Board of Education Meeting: February 10, 2026 (Spanish Captions)

001All right, we're going to go ahead and get started. Um, thank you for joining the board of education this evening. Please mute your cell phone as we begin this meeting. Today is Tuesday, February 10th, 2026, and this meeting is now called to order at 5:44 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 PSD

002TV on demand on YouTube. Okay. Next, we will do the pledge of allegiance. Please join me. I >> alian to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Okay. Next, we'll go on to approval of the agenda. Would any board members like to make any changes to the agenda? All right. Seeing none, we'll go on to recognitions and reports. Brian, do you have introductions? >> Good evening, everybody. It's really wonderful to be with all of you tonight. As you could probably tell, I'm not feeling very well, but I know uh uh I'm really really grateful to be here. So, forgive me if I don't feel like I'm on my agame today. Uh as we start

003off with recognitions and reports this evening, we are honored to recognize excellence in our district from state champions in cross country to the America's Healthiest Schools Award. 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. This evening, we're proud to celebrate students and staff and their amazing accomplishments. And our first recognition is for Batty Elementary. Batty has been awarded the Kaiser Permanente sponsored America's Healthy Schools Award from the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Here to speak more about this amazing achievement is Jen Caster. Good evening. Thanks for having us. My name is Jen Caster. I'm the assistant principal at Batty Elementary. This is Stephanie Coleman, our school counselor. Um, we're happy and proud to report that this is

004the second time we've received this award, and it truly speaks to the thoughtfulness of our community. So, I'm going to turn it over to Stephanie to share more. >> Thank you. >> This is the fun part. I get to brag about our school. Um, good evening and thank you for having us tonight. Batty is proud to be recognized for the second time by Kaiser Perente as one of their healthiest K12 schools in America. This year, Kaiser Permanente recognized 1,110 schools nationwide and Batty was just one of 31 schools in Colorado to get this distinction. The schools are picked based on their ability to create a healthier environments where students can truly thrive. We were recognized in three key areas. strengthening social emotional learning, bolstering physical uh education and activity, and enriching health education. At Batty,

005we invest deeply in social emotional learning through a 100% school counselor, a comprehensive tier 1CAL program delivered in every prek through fifth grade classroom, schoolwide co-regulation practices, a ready room to help students self-regulate, and restorative practices that are embedded into our discipline system. Additionally, in our health education, we are the only elementary school in PSD whose students are taught CDE's comprehensive health standards during their bi-weekly health class that is built into the students specialists rotation. To ensure our students have access to fun and engaging physical activity throughout the year, our PE program includes diverse experiences like snowshoeing and pickle ball. Our PE program also includes morning bike and running clubs, diverse 5210 activities, and a four schoolwide walk-in wheel challenges. We celebrate our final walk-in wheel with a community bike school parade complete with police

006escort. Watching our whole families come together to bike, rollerblade, and scoot to school is a great reminder of the many traditions woven into our Batty community. This recognition reflects the collective commitment of our staff, students, families, and our district to educating the whole child. Thank you for allowing us to share our work with you tonight. >> Congratulations, Batty Elementary. Our next recognition is for Timnith Middle High School and its state champion cross country team. I would like to invite Matt Miltonberg to the podium to say a few words about the accomplishments of the team. Okay. All right. Thank you guys. Um, at PSD we often talk about graduating with options. And um, this is a set of girls that I believe will graduate with almost unlimited options. Um, because they have learned what it takes

007to set big audacious goals even when no one else would believe it were possible. Um, and to commit to doing the work together to get there. Um, coming to a brand new school with no history or no reason to suggest that this was possible. These girls um, believed it and I can tell you that nobody works harder than they did. Um, and as a result, they've now won their second state championship in just four years as a school, something no school in Colorado history has ever done. Um, which is pretty impressive. But, uh, what I think, uh, what I know will provide, uh, these girls with all of those options is that they have learned to take the same approach not just to their running, uh, but also to everything that they do in life,

008including in the classroom, where combined they have a 4.0 GPA. Um, yeah, more than half of these girls, Yep. Awesome. Um, more than half of them are in the top 10 in their class. Uh, three of them are in the top five in their class. Two are in the top three in their class. They've earned countless um college credits, industry certificates. They have dreams of um collegiate athletics and careers in medicine, engineering, and beyond. Um, yeah. And and while it's been a real honor and privilege to be a part of of this part of their journey, what what excites me the most and makes me most proud is not the the banners and trophies that they'll leave in their wake um but all the wins that await them later in life. So congratulations ladies. Thank

009you for representing PSD and Timnit so proudly. We appreciate you. Congratulations once again to our honores. We're proud to celebrate you as you represent the very best of Pter School District. At this time, I'd like to invite our honores and board directors to the front for a group photo. All right. Now, we're going to move on to our action items. We have Can I get a motion for the resolution in support of classified employee appreciation week? I move that the board approve a resolution in support of classified employee appreciation week February 2nd to 6, 2026. >> Thank you. Can I get a second? Thank you, Kevin. And believe we have folks. >> We sure do. Joining us this evening to speak to classified employee appreciation week is Joanie Baker, the president of the Association of

010Classified Employees. Welcome, Joanie. There we go. Um, good evening, Superintendent Kingsley, President Zamora, and our board directors. I'm incredibly proud to stand before you tonight to celebrate our classified employees. Last week was classified appreciation week. Um, a time to recognize the dedicated professionals who support our district. To start, we'd like to share a video with you. My name Remy Moffett. My job title is IT field specialist, and I've been with the district full-time since 2022, but I started seasonal positions in 2018. I'm a PSD graduate. My mother's worked here since I was 8 years old. It's really all I've ever known. People here have taken care of me. People at the district offices have always taken care of me. Very welcoming environment, and it's why I've continued to stay here. >> My name is Braden.

011I'm a support center specialist here at the ITC, and I've been working here for around 2 months now. I grew up here in town, so I've always been a part of like PSD just kind of on their end of the stick. Um, but it just made a big impact on my life and being able to contribute back to that and kind of help out the people who helped shape me was pretty inspiring. >> The best part of my job is getting positive feedback from sites that something we did impacted them in a positive way. >> Probably the people that I work with here and another thing I really enjoy is the problem solving. Um, doesn't feel very repetitive. We always get something new when it comes to uh tech support. So, >> hi, my name's

012Robera Perez. I work at Pter High School. I'm the kitchen manager here. I've been working for Pter School District for about 7 years now. It's been a joy to work here for Pter School District because everyone has been just wonderful and very supportive and I have an awesome crew here and it's just the best job I've had. >> My name is Jim Runner and I am the kitchen manager at Harris Bilingual. I have been here for almost seven years as a kitchen manager. moved to Colorado and my wife worked with kids and I'm a big kid so it just it worked out. It was a perfect fit. >> The best part of my job is serving all the students and seeing their smiles when they come in in the morning for breakfast and when they

013come in during lunch. >> Definitely the kids as a big kid. It just works well. We have a lot of fun and they fill your heart. >> My name is Carl Telbot. I've been with PSD for 5 years and I work in outdoor services. I have a strong connection to the school district and the community. I also enjoy the flexibility um and stability the district provides. >> My name is Chris Omera. I've been with PSD for 2 months now and I work in outdoor services. Throughout my years here in Fort Collins, I've had a lot of friends and family work for PSD and have always had nothing but good things to say about working for Pter School District. I enjoy working outdoors and the variety of different tasks that we do and I feel good

014after a day of of working. You can see the impact that uh we have on the schools. >> I think the best part of my job so far is just getting to work outdoors and just something new every day. >> All right. Thank you, Matt, and the communications team for putting that together for us. So many of our classified employees often start their mornings at 5:30 a.m. Um, and that doesn't include until the end of the day when it's midnight and they're closing our buildings down. So, our custodians are the first to open our doors and the last to lock them. They ensure our facilities are clean, safe, and welcoming every single morning. They managed the heavy lifting of setting up and tearing down for countless events, often multiple times in a single day with

015tireless grace and not to mention all the other duties in between. Our child nutrition team works with meticulous care, preparing thousands of breakfasts and lunches every day. Beyond the cooking, they serve as the primary point of reassurance for parents, ensuring every student's dietary needs are a are met and that their allergies are managed with the highest level of safety and concern. For our transportation, for many students, first friendly face they see every morning belongs to our transportation team. They prioritize safety above all else. Navigating our roads to get students to schools, sporting events, field trips, you name it. Building vital relationships with families along the way. Our facilities and customer service department keep the engine of our district running. Whether it's a complex construction project or a quick fix for plumbing, electrical, or lock issues,

016they ensure our schools function at a top level without delay. Along with maintaining our grounds each and every facility, our security team is essential. They maintain the technology and infrastructure for cameras to badge entries and they keep our campuses secure. Most importantly, they work handinand with our school resource officers to ensure a safe environment for every student and staff member. are family liaison. These professionals provide a bridge between home and school that is vital for our student success. They work countless hours to provide families with resources and support they need to ensure their children's quality um to ensure their qu their children receive a quality education. are paraprofessionals. This group does extraordinary work supporting our most vulnerable students. They are masters of deescalating, encouragement, and patience. Despite the immense physical and emotional challenges they face,

017they return every day with the commitment to student growth. They are true leaders who directly impact our graduation rates and our students futures. Our office staff are our frontline workers, are the heartbeat of every school. They manage everything from attendance to calming an upset parent or student and providing a listening ear for a frustrated teacher. They are the ultimate support system for our educators and administrators. The role of our health techs grows more complex every year. From managing seizures, diabetes, daily medications to responding to workplace injuries, they meet every new challenge with professional professionalism and care. And last but not least, our IT and our central office. In a world where every student has a laptop, our IT department is worldclass troubleshooting technical hurdles and providing the data that drives our district. Likewise, our central

018office team in HR, finance, and payroll keep the business of education moving forward every day. Pter school district simply would not function without our classified staff. We are fortunate to have such a dedicated group of individuals who while often working behind the scenes in my opinion are the most important group. Thank you. I'm going to take the point of privilege and say I'm incredibly proud too, Joanie. Thank you very much for being here today. every classified employee makes sure that we're collectively at our best every single day just as you said and I simply can't thank them enough and I just want to say classify classified employees make me PSD proud. Thank you very much for being here. Does anyone else have anything they would like to share? Please. >> Um when I was thinking

019about this resolution, I had two fond memories. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to share. Uh when I was a kid, I went to a school that required uniforms, but every blue moon on a Friday, we'd have a free dress day. Um except that I would always forget. And so I'd get up I'd get on the bus and I'd arrive at the front and the look of horror on my face when I realized that everyone else was in normal clothes and I was in the uniform and the pointing and staring and laughing. And it's a horrible feeling when you're a little kid. But there was Miss Gloria who said to me, "Sweetie, go get your change. I'll go around the the corner and I'll come back for you. And she did that. And then when

020I got back on the bus, everything was normal. I don't think the kids remembered. I doubt she remembered, but I did. And that mattered to me. I thought about Miss Titner, who was uh our head in our the head person in our kitchen. Um she knew that every now and then we'd have pudding and uh for for part of the dessert. And I was a kid that liked butterscotch pudding. It was they didn't have enough. There was usually one or two, but I always try to get it. On one particularly rough day, she saw me coming through the line and I had had a a bad day and she could see it all over my face. And uh I got to the end of the line and there was no butterscotch pudding. And there was

021Miss Titner who had saved one for me and pulled it out and said, "Here you go, sweetie. Looks like you could use it." And I don't think that any of these people probably remembered these instances, but I remember him and it mattered to me and that kindness mattered. On my way to this board meeting, I was behind a bus on Overland and two little girls ran off at the at a stop and followed and they embraced their mother and it was really sweet and I was thinking about some of these things I was going to share anyway. And then there was a a a bus pair who ran off chasing them with a lunchbox. Um, and so I I share these stories because um I I agree with everything you said. Your your day starts

022before the kids get there. You're there during when the kids are there and you're there long after the kids are there. But to all those of you who serve in these roles, those moments of kindness that you get to have with our kids, from the bottom of my heart, I want to say thank you. >> All right, Jill, can you please call the vote? Carla Ba, >> I. Connor Duffy. >> Hi >> Kevin Havda. >> Hi >> Scott Shoenbower. >> Hi >> Dr. Andrew Spain. >> Hi >> Jessica Zamora. >> Hi >> Dr. Karanda Ziggler. >> Hi. >> Motion passes 70. >> All right. Next up we have a resolution in support of Black History Month. Can I get a motion? I move that the board approve the updated resolution that was presented to the

023board in support of Black History Month. >> Can I get a second? Thank you, Andrew. All right. Believe we have guests. >> Yes. Uh here to speak to Black History Month is Wendy Greg, gifted and talented coordinator at Canard Middle School. Welcome, Wendy. >> Good evening, everyone. It's an honor to stand here tonight. Um I've been at Canard for about 16 years as a teacher and recently in the last couple years um I've had the privilege of being able to work with students in our um Canard student social justice team and as it is a newer club at school um as a teacher sponsor we look for students who um have a heart for wanting to increase inclusion and belonging so that everyone that walks in our doors can see that this is a place

024where they are welcomed and that it resonates who they are um is appreciated and valued. And so um Hank came to our district this year and Canard is a sixth grader. And when we were putting out notice that we were looking for students, I saw this group of students around my office door at the signup and Hank front and center. And it was just true to form of what I would come to know about Hank. He's one of those students that stands out in those years as a teacher that is one where if Hank's in the room, everybody else who's around him wants to know what's Hank doing because he's up to something good. And Hank is the one that shows up, he will uh whether he's on the court. He plays on two basketball

025teams, one Denver and one here, and he's a football player. um he he plays the bass in orchestra and actually he's um one of the leaders in helping other students to know um how to show up do the extra work whether it's with the strings or with the football but in student social justice that's where I just feel super honored that's where Hank kind of captured my heart because when we began to talk about what our purpose is and why we're here took the risk to speak first and share with everyone about how important it is that when we walk our talk, we make a difference for people who we don't know what kind of day that they might be having and we don't know their story, but it's important that we um know and

026recognize. And so, um, Hank, uh, stood out so much that when Jenna Altaltimore came to visit our school to see what we're doing, um, they spoke for a little bit and she's like, "Hey, would you like to come and talk a little bit about your experience?" Um, and do the resolution speech for Black History Month. And just like Hank, he spoke up and said yes. So, thank you. Harry Tman. >> My name is Harry Tman. Greetings to the board, Dr. Ziggler. Um, I am very proud of Hank Tilman to take this opportunity to speak about Black History Month and I just want to make sure that, you know, he has fun doing it. Hello everyone. I want to thank the board of education for giving me this opportunity to speak with you today about Black

027History Month. My name is Hank Tilman. I was born and raised here in Fort Collins, Colorado. I attend Canar Middle School and I am a sixth grader. I'm African-American, Korean, and Norwegian, and I'm 12 years old. Black History Month is important to me not just because of the history books, but because of my family story. My great greatgrandfather was born a sharecropper after slavery was abolished. Even after freedom, his life was still shaped by unfair systems that made it difficult for black families to build wealth or or opportunity. My grandfather graduated as valictorian from a segregated high school and served as vice president of his class. Despite his achievements, he still faced limits because of segregation. In the 1960s, he joined the US Army and fought in the Vietnam War. While stationed in Korea, he

028met my grandmother and they later had my father in the 1970s. my father and scholarships to attend the University of Northern Colorado and later received his master's degree in computer information systems. In the 1990s, CSU lost funding from the state due to low minority representation and graduation rates from minority students. This was the reason why he applied and was accepted into Colorado State University. If my father had never been given that opportunity, he would have never met my mom and I would not exist. My family's story shows the progression of black Americans since the abolition of abolition of slavery. This is American history and it includes black history. Our school district must continue to and improve teaching this curriculum. This will strengthen our community. After slavery ended, black people continue to fight for basic light

029rights like being able to being able to use the same restrooms and water fountains, attend the same schools, and receive the same education. In 1965, black Americans were finally guaranteed the right to vote through the Voting Rights Act. Thanking thanks to leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others who risk their lives for equality. The Civil Rights Act ended segregation in schools, allowing black and white students to learn together. That change helped open doors for future generations, including mine. Black history is also filled with trailblazers who broke barriers and changed how the world saw black excellence. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. in Major League Baseball. Jim Brown became one of the greatest NFL football players of all time and opened doors for black athletes in sports. Jesse Owens won four gold medals

030in the Olympics in front of Adolf Hitler, challenging racist beliefs. Black history began long before slavery, but in America, Africans were enslaved over 400 years ago. They endured forced labor, violence, and inhumane treatment. Even in those conditions, people like Harriet Tumman and Frederick Douglas fought courageously for freedom and justice. A major turning point came at the Civil War. And while Abraham Lincoln's leadership helped move the nation toward emancipation, it was the courage and persistence of black people themselves that pushed freedom forward. Black History Month matters because it reminds us that progress progress did not happen overnight and it did not happen without struggle. It helps students like me understand where we come from and it helps all students understand where we are going. Black history is American history and learning it fully makes our education

031stronger, more honest, and more inclusive. Thank you for listening and thank you for supporting Black History Month. You guys are amazing, you know, in all I Okay, first of all, I really appreciate that you made a slideshow. Like, it's like an educational experience. That was amazing. I thought that's might be a first for me. So, thank you very much for doing that. Um, and all through all the hardship that you showed through the history of, you know, our collective experiences and your experiences, but the pride that you have in your family history and the history that you bring forward and clearly the pride that we all have in you and your father has in you is beaming and that your educators have in for you as well. I'm so sorry for not including you. I

032was so focused on these two. Um, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for sharing both your personal and the collective story. and I just can't imagine a better way to kick off a hundred years of celebrating black history. Thank you so much. >> Are there any other comments? >> I just want to acknowledge that um you are braver than I ever was at that age. Um and um thank you so much for sharing that. I think it's important when our students um share their lived histories. Um, I think we have a district that has a diversity of students with a variety of backgrounds and I think whatever opportunities that we can provide them to be able to share their family histories to be able to talk about American history and

033just give them opportunities to develop and grow as the wonderful people that they are is an amazing experience. And Hank, I just want to thank you for opening a door and being a model for other kids in the district. And um, and that was excellent. Thank you. Yes, please. >> Hank, as your superintendent, I just want want to say I could not be more proud of who you are and what you just did. When Miss Grigg uh mentioned that people around you at school on a daily basis know that you're always up to something good, we all now collectively know what that looks like, what that feels like. You're a natural leader. You're a natural teacher. And I look forward to learning more about you uh in the years to come. I also want to

034say thank you for acknowledging the importance of your family and our parents. Without them, there's no us. Uh and I want to thank all of you for being here in community with us to celebrate not just Black History Month, but this incredible district. Thank you for leading us in that effort. H Thank you. >> Chill. Can you call the vote, please? >> Carla Ba, >> I. >> Connor Duffy, >> I. >> Kevin Havda, >> I. >> Scott Shoenbower, >> I. >> Dr. Andrew Spain, >> I. >> Jessica Zamora, >> I. >> Dr. Kar Ziggler, >> I. Motion passes 70. All right. Next, we have a resolution in support of placement of a statewide ballot initiative on the November 2026 ballot to increase K12 funding and enhance educators salaries. Can I get a motion? >> I

035move that the board endorse the resolution for the inclusion of a statewide ballot initiative to increase K12 funding and enhance educator salaries. >> Can I get a second? Thank you, Kevin. Speaking about this resolution this evening is Candace Moer Pter Education Association President. Welcome Candace and crew. Oh, there we go. Uh, good evening board directors and superintendent Kingsley. My name is Candace Moer and I am the proud president of Putter Education Association. Uh we are here this evening to speak to the importance of this resolution and the need for systemic changes to the funding of structure to the funding structure for public education. With thousands of members in CEA, we are asking our legislators to refer a measure to the 2026 ballot that would allow already collected tax dollars to be used for K12 funding.

036I'd like to introduce several educators who like myself have experienced funding shortfalls and are here on behalf of the need to fund our schools more effectively. Um I would like to first present Irma Sandival. Hi everyone. I think you got the gist of that intro. Um, I am very grateful to be here to explain why we believe we need to pass a board resolution on behalf of the cut the ropes funding measure. This would allow the bilingual and biiteracy aspects of our amazing school to be more accessible to students with a wider range of learning needs. Several students who have started kindergarten with me have ended up moving to schools with the funding for autism specialized programs so they could access additional supports. If we no longer had those ropes hindering our funding, then Irish

037Esquea Bilingu would have greater flexibility to staff for stronger student ratios and provide more targeted support for students with more intensive needs. and schools that have been limited like mine would finally be able to meet those needs, ensuring that integrated services teachers are consistently available to support all students with more complex IEPs. Gracias. Good evening everyone. My name is Olivia Becker and I'm a teacher at Blevens Middle School. When I tell people I teach middle school, the response is often, "I could never," followed by jokes about hormones or students behavior. And yes, middle schoolers are navigating big changes. And rebellious or attention-seeking behavior can be a real challenge. But I want you to know this, middle school teachers love this age. We love the curiosity, the growth, and watching students find confidence in themselves, like

038we just saw in Hank. and we love what we do. We just wish we had the resources to do it well. One of the biggest supports for student behavior is having enough adults in the room. One PAR professional can make the difference between managing chaos and supporting learning. But it's hard to recruit or retain paras if they aren't paid a living wage. Another way we find joy in middle schoolers is by engaging students in their interests. As a Spanish teacher, I love working with students who are curious about language and culture. Yet, electives are often the first area to be cut when funding is tight. At my school, we also have a project-based learning class 4 days a week where students learn through hands-on experiences like managing our greenhouse, social protest, and music, and building

039a set for our theater. Funding these classes can be a challenge. Imagine the courses we could offer and the things our students could create with adequate funding. So tonight, I urge you to cup the ropes that are strangling public education because supporting this resolution will benefit all of our students. Hi everyone, my name is Theo McFarland. I use he, him, or they them pronouns. I am a language arts and theater teacher at Rocky Mountain High School. Um, and kind of building off of Olivia, I am here to talk about the effect of funding cuts and not having enough money for our arts program specifically. Um, and when I was trying to think of what I wanted to say, what I was really thinking about was all of my students. I teach technical theater, so my

040kids are responsible for right now building an 8-foot bridge that is safe enough for our actors to stand on. And so I literally went to these kids and said, "Hey, what is the impact of either having enough money or not enough money to fund our theater programs?" So here are some of the things that they told me. Theater provides an opportunity for me to express myself in ways I've always wanted to but never been able to. It helps show us what good communication is between kids and adults, which is an important life skill. There are so many life skills I've learned, like how to not cut my thumb off with a saw, and how to help a friend who came to class crying. I've learned what healthy friendships, relationships, and mentorships look like here. Theater

041is the one place where there is no judgment. No one cares who you are or where you come from. And that's what makes it amazing. I have a home in theater, a community that loves me. I don't have that anywhere else. Sometimes theater is the only reason I come to school. Theater saved my life. Like for real, no cap. If our students can understand how critical school funding is for their mental, physical, emotional, and social health, especially for the arts, I'm hopeful that our board can also see that a holistic education where students can connect, pursue their passions, and grow is as essential as any other part of their education. So, please help us cut the ropes that hold back our funds in schools. Thank you. >> Um, hi, I'm Wendy Bergman. Um, I am

042also a teacher at Rocky Mountain High School. Um, and I just kind of want to like say thank you for considering this resolution. Um, our students, families, and educators face lots of systems that often do harm by design. We spend our days making the best out of a system that is tied up in ropes, workloads that push out dedicated staff, inconsistent student supports, structures that send too many of our public dollars into the hands of corporations, and a Colorado tax code preventing the investment we need in our public schools. Staff and classroom educators are expected to hold together an entire system without the staff, the staffing levels, supports, or time that our students need. These ropes have led to the conditions we're facing in this community right now. We need more funds and we have

043to make a structural change in order to get those. And that's why educators, parents, families from around Fort Collins and across the state are fighting for the schools that we deserve. I'm really excited you're considering this resolution. I've been working on this campaign for two years. Um, and I just we can build the district that we want. We just have to go get the money to do that. So, thank you so much. Is it anything else to say? >> Just wanted to make sure you have you have an army. It's great. Um I don't have a lot to add because you guys really nailed it. But knowing that professionally and personally, I see the amazing work that you do. I can feel it in my own family. I can feel it as an educator. And

044I just imagine what you could do if you had even more funding and even more support. Thank you for what you've done so far. Thank you for bringing this forward and thank you for continuing to fight for more funding for education. >> Um I think it's timely that you bring this resolution for the board um on a night where we're going to talk about our district report card from Dr. Dwayne Schmidz and our district ends. And so we examine how we're doing and that with the impediments that you just talked about budgetarily everything we still outperform our peer district. We still hold the line and we're proud of that. And juxtaposed next to that we're going to get a pretty sobering budgetary update. And so for those of you who may not be in the

045room or may not follow that conversation, we're talking about some pretty dark times that that we keep dealing with and we keep dealing with. So I I mention that because this resolution gives me a lot of hope because we have power in numbers and while your group or our group were in isolation, we may be drowned out but together we will not and cannot be ignored and this is something that needs to be addressed because we should share in the joy and the pain of this district together. And I I appreciate you bringing it to us so that we can work together towards this end. So thank you very much. I sorry. Thanks, Kevin. I just want to make a quick comment that I second what Kevin was saying. And we know that we're getting

046really high marks and doing really well and you are doing it with less than you need. I just want that to be out there and very clear. Thank you. >> Uh I just wanted to say thank you. Um, I know that as Wendy you mentioned, you've been doing this work for about two years. I know that the work will still continue to come and just want to say that I think we all should be very appreciative because um, there's a lot of work still yet to come. Um, and you're choosing to do that and supportive and be there for educators and district and stuff. And so, I just wanted to say thank you. I think a lot of times we don't we see things on our ballot and we're like, "Cool, all right, I guess

047I'll vote for this." Um, and yet there's a lot of work to make all that happen. And so I just want to encourage everyone who's in this space right now or everyone who's listening to really consider and thinking about um what that means for us as we engage as citizens and support of the district. So thank you all. >> I want to congratulate all of you. um not just PA but CA. It was an honor to be on the steps of the Capitol uh side by side with you a couple of weeks ago um when your organization launched uh this effort and I think what's special about how you're organizing one PA stands out across the state. So, as we were standing shoulderto-shoulder with rural districts, other districts across the front range that we benchmark

048ourselves, like watching Wendy do rally cries to get everybody uh of, you know, just excited, aware, but involved in this measure. Um, we're really lucky to have the leadership that we have of this part of of PA uh in our in our backyard. You know, there's one thing in that if there's anything that I've learned in five years of living in this incredible community is that our community supports K12 public education. But what's significant about what you're proposing and what you may vote on tonight is that we realize that we can't continue to participate in a system that's broken where we have halves and have nots because it's only really whether a community can pass mill levies or bond levies to advance public education. We need a different statewide solution and this approaches that in

049my opinion in a very thoughtful way while also educating our broader community that our legislature just a year ago conducted a very thorough adequacy study of public education and there's a $4.5 billion shortfall and how we are funding K12 education in Colorado compared to other states. Yes, we know that our state is wrestling with a $1.2 2 billion deficit. But this snowball effect is not future facing. It's in our backyard now. Declining enrollment, budget challenges. We have many uh community commenters here tonight. We'll be talking about holistic education, similar to some of our community commenters. We can only do that if we figure out ways to do this work together. And so I just want to applaud you on that because as we talked about the unpopular reality of potential closure and consolidation, that holistic

050experience that you're talking about that every single child deserves in K12, our elective teachers, many of them who are sitting here proudly, they're already experiencing consolidation and closure quietly. So I want to say thank you again for standing up for the holistic education that this district stands on as a part of its values. It's the PSD promise as Dr. Schmidz would talk about and I'm sure he'll talk about later. But I'm just honored to be a part of this effort with you and as I've had opportunities over the last week to talk about this with other superintendents across the state. You've gotten a lot of people's attention in a very positive way. So kudos to you. Well done. Jill, can you please call the vote? >> Carla Ba, >> I. >> Connor Duffy, >> I.

051>> Kevin Havda, >> I. >> Scott Shoenbower, >> I. >> Dr. Andrew Spain, >> I. >> Jessica Zamora, >> I. >> Dr. Kuran Ziggler, >> I. >> Motion passes 70. I think we should do a picture. Would you guys mind? And would can we get a picture with Hank and the fam? Everyone would be Please please. All right, let's get right in the middle there. You're in You're hired. Seriously, Hank should just be a teacher. We're done. We're good. We got this. >> All right, we're going to keep rolling. Uh, next we have our superintendent report. Superintendent Kingsby will now make remarks to the board of education and to the community. >> Thank you, President Samura. Again, good evening everybody. Uh, I want to start off tonight uh with my remarks by taking a moment

052to recognize our incredible classified employees. Um, as we all know and heard earlier, it's classified employee appreciation month and many of our classified employees are often the first and last person that our students interact with each day. Joanie, you couldn't have told that story any more beautiful. Uh, you know, as I listened like all of you to the video u of many of our classified staff talk about their sense of pride of working in our district, the storyline that had kind of is a common thread was that people had always taken care of them and now they're collectively devoting their life to take care of others. Um, and our district is just point blank stronger as a result of all of you. So, I just want to say thank you for everything that you do.

053Um, it's really appreciated. Uh, we have our video highlight of the week is a feature on the boxing club at Rocky Mountain High School. I really am excited to show this to you. So, it highlights how our teachers are going above and beyond to connect with our student interest just like our classified staff members. Let's take a look at this. >> Jab, jab, one, two. It's one of like the best things that's happened so far this year. It's just like a great way to get up in the morning. >> Got to get warmed up, baby. Let's go. >> I've always been passionate about martial arts, boxing, kickboxing, etc. So, I thought it was a great opportunity for students like me. This journey of becoming a teacher starts with I was in the military. I joined

054the army in 2015 in in hopes of like finding myself in a way. And so through that experience, I really found this like passion for helping people. >> One, two, three, four. >> I often reflect on my own childhood and how hard it was and how much I needed someone like me. And so I think what better way than to become a teacher and be the person that I needed at that age. >> 10 seconds. >> Kids are putting value and time into the things that we're learning here other than the athletics. Learning discipline and boxing has definitely helped just carry me through everyday life as a better person. >> Self-discipline and like confidence in myself that like I can step out of my comfort zone. Just can't stay inside the comfort zone. Got to

055step out of it, man. >> The idea is my feet are alternating. So, I'm not just jumping. >> We give our hearts and our souls to kids in the sense that we care about their well-being. We care about their education. We care about all the other stuff. the content stuff we get to, but it's are you okay? Today, >> the boxing club, I think Mr. B has intentionally made a community where people can feel like they belong somewhere in the school. >> I think that that is ultimately what it is, is finding a home for these kiddos. It's so needed for kids to get some of that aggression out to start their morning at 8:00 in the morning. Uh it's a beautiful thing and I think that they benefit from it and I to me

056it fills my cup up just to be a part of that process. >> All right, bows on three. ONE, TWO, THREE. >> ALL RIGHT. HEY, clean yourself. Thank you guys. Thank you partners. I will see you later. >> How lucky are our kids, right? I want to thank uh Jesse and other teachers and other staff members for just continuing to figure out thoughtful, innovative, creative ways to make our students feel at home. Uh like many of those students, I had the opportunity to be on the boxing team at Penn State University about 20ome years ago. And some of those lessons around discipline and resilience and fortitude and knowing how when you get knocked down, it's important to get back up and keep moving forward are all parts of not just who I am as a

057person, but part of the superintendency as well. And I just can't tell you how grateful I am that many of our students are learning that at such a earlier age as a result of hardworking people like them. We have a very productive and thoughtful meeting planned for you uh members of the board and members of the community tonight. Uh one of our agenda items that we'll hear is the first of two reports out on the district ends from Dr. Dwayne Schmidz, our chief institutional effectiveness officer. Uh I want you to recognize I know members of the board are already in the loop on this. Uh Dr. Schmidz, I know that you are about to enter into a very well-deserved uh space of retirement at the end of this month. And as I've had an opportunity

058to work with you over the past five years, it has been such an honor and a pleasure to work with you. Out of the 28 years of me being in public education, working with many data and accountability experts, you are the only statistician that I have ever met that can make what you have learned and what you can teach accessible to just about anyone and do it in a place of space or space of joy and pride. Uh, so you're not just the CIEO of this district, you are the chief trutht teller of this district and our resident hype man. So if we can give Dr. Schmidz a round of applause for his leadership. YEAH. I think this year's monitoring report is Dr. Schmidt's 18th version of this work. So, it just lets you know

059the the longitudinal history. Uh for those of you who might not know what our monitoring report does, it examines how our students are doing in relation to our district ends foundations for success success in a changing world above and beyond and connections which were established by the then board of education in 2015. These are our aspirational goals for our students. We're going to celebrate many many successes tonight. But what's beautiful about this report is we're also going to talk about areas where we can continue to improve. Uh and that's important to have that in a both and context. So Dr. Schmidz, I'm it's a bittersweet moment tonight, but I'm I'm really honored that you are here. Also, this evening, the board will hear an update on the budget picture and some of the implications for

060managing our operational and staffing budgets in the system. I want to emphasize that the district is in a very difficult budget situation with budget reductions at the federal level. the state level and with continued declines in enrollment. What the board and public will hear tonight is a summary of those financial challenges that we're facing and how they may impact our staffing and the services and programs we are able to offer to our students in the future. So, I think it's important that we listen to both of these conversations together u as we talk about our goals and what we're setting out to do and what we're already accomplishing. and it's really going to require us to be collaborative, innovative, uh, and think differently in order to sustain the successes and overcome the challenges that we

061have in the system. So, I look forward to a very productive evening with all of you this evening. Thank you. >> Thank you very much. All right. Next, we have community comment. This is an opportunity for public comment or this opportunity for public comment is for members of the community who register to speak by the designated deadline deadline. Those people will be called on to make remarks in the order they signed up. Each speaker will be allowed three minute three minutes to address the board. First up, we have Orin Logan. Welcome. Good evening, PSD Board of Education, District Administration, teachers, staff, and community members. Thank you for letting me speak tonight. My name is Orin Logan. I am a proud elementary music teacher in PSD. And I'm here speaking on behalf of the whole child

062collective committee which is created to advocate for educating the whole child in subjects such as music, PE, art, world language, technology, health, media, and more. Teaching students is an integral joy in my life. Nothing is better than inspiring students and being inspired by them. I work hard to provide the quality life experiences that our students and community deserve. And yet, I am burnt out. Every spring, additional cuts and inconsistency limits what I can do. The budgetary crisis this year makes me especially concerned about the future of myself and others and our ability to do the best for our students. As the district weighs decisions on long-range planning, consolidation, and solving our budgetary crisis, it is vital to acknowledge positions in these subject areas and how they frequently surface as a first-line casualty of funding cuts.

063These positions are already being consolidated, and we need guarantees that our future schools and operations will appropriately value them. Teachers in these subject areas provide unique and creative opportunities in and out of the classroom such as ensemble groups, art shows, athletics, broadcasts, and community celebrations. These opportunities foster physical and mental health, creative outlets, technical skills, and self-exression that strengthens due to cognitive flexibility, social communication, critical thinking, and problem solving. We are a source of familiarity, comfort, and consistency for our communities that can attract students to our schools and provide a greater sense of belonging because of our unique roles. How many celebrations and shared experiences and challenges have included our subject areas tonight? Now, highly valuable professionals are facing reduced FTE, higher workloads that come with teaching at multiple schools, and pressure to maintain quality

064program is enrollment, time with students, and school budgets are reduced. 80% at one school and 20% at another may provide a full-time job, but often translates to double the workload with twice as many events, lessons, and relationships to build. Some teachers will be forced to move to entirely new school communities next year to maintain a livable wage as percentages fluctuate. And some teachers that have worked in the district for many years at less than 100% will have to wait longer for full-time positions. In addition, amazing new probationary teachers that bring innovative ideas are wonder if they will be able to work here in the future. Teachers feel that our hard work is not fully respected as our content areas are often thought of a luxury for a school. But when studies have shown that these

065fields are fundamentally important to development of the whole child. As the board progresses forward with long-range planning, solutions must include justice for these subjects. This means prioritizing full-time licensed individuals at each location, providing additional support for teachers, fostering multiple communities, and guaranteeing consistent and equitable involvement for all. We ask that you collaborate with us. While our committee is working on innovative solutions and criteria towards these goals, we need your support to implement them. We must build the schools that students deserve. We are not alone in challenges we face this year as many other staff and programs across the district are facing cuts. Every position, employee, and role is valuable. We need to establish long-term arrangements and processes to ensure students flourish and staff are not pushed towards burnout. How will you proactively ensure that the

066district maintains and grows essential student opportunities and the retention of highly qualified teachers in these areas? Thank you for your time, your work for this district and your current and future collaboration. >> Thank you. Next we have Derek Frans. Nope. Okay. Uh we have Courtney Peterson. Hi everyone. My name is Courtney Peterson and um I'm new to the Pter School District. So my oldest son will be entering the district in the fall as a kindergartenner and it's it's really awesome to be part of this family. Um I've been in Fort Collins for 10 years. We own a small business that serves the community and this is home. Um, I was driven to come and speak tonight because there's a lot of chatter in the neighborhoods and I'm I'm seeing tonight a lot of enthusiasm for

067our students, for our schools and it's really heartening to be able to see that and also it's really tough to be able to hear what we're hearing about the budget um deficit that you're facing and really just the low morale. It's um it's as if people have really dug in their heels and have a lot of loyalty to their particular school without a lot of thought towards the broader district and how we can be successful together. Um so I I came here tonight as a new entrant um into this space to think about what we can do about that um and then to challenge us to use this opportunity as an opportunity because that's really what it can be if we're looking at it in the right way. So, how is everyone tonight approaching your

068job? How are you what viewpoint are you bringing to conversations? Because um we can do something extraordinary for our students. We're you may be faced with closing schools. I don't know what the technicalities look like. Um but you can also use this as a chance to dream really big and figure out what we can build for our kids that's going to last for decades. um you know when's the last time you've zeroed out your budget and started from there and said okay well what goals do we want to reach and um let's let's build it fresh because you know bringing in I I love that we have three new board members I think welcome to each of you and I'm thrilled to that you're here because I'm hoping that these fresh eyes and energy is

069really going to um some bring something positive here um I know you're all smart and you're creative and you can tackle this um but I really want us to think about um how we can raise good human beings. I saw a lot of that tonight in the presentations and I thank you for that. Um but you know meeting math scores and test scores, you know, for reading, it's it's not the only thing that's important. Um, so I'm really hoping that we're figuring out how to raise resilient human beings, um, who are creative, um, who love each who love themselves and have self-respect. Um, so again, I just I really am here just to say blue sky thinking people, let's be creative, let's be innovative. We can do this together, but if we're othering each other

070and we're fighting for one school as opposed to another, we're not going to get there. Uh, thank you. Thank you. Uh, next we have Joshua Railing. Riley >> Riley, sorry. All right, it's green. I can go. Uh, hi everyone. 15 months. Uh, it has been 15 months since Fort Collins passed Proposition 4A, the mill levby override. 15 months since the community was told that a promise made needs to be a promise kept. And that passing 4A gave the district three to five years to make good on a promise made to take a deeper dive and slow down the process of consolidation to really look at things in good faith. I stand I I stood before you almost two years ago as a voice for this community. We were clear then that some outcomes might be

071unavoidable including school consolidations and closures. We understood that reality. What we were asking for was trans transparency and accountability. Many of us worked to campaign for 4A much like some of you did. And it is a front to to those efforts that you are now failing to keep your word. Last week, the so-called comprehensive planning committee released a timeline in progress. What it shows is return to the same place we were at two years ago, declining enrollment and school closures with little evidence of any analysis in between. You have asked the community through PTO's and Sachs to weigh in on clo on how closures should be implemented and what criteria should be used for those closures. Yet the commitments you made to this community remain unfulfilled. Nowhere is there an economic impact study showing what

072closing schools will actually solve or save. Nowhere is a consensus with the city regarding competing goals. And nowhere is there documented analysis of alternative ways to increase efficiency or reduce costs. Instead, we are met once again with obfuscation and condescension. This places community members who advocated for 4A in an impossible position and and continues to erode the little trust and confidence in district leadership remains. We understand that there are obstacles and hard decisions ahead and many of us are willing to work within the confines of this reality, but you cannot continue with within the confines of predetermined outcomes. This is outside the scope of the long range planning committee is not an acceptable response when people ask valid questions about the impact of school closures on things like transportation, special needs, ILS, early childhood, disciplinary

073programs, and other support programs upheld by neighborhood schools. These are not distractions. They are necessary questions. That's what we asked for. That's what we were promised. And that is what you are still not delivering. Two years ago, I told you to do better. And I will say it again because it bears repeating. Do better. >> Thank you. Next. Next, we have Sabrina Heric. Yes. Okay. I've got two things I want to touch on tonight. First, the more brief thing. Back in October, I attended one of Kingsley's listening sessions where I asked what collaboration is happening between efforts to catch up building maintenance and discussions on consolidating the district. I was told there isn't any. Fast forward to two weeks ago, an email comes out officially confirming consolidation talks are happening again. And tonight, you're being

074asked to approve millions of dollars in building repairs. The public approved millions of dollars in extra taxes to help keep PSD going. I think the public deserves an explanation of how PSD is making sure that we aren't fixing up a building just to approve closing it six months later. Second, during one of the campaign forums, we were asked what we'd think about collaborating with the city to have kids ride city buses instead of instead of school buses to school. I've since learned at least one of you is pushing for that, and my first reaction was irritation. But I've decided to give you the benefit of the doubt. The name I heard attached to this is someone who wasn't on the board when Zanella got caught and to my knowledge never attended a mediation. So maybe

075you don't know what happens when safety isn't prioritized. So tonight you will all receive context sent from my campaign email. It's a compilation video of the abuse my daughter faced. Keep in mind as you watch it, my daughter didn't face race-based abuse. She wasn't sexually battered. She didn't end up with bruises. She didn't end up hospitalized with suspected traumatic brain injury. That all happened to other victims in this case. I want you to all watch that footage. I want you to remember that in addition to that case, I sat in this room and watched the board celebrate bus employees for protecting children from a random member of the public who tried to board a bus. And then I want you to ask yourself, if all that can happen to children when PSD controls the situation,

076how bad do you think it can be when you hand responsibility off to a third party? Now, let's tie back into that first topic for a minute. We just spent a whole bunch of money on better bus cameras because of Zanella's abuse. Are we just throwing that money in the trash now by not using the buses? But let's assume for a second that you don't care about any of that. What do you think is going to happen to attendance for our BIPO community if we do this? You all already admitted that you have issues with kids being too scared to come to school because of ice. And that information predates the news of a potential concentration camp in Weld County. And public confirmation that ICE is arresting people based solely on skin color, not criminal

077background or documentation status. Do you think these kids are going to willingly get on a public bus where they don't even have the small protection efforts that PSD is currently providing them? No. All this would guarantee is whiter schools. So unless that's your goal, I suggest you rethink that plan before it causes more damage. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Next we have Annie Lawrence. Welcome. Thank you for the opportunity. Tonight, I wanted to address the apparent changes to your legislative committee process in hopes that you would consider adjusting back to the way we previously operated as a district. In 2023, PSC's legislative committee began meeting in August. In 2024, December and always occurring weekly on Fridays. This year, your meetings didn't start until the end of January, well behi well behind the state's opening

078legislative session. And despite stating that there would be two meetings in January, there was only one. And the meetings are now held every two weeks. This past Friday, I attended a meeting and most of you were absent, unlike previous years. From outside appearance, it looks to me that the chair of your committee is making unilateral decisions about bill positions in coordination with your lobbyists. Previously, board members would have discussed the bills, come to a consensus of opinions on and develop positions. I don't think many of you are aware that positions of the boards are being taken and communicated in these meetings, and I'm uncomfortable that none of this is being discussed in a public process. Additionally, this will be my second time asking you since January about the same issue. Can we please start following

079Sunshine Law and attach meeting materials to the online agendas? Last Friday's bill tracker document referred to in those meetings historically has never been shared in any legislative session by PSD. I usually have to corro request it, but in years past, there was a willingness to screen share that document during the actual meeting, which is no longer happening in a way that the viewer can follow online. The bills are public information, but PSC's position on them has been hidden for way too long. Clearly, we pay lobbyists at least $50,000 in this district, and the public deserves the clarity of understanding PSSE's legislative priorities and how they are selected. And I mean no personal harm in this following opinion, but having the chair of the legislative committee be an individual running for public office at the county

080level in an election year while simultaneously none of the other board members are attending the meeting when bill position positions are being chosen without a public process by that same candidate feels icky and it makes me question what our ethics are like. As a community member, I think it's entirely inappropriate and I wanted my objection recorded publicly here tonight. Please consider assigning another board member to this task for this particular legislative season. And this has meant as no insult to the efforts of Mr. Duffy or his generous volunteerism. I wish you the very best in your race. Finally, again, please consider posting these meetings on PSD on demand. They are being recorded. They are a public meeting that conveys the legislative intentions of a publicly funded school district. So there should be zero hesitation in

081sharing that information transparently. Given the climate of our national politics and the intention of seeking consolidation of schools, sharing your decisions, thoughts, and processes is possibly the most important thing that you could be doing for the community at large right now. Thank you for listening to my concerns and I hope that PSD will consider making this committee's intentions more effective and understandable. Thank you. >> Thank you. Next up we have Tom Griggs. Welcome. Good evening board members, Superintendent Kingsley and uh to the many people who have contributed to my understanding of all the ways in which public education is under attack. Financial pressure is building on the state front. As I mentioned at the January 27th board business meeting, I suspect even more than you all might be aware. We are being told by Governor

082Polus to believe that free money is available for Colorado education if we just take advantage of the federal voucher program tax credits who have stated his intention. Governor Polus has stated his intention to opt Colorado in to the federal program. But what will happen to the federal support for education, which has steadily decreased in recent years when these tax credits are claimed? The most likely result will be further more radical cuts than those we are facing this year. If vouchers become the order of the day, will we ever see federal support for our public schools rebound? I predict that when people take federal tax credits for contributing to private school scholarship funds, they will be used to justify even more radical cuts to federal support for public education. Free money indeed. As you can tell

083from my comments on January 27th and tonight, I view this matter as absolutely crucial. For this reason, I'm offering and intend to provide my help to keep the board and the PSD community informed about developments related to it. In the immediate term, I will be sharing with each of you via email a report called systems risk briefing, which was prepared and published by a policy analyst based in Colorado Springs. I will also be sharing a link to a webinar sponsored by Advocates for Public Education Policy in which several experts report on the drastic damage that has been done elsewhere by vouchers and voucher-like proposals and which will be done to Colorado public schools if we allow them to put roots down here. If tax credits are used to reduce federal tax revenues, the system risk

084briefing points out, it will set in motion a gradual erosion of funding for public education over the next several years that is frightening very frankly and that makes the recent cuts pale by comparison. The effect of vouchers and tax credits, which has already begun to be felt in other states across the country, is to establish a two-tiered system of schooling for those who can benefit from the scholarships while leaving behind those who cannot. I once again urge you to familiarize yourself with this issue. listen to the voices that are rising quickly to resist this federal shell game even here tonight and make Governor Polus aware perhaps through CASBY that federal vouchers to support unac unaccountable private schools are a disaster for Colorado's public school system. Thank you. Thank you. Next we have Reggie Johnson. Welcome.

085Good evening. My name is Reggie Johnson. My pronouns are she, her. I'm a proud mom and grandmom of four LGBTQ plus individuals. And I also serve as the president of P Flag Fort Collins, whose mission is to create a caring, just, and affirming world for LGBTQ people and for those who love him. That's the mission that brings me here tonight. Many of you have seen me before, but I want to ensure that the Pter School District Board of Education keeps our LGBTQ plus students top of mind as we navigate a federal climate that has emboldened discrimination on this marginalized community. LGBTQ plus students, especially transgender and non-binary students, they carry a burden that their peers do not. Their very existence is being debated and in many places it's restricted in deeply harmful ways. Two recent

086developments to illustrate this. On December 18th, 2025, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued proposed rules limiting a provider's ability to deliver gender affirming care to minors, now labeled sex rejecting procedures by the federal government. Soon after, Colorado's two largest providers, Denver Health and Children's Hospitals True Center, they announced will no longer offer gender affirming care, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy to minors. For transgender and non-binary youth, this care is literally lifesaving. At P Flag, we have seen children struggle with severe anxiety and depression, sometimes leading to attempts to end their life. Imagine carrying that weight with you when your US history teacher says they need a five-page paper about the Civil War battles. A second attack is now coming through citizen initiated ballot measures gathering signatures. Initiative 109, female and male participation

087in school sports, seeks to bar transgender girls from participating in school sports using vague language that could lead to invasive practices, if you know what I mean. Initiative 110 would prohibit certain surgeries and minors, inserting government control into decisions that should remain between a doctor, a patient, and their family. Now, imagine taking your French final exam with all that going on in your head. Hter school district has been a strong supporter of LGBTQ students and continuing that support is absolutely essential today, tomorrow and every day for these overburdened young people. Thank you. Thank you. Next we have Eric Sutherland. Nope, we do not. Last we have Ben Stew >> Stout. Thank you. Good evening. The Colorado newspaper recently published an article about an anti-ICE protest at Leer Middle School on February 2nd, 26 and on

088February 4th added to Fort Collins High School. The first sentence stated that the protest was student led. This is a key point. While student free speech is protected under the first amendments, schools are government entities and are therefore not protected. In fact, the courts prohibit schools from taking political positions. I understand this to mean that schools taxpayer funded resources cannot be used for political advocacy, including the use of art supplies, the use of facilities during school hours, and the use of staff time. The article was accompanied by photographs that suggest taxpayer funded resource resources were used and that the schools materially participated in the protests. First off, the protesters carried a lot of signs. Did these childrens or their parents purchase all these art supplies from a store? I know of no business in the

089area that carries so many cardboard sheets and markers at once. However, the schools do. And if these signs were made using school supplies, the protests are no longer meet the criteria of being led by students. They become school sponsored. When and where did the students make those many signs? Did all those children go to someone's house before or after school to make them? Not likely. It's more plausible that they were made on campus during school hours. If so, the use of school facilities also switches the activity from student led to school sponsored. The article goes on to state that school administrators, district security staff, and school resource officers were on hand to ensure the safety of the students. All of those positions are taxpayer funded. Further showing that this was not a studentled protected speech,

090but rather school sponsored political event prohibited by the courts. The Colorado and reported that nearly half of the 766 students at Leer Middle School and about 500 at Fort Collins High School walked off campus. Pter school district opencloed campus does not allow children to come and go as they please. Therefore, it appears the schools gave them permission to leave campus to participate in the protests. Again, indicating that the protests were school sponsored. Now, I am not a lawyer, so don't take my word for it. But you might want to ask your own legal counsel to log into their WLAW account and look up related cases. Then ask them to explain to those instigating these protests how they are creating exposure to liability for the district. No one wants to see you pay a hefty sum

091if it can be avoided. Thank you. >> All right, that concludes our community comments. Next, we will move on to board topics and committee reports. This agenda item is an opportunity for board members to provide an updated update on committee work or speak to board topics. Do any board members Oh, we'll give people a second to check out. All right, we'll keep rolling. You guys don't get to leave. Uh, do any board members have something they would like to report for board committee reports? No. Take yours. All right, then we will keep rolling. Uh, next we have our consent agenda. Would any board members like to pull an item from consent? No. All right. Can I get a motion? >> I move that the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for the items on

092the consent agenda. >> Thank you. Can I get a second? Thank you, Andrew. Jill, can you call the vote? >> Carla Ba, >> I. >> Connor Duffy, >> no. >> Kevin Havda, >> I. >> Scott Shoenbower, >> no. Dr. Andrew Spain. >> Hi, >> Jessica Zamora. >> I >> Dr. Kuranda Ziggler. >> I motion passes 52. >> All right. Thank you. Next, we have ourformational reports and discussion items. Um, sorry. Next. And we have our board superintendent relationship policies review. Would any board members like to discuss any of the policies, please? for starters. >> Yeah, sorry. There's two that I want to direct your all's attention to briefly. If you go to 41 in your packet, uh again for our community, these are the policies that govern how the board interacts and uh directs work

093on uh with the superintendent um as our our sole employee. So 41 talks about unity of control. Uh and briefly I'll I'll I'll read and then I'll paraphrase the rest. Only directives made by a majority of a quorum of the board are binding on the superintendent. documents approved by official board action will not be amended by the superintendent district staff without further board action unless the board has authorized further amendment and has provided notice of such amendment. The reason I bring this up is that um at many times in the last two years I have found that when we're havingformational sessions, we're having discussions. Uh Brian is in the unenviable position of trying to discern what is the will of the board and um so he does a nice job I think summarizing. I want

094to start pivoting to one of our items that's going to be a placeholder on our agenda, which is our uh prioritization or board forecasting is that's a good opportunity for us to keep doing check-ins with each other about things that we want to hear updates on, things that we want to hear um action items on. Um it will also provide more formal accounting of whether we have a quorum. And so I just want to remind us as we're grounding in that that um directive, the superintendent can't really act on the will of one board member, right? So he needs our sort of collective. So let's use that as an opportunity. The second one, I'm sorry, this is a little bit more granular, but on 42, um it talks about the um the the superintendent is

095the board's official link to operational achievement and conduct. Superintendent vested with the full authority over accountability for management and staff accordingly. We are not allowed to give direct directives to his staff to cabinet to subordinate staff with the exception of if we want uh it says accept the district's legal and policy council the board shall be able to consult with legal and policy councils as it deems necessary or advisable. Um over the last two years I have found or we have experienced two situations which will come up again where I think we need to tighten up that policy. And so one of the priorities I'm going to add is we're I'm working with Autumn to have another board policy for this exact reason. Um Autumn Aspen is the district's general counsel. So as an attorney,

096she represents the best interests of the district. That's an easy thing to say and digest, but in practice it there are some issues. So I I think about specifically an expulsion hearing for a student. Um Autumn will represent the district's side of that case in the adversarial process. But statutoily the board of directors occupies a quas judicial role and that we are the ultimate determinance of whether we're going to approve a recommendation for an expulsion or not cabined with the findings of fact that happened at that ALJ hearing. So what that means is we can't rely on Autumn if we've got questions for and we can't get independent legal advice from Autumn or our general counsel if we the board have issues with that. um we should have external counsel on speed dial so that

097we can say hey we we think there's an issue here can you give us some advice um I think that'll b be beneficial to the board in posterity so that they know they have a process in play for when there's a speed dial for hey we need our own lawyer um the same is true for certain personnel issues where again I think with license staff we're the ultimate determinance before it can be appealed to the district court we need our own external counsel so what we're going to be workshopping and gaming out is some language that would allow us to trigger when the board can just retain outside counsel and we can get independent counsel so that Autumn is not in the unenviable position of having to sort through a potential conflict of interest. Does

098that make sense? >> Sorry that was longwinded, but it's I think it's going to keep coming up. >> Thank you, Kevin. Uh are there any other comments? Yeah, please. >> Uh thanks for that input, Kevin. I did take a look at 4.1 and I worry about it a little bit. I think um you know with the present board I'm I'm sure if we asked each other like hey I have this uh area of interest I really want to pursue. Would you guys be okay helping me get a quorum so we can give a directive? I don't know if that's going to be true of future boards. I I don't want to tie the hands of future board members as a group. we are seven that you know you need a majority to pass actual policy

099but just to to dig into dig deeper into like factf finding I know it says on the bottom you know record requesting records and access to school records and things like that is not the intent of this but I I know like I was trying to think of some examples um Carolyn was an expert on like water rights I could care less about that stuff because I just don't know it, right? It's important. Don't don't get me wrong. Uh but I think, you know, her digging into that was really important back in the day for PSD. And I don't know if she on certain board could get a quorum of people to say, "Yeah, that's an important thing that we want to put uh district resources into." So, this worries me a little bit in

100terms of tying our hands. I don't want to do that. I'm not saying there's anything nefarious behind this. Um, and I think I think there's a way to rework the wording because I think the intent is we don't want to send Brian and his team on wild goose chases just on the whims of one one member. So, I think there's a middle ground. I'm just not ready to um go with it with the wording that it's in right now. I don't know if it's necessarily super important, but I would argue it doesn't mean you can't make a suggestion. It just says that they're not binding. They're not required. So, it might require like a a push and pull in a conversation and then our superintendent is not required to do the bidding of one person

101or a small subset of people. It doesn't mean that it may not be warranted. Going back to water rights, right? Not everyone is as well educated, but if we have folks and we obviously do within our uh within our staff that aligns that expertise and can speak to it and with Carolyn could get to a point where we could move forward and make it make sense for everyone else so that we could move forward. Um is it clean perfectly all the time? But I don't know that I want to make policies either for, you know, folks who are intentionally trying to break them. >> Point of order. These are this is justformational. We're not voting on these policies. This is for had this discussion. So if we need to revise it that we got the

102input. So I appreciate that, Scott. I I know when I looked at these policies, I brought up some different notions uh that I I believe that this discussion actually kind of highlights. I mean, first of all, we have things like sort of the scoping for who's things like responsibilities for timelines. Um who, you know, obviously the board is going to be the one that votes on it. That's responsibility. where are we getting content expertise things like that the things that are being I think mentioned here are another area where I think a lot of of these policies are perhaps missing and that's the procedure side of it because I'm I guess I'm used to a world where you have policies but it also has standardized procedures for how to say if this is the if

103this is the statement of policy a shall or a must or you know again we have things here saying that it has to be the board giving the directive what's the expected procedure behind it is it through a board forecasting is it through a formal vote is it through a consensus some of these things like that and I know I brought up some of these concepts at least in my in my inquiries back about should we consider adding in the procedure piece of it to provide that clarity so everyone understands here's the rules and and speaking to Scott's point, the board five years from now, wherever it may be, will see, oh, this is the rules of the road, just how to do things to meet the intent of the policy. So, I think the

104intent of the policy has some wisdom around it because if we don't have a quorum, we risk seven different requests to the same topic that may not be well aligned and that's inefficient. Absolutely, I would say that. At the same time, we want to have the capacity to get those different viewpoints. And so, just giving some guard rails and and framework around things and adding, you know, this is the policy section and then here's a procedure section for how to implement those things makes sense and is embedded in good practice for policies and procedures. >> I like clarity. So, I appreciate I like clarity. So, I appreciate that sentiment. I'm not exactly sure the level of effort behind that, but we could Start somewhere. >> It's process. Does anyone else have any feedback for our

105board policies a little bit? Okay. Well, if you do, they're amendable. Um, obviously, and we can discuss them or if we need to, if you come back to it, you have other ideas, please share. All right, we'll keep moving along. Uh, next we have our monitoring report policy review DE 1.0 uh, general district ends. Brian, do you have joining us this evening to present our DE 1.0 general district ends part one is our chief institutional effectiveness officer Dr. Dwayne Schmidz. Dwayne, welcome again. >> Thank you so much. Here we are. So, I have to start off as usual by just saying a heartfelt I feel humble. I'm proud and I'm thankful to be the a person that gets to give voice to the outcomes we're going to look at. I want to remind the viewing

106audience. So, the DE 1.0 monitoring report is is about the ends. It's about how we did. It's about outcome data. It is not about the means. The means is what we are talking about when we do the strategic plan and the UIP, the unified improvement plan that the state of Colorado requires. Those documents are the means. This is the ends. So, it's outcome data. So, there you go. I know the board knows that. I just want to make sure everyone because some people get confused like, gosh, you're showing all this interesting stuff. Why aren't they talking more about how they got there or what their next plans are? So, I'm pointing people to realize that's a different conversation, frankly. And yes, they dance together and we always have a little connective tissue in the documents

107with one another. I also really quickly want to mention, you know, the we've got a lot to celebrate and we're going to look at those things. We've also got some areas that we can continue to improve on. We're also going to look at some of those. There's a 51, I think, page report that's publicly available right now. And I'm not gonna try make an attempt like I used to in the very first rounds of this thing to go through and do a really comprehensive job of like giving voice to that report. Rather, I'm gonna try to keep it to about 15 minutes and really go kind of quick and just hit some highlights because the board and the public have the full report. And importantly, embedded in the report are hyperlinks to what we call

108the PSD analytics platform, which is our many different dashboards that we have that visualize data. And so through that process, there's hyperlinks throughout that report. Anybody who's interested like I'd like to know more about, you know, one characteristic of students crossed by another in third grade literacy specifically with Dibbles 8. Great. You can go get all that. It's all available on the PSD website. We're incredibly transparent with our data. So again, that's not my job tonight is to go through and follow every thread of possibility. It's a fairly high level conversation. The last thing I want to say is I just think it's incredible ML Johnson's in the room. He was a board member when I was hired in PSD and it was just great to see him. And I think it's interesting too and

109cool that DJ Anderson is here. And so is there something about ML and DJ like when you have two letters as the first name in essence that somehow you just keep getting sucked back into the vortex of PSD boardroom. I don't know. I don't know. But I just thought that was an interesting um occurrence. The last thing I'm struck by is I have to give voice to real quick is the passion of all the people who are in the room right now and all the people that were just in the room and that they show up for community comment. They tell us things we need to hear and it's exactly that passion along with all the other forums that we have and the board engagement opportunities and so on that we make available on a

110regular basis. It's that passion in our community around education which is going to be reflected tonight in all these outcomes we're looking at. Right. So when we were going through hard decisions in the recent not too distant past and there were a lot of people that showed up with a lot of passion. Great. We celebrated that because that's how people should feel about education. There's virtually nothing more important than our kids and our kids educations, right? Very important which includes their safety and psychological safety and all those components. It's not and we know it's not just about reading and math scores which also matter. Right. Okay. Thanks for giving me a moment just to do some upfront table setting on some of these things. Let's jump in. So real quickly again I'm just providing outcomes

111update and they are aligned to primarily the district ends and then additionally the unified improvement plan and the strategic plan which like I said is about the means not the ends and at the end then we'll talk about you know answer any board questions we may have. Okay. Okay. pre-K and early childhood. We try to um in the modern report kind of follow the flow of students through our system. So, we always start this conversation with early childhood, pre-K. And I'm happy to report that once again they had there's seven key items that we really measure and they um hit our benchmark expectations on six of those seven items, which is true last year as well. And so that's an 86% if you will success rate and our benchmark, our target is 85% or better.

112So once again we hit it but we just hit it. Um which item uh the students the young students didn't show quite the level that we want has changed. Last year it had been in math and this year it's in social emotional learning. So it changed a little bit which item and the miss is a very very slight miss. It's just barely missed. So we almost were at 100% this time around. So I want to just say we're all proud of our youngest learners. Okay. Okay. This graph I'm not going to go into great depth on. I put it up here and we can refer back to it if we if it's helpful when we're doing when we're walking through questions the board might have about any outcomes. But I do just want to spend

11315 30 seconds on this. PSD gets a lot of value out of standardized scores. And the reason we do that is because we have maps and dibbles or math dibbles, CAMASS, PSAT, SAT, TS gold. We have a lot of assessments and they all come with their own scale scores and performance levels cut by we don't I mean set by we don't know who and they don't always align and what have you. And so when we go to zcores standardized scores it it sets all those tests on the same metric of like how are our students doing compared to other real students who took that real test in that subject area. That's why we do that. Now when we do those standardized scores, we can compare how PSD is doing which is kind of in illustrated

114with the red normal curve compared to like the state as a whole or the nation as a whole when it comes to dibbles or map. That's the blue normal curve. And this is an illustrative curve just showing you that that normal curve of outcomes is shifted to the right for PSD about a quarter to a third of a standard deviation unit. basically every grade level, every test, every subject, every vendor. It's it's a very similar story which is the basis of we our community knows we are a high achievement district. That's how we track that. But we track it through that metric of like an achievement effect size by all kinds of different breakdowns and it gives us really real information where our strengths are, where our weaknesses are. Okay. So, I just want to

115mention that's a visual that just helps people understand as we're walking through the rest system and we're saying the achievement effect size. It's all we're talking about is how far to the right or to the left, which is a negative thing. Is our distribution of achievement outcomes shifted. Not every district's picture looks like ours. This is something we're proud of and we get a lot of value out of using it. for so for example let's start with again following the trajectory of kids K5 reading gains okay continue to rise there's a strong impact of our literacy initiatives chief among them is that new K5 literacy adoption that we did and thank you to the board for that um the detail is on the next slide so I'm going to show you some detail this is

116proof positive and superintendent Kingsley this is one of those things we're going to see I can think of three to four examples Um, and it's nice to have some older board members in the room too who have seen some history like I have. It is it is challenging in my opinion and it is rare for districts our size and larger to quantitatively show shifts that are both substantial and sustained in outcomes that were specifically targeted and publicly announced as a target. because it kind of is that fulfillment of that dream of like an improvement cycle where you, you know, you identify through, you know, looking for where are our areas to improve. You name a short list of them. You come up with specific steps you're going to take and you're explicit and you document

117them. That's what the UIP and strategic plans about. You implement with fidelity what you intend to and then you continue to measure the big needles and you in fact see that they've changed and that they sustain. That cycle in my opinion is kind of rare in big organizations and I can point to three or four concrete examples in PSD over the last four years. So I'm thankful for that. It makes my job easy to stand up here. So this is one of those pictures because we have early literacy, you know, K5 dibbles a MAP and CAMASS data um for our non-charter non-charter schools, okay, in PSD. And you can see in that graph real quick, it's an achievement effect size metric on the left side. And you can see we went from a 0.12 to

118a 0.16. Those are positives. Those are the normal curve being shifted to the right of the state or the nation. But you can see that it shifts further and further right relative to who? Other real kids, same grade levels taking those same tests out there. They're not also shifting. We're shifting relative to them. That is a positive picture. the the chart on the right that you can see the table of values. Your eyeball can see the color coding from where you're sitting and the yellow is the negative effect sizes, meaning we were a little bit underachchievement. And you can see that actually occurred at some early grades in some past years. And that has shifted and you can see in those early grades is where we've had those biggest shifts all coded blue where we've

119shifted like a third of a standard deviation or more. And the greens are positive. they're shifting like a point, you know, they're a positive shift. So, we're like in the positive zone. So, anyways, lots to celebrate. The the short story is third grade or sorry, not third grade, K5 literacy, good investment, lots of work on our staff's part, and we're seeing outcomes. Let's keep it rolling. Okay. um PSD students outperform state and national peers in reading and math achievement, exceeding targets and sustaining academic excellence. This is that PSD promise that um Brian Kingsley was mentioning earlier. We feel strongly about this. So, so um with regard to this this one quarter um standard deviation shift that we see in reading and math across all these different assessments like dibbles and math, CAMAS, PAT, SAT um

120increase, you know, it's just like we have a really positive story that's in the monitoring report on this. Now, the sobering part, you know, that's the pat on the back and here comes the slap in the face because this is the part we have to be fully aware of. Also, we have gaps. We've been saying that for multiple years. We don't we don't sidestep that. We have gaps. Um specifically, we have um tuned into um and put action behind trying to improve some of the gaps that we see for students supported with IEPs. Okay. Our state achievement levels are very very consistent on CAMASS for students supported with IEPs with other students supported with IEPs in other districts. And yet, if you think about it, that's still falling short of the PSD promise of we

121should be shifted a quarter or a third of a standard deviation, just like we are for the overall population. So, we are not content with the statement, which is true that our if you look at the state CAMASS outcomes for students supported with IEPs versus student support with IEPs in other districts, we're right there. We're not. Sometimes we're a little above, sometimes we're a little below by grade level, by various subject, reading or math and so on, but it's always right right there. It should be higher than that. Okay, so that's one of the gaps. English language learners, right? That's another gap that we're paying attention to. And students um eligible for free and reduced lunch. So those are three groups that we're still working hard to identify and intervene on to support better outcomes

122and close those gaps. Okay. All right. Overall results though. So now these are the overall results on this one is state assessment data because it says CAMASS PAT SAT. So that's grades really 3 through 11. Okay. This is outcomes for reading evidence-based reading and writing. That's what EBRW stands for. Evidence-based reading and writing PSAT SAT. And you can see we're at that high.31.33.35.3. Oh my gosh, it's moving the right direction. So, it's really high. It's moving the right direction. And you can see on the table below that that's true across the grade levels. And there's a whole lot of blue. Again, I just want us to pause and celebrate. These are our teachers. These are our students. These are our community partners. We heard people talking tonight about boxing club at Rocky. I actually think

123that contributes to these scores in this way because kids show up and they're inspired and they're motivated and they're passionate and they're connecting with our staff and they're connecting with their peers in more than just sitting there and learning something in a in a you know the context of a classroom. And then that does translate to more engagement and higher scores. That is, I believe, part of what we're seeing. Okay, so there we go. Well above state norms and moving in the right direction. This is the same picture for math and you can see it's it's likewise way up there 31 3230. So it's more stable. It doesn't have the increasing slope we just saw in literacy, right? But it's stable at a very very high level. Okay. And you can see the breakdown down

124there across multiple years and grade levels. So you can see there's no uh area like not contributing even in the 11th grade. You can see all those are green. That means that normal curve is shifted to the right of statewide the outcomes in math for the S that would be the SAT in 11th grade. Okay. Okay. This is important. So we had noticed our attendance was lower and and COVID had an impact on attendance nationwide. It had an impact statewide and it definitely had an impact in PSD as well. And we noticed that we talked about that in the morning reports going back to that point in time. And so this is one of the second areas I'm going to highlight real quick where the superintendent, the board of education, the the administrative team all

125identified like we there's something going on with attendance here and we should address that. So a lot of action has happened on a lot of my colleagues parts to put some concrete things in place and to be systematic about it. You've heard that thing, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And so they put some systematic pieces in place. And in fact, our our attendance has gone up each of the last several years. We're still it's still a focus area because we're still below where the state's attendance is. We're still below where some of our comparison districts are. So just because it's increased doesn't mean we're letting go of that. But attendance matters. We're addressing it. It's moving in the right direction and we're going

126to keep that work rolling. This slide is showing you how dramatic of an impact higher attendance has on achievement, which is great because that means guess what? Teachers, they matter. And that contact time matters. That's what this graph really says. The kids showing up at school more consistently are getting the point. I think that's 66 62 54 57. They're doubling our target of 0.25. That's dramatic. When we go to the next slide, these are the students. This is trimmed to the students who have less than 95% attendance. They may have 94% or they might have something less like 75. Anything under 95, right? And you can see how that drops dramatically. So now we're talking still positives, but 009. I think of this like PSD has laid out a pretty awesome buffet table. Thank you,

127Board of Education. Students who show up to that buffet table regularly, they're reaping the benefits. Students who, for various reasons, don't show up as frequently at that buffet table, they're not reaping as much of the benefit. They're still traveling in a positive zone. There's a lot of districts that would actually be pretty pleased to see that picture for their overall population. We're not pleased with that picture for any component of our population. We want everybody above that 0.25. But anyways, this again is just a story of attendance matters. I'm using math data to to make this point. I could use literacy data and it will show exactly the same story. All right, the numbers will shift a little bit, but I'm not cherry-picking up here. It's a it's a concrete real story. Okay, so on

128the tail of that, PSD attendance, as I just mentioned, did increase in 2425 and it had increased also in 2324. So, we've had a couple years of increase. We're at 90.6% overall. I didn't mention before though, the way the state calculates or the way we calculate attendance and report it to the state is not identical from one district to the next statewide. It's one of those metrics. You just got to be aware of that. It's not as consistent as like an achievement score or a growth score or certain other things. Not to mean it's meaningless, just that there's a little more slop in the way it's calculated. Nonetheless, so PSD has increased in our attendance. That is true. We know that locally. Um, and our truency remains steady at 3.1. Truency is unexcused absences. So

129that has stayed pretty like very steady. It was 3.1 the year before as well. State attendance declined a little bit, but then you notice that even though they declined a little bit, we went up a little bit, we're still below them. So we continue and will continue to take attendance serious and continue to work on that for the sake of our students. Okay. Okay. Um All right. So, we're already at this guy right here. So, additional support. Um PSD students receiving an additional support. What is that? Okay. Why do we do that? So, we put in a system in place quite a few years ago. That's pretty cool. We said, "Look, we got a mountain of data for every kid that's been in our system for at least a year, and many have been in

130our systems for a lot longer than that. Why don't we look at that so that we know which kids are traveling below the 35th percentile on all of the big tests that they took last year and then don't pretend as they walk into the next school year that we don't know that. We do know that. So let's identify that they would be good candidates for additional support because they're traveling in that lowest one-third among act among their peers grade level nationwide or statewide. that's who they're going to go compete with in the world for jobs and stuff. And so we started a system where we identified and we uh put the information into our system at the classroom teacher level so people know and then we have various ways that we provide support. So a

131good question is how are we doing with students that we knew needed additional support. So let's take a look at that catchup growth by the way we came up with if growth is 0.20 20 or higher that that on a on like in a growth effect size that if a student gets a couple years in a row of that level of growth, they actually will catch up on a performance metric. That's what it takes. It's not like a one year, you know, one hit wonder. You got to get on consecutive years of above typical growth and we did the analytics to discover. It's like for us and the way we do our analytics, it's 0.2. That's our growth target for kids who are good candidates for additional support. Again, I just want to mostly for

132the viewing public and for the board somewhat remind you that we're we just switched in my language from achievement to growth. So when we were talking achievement, we're saying let's compare PSD to other environments out there, the state, the nation, whatever. How are we doing, right? An achievement effect size. Now what we're talking, we flipped a growth and now what we're saying is a student's prescore versus a student's postcore. So now we're comparing a student to themselves and that's why I've got two normal curves stacked up over each other. The top curve is like the set of students prescores like at the beginning of the school year and the bottom normal curve is the set of scores from the same test like let's say CAMASS math or sorry math Cass math um same test but

133a year at the end of the year and so you got that normal curve of distributions and the question is kid for kid student for student did they slide forward in that normal normative comparison of distributions. Did they slide backward or did they hold their position? If every student was a black arrow coming straight down where kids that were lower achieving at the beginning were in that exact same position normatively speaking of low achievement, actually that's a year's growth in a year's time because that whole class of kids has grown and that kid grew exactly as much and held their normative position. But what we want is we want those green arrows. We want kids whether they start at lower achieving or they start at higher achieving, we want them sliding forward in that normative

134distribution to be higher yet. Right? So I set that up as a quick that's the picture we're looking for. That's the picture we would not be excited about that student slid further behind their academic peers nationwide and statewide. Right? And so this is just another way of kind of showing this growth effect size on the left. not the story we want on the right. That's the story we're looking for, you know, and we use this, by the way, in some of our teacher evaluation work and other things. So, PSD gets a lot of like uh mileage out of this kind of a concept. What we're going to show and and talk about tonight though is these growth effect sizes because when I have one of those effect sizes, the Z gain for like every individual

135kid, if you just average those up across a bunch of kids, you've got a good metric. If it's at zero, it means those kids held as a group. They held their normative position. And I'd say that's a perfect definition of a year's growth in a year's time. On the other hand, if it's a positive number, they collectively slid forward. And if it's a negative number, they slid back. So, we're looking for positives. Period. Right? But specifically for students who we knew were good candidates for additional support, we're looking for a positive of a fifth of a standard deviation, like a 0.2 or better. What I'm listing here are the students that I'm sorry um the schools not the students the schools that had met that growth target meaning their their group of students that had

136been identified as good candidates for additional support did in fact as a group make a growth effect size outcome of 0.2 two or higher. And the reason we highlight these six schools based on dibbles 8, seven based on MAP, nine based on the state assessment system, CMAS, PAT, SAT. The reason we highlight these each year is to indicate to our whole system this is possible, right? This can be done. Like you can attain this incredibly rigorous outcome of getting catchup growth for the kids that need us most. Thus to encourage all of our schools and all of our staff to be like, "Yeah, all kids can learn and all kids can grow and they can grow at exceptionally high levels and it can be done systematically." And we have evidence of that. It's that existence

137proof. If you're going to tell me I should do something, show me where it has been done because if you can't point to a single place it's been done, you're probably creating a wild guess of a target, right? Well, we're not. It's been done. So we celebrate these schools, their teachers, their efforts and these kids are the big winners in this um this outcome. Okay, this was that one was in reading. This is in math. Um and in math we have math and cass dibbles 8 of course falls off. It's just a reading test. And so in this one we can see here that we've got five schools in MAP, 13 in the state assessment system. It is a very rigorous challenge to get this outcome. So we congratulate those schools. Okay. Students supported with

138IEPs and English language learners outpace growth of academic peers reading and math. I want to make something super clear. What I didn't just say is that their achievement that that that we don't have achievement gaps. We do have achievement gaps. I'm being super transparent and clear about that. And so there is work that we continuously do and will continue to do in support of students in these two groups groupings. Okay. The celebration though which is the work of these students and their parents and their teachers. So it deserves mention is that they are in fact outgrowing they have more growth than their academic peers in reading and math. That is based on uh map data. um in both cases where for the past four years in a row both of those groups in both English

139language arts and math have had growth above zero that growth effect size that's the basis of that okay um in ELLL uh this the growth let's see is there anything different on that no that's the in for the English language learner students that statement is also true based on the state assessment system not just MAP okay and By the way, MAP was specifically designed to uh measure growth originally, which most assessments are not. Like Dibbles was not, CAMASS was not, Pattis, they're not. MAP is the only assessment we've got that was specifically designed to measure growth. Hence, the focus on MAP. When I'm talking about growth, it's the best measure of growth. It's just computer adaptive and it's there's a lot that goes into that. Next big celebration, class of 2025. Graduation rate sets PSD

140record high yet again. We keep getting these highs one after the next, right? When when does this stop? I hope it doesn't. 89%. We I've been around long enough. ML, you were here long enough. DJ, you were here long enough to know we were bouncing around just we had an 85% target we tried and tried and tried and tried to get to and we didn't ever break the ceiling except one time we got like 86. And then all of a sudden we're boom, we're up. And again, it's one of those perfect stories of like we explicitly named it. We did root cause analysis. We took specific steps. There's a whole lot of system work behind it and then it's it popped up and it's remained consistent and it's rising still. This is a big celebration.

141So that's great. You the board decided a year ago to set the target to 90 or at 90%. And I look at that as a vote of confidence of this leadership team and our staff and our community. So a lot of times past board members said at what point do you move a target up right and I always said like not the first time you hit it because of two reasons. One did you hit it with every subgroup because if you haven't hit the target with sub we don't have different targets for subgroups in this district. the target's the target, right? And so maybe you don't move the target up until you've hit it with every subgroup and you've hit it overall. The second criteria would be you can't just hit it once or twice.

142You got to have enough data hitting it like that to believe like we're sustainably hitting this thing. Well, I think that the second criteria is true in this case. So, our board made a decision to move that up to 90, which I think is appropriate because some of our comparison districts are sitting there at 91 to 93, which again is that existence proof piece. We're not crazy setting it crazy high. We definitely can get up to the mid 90s. I mean, somewhere the low 90s at least, 92, 93. We're on our way. Okay. So, that's a picture that's a picture of the state graduation rate in pink and the PSD graduation rate in black. And um we just basically talked through what's going on there. So, it's a celebration. Okay. Concurrent enrollment in career and

143technical education. Remember, we're following the trajectory of a student through the system roughly. So, students have graduated. What do they do after they graduate? Lots of different things. Um, and in fact, a lot of kids get going on that while they're still in high school, right? Because now we've we've done the big blur, as Tanya Alcarez would say. We're in the process of that. So, we've got students getting college credit and a lot of them in high school. We've got students in high school obviously getting a lot of technical credentials and training, and we've got students doing all kinds of great work-based learning and stuff. So we're definitely big participants in the big blur. And that's the uh point to this slide is actually PSD is a state leader in that space. And I want

144to pause here to mention we didn't do this alone. Not even close, right? This is about community partnership. We have so many community partners and there's too many ways for me to stand up here and name and thank how they do this. But I do just want to roughly mention they have supplied us with uh resources and in money to build facilities and such. They've supplied us with equipment and supplies and expertise to help train our kids. They've supplied us with work-based learning opportunities where they're mentoring our youth and such. It just goes on and on. So this is a community win, you know, that we're looking at. So the state data in this space has gotten unreliable. Frankly, it used to be the Colorado Department of Higher Education annually put out a report and

145it was always a couple class like graduation classes behind because it took them a few, you know, some time to put the data together, but you could see what your dual enrollment, concurrent enrollment, all these post-secary outcomes were. They had some issues. They're not um following through on all the data. So the the latest class that we have statewide comparable data between PSD and other districts is the class of 2022. The department of higher ed promised that they're going to get the class of 23 and 24 to us soon. In fact, their original promise that dates past. So we'll see when this happened. We had this talk last year. We got local data. That's the lower chunk of the graph, right? And the local data align uh shows clearly as we went from 34.8% to

14641.2 2 to 48.6% in 2425 that the statement that we're growing our concurrent enrollment participation is true. That percentage is climbing steadily and again that's through a lot of work and purposeful action. Okay. And we are state leaders. If you look up at that top like we in dual enrollment PSD the last year we have reliable data statewide on we were at 69.4. the statewide is at 42 and in concurrent enrollment we're at 66 and the state was at 36. And the monitoring report does go in and differentiate for you on I think it's pageif I forget 25 the differences between concurrent and dual enrollment because it's got that's even gotten a little blurry. Okay, switching gears. CTE, career tech ed, right? Um, the latest data from the state is that class of 21 data.

147So, there's nothing fresh there for us. Yet again, though, we see from that statewide data, PSD at 80%, statewide is 72. The local data that we're we're filling in the gap with, and I'm sure we'll keep this going in future years because it's it's great just to see this. And by the way, there's a big difference, too. Our CTE enrollment data I believe is our like ninth grade on classes where the class of 21 data is just the 12th grade. Like there's just to be ju just to recognize the grade levels reflected in the upper and lower half of this set of information is not the same. The top is just 12th grade. The bottom is 9 through 12. Conniey's probably home going, "Dwayne, it's 8 through 12." No, I could be off. But at

148any rate, you see I went from 42.1, 42.3, 49.2, and 51.1. So, we continue to expand those opportunities for our kids and they continue to um benefit and participate. Okay, we're drawing to the close. Disrupting disproportionality. That is a big phrase in Pter School District. And so, we've got some indicators of success and then we're going to follow it up with some indicators of we can see where we have work to do. Okay? And even where we see success, we still have work to do. It just means, hey, something's moving in the right direction. This first example is Dibbles 8 K3 data. It's the spring effect size, achievement effect size, and it's separating out students who have a read plan or supported with a read plan. That's the black line on the lower portion. And

149students who do not have a read plan, that's the green line, the upper portion. as we went through our K5 literacy adoption, you can see that same bump up, right? That's that K5 science of reading literacy adoption that we did. But the reason I'm putting it up here as an example of disrupting disproportionality, the type of data you'd want to see in that systematic type of work is that the slope for the students who are supported with read plans is steeper than the slope of students not. They're both happy stories. They're both moving in the right direction, but it actually impacted students with read plans even more, which actually makes sense if you know the research behind the science of reading. Okay, so that's the type of graph we want to see that we think

150is an example of starting to disrupt disproportion. Obviously, we have more work to do because there's a big gap between those lines, right? Okay, second example. We were celebrating big, right, on our English language learner graduation rates because that is the black line on that graph. And look at that crazy wonderful increase. That was fantastic. Several years in a row. It's still higher in 20 for the class of 25 than it was in many previous classes. That is true. And it is also true. It has come down. So, I selected this slide as an example because that really nice increase is what disrupting disproportionality looks like when you're increasing on-time graduation rates, four-year graduation rates for students that are second language learners. The cautionary tale is that um the the next class actually moved the

151wrong direction. The other direction came down a little bit, right? So that also gives you some wonderings that we should have as leaders, some noticings and wonderings where we should start to interrogate that because we don't want to see that continue, right? Okay. Disrupting disproportionality continuing indicators of continued opportunity because the one I just showed you actually kind of indicates we have an opportunity there too. This is the same type of a read plan support graph that we looked at a second ago for elementary, but this is for middle school. And and you notice two things that I think are important here. One, we didn't do a new literacy adoption in middle school. We don't see the science of reading. We don't see that slope that we saw on several slides tonight. And we see

152that those two lines are pretty much like railroad tracks. But if you look carefully, the students supported with read plans are in fact slightly sliding down further. There's a little bit of a widening of that gap. That's a great graph because I think again a noticing a wondering and getting curious and lean into that curiosity. Um, do we have work to do? The answer is yes. The way I'm leading us into that in the middle at the middle school level in how we support kids with read plans, which includes students with dyslexia. It's not only students with dyslexia. There's other reasons uh students have read plans as well that are equally important. So this is just a disrupting disproportionality call to action middle school literacy student supported read plans. This is a very powerful graph

153and it's a hard one to look at when you care about kids and you believe in our system. Um because this graph shows very clearly black being the graduation rate for students supported with IEPs and PSD versus pink which is the state and the other three colors are comparison districts cherry St. rain and boulder and that story that five for five years and if we went back more than five we'd continue to see a pattern somewhat like this right so there's nothing magical about cutting it off at five we are traveling low on our graduation four year on-time graduation rates that's a very complex issue the board has done a lot with the cabinet and the cabinet has done a lot to unpack that with our staff and we continue that work and I'm just

154using this as a great graph of like this is where We notice things and we get real about it and we do the hard work and it's sustained work. But what we want to see is th that graph, that black line start to pop up in a serious manner like we saw with English language learning on time graduation rates and we're capable. We've shown we can do it. We have to do it. Very similar picture for students supported or not supported students who are eligible for free or reduced lunch, right? That's and that's um and I'm going to slow down on this one a little bit because I want to point out I should have done this earlier. The top graph is what I call external gaps and they're important. How are we doing? How

155is the student group that we're talking about in PSD doing compared to that same student group elsewhere? That's an external gap. Very important to track that in my opinion. The lower part of that graph is what I call the internal gap. What is the difference between the PSD student four-year on-time graduation rate for students not supported with IEPs versus students supported with IEPs? And that is what the lower little bar is showing a negative number on. And the fact that we have the biggest negative bar graph number there is indicating we have the biggest internal gap, the biggest gap within our own system relative to our comparison districts. and we have a pretty noticeable external gap. There's work to do right there. Okay, that probably was over 20 minutes. >> I apologize. It's hard. But

156anyways, that's a like I said, that's a that's a that's not the full report, but those are some highlights. And so, I'm happy to take any questions or thoughts. >> Thank you. First, I would say please don't be sorry that it was more than 20 minutes. >> Okay? >> I think this is the core of what we do and what we care about and showcases the amazing work that our staff do day in day out. And it also in many ways gives us our marching orders of what do we want to consider, what do we want to prioritize, and where we want to put our resources. So, I really appreciate the report every year. It's so thorough. Um, does anyone want to kick our questions off? Please go for it. You you pointed out a

157lot of things that are clearly better than a number of years ago. You talked about things like root cause analyses, implementation of plans, monitoring of same uh identification of successes obviously where a few not successes and things like this. So my question for you is this. We given we are going to be facing likely some very difficult budget decisions. Do you have a list of the components that are essential to maintain that momentum? Because we risk making decisions that could impact what's creating that success. And so I just wonder how much that is readily available to say we did XYZ whatever that's done this. We've got to try and hold those as harmless as possible. Whether it and all of it ties to funding somewhere, whether it's people that are doing it, whether it's additional

158supports, equipment, etc., etc., and just as much as possible. How much clarity do you have on the things that have really made those big differences to help us with our decision-m? >> Thanks for that. Now, I want to say I'm positive every colleague in this room right now of mine is just want to get on this mic, but I get to have it. So here we go. So you guys will get >> I'll bring one over to you. >> Yeah, this that was such such a well-framed powerful question and I want to lead with this answer. Okay, there are a multitude of things that are going on in this system. No question. We are facing hard budget times and there is going to be reduced resource and I loved what the one community commenter said

159that there's opportunity in that. You can get lean and mean and you can figure out what your core stuff is and you can get committed to it and do it well. And I believe that's who we are and what we're going to do. I think we can come out of this next several years stronger and better than we're going into it because it's going to force us to get clear on some of the things you just asked about. Okay. A big theme to what the cabinet and the system have talked about is really being tight on what our what our universal, you know, standard floor of excellence is and paying attention to that as opposed to assuming that we have our standard universal level tight and then just layering on and adding on in one

160offing and gray spaces. thing and figuring all that out. If you're flush with resources, you have the luxury of doing that, of just floating along as is and going, "We're pretty good. There's a lot we can point to. We're pretty good." And then just going, "Except right there. Well, what do we plug in there?" And then what's up there? Oh, let's plug in something there. But you walk into the time frame that we're walking into and you say, "We can't afford all these plugins and extras and add-on." That's not an efficient, effective way to do this thing, right? So instead, what you do is you step back and you ask the exact question you just asked. What's c, for example, curriculum investment. It's tempting when you look at the money curriculum costs to say, gosh,

161if we could use that in other places, imagine how many problems that could fix. The truth is, imagine how many problems that's going to cause. When we just looked at what happened with those reading scores, including for the kids who need us most, that was a an implementation deep and broad in K5 literacy that was expensive that this board voted on and it produced real results. That's a hard decision you all made a couple years ago and it but it was a good decision as seen through the data. So there's going to be that is a universal level tier one. It impacted the whole K5 system, including the kids that need us most. Right? Those are the strategies I think that this system is going to have to identify and commit to and do. And

162we're going to have to learn and look hard and careful about where we're having all those one-off plug type things that wouldn't be necessary if you have the right universal pieces in place. Now, we could talk all night on that question. So, I'm very hesitant to open that one up and I might just say let's leave that right there maybe. But we do know what we're doing and we do have a list of core stuff. But I don't want to stand up here and try and >> I think you've answered my my question and I think the key is to get those things written down for those core fundamental things that can guide us to that that future recognizing that some of them are how to aggregate those those one-offs but but streamline them for

163efficiencies perhaps. you know again what what were the concepts and things like that and of course we then we can publish those things to the community because then they can see where the transparency is on the focus points and why these things you know certain things need to have continued investment for example uh and I just want to emphasize that that's really cool to hear that you've got these things and I think it's going to be really important to share just you know food if if kids not eating they're not going to succeed I think that's a we don't need data for that one probably back to Maslo's before blooms have I heard my colleague say three four times number of times uh and it's just having those things and making sure we understand the

164impact of those as much as possible for clarity even things like transportation that's an impact if you can't get to school we can't get that 95% and you can't get that enhanced achievement etc etc etc >> right we just saw is a great example we just saw that attendance impact it's just >> dyslexia resources IEP resources again just having those here's where it is. >> Thank you. >> A few questions. Um I'm going to go through the report, not the the PowerPoint, so I'll refer to page numbers if that's okay. >> Yep, that sounds good. >> On page 21 of the report, this is where it begins the graduating with options section. >> Okay. >> Kevin or Dr. or director of all >> I am definitely not a doctor. Don't don't >> Dude, you were

165doing so great earlier. I was I was tracking you know what you do when you were doing law you were doing law talk and then you were interpreting for us and I was sitting there just a minute ago listening you know earlier and I thought man you're good at that because you it was great. Okay, which page did you say? >> Say that a little bit louder for my employer though. >> All right. >> Um so I'm on page 29 of the report. It's the beginning of the graduate with options and it's got some red font, green font, key indicators, met or not met. Are you with me? >> That's 21. >> Yeah, I think you had 21. >> What' I say? >> You said 29. >> 21. >> Nope. Got a 21. That's uh

166Oh, it's getting late. Um >> page 21. >> Okay. Okay, I'm there. >> Hopefully this is a softball. Um under 6C, we're talking key indicators or they're met or not. It says CTE participation percentage and then it says the outcome is 51.1%. Are you with me? >> Right. Yep. See that? >> So I tried to glean when I was reading through this and there's a couple related questions but I don't know Dwayne is that inclusive or exclusive of students with IEPs and 504s. >> It's inclusive. >> Oh, so that includes students with IEPs? >> Yeah, it should. It should be. Yeah. CTE participation is just that. It's not like parsing out any other student groups. Now, now I'm not going to stand here off the top of my head and try and tell you >>

167what number or percentage of students with 504s or IEPs are involved in that. Like I don't know that off the top of my head, >> but that was including this. I mean, yep. >> Yeah, that was included the entire student. That's correct. That was my Okay, that's what I thought. I just want to confirm that because I think that's worth celebrating. >> 24. This is another big one kind of like director Spain's on 24. I think I got the page number right. We're talking about graduation rates for economically disadvantaged students. >> There's a line that struck me that said PSD graduation rate gap between students eligible for free and reduced meals as compared to the state >> more or less is underperforming. and it looks like it's continuing to underperform. This is a big question

168since it's your last one of these. I'd like to ask your thoughts. What do we need to do as a district so that I don't ever have to read that line in a report ever again? >> I love that question. That is a great man. You guys are hitting like the right questions in my opinion of all my experience. I mean, that's such a good one. And part of the answer is the exact same answer I just gave to Dr. Spain, right? which is students and I was one of them as a kid that was eligible for free and reduced lunch, right? They need good systems. They need universal tier one quality schools that every kid benefits from. They first and foremost that is what they need. We are not going to be able to

169change their parents' economic situation, right? That's not going to happen. there are so many community supports for folks that are um struggling economically. So, another thing the district provides and should continue to fund and provide is the outreach and the connection that we do for students and their families with core resources like when they have food insecurity, housing insecurity, they need medical assistance and other things. You know, we've got some great people here who do an awful lot. You've heard a lot about our family liaison and how critical they are on keeping us in tune and being responsive to the community we serve and like what's going on. All of those components, those pieces right there are really hyper critical, right? Supports, but we can't do it alone. PSD school districts have become more and

170more looked at as can you provide our eye care literally. Can you can you give our kids, you know, uh eye exams and make sure they have glasses? Can you make sure we're fed? When we close schools because of a cold day or something like that, we spend time and energy thinking, okay, how do we get the food packs and the different things to the families we support? school districts have become this massive like support um for the community but it takes the community and we don't do it alone currently either but I think that part of the way we function is hyperritical >> and kind of >> can I add one more thing before you add that sure >> because it's going to dubtail into page um and this goes into the connections data

171and I think what you just said I was I was hoping you thread this needle. I think you just did. If I'm If you go down to page, make sure I'm 32 and it looks we're talking about the fall 2025 high school connections by graduation expectation. >> One, I just want to make sure I've understood this. So, the connections data I will graduate. There were 5,313 respondents. I'm uncertain is 189. Does that mean I am uncertain about I mean >> whether I'll graduate? >> That's what I Okay, so drop down one level to that. food security at school. Of those respondents that responded, I will graduate, 84.8% positive response rate for f food security at school. >> Next to the students are students that are uncertain where they're going to graduate. They they have a

17260.4 response rate. >> That's right. >> And beautiful. And that's the high school data. You're looking at the lower half of the page. And there's a replica above it, right, for middle school. Mhm. >> And you look across that same item, food security, across that I will graduate, I will not graduate, you see a substantial dis disproportionality right there. So, um, director Havalda, that's perfect because it's exactly right. You know, and I wasn't thinking about this connection data when I gave you that answer where my mind was going as soon as you asked what are all the things I know we're doing in the system and stuff that really make a difference for kids who truly are coming from homes with less resource like that, right? Food's a big deal. Housing security is a big

173deal. Some of these things, some of these things we can't fix, but you can see it right there in the data. Clear as crystal. That's a big difference. So, you have um students saying like, "Do you have food security?" And there's um students that are not certain if they're going to graduate and they are not um feeling they have food security. right now where we're going with this food security is a little bit lower. I am uncertain if I'm going to graduate and they have less of them are saying they have food security, >> right? >> So that flows perfectly. >> Um, last question. >> Keep your all night. I'm sorry. Yeah, >> I might try. >> Yeah, >> selfishly. >> You guys have other big items >> on that same page. This is a

174point of reference for the rest of the board. Just a comment, not really a question attached to it. I This is fascinating me. The top three response of high schoolers I would like my school to help me learn about. Stress management was the highest response from our high schoolers in both categories. I'm certain I will graduate. I or I'm uncertain I will graduate. 20 2,157 students responded that they want their schools to equip them with some stress management tools. I don't know what we're doing uh to address that. I don't know what we can do, but that was a wondering that I had when I was reading this. >> Look at the middle school data right above that. So, the kids who think they're going to graduate, they're as you would anticipate, hey, activities is

175the main thing on my mind. I want to go play basketball. Right. The kids who say, "I don't know if I'm going to graduate." Boom. Stress management. Yeah, that's real. All our staff would tell you this is real. Um, kids feeling stress, right? and being aware that they feel stressed and how can we help build systems to help manage that to navigate that with them. It's a good call out. >> I'll turn over the mic, but I wanted to say personally thank you so much. >> Thank you >> for the work, for the service, for engaging this. I wish we could just have Dwayne sometimes for the entire board meeting. >> You will be missed and uh I hope that you will still pick up the phone and take calls of questions because >> I'm

176sure we'll have some. But I really want to thank you for everything you've always done to help not dodge hard questions either. Confront some of our gaps >> and where we can do better head on because that gives me a lot of confidence that we will. >> Thank you Dr. Schmidz for your response. I just wanted to add a little bit more context. The stress management piece. I think one of the things about living and working in a high performing community is that we have really high expectations for each other >> and we shouldn't lower them. Want to be really clear. But this is that data point is one of the primary reasons that mental health and belonging is equally as one of one of our priorities as literacy and graduation with options and we

177need to continue to figure out how to focus on that and make sure we're meeting kids who need us the most. Going director Havlla going back to uh your first question around how do we take that one data point around students with who might be experiencing an economic disadvantage and how do we disrupt that? Uh to me to to not overly simplified, but the students who are on the margins, they need and deserve more. And I think we're challenged as a system and as a governance team that when you think of the bridge to the next conversation that we're about to have and as schools are wrestling with their budgets and where reductions have to be made, it's not surprising that students on the margins are the ones that are impacted the most by that.

178You know, we have one of our elementary school principles that I won't name by name is sitting in the room right now. I think it's the last two times that I've observed and went to their school. I went into a classroom because they were subbing in the classroom that day with the students who were most marginalized in that school. That's not in the future. That's happening right now in our system. And so when you think about the budgetary challenges that we're experiencing that are leading to class sizes growing, music, art, physical education starting to I want to be really careful with my words here. We had an army of those teachers here tonight who bring joy and spirit in spite of the challenges that they're experiencing in many instances having to be shared by multiple

179schools. many of them on part-time contracts and fighting for survival where some of them don't even have benefits any longer. That's not sustainable if we want to continue to improve students who are on the margins and their connections to their personal interests and passions. That to me, those teachers and those students, they represent the soul of this district. This entire meeting started celebrating that soul. But that soul of who we are and what we value is at risk as a result of these budgetary challenges that are not makebelieve. They're very real. We've heard just as the comprehensive planning committee presented to this board, I think it was our last meeting, within the last meeting or two, that principles have already over the past year where we've had to make $12 million in staffing reductions where

180mental health specialists have to be reduced, supports and paraprofessionals to support students with IEPs have been reduced. And we're not even talking about the budget. We're not even talking about what we're needing to do to balance our budget going into next year. Those are things that have happened over the last couple of years. So what it helps us celebrate this on even a higher level in my opinion like in spite of some of those budgetary challenges, this district continues to thrive in many ways. But if we want to disrupt these data points forever for the students who need us most, we have to figure out ways to put more resources in front of them in order to close those gaps. And the reality of it is we're in a scenario where we're actually reducing resources.

181And I share that with you not to be a gloom and doom superintendent. I continue to be inspired by the incredible work that's happening by this cabinet and how they're leading and shephering different all of our employee groups and inspiring way to continue to figure out ways to do more with less. But it's not sustainable and I think we have to continue to be courageous and brave in naming that because the expectations aren't changing. Um but the reality in terms of the level of resource that we're providing the kids who need us the most is changing every day. So thank you for listening. Dwayne, thank you so much uh for this presentation. Really thorough as always. Um you're a pro and we're going to miss you greatly. Uh you really are a treasure for PSD

182and you have been for many years. Um I wanted to jump back in. My question is similar to Kevin's about the CTE program. I'm so excited about that program. I think it's one of the jewels of our um district. Um you had mentioned that you don't know off the top of your head uh the number of kids with IEPs um who or or 504s who need or who are participating in that and utilizing those courses. Do you have a ballpark or can you can you follow up or have have someone follow up? I'd love to get that out in public, >> get that information out there. Um, I think that's a pathway for a lot of those kids to find um find their passions, find their joy in the district. So, I I would ask

183that if uh if we can if we can get um actual numbers on that. Um I think everybody else has said a lot of the other questions I I had. I'm just looking at the graduation rates um for ELLL kids. Um, that seems to be the where we're dropping. Like you said though, it's it's better than it was. But, um, I think we need to emphasize focus on programs that we know work and work on spreading the word in our system and convincing leaders and buildings to adopt things that might be different and uncomfortable at first, but that have proven record and and then we can >> see that number go back up. So, >> thank you again for everything and your team as well. >> Yeah. >> Others for the moment. Go ahead. >>

184I just have a quick question. Um, who is shaking down St. Brain? How are they getting these incredible graduation rates across the board, >> right? Um, I I can't help but think public school systems are of the same value that rising tides lift all boats. That we all want to see our state scores go up. I can't imagine that they're protective of their information. And is there anyone that's I mean, I assume that we're working with other districts. >> We have a good network of people that work in our district who have friends and connections and colleagues in all the other districts, frankly. and we see each other at case conferences and we connect each other like our department leads connect with their department leads. So there's a lot of well there's a lot of

185like connective tissue between these districts and St. Rain Boulder and Cherry Creek and and Pter I mean we are the four leader districts of this state that are you know large and so yeah we do we do and every uh environment is unique like there are just unique pieces around what they do how they do so it's tempting to say let's just figure out that blueprint it and pull it over here that usually doesn't work and there's usually gold nuggets of pieces that are insightful so yeah rest assured like we do seek that out it's one of the approaches we take. So, >> Ann, thank you. Yeah, this is this is great. >> I'm glad we got to interact on camera. Say, have you ever heard of the Baze Estimator? >> No. >> The empirical

186Baze estimator. Now, it's spelled a little differently than your name, but it sounds the same and it's one of my favorite things in statistics. So, when I first saw your last name, I'm like, Baze, man, that's great. Is that how you pronounce your name exactly? Baze. Baze. >> Baze. Oh, good. Y >> perfect. >> Yeah. the empirical bay estimator. >> Don't Google my spelling. >> Little side fact. >> I'm appreciating you geeking out. This is great. >> Yeah, >> please go ahead. >> Can I just respond to one thing about St. Brain that I've noticed. Um, this is from the Google. >> Um, they cover a 411 square mile area serving students from communities as Longmont Erie, Federick, Firestone, Me and Niwat I think. Naiwat, excuse me. >> Come on, man. >> Pter covers 1,800

187square miles by comparison. And one thing that we learned, the fact a fact that I factoid that I like is that our geographic sprawl is one and a half times the size of the state of Delaware. So, I don't know if that has anything to do with it too, but we have different challenges than some of these other peer districts that I think is also important for us to keep not an excuse, but also a calibration because if we're still targeting them, >> even though we have the challenges that we that we continue to face, I mean, that that gives me some inspiration. >> I just want to close to we are good partners with other districts and they are good partners with us. We have people on this team that have gone off and

188helped other districts in specific areas where they want some consultation and help likewise. And so yeah, they and and contexts are different and talent is not all in PSD. There's talent there, too. So, we're open to it. >> I don't know if I want to go that far. >> All right. I went a That was a bridge too far. >> Bridge too far. >> Okay. >> Uh I do actually have a question. Um, so you were saying that attendance is reported differently in different spaces. Can you just give an example of like how do we do it and maybe if you have no like one or two other that are tweaks different? >> All I can tell you is that the state of Colorado doesn't require an identical. Now if you really wanted to know

189more, Bud or someone on Bud's team could give you an in-depth explanation to nuance differences. I know enough to know that the state of Colorado doesn't require a really uh um um a methodology that is exactly the same from district to district. So, a student's 10 minutes late or 15 minutes late, at what point 12 minutes late, when does that become an absence, right? If they miss one out of three classes, there's all these little possible rules. Like all things are when you start to program it, you get into the details and there's just different ways to come up with that. So, I know enough to know that it's not consistent perfectly, but I'm careful to say it doesn't mean all that data is just noise. There's something there for sure. It's just not laser

190precise if you're trying to compare between two districts. >> So, the state just takes all these numbers and averages them and >> well, they report out they report back out what we report to them. And so, yeah, the the differences flow through into those statewide numbers. >> Thank you. >> They don't clean it up. that. Yeah. >> Is that fair, bud? >> Okay. Yeah, >> great. That's difficult to use, but I appreciate at least naming it. Uh, any Does anyone else have a question? >> Sure. I think we're good. Thank you so much for being here. >> Okay, thank you. I'm here. Okay. Well, thank you so much. You guys are too kind. Uh, we're going to take a short break and try to be back by 8:35. Yes. All right, we're gonna come right

191back in. Just one minute late, so not too bad. Thank you for waiting patiently for us. All right, the next uh item on our agenda is our budget update. Um Brian, >> there we go. Tonight, we look forward to hearing the budget update from our chief of staff, Dr. Lauren Hooton, and our chief finance officer, Dave Mononttoya. Welcome both of you. >> Good evening board. Uh tonight we're here to provide a high level update on financial developments at both the federal, state, and local level. Um and so we're going to get right into the presentation. Um we're going to talk about some uh some changes, some things that uh we see on the horizon. Um there's some things we know, there's some things that are more speculative in nature. I'll try to draw those out

192during the presentation. So the first thing is uh just kind of as we kicked it off at the uh the high level um an update on the financial developments is that we continue to have a grind at the federal level at the national level impacting our grant funding, entitlement funding. Um and there's just a lot of instability still. Uh we had a $9 million mental health grant that uh went away and so that was kind of one of the first pieces that we uh that we saw coming on this horizon. There were days where we'd show up to work and we'd hear that the federal funding was gone and then later in that day we'd hear that it was restored. So, um it's completely there's a lot of instability in the federal funding and I

193think it's just I think there's that goes without saying. Uh most of us understand that. Uh there is also some challenges at the state level. Uh we have a $1.2 billion state budget deficit that the state is trying to manage. Um this is uh also probably in in relation to some of the federal instability that the state is feeling. Um and in fact that's a big part of it and um and so that is a real uh a real barrier to us getting our budget uh solved for next year. And then at the local level uh we do have declining enrollment continuing to to happen. Um you know in the past there was some question as to whether that was really real. Um it is continuing to happen every year and in fact when we

194look to next year our current uh projections for uh that were finalized in January 30th for next year uh we are um currently estimated to decline another 16 654 students. So that was 654 students decline. Um and so we are still in a declining uh mode in this district and and that trend is not changing. um getting into the impacts on PSD's budget. Uh we the the first two bullet points I think are probably more known to us at this point and um and as we go through down the list um there's a little bit more uh that's not known or that is still being developed at the state level. I'll try to draw out what we know and what we don't as I go through this. Um the first bullet point is talking about

195base PPR um in the state and uh and really what what's happening here just like it happened all through even after the great recession and into uh the negative factor and budget stabilization factor is that the state will be required constitutionally to provide a 2.3% inflation rate um to the base funding in the school finance formula that will generate additional revenue approximately about $7 million of new funds. Um and so that is something that typically happens in every budget cycle and we would expect that that would happen in this budget cycle as well. Um what is uh what is coming on the other side of this that is going to negate all of that increase that I just talked about is that we have a decreased number in funded pupils again as I mentioned that's

196654 fewer students that we're anticipating in the district next year. And if you do the math with our current PPR rate, um that's about a $7 million reduction in in funding because of the loss of students. So if you're keeping up with the math, I just kind of netted us out to zero. And when you do the real math behind it, um it's probably a little bit more negative. Um once you net those two numbers together at that point, um those two bullet points are fairly well known at this point. Um and so I I feel that those are things that we should count on and and we will be planning um accordingly with the budget. Uh moving forward um into the next bullets. Um I think it's important to understand that we're here presenting

197this tonight as transparently as we can based on what we know and what our knowledge is dictating. Um, that's not to say that we know everything that's going to happen and and I I can pretty much say with confidence that as I go down this list, things will change as we go through the legislative process. Um, this happens pretty much every time we go through these budget contractions. Um, there will be ideas that are thrown out at the state. They will be negated. There will be new ideas that come in and we'll just have to pay attention to that as it moves forward. So, moving into bullet point three, um we are um possibly anticipating continued reduction of our averaging uh component that's in the school finance formula. And simply for those that are watching,

198what that means is the school finance act of uh in Colorado that dictates the funding to Colorado school districts is based on a primarily based on the number of students you have times a PPR rate. um the state many many years ago and it's always been in the formula since I remember is that there is an averaging component component built into the formula and it was designed to help declining districts as they decline. Um and so what the averaging does is it basically takes your five-year average or four-year average now and it will take the larger four-year average or your actual count and if you're in decline your average will always be higher than your actual count. So, so this is something that was kicked around at the state last year as they were talking

199about budget adjustments. It is coming back up again. Um, and so we are paying attention to that. If averaging were to completely go away, that could be another $7 million reduction for the school district. Again, I'm not saying that that is going to happen. We don't have a bill or anything that is in legislature to to dictate that, but this is just what we're hearing and it may or may not come to fruition. The uh the third the fourth bullet point I think is another idea that we've heard at the state where um this is more of a technical uh issue um really in how districts receive specific ownership taxes and and really it's a change in practice where instead of just picking up the specific ownership tax that is generated from our 27 mills

200in the school finance act the proposal is that they would also be looking at specific ownership tax generated from mill levies and bonds. Um what this means is that the state would just have a direct dollar for-dollar reduction in the amount that they're supporting in equalization. Again, as we get through this list, I think that um the specula there's there's some speculation as to whether this is actually going to happen or not. This bullet point itself impacts large districts specifically. And so I suspect that there will be a lot of lobby efforts to try to change this uh this idea and and I'm and I know that we will be part of that. Um we also um are having other budget impacts. Um you know we have uh health increases uh health insurance increases that

201we uh may be contemplating. Compensation increases are going to be extremely hard in this environment. Um but if there was compensation that would need to be factored in and would add to further reductions that we would need to balance the budget as we look at all of the information as we know it today. And again, I'm really trying to emphasize that we really know bullet point one, bullet point two. Much of this is the rest of this is speculation or discussions that are happening. Um, but the range of reductions could be anywhere from 8 million to 17 million in PSD general fund as a result to one or multiple of these levers being pulled if they're necessary to balance the state's budget. Um, the note at the bottom is important. I've me mentioned it multiple

202times. This is not final. these estimates will change in the coming months and um and this is typically how this works in the legislative session. I would expect that we will see multiple changes between now and April. Um so we'll just have to pay attention to that as it moves forward. Um moving into uh planning for the future um and and what this means for the district. Uh what this means is that we will be going through a reduction of budgets. Um that is pretty obvious to me from the last slide that that is what's what's coming at us and that's what we need to be preparing for. Um to prepare for that, we are currently looking and evaluating central office reductions. Um we're not prepared to talk about those tonight, but these are things

203that we're working on right now. We've also um and these in in the next things that I'm going to talk about are really more in relationship to the 264 um kid decline than the 1.2 billion shortfall at the state. So, I'm trying to uncouple those because they're they're not necessarily related. Um, and so what I'm talking about here is that there will be some adjustments to our studentbased budgeting formula. And um, the first part, the first bullet point there is it's really a formulaic thing. As we lose students, the formula provides less money for those students. It's a it's a calculation. So there's nothing that we're changing here. This is just how the formula works. So fewer kids means that there will be fewer fewer budget deployed out to the schools, meaning fewer staff, fewer

204paras, um, fewer resources. In addition to that, we are also making a a change u based on some feedback we got from the community and from the board uh last year around how we are applying the size adjustment to our schools in the studentbased budgeting. And the change that we are really um looking at is bringing forward a a uh situation where no elementary school above 400 would be getting a size adjustment and any um middle school over 700 would not get a size adjustment any longer. So that was based on the feedback, some values that we heard from the board and the community around um how the uh the small school uh money was being used in 4A. Um we do continue to have within our uh formula this new idea that came about

205from 4A and that is a floor for our schools as they get smaller. And so as we look at next year um we have more and more small schools that are getting more and more of that floor funding. And so that is going to be an increase in cost in the the budget formula. Um there will be um all of this and and I think as you're as we're talking about magnitudes and and just for context uh we're talking about it about an $8 million reduction just in the first two bullet points there. Um really what that means is that this will require reductions in staff. We we can't make this this uh this level of reductions without impacting staff. 85% of our budget is staff and so that it is it is really um

206to some extent unavoidable in a budget situation like this. Um just a little bit of uh context for those that that may want to hear it. Um this is very reminiscent to what um I experienced during the the great recession of 910. The magnitudes are very similar if you take into account the time value of money. The magnitudes are almost very similar to what was being discussed back then. Um I I hope that the state can come up with some creative ideas to avoid coming to what what we're seeing on the horizon, but in line with executive limitation 2.4 2.3 um we're required to provide the board with conservative estimates of both revenue and expenditures. And so if we were not I would not be doing that if I was not bringing this news to

207you. I'm hoping that the news improves as we go through the legislative cycle. Um just in reflection and kind of thinking back to the great recession um during that time we cut $12 million from the budget. Um so again that was a while ago. So time value money would apply to that and that was about 139 positions both all administrative classified and licensed. Um very similar magnitudes to what I experienced at that time. Um I'm going to turn it over to uh Dr. Dr. Hootin and she's going to go through some of the employee uh employee group uh or employee agreement language and I do think I have another piece in here in just a second. >> All right. So, as we're talking about reduction to our budgets, as Dave mentioned, 85% of our budget

208is staffing. So, we are in a position where we are looking at staffing reductions across the system. I do want to start this by saying that we understand that staffing impacts have an incredible impact on individuals, on families, on our community in a very broad way. So that is not lost on us as we move through this process. We will do everything we can to support our staff as we move through the reductions of budgets and provide that staffing support in alignment with what is articulated in the employee agreement. So what I will be walking through here for all of you are some highlevel pieces of the employee agreement that the board does need to be aware of because you have specific responsibilities as related to those articles in the employee agreement. So we will

209be specifically talking about employee agreement articles 14 15 and 17. Article 14 concerns licensed staffing. Article 15 concerns classified as well as licensed staffing. and article 17 specifically addresses administrative and professional staffing. In this discussion this evening, we'll be focusing on the article 14 language and specifically the concept of a reduction in force. And again, that is because the board has a role to play uh as we move through this process. So for clarity, the uh reduction in force is a process by which the district may cancel the contracts of continuing uh contract teachers or educators in our system due to fiscal exigency situations, which is what we find ourselves in now. Uh when uh educators enter our system, licensed staff enter our system, they are probationary staff members for three years. At the fourth

210year, they become continuing contract staff, which essentially means that they are guaranteed a contract going forward. If we are in a space of essentially fiscal emergency, we do uh have the provision in the employee agreement in article 14 to enact a reduction in force to essentially uh discontinue any number of those continuing contracts that may be necessary. I want to very much emphasize at this moment in time that this discussion of reduction in force does not mean that a reduction in force will happen. This is a preparatory step for what we may be facing down the road in the spring as we as we work towards balancing the district's budget. So I just want that to be very very clear in this room and to anyone who is watching this uh presentation after this meeting.

211So, this is really a procedural step and an informative step that is necessary as outlined in the employee agreement. I also want to emphasize that this is part of our commitment to being transparent with our staff and with our community about what we are experiencing and what and how we're planning for the future. So with that said, uh, as we talk about bringing forward the possibility of a reduction in force as outlined in article 14, we're doing this at this point in time in the budgeting cycle because there are certain timelines that are guaranteed to our employees in the employee agreement that we do have to meet. Those timelines are also associated with the work that our principles and our department directors are doing right now to establish their staffing allocations for the next school

212year. There's an intersection between what's required in the employee agreement, the budgeting process that is occurring now and over the next few weeks that has implications on how we actually staff our buildings preparing for the 2627 school year in the coming months. We often hear why can't you wait until the state legislature settles their budget. Unfortunately, that doesn't usually happen until the first week of May, which would not allow us to meet the timelines that we are required to meet. in the employee agreement and would not allow us to sufficiently prepare for the next school year in terms of the staffing that our buildings need to allocate and plan for. There are a couple of other pieces that are important to why we are bringing this forward now. Those are the fund bal fund balance

213policies which is outlined in EL 2.3 and EL2.4 as well as information about our reserves and I'm going to ask Dave to step in for a minute just to speak to those items and then we'll come back to the procedural elements. >> Yeah. So, so why this is important is if we um as we face reductions like this and it's important for us to balance our budget. Um and I would encourage the board to go back and review executive limitation 2.3 and executive limitation 2.4. In there it talks and I'll just kind of talk in generalities. It talks about me needing to maintain a balanced budget and there's certain conditions where we may where we can maybe talk about where that doesn't happen. Where that has occurred in the past is when we've had good

214fund balance. Um but because of some draw downs of fund balance over the last couple years, our fund balance is at the minimum level that our fund balance policy DBA which is a board policy approved by the board. Um that policy dictates that we must maintain 3 to 5% unencumbered unreserved funds um in the uh in that fund balance policy. If we are unable to balance the budget moving into next year, what that fund balance policy will require because that then our fund balance would drop below that 3% reserve. What it would require is us to immediately institute reductions to bring that back into balance. And depending on how deep we go below the 3%, we have to restore it faster. So if you go below the 2%, you're making those reductions as quickly as

215you can. um if you're between the two to 3% um there's a little bit more time to make those reductions, but the fund balance policy will require you to make reductions. Um and so that's that's important. Uh this is a little bit different than when we were in the great recession that I was mentioning earlier. Um our district had a lot more fund balance at that time. We were above the 3 to 5% uh limit and so there were certain things that we could take advantage of because of that. We do not have those at our disposal this round. So we will need to balance the budget. Okay. So, at this point, we're going to talk a little bit more about the steps that are associated with a reduction in force process as article 14

216outline specifically. And I'm attaching a timeline here so that we're all on the same page about where we are in the next several weeks and months. So, as we move into the process of potentially having to reduce the number of of certified staff that we have on our rosters, the human resources department is responsible for preparing seniority lists as well as lists of endorsements, which essentially is what teachers are authorized to teach uh and the years of service records. All of those elements are used to determine placements when we end up in a situation where we potentially have more certified or licensed staff on our rosters than we have positions for going into the next school year. So, anyone who would like to look at article 14, this outlines those criteria very specifically there. Um,

217and again, I will say it many many times, this does not mean we are doing a reduction enforce or a riff. This is just the process that needs to be followed as we prepare for using that mechanism if it proves to be necessary as we move through the budget process in the spring. So the next step in this process according to the employee agreement is that the board must adopt a resolution that authorizes the district to take action to begin the process of implementing a riff. If the board were to take that action on February 24th, the district would convene a riff committee. This consists of three administrators and three licensed staff members. Those administrators are appointed by the superintendent. The licensed staff members are appointed by Pter Education Association or PEA. Uh this also

218is stipulated specifically in the employee agreement. The responsibility of this group is to review the data that we have available to us about staffing needs uh and staffing that we have on our rosters. that group will essentially have the opportunity to dive into that data and recommended reductions. It is then the superintendent's responsibility to make a decision on reduction areas and the number of positions to be reduced. This is coinciding with the beginning of March because this is the period of time in which we're working with our principles to identify how many staff and what specific staff they need in their building for the 2627 school year. So this is the point at which there's an intersection between the possibility of needing a reduction in force and the spring action and overage process that we

219go through every year as we're looking at staffing in buildings. So at this point in time, we'd be working closely with principles to take a look at their building budget, their staffing needs, and where they may have a need for additional staff or they may have identified that they have more staff on their roster than they will need to meet the needs of their students in the coming year. At this point in time, we're very much into the overage process. To give a very, very short version of what the overage process is, essentially we work with our building leaders to identify their staffing need. In some cases, they may have continuing contract staff for whom there is not a placement in their building going forward. Uh at that point in time, those continuing contract staff

220are placed into overage and we look for a placement for them in all of the schools in the district. So the intention is to place all of our continuing contract staff. Uh if we are in a position in which we cannot place all of our continuing contract staff, that is the point at which we're talking about a reduction in force being formalized. So we're looking at the end of March, beginning of April when we will know that for sure. Uh the board at that point if we do determine that we have more continuing contract staff than we have placements for the board would need to receive a formal recommendation for contract cancellations for those continuing contract staff. Under the employee agreement they are entitled to individual hearings at that time which would be scheduled with

221the board of education. That process would move forward over about a 10day period and then we would finalize all overage placements and any riff notifications that need to be finalized at that point in time. We need to complete all of this work by June 1st. This is a very complex process which is why we are bringing this to the board now so that we can prepare our system, prepare our staff to adapt as we move through the next several months. We know that there are a lot of questions that are going to be asked about reduction in force and so we want to take an opportunity to answer some of those that we anticipate coming now. We know that there are likely to be others. We will provide as much information as our staff needs

222as we move through this process. Um so the first question that we anticipate hearing is what happens if a if the board decides not to authorize a reduction in force. So there are a couple of considerations for us to keep in mind if that were to occur. If we do not authorize a reduction in force and we have more continuing contract teachers, let's say in one subject area than we need, that means essentially that we'll be retaining those uh subject area teachers on our staff and potentially not filling positions that do need to be filled. And the reason that this can happen, and we'll get to this a little bit with the last question, is that teachers are endorsed to teach certain subject areas and certain levels. When we go through a process like overage,

223it is possible that we will have a mismatch between who's qualified to teach what at what level and the positions that are open and available for continuing contract teachers. So there is a potential of misalignment that could happen in that space. If the board does not authorize a riff, the district would be looking at reductions in other areas as well as was mentioned previously. We are already in the process of making reductions to staffing in other areas across the system. So those reductions would be deeper in those spaces. The next frequently asked question that we're anticipating is what happens if the financial forecast improves and we don't need as many reductions to balance the budget. We hope that this is the situation that we are in. Our finance team will monitor what's happening at the

224state very closely over the next several months. If we get concrete signals that we are going to be in a better place, we will adjust of course. So I need everyone to also hear that very clearly. We are not set in stone on enacting a rift and we will adjust course as necessary and as we have concrete information that would inform a change in direction. Uh what happens if more must be cut from the PSD budget to balance it. If we end up in this situation after we've already gone through a series of reductions, we would essentially need to start that reduction process over again. Um, this is something that we as a system try to avoid because it makes it very difficult to plan for the next school year and appropriately staff our buildings

225if we're doing multiple series of cuts over time. The system did experience mid-year cuts during COVID and we would very much like to avoid having that situation in the future. Um but if we need to because there is greater deficit then we are anticipating we would begin this process essentially over again to identify necessary reductions. Uh as I mentioned earlier we often hear why can't we wait until the close of the legislative session when we know for sure what the state's going to do with its budget. Simply put their timeline does not align with ours. Uh the the legislative session will not end until approximately the first week in May. All of the processes that are associated with staffing buildings take several months to execute and we owe our employees decisions by June 1st. Uh

226we also want to do right by our employees who are transitioning out of our system. Give them ample notice so that they can continue to pursue their career options elsewhere. That's critically important as we think about this timeline as well. And then finally, why is it possible that continuing contract teachers would experience a reduction in force in lie of impacting only probationary teachers? So, typically when we are reducing in the licensed area and really any area in our system, we're going to look for uh reductions through attrition first. The next space we'd look through look for reductions would be in probationary staff. So, staff who are not guaranteed continuing contracts at this point in time. If those options have been exhausted that that's the point at which we move into the reduction in force space.

227As I mentioned earlier, there can be a situation in which we have uh a cohort or a number of teachers that only have certain endorsements and can only teach certain subject areas at certain levels and we may not have open positions for those subject areas and those levels at which point it is possible a probationary staff member would remain and a continuing contract uh educator's contract would be discontinued at that point in time. So there's a lot of kind of matching of of qualifications and uh matching based on what is outlined in the employee agreement as well that will dictate this process. So next steps as we move forward the budget design team or BDT will continue to meet through the spring. This group meets every year. They provide feedback on the budget as it

228is developed. BDT consists of representation of our building leaders, our department leaders. There are also representatives from all of our employee associations on the BDT group. They will continue to engage with the budget as we move over the next several months. The finance team will continue to monitor developments at the state and federal level. They will provide regular updates to the board in the next several months. You're probably going to have a budget update on just about every board meeting going forward through the spring. The superintendent will also provide regular updates to the community about the budget and changes that we anticipate coming. We are committed to being transparent with what we are facing. So, we will be sharing a lot of information with our community and keeping everyone apprised of what we are grappling

229with as we prepare for the 2627 school year. As is always the case, the board will receive the preliminary and proposed budgets that the finance team develops in April and in May. That is part of a three-step budget process that occurs annually. The board must then adopt a final budget with all reductions that are contemplated across our system both in operating as well as staffing budgets no later than June 30th per statute. So what we need from the board we'll we'll close here and then we'll take questions. So we as administration believe that in alignment with the fund balance policy and what is stipulated in EL 2.3 and EL2.4 4 authorizing a reduction in force is needed. As a reminder, this does not mean that a reduction in force will automatically occur. It is giving

230the district the mechanism to use this this uh process if it proves to be necessary as we get to later in the spring and we have a clearer picture of what we're facing. Um I also want to reiterate we are not asking the board to vote this evening. We are asking you all for guidance around whether there is opposition to the district bringing forward a resolution as is required in the employee agreement in article 14 specific to giving the district the um the authorization to implement a reduction in force if it proves to be necessary. Okay. So we'll take questions at this point in time. >> Thank you. Would anyone like to get us started? Go for it. This may be a technical question. Um Dave, you talked about before um and I think this

231was in connection with 4A, but when we have cash flow shortages, we often um go to our lenders and ask for um either interest free or some limited cash flow. Do you recall what I'm talking about? >> Yeah. So, we do participate in the interest interest free cash cash program. And what it it what that's designed to do is in Colorado, the state recognizes that property taxes don't come in until the spring, >> right? >> And so, we don't get that cash until late in the spring. What the state does is it goes out and issues debt financing on behalf of the districts. the districts can use that debt financing, use that cash to get through those cash poor months until the property taxes come back in. When the property taxes come in, we must

232immediately pay those back to the state. Um, it does not resolve us from balancing our budget. We can't we can't draw or borrow from the state to balance our budget. >> That wasn't my question, but you anticipated close to where I was going is that my understanding at least is some of those is that there's there's debt ratios that would trigger instances of default. So I guess another question I have is does that is this implicated by if the board doesn't move forward with the riff and we have an imbalance of the budget would that be an instance of default that we should be worried about on some of those >> Yeah. >> See you're right it is a very technical question. I'm not going to be able to go too deep with that tonight

233but what I'm reflecting on is the board's audit committee many many years ago created this fund balance policy DBA and what the fund balance policy contemplated in it was various different things. It was thinking about cash flow. was thinking about debt ratings. It was thinking about all sort there was a couple other things but those were the big ones that are coming to my mind. Um we utilized our bond underwriter RBC capital markets to help us determine what that was way back when. Um and we I think we actually used some attorney help at that time. It was a long time ago probably a good 18 years ago. Um, but to your point, if we're unable to, and that's why the fund balance policy came into about because if we're unable to balance the budget

234or if our reserves dip to a unforeseen low position, our debt credit, our reading, our ratings will start to drop. Um, we may have trouble getting other things. There's a lot of problems with that. Um, and the other thing around the debt, the um the reserves is it's also calculated in as part of the cash flow. So we know we have some reserves as part of the cash. Now that doesn't get us all the way through January and February, but it is part of the the equation and the state actually looks at that when we submit for that interest relo. They want to know how much reserves we have because they're contemplating that factoring that in. >> Please one question I have is I'm presumptive that there will be a second vote. If next board

235meeting we're saying yes, start the process. What I don't didn't see in the slides is at some point there will be the final >> yes, do it vote. And so I I did I just missed that or >> at your April 14th meeting. So the the first step in this process would be for the board to authorize this mechanism if it is necessary. That will happen on February 24th if you all give us the guidance to bring it forward. Uh that then will kind of start the process that we will we will track through the next several months. The next point at which the board will be making a a formal determination via a vote is at your April 14th meeting where you will receive a recommendation for contract cancellations. You will need to take

236action on that at that meeting. which means we'll still be making an estimated guess on state outcomes potentially with budget. I I'm I'm just Yes, >> it's it's a yucky situation. I don't want to pretend otherwise. Um just trying to make sure I fully understand the situation. >> Yes, that is that is accurate because the legislature usually does not conclude its process until the first week in May. And at that point in time, the district would not have enough runway, nor would it be fair to our employees to kind of keep them in a holding pattern until that point in time at which we would have to complete any sort of staff related actions before the guaranteed deadline on June 1st. >> Okay. And what is your sense given the data that came out that

237showed roughly twothirds of the districts in the state are losing students? what's your sense for how many of them are facing a similar situation or or have already impacted enabled this or started the process? >> So, at this point in time, most districts are kind of at the place that we are in terms of determining how to move forward. We know that other major districts along the front range are making multi-million dollar reductions to their budgets. Each district is approaching that in very different ways based on the circumstances of their district and but based on whether or not they have an employee agreement with their employees and the stipulations that are outlined in that agreement. But I will say to say that in a very short way, we are not alone in facing multi-million dollar

238reductions across uh this is something that we're seeing across the state. On the April 14th meeting, will that recommendation include how many contract cancellations? >> Yes, it will include the specific contract cancellations, >> please. It's my understanding that the circumstances that you've just shared paint a a really grim picture of what might be coming, but it's also my understanding um Dr. Spain and I were able to visit with principal Hy at Bacon and he had just received their budget and had to share with his team that it was twice as small like they had a deficiency double of what he had originally anticipated. And so my question would be, is this happening across the district? And is this reflective that even if these circumstances that you shared earlier don't come to fruition, we still need

239to consider a riff. >> So I'll take the the piece around staffing and I'll ask Dave to step in around budget specifically. Yes. Uh Director Bass to to your question. Even in the absence of a change to averaging or to specific ownership tax, the decline in enrollment in the district would put us in a position in which we would be considering a reduction in force. Again, just to be clear, not a decision. We will go through several steps before making that final determination, but yes, we would be in the same situation. >> And and I would add that um from the budget perspective for the schools, um they would all expect to experience a decline in enrollment. They have been experiencing, especially our elementary schools. They've been experiencing that for many years now. So, I

240would expect that that would be something that they were contemplating. I think what you're also hearing is that there are going to be some schools that are feeling the reduction of the size adjustment um because it is being targeted specifically at schools that are above 400 at the elementary and above 700 at the middle schools. >> Can you talk Sorry, I guess I'm curious about like 4A and how that factors into here. Does that not at all. >> So 4A um freed up about $4 million of general fund dollars to put to small school support. Um what we're seeing in the most recent runs that'll be released on Friday is that the tier one and tier 2 supports which are our zerobased tier supports and our um and our floor funding supports will exceed $4

241million just this next year. Considering the um ambiguity on what the final budget is going to be, could you um walk us briefly through how we would gain employees back um if the budget isn't as severe as it as it um indicates. >> Yeah. So, article 14, which specifically pertains to our licensed certified staff, does have recall provisions that are that are outlined in it. There's quite a lot of detail in the steps of those recall provisions, which I I'm not going to try to walk through in this space, but we would follow those those procedures specifically if we were in a situation where we were bringing staff back. I'm just curious. So like because you mentioned like there would be like a reduction in for like if the resolution went through there would be

242a reduction in forest but then somewhere in there you was like we might potentially have to do a second reduction in force. So I'm curious I'm going to assume based on the what you have on April 14th that if you had to do that second wave that would come back to the board too, right? >> Yes. So the board is responsible for formally taking action on continuing contract cancellations. The district cannot do that without board action. So if we went through another round of reductions, we would not bring a new resolution specific to resolution in force if it had already been authorized within this this cycle. Um but we would bring another set of contract cancellations if they were necessary for board approval. The timing of that would be determined upon when when we know

243Sorry. Uh quick question on uh on the communication side of things. Obviously, this is the first public meeting that we're having about this these specifics. How much have the uh the employee groups or at least their leadership been informed about this? Um, is that a plan going forward or have they already been clued in on this? Um, at this point, >> we have been sharing information with our associations about the budget reality that we're in for quite some time. Uh, we also have shared this information with all of our building leaders and department leaders. >> Great. Thank you. I think transparency, communication, super important, especially with something this uh devastating. Dave, can you provide as much as you can? How solid the projections are by the time we would be informing staff at the end

244of March and by the time we would have to take a vote in April. >> Yeah, I I wish I could, but I can't. It's going to be dependent on the legislature, and I'm reflecting on prior experience of these times where we don't know these answers until late. We're going to do our best. we're going to have to quote unquote call the ball at one point to say this is the number we're solving for because of the timelines. Um, but we may not have a complete picture as we're moving through this process and it's it's uncomfortable, but that's that's how this works. I'm always looking for solutions and uh and ways to kind of not just accept things. Um so in terms of what people can do, I think the number one thing is call

245your legislator at the state house. We need decisions sooner rather than later. You know, enrollment is a big problem. that's the loss of of kids is is a big problem that's ours but also other districts but um but the state funding the fact that they're a billion dollars for the second year in a row um short is a is a huge problem and so they need to step up and help school districts with the reality and and uh the consequences of their um inability to to balance a budget. but force them to make decisions on what their priorities are. What are our values as a state? So, call your legislator. That's the number one thing. Enrollment wise, I will continue to talk about marketing. Uh we need to attract people back to our district that

246are going to alternative schools outside of our district. We need to do that. I know there's birth rate issues, but there are several hundred kids that could be PSD kids that aren't here and that would alleviate us having to make these tough decisions, too. So, think of it from that side of the ledger as well. What can we do to bring more kids back and what can we do at the state legislator legislature? Um, any other ideas? I'd love to hear of what can be done to help avoid this. >> Okay. I don't >> I think to be honest as we move through the budgeting process and we're facing the kind of magnitude of a deficit that we're we're looking at, we will be exploring all creative solutions that might be in front of us

247what exactly those might be. I I'm not in a position to share right now. Um but the district, I would say in the time that I have worked here has worked very very hard to ensure that we have as many qualified staff in front of our students as possible and we will continue to do that. Uh, Director Shar, you may not want to hear this, but >> um, when we started talking about the the BS factor that the amount of money that we've lost from the BS factor from legislator, it was, correct me if I'm wrong, Dave, somewhere around 350 million over a 10-year period. >> 330 330, excuse me, thank you. 330 million over a 10-year period. An operating budget of ours around 450 million. That's like twothirds or excuse me three quarters of

248our entire operating budget for a cycle that's been reduced by BS. So in one of our meetings recently someone uh shared a a lawsuit from Washington where a school district had sued state of the legislature in Washington and got some good relief there. My home state of Kentucky, there was a lawsuit named Rose versus Council for Better Education where essentially lawsuits have held the general assembly to task. I'm not advocating for that in this room. I'm not suggesting that PSD um declares any kind of legal war with the general assembly. But you asked for I I think what we're hearing tonight, at least I'll just react to my individually, is that we keep getting bad news and you ask about our locus of control. From my perspective, it's scant to zero. It's nothing as far

249as what we're talking about. Um I can't force birth rates to go in an upward trajectory. I can't force people to migrate into our community if it's not affordable to live here. I can't force affordable housing. So, what we're talking about is the locus of control what we can do and we have to hold the line more or less is what I'm hearing too based on sort of the budgetary climate that we find ourselves in. Now, we don't know what's going to happen with averaging. We don't know what's going to happen to that specific property ownership tax. Those have got me nervous as well, Dave. But I think if we're starting to think about not getting in this death spiral year after year after year, we may have to start thinking drastically. And one thought

250I had is to hold the legislature to task for what's happened to this district and in particular. >> I would I would add that there has been at least in my time here a handful of lawsuits that have gone to the state. They have not been successful. Um, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to try. >> Okay, this is just me sense making out loud. So, the way I'm making sense of this is I'm viewing it through the lens of like a household budget. So, I got a household budget. Uh, I got more expenses than I have coming in. So, I got to make some changes. So, do I want to pay my mortgage, my light bill, so on and so forth. Um, but what it sounds like, we don't have any like great

251aunts or uncles. Um, nobody that's going to give us a loan. >> Like, so I guess I'm just trying to like that's the context that I'm understanding what you're saying. So, do you think that's a fair sense that I've made from what you're describing? >> Yes, absolutely. And I I wish that we had some great force out there that would provide us with sufficient funding, but frankly, this is a reality. >> Or imagine if your employer kept changing your salary year after year and you had no idea how much money you were going to make every year and plan your household budget. I think that's somewhat of a more apt analogy and I'll let you draw your own conclusions as to who the employer would be in that. >> Yeah. >> Any final thoughts? I

252just want to thank you all. I guess I What? Sorry, y'all. Um, it's been a rough night. I'mma cry all night. Um, I guess Sorry. I just wanted to say I I appreciate you naming giving people a heads up. I think that really matters. I like I appreciate that transparency. I think sometimes I like to say decisions go into a dark abyss and then decisions come out. But um it gives people an opportunity to plan and to prepare and if the worst doesn't happen, great. Um so I just want to say I am appreciative of that and thank you for considering that advanced notice as we consider the people within our district. >> I I appreciate that comment and I I do think and because Lauren mentioned it earlier, I'll mention it again. Um transparency

253is at the core of what we do. Um if we're not transparent, we're not doing our jobs. So, I know we're not taking a vote tonight, but it might be handy if anyone has any concerns about the vote coming April 20 or not April, sorry, February 24th. Now would be a good time to state them. >> Do you need us I mean, have you gotten what you needed as far as what the I think the question on the slide was are we going to do it or not? if it's not an informal vote, but I'm sorry to hijack, but >> I think to to the the question that was just posed by President Zamora, if there are concerns or objections of us bringing forward a resolution, it would be helpful to know that >> I'll

254go first. No, >> same. >> You don't have to necessarily say anything, but it is helpful to get clarity. I don't have objections to you doing the work. I I think that it's appropriate at this time. >> I I would say the same. Uh I think there there's lots of things that could be said. I I don't think I've talked to anyone who is not absolutely stressed about the fact that we're impacting people um and how to engage in a process like this with empathy to specifically to that fact. And there I don't know if we have any great answers for it except to try and work with everyone that we can. I mean I know we've got a our listening session scheduled on February 19th coming up. So I'm hoping that the community will

255come and talk to us about these things. Um I mean there's a lot of things that are popping. Um and they're I I for myself I would say they feel very fast but change has come at us really really fast. Two years ago I was on the steering committee. It's such a different picture even from two years ago. Um, not just the change of numbers, but the the change of what we're actually getting funding wise. It's it's it feels dramatic and that's probably accurate. We're having to look at everything and so that that hurts for all of us and and these are not easy things for you to share with us. And so I just want to say thank you and and we've got to look at all the levers that we can to keep

256this district doing great things. Uh Andrew, thanks for saying that. I think you and Carla for sure, you know, dead on in terms of I I agree with let's move forward with the work. Along with what Andrew was saying, um you know, I was a new board member two years ago, so this is all fresh and um but we've taken the time. I've been going to the comprehensive planning committee meetings. I'm seeing the data. It's it's dire and um and so reality is we need to we need to finally make some decisions and um not kick the can. So I I you know hope we don't have to do anything but I I agree that we need to at least prepare. I have no objections. >> Would you like to speak to it or you

257>> Okay. Do you have what you need? >> I think we have what we need. And I would just like to say in closing again, our staff is our greatest asset. They are the people in front of our students each and every day. It is our commitment to handle this process with empathy, compassion. As we move forward, we will continue to be transparent. You can expect to hear a lot from us in the coming months so that we can move this forward together. >> Thank you, Lauren and Dave. >> Yes. Thank you very much. >> Oh, we're not there yet. We're solo here. One more thing. You're so close. All right, that moves us to 11.0 board forecasting. This agenda item is an opportunity for board members to discuss topics of interest for future board

258meetings. Would any board member like to start the discussion? Okay, I have one actually based on some of the commentary we had during the uh monitoring report. I would actually like to know when our since our middle school and high school students predominantly want to know more about their stress management. I would like to understand what our middle schools and high schools are doing currently, what they may need, what those students need. anytime a student is coming with an idea, especially at that level with so many of them choosing that that feels like an important thing for us to consider. >> I'll second that because I'm I'm interested in the if we drill down into that, what that does for the mental health and belonging aspect and will there be more connectivity? Will there be

259better response rates when we get our healthy school survey this iteration? Um, I mean that they're I'm gonna use a Scottism. They're they're our customers, right? Our students. So, we need to figure out what we can do to equip them. Um, yeah, I'll just second that. And the other I already mentioned it, but I would like to examine the BSR policy on retaining outside counsel for the board. Again, we can I can work with Autumn on that. We've got an idea. What we need to be able to do is have a couple of bullets that would trigger that so that we have enough flexibility if it's not in this tight hypotheticals that I've provided, but we need to be able to do that. I think we've got some external counsel now that we like that

260have been doing um good work for us on fairly routine public matters. They may have some suggestions of how we can do that. So, uh I don't know how soon that cadence would look like, but when we're going to revise BSR policies, we should probably have that implemented somewhat soon. >> Any other suggestions? Yes, Scott. >> Um I just wanted to reiterate the question I had for Dwayne earlier. I'd like to get uh uh some feedback on uh people with IEPs and 504 like what what are the actual numbers of of them utilizing CTE? I'd like to see that. >> Sorry, I'm wondering is that like a oneliner question or is that something that you want to be like a priority go? Like do you want both? Like just the what it is right now

261and then what we intend to do in the future or is it just what you want you want to know what we are where we are now. >> I'd like to know where we are right now. That's the main thing and then from that number we'll see if we need to improve. >> Okay. Thank you. All right. Any other Okay. Now I think we are on to 12.0. Can you please? >> I move the board enter executive session for the following purposes. one to confer with an attorney for the board to receive legal advice on specific legal questions relating to CRS section 2230.5104 as authorized by CRS section 246424B and two to develop the strategy of the school district for negotiations relating to the 2026 2027 collective bargaining agreement or employment contracts as authorized by

262CRS section 246424E3. Individuals invited to join the board in executive session are superintendent Brian Kingsley, chief of staff Dr. Lauren Hooton, lead assistant superintendent Dr. Tracy Gal, chief finance officer Dave Mononttoya, and general counsel Autumn Aspen. >> Thank you. Can I get a second? Thank you. Andrew and Leah, can you please call the vote? >> Carla Baze, >> I. >> Connor Duffy, >> hi. >> Kevin Havda, >> hi. >> Scott Shenbower, >> hi. >> Dr. Andrew Spain. >> Hi. >> Jessica Zamora. >> Hi. >> Dr. Corand Ziggler. >> Hi. >> Motion passes 7 to zero. >> I have to adjourn at the end. Oh, sorry. We will Sorry, I missed it. Thank you. We will now convene in a closed session. This is the last agenda item before adjournment. At the conclusion of the executive

263session, we will adjourn the meeting and adjournment will be recorded.