th turned very emotional about

035community and belonging for those students, I want to tell you that it made me want to vomit because I have been fighting that emotionality excuse for 13 years. PSD is not a community center for but a place for preparation. At least it is for general education students and these students deserve no less. In fact, federal law guarantees it. Children come here to get prepared for their future as adults, not to subsidize sightbased budgets by staying for five, six, and seven years because of district feel-good culture. If the presentation tonight satisfies your questions and concerns about disabled students in the district, then you intentionally have chosen to live in an alternative based reality and ignore all evidence. There is a lot to learn about what is actually happening at school sites versus ideologies given from administrators

036who are working in this building and 3 minutes doesn't do it justice. The presentation tonight also doesn't indicate what training is being given at school sites to help identify students with disabilities and raise those child fine statistics. So, please quit accepting generalities from these administrators and direct your attention toward actual school site implementation. Thank you. >> Thank you. Next. Next up. Is this working? >> It's on. Oh, there we go. Sorry. Um, thank you very much, Danny. And next we have Kevin Hughes. Good evening, members of the board. My name is Kevin Hughes and I'm the owner of American Driving Academy, the largest driving school in Colorado. We have 15 locations across the Front Range and help more than 4,000 people each month work towards getting their driver's license. We also partner with many schools

037across the state by offering discounted programs for students and in some cases, we even teach driver's education classes directly within high schools. Beginning next month, we will also be opening a location here in Fort Collins, and we're excited to become part of the PSD community. The main reason I wanted to come tonight was simply to introduce ourselves and share some information about an upcoming change to Colorado's driver's education laws that will take effect January 1st, 2027. In Colorado today, driver education requirements depend on a student's age. Students who want to get their permit at 15 must complete a 30-hour driver's education course. Once a student turns 15 and a half, they can instead take a shorter 4-hour driver awareness course. And once a student turns 16, they can obtain a permit without taking a course

038at all. Because of this, many students simply wait until they turn 16 so they can get a permit without taking and paying for driver's education. Beginning January 1st, 2027, that will change. Under the new law, every student under 18 will be required to complete a full 30-hour driver's education course before obtaining a learner's permit. So again, everyone under 18 will have to take a 30-hour driver's ed course. In addition, individuals between 18 and 20 will be required to complete a 4-hour course before getting their permit. The goal of this change is to ensure that all young drivers receive formal education before they begin driving independently. Because of these changes, schools and districts across Colorado will likely start receiving more questions from students and parents about what these new requirements mean and how the licensing process

039will work. Our goal is reaching out. Our goal in reaching out is not to be salesfocused, but simply to let the district know we're happy to be an information resource if that's helpful. If counselors, administrators, or families ever have questions about driver's education requirements or the licensing process, we would always be happy to help. I mainly just wanted to introduce ourselves, let you know we'll soon be part of the Fort Collins community, and offer ourselves as a resource as these changes approach. Thank you very much for your time. >> Thank you. Next, we have Grace Turnbull. All right. Um, thank you for your time this evening. I wish to discuss some trust issues that have been on my mind in the last couple board meetings. Um, when the trauma 17 months ago ended, the community,

040my neighborhood, and my kids were under the assumption that we had 3 to five years to deal with the school closure situation again. I walked around my neighborhood talking to people about 4A and I was told three things to say to say. This will give teachers a raise. This will help fund our schools upgrades and we will pause school closures for 3 to 5 years. Teachers got a raise, but now jobs are being threatened if their pair is unclassified or non-tenured. That just doesn't sit right. Schools are getting upgrades, but now we're going to be closing some buildings without any concrete sustainable plans for their future use. At least none that I've heard. Now, in November of 2026, decisions are going to be made on what schools to close based on a comprehensive planning committee

041whose scope was so narrow that school closure is the only solution. I lied. It doesn't make me feel good. And so here's what I think PSD can do to rebuild trust. The messaging needs to change and PSD needs to make a bigger effort to focus and act on what our school communities are gaining with consolidation. You've made it very clear what we're losing on state and federal funding levels. However, children do not equal money. children allow you the funds to work with in order for you to have a job. PSD needs to get away from the threats and uncertainty because parents, neighborhoods, and communities are feeling that they're listening. Families will continue to make different education choices for their children. That is not PSD, and our district will further suffer if the messaging does not

042change. Stop talking about what we're losing and start talking about what we're gaining. Actual plans for these buildings need to coincide with closures. Actual busing and school of choice option plans for our most vulnerable students need to be prioritized. Restructuring for sustainability needs to be the message and restructuring needs to start from the core. Do better. Thank you. Next we have Ann Green. Oh, good evening. Pter school district's mission is clear. Educate every child every day. This promise does not come with an asterric. It applies equally to students with disabilities, both by mission and by law. First, data integrity within integrated services. Our community deserves transparent, comparable, and CDE aligned reporting for students with IEPs. Colorado already provides standardized definitions and public comparable reporting from school views, district dashboards to special education indicator one, and

043other required IDA indicators. If PSD's outcomes appear different because we report data differently, that's not a defense. It's a data governance problem. Please require integrated services to conform CDE's definitions and formats so families, educators, and this board can make actual appleto comparisons and hold people accountable. Second, declining enrollment budgets and civil rights. Your comprehensive planning committee told the board that underutilization spreads limited resources thin and a survey principles reported that they are already cutting pair of professionals and IEP support services and that was included in the comprehensive planning committees slide deck. That is precisely where students with disabilities are at most risk when supports like paraprofessionals and IEP services erode. But federal and state requirements are non-negotiable. IDA guarantees a free and appropriate public education based on an individualized IEP, not on budgets. The US

044Department of Education is explicit about that and CDE's own guidance reiterates that funding formulas do not define what FAPE must provide. The IEP does. In short, when budgets and civil rights coni collide, the law sides with students. Someone in leadership needs to inform your principles immediately. I offer three concrete steps. Data reform. Direct Superintendent Kingsley to publish this spring a data integrity alignment plan for integrated services that A adopt CDE's reporting definitions and formats. B post disagregated IEP outcomes on PDS PSD's websites and C schedules independent annual data quality checks tied to school view metrics and CDE idea indicators. Two, civil rights compliance and budgeting. Adopt a board directive affirming IEP required services and accommodations are not subject to reductions due to enrollment driven cuts. Require principles and central office to document how IEP services

045will be maintained during staffing changes. Finally, publicly support Colorado Senate Bill 2625. This bill codifies federal disab disability protections into Colorado law, creating state level compliance and enforcement process. Accurate data, lawful services, true adherence to PSD's mission. That's what our students with disabilities in our community deserve. Thank you. >> Thank you. Next, we have Janet Wright. I'll just do this. Okay. So, sorry. Trying to get this. Good evening, Superintendent Kingsley, President Zamora, and board. I'm Janet Wright and I use she her pronouns. I live in Fort Collins and I have three teenagers in PSD. I know that everyone here has probably heard of Maslo's hierarchy of needs. There are five. It's usually in a triangle and the lower needs are ranked um or considered essential in biological requirements. At the base is uh physiological which

046is air, food, sleep, stuff we need to live, safety, love, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. If you'll note number two, next to the basic needs to survive, that's safety. Students can grow and learn when they feel safe. Thank you to the schools, the administrations, and each security team who keep our students safe through their day-to-day activities and when they exercise their First Amendment rights. Our youth are bombarded with so much right now, hate, anger, fear, and civil unrest. Being able to express all that is a testament to the respect and dedication of the administration and school resource officers. Today though, your LGBTQ plus students do not feel as safe. They are waiting to hear what the next right stripped could be based on a reported 170,000 signatures gathered by a group driven by ignorance,

047hate, and division. all to put an initiative on the BA on November ballot affecting people that they don't even know. 170,000 people signed based on misinformation, propaganda, rhetoric, and lies. 170,000 names on sheets of paper that go against science and every reputable medical association in the world. How safe do you think the students feel today? not so safe. Don't forget them. Continue standing with them. Continue educating by showing up and by keeping all of our students safe. Because without safety, the next one in the triangle, which is love and belonging, are harder to attain. And then esteem and self-actualization are almost impossible. I thank you for the time to speak. Thank you. Uh, next we have Anna Leetta. Good evening. It's been one of those days in my household. One of those days that made

048it almost impossible to be standing here tonight. And definitely one of those days that didn't allow me to prepare for this evening the way that I had hoped. Despite not having a polished comment tonight, I want to make sure that I don't lose the opportunity to come before you and ask you to please take disrupting disproportionality and equity into your considerations for crit for consolidation criteria. This is something that must be considered carefully on the front end of this important work this round and cannot be an afterthought. Please consider strategically preserving a handful of smaller schools that can be identified as discoverable and accessible resource hubs for kids who need a different type of learning environment to thrive. Students who have acquired learning gaps for various reasons because life happens. We need smaller schools that

049are very thoughtfully and intentionally staffed to serve the needs of students who will not be okay in a larger environment. In many cases, these are students who are already not okay because resources have been stretched thin for too long. There is much work to be done around defining equity. But I think a great place to start is considering how to provide targeted stability and extra resources to the students whose AC academic outcomes are already clearly identified by the data that we've seen presented in this boardroom the last few years. the students that we acknowledge exist, the students that consistently fall below the state average, but for whom we have yet to make an intentional focused plan for rescue. Many of these are secondary students, IEPs or not, who are still unable to read or write

050proficiently, who will not be able to learn to read at a secondary level in a large gened class. the free and reduced lunch students, elementary or or secondary whose parents cannot afford to get outside testing and tutoring. You know the students, you have the behindthescenes data. I'll be back with more concise thoughts, but for now, please consider this food for thought. Thank you. Next, uh we have Eric Sutherland. Eric Sland, citizen of Fort Collins. Uh, door number one, door number two. Here's your choice, guys. Cluster of facts to consider making your decision. The state is broke. The state is currently spending $120 million a year backfilling diversions of local property tax to the tax increment finance mechanism. I'll bet anybody $3,000 today that 50% of that money at a minimum is legally impermissible. It's in

051conflict with constitution. Most of these violations of law are constitutional dimension Kevin Havda and have nothing to do with the general assembly Brian Kingsley. Now, next cluster of facts school district owes the property owners of this district about $35 million for illegally collecting taxes. that illegal taxation happened because of the same abuses of tax increment financing that are depriving the state of money that it needs to fund things like public education. So based on those facts, Mr. Hild, I don't want to hear you or anybody else up there say you're going to do what you can because you're not doing what you can. So door number one is you cooperate with efforts that are going on in the state of Colorado right now to claw back as much of that $120 million which by the

052way it's $14 million from Lammer County alone to claw back that money now in cooperation with efforts that are going on down there. Or you take door number two and you continue to dance with them that br you here. We're really in trouble if you go down door number two because right now you're two years behind dealing with declining enrollment and you owe the taxpayers $35 million. I really don't have to say a lot more. You're flailing on a business front. Absolutely flailing here. And Timoth is getting $9 million this year from tax increment. What for? I don't think they can put up anything in the realm of public interest that even begins to compete with the benefits that society gets when they educate our young kids. People have voted repeatedly to spend their tax

053dollars to do that and you're letting them all down. This really is an unfortunate situation, but you do have a choice. Behind door number one is a feather in your cap for solving a longstanding problem which has been injurious to public education, injurious to public trust and a lot of other things. Behind door number two, and you seem to be constantly standing in front of that door, looking at that door, wanting to open that door is the dunce cap. Right. Thank you. And that concludes our community comment for the evening. Uh, next on our agenda, we have board topics and committee reports. This agenda item is for an opportunity for board members to provide an update on committee work or speak to board topics. Do any board members have something they would like to report?

054Please. >> Just a quick update to the legislative committee. Um, on Friday we cut the call short after about 10 15 minutes. Um and Barkcus was introducing and testifying on a bill I believe um on Friday that often happens um and nor we control the schedule at the state house. Um this week we will have a call although this week and next week we'll have a call. Um some of the things that we are going to discuss if it's pertinent to anybody on the board or anybody in the community like to hear um number one SB 26 U 135 that is Senator Jeff Bridges's bill pertaining to Taber and funding. We'll do a little deeper dive and um talk about that one. Another one, um, House Bill 26101, that's the Home Act, introduced by, uh,

055Representative Andrew Basineker. Um, that is still currently the only bill that Pter school district is in full support of on our legislative tracker. I provided testimony for that bill last Wednesday. It is on the second reading in the Senate. um if I was the very few amendments on it. Um it has passed the house. So we will see on that. And then last but not least um for this Friday's call and then most I would say most likely the following Friday. Um we'll speak more about joint budget committee. JBC is meeting uh currently on their docket for their next meeting. Um K12 finance is not one of the topics. Um it will be a topic later on. Um some of the things that I've seen is it looks more um like they're going to tackle

056budgetary issues pertaining to health care first and then um after that um and I would that's why I say most likely it'll be extended later on. Um those are the three that I think we'll um get to in more depth on this Friday. and the following Friday. Please join if you'd like. These meetings are also open to the public. >> Thank you. Are there any others? >> Go ahead. >> Just a quick sports update as I want to do. Um, I had the unique opportunity to go down to the uh the championship game of the um, uh, Chassa hockey tournament where PSD, the PSD stars once again made it and unfortunately once again fell short. So, it was a tough one. There were some pretty exciting moments, but um, just super impressed with our our

057team, the tenacity, and and just they keep coming back. We're blessed with a great coach and really great players that are that are playing for us. So, one of the day these days we'll get there. Um, and then also just congratulations to all the uh the PSD schools that made it to the playoffs. Um, Timnith is still in the quarterfinals. They're both their um boys and girls teams, so let's keep them in mind. Um, and then if you want to see the greatest last second shot ever, look up uh Fossil Creek versus Denver East about a week ago. I think it was Fossil Ridge, sorry. Uh, last second shot. Um, buzz or beater was amazing. So, and I think we had one board member who was there. That's, uh, and I'm super jealous that I

058wasn't. So, um, great job, Fossil. >> Great. Please. >> Uh, thanks and apologies for being a little bit late this evening. Um, we had our board of engagement sessions last week. Uh, Dr. Ziggler and I attended Bouter. Um, there's a lot of great discussions that were discussed. Uh, we had a pretty big crowd. Uh, I didn't count. I would say ballpark 30-ish. I was going to say 30 or 40. Great. I'll use your numbers. Um, jump in if I missed anything of note. Dr. Ziegler. Um, kicked off the conversation with someone that brought an interesting uh idea about the use of technology in our schools. Um, and there was discussion about the options for parents to opt out versus opting in of Chromebook usage, etc. Um, I want to thank um, Bud Hunt for engaging

059with that constituent. They said they respond that they had pushed it up the food letter, so to speak, and and you gave a response and I think you had a meeting, so I appreciate that. Um, where there was a lot of conversation about the budget. I think that's probably consumed majority of our hour and a half. Um there was some uh concern about how the district is allocating salaries and budgets among schools versus central office, things like that. Um there were a lot of conversations about what that meant for our sitebased budgeting. We we had a pretty good conversation about that. Um I'm just going through my my half-hazard note. So Dr. Ziggler, this is your cue that I'm wrapping up. So if you have anything to to add. Um, we talked about cultivating our

060school cultures and being more protective of our neighborhood schools. Um, there was some really great anecdotal discussion about parents that voiced why they chose a charter school for one of their kids but a district a traditional public uh district school for the other. And so there's rich conversation around what choice meant to certain parents. Um, we did have a lengthy conversation about charter schools and some of the legalities of, you know, just setting the stage for what's a district charter versus what's a non-district charter, um, etc. There was an ask to do sort of a broad sweep of purchasing freezes, uh, during, um, sort of the climate that we're in with RIFF. Um, there was also some discussion about transportation and the cost of closing schools, um, considerations of boundary shifts, utilization. Um, and then

061the last plea that I took was or plea, excuse me, that's the wrong word. I misspoke. Um, request was to consider qualitative data, not just quantitative data in our discussions with the comprehensive long-range planning committee. And now I'm done. Dr. Ziggler, did I miss anything? >> Nice. That's all I got. Thank you. >> Oh, sorry. Turned off. Um, well, I'll go in case that inspires anyone else because you've had some good models so far. So, I went to the comprehensive planning committee um last week and I think that they really needed the two hours. So, I really appreciate that they are willing to commit that time. Um they talked through and looked at some other districts plans and options that they have used to kind of assess how they compare to what we feel like

062we need here and to inform kind of how they would get at the pieces that some of those plans were very specific and very detailed. others were kind of less so but in their own I don't I'm sure they're in your inbox you should look at them but they exist they're out there but they're kind of looking at what is best for PSD which I thought was great there was some um really good conversation around and I'm not going to name everything but highlights were defining language so making sure that when we talk consolidation when we talk closure when we're talking about any particular vocabulary we hear it all the time so making sure that when we say it we're actually defining it for others so that everyone's on the same page when we talk

063about um our consolidation process. Uh let's see, developing timelines, making sure that people kind of can anticipate I think we're doing a much better job. I think that we've heard that pretty consistently at this time is much people can anticipate much better what we're doing when that's a consistent message. So making sure that we hold to that. Um naming what data will be used in the process was very clear in the uh other district's processes. So, making sure that the data and criteria that we're using that they align to the data we can we can actually collect and making sure that we're able to take action with that information. Um, let's see. And then last but not least, certainly not least, because this comes up a lot, how our school community will be supported. So,

064once a transition is named, how what do we do next? Whether that's what happens in our buildings, how do we support staff and students and families as they may transition to a different building. Um, that's come up loud and clear multiple times. So, I think that's something we should pay a lot of attention to. And okay, I'm gonna stroll right into DAB because it relates to that comprehensive planning committee. Um, they spent probably a solid hour just talking through the presentation uh that the comprehensive planning committee gave to them be at their previous meeting and then were hashing it out, collecting what their individual schools inputs were from their stacks and PTAs. Um, again, I'm not going to be able to. I have like four pages of notes and I didn't capture everything. This is

065just what I could hear as I was rolling roaming around the room. Um, but some highlights, making sure the process is clear and defined. So, hearing that again, making sure it's as transparent as possible. So, once criteria are outlined, making sure that whatever decision is made is based on that criteria and that it's clear how the criteria were used in the decision-making process. Um, and then again, that what comes next. I think families really want like I heard a red carpet process, but it's not just for children. It's for how do we help families navigate that? How do we help our staff navigate that? Um, one person came up with, you know, having buddies for kids, but almost maybe family buddies of how do we connect people early so that even if they're leaving one

066building, they're leaning into and they already feel a sense of community and belonging in the next place they're going. So, very big high level. Happy to share more. I owe you guys a summary, but I wanted to give you kind of highlights while I had you. Um, are there any other updates at the moment? >> I was just gonna add for the district advisory board if um there are several um open seats or seats that are coming open at both um um you know all throughout all levels where there's early childhood or um elementary, middle school and so forth. So if um anyone listening or present has interest in serving on the district advisory board um you can reach out and um find that information on our website. >> Yeah, please. Thank you. >> Thanks.

067One other thing I thought about for the engagement session we had. I don't think I've I've been to I think I counted maybe eight or nine total since we've been doing this since we rolled these out. No two engagement sessions have been the same which is kind of nice. um you don't know what to expect. One thing that we did just administratively, I made an executive decision. I printed out a very rudimentary sheet before of a optional signin so you could tell me who you were, what your connection if any to PSD was, if you feel comfortable sharing that, and also what topic or topics you wish to discuss or kind of engage with. We were doing that at the very beginning, introducing people, and if it's a smaller room, we can kind of just

068do that informally, but I thought it was it was it saved us a little bit of time. Um and then we just kind of let the room go. And what I what I will say is that I I thought a lot about it after um the engagement session about her was the word I'll use is spirited. It was a spirited conversation which uh none of us are afraid of. So we really appreciated that because people were being their genuine selves. Um and there was disagreement. I mean I think this is the first time that we openly uh really kind of pushed each other into thinking and not just the board members versus our community. I don't want to say that optically, but community members are kind of engaging each other, which I thought was a

069really nice thing. And so, I don't know if anyone else had that kind of experience, but I want to make sure that we amplify that, too, because that's that's an important part of why we have these things is to have that open dialogue so it's not just a two-way streak of of dialogue. So, I just want to say I appreciate everyone showing up um after work for most people. Um some people kind of got there late when they got off their shift, so I really appreciate everyone participating that making it so good. Thank you for that. All right. If there are no other comments, we will move along to our consent agenda. Would any board members like to pull an item from consent? >> I move to remove items 9.3, 9.4, and 9.5 from the

070consent agenda. >> Yep. Okay. Do I need a motion to move them? >> Yes. No, just move them. Okay. Just making sure. We don't do this all the time. All right. So then I'm going move 9.3 to 10.1, 9.4 to 10.2, and 9.5 will now be 10.3. Can I Is there anything else anyone would like to change or is that sufficient? Okay. Can I get a motion for the remainder of the consent agenda items? I move that the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for the items remaining on the consent agenda. >> Can I get a second? Thank you, Andrew. And Jill, will you please call a vote? >> Carla Ba, >> I. >> Connor Duffy, >> hi. >> Kevin Havda, >> I. >> Scott Shoenbower. >> Hi. >> Dr. Andrew Spain. >> Hi.

071>> Jessica Zamora. >> Hi. >> Dr. Kar Ziggler. >> Hi. >> Motion passes. 70. >> All right. Now, we will go on to those action items that we just pulled. So, we'll have action item 10.1, the approval of the 10-year contracts for K5 mathematics, Spanish, and German curriculum. Can I get a motion? Um, I move that the board approve 1K35 mathematics curriculum 10-year print and digital purchase from curriculum associates for $3,440,2946. Yay. um two Spanish curriculum tenure digital purchase from comprehensive classroom for 21,03 German curriculum tenure digital and classroom set of print materials from wayside for 47,65865 for a grand total of 3,688,68811. >> Thank you. Can I get a second? Thank you, Andrew. All right. And now I believe we have some discussion around this. I just wanted to bring up a couple things

072because uh as has been mentioned >> um just even from our our board reports the the community is watching how we're spending our money and they need to know how we got to looking at these things which when you think about it like there's a big dollar bill attached to this right >> that anything okay um we also feel that things about well how were the curriculums decided upon and so I reached out to the uh just get some data for you all to help you understand uh where we are with this and so there's probably a couple key things um information I received is that there was over 2,000 hours of teacher time that helped decide these curriculum choices so they're not just some decided upon curriculum but at least they were evaluated and

073agreed upon through a consensus process uh the funding for some of them comes from levy. Some of them comes from general funds. Um, sort of a mixture of different things. But some of the some of the the benefits that we get from adopting these curriculums and spending this level of money is district-wide consistency. We are going to see actually a savings of money because just continuing the K5 mathematics would cost us over 10 years approximately $10 million. We're going to get it for $3.4 million for an updated curriculum with more resources that meets current standards. It's not outdated. So, that is a significant savings to the district. The numbers I received regarding the Spanish and German were similar in terms of the savings. we can either continue with what we have with limited resources, with

074outdated items to the tune of $2.3 million for the next 10 years versus approximately $21,000 for 10 years. And so these are the types of things that we've asked to look at because there are times we can delay decisions. Although I put a giant asterisk on that because a lot of the hole that we are digging out of is because we have pushed financial decisions down the road for many, many years. and that's actually hurt us for our current situation. Nonetheless, we should look at each one and decide, is this the right time to spend money, especially when we're talking about millions of dollars. When I look at these figures, we're saving tremendous amount of money and gaining a lot for our students. Yes, there will be a transition. Unfortunately, and I'm looking at our

075our friend in the back there, Candace, your teachers are going to have a lot of work to implement these things with the paras. I understand that. But it seems all very positive and it seems like we've made appropriate choices to get here. And that's why I wanted to pull this from the consent agenda just to make sure we are having that shared understanding that this will actually be a good decision for the district and save us money long term. >> Thank you. Is there any other comments? >> I'm glad I didn't say nothing. I wasn't supposed to say so I didn't turn my mic off, but um I almost had a hot mic moment. Uh I would just say that um I appreciate making things clear. Um I do know in the listening sessions that

076has come up a lot from different folks in terms of you know how are we um you know talking with the comprehensive planning committee um and criterion for consolidation process or even the reduction force or riff as people are referring to it and yet at the same time we are spending money on curriculum and other items and and why is that and uh thanks for sharing that Andrew I think that clarif Fising shows to an extent that it's necessary now and even if we don't get a new curriculum, we are still spending the money in order to do that because you know um there's only so many vendors um and we also need um curriculum in our classrooms. And I think that uh as spending time in the classroom myself and I can I feel

077relate to teachers like when we have to piece mill together um the curriculum or peacemail different content pieces in order to educate our students um can be very difficult. So to be able to look towards something that's a little bit more comprehensive and put together and provides both that digital um access as well as like physical materials and things like that. Um, so we're getting a good comprehensive plan. Um, wanted to make sure that was clear on why we were making this purchase at this particular time. So I'm appreciative that is um known so that the community can understand why now this particular purchase. >> Are there any other please? >> Yeah, I'll echo Karanda and Andrew on this. And the thing that jumped out to me was uh one of the uh explanations was

078the key goal of these adoptions is district-wide consistency. And I think we learned at the meeting where this was covered. Um that it's very inconsistent across the board, there's some outdated textbooks and um the uh what we learned from the literacy implementation of the new curriculum is that if we get that consistency, it is difficult. It's a heavy lift for sure for our staff. Um, but once we get into a groove, it really shows results and that's what we're looking for is to have continued growth in our uh our outcomes. So, I uh it is a difficult thing to justify spending that kind of money, but when you look at it and look that we were also going to have to spend money on renewals of of the old curriculum, then this is actually saving

079us money in the long run. All right, thank you for that. I'm not seeing any other comments, so Jill, can you please call the vote? >> Carlo Bay, >> I. >> Connor Duffy, >> hi. >> Kevin Havda, >> hi. >> Scott Shenbau, >> hi. >> Dr. Andrew Spain, >> hi. >> Jessica Zamora, >> hi. >> Dr. Kuronda Ziggler, >> hi. Motion passes 70. >> Thank you very much. All right, we'll switch to 10.2 for our technology refresh. Can I get a motion? >> I move that the board approve expenditures in ex in excess of $250,000 authorizing senior staff to issue purchase orders to the vendors and work noted in the cover sheet of this item. >> Can I get a second? Thank you, Connor. And discussion. >> We pulled it. We should probably discuss it.

080Um, I was wondering if we could get a quick summary from staff about what this one's covering. >> We'd be happy to. I'm going to ask our chief technology officer, Bud Hunt, to address you all. >> Be glad to do that. This front of classroom technology refresh is outlined in your board packet represents about 380 of our classrooms that are in the second year of our second 8-year cycle of classroom refresh related to the front of classroom technology that powers actually many of the things you've just approved in curriculum but also creates the heads-up display for uh front of our front of classroom hence the clever name as well as supports many of the audio functionality in the classroom so that it's a wired and consistent experience It's roughly 1,400 classrooms. Don't quote me on

081that. It might be a little higher, might be a little lower. That number is in flux as we continually re configure buildings in the district, but uh our front of classroom program, which we began uh prior to my leadership and is has been stewarded by Tyson Ber, who's a great member of our team, is currently our asset manager, they have been working to conduct and build a consistent classroom technology standard since prior to the start of that first eight-year cycle. uh it does require an ongoing expense to maintain the investment. And so this uh fund or this particular uh approval is for uh our general fund allocation of roughly $800,000 which we continually put into that as a refresh item to ensure that every classroom in our system has the same access to audio, visual

082safety and security technologies related to the front of classroom elements. about the best way to talk about that would be the TV itself here in the boardroom. If you look to the far presentation wall, that is the that is roughly the television that is in every PSD classroom with a couple of exceptions. This 8-year cycle is focused on getting us to a consistent interactive display in every classroom. We have a somewhere between 150 and 175 televisions that aren't yet to the interactive technology standard, which means if you touch the screen, nothing happens. uh much to the disappointment of the teachers who will go into a different classroom and discover that that was an interactive display. We aren't quite to that level of standard uh yet. So, this is a achieving that goal. Uh as outlined

083in the board packet, you you get a lot more information about how many teachers were involved in the creation of this standard, how we continually are in conversation about making sure we're putting the right technology into every classroom, uh and any technology that's coming off of the wall. because I frequently get this question, so I'm trying to get ahead of it. Uh, we put in the next space that it needs a classroom display. We've been fortunate to maintain and and work our way towards a seven or eight year warranty on all of the classroom displays that we put in. Our goal is to outlast the warranty and to refresh at a rate so that we have that warranty protecting the investment throughout the life of the classroom technology. I'll pause there and see if you

084have any questions. I think I want to I was thinking about the um grace earlier in community comment and what we're doing with our buildings if this consolidation process goes through and I think I'm sitting here kind of struggling with I'm I'm struggling a little bit because I never want to take anything away from teachers and I know you know having my own kids benefit from technology in the classroom and it does make a difference depending upon what's in front of the class but I I'm kind of struggling with like since there's a lot of stuff up in the air and I know that we have a cycle like why now and are we would it be better maybe to um wait another year to do these technology upgrades so that we're not putting technology

085in classrooms that may not be classrooms next year after a result of the consolidation process. I know that's a lot, but I guess my ultimate key question is like why now? And how do we make sure that this is a good steward of dollars versus waiting another year? >> I I think it's always a good question to ask. There is there is a need for the classrooms that are in use today to be at PSD standards today. Um we've had a similar conversation with board members in the past related to wireless upgrades. our facilities until they're not our facilities need to be maintained at the level of our facilities. That said, all of the technology that's in this particular conversation is movable. As I mentioned earlier, the technology that will be installed uh or replaced

086in some of our schools is not at the end of its useful life. It's going into another classroom to satisfy an immediate need there. And so long as we have buildings or people using our buildings in our spaces, we need to maintain that standard. Uh it can seem uh like a good idea to pause a refresh cycle in a moment like this and sometimes it is. I would say it also creates a backlog of work later in the event that we resume that cycle. Um if you were to ask me directly, is this a good use of our dollars and will these dollars be used to serve PSD students for the life of the technology in this particular refresh? My answer would be absolutely yes. >> Thanks but that makes sense. I just think it's

087important to high like you know it really is maybe this is just my struggle but it's like we are making a lot of decisions and I think I'm hearing from the community where it's like we're being everyone else is being asked of a lot but we're seeing these purchases and these other things and so it's kind of like you know one person at um Bouter mentioned that they work um at a school here in town university and they spoke to in higher education that everything is frozen from hiring to purchases to all these things to accommodate that budget stuff and they were struggling with why they're not seeing that same level of um pause or consideration um within our school district. And so um I just want to highlight that and um I can't remember

088her name also about her she asked us to consider that as we were thinking about this whole process. What can we put on hold even though we have our processes and our refresh and our updates? What can we put on hold and pause? and really think about what message that's sending to the community um and who's being impacted by these decisions. And we have to think about this is my own perspective with agency and power, right? And when we are sitting in these seats where we make the decisions and we control the budget, we have a lot more agency and power to decide what we're going to purchase and how we're going to spend money. But we're also making decisions for folks who do not have that agency and power and we are putting things

089on them, right? and what the community is asking that we also take ownership of what we are spending money on and what things we are doing without. And so I just want to ask you all to consider that as we are making decisions as a district. But but I do also appreciate you sharing that. I think the important point what you were saying is that it's not a loss at this moment because they can be moved. They're mobile. They can be moved throughout different classrooms and things like that. But I do ask us to seriously take that into consideration. How much agency and power do we have and where might we need to take a pause so that we also are feeling the pain and the hurt along with other folks and whether it's perceptions

090or not I think we also need to highlight that if that hurts felt throughout the whole system where it's being felt at. Um and and I just feel that when I'm out there talking to people so I just wanted to clarify that. So thank you. What's the cost if we if similar to the curriculum there there's a cost if we do nothing. What is the cost if we do nothing? That's my first piece. I think the other piece that I'm curious about I agree all of this is movable and at times we've had conversations where we talk about moving people around and this is a question I'm not sure you're going to be able to answer. >> What is the cost of moving if we were to have to install something and then take it

091off and move it somewhere else? Excuse me. I can't give you the full cost of moving a hypothetical number of things without knowing the number of things. We regularly move equipment around the district through the course of I mean we will absorb the movement of roughly 150 175 of the screens that'll be coming out of classrooms into new classrooms as part of our summer work. The cost of not doing this work now is twofold. we begin to ring up a bill of of what I would call technical debt or a backlog of need to resume at higher prices because we are losing our purchasing agreements, right? So, we would need to spend more money for equivalent equipment in the future, which is an opportunity cost. The other uh variable would be that we would see

092a degra a degradation of service in some classrooms and we would see an inability to get to that interactive standard as we have committed uh to attempt. Now, I I can argue that that is to to Dr. Ziggler's point there there are opportunities to to pause, right? Um I don't know that this particular conversation would be the right place to make that pause because the students who would benefit from this investment are in classrooms today in our schools. Um the did I answer both of your questions? >> Well, I didn't expect you to be able to answer the second one. >> Well, yeah, the second one Yeah, the second one's a math problem. It depends on how much we're talking about, right? >> And I would remind the board of the timing of a movement

093out of a school building. If we were to make a decision like that in the fall, there would still be a year before that decision would begin to become a reality and there would be logistics associated with that. In the long term, the real advantage in many of our technology purchases that are tied to either physical spaces or humans is over time we spend less when we are provisioning technology for fewer individuals and when we are provisioning or refreshing technology for fewer classrooms. So there is in our stewardship and I I I appreciate you naming it. It's very important. There is in our stewardship as a department a builtin ratchet back effect when we have fewer classrooms or individuals that we're provisioning through our technology conversations. >> All right, I'm going to take a point

094of privilege in case there's another question for one more. Um would this item come like let's say we approve it for next year we would have another item like this for whichever are on the tier. So basically, if we punt this year and we don't do it next year, we could have 600 classrooms or more is what I'm >> Yes. >> or whatever the number is, but we we will do this next year potentially. Anyway, >> yes, we we will have a quarter and we roughly we roughly refresh a quarter of our facilities and a quarter of our people every year as part of our refresh cycle. It took several years to get to a place where that was a maintenance expense rather than a significant new investment. So delaying that would create an increased

095cost later and I would phrase what the second part of your question a different way. Were we to find ourselves in a different constraint in a year that would be a better time to adjust a particular investment when we had data about which classrooms may or may not be needing to outfitted needing to be outfitted as classrooms if that makes sense. >> Thank you. Are there any other questions? Sorry to steal the floor for a minute. >> I do have one more question. So I'm hearing you speak to about classrooms today and so can you so it sounds a little bit you've spoke to it about future. So um I guess I just want to know the significance of today like we do we're going to have students in classes today we're going to have

096students in classes next year and so forth. So to me it's it's an ongoing concern. There's classrooms are always still going to be used, right? So what's significant about today to where decisions and things couldn't shift? And that's my last question was just something that when you said that I think >> just trying to get a a temper around >> um what is prioritize is it like we're we're making future decisions but then we also have to address today, right? You got to plan for the future and plan for today at the same time. And so just talk a little bit about that approach. >> The the reason and forgive me if if I wasn't clear the my intention in saying today is that we have a refresh cycle requires an annual investment. Right? At

097the moment that we make the purchase, we always have to evaluate do we have a need for this? Right? Which we would not have brought this forward if we didn't believe that need was there. We do have 380 classrooms that are in need of attention today. When I mentioned today, I just meant at a time when we are a year from now having this conversation, we may have a different number of classrooms either in actuality or in projected use to satisfy that investment. If that makes sense. Did I answer your question? >> Yeah. Thank you. >> Are there any other questions or comments? Okay, seeing none, uh Jill, can you please call the vote? Carla Ba nay. >> Connor Duffy. >> Hi. >> Kevin Havda. >> Hi. >> Scott Shoenbower. >> Nay. >> Dr. Andrew

098Spain. >> Hi. >> Jessica Zamora. >> I. >> Dr. Kar Ziggler. >> Nay. >> Motion passes. 43. >> Thank you. All right. We'll keep going and we'll move on to 10.3, our district firewall services renewal. Can I get a motion? >> We have a conversation. >> Oh, no. We motion first and then we come have a conversation. >> It's okay. Can I get a motion, please? >> I move that the board approve approve expenditures in excess of $250,000 authorizing staff to execute an agreement with the vendor noted in this item. >> Right. Thank you. Can I get a second? Thank you, Connor. And discussion, >> I'll go I'll try to be brief. Um, uh, this is a a very valuable service and one that we need. I've read the report. I've read the background. Um,

099the cost for this, if I'm not mistaken. Um, so there is a total cost for the renewal is $375,320. Correct. Okay. with the uh the cost is eligible for -ate reimbursement. Current reate e- rate reimbursement. There's a lot of ERS in there. 60% bring that down to 322,148. Is that right? >> Yeah, I think your math is right. We don't tend to budget the rate reimbursement because we never count on the federal government to honor that until we have the check physically received on site. >> I say that as I'm reading from the report so we're clear. Yeah, your math is correct. >> Don't do the ma Don't make me do math. Um, so I and the reason I bring this up is not a direct cost that I wanted to talk about for briefly

100moment because I think that just exceeds our threshold for what we you need board approval at 250,000. Um, I think that cost is appropriate. I'm sure it was put out to bid and it was and I've read the bid materials. I think it's great. My cho my my issue is with the contracts themselves. Um, both these uh contain uh governing law provision that I'm not a fan of and I'll explain why. So section three says the agreement will be governed by the laws of Missouri without regard to conflict of law rules. Any litigation will be brought exclusively in the federal state courts located in the state of the commonwealth where where the customer's location identified above. So I'm going to take a a pause and a play from what Dr. Ziggler said and one of

101the things we were asked at our engagement session was to make some of our language more accessible. Um so not this is not an issue with the cost. So I want to make sure that's very very clear and this is a necessary item. the indirect cost and what I read into that and why I don't like that and I'll be consider this a protest no vote just and I I I presume this will go through is that by selecting a choice of law in a state that's not Colorado um Autumn has worked very hard on our external council list and we've been we've been really impressed with how we've streamlined some of our costs um to to kind of break this down any contract can be governed by any other state's law at once. So

102a lot of times in corporate stuff you'll see that um even though the company is here it has a choice of law of Delaware since that's where the company was born more or less right so the laws of Delaware are what's going to govern any enforcement or dispute. So a Colorado court is going to have to look to the other state. Now the courts here can do that especially federal courts. Um the venue is different. So venue is where you're going to hear a controversy. So, this this choice of law says that any controversy that the district may have with um this vendor, when I wrote the name down, I'm not I'm not going to put them on a naughty list or anything, but um is it shall be heard in the state of Colorado,

103which makes sense. That's our backyard. Except the problem with that, the practical reality why it's an indirect dup duplicative cost in my view is that lawyers are licensed in usually one or a few states. Um, I I'm licensed in Kentucky and Colorado, meaning I can hear cases and I have familiarity with laws of both Kentucky and Colorado. So, and I know this because I'm a little bit of a unicorn. I get a lot of business from my uh network in Kentucky that needs a Colorado lawyer that knows the courts, but also can practice here. So, what this means is if there is a dispute, um, we would need local counsel here, particularly Kaplan and Ernest, which is one of our preferred external councils. Um, I don't think anyone on their roster has a license in

104Missouri, which means we'd also have to hire a Missouri lawyer in order to interpret Missouri laws if there was any issues with this. And so, again, this is a very boilerplate kind of thing. A lot of bigger vendors like this vendor is a pretty large national platform. There's not a whole lot of give that they'll that they'll usually do because for the same reason they want to pass that cost on to us. They don't want to have to find a Colorado lawyer and, you know, to do one. So, I think it's a streamlined approach. So, if we want to put a tick on a a preferred vendor status as one extra little thing that we can do for our public bids, it would be that we negotiate a Colorado choice of law and a Colorado

105venue. I'm encouraged by the venue. Um, so it sounds like they've got a big enough sprawl where they've got law firms all across the United States, but it puts the onus on the school district to have to go and then find a a national council in Missouri that then also make contact with the local council who can actually file the stuff in the court. So, I'll be voting no, but not because of the the total cost. But that's just one of these things that as we are also being mindful of how we're spending our costs, we're trying to do our job collectively as a governance team to make sure that we are examining everything. And this may seem small or petty, but for me, it was enough to move the needle to just say no.

106So, I wanted to explain that. >> Is there any other comment or conversation? Please, >> bud. What are the safety ramifications if we don't renew this? as I've shared with the board some of the specific security measures that that our firewalls do prevent and block every day. I will name that this is a moment where I won't provide those details on a public microphone for security protection for staff and students. But our firewalls intercept literally millions of interactions per day. And the services that are outlined here do two primary things. They make sure that those dangerous threats don't make it to an end user in our district. and they make sure that our network is extendable to our staff who work remotely or or are traveling so that they can continue to receive the protection

107of our network when they aren't physically on site. So, this is a combination of security services and access services that are essential for the uh internet that we provide and the networking services that we provide to staff and students. So, we're talking URL threat interruption. We're talking malware detection and stopping. We're talking safety uh of content and a a wide variety of other things. This is pretty important stuff for a 21st century learning organization. Thank you for the question. >> And if director's um reasoning would clear would cost the district, is there an opportunity for us to find a more local organization to use? I'm going to I'm going to let Chief Financial Officer Montoya Hopin in a second. Before I do, let me tell you one of the reasons that we continue to work

108with this vendor. It's twofold. To some earlier points, they continue to bring us the lowest price and the best reseller or value added services on top of that price. So, technical support, assistance, management, and they're very they're very good business partner. We've not needed to engage litigation services to my knowledge because they are a good vendor. So I I think I take your point. I think it's a good thing for us to continue to work towards with our with our contracting team and because they're a good partner, they might be willing to explore uh director your your statement about venue. Uh that said, we we constantly bid these services out because they frequently are commodities. we like to do business with this vendor because we get the value ad of those additional services. Uh litigation

109hasn't been an issue. >> Um and I appreciate those comments too. I think that the risk that the district faces of going into litigation is very little, right? I mean, I think there's a reason this is a good vendor except I note that in the contract they're an Illinois LLC and they're choosing a Missouri choice of law, which I don't like because there's probably something in Missouri that they know that is helpful to them. So, your point's well taken. Um, and it's it's choice of law, not venue. This is >> I I take yours, too. Yeah, forgive me. Choice of law. >> No, you're fine. I apologize. >> I I would like to add general counsel and I were talking over here. Um, for one, these are very large vendors. Sometimes it's like Microsoft, you're

110not going to get them to move or Google, things like that. NCS22-1-135. Um, it states that all public school contracts except for contracts with another government are governed by Colorado law notwithstanding any contract terms or conditions to the contrary. So, I think there are additional provisions that would allow us to pull it back to Colorado, but it's not written that way. It would have you'd have to go back to the statute. Did I say that? >> I've gotten burned before having it. There's a ch there's a statute in Colorado for non-compete specifically that says after the law changed that it has to be brought in Colorado and Colorado governs and I've still had people being sued in foreign jurisdictions which is costly expensive and had the risk of other courts ignoring Colorado law which is

111exactly what happened. So I appreciate it but >> I I I understand. So, um, I'd also say that we that we consider risk also when we're looking at these. Um, and like you said, this is probably a lowrisisk contract, but if it was a higher risk contract, I think we would be having a very different conversation with the vendor. Um, again, these are very large companies. They we could spend a six months negotiating that term and not get anywhere. >> I don't want to signal to my board colleagues that I'm philosophically opposed to this contract in any other way. It's and I don't want to dimminimize it, but I anticipated some of that conversation. So, I I appreciate that. And I apologize also, I wasn't able to give you a heads up, but that was

112my concern leading up to tonight, but I I do appreciate your comments. Thank you. >> Are there any Oh, sorry. Go ahead. >> Uh just clarification on that E rate reimbursement. 60% as I read it is actually of the 322,000 that you listed which means we would get 192 plus thousand back if it goes through. Correct. >> Yes, I believe that's correct. And I mean don't get me started. It's one of my favorite things to talk about. But um we and many other local governments and school districts benefit from what is universal service. If you've ever wondered on your phone bill, what is that? Why do I have a universal service fee? That's a collection that's been going on since the early days of Ma Bell to make sure that the federal government is returning

113some money for reinvestment into telecommunications and now internet infrastructure. We would expect to receive roughly that amount back on this particular contract. Uh so sorry that was a long-winded answer to your question on one of my favorite subjects and if you have more questions I'm happy to talk more about -er universal service. >> You mentioned that it's been in place for now decades. I remember the ML breakup. >> Yep. rate quite some time. That's right. >> Is the risk of this being removed in future federal budget considerations? >> U I am not a lawyer. I will tell you the Supreme Court spent a lot of time talking about universal service in its last session and I would refer you to a lawyer or two, but the court itself sort of said this one's going to

114stick. >> Okay. No, just wanted to make sure that that means it's a really tiny little risk and that's fine. Want to make that could be a cost of putting it off. >> Yeah. to to the larger point and I I want to reiterate some of like some of the things we've heard from the board tonight that is a it's a stewardship move by us to not plan on that uh reimbursement. We budget assuming it won't happen and there are benefits to the district and to other programs when it does and it does. Our team works very closely with finance and our grants team to ensure that we're constantly taking full advantage of that reimbursement. >> Other questions? This is just a um for um us amateurs in tech. So I'm gonna say the word

115cyber security. Is that applicable here? Because I think firewall people have those. But I think a a hot topic and a hot word that folks understand is cyber security. So this feels related to that. >> It it is exactly related to that. This is a primary cyber security investment of or for the district that limits risk. >> Great. Any other comments? All right, I think we're ready to call the vote. Jill >> Carla Baz >> I. >> Connor Duffy. >> Hi. >> Kevin Hava. >> Nay. >> Scott Shoenbower. >> Hi. >> Dr. Andrew Spain. >> Hi. >> Jessica Zamora. >> Hi. >> Dr. Kanda Ziggler. >> Hi. >> Motion passes. 61. All right. Uh we've covered our action items. Now we are going to move on toformational reports and discussion items. First up we have

116child find. Brian, can you introduce our guests? >> Sure will. Uh thank you. Joining us this evening to provide an update on integrated services and child fund is Dr. Jod Raml, director of integrated services. Welcome Dr. Raml. We're glad to have you here tonight. >> Thank you. Good evening everybody. Thank you so much for giving me the time and space tonight to uh share some information about Childline and impact some data around special education in our in our school district. So with some of you being newish on the board, I thought it would be important to share like an overview of our department. Um, so currently we have 3,362 students served through individual education programs or special education and that's 3 through 21. Um, our staffing currently is 1,077 staff that includes our certified and

117our classified staff. All but about 14 of us um that work at central office are out in schools. So we have four different types of programming and integrated services. So multicategorical uh that's to serve mild to moderate needs and that's the bulk of the students that we serve in our district. Effective needs are for those students who have um needs in the area of social, emotional and behavioral needs that are are more significant and that's a center-based program model. We have 10 schools that currently have that programming. um the integrated learning services that's um our students who have significant cognitive andor medical needs and that is also center-based and it's located in 16 of our schools. And then we also have our center-based autism which focuses on language development and behavior regulation needs. Um and

118we have that program at centerbased in 16 of our schools. So tonight the the purpose is to really unpack child fine obligations and basically that is our uh federal which is IDEIDA and our state ECEA regulations that uh require us to continuously and systematically identify students who require special education. And our goal is to do that accurately and timely and to align it with the legal regulations that we work under. So under child fine uh PSD employees are required to uh refer a child for special education if we suspect a disability and there's 14 categories. For the sake of 3 to 21, there's uh 13 categories and that includes autism spectrum disorder, deaf and blindness, developmental delay, hearing impairment, intellectual disability, multiple disabilities, orthopedic impairment, other health impairment, serious emotional disability, specific learning disability, speech

119and language impairment, traumatic brain injury, and visual impairment. The other important thing to note is that parents can also refer their parents and guardians can also refer their children for testing for special education. So there's three ways um or three prongs that are required in order for a child to be qualified for special education and that includes they have to have currently have a disability. There has to be educational impact and I want to explain that a little bit. Educational impact is different from academic impact. That doesn't just mean grades or test scores. It could be uh the ability to access classroom to be able to emotionally and um behaviorally regulate in order to to complete a task at school. Um and they also have a need for specially designed instruction. And in my world,

120specially designed instruction is synonymous with special education. It means that there is a skill deficit that goes beyond general education that needs to be worked on. So, we do reporting um throughout the year, but the two big major reporting periods are our December one count and then also our end of the year um reporting. So, we just recently got our data back from the state on our December one count information. And this is one of the screenshots from that. And this looks at um all the different eligibility categories and also I can tell you a little bit about the trends that we're seeing. Um so on the left side is names all the different categories and then it shows from 2024 to 2025 any changes that we're seeing and then any um percentages that went

121up or down. Some of the ones that are significant um to mention are serious emotional disability were up 10% and that's been a pretty steady trend since co um we have seen more students qualify in that area. We also see autism spectrum disorder up by 10% and that's been pretty steady in our district as well and we continue to open new programs and people continue to move in. It's really um we're a a a district that's very desirable for families who want to come and move here to to have their children be served in our center-based autism program. I wanted to clarify um one thing about specific learning disability or we and we talk in alphabet soup. So if I start to throw out acronyms just remind me not to do that. But specific learning

122disability is one of those like dyslexia would fall under that category for example. So, reading, writing, and math uh disabilities fall in that category. And even though it looks like we did not change at all from one year to the next. Um I I pulled that data and just I know that it's accurate, it's really an anomaly that they're the exact same number, but remember this is a snapshot on December 1, on December 1 of 2024 and a snapshot on December 1 of 2025. Between 2024 and 2025, lots of things happen, right? numbers are fluid and we had um I believe we had uh about 120 students that we qualified um since the last reporting period for SLD, especially specific learning disability. But at the same time, we have students who who come in and

123out of our district. We have students who qualify. Then we have students who no longer qualify and they're able to manage without an IEP. And so that number is interesting. It's the exact same number, but we have had students qualify um in that spa time span. The other one I wanted to point out is um just a lot of people wonder about other health impairment and there um is minimal change there, but that is mostly students with um a physical need or a um attention deficit disorder would fall under that as well. Another one that's um that that you might have questions about is like the 100% or the the higher increases. Those are usually in our low incidence. So not many people um have those disabilities. So if we just go up by two

124and we had zero before, that's 100% increase. Okay. So this is some important data to share with you. So, um, if you look on the the far side, it tells the year. And so, tracking this data since 2020 up until, um, 2025 has not been released from the state yet. But all these numbers are directly from the CDE website. Um, but if you were to look at the state average in that next column, back in 2020, it was at 11.94%. As you can see, the state continues to increase um its averages of students who are identified for special education. Then the next column shows where we are at in PSD. And so um you can see that every year we increase just like the state does, but there continues to be a gap between the

125state identification and how we identify between a two to three% gap. Um if you look at the far uh um column, you can see that every year we're increasing the number of students on IEPs. Even though the district's um enrollment continues to go down, that's not the case for special education. We continue to grow. So about 100 to 200 students every year. We're having more students um in special education in the school district. If the last I mean when I wrote made these slides um our current student number was 3,328 and that puts us at about a 12 percentile of students in our district. A little bit lower than the state average. Um if you compare us to our other districts that we tend to compare ourselves to, Boulder is higher. They're at 14%. St.

126Brains at 13. Cherry Creek's at 14. Thompson down the street's at 13. Uh Weld, which is Windsor is at 10%. Um, and then as a state we identify lower than the national average. The national average is 15%. Colorado is at around 13. Where are opportunities for growth? So, one of the big uh big boulders that we've been lifting is around our MTSS alignment, not just in the area of special ed referral, but across all the tiers of multi- uh of of MTSS. Um, an example of that would be, um, really trying to align how long does a student stay in a tier 2 or a tier 2 intervention. What is a proper intervention and how long would they stay in that? Um, because we want to make sure we're not delaying any referrals for special

127education. Um, also along 504s, so 504s fall under ADA, a little bit different than IDA and special education. Um but there needs to be some clarity out in the system between what is a when a student has a disability but needs accommodations only or if a student needs specially designed instruction. So trying to clarify that out in a system. Also I've been doing a lot of work a lot of work a lot of PD on educating people about some misunderstandings around eligibility. And every AU tends to have a culture of things that we need to correct. And there's a couple things here around um for example attendance. Sometimes attendance can be uh a team may a problem in solving team say well you know they haven't had access to instruction because their attendance is poor.

128But I think that we need to not stop there. We need to ask why. Is that attendance a disability related reason? Is it fatigue from their disability? Is it is it mental health? There's other reasons why kids don't attend school. Um, and so I think that's something that we need to to be looking at closely and not making it a yes or no, but asking why and digging a little deeper. Um, also looking at the whole body of evidence. So when we look at different test scores, really unpacking that and and not being hooked on one score, you know, we want to look at the whole child and all of their performance areas and really um taking a deep dive into the whole body of evidence. Just a couple examples of some things that we're

129we're uh educating people on in the system. So, we've been doing a lot of work. Um, some of it's currently done and some of it's in process. That MTSS alignment that I spoke of, really making sure that our problem solving teams are aligned across the district. It shouldn't depend, a psych shouldn't walk into a school and have a different process in every school. We're really working hard on that. Um, also professional development with all groups. So, that includes our principles, our uh my is leadership. So, we have reps from every every school who come to quarterly meetings. Um, and we're going to be doing taking our our show on the road, so to speak, going to meet with different principles of schools who are identifying lower and just sitting with them and looking at their

130data and talking through it and making sure that their processes are in place and that parents and gened staff and special ed staff know the process to uh refer a student to special ed and when that's appropriate. um also universal screening opportunities. So for example, right now um we use dibbles which is the gold standard for reading um uh and and catching students who perhaps have dyslexia and making sure that we're referring those students based on our cut scores and looking at different things. Um, and then also communication, making sure that, uh, messaging is going out to community on what Childfind is and how you would refer um, and who you would call. I mean, um, I think a flyer went out in the March newsletter that even had our numbers of people who to

131call for what age groups on if you suspect that your child is, um, has a disability or having a delay. I also um think that we could increase our outreach and we're starting to do that with like pediatricians and mental health providers out in the community, our private schools. We've always done that. That's part of a process that CDE outlines, but increasing that and making sure that our gened teachers really know too when it's time to refer a student. Um and we continue to evaluate the data and assess those address those trends that we see. We've done a lot of collaboration with CDE on a first-name basis with a lot of people at CDE. Christa Claybo, for example, came out. She worked extensively with our school psychologists to look at our practices and to look

132at our numbers and try to identify some changes that we could make and also to just assure that we are in alignment with the law and doing what we're supposed to be doing for child fine. So, additional screening opportunities, like this is just an example, but like in kindergarten, um we don't currently screen all students for an articulation. We that's a great way to ensure that we aren't missing any students who might need speech and language therapy for an articulation pronunciation uh disability. Um, we're also, um, yeah, I think these are kind of a repeat, but we're just doing a lot of things out in the community to ensure everybody is aware of our obligations. I would imagine you have questions. Thank you. And this is your time to ask me things. >> Yeah, >>

133thank you very much. >> Right. Does anyone have a question they would like to kick us off with? I have excuse me I have a question. Um it seemed like in your first couple of slides that our scrolling through here. Um >> do you want me to go back? Do you >> No, I've got it. Thank you. Or unless you want to for um the folks at home. Uh it was it's slide seven that has the percentages and I just made it go away. >> Yep, there we go. >> Okay, great. Um it looked like our uh the PSD average was going up. Do you think that that's due to identifying problems um better testing and better identification? >> I would like to think that the education and the the um the PD that we've

134been doing is making a difference. Um I I sure hope that's the reason. Yeah. >> My my reason for asking that is because you mentioned that um St. Brain and Boulder had higher averages than we do. >> And when Fud shared the statistics that he did about our schools um across the Front Range, >> they had um significantly better outcomes than we do as far as graduation um especially with students with um special needs. And so I just um I'm wondering if maybe there's something that we could glean from those school districts too around some of the testing that they're doing identifying students at an earlier age maybe. >> Yeah, that's something that I can definitely reach out to colleagues on and see if there is something that we're missing. Other questions? Um, yeah, thank

135you for the presentation. >> Yeah, my pleasure. >> Um, and it also looks like y'all are doing a lot of good outreach and whatnot. So, I was just curious about capacity, right? So, in terms of like students being identified and number of staffs and being able to support students, um can you talk a little bit about capacity and how you feel um where that's at? And um I don't know, anything else you want to offer about that? Like what would be missing, would be needed, those kind of things. >> Um that's what's coming up for me. >> When you say capacity, do you do you mean how we're serving students? >> Yeah, how are we serving students? Right. like we can bring more students into the ecosystem. >> Um but what's the level and quality

136of support and services are we providing them? And so um as so what let me correct assumptions as I was listening it sounded like we were doing a lot more outreach, right? And when we when you do more outreach, sometimes that leads to increased identification which then leads to more services which then leads to do we have the capacity to serve those and so um just want to I'm thinking about alignment and so just wondering if you could speak to that. >> Yeah, those are great questions. So I will say >> sorry it just popped up like >> No, I love it. I love it. It's great. So, I think that um I've never been so lucky to work in a district that has such robust um resources for students with special needs. And um

137like when we just hired a new assistant director, we have five assistant directors, six, excuse me. And you know, one of the things in her interview like why here? And I said because you won't find a place that supports students with disabilities better than PSD. and and you all don't know me, but I've I've lived and worked all over the world on one of those. So, I've been in private, I've been in public, I've been in international schools and um it's it's astounding the the way that we um support and it's never enough in special ed. I mean, it's just never enough, right? Because there's always so many more needs or we always want to do better. But we have ratios that we follow. We follow them very strictly so that we um make sure

138that the student to to adult ratio is is really low um in our district and we have low case loads. Um and I do think that if we were to have more students we would have the capacity to serve them. I'm not concerned about that. Um I think the bigger uh the bigger issue is that we have disparit identification in the district. So we have some schools that are identifying very high rate to the point where you know we we had to open other schools for the autism program because Bolt's numbers were getting so high that they were almost I want to say between 30 and 40% somewhere around there don't quote me um but they were very high and we needed to open two other middle school programs and then you have other schools

139that are identifying a very low rate and so I think trying to find that assemblance of balance and make sure that everybody has the same process for identifying and that we are doing things um cohesively is really a big big part of what's happening. >> Other questions please. >> Yeah, thank you for the presentation. Um on the last slide you were talking about uh additional universal screening opportunities. I'm curious uh what is the for dyslexia and just you know I guess um people having learning disabilities in that in that world. Um what is the age that you're doing screenings now to identify? >> So Dibble starts in kindergarten. >> Okay. >> And then in um early childhood they do TS Gold which is another uh another assessment tool that the state uh mandates that every

140early childhood program uh utilizes. Um but we start dibbles which is that gold standard um to looking at our the reading um needs um in kindergarten. >> Okay. >> I had heard it was like it wasn't until third grade though that they're actually um diagnosed with dyslexia, that type of thing. Uh and then have some interventions happen. Has that changed? I I think that that could have been a person or a group of people's experience, but that is not um our process, nor should it be. The earlier we can intervene, the better. >> Yeah. >> And one thing that's interesting about SLD, so there's two I don't know if we want to get this deep in the weeds, but there's two categories um that you absolutely have to do interventions because you can't get to

141the table and look through the eligibility determination form unless you have done cycles of intervention. and one happens to be uh specific learning disability which dyslexia falls under and so that is a requirement by the state that we have to do some cycles of intervention to see how they respond before we even evaluate. Um but I think it's really important and that's that work of that alignment with the MTSS that we we were talking about to make sure that students don't live in that tier 2 tier three intervention for too long. We want to make sure that they're getting what they need. One theory about our identification is that our interventionists at our elementary schools are so good and kids make so much growth with them that they delay referring to special education. But that's

142something that we really need to be careful of. Um I think it's Senate Bill 250. Is that right? The dyslexia testing >> I'm not sure >> bill that Andrew Andrew Bayer has been working on. Um, I am just wondering how that will affect PSD. I don't I don't know if we have anything in place for that or what the what the state will then what ZDE will >> I know which bill you're talking about. I wasn't sure of the number, but >> Sorry. >> Oh, no. That's it. >> Um, my understanding is that my my initial understanding is that they're working towards making sure that we have proper screenings and that they will mandate that schools have the proper screenings. I think they're going to say it's got to be doubles and we already do

143that. So, I think we're in good shape. >> Do you have a question? >> How what can you share the progress that we've I mean we we have heard previously years back not not too far back I suppose about you know dyslexia screening wasn't super prevalent. um here in the district. And so I'm just curious to see what progress we've made and if you can give an estimate of of how well we're doing and >> um you know how what what we're looking at in in terms of continuing to make sure every child gets that testing. >> I think um you know I've only this is my third year so to just give you kind of a global context um on a couple things that have changed. you know, when I went to school, only

14410% of the population, you know, that was your typical that's changing, right? And then I that qualify for special education. I also remember not too long ago when I worked for Thompson, we were flagged because we were too high for spec um for SLI, speech and language impairment, because we at the 13th percentile. Now, that's the average. So, this has been an interesting thing to watch how things have changed. But as far as dyslexia, you know, I think even when I worked in other places and spaces, you know, there was like this avoidance of the word and and because there wasn't a specific category, I have no problem saying dyslexia. I I don't have any problem naming it or calling it. And we've been working with our with our, you know, is teams and principles

145to make sure like it's okay to say it like a a reading disability and dyslexia that both terms are appropriate. The difference is there's just not an eligibility category yet. I wouldn't be surprised if it's coming. I think that's that could be coming that there's going to be a separate eligibility category, but as of right now, I think that's a lot of times where that confusion comes in because we don't we don't qualify under dyslexia. We qualify under specific learning disability. But I I think that, you know, I'm I'm humble in front of you and say we can always get better. But I do think there's a shift there. I think that the word has gotten out. We've done so much training, not just with special education, but all of our general education teachers, intensive

146training on dyslexia over the last few years. >> And are you seeing an uptick in in the testing, especially of course at the kindergarten level when they're first entering our system? Like is that some >> Well, Tracy, I would defer to you. How long have we been doing dibbles um in this district? >> For a very long time. Um probably close to 15 years, I would say. So I mean that's that's So if you mean that testing I don't I don't know that that's changed. I think that's been on the same cadence. Um but as far as u specific learning disability um it's it's an eb and flow and that's something that we want to keep an eye on. That's those were the numbers I said that were synonymous. They were like the same from

147year to year but but we had assessed um many many students um in that time frame. But that's the most common disability. So when students move out of our district, I mean students with IEPs, we we have about 10 leave a a week. So I get that report and we also get 10 or 20 every week. So it's a really fluid number, but I think it's something to keep a close eye on. Yeah. >> So one I want to just say to the members of the board, I really appreciate the spirit of the questions. I think uh Dr. Raml and Dr. Gaw are right. We have had as a system dibbles in place for over a decade. I do believe um the spirit of your question regarding legislation both current and past that the spirit

148of that is to consider having systems doing more. Uh and I'd love to have Dr. Olsen, if that's okay, weigh in on that a little bit. Uh because as you may have remembered from my recent uh update around the progress status updates of our work, we have six schools right now that are piloting uh a screener above and beyond uh what is currently in place in all schools and would love to have Dr. Olsson just give you a status update on that. Thank you. >> Yeah, thanks. Um so we have six um elementary schools currently in the pilot with over um 60 adults piloting this program. So we have general education teachers um we have um interventionists, we have ELD teachers, we also have classified um staff and we have obviously principal leaders who are

149part of the focus groups in each of these buildings. um they have all met with and completed the training as well as provided the screener and now they are in the analysis phase and talking through um what a system lift would look like. Um as we did approach um all different types of elementary schools so that we weren't just looking at certain size schools. We actually looked at programming. We looked at differentiation so that um we could get a depth of depth that doesn't sound right. So that we get a variety of feedback from all different um educators that work with um our students specifically um with our platform. So, uh, more to come, but we are definitely in the throws of it now and getting some really good feedback from our practitioners, um, so

150that we can create an implementation plan for the entire district. >> Thank you, Dr. Olsson. And just to build off of that, I we're certainly committed to providing you a more detailed update around what we're learning. I think what Dr. Olsson is suggesting, which is absolutely accurate, we're in this learning phase. uh what we're learning from the professional development, what we're learning regarding the implementation, what are some of the implications of that. So I believe, you know, we can we have to come back to the board around that. Something that I'm really proud of staff in doing as well as our district is the spirit of that implementation of the legislation is future facing of uh I think 27 28 am. So, we're taking this step forward as a modeling of a wanting to be

151an early adopter uh to not have to wait for the legislation knowing that this has been a priority of this board that we want to continue to figure out a way to move forward more expeditiously. So, I just think that's important to note that not all systems across the state are piloting. They're kind of waiting to see how the legislation uh bakes out. Um, but I'm I am really proud of staff to take on this effort so we can learn and from a change management perspective look at that expansion of a systemwide effort more thoughtfully. And Carla, you kind of threw me for a loop there. I thought you were mentioning a bill that was uh being discussed now, but now that everybody's talking, this is this was uh I think number 200 last year.

152Um, and I remember one of the things on that is we as a group in the legislative committee and in the community were pushing for a faster implementation to see if we could get it done more quickly um that did not get put into the bill um because other districts aren't as as far ahead as we are on this. So, that's kind of and we we still are. We're I I think that it was a concerted effort by staff um to continue even though the bill didn't have the language in there to fasttrack the policy and go ahead at our own speed. We've always been ahead. I think it's we will exceed the um original recommendations for I think it is 20 27 28 I think it is. >> Please Can you talk to me

153a little bit about the significance of um sorry the uh percentages? So like you know we're comparing oursel to districts and you know I know that often happens this comparison peers. Um so tell me the significance of that for us and why do we why why are we using that particular number? Um because it's like well yeah we can be better or worse than our peers but there's also within the district and how we evaluate our performance which sounds good but I'm just trying to understand because it's in the slide so it feels like it's significant or it's a point that's trying to be made. So if you could just talk to that a little bit. I mean I think it's important that we um the most important thing is that we are doing the

154identification correctly, accurately, quickly and following all the regulations. It's hard to uh say like we are under identifying. Um but I think that it's good to just compare and to make sure that we um just are aware of which schools in particular are identifying lower to make sure that they have the processes in place um and that we can address it from like more of a granular. Um, and I I just think that um I believe that was a question that was brought up and so we wanted to to in the community and I think we wanted to address it and with full transparency um just wanted to share those numbers with you um and just to see the trends. Um I think to um you know I guess that the biggest concern would be

155if we were not if we were missing the student then they wouldn't have the specially designed instruction that they need and they wouldn't have the protections that they have under the law and that would be a concern if we weren't identifying um the students that are out there that truly should be um under that protection of IDA. >> Thank you. That was very helpful. I think is I'm a I was asking that question because I know that I've been asked that by people like well we keep using these period comparisons what does that mean for us in our district? Um and so I just wanted to know and understand what that meant for the context of this presentation. >> I think it's part of the narrative. >> Thank you very much. >> Yeah. I think

156it's part of our story and something that um we should pay attention to. Before I ask my question, I I want to say that um funding of children with special needs and uh children on IEP um is of the utmost importance I think for everybody on this board. My question is as we transition more children onto IEPs and I think maybe this is more towards Dave. I know that we are allocated a additional funding um for those children Um, maybe this is a rhetorical question, but is that additional state funding adequate for the amount of resources that we're spending for these children? >> not even close. >> It it really isn't. Um, it's been known for a long time that the categorical that we're bringing in is not near enough to provide the services that

157are required for students on IEPs. um that a combination of both the state and the federal funding still don't get us to where we need. We we need to take our total program funding and actually allocate more of that to even meet those needs. >> Thank you. And I'll reiterate for for everybody and and people the throngs of people online. So I think I can speak for everybody. Funding these students is the utmost priority for us. >> Yes. Okay. I had two um questions. I'm trying to remember the first one was Oh, the first one was dyslexia was named by many of us for our priorities. And I'm sorry, Scott, I just remembered I overstepped you. So, you'll go next. I apologize. Um I was wondering if we could either get an update or just

158give us a timeline of when we could get an update on that screener. Would it be June? Is it we're talking August, September? or what time frame should we expect so that we're not pushing any faster than we really should? >> Dr. Olsson, I'm going to look to you to weigh in on this. When would we be able to have a more robust update on what we're learning from the implementation of the screener at those six schools? >> Um, sorry, I'm just trying to think through the timeline that they've given me. Um, I would to be fair because um of where they're at currently in the process, I would say towards the end of May, I would be able to give you a better report than I would even a month from now. So, >>

159that's sooner than I was anticipating. So, I will take it. >> Thank you. >> Okay, Scott, I will not step on your toes further. Go ahead. >> No, you can go first. Um just a thought that came to mind and I'm not sure legally what we can do but um you know with the talk of consolidation and and what do we do with buildings and things like that. You know, I think there are some school districts that have schools that specifically cater to um students that have specially designed instruction um rather than spreading our resources across. I mean, it it sounds like we're shooting for every school at some level, but for some of the more intense instruction, maybe kids that are diagnosed with dyslexia, is that an option where there's a school where that's

160the specific focus and there's less pressure to keep up with your peers and in fact all the instruction is designed for the same issue. and it can I've heard stories that it can be incredibly productive and and have great results. Is that something we can even do or consider when we're looking at >> I think everything can be considered. Um I have some worries. I have worries about inclusion and having our students be included and be part of um everything that every school has to offer. Um but I think it's something we could consider. I'm not opposed to it. >> I just want to make a comment to what you've shared, Scott, and I appreciate you saying it. I think that inclusion piece is important. Like when I hear that, I'm like, what's being missed

161out? And then again, just thinking about um being at um Balor this week, there was a parent who spoke about that and um having concerns about um her students being at a school that only serves certain types of students and the stigma that's often associated with that and the experience they have. So, I think um we have to consider the variety of students and families that we have in our district um and ultimately what the impact is on the students. And when I hear that, I immediately think about my own um educational experiences and how students weren't in the classroom and were separated out and stuff and the impact that it had on their overall development. And so um as a district, I would love for us to really think about that and um and

162again um have an empathy, right? because um whatever we do definitely from the perspectives of the students and the family's lived experiences versus um assumptions or anecdotals and things. So um let's just I just want to be mindful in that inclusion piece and thanks for sharing that. >> Thank you. I need to finish a thought. Um, my question that comes up frequently with this because I see our numbers and knowing many a handful at least of families how have had children actually no longer need and outgrow their IEPs. I'm wondering what percentage of our students and I apologize for not asking that sooner. So, if you don't have it, I'll gladly take that information later. But I wonder sometimes in these numbers if we are bringing students in, we serve the them exceptionally well and

163then they actually don't need their IEP and so our numbers stay in this space that's different than some of our comparables in our state for other reasons that maybe we're not describing. >> I I can speak to that a little bit. I mean I think there's certain categories that we definitely see students exiting an IEP. Um, speech and language is definitely one that many many students is very prevalent that young children need that support for language and articulation, but as they grow and improve, they don't need that anymore. Um, I think that uh we we definitely have students who who just meet their goals and start to to start scoring in the average ranges and we no longer they don't need that support or maybe they shift over to a 504 for accommodations but don't

164need that direct instruction. So there they that does happen quite a bit. Developmental delay is another one that a lot of students maybe at the beginning they need that that only lasts till eight years old and then they have to either go on to another category or they don't qualify anymore under that one. So those are some areas that we see students exit but as far as an exact number I will get that for you. >> No, that's okay. I don't have that off the top of my head. >> Um just having heard that story a numerous times it but of course it didn't occur to me before today. So I really appreciate getting that answer in the future. Um are there any other questions? Yes, please. >> I just want to correct something. I

165didn't thank you for all this amazing information. Thank you for putting this these slides together for us. The work that you're doing is so important. Um >> near and dear to my heart. So, Dr. Rumble, thank you again. >> Oh, you're so welcome. And I would Yeah, anytime you all have curiosities, I'm happy to come back and share the information. And we're always growing, continuous improvement. >> Okay. Thank you. >> I do have I'm sorry. I'm going to take 30 more seconds. It's not a question. Okay. It's just a comment similar to Carla. Um you said consistent and cohesive and trying to ensure that all of our schools have that consistency are identifying students consistently and I so appreciate that. I think in my tenure as a board director we have been striving towards becoming

166a school district and I think this is a core tenant of that piece and we also it ends up being that our students are well supported throughout their educational process. they're not exceptionally well supported maybe in elementary school and then they're having to redefine their needs in middle school, right? That consistency is so important for a student to just maintain their their needs and their resources. So, I so appreciate you doing that work and thank you. >> You're welcome. All right, y'all have a good spring break and I'll see you soon. >> All right. Yes. Okay. All right. We have one more um instructional report and it is our PSD marketing update. Brian, I believe we have some guests for this one as well. >> Yeah, thank you. Uh tonight we look forward to hearing

167the PSD marketing update from John Cop, our executive director of communications. Welcome, John. >> Thank you. This looks like Matt's working on it for us in the back. Good evening, President Zamora, Superintendent Kingsley, and board directors. I'm very excited this evening to talk to you all about our marketing campaign, specifically Choose PSD, um, and all the great things we're trying to do here in the school district. I want to start by telling a personal story, which is it's been almost a year and a half since I arrived here from Texas with my family and I have three young kids. Two of them are in elementary school. One of them is a couple years away. Her birthday is October 3rd. I wish it was a little earlier to get her up, but um we're going to

168be excited when she gets into the schools. My kids started, the two boys are in elementary school. They started around towards the end of the fall semester. So, they left their schools back in Texas. um and they were accepted um and felt comfortable in those schools so quickly. Um and they loved that school and this year they're at a different neighborhood school. So they've now been to two different neighborhood schools and they're both exceptional. Um and I say that because when I first arrived here and I went and talked to all the principles and I talked to people in the community, everyone said how great the schools here and they're all great but they're different and I've had that experience with my own family so far. And so it makes it a lot easier to

169market something when you know that it's what you're saying is the truth. So, I just wanted to start off by saying that the reason why our schools are so exceptional is because of our our teachers, our paras, our school administrators, and our support staff. Um, our schools are exceptional not just with because they're high performing, which they are, but because of that welcoming, affirming affirming culture that they have. There is a sense of belonging at our schools. We all know that that have been in many of our school buildings. And that's important because we want to make sure that the families that live here now and that are potentially moving here understand that I'm confident a family could send their child to any of our schools and receive an excellent education. Brian's often said if

170you put a a map of the schools on the wall and throw a dart anywhere it lands that school is going to be exceptional. That is true and that's also rare. Coming from somewhere else, that's not the story everywhere. Not every community you can choose a house anywhere within the boundary and your kid goes to an exceptional school. Families that live here, you've you've hit the jackpot. I feel like I've hit the jackpot. Um and I think that's something that's important for us to remember. Also, our district is exceptional systemwide, but we don't shy away from our challenges or pretend that they don't exist. And that is authentic. Um it's important to be authentic in that way. So, let's talk a little bit about the competitive landscape here with NPSD and really the state of

171Colorado. Colorado has the second best state public charter school laws in the nation according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. So, this makes Colorado one of the most competitive school choice environments in the country. PSD currently serves 81.2% 2% of school age children through non-charter schools and another 9.1% through PSD authorized charter schools. This means that over 90% of our families within our boundaries are choosing PSD in some capacity. That is a very strong number. Um it tells me that the PSD brand is strong and we we look at the pupil distribution data that exists. This is you can find it on the website under our enrollment trend site on the side menu there. We have a lot of um data that you can dig through including all of our October counts. One

172of those pieces of data is our people distribution. And if you look at that, our share of students that are in non-tra or in traditional PSD schools has hover between 81 and 83% since 2020. So even as enrollment has declined, we still have the same share within two percentage points. And what that means is that we're retaining these students despite all the al alternatives and choices that families have, which is really important. So what is the 90% capture rate? How does that compare to other districts? Um the forom institute has something called the education competition index and they analyze 125 of the largest school districts in the country. And so when you look at that, the highest to rate you'll find is in Clayton County, Georgia, which is Jonesboro, just south of Atlanta, and they

173capture at 95%. There are other districts like Washington DC public schools, San Antonio ISD that are around 50%. So where we are is very good when you compare it to other school districts across the nation. So then the question becomes what are the decision factors that leads to family choices. We have internal surveys within the district where we can ask our own families. When it comes to those who are not a part of PSD currently we have to rely sometimes on external sources. Um when you look at the data that exists both the department of ed national center for education statistics as well as through um the school national school public relations association council of great city schools various sources for this. You basically come down to several different decision factors. It's a matrix of

174decisions. Educational philosophy, the pedigogy, whether it's an interest in monastery or classical education. Some families choose it based on religious instruction, political ideology, proximity to work or family support, specific student needs, and really importantly, the family friend relationship and peer groups. As I mentioned earlier, whenever I first arrived here, the first thing I wanted to do was go talk to our principles and visit our schools. It's important to listen and understand the local context before you try to make any decisions or assume something's going to work somewhere else or something's going to work here that works somewhere else. Um through that listening tour both with our school leaders as well as district department leaders and the community itself um something that came up in most of those meetings when we were asking what's worked really

175well what could we improve was there's a sense that we are marketing against ourselves. Each school was responsible for their own marketing. Um and that's very challenging especially when you're seeing enrollment decline in less kids. So if less kids are being born in the community and we are competing against ourselves, that's that's hard. Um it's also unsustainable and inefficient and inequitable. Not every campus has a marketing or communications expert on campus to help with that. And it's another added burden on school leadership beyond the main core scope of their job. And so we wanted to listen, understand that, and try to come up with a strategy that markets PSD collectively. um without limiting the individual school's unique identity. So it's not an either or. This is a both end. And so this is the context

176of how the choose PSD campaign was formed. And so you've probably at this point seen choose PSD messaging advertising um in the world as well as online. The core messages that we've developed for what we'll call choose PSD 1.0 know is choose excellence which is focusing on the fact that our schools are amazing. We're one of the best districts in Colorado and honestly in the nation and the data supports that claim and so there's excellence here. We also want to emphasize that you're choosing belonging because we prioritize mental health and belonging in this district in ways other places don't. And we treat our students as people, not just assets that we invest in for their test performance. And that shows up in the relationships our students build with the adults in those schools. And we

177want people to choose PSD because like we said earlier, we truly believe every one of our schools is great and could potentially be the best fit for any of our families. So we target four audiences specifically because not everyone is in a place where they're necessarily going to make a big change. And so with limited funding for marketing, we're looking at where can we have the biggest return on investment. And our current target audiences are people that are just moving into this region or people who are searching about moving to this region. Also, families that live here now and they have a child entering pre-k or kindergarten. Our current fifth grade families transitioning into middle school. And our current eighth grade families that will be transitioning to high school. The reason for that is once

178kids have friends in the middle of like third grade, the chances of them making a big move, if you have kids of that age, you know that's that's hard leaving your friends behind. And so we're wanting to make sure that we target these audiences because we feel like they're the most persuadable. Now, at this time, I don't want this to sound patronizing, but we're gonna do a little bit of like marketing 101 real quick. Just like what is marketing? Um, and so audience is the most important thing. Like we mentioned earlier, when you go to a new place, you want to understand the audience, listen to them to understand what their needs are. You want to have a goal in mind, you have me messages around that and tactics to to hit those goals. So

179simple story, if you're opening a hair salon in a town and you want to stand out in the crowd, maybe you find out that a lot of the kids in town like mullets. Um, and so you would advertise, we have the best mullets in town. We've actually hired a side stylist who's an expert in mullets and you market that and you reach them where they are and maybe you get some business. Also, there are people in town who don't like mullets and so that's not going to work for them at all. So that's the that's the fun part of any marketing or advertising campaign is even if you know what people want, not everyone wants the same thing. So there's a myriad of reasons why people make decisions. And weird transition, we'll talk about the

180choose PSD website. So the thought here was we didn't have a single source to find out about all of our schools and what makes them different and great. And so we wanted to build a page where you could learn about each school, read a profile about them that we wrote in collaboration with school leaders and also have a comprehensive FAQ to find out about the registration process, make sure we have an easy link to get to the registration page. Um we have school locator maps on there as well. Um, we have those by categories, so you can see where our schools are. But we really wanted to make it a one-stop shop for families that are either new to the district or in the district and want to see what all the options are. This

181is also really beneficial for us from the marketing side because when you have a bunch of digital ads, you want to send them somewhere. Um, and so this is a single source that we've been able to send people to. This is an example of some of those ads. We focus a lot on meta which is Facebook and Instagram because you can target very easily within their advertising platform to make sure that our ads and sponsored posts are getting to appropriate audiences. And so this is our highest performing channel by far. We also do spend money on Google search um sponsored posts I believe is what they're called. These have exceptional analytics because people are searching for what is the best school in Fort Collins or thinking about moving here and they're looking into the schools

182and they click our post there. I'll talk about the data later. Um, but those numbers are really great for Google search. And then we had Google display ads which are ads similar to what you would see on Facebook or Instagram, but they're on other websites. um those we didn't see as nearly as um many clicks and so we've discontinued that because we're always trying to see what's working and what's not working. So, what you'll see on the screen now is an example of one of our Spanish language ads on I think that's a Facebook post and that one targets specifically our families with Spanish being their primary language. And then we also have a Batty elementary ad on here as well because we're not just doing Choose PSD. There are also ads running for all

183of our individual schools with content specifically um about that school and what makes them special and different. Beyond the digital marketing, we're also doing um several other forms. So, you've probably seen yard signs around town. Those are specifically designed for the schools. So, it's not just once again choose PSD, it's choose blank elementary school, but it's under the umbrella. So, we're trying to unify and become a system that works together for marketing without losing that individual identity for each campus. We also had vinyl banners that went up over the summer before the start of school. We started off by putting those on fences at schools that have um locations where there's lots of car traffic. Some of those need to be replaced. The wind's gotten a hold of them over over time. Um we've also

184been sending direct mail postcards to our families. There's different versions of this. There's a generic PSD choose PSD postcard that goes to all families. We also have a kindergarten specific one that's going to families that we know have a four to 5-year-old that with the home. Um, not only do we mail those to the houses, we've also been delivering them to pediatricians offices and preschools to make sure that we have those physically in spaces where families are. We did out outdoor advertising via billboards. Um, we have KRFC radio underwriting spots that have been going on throughout the year. Um over the summer and last semester we had movie theater ads. We'll continue that again once a families are off on break. It's a little bit better than doing it now, but we'll we'll definitely do

185that. The graduation ad that we played, we had we had a lot of positive reception about that. Um so we'll plan to do something like that again. One of our first Choose PSD advertisements was in Valpac, which in my head is kind of like a billboard. Um, we discontinued that just because the QR code scans weren't when we were looking at our budgets just didn't make sense to continue it, but it was an interesting thing to try out and we're always looking to see what works and what doesn't work. We also want to make sure that we're actually in the physical world where families are. So, we're trying to attend more community events. Um, this is the second year we've gone to Treat Sylvania and had a little booth. So, as the kids come get

186candy, PSD sponsors one of those. We also were able to provide them some of the Choose PSD stickers that were Halloween themed um to go in their little goodie bags. And we were at Hero Fest over at Council Tree this year as well. And we're always looking to find more ways to get out in the community to meet families where they are. So we're not just waiting for them to come to us or waiting for them to receive information online. Now we're going to look at some of the performance metrics for our marketing. So, our sponsored posts were seen by the target audience more than 800,000 times, which is a lot. Um, and when you look at that, we generated 29,113 clicks to PSD enrollment pages. And via meta advertising alone, we reached 656,000 unique

187people. And our engagement rates on these ads significantly significantly exceeded our industry benchmarks that come from a thirdparty marketing firm. On Meta specifically, we achieved a 3% click-through rate. Um, and a click-through rate basically is a digital marketing metric which measures the percentage of people who click on a link, an ad, or an email after they see it. And so those percentages just that's what that means. Um, we generally generated nearly 10,000 post engagements. Um, and we saw strong engagement specifically with audiences that are aged 35 to 54 as well as grandparents aed 65 and older. As I mentioned earlier, Google search was really important for us. When we looked at the data, we achieved a 37.4% click-through rate, which is more than 10 times the industry benchmark of 3.2%. And some of our keyword

188searches ended up being at 50% clickthrough rate, which is even better. Every single elementary school exceeded the industry benchmark across the board, which is really honestly crazy um that that would be the case. Some of those ads achieved five to seven times the benchmark. those schools, for example, Canard, Riffenberg, Tolli, and Harris all were in that five to seven times the benchmark range for their individual um sponsored posts. And what that tells us is that school specific campaigns are outperforming the general district messaging by two to five times. Um it tells us when we tell school specific stories, families engage at a much higher rate. So we we're taking all this information in so as we iterate and do choose PSD 2.0 you know that we're taking all this in mind, putting all this in

189mind as we go back to the table and collaborate for how we can improve things because we're committed to continuously improving it basing based on the data. Now, I want to talk about what marketing can and cannot do. Um, in grad school, my first research methods class, the professor told us on the first day, um, that we can get an automatic A if anyone in the class could find a peer-reviewed study that definitively proved advertising causes changes in human behavior. Um, and that's not possible because it doesn't exist. Um, that doesn't mean advertising and marketing are not important. It just means you can't prove causation. Um there's actually a well-known academic paper that's by researchers at Google and Microsoft titled on the near impossibility of measuring the returns to advertising and they use billions of

190ad impressions and really sophisticated data and they couldn't reliably establish a causal link. So marketing science can measure correlation and engagement and awareness and those things really matter. And so with that in mind, we want to make sure that we look at why families are choosing schools. And that's a very complex matrix. It includes school boundaries, proximity, sibling enrollment, word of mouth, school tours, competition from other choices, relocation patterns, economic factors, housing availability, educational philosophy, religious values, and specific student needs. You can go on and on. There are so many reasons why people choose schools. And so what we're trying to do is become a touch point in a complex decision-making journey. And that's best understood in my opinion as being about brand building and awareness efforts that keep PSD top of mind so that

191whenever you do reach a consideration phase, you're thinking about PSD. So our true value is ensuring that PSD schools are visible, that they're accessible and well positioned when families are actively exploring options. Even if we can't provide causation, we know that this awareness matters. It's also about more than just trying to increase enrollment numbers, which we obviously are trying to do. It's also about celebrating the system itself and our students and highlighting the successes and stories across all of our schools. 77% of our households in our community don't have school age children and we want them to understand the value PSD brings as well. Honestly, public education benefits everyone in the community whether they have children in the schools or not. Um there's like economic development, there's community strength in our schools, and the choose

192PSD campaign is really attempting to support our schools by relieving marketing burden from the local school by providing professional expertise from our team and creating consistent high-quality messages and yes, trying to increase and maintain enrollment, especially given the budget challenges that we're all aware of. But we're honest about the limits of what marketing alone can do. And we also know that word of mouth matters a lot. Whenever you ask families, why did you choose a school, survey after survey, whether it be here or other places I've been or other districts I talked to, we all try to write the survey differently. We get the same result. I chose this school because my friend or family told me it was good. It's a word of mouth thing. What that means is that the marketing that matters

193most is already in all of our buildings. It's our current families. those stories that they share with their friends and family is the best way to make sure people know that we're the best choice. We're going to keep doing everything we're doing, but we need to know that we still have some agency as well, just with our current families and also our staff to make sure that story is getting out there because even if we can't prove it was because of an ad um and everyone says word of mouth, we know that those ads still have an impact because people are seeing those stories and those messages. I will end with just saying that I truly do feel honored to be able to market PSD because we're an exceptional school district and that's not always

194the case for someone in a role like mine. Sometimes you are asked to market and sell something that you wouldn't put your kids in. Um that's not the case here. Our district truly is exceptional. I don't have to spend in my job every day say look over here. Don't look over here. In fact, whenever there are things that we can improve, we say look over here. we need to improve this. That's important. That's authentic and it's powerful. And so at this time, if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Um, but that's an overview of Choose PSD 1.0. >> Thank you so much. All right. Are there any anyone want to kick us off >> questions? Questions? >> I know. I'm like I see them spinning. Go ahead. >> They are bubbling.

195Um, first off, just a personal note. Uh, I did have a town that focused on mullets. And, uh, there are photos out there of seventh grade Scotty with a pretty sweet one. So, uh, if you guys want to look that up. >> Yes, exactly. Let the googling begin. Um, big hit with the ladies. Uh, anyhow, you mentioned, uh, well, first off, thank you so much for putting this together. This is really impressive and and very exciting. that the um the metadata is awesome. Like I mean that is very unusual. Um clickthrough rates and things like that. Uh one thing I would emphasize and I always talk about this stuff but it is true. Um I think we have a competitive advantage and this is one thing I would add to your your photos, your stories,

196things like that is our athletic excellence. the competitive advantage of a traditional high school, even middle school, is something we really need to focus on over our competition um of nonPSD schools. And so I think that's something that I would add. We have amazing stories and and we've recognized them in this room um of individual and team sports. So that for somebody, you know, a parent that's talking about putting their kid into school, let's just, you know, be honest, people live vicariously through their kids. And so if they can see that, oh, if I put my kid into this school, they might win state in baseball or swimming, those types of things. Um, that is something that we can capture and and really leverage about our schools. So I and it's all true. Um, I

197talk about that. Um, there's a whole history of alumni in PSD that are incredibly impressive people that we should highlight on our website. We talked about that almost like a hall of fame. Um, going back 100 years, you know. So, um, I would focus on that as well. Uh the last thing you you mentioned here, the current kindergarten campaign and future strategy on that slide right before this. This is one of the the things I've been really interested in. You'd mentioned with marketing, you want to understand your audience, right? Who they are and what they want, what are their needs. That's an area where, and I think Brian and I have talked about this, where if we have um kindergarten teachers, preschool staff that are talking to parents about what's your choice for getting your

198kid into or you know, when your kids's ready to go into kindergarten, you know, what's your thinking? I would love some kind of tool or mechanism to survey that and and get those answers. Even if they don't choose PSD, let's find out why right from the beginning. and then that will inform our marketing efforts in in the future. So that'd be the only thing I would ask for. I think everything else is looking really really strong. So thank you for putting this together and thank your team as well. >> I I appreciate it and I will say that our team that choose excellence piece of the tag athletics and our activities, our bands and and everything else like we have state champions that is also doesn't exist everywhere. And so you're absolutely right and as

199we've talked about our next iterations, that's something we want to focus a lot more on. Um, as well as the alums, that's something we've talked about as well as with our team. So I really appreciate that. >> I feel like Scott says something and I'm like, and also um, just comment on that too, right? We got excellent sports programs, we also have excellent programs in our arts. And so how do we highlight what's taking place there? I think about even the summer musical last summer and how fabulous that was. So if we could just be well-rounded. Um I think that would be important. So that was just me picking on Scott and want to share that. But um my um two things. One I want to say thank you um for the presentation and also

200um I see like the little things pop up on my Facebook with different schools and so I have enjoyed like clicking on them and learning different things about our district. So that's pretty cool. So, it's out there. Um, but I do have a question. So, my question is if the district already captures um 90% of our students, I'm trying to figure out what problem is this campaign trying to solve. Can you answer that? >> And so, that's gets back to those four target audiences again. And so we have a good market share based upon the data that we have at this point. But there are still people that do move here and there are people that are entering a system for the first time and we don't want to be off the playing field. We

201want to make sure that we're getting our messages out there for those families because we'd like to that number to go up. We would like to pick up more of that. Um because we know once families choose us, I'm pretty confident in saying they're going to be have a pretty good experience. Not everyone, but most. And so, if we can get them in the door, I'm pretty comfortable saying that our schools are going to be able to help us keep them. And so, that's why we're focusing on those four specific target audiences to try to reach people when they're in the in their most persuadable moments. So, they've just moved here, they're considering moving here, they have a kid entering pre-K or K, and then current fifth and current ethic to middle or high school.

202>> Thank you. I appreciate that. But then my other question is if we're targeting people and it sounds like it's related to enrollment, how are we tracking the effectiveness of this campaign? I know you said marketing can't do causality or anything like that, but like what indicators or what are we watching to show that the this is an effective marketing campaign. So right, if you if we have certain numbers that we look at at the beginning, we do a campaign, we should be able to see other numbers. And I don't know if you can answer it or someone else can answer that, but how are we tracking the effectiveness of this campaign if our focus is on these specific populations um beyond um which are like Scott said are excellent, right? But these are also

203awareness and engagement markers and indicators, but how's this campaign connected to our overall enrollment goals? >> So, we're looking at how many people click on an ad and get to the enrollment page. So when I talk about the caus causation piece, all I'm saying there is I can't make some and marketing can't make them make the choice. But if we can get them to the page, that's really important for us because then it may be a part of their matrix of decisions at that point. And so we do measure, as we mentioned earlier in the presentation, we're measuring a lot. We're not just measuring clicks themselves. We're also looking at the engagement, positive and negative. And we're doing it beyond just the advertising. So we we look at the comments people make on stories we

204post or not we post that are posted in the world and we see whether the positive negative and we're listening. We're constantly listening because communications is not just pushing out into the world. It's also listening. So we're trying to be responsive to what we're seeing. And so whenever we put these ads out there, we see what people say about them, how many of them share them, um which ones are doing better, which photos are doing better, and we're constantly iterating based upon the metrics. and we're ultimately trying to get them to go to that choose PSD website and the enrollment page and we're seeing traffic there. It's just that as we know that there's more to the story than just getting them to the page. And so we're tracking all those things and so whether

205or not PSC is successful, I think we're looking at those metrics. I can go up here and tell you like the metrics look great. They're above benchmark. Um but there's more beyond just that quantitative piece that is how is PSD represented in our community in terms of um pride and trust that's harder to measure through the data itself. But I think some of these ads like you're mentioning looking at the different schools. Just seeing what our kids are doing, what our teachers are up to, I think is really important. And so that's harder for me to measure in a quantitative way. Um but we're actively exploring how to better do that. >> Thank you. I do think like I do want to make that point like if we if we're saying that we're marketing to

206folks to get them to choose PSD then how are we seeing that they're choosing PhD I don't know if it's necessarily marketing like marketing sometimes I know like the metrics that's been offered is awareness and engagement are people clicking on the ads are people visiting the page like we have evidence of that but it seems to me that the purpose of the campaign is to then turn those clicks and those engagements into enrollment and so is Is there a way we can track that? I know that I've seen it at times, right? Before you launch a campaign, you you look at the baseline numbers, right? You know, how many applications or how many clicks would have prior to we launched this campaign. So, the period of intervention and then what was that? I don't This

207might get on my nerves. Let me I'm looking. This is serious. No. Um just you know I just want and I'm and I'm not saying that it's your responsibility to do that but I just want to put that out if we could develop some metric measurement around that because otherwise we're just bringing awareness and people are engaging we got 90% of the market um how do we know that like even if it's like you know we enrolled from the prek parents that we reached out to um we can identify that after we ran this particular campaign, we saw an increase in so many numbers. So, it's all kind of anecdotal, but it still provides some measure of metrics to see if it's having an impact on enrollment. And so, I just want to encourage us

208to think beyond engagement and awareness and identify some aspect and I think it could be done because I think about Dwayne showing how he operationalized the connection survey, right, and this idea around belonging. So I think there's evidence in the district that we know how to take abstract concepts and turn them into operational outcomes and I think that would be valuable in this space. Thank you and thank you for all your hard work. Sorry, >> I have a comment that's directly related to that. I was chomping at the bit because I was like this is so uh let me get some comments out first and then I'll give you my question slashmusing wondering whatever you want to call it. Um first of all John I want to say thank you for this. This is great.

209I was this is a really anticipated presentation so I really appreciate the the hard work. Um, anecdotally, I'm one of the people that chose PSD before there was a campaign, because of the reputation of the school. I mean, we moved from Denver primarily because of the schools and the reputation that it had. So, um, it was interesting when we were at I'm trying to remember who was at TLI with me. You were at TLI and Andrew. Um, we heard someone that was very similar and it was like, oh, you're like four years behind where I was where he came to this district because of the the strength and then he's like, but but there's differences in all these schools. And so, we talked about how overwhelming it was. So, first point is it's working regardless

210of whether this campaign has has started from anecdotal basis. Um, I also want to give a shout out because if you're on choose PSD, there is so much good information on here. I mean, it is not to be overwhelming and indenting, but for a nerd like me, getting the the elementary school boundaries map in one place, getting the middle school maps, the elementary school maps, like that kind of stuff is really helpful for the work we're doing in the district. Um, okay. So, Dr. Ziggler makes a good point. I was in similar mind meltd. Okay, I'm not stealing your thunder or claiming your thought, but I've got one that kind of >> I know that's what they separated us. See, they know what they did. They moved us apart. Um, okay. So, I want to

211focus with some of the numbers and some of the original slides because I think this this also came up at our last engagement session. I'm really proud of this is that um, you know, the 80% more or less of our students are choosing PSD traditional schools. And so, if you include our uh, charter schools, our PSD charters, that number is 90 90.3%. So like 90% of the kids in our in our district are choosing our schools. That's incredible. So my push is this because I'm very since we're talking market share, we're we're a board and we need to be competitive. I want to aggressively go after that 9.7% that remains. And so you talked about causation and and correlation. By the way, uh Don Draper might have might want to have a word with your

212professor. Um but but on this as far as what's in our control or not, I think that's an appropriate sort of setting the stage. But to Dr. Ziggler's point, here's here's my question. We've got some we've got some data about uh you know factors of people choosing, right? I wonder if trends are emerging, right? So, if we could maybe structure our survey to say in you know how what are the reasons you chose not to go to a charter or a traditional PSD school and of these reasons rank them, right? So, I think we can glean some insights there. So, for instance, if one of the factors you listed, which is true of a lot of our our folks, is they want a religious education. Well, we exclusively cannot will not ever do that. We're

213a secular district. We'll always be a secular district, right? So, maybe we don't target that group for marketing. Maybe we can have other things that we're looking at. People are either on the fence or if I I like the idea being them the clicks to get into more information. So, if we can grab attention of those that maybe have the wondering or maybe they've heard things like, "Oh, it's it's it's a political divide or it's this or it's academics or whatever the, you know, the narrative is that we keep hearing rumblings of and say, uh-uh, here, go here and and see." I wonder if that's a good way to kind of calibrate the efficacy of the campaign by making it more targeted as to what trends and the other reason I'd say that is because

214I think trends are also fleeting, right? So a trend for this next five years of a of school age children that may be completely outdated by the time we get to do anything to implement it. So anyway, that's a lot of questions. I'm sorry, but I know you were nodding. I know you're thinking about this because you're an expert in this. So, one of the first thing that comes to mind when you said that last part there was I think this is where the Google search ads come into play a lot because those are the families that are actively searching things like which schools in Fort Collins are the best like and they get to whatever like niche or any of these great schools sites that exist and we have our content there to try

215to get them to choose PSD as quickly as possible and those audiences and I think that's why our engagement rates are so high in that space is because those are people that are actively looking for it as opposed to people that are just on their phone and doom scrolling and then an ad pops up. Like they may click it. Um but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're actively looking. And so Google search I think is very important because it's to me a more persuadable audience because they are looking for us and then we are directing them to a site we want them to go to to find out as much information as possible. And so I do agree. I'd love all the information. I'd like to know why people are making decisions, why they're not

216making decisions. the more the marrier. Um, some of those things are more challenging. Some of those things come with cost. Um, but I always want to find that out. Um, through meta there's a limit to the targeting of the audiences. You can do a lot. Um, but you can't do everything. And so I I can't get down to are they in a PSD traditional school or not. Like it's not going to tell me that. And so, but there are other things you can like exclusion of certain people who may not be in the persuadable category. Those are things to consider. I'd love to talk about that with my team and brainstorm. Um, once again, like we want to iterate and look at what's working, what's not working, and try to improve this because ultimately we

217have a great product and I want people to know that. I want to get that into as many people's eyes or ears as I possibly can. >> Carla wants to go, but I want to say thank you for asking the right questions. >> Yeah, I'm sorry we didn't get to have coffee before this, but I'm glad that my voice is back a little bit. Um, I would say that Don Draper would say you take away the choice. Um, and I am I just feel like 100% we need a dashboard on the front page of this website that shows why you go to your neighborhood school. Um, something you mentioned too, John, uh, about the click-through rates. I found kind of interesting that people were clicking through school specific and I feel my hope is that

218if we can get some of that incredible data that that um Dr. Schmidt's put together on the that front page that people won't care what school it is as long as it has PSD attached to it. Um so I I would say that that's our overarching goal. um all of us. And um now I'm losing my my way of course. Um I I think that's kind of it for me. I just I feel like if we can get people to the website and you can demonstrate this greatness, which we all know PSD has, um we take away the choice. Don Draper, >> we we are actively working on a new website design and so that's something that's in process right now and a lot of the focus is on that homepage and making sure it

219has a marketing centric approach to it. There's parts of that page should be evergreen and just have pride points. Um, of course you want to get information to people. We'll likely be concentrating on how do we get the right audience to the right page. So that landing page is probably going to be more marketing heavy, but then you have your family's page, your students page, your staff page, and those are different audiences. And so we're talking about that right now as we are in the early stages of thinking about that design. Um but we are going to be re redesigning the website. >> Um so some of this came to mind. So there's a doing a great job at promoting all the schools. I was just curious how are we addressing um maybe some the

220narrative that might exist in the community about certain populations. So, right. So, how are we offering a counternarrative? And when I and I'm saying this specifically of like I can tell you what the school offers, we know PSD is a good district, but if I have a per certain perception of a school, no matter how you promote that school, I'm not going to even consider that school because of these other narratives out there. So, I'm just curious um one if you are aware of some of those narratives. We don't have to talk about them or named schools. I don't want to call nobody out. Um, and if so, how are we countering those narratives and specifically speaking to that concern, right, from a marketing standpoint, right? Or we were trying to get someone to buy

221into something, we're speaking to a certain emotion, a certain psychology associated with that. So, if I have a real fear about a school, I need that fear to be addressed. If I think safety is a concern, but that school makes sense for me to attend, I need to know that I'm going to be safe in that school. So, I'm just kind of I'm a high context person, so I don't want to leave it up to you to figure out what I'm trying to ask. So, yeah. So, if you are aware of those narratives, how are we countering those narratives beyond just promoting the school and what they offer? So when we first started out with choose PSD and our strategy, we looked at all data we could possibly get our hands on so we could

222create a target list basically because it's not like this is not the marketing effort is as equitable as we can possibly be in terms of who needs the most um whether it be messaging and storytelling or literally like there this school doesn't have very much space in their capacity like so we're not necessarily spending the exact same dollar amount for every school when we're doing these ads. And so there are a lot of things that come into play when we're making those decisions. And then we start thinking about the messaging itself. Um start thinking about not just the English messaging, but what's the message that we're communicating when we're doing our Spanish ads? How are we translating? Um and what visuals are we accompanying these ads with? And who specifically are we going to be

223targeting? And so we're thinking about those things. I don't have a perfect answer for how you change perceptions, but I know that we are as a team actively having those kinds of conversations. Well, even while we're writing the school profiles with the principles that go on the choose PSD web page, how do we want to present this school? Like everyone's aware of potential like what may exist out there, we're not necessarily going to say like we are not this, we are this, but we want to make sure that we're presenting the true story of our schools because they are all excellent and they are all different. Like I've only been my kids only been to two so far, so I can't speak to all of them from a personal standpoint, but I can tell you

224like those schools are radically different, but they're both incredible. Um, and my kids would go to either of them any day. Um, they'd be happy. I'd be happy. And so I don't know if that answered your question specifically, but >> I wonder if it goes to what Scott was saying if we might need to ask different questions, right? Like and some of this I speak to personally, right, to like, you know, I've had kids go to schools and, you know, I've been and maybe experiences that I know parents have had at different schools in the district. Um, won't name them. Um, there's other perceptions. So, I I guess I'm just I'm It's not really something I'm trying to um keep running around the track on, but just saying um how can we consider that? And

225again, I'm really sensitive to consolidation process and stuff and how those narratives might play into enrollments in some of our schools. And so, I appreciate you naming equity and those things, but it's also like I think it's more than that. I think it's like really hearing what those things are. It's kind of like if someone had a personal opinion of you, you wouldn't just highlight any of us wouldn't just highlight our good traits. we're probably trying to defend ourselves and counter that perception that that person has of us. And so I just hoping that we can counter perceptions. And if we don't know what those perceptions are, kind of what Scott was saying, I would love for us to identify those questions. We have to be willing to ask hard questions and not just the

226easy ones. What's making you choose this school? Alternatively, can ask what's making you not choose this neighborhood school? Right? And that might get us into some of those pieces. And so I just want us to um kind of do a both and right. So we have one narrative. What's the counternarratives and how are we addressing that within our programs? Just a thought. Thank you so much. >> All right. Dr. Ziggler pushed a thought for me. So pingpong ideas over here. Um I'm on slide what's nine to 15 and there's a couple of graphics and I was looking at them. This is one that says, "I choose McGra, I choose Weber, I choose Timoth." And then below it, "Choose PSD. We are PSD, one community, many voices, infinite possibilities." The one below, I think, is is

227appropriate. And I'll be vulnerable for a moment and say that some of the things that I'm hearing from our community because we represent folks that um choose charter schools and traditional PSD. But again, I'm I'm also interested in the thought processes of those that would choose other. And I'll I'll go on a limb and say that one of the themes that I keep hearing is is political uh sort of messaging, right? And so the reason I'm going to bring these up is because interestingly to be inclusive of some of the the opinions I think that Dr. Ziggler may have been talking about, and if I'm wrong about this, you can shut me up. But I like the one that says choose excellence, choose belonging, choose PSD. Not that it there's a hierarchy. I like I

228like the the rhythm that it's building, but I also like that those two things are not mutually exclusive. And I think we cannot run away from ourselves as a district about being inclusive and including being a place of belonging. But I think the message that we hear is that we we as and I don't believe I don't subscribe to this. I want to make sure that's very clear that we choose that to the detriment of our focus on academics. That we choose that to the to the detriment of our focus on on uh academic outcomes or performance. And so it's that this narrative of that's what the that's what the district is. And I see this on social media and again I don't take particular umbrage with some of these comments, but I think it's

229helpful data points to receive too that they're not mutually exclusive. We do both and here's why. Right? So I like those messages that don't seem like they're they're just doing one or the other. I kind of I because I believe that's who we are. That that one is it feel that resonates strongly with me. >> Thank you. I think on that note again going back to Dwayne's data he shares over and over when students feel belonging they excel academically right so both those things are incredibly important um did anyone else have a question before I ask one or two all right um first I just want to name that in one of your slides you name you said school or you learned school specific stories work better than that PSD generic story and I 100%

230believe that to be true And I do think we have families who it gives a certain feeling to when we name when we're not trying to be just the district message. And so I think us knowing that when we have those very specific stories about schools or students within a school and not naming a school that a child is in doesn't feel right. So I think it's important for us to recognize like there's a reason that we're highlighting school stories. It's because it resonates more with people and it tracks better. Um so I just wanted to call that out. And I think I had one other somewhere in here. Sorry, I got so distracted with all the things. >> Um I >> I would say >> maybe I didn't maybe it was already asked. It's

231very possible. >> It's a very common it's it's not just here. So when you talk to other school districts and peers that do similar work, um what you run into is families generally consider themselves to be a part of a school, not a district. My kid goes to Blank Elementary. That is my school. Yes, it's part of a district, but like my I don't consider myself to be a my kids at the school district. He's at a school. And so that's something that it makes a lot of sense when you think about it that way. And that's why we can never just market choose PSD, choose PSD without the school level because that's what is the connection point. That's where your kid goes every day. Um so it's important to remember that. >> Sorry, now

232I remember my other it's just a comment and it's just silly. So, but I'm still going to say it. Um because I really appreciate that you captured the data around who was clicking and the unique people so that I could at least be aware that I am not clicking on it 800,000 times that I am one of 656,000 people. So thank you very much because I think that's an important piece of the puzzle too for us is to recognize that we are getting unique people. It's not the like if I am a parent and I'm trying to choose where my child goes to school for one of those transition years, I might click it all the time depending on what this kid's question is that day. And so knowing that we're getting unique people, I

233think is really important. So I just wanted to name that as well. Um not really questions, just comments, but thank you. Are there any other questions or comments, please? >> You you made me think of something, too. Um, Kuronda said that, you know, some schools might not have the best connotation with them. My goal, my reason for sitting here is so that every school in this district is attractive to the people that are within its neighborhood. And so I feel really fortunate that I lived in a neighborhood where my kids walk to a school that is phenomenal and I didn't ever have those questions or thoughts in my head. And I think that we need to ensure right that's the the job we're doing here. So that's my goal and that's why I said you

234know I think that's why I say choose PSD as like the overarching message. I just wanted to clarify that. Thank you. All right. Any other questions or comments before we Okay. Thank you so much for being here and thank you for this update. I know we've all been wanting it and longing for it for a long time. All right. And then moving on into our meeting, we are very close. So um our last uh item is board forecasting. This is an agenda item as an opportunity for board members to discuss topics of interest for future board meetings. Would any board members like to start the discussion? >> Can I just make a quick comment about something earlier in this meeting? Is that appropriate? Um we were talking about um on the consent agenda, we were

235talking about curriculum being added and at a very sensitive time as far as budgetary things and we were also having a a conversation about things being very quantitative and I feel like we kind of missed the mark with that one. Um Bud was so great and went into detail about um our tech side of things and the qualitative pieces there. I feel like maybe we need to give our community the opportunity to hear how that curriculum was chosen for two reasons. um one is that I think that they deserve to know why we chose what we chose and that sort of qualitative piece and the other being um we participated in a forum at CSU when we were campaigning and there were two teachers in the audience who spoke to me afterwards and um mentioned

236that some curriculum was uh put into place and that they were surprised by it. I I don't I don't know the extent of the story, but I just want I I feel like the need to clarify kind of why we chose what we did and how >> I I mean, if that's something that we we look into the future, I I I think it's as simple as talking about like a committee that was formed and how it was chosen. I'm sorry that I'm not more knowledgeable about it, but >> there's no there's no apologies needed. Dr. Olson, I'm wondering if we could provide a verbal tonight or if it's best to reorient teachers to the presentation that was provided at a previous board meeting. I >> It's a very fair question. >> Yeah. >> It

237was January 27th when we presented and um remember we had that monstrosity of a packet for you all. Um, and it is very detailed outlined in there. So, I would encourage not just I mean I know that watching the entire board meeting might not be what people want to do, but um definitely there's sections they can view the PowerPoint if they don't want to watch the video and then the board report is actually broken down. So, if they just want to see teacher comments, they can go directly to that appendix or if they want to see student comments. So, and the wise are all embedded in there. I don't believe I would do great justice to having a verbal dialogue at this point at this time of night to honor all of the committees that

238spent time on this. And so I can say that we did have a representation from every single building that um is going to experience the new K5 curriculum um and multiple teachers from each building. And so um I do believe that it was very extensive and it's teacher voice that we are amplifying. um there was only um a handful of administrators in the adoption committee and so um just want to ensure that um that process um was pretty clearly outlined in that report and um I know there's a lot of pages in there but if they start with a table of contents it will help narrow down where they may want to look at some specific details of how our teachers felt during the pilot after the pilot and how our students felt as well.

239um through their experience. Thank you, Dr. Olsen. >> We'll resend that to the entire board so it's at the top of your inbox, too. You're so welcome. >> I just wanted to comment and add to Dr. Olsen since we went back and forth on where information was located. Um I I just wanted to highlight and say yes, I want to affirm people should refer back to that. It's a very detailed um document. There's a lot of information in there. you can like she's already said like there's teachers voices and the experiences the process they went through um and even um even though I had other questions like I even remember that board meeting and um I cannot remember the um educator who spoke with you but um in that particular meeting in that presentation I

240want to highlight that she was so specific from like A through Z in terms of how like they arrive arrived at that conclusion. So, um I don't know. I just wanted to affirm that that like I'm a I like a lot of detail and information and in my short term, I really appreciate the level of depth and information that was provided in that. So, I really would encourage people to take a look at it and it'd be very clear on why things were done. So what I'm hearing is you just wanted clarification on these particular adoptions, not a general sense like a new presentation about process. Okay. Just wanted to clarify. >> Are there any other prioritization pieces? >> Um I want to I don't know if this is the right word, but like um

241how we present information. I think this is a good example, right? Like I feel like I get asked questions and how might we um I don't know how to explain it like make clear maybe like illuminate pathways for people so they can find the information. I think about like um and maybe as a new board member like even when I go on the site sometimes it's hard to find information. So I think um what I've noticed is like we talk about stuff in these meetings, there's an agenda, they come back around and then in the middle of all of this um you have these community listening sessions and people are asking questions and they can't find the information. And so I don't know if it's like a table of contents on websites, a wayfinder page

242or something like um you know like it's obvious to us perhaps but it's like you know like someone asked about the legislature meeting and stuff and I can't I don't know if I was with Kevin or Jess and they like knew but I just so yeah I guess what I want to prioritize is um how do we illuminate pathways for community engage maybe it's community engagement um so folks don't have to struggle struggle so hard to find information on our and I know we're going to do a refresh. Um, but I think I'm more so talking about that process and what makes the most sense I guess would be important or even how we shared in our board meetings like there's a specific thing like sorry I'm just really on one. Um, I'm going to

243set my timer though but like I was even thinking like with the curriculum or like it's just it's a pattern of like I think the community misses it, right? So, like if we do this board meeting, things are presented and everything and then there's like that next meeting and we're voting on it. Well, if somebody didn't do both or didn't catch the one last November, December, the one in January, and the one last week, they're kind of lost. And so, how do we help folks understand that? And the reason I'm highlighting that because I think that would help alleviate some of the questions that people even have. Like, we just talked about curriculum. If you want to know why the curriculum was chosen, refer a board meeting on this date in this section in these

244documents. Um, so kind of like an FAQ for pathways. Thank you all very much. I'm tired and I apologize for the long-windedness. uh the priority that I wrote down for board forecasting. Um when we were in our prioritization meeting, we were trying to coalesce around clusters I think priorities and I think Brian did a good job of saying that we were trying to squish priorities together that may not somewhat conceptually related but added to it. So I think um one of the priorities we did discuss um and I just want this is more for inviting kind of where we are or where you're thinking about Brian and others. Um, so we got what I'd call the downstream update of IS tonight, which was great, which is very helpful about what we're doing to screen, what

245our numbers look like in our district. Um, but then I want to talk a little bit about upstream because we did have a really good conversation about um, graduation rates for our students with disabilities. But then one layer below that is um there there was a lot of discussion about assessment for students with disabilities. Um, and so these are some of the questions I had and and and I don't know if this is if if it's in the rotation for maybe fall or some other thing or when we might get an update, but I'd like to know um, you know, just from a some wonderings are what sort of our district policies. I think Dr. Raml spoke to that a bit when we were talking about those graduation rates at that meeting. Um and then

246you know what would it look like to have alignment across all schools for assessment and not do a sitebased sort of curating of how how each school believes it needs to be implemented. And then the third part of that would be all right if we were to bring all schools in alignment to whatever our district policies are for assessment and I'm focused more on our high school uh folks. What does that look like as far as a resource allocation? So, what does it look like to staff a school or to have extra teachers, extra paras in order to do the assessment that we want to do for our students with this uh IEPs and and and on the MTSS? And is that even possible? So, those are just kind of the questions. Those are big

247questions, I know, but um I wonder if there's some kind of a landing point in the fall or something where we might get another update on that work. And it might be when do we get graduation uh results from last year? Do we know that? There's there's a time in the calendar we usually get that. >> So, we have graduation rate data from last year. It's the second year in a row that we're in our district's highest in its history. We did improve our graduation rate for students with IEPs at approximately, I think, 3 to 4% last year from the year prior. So, we won't have that data until next school year starts. So, traditionally, some of that upstream data specific to student outcomes will be a part of our DE 1.0 district monitoring report.

248Uh because a lot of that data gets embargoed by the state until like January of this year, which was really hard to hold on to that preliminary news for so long, right? I do I think one of the things that as a takeaway from what you're sharing is I think we need maybe a a detailed update around what assessments are in place in all schools and what is the like the functionality and the purpose of those particular assessments. We do have a robust series of assessments already in place and so I wonder if just kind of educating about current state and what may be the desired future state can help kind of us you know level set on what that might be. I would say we're taking on a lot right now and you asked

249me to kind of be honest about like what's in front of us over the next six months, but I certainly think if if the fall would be appropriate uh we could deliver on that uh as a presentation in the fall around what does our assessment system look like as a district? >> Is there other board alignment around that? I know that there was an interesting topic. I just I I this why I appreciate the cander about what the ask is. I'm even asking because that is helpful. I just want to make sure that we're not letting urgent drown out important because I think this year there's going to be a lot of urgency like there is every year and so I I personally think it's very important work but I don't want to be >>

250so I'm going to pause though because our prioritization list has a handful of things on it as well as the things that we've >> we didn't do right so we should have another retreat where we decide as a group >> yeah during the ideal would be June would be ideal we have to schedule it out >> before you commit to that maybe we have a followup conversation May I do a process check just around our last three sheets just so I can make sure that I'm leading staff in partnership with them in an appropriate way as we learned as a collective around the work that Boulder Valley School District was doing around these particular regular setting agenda items around prioritization. My understanding was these spaces here would be to curate a list and then take

251that list to a retreat that we would have twice a year to say, "Hey, these are the list of things that we've had. Now, let's prioritize that so we can then build out the next six months of agendas to make sure that the topics that we're discussing are what's most important to you." That's obviously subject to change at the, you know, the will of the board. Um, but that was my understanding of our agreements and I just wanted to check in to see if that's still is my assessment or my memory accurate. >> It is. Yeah. And that's why I again I think I'm I'm not being as as elegant as I wanted to be. But I think this space as far as I I think it's helpful for us to remember too that oh

252there's a space for us to talk about the things that we talked about two or three minutes ago. And then again this is helpful for me because I have a hard time remembering where things were and stacking up. So part of it is a dialogue too, which I appreciate as far as, hey, can we check in in the fall or whatever. So that's what Yeah. So I remember it correctly that way. >> That's great. Are there any other items people would like to add to that list? >> Yeah, please. I'd like to add is it under I'm I'm not looking at it but celebrations you know like how are we celebrating and honoring um or even thinking about accomplishments right like I think I've been watching presentations and we're doing good things um but maybe

253still continue to present but how do we also like celebrate is there a period point like maybe you know I'm I'm in month two, so maybe we do this in September, but you know, what's been accomplished for the year um beyond like what's necessary? Um yeah, I just that's just something that pops up in my head. Um where do we leave time for that versus everything always being business? So, we do obviously lots of celebrations, but are you saying like so in our board meeting having a moment to capture all the good work that's happened as like a presentation or what are we >> Yeah, perhaps. Yeah, just like Yeah, I'll think about it more, but it's just feels like we could do I know we have like the community come in and we celebrate

254the things that they're doing, but like I'm just thinking about how many employees we have in our district and besides what we have going on like you know and if there's celebrations happening at in different sites and spaces, how do we also elevate that in this space as well? I know it also takes place in the newsletter that goes out from the district. I see it on the Facebook sites too. Um and maybe and I'm also just thinking about that when we're thinking about staff and and stuff like um and I think I think maybe it's what Kevin said like how do we show I guess like how are we showing our growth too and stuff really highlighting that. I don't know. It's the whole thought. So it could be anything. It just it just

255feels so b which it is support don't get me wrong it's just so business and I'm also like how do we celebrate right >> yeah is this also a plug for bud to talk about PSD celebrates that I presume you're going to MC again >> I look forward to celebrating PSD with you in May fourth very good yes that was a clean opportunity to make that plug Yeah, I I appreciate the healthy push. I think we're always looking for different ways to get out the good word about what we're doing, whether it's in official recognitions, including celebrations. I think in each of the presentations tonight, they were there. We have, and I think this would probably be your first opportunity for those of you that are new board members. This, I think, is our third

256annual PSD celebrates uh ceremony at the Lincoln Center where we celebrate our all of our employee groups, various roles around the district. It's a beautiful night of just uplifting all of the incredible people who are doing great things on on behalf of children uh and each other. And so I think that would be a great opportunity, but the feedback around ideas that you have around different ways we can be celebrating, I think that is always welcome. Um because there is a lot to celebrate. >> Yeah, maybe this takes place somewhere. So correct me. Um but like I was even thinking about like folks who are retiring, right? Like let's say we had a list of four or five people retired. Could we take five minutes to invite them in and say thank you, right? Um

257in this space, I think space is important, right? And so I think I'm asking how do we conceptualize this space and to just have I don't know and again I know celebrations take place throughout the district but it's kind of like I got five names on a piece of paper and we move on. How do we take a moment to acknowledge those five people right or at least give them the opportunity? So, I'm just thinking of like how can we find moments in this space um to show that we care and the ways that opportunities present themselves. >> I appreciate that. All right. Any other thoughts? Okay. I have uh one I feel a little bit bad that I keep adding. Um, but at our uh listening session, we had someone come and tell us

258about secondary schools and open campus and having wonderings about how changing that. Thank you. Um, or why that's been the case, why that's our practice. Is that practice still serving our students? I think we've talked a lot about cell phones and technology and wondering if that open campus is also leading them to not engage with their academics as much as they could. Um, I will be 100% honest. I am not an expert in open campus. So, I'd kind of want to the history of how we landed there, what the value statements are there, how our um, comprehensive high schools in particular and really all of our high schools engage in that practice and how they feel about it because I would similar to the cell phones. I think that conversation to me felt very much

259I don't want to impose something that people can't enact or aren't don't want to and don't think it's in the best interest of their school to enact. So I am looking for information. I just want to be very clear about that. I'm typing and I'm I need to actually lead the meeting as well. Any other things for you guys and I can finish typing this in a minute. All right. If there's no other items then we can adjourn and our meeting is now adjourned at 9:05 p.m. Thank you very much.