Board of Education Meeting: October 21 (Spanish Captions)

001All right. Good evening. Thank you for joining the board of education this evening. Please mute your cell phones as we begin. Today is Tuesday, October 21st, 2025, and this meeting is now called to order at 5:35 p.m. Thank you for your patience. 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 of the PSD website on PSD TV on demand on YouTube.

002All right. Would any board members like to make changes to the agenda? Okay, seeing none, we'll move on to our action item. So, board resolution in support of Colorado's healthy school meals for all, Colorado State ballot propositions LL and MM. Can I get a motion? I move that the board approve the resolution to support Colorado's healthy school meals for all Colorado State ballot proposition LL and MM. >> Can I get a second? Thank you, Jessica. All right. Would any board members care to speak about the resolution? >> I think Scott was gonna go. >> No. No. Scott. All right. Justice, you want to >> All right. Um, I support the resolution because I think our kids can only learn if they're eating and they're fed. And I think our state committed to feeding our children

003already. And now we realize when we truly want to feed all children, children participate. And we realize that when they participate in large numbers, we need more funding, which is what these resolutions would fix. So, I am in strong support and I hope you will be, too. Anyone else? All right. Go ahead. Go ahead. >> I I think the only thing to add to what Jessica mentioned is the notion of well-being crosses many different concepts and for kids to be able to engage in education, we have to meet all of those needs and obviously this is one of them. So certainly a good motion. Okay, go ahead, Kevin. >> Uh, I suppose everything that's been said, so I've been said this at nauseium before, so forgive me for being repetitive, but it's important is that

004uh when I was an educator, we had a saying, it was uh Maslo's before blooms. And so before our student can learn the taxonomy, they need to be feel secure, feel safe, feel fed. So, anything that we can do to accomplish that, but also reduce the stigma uh stigmas of being um you know, a lower economic student uh I think is is a good thing and a step in the right direction. I think it's a good value statement for our board and for our district. >> Thank you. Anyone else? >> And I support all of what has been said here and um I think the state had made a great step forward in the start of this program. Unfortunately, was not enough money in there to cover the entirety of it. And so what we're

005asking for now is to cover the entirety of it. And so I think it's very uh appropriate for us to as a board to be asking for this. So with that, we'll call the vote. >> Jim Brokish. >> Hi. >> Kristen Draper. >> Hi. >> Connor Duffy. >> Hi. >> Kevin Havda. >> I. >> Scott Shoenbower. >> Hi. >> Andrew Spain. >> I. >> Jessica Zamora. >> I. >> Motion passes 70. >> Wonderful. Thank you. All right. move on to the superintendent report and superintendent Kingsley will now make remarks to the board of education and to the community. Welcome. >> Thanks, President Draper. Uh good evening everybody. It's great to be with all of you tonight. Uh I'm going to start my remarks by showing off the communications quick win video of this particular meeting

006which focuses on the recent Canvas community classic. And I just want to all the members of our board, the members of our community. It's an all hands- on deck effort for employees to make the most enjoyable experience uh for really everyone involved, not just our football teams, uh but for elementary school students. We had face painting. So, Canvas Credit Union, Colorado State University, just want to say thank you and want to make sure we can celebrate this event again with our community by showing a little bit about what our perspective was as a district. [Music] Ladies and gentlemen, we are live at Canvas Stadium. >> Yeah, we got an intriguing match up today. It's a cross town rivalry. >> Fires to Eli Swanson >> and it's been intercepted by Wellington. >> Chance fires up the

007middle and has picked off this one. He returns brought back. He's still on his feet. He has a lot of room. Oh, boy. Unbelievable. >> The Anggeles is still going. He's still going. Oh, that's going to be a pass and that is a touchdown. Tim diving catch by Eli Swanson. Finds a man downfield by Christian. [Applause] So fun. I I really wish my college football team played as well as our high school football teams. I'd be in such a better mood this month. Uh but really a special thanks to all involved, our partners, to members of our community. A special shout out to Ben Carluchi, our Dick's athletic director, his entire team, our cabinet team. Uh also our safety and security team, uh who helped make that a really enjoyable experience and a safe experience

008for everybody that's involved. Uh since I've last met with all of you in a board meeting, I've had a chance to visit seven different schools. I'd love to talk about all of them, but I know I don't have that much time. But some special highlights. Uh, director Havda, you and I went to the Bruins Bash. I think it was the second annual Blevens Middle School Bruins Bash two Fridays ago where I got pied in the face. Uh, it was a peace offering to the Blevens community. Really, really got hit in the shoulder. No injuries, no workman's paperwork coming your way, but I had a lot of really great time and just to see how energized that community is just continues to be something that's just super impressive for everybody involved. A couple other school visits

009that I went to, uh, Timothith Middle High, I think really deserves some special recognition. Last year, they had, as you know, their first graduating class in quite some time. Uh, and that graduation rate was over 95%. And as I had a chance to sit down with their principal, Jesse Mororrow, and go through their data, I just super impressed to see the roots just stabilizing underneath that school in terms of how they're producing incredible outcomes for kids. And they're doing that in partnership with their teachers. They have incredible professional learning communities, uh, strong collegial conversations and relationships and just continue to be impressed by all the things that are happening uh, at that particular school. Uh, then had a chance later on that same day to go to McGra Elementary School. Uh, as you know, it's

010one of our highest performing elementary schools. It's an IB program. Uh, it's a great school and how they've tended to our recent literacy adoption and just have really dialed in uh, is just really quite amazing. And one of the things that stood out to me in this recent visit uh is how their teachers are already starting to anticipate a new elementary school math curriculum. And so when you think about year one of implementation, they're in year zero of figuring out what do they need to do in their respective teams and grade levels to have a level of readiness to hit the ground running with their IB program. So just thinking the foresight of the leadership there and the school teachers is just really was tremendous. Uh, and then I'll celebrate uh Lopez Elementary School that

011continues their leader in me program. Just makes your heart feel good when you walk in the school. And I had a chance to meet I can't show you on the camera, but it's young uh student named Aiden who was superintendent of the day uh the week before I came and didn't know I was coming the next week for a school visit. So, having a chance to meet Aiden and convince him that my only job was not to fire everybody. I told him, I said, "Aden, you can't fire people. You can't fire your way to excellence." but we had a great time and laughed with each other, but just really impressed uh with the leader and me program over at the school. So, just there's a lot of great things happening in all of our schools

012and I just want to thank members of the board, members of our community for helping me celebrate uh all of them. We have a really important board meeting tonight to talk about some really important topics and I'm excited about it. One of the topics that we will be talking about is air conditioning. Uh we're going to hear an update together on our district's strateg strategic approach to installing air conditioning in the 30 schools in our district that don't have it yet. We'll be focusing on the next five years of installation plans in our conversation this evening. I want to take in behalf of our entire team and us as a governance team to thank the voters for their support for the 2024 debtfree mill levy. Uh this conversation tonight would not be possible without our

013voter support, our community support, and it's just really really grateful. Uh and our ability to address those diverted maintenance needs that are in the amount of over a billion dollars is just going to be absolutely transformational for this entire community. We'll also have another conversation to hear about potential modifications to bell times. This is a continuation, a part two. Well, I would say it's probably part three or four. Uh we've been having this discussion for a long time. And to be honest, as I go back and, you know, learn and think about prior boards, prior superintendents, this has been a conversation that's been happening in our community for over a decade. So, it's an important one. And I know the the weight of that will continue to be thoughtful and patient and kind in how

014we engage with each other and talking about the length of our instructional day and the potential implications that has on bell time. So, I look forward to a great meeting with all of you and thank you for allowing me a few minutes to address the community. >> Thank you very much. All right, we're going to move on to the community comment portion of the board meeting. The board desires to hear the viewpoints of all stakeholders, including students, employees, parents, guardians, and community members. Public comment is designed to address issues, not personalities or personnel matters. Please keep your concerns and comments focused upon the district and appropriate for a K12 audience. Please note that the board does not generally respond to remarks made during community comment. Our lack of response should not be construed to mean

015that we agree or disagree with what is said or with the description or interpretation of events as presented by any speaker. Further, even if some remarks may be factually inaccurate, we generally choose not to respond or correct the record here because formal board meetings are not the time or place for back and forth dialogue. As we begin this community comment session, let us model for our entire community how to listen and how to interact respectfully, even with those with whom we disagree. for we all have the students best interests at heart. So this opportunity for public comment is for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated deadline. Those people will be called upon to make remarks in the order that they signed up and each speaker will be allowed three minutes

016to address the board. So first up we have Laura Whitehead. Welcome. Hold on just a moment. I think got to get the mic on there. >> Okay. Thank you. >> There we go. >> Hello. My name is Laura Whitehead and I am speaking to you today not only as a former employee of CLE but also as a concerned parent and long-standing member of the CL community. I am here to address the mishandlings of the effective needs program, a program that has seen many successes, some of which I was proud to be a part of. I have always taken pride in my ability to understand behavior, use sound judgment, and be trusted to make decisions in the best interest of students. Unfortunately, recently recent changes in protocols have stripped me and others of the trust, particularly

017when it comes to safety. On September 8th of this year, during a seclusion training, we were instructed that if a child was running, regardless of whether the staff was CPI trained, they were to be stopped. However, just two weeks later, on September 21st, that directive was abruptly reversed. When I sought clarification on the new procedure, I was met with vague responses like, "Yeah, I know. Sorry." Or simply, "You'd need to trust, but trust in what?" No clear guidance or plan was provided. I was later informed that I was no longer allowed to protect myself in situations of imminent danger. As a direct result of this policy, I was personally assaulted. The only instruction I received was to get out of the way. This directive, especially when applied to those labeled as just paras were implemented

018without consistent communication, without transparency, and without support from leadership. The fallout has been devastating. Essential staff have been mischaracterized, their reputation damaged, and their roles diminished. More importantly, the children of the ANN program have suffered without clear expectations, boundaries, or consistent protocols. There has been noticeable regression among nearly every student in the program. This lack of structure has even begun to impact general education students, creating a ripple effect throughout the school. Many students are not now afraid to walk through the hallways, and some are even being denied access to the bathroom due to safety concerns. When fear and restriction replace routine and support, how can we expect students to feel safe, let alone learn? By removing expectations, eliminating structure, and failing to provide clear leadership, we have not only stunted the growth of our most

019vulnerable students, we have created an unsafe and chaotic environment for all learners. So I ask, when did this become acceptable to Pter School District? >> Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you. Next up, we have Molly Gutier. Welcome. All right. Good evening. My name is Molly and I'm a parent of a 10th grader at Rocky Mountain High School. My wife and I are proud to be raising students in this district. We have two other older children that have already graduated from PSD. I have a doctorate degree in public health, but tonight I'm here simply as a member of this community who believes deeply in the power of education to shape lives. We all want our students to succeed academically, yes, but also as full human beings. And as someone who studies health and well-being, I can

020tell you this. Education is one of the strongest predictors of long-term health, happiness, and life opportunity. But students don't learn best when they're afraid or disconnected. They learn when they feel safe. They learn when they're fed. They learn when they feel seen. and when they feel like they belong. And those conditions, safety, connection, belonging, don't happen by accident. They're created intentionally every day by teachers, by staff, and by leadership, by a board that's committed to inclusive, responsive education. So, I want to thank you for the work that you've already done in this direction, especially around mental health and belonging. I know from personal experience just how transformative that kind of environment can be. I grew up queer in a public school system. And at that time, there weren't many visible examples of what it looks

021like to grow up and thrive. And yet, thanks to educators who believed in me, who made space for me, who told me I belonged, I did thrive. I became a professor. I became a parent. I've built a life of purpose and connection. And I know I'm not alone in that. So many of us can point to a teacher or a moment or a book we read that we felt like we mattered. And that's what I want for every student in this district. The chance to fully become themselves in the presence of adults who expect great things from them. That's not political. That's educational. That's good public health. That's how we raise resilient, curious, engaged young people. So, thanks for your time. I know firsthand that public board service is hard yet worthy work. Thank you

022for staying focused on what matters, creating schools where every student feels like they belong and every student has a future they can believe in. Thanks. >> Thank you. Next up, we have Tom Griggs. Welcome when I started my campaign for school board back in April. Uh a lot of people were asking me what are we going to do about the federal budget cuts or the anticipated at that time they were anticipated still I believe um or the threat of state budget cuts and I didn't have a good answer at that time but I started looking around and I recognized that the strength of this community is what is probably going to end up carrying us through. I'm an optimist by nature perhaps but I'm also an optimist by choice. I started getting to know what

023partnerships existed in the district. I checked I I visited or made contact with in various ways Conflict Resolution Works, which is a city of Fort Collins project that helps divert kids that are in trouble with uh legal issues away from the criminal justice system. I visited Dexter Row as a former uh uh school resource officer now as community engagement officer for Fort Collins Police Department. I went to Kuanas meetings to Rotary International meetings. I went to North Fort Collins Business Association meetings. I went to Rotary I'm sorry getting ahead of myself. Fort Collins Chamber of Commerce. I visited with representatives of the Association for Classified Employees and I appreciated the video on custodials that we saw uh last meeting. I've been to two or three different faith communities. I know about projects that are going

024on. Bike Fort Collins Coats and Boots Project Smile Mc Backpack where I helped pack food for kids that don't make it through the weekend without having food for themselves. And I got to say my optimism is holding up pretty strongly after all those visits and all those people and all those projects I got to know. Um very very positive experience for me and gives me a good feeling and a confidence in my feelings of optimism. And I've got to underscore that for me optimism is a political choice. It's one we're going to face as a community, especially when we hear about the budget cuts that are still going to be coming for a while and uh we've got to start working together on those things and keep working together and build those projects as much

025as we can. That's what's going to get us through, I think. So, thank you very much. I'm Tom Griggs. I'm a candidate for the district D seat on the school board. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Next up we have Carrie. Um, is it Pitulo? Welcome. >> Hello, my name is Carrie and my pronouns are she, her. I'm the mom of a non-binary child in PSD and the proud aunt of a successful, brilliant trans nephew who is on his way to med school. My baby has just started middle school at Weber and is thriving. I've been thrilled to see the support they've gotten from their teachers in using their preferred name and pronouns. See, my baby is aware that the world isn't always so welcoming to LGBTQ plus kids. But thankfully, hostility and discrimination

026has not been a real factor in their life. At least not yet. My baby is growing up in a community, school, and a district that supports their health and wellness. They have not been stifled, minimized, or restricted in spreading their wings and being who they are. And they are brave, creative, happy, smart, and kind. For children who do not have that kind of support, the consequences can be dire. Just a reminder, given the outsized political attacks on this most vulnerable population, according to the CDC in 2023, only around 3% of youth identify as transgender. According to the Trevor Project, 39% of LGBTQ plus young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including 46% of transgender and non-binary young people. LGBTQ plus youth of color reported higher rates than white peers. 54% of transgender

027and non-binary young people found their school to be gender affirming, and those who did reported lower rates of attempting suicide. LGBTQ plus young people who reported living in very accepting communities attempted suicide at less than half the rate of those who reported living in very unaccepting communities. According to the American School Counselor Association, transgender and non-binary students and their families face increased risks as well as unique circumstances that often require additional support and recommendations to help ensure these students receive the same educational opportunities as their peers. Research shows 83% of transgender and 68% of non-binary youth reported being victimized at school due to their gender. Students with supportive adults in their school are less likely to feel unsafe or to miss school and are more likely to have higher GPA to pursue post-secary education and

028to feel a higher sense of belonging in school. My family is new to PSD this year and I'm so happy to see that clear supportive policies are in place for trans and non-binary students. Thank you for that support. Our kids need you. [Applause] Thank you. And next up we have Danny Lawrence. Welcome. In your email tonight are the documents that I'm referring to in my speech this evening. And I hope that you will consider the information and that it will help you to be more informed for your November 4th meeting about integrated services. In 2024, the Office of Special Education Programs or OEP participated in investigating the Colorado Department of Education and released their findings in May of 2024. In their review of the state's performance, they indicated that CDE failed to adhere to the

029responsibilities for enforcing the annual reporting data from school districts under part B of IDA, among other offenses. So, the representation from the integrated services department here at PSC that you are being audited by CDE isn't exactly true. CDE is finally requiring school districts to do annually what they were required to do all along. This is not an audit. It is certainly not a thirdparty objective view of the two entities that dropped the ball. But due to the performance of CDE, OEP instituted a facilitated assessment schedule. And our district will begin participating in that data collection in February. Not just an audit, but just a federally required data collection now hopefully being enforced. of the information that was supposed to be reported were vital statistics called indicators 1 through 16 beyond graduation rates like things like

030assessment outcomes, suspensions, preschool performance, child fine, post-secondary outcomes, disproportionate represent representation not just for race and ethnicity for IEP students, but disproportionality regarding their specific disability category, which is hugely important. Despite that CDE wasn't enforcing the collection of that data, PSD knew they were supposed to be collecting the data. It's a federal law and so I'm asking you as directors to seek the information and make it publicly available. Additionally, we have been we we have information spoken in this room that I think deviates from giving the full picture. And I just wanted to point out the year-over-year statistic that you guys keep talking about that IEP students are improving one year's growth over the previous year. I think Brian and Kevin have both mentioned that statistic. I want you to understand that our director indicates

031that that growth statistic includes charter schools as well. Does the graduation rate data include charter schools, too? Do we keep separate statistics on charter versus public schools? Because staff is now stating that the graduation rate data is corrupt because it includes those students who stay longer, the 18 to 21 year olds, but those students shouldn't be included in the graduation rate data according to the well- definfined parameters of that federal reporter indication. And so, why is that happening? In short, how can we evaluate this wicked problem without data integrity? And I'm asking you to demand it. And given the breakdown of CDE and PSC together, I believe there's strong cause to ask for this information to be collected by a thirdparty auditing source. So, please be analytical of what you hear in the next meeting

032and ask deeper questions that will help a lot of very vulnerable students at a critical time in our school district. Students with disabilities are more unprotected now than ever, and they are owed any safety uh any safeguards that you can all give them. So, thank you for reading my email. >> Thank you. Okay, thank you all so much for taking the time to share your thoughts uh during this community comment tonight. We appreciate your engagement and the feedback that you provide and we look forward to further discussions at our next engagement session on anybody have that readily available. I know it's November 6th. Thank you. Um, and the two schools are going to be >> Yeah, I have to I have to double check on that now. Somebody's going to check for me. Um, but

033yes, we will have our two engagement sessions again on November 6th starting at 5:30. Um, and we welcome you all. You do not have to be a member of this school um area to go to that particular school. You can come to which schools are they again? >> Irish and Timoth. >> Irish and Timnith. Um, so if you would like to join and you do not have to be a um have somebody in that school, you do not have to have uh you can be just a community member. You don't have to have uh be a parent or a caregiver to somebody who's in the district. Just come and chat with us and we will see you there. Thank you. All right. And now we will move on to uh board topics and committee reports.

034So this agenda item is an opportunity for board members to provide an update on committee work or speak to board topics. Do any board members have anything to report? Go ahead, Connor. >> Just a quick announcement for the uh PSD Foundation. They're having the Ignite the Impact Night. Um it's a fundraiser. It'll be November 10th. Um and it's I believe 5:30 to 7:30. Um you can go online to PSD Foundation the Impact. Um and you'll be able to get all the information there. It's a great night. Uh, I believe Brian is speaking. Kristen, are you speaking as well? >> Not that I know of. >> I'll be there, but I >> at least one of you two will be speaking. And it's always a very uplifting night. There's a great celebration for all the things

035that the foundation does and all the things that they enable our students to do. So, please, if you have a chance, please join us. >> Wonderful. Thank you. Anyone else? Go ahead, Jim. I'd like to give an update from the community um community engagement session that we had at Linton last week. Uh there were about 10 people attending and Jess and I led that session. Uh the biggest interest in the group was about integrated services. So that's where we spent most of the time that evening. Um the last community commenter covered a couple of my bullets. So I'm not going to recover them here in interest of time. But uh for integrated services, there was concern that some IEP kids are being gently or otherwise encouraged to opt out of testing. Uh one community mentioned

036that sometimes parents opt out their high performance to students as well. And of course, we want all the kids taking the tests. Uh in some districts is leads are cabinet positions. So in PSD it is it is not and the question was does is have sufficient clout in the organization. Um, also a comment, please keep accessibility requirements in the forefront as we move to the new district website. Uh, the final one I guess on this section of integrated services was uh, one community member discussed that she had had an excellent experience in PSD with her special needs child. Uh, she said her school recommended that she choice into a different school in the district that could meet the needs of her child better. She did that and she has just been thrilled with the results.

037So, that was interesting as well. Uh we talked a lot about dyslexia. Uh the new curricula is great, but there's a current there's a concern that those students above K through three that started with the old curricula still need more attention, screening and help and some concern that the implementation was moved in the legislation for screening from 2627 to 2728. Um, I know that PSD is already doing some trial screening tests at six elementary schools. Uh, in the dinner session tonight, Brian updated us on a meeting last week regarding dyslexia um with the staff and the community where we're continuing to work on this area. And the final thing I'd mention is just a miscellaneous one. Uh, one uh community member uh wondered if we were too rushed in the calendar, bell times, bus schedules

038decisions. So, we'll have plenty of discussion on that tonight. >> Wonderful. Thank you. Anyone else? Scott, you had a >> got a a couple things. So, we also had a community comment event up in Wellington. Um, we only had two attendees. Um, but we had we filled the time. We had uh deep conversations about integrated services, very similar what Jim's talking about. We also talked about um some long ongoing pro uh problems and uh questions about um some tax uh policy in Timoth. Um so we're looking into that as well. Um so it was actually good. Andrew and I uh attended that and and I enjoyed it. I thought it was a good discussion. Um the other thing I wanted to bring up was uh we just had our first annual equipment swap, a sports

039equipment swap. Uh this was put on by the student advisory committee. Um there's a student kind of took the lead named Isla and uh the the group did a great job organizing this. And basically the idea is there are um really pe expensive pieces of equipment that are necessary to play sports in this district and not everybody has access to it. But there's tons of kids who finish playing and then those I think we all have garages full of sports equipment that sit for years. So, this is an outlet for for an exchange of that to people that can use it um for their uh their future plans to play. Um so, this was on Saturday. Um it was over at Blevens and and really well organized and and run by the students. Uh we

040had the first half of the day was people coming with donations. The second half was families that came and got to uh to shop the uh the equipment and uh it sounds like it went really well. Um, I was there in the morning. I didn't see the uh the end result, but I wanted to thank Insoon Olsen, Dwayne Schmidz, and Brandon Carluchi uh from the district for really helping put this whole thing together. And uh we're excited. I was talking to Insoon earlier, and we're going to do this again next year. We'll do it earlier in the in the year uh in August, so people have a chance for these fall sports as well. So, um, really proud of the student advisory committee for taking the lead, um, on this and, uh, I think it's

041going to be something we'll do for years to come. >> That's fantastic. Thank you, Jess. >> Just going to build off of what uh, Jim said, just because there's a couple of things that I also wanted to ask. So, um, we've heard it before, but there was an ask for an audit of integrated services. Um, one of the questions or comments, I think it was both, came around our number of 504 plans compared to the number of IEPs that we have in this district compared to our um, similar districts. So, just curious if that'll come in our November meeting, like that comparison. And then we've also heard this task force and feedback loop before between our district and SEAK parts and then our parents at large. And I think to you know Jim's point about

042the parent who had a really amazing experience and some parents are not having the same level of um experience and wondering how do we make that consistent and some of it is also looking at what are the schools that are consistently doing it really well and making families feel like there's a very warm welcome and an understanding of what their options are because some parents were talking about not even knowing that some of the centerbased programs were available to their kids that they would have to search it out or if there were schools dyslexia in particular that were more geared toward had more resources for dyslexia that that was hard to find. So having ways for parents to discover if they do have to choice schools to discover which school would really be the best

043choice based on all of the information, all of the needs of their child um and how they can get that information more efficiently. >> Wonderful. Anyone? Yeah, go ahead, Andrew. Uh just a a couple of things. First of all, a shout out to the Wellington softball team that's on the way to state. I don't know if you all knew that or not, but they have a big send off on Thursday. Uh also, uh Wellington football is is doing some serious damage as well. But I actually wanted to talk more specifically about a particular individual on the football team by the name of Seth Long. He's their kicker. Does the the kickoffs, punts, everything like that. and he actually is kicking against cancer. And so he's actually doing a fundraiser throughout the entire year. For every

044yard he kicks, he's collecting pledges and donations to uh give to Alex's lemonade stand. And I just thought this was a first of all, I want to congratulate him on a not being just just a fabulous kicker because he's really good, by the way. Uh but being a fabulous person and how that's an indicator of the amazing students we have every single day in our district. Uh, and we don't even hear about most of their stories, of course, but this is at least one I can share and I think he's doing an amazing job and hopefully he's going to kick him kick them all the way to a state championship as well. So, we'll see. But, but kudos to Seth and and his family who gave me permission to share the story because he's he's

045doing great things. >> Thank you so much. And you can find that information on Facebook. >> Yes. >> Excellent. Thank you. All right. Anyone else? All right. I'm just gonna um kind of hop off what you were talking about, Andrew, with the students u because I was able to in the last two weeks uh attend um the community classic and the peer summit and I just want to say hats off to the peer summit um the group. Thank you to the um adults in the room who organized that, but especially thank you to the um to the students who were there and were very willingly sharing their experiences and and what can be done better, what's working for them, that kind of thing. um and they got to um share with each other which I

046think is extremely important as well as sharing with adults. So that was simply fabulous. And I did want to mention in the community classic as we were watching the the film there um Brian and I got to see the students actually the broadcast um community >> broadcast journalism >> yeah the sports broadcast journalism uh kids and so we actually got to watch the football game while they were putting together the film for it and broadcasting that and it was just amazing. It was simply fabulous to be able to to see them in in their element doing their work. Um, and I I know that they're all going to be working either for the NFL or the M, you know, NBA or something like that after this. So, it's fantastic. Um, so thank you all for

047that. And with that, uh, we will go ahead and move on to the consent agenda. Would any board members like to pull anything from consent? Okay. Uh, seeing none, can I get a motion? I move that the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for the items on the consent agenda. >> Can I get a second? Thank you, Jim. All right, Joe, will you please call the vote? >> Jim Brokish, >> hi. >> Kristen Draper, >> I. >> Connor Duffy, >> I. >> Kevin Havda, >> I. >> Scott Shoenbower, >> hi. >> Andrew Spain, >> I. >> Jessica Zamora, >> I. >> Motion passes 70. >> Fantastic. We'll move on toformational reports and discussion items. 8.1 is an update on plans for AC installation. So, we have a couple of special guests for this. >>

048Yeah. Presenting the update on plans for air conditioning installation is our chief finance officer, Dave Mononttoya. Welcome, Dave. >> Good evening and thank you for having this presentation tonight. Um, it is on air conditioning. Let me get it set up here. Okay. So, uh, we're here to talk to you about, uh, our plan for air conditioning, uh, on the upcoming summer and then a little bit into the the future years as well. Um, I'm joined with some guests that I'm going to have come up toward the tail end of the presentation, uh, Franen and Pitman and Saunders. And they're joined by PEC and Engineering Group and DA Modeling. Everybody is represented in this in this in the room tonight. So, um, these are going to be our teams that are helping us with the new

049projects that we're taking on next summer. Um, so excited to just kind of walk through where we're at with this whole process. Um, Superintendent Kingsley, I think, mentioned during his update that we need to talk about the debtree mill before we start this conversation. Um, it's only through the debtree mill levy that we're even possibly having this conversation. If the debt free millivity did not pass, we would be in a much dire situation and we would be holding on to every dollar to replace things that broke in the minute, but there would not be any pre uh pro proactive kind of approach to deferred maintenance. So the debtree mill levy is extremely instrumental and and transformational as uh as superintendent Kingsley said. Um so let's just review the debtree mill levy a little bit here

050just to ground ourselves. So, the first part is we did pass an override November 2024 and that was for $49 million. Um, it was approved November 24. I think I just said that. Um, it grows with inflation. So, this was a very important part of our planning for the debtree mill was a dollar today won't be a dollar in future years. So, we need to make sure that the revenue keeps up with that. And so, we added an inflationary component of which the voters did approve. Um, so just looking at the numbers here, you can see that 49 is now 50 million and that's because we did have uh I think it's 2.3% inflation that we were able to apply in there um for the 25 26 year that the the current year we're in

051now. That's the 50 million. Um just a reminder, it was designed for recruitment and tension retention, school maintenance, classroom resources, and SC small neighborhood schools. Um, backed by popular demand is the graphic that we've all uh that we all got to know so well last year. Um, and and I thought it would be just good to I didn't think I'd ever have to show this graphic again, but I thought it would be good just to ground ourselves in kind of what we talked about and how this mechanically how the debtree male levy was working. Um, as as you may remember, and I think maybe people can see my slider here. Um, one of our goals was to actually utilize um existing expenditures in general fund, move them over, utilize existing funds in the general fund

052um to basically move those move staffing and existing budgets over to the debt free mill levby. What this did and it's on the left here um it freed up about 21.5 million dollars of budget in general fund and we really did three things with that and we're continuing to do these three things. Um the first one is uh $4 million dedicated to small school um support and programming. That kind of ties into the neighbor small neighborhood school uh component. We also had a a large um injection of money to move our salaries forward one year. Um and so that has happened and that was about a 5% increase across the board. Um and that cost just under 15 million or just around $15 million to do that. Um get this question a lot with compensation.

053And does that mean that we're going to get another $15 million next year and another $15 million next year? No. That the $15 million that we moved aside is established. It's in there. It's supporting those ongoing pay increases, but there's not new revenue that generates to apply to more increase, right? Um but it the 15 million is in the budget and it's dedicated to supporting those increases that we gave in going forward. Uh the third bucket is really $2.5 million that we were uh really focusing on replacement cycles for things that are kind of outside of maintenance and operation. Think about instruments, curriculum, athletic supplies, things like that. Um so that was really the goal was to free up some money in general fund to do those three things, but also and then now we're

054going to kind of gyate to the right of the graph. Um also was to actually move us forward in maintenance and operations and deferred maintenance. Um so you can see this graphic shows that existing operations staff and existing operating budget of which there wasn't much. There was about $800,000 that we had in general fund um for operations that all moved over into the debtree mill. And so that that doesn't really change that $21.5 million is exactly what we were doing before. So it's nothing new. Um but then the green box right under the uh the the pink box there is really the new the new expenditures. So we um we have expenditures for maintenance and really this is our deferred maintenance uh category. Um there's $22.9 million that was dedicated the first year for that

055and that goes everywhere from HVAC, plumbing, electrical, so like your MEP type stuff, um bus fleet replacement, we're going to talk about transportation here after this presentation, um software, hardware, um switches, all of that fun stuff. And then um things that are actually a little more visible to the students, things like sound systems, gym systems, digital scoreboards, those were all contemplated in that deferred maintenance that we wanted to start tackling. And so we have $22.9 million that is ongoing for that. Um and then the last portion of the debtree mill levy is the prata share to our district charter schools. Um they receive a 95% prata share based on state statute. And so you can see um in last year that was $4.6 million. um in the in the budget. So, so this graphic just

056represents how we were conceptualizing the general fund and the debtree mill interplay. Um and I I think it does a good job of telling that story. So So now to kind of come into a little more detail than than you saw the first or in that graphic, um let's dive into some of the budgets so you can see how the allocation of the debtree millia is actually happening. Um, so you remember uh there's there's really two components that moved over from general fund. Some staffing as well as a small amount of operating budget. This first line item represents the staffing. So that's our existing maintenance and operation staff. They moved over from general fund into the debtree million and that was about $21.1 million in this year's budget. Um, charter schools, uh, you'll notice that

057number increased slightly. Um, and I'm going to explain why in a minute, but actually I'll I'll kind of jump to it. The first two lines in here um need to increase by inflation regardless of what we do because inflation will happen. Pay is going to increase. Um charter schools if the if there's inflation and we're collecting more money, they should get their program a share. Um so those are those are really um things that are are heavily tied to uh inflation and something that we want to think about. Then we get into the more of the maintenance type categories or the deferred maintenance that we're trying to take care of. And and I'm just going to go through these categories quickly. Um we have about $1.8 million in information technology. That's replacement cycles, enhancements, um

058switches, networks, all of that type stuff. Um those are all contemplated in in that in that budget. Um 300,000 is going towards security upgrades directly. Um those are going to be taking care of the small replacement cycles like cameras, door access, things of that nature. Um the next category is bus and support fleet replacement cycles. So, we we talked a lot about last year about our bus fleet and the poor condition it was in because we weren't able to buy new buses. Um, this was instrumental in changing just how transportation is operating this year with having some new buses arrive on the fleet. So, um, that's exactly what this line item is intended to do and will continue to do. Um, we have about 800,000 for child nutrition and custodial equipment. This is everything from

059like a floor scrubber to um, I think we're installing some new serving lines at Rocky Mountain High School. uh right now in in this month I believe. Um so so those are kind of some things in the equipment and replacement cycle there. Then you get into the more general the facilities and outdoor um services type maintenance and these are the smaller non- construction deferred maintenance that we're taking care of. So think about a a water heater that might go out or um filters that need to be replaced or a motor that if we swap this out it makes the equipment run longer. Those are all contemplated in both the facilities and the outdoor maintenance budget. Um, a large portion of this is actually in the outdoor services realm because when you start talking about maintenance,

060and I'm sure you've all witnessed walking around in our schools, our concrete and our asphalt needs some attention. And so, that's going to take us a while to get through the district and all the concrete and asphalt that we have. So, um, so that's really what those dollars are going toward. And then we have a larger bucket which is called the capital or large projects budget. And this is really the the deferred maintenance plan that we talked so heavily about last year. We talked about, you know, the bigger items like boilers, rooftop units, um, uh, fire, uh, fire suppression systems, things like that. Um, so, so these are the large projects, and that's not to say that a large project couldn't take on a characteristic of another one. So, I'll give you an example, just

061a hypothetical on the fly here. Security upgrades. we may decide at some point that we need to replace a system in security that will probably be in excess of $300,000 that year. So, it would make sense that that might go to a larger project type thing. Um, so that's just an example of how that that capital large project uh budget can interplay with some of these, but it's really focusing on the large capital projects. And and what I did here is I did uh put a link in here as well as the uh the website. Uh our projects that we've been planning to do over the over the next five years have not changed drastically. Um they're all out here on the website. You can kind of see um this is a some documentation that

062we put together before the election that goes goes through by school and talks about the things that we were planning on doing. Um we also talked a lot last year about this is deferred maintenance. So, if we have something that has a priority um over it, um something in that list might have to shift down if something else is a priority that breaks that we that we we didn't plan for. So, um this is going to be uh just a breakdown of how we're using this. And got about $50.3 million in total. And so, the balance of everything that I've shown above and the 53.3 really comes down to about 1.2 that's unspoken for. Um and then that could be applied to air conditioning. We're going to see how this works in a little bit.

063Okay. So, let's talk about the current air conditioning status and and and how we're thinking about prioritizing the the way we're going to move through these uh projects. So, first is uh identifying schools that don't have mechanical cooling. So, we have 22 elementary sites. Um that would have been 24 um if I was presenting this last spring. Um Batty and OD are now airond conditioned. So, that that has gone down by two. Um we have five middle schools. Um we're going to be talking about two of them today. And then we also have three uh non-traditional schools, Polaris, PCA, and Centennial that would need some mechanical cooling as well. Um so that that's kind of the status and and we have already incremented incrementally moved forward a little bit um this last summer. Um but

064we still have a a long way to go. 30 schools is a few is quite a few to get through. Um so then the next question is, well, how are we prioritizing that? And it really kind of boils down to three big bullets. And I would say the first two bullets are probably the dominant bullets right now and probably in the short term of this plan. Um but all three are going to interplay with how we're prioritizing the air conditioning approach. Um the first one is um and it kind of alludes to the bullet above implementation of mechanical cooling at sites with no mechanical site uh cooling or tempering. So what this means is if you're one of the schools listed above, you would be prioritized. Um the second bullet point is prioritizing schools with

065larger student population and higher occupant densities such as middle schools. Um so when we when we think about what that bullet point is saying, it's saying we have larger populations in our middle schools. They also have higher densities and they're typically there for longer periods of day. So there was some prioritization there. And then the last category kind of after you get through the large concentration of schools of which again would be the middle schools then I think you start to settle into prioritizing the other projects based on um a number of things and and things that we've looked at where um like we have data on high internal temperatures during high heat days. Um that would be a way to distinguish between what school to do next. Um we do have um a plan

066in in rank order. Um, but I will say once you get through 30 schools, I mean, you're probably talking 12, 15 or more years out, um, that may or may not land exactly at that point in time. Um, so, so the the prioritization is really we're focusing on the middle schools first and, um, and the ne the schools that we're really going to be, um, working on next summer and into the next year is going to be Le We Weber and Leer. And um we talked about this at the last update when I did a kind of a a pro summer projects update. Um one of the things we learned through these projects is to not take on more than we can handle in a small summer summer window. Um so in both of these

067projects, we're going to take a multi-year phased approach of which uh when I turn it over to the guests later in the presentation, they can talk a little bit about what they're thinking around how to help us move through a multi-year approach. Um, so the next part of this presentation is going to focus a lot on the financing of air conditioning. Um, and we're really going to pull from various different items to make this work. And, uh, what I would say about these these items is um, I'm going to go through them each each all four of them, but what I would say is that they can be used in conjunction with each other. They can be used independently. Um there's there's a lot of flexibility as to when we when we let's say pull

068a lever each one of these bullet or bullet points is like a lever. Um we can pull multiple simultaneously or defer them separately. Um using a combination of approaches and because I just said it's very flexible. Um, you can slice this all sorts of ways, but one example that we came up with as we were kind of just looking at this is, um, by pulling these four levers in different times, you can yield something of around $110 million over the course of five years for air conditioning. Um, in that assumption, I'm assuming a 2% inflation rate. I don't know that that would last over a 15-year period, but just so you know what the assumption rate is, um, because that's critical in there. So, those are those are really the the options that we're going

069to walk through. through and so I'm going to walk through them in an orderly fashion here. Um the first one is um we could consider allocating a portion of the capital large projects deferred maintenance directly to air conditioning. And in the example that I have on this slide, what you'll see, and I intentionally left the strike out here, what we would maybe do is reduce $15 million to $13 million. Um that would allow us to continue to do deferred maintenance on those projects on that list that I just showed. Um, but it does allow us to move $2 million toward air conditioning. That would be one example or one lever that you could pull. Um, obviously I've shown $2 million. You could do three, you could do one. It just depends on what the need

070is there. Um, the other option and probably lever two is um utilizing our remaining 2016 bond reserves. Uh, prior to the election, we talked a lot about these reserves would be what carried the district for potentially eight years if we had to go to another election if the mill levy didn't pass. And so what we've done is we've scrutinized and looked at the the reserves and we're actually closing projects out at this point as well. And we've got a number of things that kind of build up to some reserve dollars that I think that we can start to count on to utilize toward air conditioning. One is we just had some general reserves and um believe that was $12 million a number of years ago when we started this. Some of it has been used

071for things that came up prior to the election. Um but right now we're standing at about 10.6 million in bond reserves and those are just unspoken for. Um we have a about $4.2 million of of um what I would call budget closeouts. So we've completed a large number of big big projects and as a result of that we did have some positive budget savings or variance and so there's 4.2 two that is going to be swept from those large projects to um to the reserve. Um the next category is a is project closeouts 2.7 million. Um what this is is a lot of a lot of other things that are not large construction. So these are all the other small projects that were in what we called the $40 million list as part of the

0722016 uh bond election. And so you're going to see a number of things closed out here. The the largest one in here though is about $1.5 million for um for what we call uh project management. And what that was really doing is paying for staff that were paying uh that were supported out of the bond. It would buy other things that were necessary for construction at that time. Um we were pretty tight on that because we didn't know that the election was going to pass. So, we actually have some positive um savings from that of about $1.5 million. The rest of it is a whole bunch of other small projects. I mean, most of them are under $40,000 um that are swept and going back to the bond reserve um because they're closed out. Um

073we also have uh some projects that uh the debtree milvy, if you were to look at that that list on the website, um there was one project in in particular um that the debtree milvy called out that was in the bond. And so this was one that we did move to the the debtree mill levy that just frees up that money to utilize in the bond for other purposes. Um that that project was the Fort Collins uh high school uh controls project that we did this last summer and that was about 3 million of the 3.8 million. So So what you have is the bond reserves that we we kind of knew were unaccounted for. Um we've closed out most of the rest of the bond and there's really not much left that's active in

074there. So, these are all positive budget variances from uh from the budgets that were established. And with with all of this, we can come up to close to about 20 $21 million of bond money that could be deployed for air conditioning. Again, this lever, just like the last lever, can be pulled at different times. I mean, we could put $21 million in one year or we can stretch that out across over four years. It just depends on what the need is. Um, but that is another lever that we have at our disposal to utilize. The next the next lever, the third lever that I'm going to talk about is inflationary increases. And um this is why I kind of alluded to there's some items in this list that we need to keep inflation up with.

075And there's some that we might be able to freeze. And that's exactly what this lever or this approach is doing. Um, what it's saying is we would need to continue to apply inflation. So, if it was 2% in that forecast, every year we would add another 2% to both the staffing and the charter budgets to make sure that they're able to support the staffing that we moved over there as well as to support the prata share that the charter charters are legally entitled to. Um, our intention was to apply the inflation across the board to all the categories. Um but an option would be to delay that or defer that inflationary increase to these um to these categories. And so really what you're looking at is the the ones that aren't those two c the

076staffing and charters. It's the IT, it's the security upgrades, bus uh bus fleet replacement, child nutrition equipment, all of those. Um in this example or this lever, what you can do is you can freeze those inflationary increases for a number of years. And in the model that I drafted that got to the $110 million over 15 years, um that was a that was an inflation uh freeze of five years. You could do six, seven years if you wanted to. I I think that as we con as we do this and continue to do this, these budgets are taxed even harder in the future to actually do what they were designed to do. So, so we want to be careful with this, but it is an option that's available to us. And then there's really the

077last the last lever or the last um strategy that can be deployed and and there's a reason why I kind of put it toward the end is I I do think we want to utilize other strategies where we can. Um but there is also the idea of issuing more debt and and that's you know it's financing and there's really two ways that you can get at that. I'm going to just briefly mention bonded debt. Um this is typically what um school districts have done for a long time. They issue bonds. they spend the bonds and they issue more bonds and then they spend the bonds. Um, when you're issuing bonded debt, it's uh it's considered general obligation bonds and and that's why they're called geo bonds. And that means basically that the voters are the

078ones that are authorizing and they're also agreeing to support that bond. And so we can tax them for the principal and interest payments on those bonds. That's what geo bonds means. Um, these typically fund major capital projects of which This could be air conditioning could be is absolutely considered one of a large capital project. Um it does require voter authorization. So it's not something that just automatically happens. Um and any taxes that are levied for this specifically have to go to pay off the principle and interest on that debt. Um the big bullet point that I have at the bottom is probably the most relevant here is that voter tolerance must be considered if you're considering any kind of election like this. Um right now we just had an election. So, I I would say

079that voter tolerance may not be there immediately and that that may be something that we're looking at in the future, but I wanted to display this as an option just to be fully transparent with the options that we might have available to us in the future. So, that gets me to probably another type of debt that we haven't talked about in board meetings uh for quite a while. Um probably 18 years ago, we were talking about certificates of participation. Um, certificates of participation is another form of debt. Um, just similar to a bond, it's used for capital improvements and it's usually used when a district cannot or does not wish to seek voter approval for a bond or mill levy. And so what does that mean? Um, it may mean that you don't have voter

080support and you're not going to have voter support. And there's districts in this state that that is true. Um there's also um a situation where um we may not we may not want to issue debt um because it's going because we're not positioned to pass an election. That that is the that is the the crux of that or the the focus of that. Um and then there's sometimes where you just don't have the property tax wealth to to necessarily go out and raise a mill for debt or something like that. Um so so another option that's utilized when when um districts bump into this situation and it does happen. We used to have them way back when. Um we can issue this different type of debt. It's called a certificate of participation. It's very different

081in the fact that it's not directly supported by by the voters. Um and in fact it's not issued in the bond market. A bank issues. It's like a loan. It's like a mortgage and then you would pay it back over time. Um annual appropriations from the district's budget. So that's general fund are what pays for certificates of part participation not a dedicated tax. So it's a very important distinction there. Um I had a very lengthy conversation with our bond underwriter RBC Capital um number of weeks ago and then a detailed conversation again today walking through some of these numbers and they still hold true. Um right now they would forecast that about for every million dollars of debt service. So that's principal and interest payments. Um you could issue up to about $14 million in

082coops. Um the the payback for those is very similar to a bond. I mean it's just another form of debt. Um so it's very similar to a bond, but it it it is paid back over 20 years, 20 to 24 years. Um, so in the example that I kind of started with that got us to $110 million, one of the things I'm doing in year six and then year I think it's nine is we're starting to issue coops and they're being issued at about $1.5 million per per issue. So that would generate about $21 million each time you did that. In my forecast, I did it twice. Um, you could possibly look at doing it a third time in the out years if you needed to. Um, but the other the other option and and

083like I like I said when I started this, these can all be pulled at different times and this can be pulled or utilized when we have a heavy workload cycle where we think we can get to a lot of work. Um, so all of this money can be targeted to the amount of work we're able to accomplish and we're not talking about it the other way with saying, well, we only have this much money. How much can we get done? It's a very different approach and it's it's a really good way I think of actually not getting ahead of ourselves. So those are really the the four bullets that I wanted to talk about. Um just to summarize those um methods to describe can be used together or independently to allocate funding. So we could

084put more money up front. We could put more money toward the end. Um we can actually apply it where it needs to be where the where the the work can get done. Um focus uh can be on how much work can we do. Um and it's a and a shift of the timing strategies to match what can be accomplished. I just mentioned that in the last slide. Um so it's it's really focusing on the work and then the the financing can match what the work is. Um and again the bullet point here is uh in the one example that I created. And again, if you're pulling four different letter levers at different times and different magnitudes, you can come up with all sorts of different numbers here. but $110 million seemed like a a good

085uh a good example when when I was looking at this and that generated over about 15 years. Um so that's really the financing. There's also two other bullet points that I just wanted to make sure the board was aware of. I don't know that we need to focus on them heavily, but um we're talking about the financing and there's also the work side of it, like how much work are we taking on? Um, we've talked last uh the summer uh summer project update that we have this extremely short window in the summer. Um, so we could actually start moving quicker on work if we had somewhere a a space in a building to move kids while we did work. And then that would allow us to actually do work beyond the summer window. We might

086be doing work in the fall while those kids are moved to a different location and then they might move back um after the project's done. That's just one example. I I don't know that anybody's talking about it significantly seriously right now, but I did want to bring it up. The other one is this idea of reducing the number of schools um and potentially reducing the number of AC projects. I think that really depends on what we do with schools. If we were to reduce schools and to really get at what I'm talking about here, you would need to devest ourselves of the property or ensure that that property would not be you needing air conditioning if that was something you were going to do. I just I just mentioned these two because as we're talking

087about a 15-year strategy, it may be pulling multiple different levers at different times and and these are other ways to actually get at more work in a more timely way. Um, so now I'm going to move into the the Weber and Leer project for next summer. And what we did is we um we established that uh we were going to approach this as a design build approach. Um meaning that we have a single t team and we're joined by them tonight. There's two teams here. Um and we have a contractor, an engineering team and an architect and and that's the teams on each one of them. Um, in this situation, uh, because you've got the contractor, the engineers, and the architect together, you can actually move quicker because you're all doing the work together. And

088as the design, as the um, engineers and the designers are coming up with designs, the contractor can say, "Yes, I can do that. No, I can't do that." Because they're all talking in real time. Um, in this type of approach, the district defines the need and then the team develops a solution collaboratively. So it's it we need to be involved in the team as PSD for this this approach. Um this approach sets up a an initial get the design done. That's the design build team that's working on that. And what they do is they build to a point. So we'll start the work and then there's going to be a point where we will bring a contract to the board with a what we call a guaranteed maximum price amendment. And what that'll do is

089it'll actually establish the price of the project once the contractor's been able to go out and bid it out, get an understanding of what those costs are, what the contractor pool looks like. Um, and so that is something that once the the scope is fully developed, um, we would actually be bringing a a GMP to the board to approve and that would actually establish the cost for that for that project. Um by doing this approach again if you have the whole team together and collaborating together it shortens schedules it reduce risks um and and it supports efficiency in in a phased uh multi-year approach because because we all need to be talking can we move the classrooms out in time can we get the classrooms moved back in in time for the window that we

090have. Um so that's the design build approach. We um just recently and uh not recently but a little bit ago um we did uh come up with the selections. Obviously I've got two here today. Um that was RFP 267004. And uh just a little bit of statistics from that. We did receive five qualified design build teams. So that's not just contractors. That's contractors that came with engineers and with architects as a team. Um, so we received five qualified um, out of the the process. Um, we did, uh, bring in four and it was really our constructions and trade staff that did this. Um, so you're talking about our plumbing uh, department head. You're talking about our HVAC, our controls, our electrical controls um, department heads. You're also talking about our construction staff, all of our

091project managers. Um, they were all in this evaluation to select four firms to interview. Um we did bring four firms in. Um that group interviewed those four firms and we um in the end selected two and so um that's what the committee is. It was actually an internal committee of of the people I just talked about the construction and the trade staff. Um and we selected Weber. Um and for Weber it's uh Franen and Pitman um joined with PEC that's an engineering firm and DA modeling and architect and then Leer is going to be um provided to Saunders and then a very similar uh engineering identical engineering and design team in that. So, um, with that, uh, what I would like to do is I'm going to turn the the balance of this presentation over

092to our our two, uh, contractors that are going to that come up in succession and just lightly talk about what we're going to be doing over the next couple months to develop a scope, things that we're how we're going to go about that, and then they might also talk a little bit about how they're thinking about phasing things over multiple summers. That was something we were looking for in the interviews. Um, so I'm I'm going to be joined uh and I'll call you up in here in a second, but Sergio is going to join us with PR Fran and Pitman. Uh, Gabe is going to join us from Saunders. And then with PEC Engineering, we have Chad and Dan here tonight. And with DA modeling, we have Sean here. And I don't have everybody's last

093names. I'm sorry I didn't write them all down. Um, but those are the those are the teams. And I'm going to now turn it over to Saunders. and they're going to come up and talk about the the project that they're uh focusing on of which is Lasher. >> Hello. Um my name is Gabe Dunar. I'm with Saunders Construction. I'll I'll be leading the the team for Leer. Um I'm a proud alumni of the district. So, thank you all for what you do. Um so, I just wanted to talk briefly about our timeline. um things that we're working on right now at Leher and what's going to happen before the end of the year ultimately in in preparation for our 10 weeks of summer activity out there. Um excuse me. So, we've done um already started

094our on-site investigation work. Uh we were there this past couple days that they had off of school. Um we are starting to work on confirming the um design strategies for cooling this um this building. Um, some some of you may know that it was originally built in 1959. There's been several additions over the years. So, um, it's a pretty complicated project, which is something that gets us kind of excited and we geek out over. So, um, our we've got a few milestones that we need to hit here in the next um, couple months. The first one being um, our schematic design documents that'll allow us to go solicit um, for mechanical subcontractors. Um Chad with PEC and Dan with PEC and Sean with DA modeling are are working on those design documents. Now um the

095next big milestone that you'll see on here is our permit submission. Um over the course of the winter, um the state of Colorado gets very busy with permit review. So that's a big big milestone for us to hit that before winter break. Um and then ultimately ordering equipment. So ordering our mechanical equipment that some of these um pieces of equipment have pretty long lead times. I can talk about that on the next slide. Um but hitting that date before winter break is really important for us. Um kind of a little graphic to show you what we're looking at, but um some of the lead times that we're seeing on equipment these days are are four months, five months. um some electrical equipments even almost a year. Um so with that being said, we're going to

096focus on um the first summer being the cooling the classroom specifically on that south wing of the school of the school. Um and then coming up with a strategy that we can defer any major electrical upgrades to that second summer to allow us time to order that equipment um and get it on site for 2027. Um just a a quick overview of of the plan. Um the purple shaded areas are what we're going to focus on that first summer. Um and the yellow shaded areas are what we're going to focus on for the uh summer of 27. Um if there's no >> Yeah. It's turned. So, yeah, the south side is actually from left to right on that bottom of of the page. I'll turn it over Sergio. >> Thanks, Gabe. >> Hi, my name

097is Sergio Ortiz with Francon Pitman. I appreciate your time. Um, yeah, Weber Middle School. Pretty near and dear to me. I've been there, this will be my sixth year as a parent. So, I have a 20-year-old, Rocky Mountain, Weber, uh, Batty Elementary, and then I have two other daughters. So, Johnson, Weber, Rocky. So, this will be great. And I do want to tell you that my youngest daughter told me she wants it nice and cool when she goes for opening night next summer. So I have some pressure because she's been through all the events and all the concerts. Um but in all seriousness, um I appreciate the district doing a design build approach. I actually have over 17 years of experience in that specific model. Um it's a very good model to bring everybody up

098front. I love it for a lot of reasons. It's not only to set up the job successfully of what's important and get the team oriented towards that same common goal, but it also breeds a lot of accountability. So when everybody's in early planning early, they get to hear the discussions. They get to be a part of the solutions and they actually own how the the execution goes. So another kudos um to Alex and your group and and everybody who went that way. Um don't want to bore too much when we go to the slides here. Very similar to what Saunders just covered. similar timeline when it comes to the upfront and coordination for um the project itself. Um so as we've talked this is the team I will be your senior project manager and lead

099for it. Um very similarly uh we have what we're calling you know the uh bases of work which is the critical spaces. Um we are focusing heavily on the dense areas. So you'll see we have noted classrooms. So when you're looking at this this is kind of in a northwest perspective. Um, when you look at the plan view for Weber, um, I was going to let some of my team come in and speak a little bit around the intent and the strategies that we're working through as well, specifically at Weber. So, go ahead, Chad. >> Hi. Um, yeah, on the cooling side, I mean, I'll keep this pretty high level. Uh, Weber went over uh or they had some major HVAC equipment replaced about 12, 13 years ago. Uh, that updated a lot of aged

100equipment. So, what we're hoping to do is just bring cooling into that equipment. Um, you know, we're focusing and working with the facilities group to make sure we're looking at longevity of equipment, efficiency, and we really want to try to keep as much as we can in place. So, we're looking at all the options that'll allow us to do that. Uh, the heating plant is in good shape at Weber. So, you know, this one, yeah, we're just concentrated a little bit more on the cooling and strategies we can do to bring that in. >> Appreciate that, Chad. And then I was going to introduce uh Dan to come and speak a little bit. Uh, we as well were at Weber Middle School last Friday. uh we spent about five hours there total looking at existing

101equipment infrastructure. So uh obviously the success here is we don't want to overpromise of what we can do in a in a summer wonder right and it sounds like there's been experience there. So what is very important and vital for us is what our current electrical loads are >> right as everybody knows that's some pretty old equipment. So, uh, my number one task is to coordinate with the power company, find out what we got available, and then feed back to our mechanical team and hopefully get that those classrooms and everything hooked up in that phase one. And then in phase two, we'll bring in those long lead items for that switch gear, get it hooked up, get you brand new equipment, and we'll never have to worry about this again. This will be a one

102and done on both schools once we get these service upgrades. That's kind of what we're looking at. >> Thanks, Dan. And the only thing I was going to note with France and Pitman technique is uh we utilize a lot of uh technology these days. I like sharing it with districts, getting students involved. So, we've already conducted our drone flight and we've created uh effectively an ortho model uh from the outside. So, now we have our asbuilt conditions that we could back check all of the documents that are in place. Uh we've also done our uh integration of 360 walks on the inside of the building. And then once we get a little more specific, we're going to utilize laser scanning technology. And what that helps us do when we're upfront in design is be able

103to verify the actual conditions and eliminate the oh nos because when you're on a 10-e timeline for a summer wonder, you a day is like a week and a week is like a month. I can't even express how tight those schedules are. So there's a lot of reasons we do that pre-planning. And without getting into all the specifics, um, we have a very high level, uh, schedule kind of showing some of the early release similar to once again what, uh, Saunders was showing for the Leer Middle School. So, I'll open it up to any further questions. >> So, uh, so thank you. That is the end of our presentation. Um, we'll be able to take any questions at this point and I'll I'll have the team stay up here with me in case they have

104questions. >> All right. Fantastic. Thank you so much and thank you for all the work that you are doing. I know that um not only are your kids going to be happy, but all the kids in in Weber will be extremely happy about this. So, thank you so much. Um questions. >> Go ahead, Kevin. >> Excuse me. I got three. I'm going to go in reverse order. Um, as someone who's experiencing a design build project that was an unintentional one with my own personal residence, I do appreciate the model. I think it's it has a lot of virtue. I guess my question is we started this conversation with financing and talking about 4A money and the sliver of the bucket of the 4A that's going to be appropriated to AC which 2.1 1.2, excuse me.

105Um, so 1.2. So I guess my question is if we're if we're doing a design build concept and we're not going to cheer up the numbers for any specific project until the design phase is complete which is I think prudent thing to do. How do we know how much money we're talking about in the grand scheme of things? And that builds into to the other questions that I >> and and you're talking about in the grand scheme of things of the district-wide air conditioning, right? >> And so I don't want to pretend like we've gone through and costed out every school. We haven't done that yet. Um what we are doing is relying heavily on the Mckinstry data that was done. They did air conditioning studies in the district of each of the schools that

106doesn't have air conditioning. Um I will say that um with McKinstry um they suggested the systems they would like um in in an air conditioning retrofit I think each of our teams will be asking the questions what equipment do you need and what serves the district best and we'll have our trades in there and our construction people to help figure that out. That was that collaboration I was talking about. Um but that's really where we're at right now with the the planning and the cost side. >> I appreciate that. The reason I bring that up is of 22 elementaryaries, five middles, and three non-traditionals. If we get to a situation where I'm I'm not going to pick on Leer, but let's say that Leer becomes a 10.5 million and then oops, scope creep and some

107things are happening with tariffs. It's now 15.2 and in lie of that, we could have gotten three or four smaller projects knocked out in a two or three year cadence. I'd be interested in that conversation coming up early, but again, I know you don't Yeah, I know you've kind of estimated frolies and we're using McKinstry, but I wonder how much thought that was went into that. >> Yeah, I mean, I I think that scope scope creep can happen all the time and we want to plan for that. Um the the good thing with the GMP is that we actually know what number we're working to once we get there. That's really important. Um but we don't necessarily know what that means for CLP middle school or bullets, right? um we can use data and actually

108now that we have teams on board we can actually use things like square foot indicators and things like that once we get through the middle school design detail design what I'm hoping is that we can turn our design teams into okay now let's start looking at a high level at these other schools and start thinking about how that goes but we want to prioritize Leer and Weber first >> yeah that makes sense because I mean because I'm I'm assuming that of the sites there may be some that just need updates they don't may need the entire bridge thing. So that that might be easier to triage. >> And I and I think that's something that we actually saw with even Batty and OD that like >> it wasn't that we needed to go in and

109replace the entire system. We're able to replace rooftop units that had you guys know about some of you know about this more than I do, but the the AC came in as a as an addin or an improvement to that. >> Okay. And last question of my three is you'd mentioned one of the slides the committee that was sort of examining this and making some decisions about which site. Could you speak to that just very briefly because I think it builds off of that last question. >> Yep. Sure. So, so um our internal committee and and what what I mean by a committee is anytime we do an RFP or something like this, we get a group of people together to evaluate. And in this one, I'm just going to list the people off so

110you kind of know who's in there. Um had Alex Hendricks, our uh planning and construction manager. Um Trudy Trimbath, she's sitting behind Dan over there. Um she's our assistant director of facilities. We had Jason Lee, construction project manager. T. Brockheimimer, construction project manager. Zack Kobuk, uh, didn't say that right. Construction project manager. Um, and then you get into our our trade experts. So, we have Matt Robbins. He's our building automation controls uh department head. He knows just about everything there is to know about controls in in the world. and and what I say about the controls and the HVAC and even the plumbing and electrical, I can't think of anybody that's more of an expert than somebody that is responsible for managing 54 plus sites of different systems and keep those things running all day

111long. So, these four people, Matt Robbins, building automations and control, Steve Saab, HVAC, uh Colin Le, he's in our plumbing department, and Brian Zimmerman with our electrical department. um they just have so much knowledge as to what works in this district, what doesn't work within this district. Most of these people have worked with the people behind me at some level or another in in the past. Um so that's really the group that was put together for that. Um and then I was there, but I I felt like I the expertise was there and my vote wasn't really that important. >> Thank you. Other questions? Go ahead, Jim. Yeah, Dave, I want to talk mostly about the financing part of this. Um, as I go through your slides for that, the I'll just go through I

112think you had five categories. One was rep prioritize capital sounds fine to me. I'd leave that up to the administration. Uh, using the 2016 bond money sounds fine to me. Leave it up to the administration. Defer inflationary adjustments. You're the best. Inflationary adjustments. You're the best one to figure that out. Um, I'm I'm good with all that. When we get to the bonded debt, going back to the voters, it just doesn't feel like a good idea to me. And then, uh, when we start talking about certificates of participation, I think you're in the same camp, but this one makes me really nervous because, um, first, I think we should adopt a pay as you go kind of approach on this. And also things are going to become clearer and clearer over the next five and

11310 years >> where we're at with our schools. Have we had closures? Um all those kinds of things. So it's we're going to know more. >> Yeah. >> As as much as I want to get this thing done tomorrow. >> We're going to know more over time and it's going to be a better use of our taxpayers money. >> Yeah. I I appreciate you mentioning the coops as a pay as you go is the exact same phrase that we were talking with our bond underwriters today when I was talking to them and in the way we've structured this because we can infuse them in small amounts if we need to. We can literally once we get the runway and know on a fairly detailed level what we think the costs are going to be over

114a course of number of years, we can accelerate a cop and do that faster. Um, but it it's just another option and and like you said, I agree with you. The the bonded debt the bonded debt geo debt right now just doesn't seem like it's a conversation that we should be having. >> Thank you. Yeah. Go ahead, Scott. >> Yeah, kind of uh building off of what Jim was just saying, I I agree um with those first options you were talking about that could free up about $21 million. Um, I'm very impatient on on getting this done and I think the voters are too. And uh um you know getting two middle schools done in two years is great, but I want more. So, so I definitely want to explore options to start getting some

115of those elementary schools and that type of thing. I do agree from the last presentation that you had that the middle schools are a you know we're going to help a large number of kids all in one building. Um so I I do agree with the middle school approach but I think we need to kind of tackle some of the other um the other ones out there. So I'm I'm impatient but I agree with Jim the bond is not >> poutable. Um and I'm actually curious about the certificates of participation. um but only if that's kind of a last resort and we have an opportunity to kind of pounce on some other projects soon. Um the big thing though is I want to make sure we're you utilizing our money as efficiently as possible. And

116so one thing that we've heard some feedback from recently is when we're doing this and I think this came up with um Batty um roof replacements uh the >> any lighting improvements uh sprinkler upgrades. Are we doing that at Weber and Leer? Are we planning to do that on on those projects or are there needs for those things? And is that part of the planning on on other things? >> Yeah. And in fact, I'm going to answer and I'm not even going to look behind me to make sure that they agree with me or not, but um those are absolutely things that we are thinking about as part of that. So, just like with Batty, lighting upgrades, I mean, this is going to be a design build. We haven't done the we haven't finished the

117scope yet, and those would be something that we would consider definitely in there. Um, another one is like at Leer, there's a secure entryway, too, that we're going to get ready to do. And I I believe that there's been conversations between our project managers and at least the people that are working on that school at Leher. Um but yes, >> thank you. Other questions? Andrew, did you have some? Go ahead. What capacity do we have for number of projects per summer would you estimate based on availability of of those who can actually perform the work etc. >> I don't know that I'm equipped to answer that right now. I think we're going to know that much better come December and I haven't talked to these guys about it. As part of that GMP process, one

118of the things they're going to do is go out to their subs and get costs. And at that point, I think we're going to have a real good measure of how much capacity and work is out there. We'll have a conversation with them to talk about how many how much interest did you get, how many subcontractors came in, what were the bids looking like, and and then that's actually something we need to sit down and review with them as they're going through their bids. But at that point, I think we'll have a much better read on what capacity the contractors have. >> Do we have >> Sorry, did you have another >> a few more? >> Okay, go ahead. Yep. >> Um, is there an overall order of placement in terms of at least grouping

119of schools that have been identified as higher priority and then moving on? I mean if it's literally just we starting with the middle schools and then we go to the elementary. I just wonder if there has been any any assessment. >> Yeah. >> To that level. >> Um yes there has and it was primarily done by our trades folks. Um but we do have um Weber and Leer at the top of the list. Um next would be Boltz CL Middle School. Um we might come in and do a smaller thing with the Centennial Annex. Um then you get into other population or density schools like the K12s like Polaris and then right after that you're getting into the elementary schools. That's at least the order now. That's not to say that's in concrete like if

120priorities change we can move things around but that's at least our thinking right now. >> No appreciate that. Uh couple of things in my mind related to risk points and there was one comment about electrical and what that might look like external to the schools and I wonder are there concerns about the grid where we might have to have for instance work with the city to have improvements um in coordination with the city obviously for that increased electrical need. >> Sure. And then the other risk point I wondered about was how we're managing costs with the changes of what's more expensive external to the US versus internal costs of steel, etc. Things like that. What mitigation strategies we have for those types of things. >> I'm going to let him take the electrical one and

121then maybe somebody else might want to take the >> managing tariffs and all of that. >> Right. I've already been in conversation with Fort Collins Power and Light. They are uh they this is on their radar. So they do know, we've even talked about uh having the transformers available from power company and they're already searching for those right now. So we're not going to be on long lead times, you know, getting the new switch gear now waiting on a utility transformer. So we're kind of jumping ahead before we select the mechanical equipment. I'm kind of getting ahead of everybody else and trying to head these problems off at the past by, you know, starting that conversation early. >> Appreciate that. Just again, I see those as potential all of a sudden what if things slow

122down again somehow and so I just appreciate the >> No, that's a good question. But yeah, that that's uh that that's on my task early early in the design. >> Okay. >> And then I get the only other thing I think I had because I feel like he addressed both of the items there. Um just what what do you need from us tonight in terms of direction, input, um or just hold for more information? Any of this? >> I I think this is anformational item tonight. It's just it's just an update. Um what you will expect is you're going to start to see some contracts hit the board agendas. Um so um as soon because we're impatient as well, as soon as we have the GMPs ready, we will get those in front of the

123board. We'll want to turn those around quickly um because that allows us to actually start moving in a very robust way after that. Um so it's informational tonight. I think um I think I've heard a little bit of commentary around that looks good, maybe not that. Um the good news is the maybe not the bond. That wasn't even something we're thinking about for six or seven years, at least in my forecast. So that's not to say you couldn't do it sooner, but like that that's where I placed it with the 110. So So yeah, I think uh yeah, we're just Yeah. >> Thank you all for the work you're doing on this. Looking forward to it. Okay. Anything else? >> Okay. Go ahead, Jess. >> Me. All right. I've just got a couple of things.

124Um, first is I saw the lead time on some of the things. Should we start considering preemptively purchasing anything, particularly those switchboards? >> I don't know if all switchboards are the same for all projects. I'm going to guess not. But is there anything that we should be doing proactively since this is a long-term project at a lot of buildings? >> Yes, I think there is. And then I think even in the interviews, um, some of them alluded to that we would want to buy equipment earlier if we can. Um, I have had some conversations with Autumn, our legal and policy council, Autumn Aspen, and we believe we can get there. That should not be a challenge. We can purchase the equipment. We just need to do the documents correctly so that in the end that

125gets folded into the GMP. But that with the GMP and that's but that is something we're going to do. If we can get equipment early, we will. >> Well, I mean, so you'd have equipment and then you wouldn't necessar Are you saying we get equipment and then we decide where to put it later? >> No. No. We would get we would get the design. We'd know what equipment we're after. And then if we don't have the GMP at that point, I don't know that we want to wait a month for that to happen. We might go out and purchase that equipment that's in that design. We're going to have to assess whether we're ready for that or not in that moment. Um, but that's a way to move a little quicker and we've thought about

126that. >> I mean, I think that's great. If I'm remembering the G, when was the GMP this time around? Like January? Like the 50 weeks wouldn't be I mean, it will be it's okay for this project because it's a two-year project, but if there's other projects that are only a one-year project. >> Yeah. And we did not do a design build on the other ones. Um, the design build is is where you bring the GMP. That's that's a little different. The other ones, I believe, were bids. Um, let's see. Sorry, I had a couple of pieces. Uh, as far as like value statements go, I'll be really curious if you guys could bring back um, sorry, I have it here somewhere. Um, sorry, so many notes. um once we know more through this process like

127if you guys could come back so that we when we go through those five options right whether we're >> deciding to go out for a bond which I agree not we >> prioritize that with the mill um but if we did want to do a cop what that would look like how much we'd have a better idea once you guys have done the leg work especially through a round or two so that we know what that looks like and how much we would actually be willing to consider Absolutely. That that's exactly the plan is that as we get and as we get through these middle schools, we're going to learn a lot more about how we can move in this design build process and and as we get better information, we can be more informed.

128>> The good news about those levers is that they can be pulled at different times, right? And so I had the cops not coming in in the forecast until like six or seven years out, >> but if we find that we can if we find we can do more work I got to stop talking on my hands. If we find we can do more work somehow by increasing the window or something like that of the work we can do, >> we can move that cash to upfront. We can we can do something like that earlier and at that point we'll know why we're doing it. >> Yeah. And I think like knowing what the capacity of our community is or actually getting these things done, how much would be really helpful information. Um there was

129something you said, Andrew, that made me want another update. Oh, cap. Yeah, capacity for a number of projects I think was Can you you said you have an answer around December. Can you give us an update once you guys have that idea for what that capacity? >> Yeah, the the vendor capacity. Yeah. And I and I I said December. It might be December, Januaryish, but yeah, >> I figure you guys will find some information. I have to sift through it and decipher it. And I don't know when that update comes to us, but >> what they'll do is they'll go out and get bids from their subcontractors. They're going to tally those up. We're going to all review those together, make sure we all agree with the selections, and at that point, we'll have conversations

130about what was the interest, how many contractors did we have. If we see that there's like eight subs lining up for work, that would indicate that we might have capacity to take on more. I would look to the GCS to tell us that though, because that's their work, >> for sure. >> They and they know whether that makes sense or not. We would be asking that in that moment. >> Yeah, I would rather work get done well than fast just for the sake of fast. I do like fast, too, don't get me wrong, but I'd rather it be done well. Um, and then just one last piece because you guys, your team did a lot of work this summer on trying to help our schools mitigate heat. Do is there a plan to give us

131an update on how that's going or how that went this fall at some point so that we can also I know it's out of the scope of this presentation, but >> yeah, I I don't know that there's a plan to come back with the board. I'd have to look to the superintendent to see if that's something we want to if the board wanted to bring that back in. Um we have been uh having regular updates with a group that is managing heat a little bit in the district. Uh includes some of our educators. Um and so we talked a lot about some of the things that worked, some of the things that didn't work. Um the portable air coolers, I I think for the most part they were received well. Um now schools are trying

132to find places to store them and what to do with them and so maybe they're not as desired right now. Um, and so I think that that's going to be something that we're learning through. Um, we did try some window tent on some film. Um, we tried putting some shades in the Delaney models. >> Um, we're going to evaluate to see if that really I don't know that those helped as much. What we found with the window film is once we got to a certain temperature, I think it was like 95, any of the benefit of the window tinting kind of went out and you can see the temperature just boom. It's like you're you're back to where it was without the window film. So, so that may not be something that we deploy greatly,

133but we are going to try it at least at another school or two to see if we have better success. Um, those are some of the things and I think that's those are the big ones, >> right? Just an idea of like just because it'll give us an idea of if something's working. If those portable units are working relatively well, maybe it says that we can take our time and do it with the money that we have available. if they're not working well, maybe then it pushes us to go for a cop so that we can be quicker. >> I wouldn't I wouldn't want to stand at the podium and represent that they work that well. >> I I think our teachers would probably not like that if I said that. Um um because I

134think there's also other considerations like noise, humidity. >> Absolutely. >> Those are some other things that we heard about with those portable coolers is >> Yeah. There's challenges with them. They're not perfect, >> right? They weren't designed to be. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. Okay. And quick followup. >> Sorry. And I know we've got another uh big information session. Um I did want to at least acknowledge the folks that are standing behind you and saying thanks for pwning up with us on this particular journey. May not be every client that you have to come present at 7:30 in a public meeting. Um I did want to underscore something that one of you said, I forget who said it. I apologize about I think a day feeling like a year, etc. That jo bear with me.

135Um, it reminded me of the scene from Interstellar where they're on Miller's planet where every tick represents I think it's like a year or an hour on Earth. I I do want to underscore that while we're developing these partnerships, I appreciate it and I hope you don't feel too much under the the spotlight here, but any efficiency gains we can make to Scott's point, anything you're learning. Um, I'm not I'm not saying it's going to give you preferred vendor status in the next RFP, but you know, we're looking for partners that are that are saddling up with us because every summer that we're spending this work is another time when kids and staff are coming into these buildings that are hot and they're not learning. And so, this is a partnership. U, we will appreciate

136you taking this venture with us and we hope to learn a lot about the work that you're doing so that we can accelerate this uh this partnership down the road. So, thank you. >> Yeah, thank you so much. Oh, go ahead, Scott. One last thing. >> Yeah, last thing. Um, I'm just curious how much uh of this work is we can duplicate um where we're not having to take every building as a as its own brand new project where there's, you know, like you were talking about, there's a lot of buildings that are the same design. So, can we just implement that that same uh plan? And then real quick, the other thing would be bulk buying equipment that fits those those plants. So we kind of save money and time >> on both those.

137>> Yeah, I I think I think to your point and and and I want to echo what I heard the urgency around doing this, we want to do it quickly, too. >> Um so so yes, I I I do think that we we want to move as fast as we can on that. Um Scott, I'm sorry. Can you repeat your question again? Yeah, >> just basically like can we instead of having to do brand new designs for every building >> uh can we just duplicate and say okay this worked in this middle school let's do >> so yes and no maybe um for like the middle schools I think both of these schools are different um when you get to Bolts it's even more different it's going to be more challenging just because of the

138way that's constructed um but then you're right we do have schools like the Delaney models and different models that are similar similar models and we would want to look for efficiencies there if we could. Um those are all things that I I'm I'm now they're listening behind us and those are all things we want to do together as a team and and to Kevin's point I would also say that um there's opportunity for us to continue with good working teams as well the way we structured this RFP. So there's opportunity to to actually have a partnership for a bit if it works. >> Great. Well, I want to thank you all so much for um coming and presenting to us. I I do want to keep um in mind when we are talking about the

139AC and the prioritization. It ties very well into our next conversation of bell times because if we are talking about, you know, flipping bell times and elementary schools start going an hour plus later and staying for an hour longer than they um have, we are talking about hotter temperatures in buildings. So, you know, that may influence where we want to um prioritize. So, I think that is something that we need to also be considering as we as we move forward. Um that said, I just want to say thank you so much. Uh thanks for presenting and thanks for all the great work that you will be doing at Leer and Weber. I know that we're all looking forward to that and the students especially. So, thank you all. [Applause] Is there any interest in taking

140five minutes before we go ahead? Yes. Okay. We will go ahead and take five minutes. We'll be back here at actually we'll do 7:30. We will start. Thanks. All right, if I can start to call everybody back Andrew and Scott All right, welcome back. Uh, thanks for um, bearing with us. We just needed a little break there. And now we're going to move on to uh,formational reports, discussion items of bell times. So, uh, we have a guest for this as well. >> Yeah, we got a couple guests here and I just want to start before we transition. Wasn't that last pres presentation a good one? a really good one. Uh, I want us as we get into this next one, which is going to be equally as great, and that's not putting pressure on the

141presenters. It's it's it's not. No, it's not. But I do I do I do want to gently remind us what the lead from Saunders PSD grad shared that when he found out with his team that the project at Leer Middle School was going to be quite complicated, it got their team really energized. And so I'm asking all of us to have that same mindset as we enter into this next important conversation because it's equally as complex as we all know. And so we're going to talk about Bell Times. I look forward to the discussion with our CFO Dave Mononttoya and our director of transportation Dan Weaver. Welcome both of you. Thanks for being here. >> Thank you. And I'm just going to do a brief introduction. This is really Dan's presentation. Um, the words that

142I wanted to do because I I know we're going to get into a serious conversation here with Bell Times. Before we start that, I just want to really appreciate the work that Dan and the routing team did and the entire transportation department to to pull off the data that we're going to show you. It took a whole system to do that. And what that meant is when Dan and the routers were working on bell times, the others had to step up and keep the buses running. and and we all know that um and Dan's going to talk about this, we all know that transportation is way understaffed right now and that's a real challenge. So, I just I couldn't be prouder of the work they did. Um and it's um it's just amazing. So, Dan,

143[Applause] >> thank you. I appreciate that. Uh I just want to quickly echo exactly what Dave said. Um, I couldn't be prouder of my team, both the routing team and just the transportation department as a whole. All the work that they put in on a daily basis and the extra mile they continually go. Um, I'm proud of them and I'm honored to to work with them in such a great department. So, just wanted to start with that and I appreciate you guys having me here tonight to talk about Bell Times. So I wanted to start off tonight with a uh brief overview of the recent history with our Belltime project. As we took a look at this uh in 2023 24 school year, transportation department was tasked with evaluating our routing efficiencies. We uh we

144contracted with first services to assist with this evaluation. In the 2425 school year, some bell ch belltime changes were implemented to increase our efficiency this year. Going into the school year, uh we did some additional changes that also further decreased our efficiency. Those were mainly looking at uh group stops instead of doortodoor. Also doing individual analysis of individual routes and just kind of seeing where we could make some improvements. Some of the goals we had as we looked into this project was we really didn't want to start any earlier than what we are now. In fact, we wanted to try to make it a little later even, but we at least set that as our target. So, no bell time starting earlier than 7:30 a.m. We wanted to make sure high schools were ending no

145later than 4 p.m. to give them the time they need for their athletics, activities, jobs, other things that that uh they have involved in their lives. We want to increase our efficiency and our cost savings and also decrease our total number of routes to help with our driver shortage. So, as we took a look at this, we first started off working in conjunction with First Services. We took a different approach this year. Um I for I failed to mention to we also looked into the instructional minutes and made sure that those were in alignment with everything we were doing as we started the Belltime U conversation. We then started working with first services and used their team to work on it as well as our internal routing department in Pter school district. Both of the

146teams came up with great ideas. Um, all of the examples you'll see tonight were actually proposals that came through from our internal routing department. Colton and his team did a fantastic job as well. What we saw and some of the stuff that he looked at had some time savings. Meaning on our tiers, when we look at a three- tier system, he might have saved 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there. Um, when we really started looking at some of those, what we didn't account for was inclement weather and different traffic situations. So there was a real risk of running behind schedule on a daily basis. And so that's why we kind of leaned towards the models that our team did in house. After both teams finished their assessments, we then had the teams get together. We

147had Colton meet with our internal team and myself and Dave and we kind of vetted each other's work and Colton really looked at it and said, "Yeah, you guys really knocked it out of the park with this." So all the models you're about to see kind of focus around what we did internally. We did run some other scenarios and look at some other options as well. some of the current transportation challenges that we're facing. Um, currently we are running with 11 operator open operator positions and three PAR positions. We also as of the end of week nine, which we are now starting week 11, so this is a little over a week ago, our absences and time off requests totaled 554 times in the first nine weeks of school. Myself and our support team, which

148is managers, supervisors, routers, dispatchers, trainers, and myself have been on the buses 350 times since the start of the school year. Those numbers have actually increased. I looked this morning, and as of today, starting off week 11, we've had 634 absences, and our staff has now been on the buses 405 times. We also face a really large geographical size to our district. So, our schools are spaced out quite a bit and we're similar in size to the state of Roh Rhode Island. We picked a starting point of trying to find exactly what we wanted and valued in our district. What if we could make every bell time fall between the 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. window? Could we use the the 7 hours and 15 minute instructional minutes um length of day that Mr. Hunt

149talked about last board meeting and get over 8,000 over 8,400 students to 49 different schools in that window. The simple answer is yes, but it comes at an extreme cost. We would have to increase we currently are running 113 routes. We would have to increase to 156 routes to accomplish this. That's a 24% increase in total number of routes coming in at just under 2.7 million in additional costs for routes alone. In addition to that, we'd have to look at adding to our fleet and growing the size of it, which comes in $6.6 million for additional buses and equipment. So, as we go into the five scenarios, um, again, as as Bud talked about last board meeting, there was three models that kind of came to the light as we did instructional minutes. A level

150aligned model, which was all elementary at the same time, middle at their own time, and then high school as well. a system aligned and then a system aligned with a late start. Our team looked at all three of those models and then we gave two additional models as well trying to get a little creative and and think outside the box a little bit. So in scenario one is our level aligned. As you can see the tiers each of these models will show a three tier system meaning each bus route transports to three different schools. So that in this model they will pick up middle schoolers first then elementary school and high school. It's worth noting on all of these scenarios because the sheer number of elementary schools that we have, some elementary schools are on

151those other tiers that it's not noted. So, elementaryaries p primarily on the second tier in this, but some fall onto the first and third. With this model, you've got 6 hours and 54 minutes of instructional or of bell time for elementary, 7:22 for middle school, and 7:25 for high schools. This model came in at the exact efficiencies that we're running at right now. 113 total routes, which is what we're doing this year. We are budgeted for 118 because that's where we were last year, which gives us about $355,000 in savings. And we'll talk about the calculation of how we calculate exactly what the cost per route is at a later slide. So, as you can see, when you look over to the table, and I want to get everybody familiar with this because you'll see

152this on all of our scenarios. This table shows, you'll see that first column is labeled as bell times before 8 am. Again, we wanted to model anything that started before that time. And then down at the bottom, you'll see it bell times that go after 4 p.m. This only shows any of the schools that are falling outside of those windows. Oh, I've had a good mentor. I did. Yes, it's payback. Um, that's good. So, on on that table, we modeled everything that started before 8 a.m. on all of these slides. And then we modeled anything that went after 4 p.m. in the evening. As you can see, you then have a breakdown of elementary, middle, and high school. This model shows seven middle schools starting as early as 7:03. Again, that's not what we were

153wanting to see, but some of these, as we talked about in the previous slide, really, we couldn't make it happen with only 45 minutes to spread out before and after with a 7 hour and 15 minute day, or in this model, close to 7 hours. We also have nine elementary schools starting at 7:29, one elementary at 7:39, one middle school at 7:40, and one elementary at 7:45. This MOS model also has all of our high schools going after 4 p.m. They are ending at 4:20. So, this one did not meet the criteria of nothing starting before 7:30. Our high schools go past 4 p.m. There's no additional increase or no additional efficiency or cost savings per uh or compared to what we're currently doing and no change in total number of routes helping with our

154driver shortage. Scenario two is our system aligned. This model shows with all schools at every grade level having a day length of seven hours and 15 minutes. This one is set up with elementary part primarily on the first tier, middle school on the second and high school on the third. With this, this was our most efficient model. we were able to look at reducing it down to 100 routes even, which is compared to our budgeted 118 routes, almost $1.3 million in route savings. This one has 19 elementary schools starting at 7:30 and one starting at 740. So, we did start at 7:30 or later. Um, and our high schools still unfortunately now are getting out at 4:25. So, we did spill out on the back end of it. Scenario number three is the system aligned

155with the dedicated late start. To explain that, that means that one day per week, every grade level would have a 35 minute late start or early release, however you wanted to set that up. It's important to note that in order for this to work and to hit the efficiency models that we've done, it has to be 100% of the entire district deciding on that. We cannot split it and have some schools deciding to do an early early uh release and some doing a late start. So it would have to be districtwide one way or the other. Um it's also worth noting I I I forgot to mention earlier all of these models our routing team actually fully routed. Students have been assigned on all of these. So we've proofed the concept and backed it up

156with actual data show showing all of these students getting transportation that we're providing transportation to as currently we also have no reduction in service that we're offering at the district level. So with this model there's two ways that you can do this in order to do that 35minute late start. The other four days of the week you're going to need to add 10 minutes. Now you can either add that 10 minutes at the start of the day or at the end of the day. We modeled, you'll see down at the bottom there, the data is shown with the 10 minutes added onto the morning. So the morning bell times shift forward or shift earlier by 10 minutes. So now those same 19 schools are now starting at 7:20, one at 7:30 and one at 7

157or four at 7:50. All elementary schools. And again, because we added time only on the front end of the day, we still have 10 of our high schools getting out at 4:25. So this one bell times potentially start at 7:30. That's if you added that time on in the afternoon. The high schools do end later than 4 p.m. We still see our max efficiencies at 100 routes. And we do decrease the number of routes to help with our driver shortage. Scenario number four is where we kind of switched it up and really tried to take a different look at it. We modeled both four and five off of that 7 hour and 15 minute day, the system aligned day. With this one, the biggest change is we've now put high school as the first tier.

158So, we're now moving high school to the first schools to start every day. With that, you end up with only four elementary schools starting at 7:45. So, now we've actually pushed the day back a little bit, but eight of our high schools are starting at 7:45. So, we've actually pushed back the day by 15 minutes compared to what we're doing currently. Um, this one comes in at just slightly less route savings at 105 routes, which is just under a million dollars. And then on the back end, we do have several schools that end up going past 4 p.m. And so you can see a breakdown of how that lands, most of those being elementaryaries at the four uh 410 p.m. time slot, you'll notice over on the the high school column, the little asterk next

159to the two. Those two schools are actually our K12 schools. So those would be not our traditional high schools, but some of our alternative K through2 schools that are ending at that time. Scenario number five, we set up again with high school as the first tier. The switch on this one is we now put middle school on the second and elementary on the primarily on the third tier. We come in with the same number of routes that we had on the previous model, 105 total routes, so just under a million dollars in savings. Our bell times start at 7:30, so we're right on par with what we're currently doing. All of our high schools end before 4 p.m. In fact, they actually end at 300 p.m. And our middle schools end at 3:45 and 4

160p.m. So, we've actually not only had high school, but we've had middle school fall into that category that we were trying to target. We do see increased efficiencies and cost savings and we do decrease the total number of routes compared to our current model. Now you'll notice some of the downside on this model is now we have our elementary schools ending later in the day. So we have three at 4 p.m. 18 of them so the majority of them at 4:35 and two that go until 4:45. Here's a comparison of all the different models as well as our current system. So, it kind of breaks down the total length of day, total number of routes each one has, the percentage of route efficiency. So, that's total number of routes is what that is. Uh the

161earliest start time for each model, and that's district-wide at all levels, the latest release, and then how the tiers are structured for transportation. So, you'll see like on our current system, we do middle school first, then elementary, then high school. So this kind of breaks it down, runs through every different scenario, and as you can see, scenario two and three as far as transportation efficiency are our maximum models at 15%. This is where we kind of talk about how we come up with that route cost. So it's uh I want to clarify that we are discussing cost per route numbers. This is not overall transportation budgeting. This doesn't take into account, you know, salaries for staff, office supplies, different things that it takes to run daytoday that the number total number of routes doesn't affect

162the cost. So, we take the driver and parap pay plus your fuel cost plus your maintenance cost and that's how you come out with your total route. We figured that at 71,000 per route annually and we're currently budgeted for that 118. So, as you run down each one of these, that route savings column is how many routes we trimmed off of that 118 model. And then the cost next to it is how much money that saves based on that figure of 71,000 per route. We then wanted to sit down and start discussions and get peer reviews from different people in the district and get a feedback loop going. We did that for all of our scenarios. Um some of the pros and cons going into scenario one. On the pro side, minimal disruption. This one's

163the closest to what we're currently doing. Uh elementary start times may align with younger children's wake times and learn learning stamina. Cost sa cost cost savings for hourly staff. So it minimizes the additional costs for elementary hourly employees like pair of professionals. The downside high school end time. Again, we're going past that 4pm mark. Operational issues for shared staff and schools. Significant difference in start end times between middle and high schools could be challenging for schools that share jobs like specials and SSPs. The early middle school start time. 7:30 start could be viewed by some in the community to be too early for middle school students. Scenario number two, some of the pros. Later start for middle school students. The later start for middle school may be viewed as better for students in this age

164group and may be more manageable than the current schedule with its early start time. Alignment with research. Early elementary start time aligns with research indicating that younger students are typically awake earlier. Operational efficiency provides greater operational efficiencies and brings middle and high school times closer to alignment. Expanded bel benefit eligibility. A longer school day will result in additional staff having an eight-hour day, making more staff benefits eligible. Pair of professional compensation. A longer school day will result in pair of professionals working additional hours, increasing compensation, and universal prek funding opportunity. The longer hours offer more funding opportunities for our early childhood program. Some of the cons. High school end time could be considered suboptimal for athletics activities and students who work. Significant cost increase for hourly for hourly staff. Lengthening the day means 6.5 hour

165pair of professionals particular particularly in integrated services must be assigned additional hours leading to increased costs especially at the elementary level. Early elementary start time. 7:30 start time for elementary students may be too early and could lead to increases in tardies. Benefits benefits cost increases. Uh expanding benefits eligibility will likely result in additional costs to the district's self- insurance plan and compensation cost. The district is experiencing budget constraints and would need to identify funding to support compensation increases for pair of professionals associ associated with additional hours worked. Scenario three, some of the pros, built-in staff collaboration. So you now have, this is our dedicated late start. So there now is built-in time for those teams to collaborate. Middle school collaboration time, same thing. Operational efficiencies provides greatest operational efficiencies in transportation. This is true of

166both scenario two and three. Expanded benefits el eligibility, again, more staff working eight hours. pair of professional compensation. They're getting more compensation from longer hours. We have the same increased universal prek funding opportunities. The downside, high school end time. Again, we're going past 4 p.m. We're getting kind of late there. Impact of weather and daylight conditions. Elementary students starting at 7:20 may be out in the cold dark waiting for morning buses. late start and elementary paraprofessional or professional learning communities PLC's 35 minute late start meaning meeting may not be effective for PLC work at the elementary level and again to pull off the dedicated late start we would need all grade levels to do that so that's why that's a concern on this one uh the increase in benefits costs and then the comp compensation

167costs scenario number Pros can be high school end times. High schools now uh high schools may benefit from a 3pm end time for athletics activities and students who work. High school dismissal prior to other levels. Students being dismissed earlier in the day may allow them to be home to receive care for younger siblings. Child care for younger students. Later elementary and middle school dismissal times may align with parent guardian work schedules, potentially minimizing child care needs. expanded benefits eligibility, pair professional compensation, and increased uh universal pre-k funding. The cons, middle school end time, 450 end time for middle school may be considered too late and may impact activities and athletics. This is the latest um bell time ending for any of the scenarios. So that 450 time frame is is the latest of all five

168scenarios. Elementary end times. Elementary schools ending as late as 4:50 could impact the dinner hour for families and may be considered a hardship for families. Significant start end time shift for some schools. Schools moving from the earliest to the latest start times. Example would be going from a 7:45 at our current schedule to a 9:30 uh shift is a shift that could be difficult for the community. Benefit cost increases and compensation costs. And on our last scenario, secondary end time as a as a pro. End times for middle and high school may be considered ideal because they accommodate athletics activities and students who work. Class time. High school students may miss less class for athletics and activities because high school end times are earlier. Again, this model shows all high schools getting out by by

1693 p.m. High uh high school dismissal prior to other levels. Students will be home so they can receive and care for their younger siblings. Child care for younger students, later elementary and middle school dismissal times may align with parent guardian work schedules, potentially minimizing child care needs. Expanded benefits, paraprofessional compensation, and universal prek. The cons, elementary start time. A late start for elementary may be difficult for families to work schedules uh for families work schedules and younger students may be awake for a significant amount of time before school begins. Learning for younger or yeah learning for younger students later end times 3:30 p.m. or later could be difficult for younger children which could result in loss of learning benefits increases and compensation costs. I'd like to add on this one as well. um a potential

170pro, you know, depending on how you look at it. We could look at then putting some of our afterchool programs at the elementary level as possibly being before school programs and offsetting it that way. And you could argue as well, and it's going to vary household to household um that this may actually align with the standard nine-to-five work shift, which not everybody has. Um but it could be in alignment with a lot of different families in our district. questions and discussion. So, as we came to an end of this, uh, we just had a couple questions that we wanted to to discuss. Are there additional feedback loops that the board would like the district to explore? And if the district implements changes to the length of instructional day and to bell times, should this implementation

171occur for the 2627 school year or the 2728 school year? And so I'll turn it over to you to any questions that you may have. >> Dan, thank you so much um not only for the great presentation, but for the amount of work that you and your staff uh put into this. Um I know that to have it come back um when you've given it to a consultant and have them come back and say, "You guys rocked it. You know, you did good." So >> very proud. >> Yes, you should be very proud and we're very proud of you and of the transportation department. Um, so I just want to, you know, send our our thank yous out to you and if you would please pass them along to all of your staff as well

172because this is this is fantastic work. Um and you know with that I I know that um you know we had a a discussion last uh board meeting where we were talking about the instructional day um alignment and I think that the board mostly aligned with the having the day be the same amount of time. So seven hours uh and 25 minutes um is sorry 15 minutes sorry um so that we could have that um that alignment throughout the schools. And so I think keeping that in mind as we go through the scenarios um it's yet another reason why you know scenario one does not look like it's it's going to be um something that we we go ahead and discuss. um you know going back to our previous discussion of the AC you know

173I look at um scenario two and I I see that you know elementary starting um the mostly the earliest and so that would actually be you know something that we didn't think about as a pro or a con um necessarily but for those elementary schools that are starting early and getting out early um that's a pro for them in the early uh part of the year when it's very hot um Whereas if we looked at scenarios four and five when they're the the last to ticket out getting out at 450 in those buildings that are not airond conditioned um that could that could be considered a negative too. So I think those are things that we need to be thinking about as we go ahead and have this discussion. Um and then thinking about the

174implementation um you know the 2627 or the 2728. And I I just want to put out there as we um go ahead and ask questions um that this is something that I know all of us feel that urgency. We want to make sure that we have um the best for our students and I also want to caution us for going maybe too fast. So I want to just put a cautionary out there about again slow is smooth and smooth is fast and when you look at these scenarios I mean for me what I'm looking at is if do we do scenario two or scenario five that's where my brain has landed those are hugely different you know you're talking about elementary school going first and scenario 2 and high school getting out at 4:25 or

175you're talking about high school starting at 7:30 and getting out at 2:45 and elementary not getting out until almost 4:45. Those are huge differences and I think it's wise for us to counsel um get counsel from our community on that. So I will preface it with that. Um and then we can kick off with if if there are any questions. >> May May I add something? >> Absolutely. So I uh also failed to mention with all of these models you can also if you take the entire model in in completion 100% of it you can shift these forward or back however you need. So what matters in our department for our efficiencies is just the order that they all take place. So the actual start and end time we just send drivers out on the

176road earlier or later. So all of them could be shifted forward or back to kind of fine-tuned a little bit. And then also as we started to dig into them a little bit more, we could look for increased efficiencies and tighten things up as well. >> Thank you for that. Yeah. >> So what what questions are there? Go ahead, Jess. >> I just want to kind of kick it off because you mentioned it towards the beginning of one. We currently have 113 routes and we have 11 open positions. So as of right now, our like best efficiency, if you will, is 102 routes. That would be with our current team. So regardless of pretty much any of these excluding scenario one, right? No, scenario three. >> Yeah. Two and three. >> Well, >> one is

177113. Two and three are the only ones that get us >> where our current team can take it and we're good. >> Um, >> not saying I'm a fan of them necessarily, but just to frame any decision, we're probably still going to have a challenge with our transportation team. Um, I want to sit for a minute if anyone else has another question. So, go off of >> questions. Scott, did you have one? >> Go ahead. >> Um, kind of along the lines of what just is saying, um, maybe from a different perspective because that's how I roll. What is your current equipment capacity? Like let's forget about number of drivers but if you had an unlim like you know obviously I couldn't drive but let's say you had unlimited people that could drive. How many

178buses or how many routes could you do with the current equipment that you have right now? I don't know if that's an easy question to answer. >> It is not an easy question to answer. Uh I'm very well verssed uh as many of you know I was the vehicle manager prior to taking this role and so I am very well verssed in our actual bus fleet. Um it there's a direct correlation of how many additional activities and other things that we provide transportation to. So, the thing that's not mentioned in all of these is in addition to the 113 routes that we're currently doing, we're taking athletic trips, we're doing special programs, we're working with CTC, we're doing custom transportation, we're doing different things to handle uh required transportation for our our most vulnerable students,

179both with uh IEPs and with Mckin Vento. So, there's a lot of additional stuff that plays into it. So, it's not a one for one. We are currently now starting year one. We just started our first year of the replacement cycle that Dave kind of spoke to earlier. Um, and with that, we've now gotten rid of some of our older buses and are working on putting those through the auction and and cycling through. We're currently running about 150 school buses, but that is for everything that we do, which you also have to account on average, national average suggests that you should have about 18 to 20% school buses on standby as spares for any breakdowns. So, we're already pushing those limits right there without even taking into account all of the extra things that we're

180doing. So, I would need to kind of break that up and really kind of do a full presentation on that alone to get you a better answer to that. Quick follow on to that one. in um we had a discussion in 2023 24 about changing the bell times. The decrease or the cost savings of that was primarily getting us to reduce the usage of charters. >> Correct. >> Has that happened substantially? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> So, again, with our staffing issues going into this year, we've kind of seen some setbacks with that. Um last year, we really tightened it up quite a bit and were able to bring the majority of those back into house. Um, so we had substantial savings with doing those runs in-house instead of using charter buses. You look at

181usually spending about three times as much to run a charter versus doing it in-house. And that's, you know, for the mileage, you know, the cost that they charge us versus, you know, fuel, wear and tear, driver pay, all of that stuff that plays into it. >> Yeah, absolutely. I I would also add that when we're talking about cost with the charters not using those as much, we are seeing a lot of overtime as a result of the the vacancies that we have. And so that's another cost that I I just want to bring forward. >> Yeah. And so the numbers presented tonight are strictly, as I mentioned, a per route cost. These are not our transportation overhead and budgeting um numbers. And there's a lot that plays into that. And Dave's absolutely right. our number

182of overtime hours is substantial. >> Thank you. And I just want to clarify for anybody who's listening when we when we're talking about charters in this um situation, we are talking about charter busing. >> Yes. And so charter busing. Yes. >> Right. We would hire buses to come in and uh it has nothing to do with schools. So I just want I just want that to be clear because it's the same name. So Jim, you look like you had a question. >> Not question as much, but I wanted to make some comments. Um, I also went through my phase of why can't we just hire more bus drivers, right? And um, I I think I've kind of started to get it that the more bus drivers just aren't available. And even if we did, you

183know, could we pay more money? Could we do all those kinds of things? Even if we did those things and got more bus drivers, that would just make it so that people in the central office aren't driving buses and would be doing their normal jobs, I think, is the answer to that. Do you? >> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um, again, my staff and myself are on buses so frequently that on a lot of days, half of our day, if if you're talking an 8 hour day, that which isn't very standard in our department. All of my staff is very dedicated and puts in that extra time. Um, but when you're talking an 8 hour day, we're on routes more than 50% of our day. We still need to follow up with video download and review. We

184need to follow up with meeting with drivers, drivers that need to talk to our supervisors, handling different issues that come up, conversations with parent and community members, conversations with schools. We all we all have to still figure out a time to do that around being on the bus and filling in. >> So then with our continued efforts to get more drivers, it's really just going to bring us up to what what might be a reasonable operating point for you and your team. That's that's what I'm hearing. Absolutely. And the district has been fantastic about backing not just in transportation but staffing issues as a whole. I've seen a lot of shifts recently on how they're attacking this and that, you know, the new switch to how we're doing our acquisition team and we've gotten great

185support over there. So, we are trying new ways of bringing people in. There's a lot of support on a district level and trying to attack this with fresh eyes and and look at how we can get that staffing taken care of. So, I I wanted to give a shout out there. We've gotten um great support from the district on trying to acquire that. I'm ready to give some suggestions, but I think there's more questions, so I'm going to let that happen first. >> Dan, quickly, is your staff getting overtime? >> Uh, depends on the position. If you're talking um managers and supervisors, they are salaried positions. Um, and then we have classified hourly for our trainers and dispatchers. Uh, who else am I for? And routing as well. >> Go ahead, Scott. Um on the

186on the staffing side of thing, I seem to recall like in 23 24 whenever we initially were talking about this, wasn't the staff or wasn't what were the number of routes that you were running and then having to fill in then wasn't like 120 routes and >> so the the data actually disappears off of bus planner. So I would have had that statistic for you, but if memory serves me correctly, we were running 122 or 123 routes that year. >> And that was with management filling in then. I thought at the time that was one of the the reasons to change the bus or the bell times was to, you know, help management deal with that. >> So now we're down to 113. So, we've lost 10 more or we have 10 less drivers than

187we did two years ago. What's to say that? I mean, right now we're we've got these scenarios and they're around 100 to 102 buses. What's to say we're not going to be down to 90? Like, I'm I'm telling you, the staffing thing is the is the thing. And Jim's Jim's right. That's where I'm coming from is holy crap. We don't need to change everybody's world. If we can solve 25 positions, like throw everything we have at it. And in a hiring bonanza, we publicize the hell out of it. I don't know what it is, but we can I think we can find those drivers. I And maybe I'm just being naive saying that, but to me, this is going to keep happening if we keep doing the same the things that we're we're doing. And

188I just I really want to explore that side more than diving into this massive change for 30,000 people. That's just that's one perspective. >> I I I appreciate the perspective. I I think back from even in the finance seat, we've tried a lot to get a lot of bus drivers. We've tried hiring bonuses. We've tried all sort, you know, we've tried a lot of methods and There's there's just a lot of competition out there. Um, we have a Amazon warehouse that I know it's not the same driving. There I go again. I know it's not the same driving, but it's taking people that drive that want to do that for work. And so it's it's been hard. >> And if I can throw into there too, when we had 122 routes, we were down 40

189bus drivers. Is that cor is that correct? That figure I don't have I'd have to I'd have to >> We were down quite I remember >> it was it was more substantial than >> it was significant the the number that we were down as far as and because I I remember that I mean nobody was was basically in the office. >> Yeah. So working during that year I can remember call uh times that not only was the staff that currently you know counting the total number of people we have on the rotation is 22. In addition to that, we were clearing out the shop. Our technicians were on buses as well. We were getting down to where all three of our locations, that being our two main terminals, our north and south terminals, plus then

190our satellite terminal of Wellington, having one technician on hand for 120 routes in case there was a a breakdown or something that happened on the road. Um there was times where we were very worried that we weren't going to be able to cover all the routes. Uh, I know it's a point of pride for me and the whole department that during times when other school districts were looking at rolling blackouts as an option and just cycling through which neighborhoods did not get transportation, we did not do that and we did not drop any routes. So, a lot of pride went into that, but at a great cost to the staff that we have in the department. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I just want to bring that up so that we, you know, have that understanding

191of not only um, you know, when we dropped the routes in 2320, uh, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. 2324. Sorry, brain. Um, so when we dropped those routes, yes, we were we didn't have a a savings, but it was not in the sense of um, it what it meant was that fewer people who were not hired as bus drivers were driving buses. So it's not that we went to zero. It's that we went to a lot fewer who were doing that. So it just I I just want to have you know keep that in mind as well. So it's not that I don't think what's happening is we're we're saying we'll do fewer routes and then we have fewer bus drivers. I think we're just trying to get to a point where we have the same number

192of bus drivers as we have routes and that would be ideal. >> Correct. And we also in our department have uh lead driver positions as well, which are kind of drivers that are the front line to fill in when there's absences and other things like that. So when we talk about these numbers of staff being on the bus, this doesn't take into account the those 18 individuals that are already doing that. This is getting past that. and then staff who's not designed to be on the bus or not that's probably not the best word there but not usually gonna that's that's not their primary role now getting on and filling in. So we've already gone through all 18 of our lead drivers. They're already out providing transportation and providing this level of service that we

193want to show for the district and the community. And now we've dug into our staff that are office staff that are tasked with a bunch of other things on top of that. And I I I agree with you too, Dan. I just want to emphasize that it is a point of pride that we never have gone to, nor are we considering going to rolling blackouts. Correct. And I do think that that is something that um you know is a point of pride for for myself and this board as well that we are not going to consider that in the sense of we want to make sure that all of our kids get to all of our schools. So, um, just, you know, thank you for I know you had been thinking about that that it

194not that it was a possibility, but there, you know, it's out there in the world. >> Yeah. I mean, the idea is floating around, but it it was never a consideration in our department. Again, we've got a lot of extremely dedicated people, and we weren't even we didn't even bring that to the table. when we try to look at solutions and how we solve this problem, we get together and try to build each other up and give that moral support to keep everybody going and you know look at different options and that was never a consideration over the last three years. >> Yeah. And I appreciate that and I think it it brings back to that this is a big problem. you know, it's a wicked problem and one of the things that I think

195we probably need to do is also talk about, you know, the school year in which we need to implement something and they go hand in hand. I do think that this is a bigger problem and I do think that maybe this is something that we need to wrestle with and not do an immediate decision. Um, you know, we're talking about again the dates November, we were talking about having this done by November >> 3rd, >> 4th. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, that's that's coming up very quickly. Um, so that gives you two weeks to be thinking about that. Gives us two weeks to try and do some um if if we want to get some community input on that. I know we can push that out a little bit further than that. Um, at that

196point there will be a new board. There will be more uh we'll have to get people um up to speed uh on the bus. So, um, yeah, sorry, little speed reference there. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, you like that, >> man. >> But I'm just I just want to point that out there. So, >> point of clarification. >> Yes. >> Are we looking to not only make a decision for the length of the school day, but also the transportation scenarios all in the same decision? If we have to do it in two weeks, is that is that what we're so that we can contemplate that we're talking about lengthening the school day as well as optimizing transportation? >> Yes, that that would be not necessarily staff's recommendation. We're looking for guidance from the board on a suggested

197timeline. Um, I think we as a management team recognize that the board and our community has asked a lot of us, right? Trying to, as I shared with you the last meeting, like optimize bell times, optimize the calendar, optimize the and get in compliance with the length of the instructional day, be more competitive with charter schools, maximize early childhood programming. um think differently about the efficiencies that are needed uh in our transportation department. Um so supervisors can take on supervisory roles which as a governance team we've talked about the importance of that even as much as trying to identify how much time is realistic that they watch tape of. So it's just like really thinking about the tradeoffs. There's been a lot asked. It's wildly complicated, but it it would be my recommendation for the

198board to provide us guidance that would take into consideration those two things, the length of the instrumental day and the bell times as one one decision point. >> Go ahead, Kevin. >> Okay, we got some comments. Um, that's a great dovetail into something I was going to say. So, um, I'm seeing a lot of emails already on this subject. Um, and a lot of constituents are reaching out to us and kind of giving input. So, let me first of all clarify one, no decision has been made. None. Um, not to lengthen the day for instructional time or for bell time adjustments. I think we had to talk about both because they're necessarily related. Here's my list. Um, because I also want to say I agree with some of the history of how we got here,

199but it goes it goes further than that, guys. Um, most immediately the conversations we were having in May about the CDE lengthening the day and were we going to be in compliance or not. At that point, we were examining. We didn't know. We've had some more input. We had a very lengthy uh board meeting. We've had some good discussion. The district leadership has gotten some charges as far as sort of where we are falling on that. We're each doing our own iterative feedbacks for our community. So, our association presidents are um the folks who are, you know, who are coming to these meetings, the folks that aren't coming to these meetings, we're doing our check-ins as we we should be doing. Um so, I mean, that's that's part of the process. But even before that,

200I think you were talking about it, Connor, and you were talking about it too, Scott, that we had this what I called a crisis of our transportation department um over a year and a half ago. And so, we had to make a really tough call. I remember sitting almost exactly in the same spot and Connor was vehemently against it because some of the feedback that we've been hearing too was that people don't want to have continued disruption which I think is a norm. So I've I've got my list of norms of things that I've been hearing as we're doing this processes is that in almost in equal measure if we're going to change if we're going to do a system a systematic change or something largecale change do it all at once and then do

201it well right which takes time. I understand that. I've also heard almost in equal measure, stop changing things. I need continuity. I need predictability in my life. I need to figure out what my child care schedule is going to be after school. I need to figure out my work schedule's going to be after school. So, there's a lot of competing feedback that we're getting as we're making these. Um, I've heard and again I I've I've heard this again and again and again, mostly from the folks who have schools in elementary and middle schools that starting school before 8 a.m. is too early. We've also heard in equal measure almost as as loudly just so I can be uh very fair to this is that having high schools middle middle schools end after 4 p.m. feels

202too late. Okay. So with all of this I'm also looking at here's what has happened in the last two years. We've gone through a school consolidation, school closure uh process which led to 4A which led to further conversations about AC which has uh led to uh bell time which has led to uh uh instructional time also where what our calendar is doing. So this these are all the things that are sort of interrelated, interconnected. And if you've been paying attention to the conversation with as much precision as I have and if you grasp 90% of all of it, then credit to you. But that's not most of our community. That's not most people in this room. That's not the most people on this board. So in tandem with all those things, what's also happened is

203we've lost federal dollars. We've had major disruption to our federal government. And now we're still in a shutdown situation. We don't know what that's going to happen or when that's going to be re reopened. Not to mention the fact that those CD requirements, none of us saw that coming and we don't know what happens with that down the road. So, I guess some of the point that I'm making as far as feedback loops, we need to be as as in intentional as we possibly can right now to get as much feedback as we possibly can. But to suggest that if we pull the crowd or pull our community that we're going to be datified out of or making a decision that's going to be in everyone's best interest, I think is naive. I think we

204are elected to be in these positions because we are commanded to try to understand the nuances of all these interconnected things and make the best decision that we can for the people that we serve right now. Because if we kick the can down the road two years, one year, and we say, "Ah, but if we just have one more year of iterative feedback loop, if we did one more committee, maybe we studied this and that, guess what? I mean, there's going to be another thing that happens that disrupts that even further and then we've just got analysis paralysis." So I would say that there are there a lot of the folks that we represent, people that are may not be listening or will never listen to this conversation, they expect us to be engaged so

205that they don't have to be micromanaging every single systemic decision that we have to make. And so I don't want to duck tough calls while we're up here. I'm not saying we need to do this in two weeks or that's it. But I also don't think that next year is this is going to get hugely better than the moment that we've got right now. We can always wait for the next board. We can always wait for the dynamic in the room to change. We can always wait for leadership in cabinet to change and cycle in and out. We're still going to be confronting these problems in the school district. Meanwhile, we have a shrinking budget. Meanwhile, we have a transportation cabinet that's telling us they are in dire need of some reprieve. Otherwise, we may

206not have routes to school anymore. So, without sounding shrill, yes, I think we need more feedback loops, but that depends on when we're doing this. You know, if we're doing this, if we're doing this for the 27 28 year and we want to give ourselves that year, great. Let's not forget there's a there's a strategic planning committee that's also talking about which schools, if ever, or for how we're doing enrollment. Should we wait for that, too? Should we wait for three years? Should we wait for four? Should we wait till the point where we don't get to make decisions that are in the best interest of the district, but because we have to because of budgetary crisis? So to me the the the decision is I I I think two weeks is too soon at

207least for this amount of information for our community to absorb meaningfully. I think these scenarios what I would like to see as far as feedback loops from our community is to again give them things that we can we can use. So tell me what where your kids are and what's in what level of school for next year. Are they elementary? Are they middle? Are they a hybrid of of high school? What is your true value? I mean, make our community tell us what's the value. Is it starting before starting after 8? Is it ending before 4? Is it to um you is it saving the district money? Is it cost neutrality for these decision? What is the value that we are trying to extrapolate so that we can make an informed decision? Because without that,

208I could give you an interest for every single category of person that we've just talked about where it's going to be a loser for them and a winner for them. I think I mean to me what I what I see here is that we have three choices. We can stay where we are um which you know gives us the um ability to not make major changes. We are then out of compliance. I don't really see that as a choice. Um because I I I don't want to have continually have recess become part of our standard day um as as instructional minutes. I don't I don't think that that's where we need to be. I think the exception for that for while we get into compliance is something that we can do, but I don't want

209to see that become the the norm. So the that's one choice um that I I don't think it's necessarily a choice. I mean it's something we can do uh as a board, but I don't think it's a good choice. Um the two others that I see is we can move to scenario two or scenario five. Um and maybe four or five can be interchanged um at that point. Um, what I see there though is there are some major choices to make in that sense because you're either saying that high school getting out at 4:00 or before is your main importance and middle school as well. Um, when you're doing the middle the five um, gets middle school out before 4 as well and elementary is is getting out later. or you completely flip it and

210you say that high school gets out and middle school gets out later. So those are the to me those are the two major choices um is who gets to go first and who gets to get home last. And that is something to me that I I feel like we need to go ahead and and ask the community about. Um can we do that in a short amount of time? I think that's the question. Um, if those are the things that we narrow it down to, I mean, honestly, the difference between, you know, um, 1.2 million and 923,000, I'm willing to take either one of those depending on what, um, people say is more important to them. Um, because they're both a huge cost savings to us. They're both huge as far as our staffing goes.

211Um, so what is it that we want to do on that? And to me, that's a large decision that we need to ask for feedback on. It doesn't have to be a year's worth if we can get specific feedback in the next couple of um weeks. But I do feel like that is a that is a short window. I think if we've learned anything from our two years ago where we because we were in this exact same position two years ago, we were talking about consolidating schools. We were all in agreement that schools needed to be consolidated. There was absolutely no doubt in anybody's mind that the money wasn't there. There was no doubt that the only way to do this was to be looking at something that was not going to be pretty, something

212that was not going to be um something that people liked. We all said we're going to do it and then April came and we didn't. And I don't want that to happen again because this is a tough decision. People are going to have feelings about it. And we need to be aware that we were told by our constituents that this was something they wanted to have a piece a a part of that voice in. And so I feel like that, you know, if we if we just you're correct that we need to make the decision and is that something that we want to do without any voice? So I I'm just putting that out there. And to be, you know, to be frank about it, I'm I'm gone in a month and so whatever gets

213decided is not something that I'm going to probably be voting on. So I want you all to be comfortable with what has to happen and what the process is going to be. And what I don't want to see is that, you know, there's steadfast we are going to do this and then new people come on board and then there's lots of thought and lots of um emails and lots of you know voices that are out there um and and minds get changed and then all of a sudden we're not doing that and we're waiting and we've said we're going to make a change. Do do you see what I'm saying? >> Yep. Go ahead. I I'm agreeing with you to an extent because as I'm looking at the I've kind of charted them out. We've

214talked about them a bit. As I'm looking at the five options, I mean, I'll just if it helps, I'll go through what I'm thinking because I think it marries some of those values that we just talked about. Um the level of line to me, I it's it's I don't think we do it. I mean, if it's me, I I don't like level of line. It's too similar to what we have. And I think that what we should be trying to, and I guess this is the point I was making, is that it's never going to be perfect, but it's it's incumbent on us to try to make this district better and make it more efficient and make it better. Not not just for, you know, so it looks good on paper, but it's these are

215people's lives that are getting better by these decisions, right? I like system 2 and 52. That's where I came out. That's the where as someone that says that the 19 elementary schools starting at 7:30 that felt that felt harsh still and then there's 10 high schools that are released at 425. So that doesn't meet that value but it's a huge amount of savings and it's it sort of kind of gets to where we're we're we need to be whereas five feels like to me the sweet spot. You've got there's only four ele elementaryaries at 7:30, one elementary at 7:45, one at 7:55, and on the back end, you've got three elementaryaries and then eight 18 elementaryaries finishing at 4:35. That's a value for those families because they don't have to figure out child care coverage

216at 2:20 in the afternoon or maybe maybe they're putting their kids on buses quite frankly because it buys their family an extra hour before they have to figure out how they're going to get off work. So that may solve some of those problems, too. But five has zero high schools ending after four, which is a huge value that we've been hearing from our community, too. So, well done there with the creativity. Um, yeah, and and then the the eight high schools with an early start, you know, that's something we're going to need to examine. So I what I think what I think we need to do is synthesize what the values are that we're hearing from our community and whether they want this and if they want it present them with ones that we agree

217that we're going to be in alignment for. So narrowing the list down and saying these are the ponies and make it digestible and here's the pros and the cons. I like that in every single one of these. Let's not be mistaken though there will be a cost. There will be a cost in additional uh classified work and and overtime potentially for our staff. that that that to me is worth further examination. That's where we want to get take a little bit more time with it. But correct me if I'm wrong, Dave. We could roll out any of these next year, right? >> That is true. Yes. >> Okay. So, at least that that answers that part of it. Whether we do it or not, I think is the is the bigger question. I think you're

218right, President D. I think we teed that up. So, I just want to say that I'm not advocating we do all this tomorrow, but I think we need to start presenting. We need to be appreciative of our community's time and say, "Look, we we're hearing what you're saying. we're getting our feedback loops and let's present some options and then do something. >> That's where I'm at. >> Okay. And I think that's yeah, we are in alignment because I I really do feel like, you know, again, three options. One of them I don't really think is viable. Um and we need to find out what we're not thinking about for option two and for option five. Um because, you know, I look at that and I didn't see anywhere in there about the fact that you're

219going to have elementary schools that are not aironditioned be staying be going till 5:00 pm close to. So that's a that's you know something that will come will come up but it's it's something else that there's something else out there that we have not thought of um that you know it will be brought up and it needs to be put into the discussion. So I I agree. I think if we can have something of a um survey or a somehow get um some sort of discussion going and essentially ask between scenarios two and five um you know which would we prefer as a community. >> Go ahead Jim. >> I appreciate both of those discussions and I find myself agreeing with both of you but not completely on the options. Uh I really like I

220like options four or five and I have a preference for four. So let me talk about why that is. I kind of anchored my thinking with the high school, right? So get the high school set so that sports, jobs, all that kind of stuff are set. So I had them in the first tier and then after that the question is what do you do? Do you put the elementary first and then the middle school or do you put the middle school first and then and then the elementary? I would give the elementary the next tier. And why would I do that? It feels like we're already asking the elementary teachers to teach a longer day. And when we do that, it feels like pushing them to the very latest time doesn't feel like the right

221thing to me. Um, so I would propose to give them what I consider the best schedule. Kevin, you mentioned maybe that's not best for everyone, and I understand that. So that's a that's a question, I guess. Um, another reason that I would do that is that um some charter schools have an 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. school day. So I would want to try to get our elementaryaries as close to that as possible. I don't want to make that an issue. And then Kristen, you brought up the air conditioning issue, which giving them that second tier helps that problem, right? It gets them at least half an hour earlier or what or whatever it is. And then I would put middle school at the in the third tier. They get the latest times in this

222scenario. Late starts good for developing brains, all that kind of thing. But um the late end times is bad for middle school sports, of course. So there's the middle schools are going to have to be flexible. Maybe they do things before school or I I don't know how all that works exactly, but um that in my mind is a lower priority. I personally would like to jump in and do this in the 26 27 school year. I mean, I really resonated with a lot of your comments, Kevin, about we are never going to get total agreement on this. And there will always be a lot of concerns from the community when we're doing this kind of thing. And a big part of our job is figuring out after analyzing and thinking and laying awake at

223night thinking about all this, what what do we feel is best and agreeing on as a board on what that is. So, I would like to do it early. The only caveat I would have to that is if we're going to close any schools, so I would propose to do it in the 26 27 school year. If we were going to close any schools in the 2728 school year, then maybe we should wait a year, right? But we get into exactly what you said, Kevin, of pretty soon we're in analysis paralysis. And are we analysis paralysis? And are we really going to close any schools? I am highly skeptical. So I would like to roll this into the and get the savings as quickly as we can get this rolling and go from there. So

224that's my view. I would still like some community feedback over the next month but I feel you know I want to look at all that data and I will look at all that data but it feels to me a little like I already know what a lot of that's going to be. So that's what I'm uh concerned about. Thanks. One other thing I do want to bring up is that um and it if we can have it shared with us um and with the general public, the data that we have about high school um and first period misses and uh last period um absenteeism because one of the things that we had talked about in our previous discussions about making high school start later and um bringing elementary earlier um is that with high school

225starting so early that you kids were not their their brains are still developing. There's a lot of data out there. There's a lot of papers that talk about a later start is better for our high high school and middle school kids. what we had found um and this is one of those things that I would if we can have the data be shown to the general public as well that we're not only now having high school kids miss first period but they're missing first period and last period um because they're they're leaving early to go to sports or other activities and they're still missing their first period. So we're not seeing the the change that we had hoped. we are not seeing the fact that we're having everybody show up in first period for high

226school. So while the data nationally says yes, this is true, what we were seeing locally was that is not necessarily true. And so I just want to have that shared out with everybody too. So it's not something that we can um we're just sort of talking off the cuff. We actually have numbers on this. Anecdotally, I feel confident I can speak to at a high level what was shared a year ago when we were having this conversation was that the yielding of more sleep time was actually creating a negative effect on first period attendance um in our high schools. Our middle school first period attendance last year, I have not pulled a run this year um was really good. Um and so we are getting feedback from many of our high schools that you know

227decisions were made five six years ago with really good intentions but may have not produced the results that the system uh desired. And I think as a result of like even going back and thinking about this I was speaking with several board members earlier today. I just, you know, I'm looking at a report right now from 2018 when the district surveyed all of its families on what they think about bell times and it's like listening to our conversation like the first I'm I'm on page 22 of a 29page report. First bullet, elementary school should start earlier. Second bullet, elementary school should not start earlier. Just process that for a second. And it continues. Um, dismissal times after four are too late. um it's hot in PSD buildings as the day progresses. So I feel like

228we know what the community is going to share with us. I think the question that we have to wrestle with as a governance team that we I know we all collectively believe in engaging our community and having robust dialogue but asking ourselves what is the feedback that we're seeking. Is it about their feelings? Is that community-led decision or is it about specific governance teamled options that we want their opinion on before actually rolling them out? The only difference that I see and this is me Brian speaking for Brian. I haven't engaged the team thoughtfully about this report. I'm still processing it and this is my first read is that the postcoid work environment is very different than what is in here. And so there's no mention of some of the constraints that Dan eloquently articulated

229and we've articulated over the last two or three years that transportation in 2018 wasn't dealing with the issues that it's been dealing with since since CO. I think that's really important to notice. Um I don't think we as a system prior to CO I could be wrong wasn't here but we were talking about being competitive with some of our other competing options. we might have been at that time competing with our own within our own 49 traditional public schools. And I also don't think I don't see anything here about compliance. It was very research driven. So I just think that's context that as we think about engaging the community. I I think it's actually more of a need for focus groups where all groups are represented in our community equally. Uh director Havda amongst others

230articulated the nuance of this. people really need a deep dive in understanding this problem of practice before providing any kind of feedback on it. And I think we're all still in a very much a learning space. Um, but I think having a survey to just get more of what we may already know may frustrate the community more than appease them. And I just want us to just proceed with caution there. >> Yeah, Andrew, go ahead. 4 82627 change. I need to know the date. You need a decision from us which from what I can see looks like December 9th is it from last what I asked last session was if we go any longer than December we're it it's pretty much impossible to get this scope of changes done in terms of contracts all all

231the ripple pieces for longer days things like that so is that an accurate statement that we would have to be no later than that board meeting in December. >> What I want you to hope include in your answer which might prove one of my points ironically is what's our choice window? >> It's nove it's I think it's November beginning of November, right? >> Yeah. First round choice right now is scheduled to be November 3rd through December 15th is when that closes. So the only the only reason I'd say that is because there will be people making a choice about where to send their kid maybe not in their neighborhood school but elsewhere specifically based on when they start their schools >> which even if we make a decision next week we may not or next

232meeting we might not actually know because we have to determine which elementaryaries are starting when for example so that may be I that's a guess I I need to know first what is our drop dead deadline if we're going to even have success for next year. >> I ideally it would be the first I mean I don't think the next two weeks is realistic in in doing it in an authentic way. Just want to name that. It would be very performative. Um and I don't think anybody on this dis is after that. That's not the goal. I do think that the team has done an incredible job and I just want to commend them for this reminiscent of the Denver Broncos scoring 33 points in the fourth quarter on Sunday. I mean the like what

233you all came up with as our best options that address the majority of some of the challenges that we've addressed. I think this is our best thinking, our best work and there's some flexibility within the options that if we shift it one way or another, as long as we're shifting the whole there's there's some opportunity there. So I think direct director Spain, I wouldn't want families to go into that second phase of the choice window without really being able to either change their mind or make a choice. But the further we go into that window without having direction, I just think again we're going to create frustration. And I think that frustration isn't yet present in this room. I I just want to and and I'll share it with you and I and I'll be

234quiet here. I'm really wrestling with this just like you. The staff is really wrestling with this. Um, it's not lost on me that two years ago we were pushing hard to make a management decision that we thought was in the best interest of the district and we stopped that for all the right reasons. I believe we led with sometimes the problem and the solution. People needed more time to process. People are so attached to our public schools that just the thought of losing one was incomprehensible. And I I'm cautiously optimistic that we can think differently about this process moving forward. But I haven't yet heard what the out what the outcry from the community is going to be. I do think the options that are being presented are our best thinking to address as many

235of the challenges as we possibly can. I think what I'm most interested in, I think the team is most interested in how do you want us to engage with the community so it feels right, people feel heard. That's to me the the value proposition that I'm looking to really understand. So all of our parents, all of our teachers, our educators who are they're all leaders, but our principles, assistant principles, our classified staff, child care providers, everybody has a seat at the table because everybody has different interests in this space. Um, and it makes it a really difficult decision for all of us. So I just wanted to like pay respect to that. But I I think if to go back to answering your question, the sooner the better, but it comes at the expense of

236the robust dialogue that I also think our community deeply values and has consistently shared since I've been a part of this great community. So I would suggest for for us that honestly um Jim I think you made a a persuasive argument there and that it's we talk about scenario two scenario four and scenario five and the reason we do that is because in one elementary goes first um in one high school um and and then middle so it's elementary middle high then there's high elementary middle and there's high middle So it gives us that that opportunity to look at all um all ways that we can shift um from where we are currently. And so I would if if I were to to ask I would ask for engagement on those three um and I

237would ask um what it you know as far as yes it's going to be a 7:30 start time start time for in two of those but here are the trade-offs. So, what is it that our community values in? Is it the Is it mostly the four o'clock um being having high schools and middle schools done by 4? Is it just having high school done by 4? Is it having elementary start later? Those are the things that I would ask. Um and I would have all in here all of the things that um Dan has put in as far as our cost savings, um the earliest start, the latest start. I would also keep it so that it's not per school. I mean, I think you did an excellent job of putting together what this would

238look like for us. And we have all of the schools routed, but they're not named. And so, you're not going to make a decision based on my school will start at this time. It's it's based on what's best for middles in general, what's best for elementaryaries in general, and what's best for high schools in general. And for that, what we're asking for the community is not only are you looking for what is um what are you looking for today uh for your child in elementary school, but what else are you looking for when your child then goes into middle and high school? So, personally for Kristen, that's what I would ask. I think if we're if we're going to be serious about engagement. I think it needs to be structured and we could sit up

239here and talk amongst us and probably come up with some great questions and items that would help us with our decision. Um because at this point I feel like my own preference is essentially irrelevant. You're not asking me to vote today. I'm going to make a much better voting decision if I can get information from key areas of our community. And so I want to understand the positions of the teachers, the professional staff, the principles, uh if we can get some kind of collective from the parents perhaps through DAB, uh different groups like that that can actually help us identify the reality of a lot of missing information because if we extend the elementary school day, is there actually an embedded pro? because now you can actually have longer or more recess. We don't know

240that because we haven't had that discussion with our teachers. We don't know what the impact is. If we move, if we keep high schools where they are and have the allowance because we know the data for if somebody's working, they still get school credit. that they have worksheets if they're going and doing sport and that lessens that impact. That's a data point we don't have in front of us right now. These are the kinds of things that I think our our various groups can give us feedback on in a relatively short period of time and what that looks like and this is why the drop deadline is if we if we go beyond a certain time it doesn't matter if we make a decision at that point because it's it's no longer relevant. too much

241impact to the community, too much impact to the staff, whatever it might be. Because as I mean when when Dan presented this to us first, it's like what was their preference and why? We've seen it pros and cons. Why can't we ask all those groups to say the same thing? If the principles have a a preference and it may be that the principles are at different levels, the teachers are at different levels, but group those aggregate responses to help us understand the pros and cons of each one. So we can better make a decision and ask them simultaneously what happens if we do nothing. What happens if we freeze another year, get paralyzed? Because it's it's really hard to sit here and hear they can't they they have to sleep in early and and can't

242get to school early yet they also have to leave early because of sport and and work. Those are two very different things and it's there's going to be no agreement on that ever. But if there are alternatives that minimize the impact and that's the input I think we need to be asking from our community, look at these scenarios that our team has developed and doesn't even have, by the way, a later start date if we're going to make that decision because that minimizes the heat concerns. Doesn't eliminate them. minimizes them. At least we can say, "Okay, we might lose a couple of days, but we're not going to lose eight or nine or worse." And those things are very valuable and and could be again tier decisions. But it feels like that's the kind of

243input input I want is aggregated information from our key groups, administration, transportation, teachers, principles, community could be, again, there's going to be subsets within the community, I'm sure. And I think we can achieve that in a relatively formatted manner within probably about a month to give us two weeks. If we're again if we're if we're saying that December is is a drop dead and we can't go beyond that, I we don't have that answer. So I understand that may be difficult to predict, but it's we have to give them a timeline if we're going to say we're going to make a decision. And it could be the decision is we have to wait a year because of the feedback. We don't know. But at least gives us an opportunity to get deliberate feedback, deliberate engagement

244and and get that piece met. I believe >> I I like the urgency. I think we're balancing the tension between urgency and thoughtfulness and and I think that's good governance. So I just want to say thank you for that. I you know, as I shared with you prior to this meeting after collaborating with staff, I do think it's in our best interest to conduct focus groups on this particular topic. I think isolating each of the stakeholder groups and getting individual feedback would not necessarily meet your desired goal in my opinion. Cross representation matters here. Having teachers sit next to parents, sitting next to principles, sitting next to pair of professionals, I think is really really important in the space. I don't want to overpromise and underdel. We can go back and aspire to pull focus

245groups together and I would ask that board members serve on them as well. Um and and that way you're listening to the myriad of the different perspectives that are happening in the room and we can take our best shot at putting something together quickly by also trying to be thoughtful. I don't know what the participation and turnout we haven't tried to turn something like that on a dime in in quite a while. Um but we can certainly try if it's the will of the board. Um but it's going to feel fast and I just want us to be like prepared for that. That's not to say stop. Um I do think the likelihood of us making a decision in 26 27 I'm wrestling with the same tension you are. Um because my biggest fear is

246that we don't make a decision at all and we end up having this conversation every year for the next couple years too. >> So I've got a number of comments. Um I appreciate structured engagement. I think there are probably unforeseen consequences that we haven't considered. Not because we don't have incredibly talented and wonderful humans in the room, but because when you stare at a problem too long, you start to miss the things that you used to consider. Or maybe you just missed in the beginning when you named the problem in the first place. And that's where we need our associations, we need our families, we need the feedback loops, not just to tell us what they'll like or don't like or what works for their family or doesn't work for their family because you're right,

247we will get the gambit, but we will also get through those conversations things that we didn't consider. And I think that's valuable. when we do that and we only have two weeks or a month, I don't think we're going to have time to adjust with any of that feedback. So, I do think it'll be very performative even with a month. I think another piece that we're missing here is that all of the scenarios that we have said that we value are system aligned. All of those butt up against our employee agreement. All of those butt up against our finances. All of these while they will save us in transportation they will cost us somewhere else whether that's pair of professionals in the schools or depending on how it gets negotiated with those extra minutes depending

248on each grade level and we don't have currently a method of paying for it. So we would be blindly voting to do something a month from now, six weeks from now that we don't have a plan for how to pay for it. We don't have a plan for what it how it will get negotiated with our associations when it comes to our employee agreement. What I would personally like to see so that we don't get into analysis paralysis would we take this year we do the robust engagement we do focus groups we do everything we need to to be able to make a decision and say okay we've taken all the information in this is the decision that we're going to make by the end of this year for 2728. And also when we talked

249about consolidation, there were also a lot of families that said, "Can you even if you make a decision, can you just wait a year? Give us time to process. Give us time to mourn. Give us time to consider our options." It then says, "Okay, if we have a decision by the end of this year, it gives families time for the next few months. If they want to make a different choice for the following year, they have time to consider it. They're not trying to do it abruptly. It gives them time if they to figure out how they're going to change their work schedule if they need to. There are a lot of benefits to giving time. I don't want to get into analysis paralysis. Bell times is one of the things that I care an

250unnatural amount about compared to many topics. And so it's a lot for me to say it and waiting or giving ourselves time and space to do it well I think is really valuable. One other piece to this puzzle is Dan's team has done an amazing job of finding efficiencies and being very thoughtful about how to cut some of the routes based on how to get kids to clump together more. I have full faith that there's pro possibly still more efficiencies to be had, but that is intricate neighborhood by neighborhood work. That is not something that I would ever want to be done fast because it puts safety first if we do it slow. So, it also gives you guys time potentially to find more of those efficiencies while we're negotiating with our community on what

251scenario may be best. Amongst the seven of us, we haven't landed on that scenario is the best one. We have named three of the five. We've named more of them than we haven't. And if that's the seven of us, I can only imagine what our community is thinking. Right? So that's my two cents. I also love the urgency. And I think we can still keep that level of momentum if we keep our eye on the ball for this year and then give ourselves a year to really implement the best possible plan for 2728. All right, you're going to call >> Wait, >> I I just I just want to know, are you hearing what you need to are you getting what you need uh from this conversation? Because if not, I want to redirect it.

252>> Can I help make this easier? >> So, I think I hear you say 27 28 at least for the last part, right? Like you Kristen, you don't want to do now like because I I don't know if we've got a consensus. I think I think I think we do, but you probably need that. >> I do. Okay. So, yeah. So, let's do a quick whip around just on that. >> My suggestion is the asking the direct questions about the various scenarios for 2728. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. And I understand the urgency in wanting to do it fast, but let's do it right because if we do it wrong, we're going to hear about it and we're going to make everybody miserable in the process. So, sm slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

25327 28 >> Ditto. >> Um, I've been going back and forth. I've got all kinds of comments. You guys have been pretty convincing. Um, I Jess just really said a lot a lot and I agree with her on the I think we really need to analyze the uh the roots themselves and possibly changing just what qualifies. I think Connor who has chosen not to speak but everybody's feeling what he's thinking is how much is this going to cost? And I think that's a huge thing that we really need to to analyze and Jess said that as well. I've been the most impatient on this maybe other than you. Um but and I also I'm telling you I'm going after the staffing. I want to help you guys so bad. So I I will be working

254on creative ideas on that. I'm 2728. I'm I'm not sure I'm going to be able to vote one way or another because I don't have enough information. Here's what I know. Bell times are coming. That's effect. We have a department that busted their you know what to put something together for us perhaps faster than anyone else because we have too many things related to bell times that we don't know. What's that going to do for impact on contract a proactive department? I don't want to penalize them. So I want to I wanted Dan to make and and company to make sure you hear this is amazing work but bell times are coming and if we push them back another year that's another year out of compliance where we have to make an edit to our

255policy. I'm I'm not happy about that when we can I I I feel like we can take a little bit of time to at least get some initial feedback and don't have to make even a decision right at this moment. We can make it in a couple weeks. Even if we're starting to hear from our our key people, it may not be focus groups. It may not I I don't know. But I think we already have a lot of feedback from people. They don't like our current bell times. There's lots of problems with them. We know this. We also know there's feedback about the start date. We don't have feedback about length of day. So, that's something we definitely need from the community. This I I I don't know. I'm I'm going to pass to

256Jim. I'm still in the 26 27 push. Um, we're never going to have perfect data on this. I I'm not saying we ignore community common. I think the focus groups on this is a great way to go. And I think that's um I think we can get enough data out of that to spot some of the concerns that Jess has around, you know, are we thinking of everything? There may be some things that come out of that. I'll accept that. Wow, we didn't think of that. I'm I'm good with that. But yeah, doing let's take a year and think about this more. Oh my gosh, I think we were put in these positions to lead and make some of these tough calls. And this is a tough call. It's do you want to cut off

257your arm or cut off your leg? You know, it's a typical school board decision that we have here and it's it's just really tough. But um I I still believe we should do it and do it sooner rather than later. And that's yeah, I'll leave it there. I'm uh I'm 26 27. Um I would prefer if we were to actually look at these and multiple decisions for 2728 and 2829. because if we do it next year, we're going to do it the same following year. And I've gone back. I actually am very proud of myself. Mr. Shonbar, shall teach you save everything because the transportation department last time said that this would be fixed. It wasn't. And we were even pushed last time to say it was going to be done in two tranches. We

258never got around to the second trunch because our voters are so incredible that they gave the ultimate referendum to keep our schools open. So if we do a change next year, it's every two years we're changing bill times. Not to mention, if you go back to 2019 2020 when we changed it last time, that's another two years. So, I mean, this is going on a long time that we haven't been able to fix this problem. I would prefer that we delay. I believe that we can work with the Colorado Department of Education for waiverss on our compliance. Would that mean we may have to quantify some things under recess time? Yes. But at some point, this exercise becomes more efficient and we can optimize better because one, we don't have as many students on the

259bus and two, we don't have as many locations. That's just the hard facts. You can get all the data that you want, but enrollment is going down and it's going down year after year after year after year. We are going to have to close schools, right? We're going to transform those institutions into other things about education. Our voters went to us and said, "Hey, we agree with the 3 to 5year plan on not closing schools." That's one definitive data point that we have. Let's stick to that and then do everything together so that we don't keep causing more and more friction with the community. You want to pull the community? I know what they want. They don't want change. You want to know why? Because I don't either, right? My bell times, only 40% of

260the bell times changed last time. Mine did. Now, I can go to my boss and say, "Hey, bell times changed. I need to come in a little bit later." Okay, he's understandable. What I can't go and do is every two years go back to them and say, "Hey, I need to change again because our school board just can't get it together." So I would prefer that we look even later than 2627. I will vote for 26. We're not going to do it for 2026. Right. So 2728 or even 2829. Also recommend, sorry Tracy, but I think that this is a great exercise for the comprehensive planning committee. Um, so I think about this in two things. I think that honestly I think we can get to build schedule decision quicker, but we can't do that

261without getting a decision for on instructional time. I think what I'm hearing too is that instructional time impacts our associations and our teachers far more directly than it would our community and vice versa. I think Belle's schedules are going to affect the community way more. So, I think that helps me figure out where our those focus points should be. Do I think we are ready in two weeks to make a decision on instructional time without the input of our associations or our teachers or anyone else? No. And so, again, my my my clearing voice of urgency is that unlike what I'll disagree with director Duffy on on a few things. I agree with him that I think that we need continuity because that's also going to get us, you know, I I agree with you,

262but I also insist that we I'm a very competitive person and I am not ever satisfied with something that I know I can make better personally for my kids, for my family, for work, for my clients. I'm never satisfied with just doing eh good enough. And so to me, if we're going to duck big decisions because we're scared of the the shrapnel that's going to come from uh the fuss of of of people yelling at us, then I I I think that we should just abandon our seats and give it to someone that will make those decisions, right? I disagree respectfully what's been said about comparing this to school closures and cons consolidations. That is apples to oranges in my view. changing the bell schedules and disrupting people's lives by an hour or more is

263way different from telling you your school's closed, you're going elsewhere. I think the fabric of disruption that we're talking about is way less. I think it's I think it's not to minimize it. I think we should validate that. So, I I'm fine going 2728. That seems to be the consensus, seem to be a sweet point, but not not because of um you know, not just wanting to pun it. It's it's if we want to be thoughtful and get feedback loops, what we really need to land is the the length of day and make sure that we're solid on that before we can go to bell schedules. And then I think I like the idea what Dan said, we can slide that scale and tailor it. Um and then we can talk because very quickly we

264didn't talk about why we're kind of not going through the other ones. Um you know, so the system aligned late start, I'm not a fan of that. I haven't I've expressed it to you all but not to our community is that that puts a huge burden on people to your point that have to tell their employer, oh yeah, it's one of the days of a week I got to come in late or leave early or that's that's that's a huge huge disruption and it's it's a huge disruption for parents that have multiple jobs that they got to they got to figure out. So I do think the sweet spot it's interesting I think is probably between two four and five and so we need some some input there but at least narrowing it. So 27

26528 convince me. Sure. >> I'll be brief. I think I have what I need. So, I just want to say thank you very much. I also want to just give a special thanks to Dave, Dr. Kyle and Bud uh for and so many other people, the action team that have been involved really for a long time of just trying to understand the problem, helping other people understand the problem to get us to a point where we have potential solutions. And I'll close by saying, Dan, I want to thank you and your respective team as well. Uh when I first met you, you were trying to sell me a dream about a bus named Craig. And look how far we've come. You're an amazing guy and I just appreciate your thoughtfulness and the way that you

266represent our district and our team. So, please make sure you extend that same message back to all of the people involved. Okay. >> I appreciate that. Thank you. >> Thank you so much. [Applause] >> All right. And thanks all for the for the um great engagement and discussion. I think that was yeah that was very very helpful. So, um, with that, um, we will move on to 9.0 executive session. Can I get a motion, please? Go ahead. Said it pulled up. I move the board enter into executive session as authorized by CRS, uh, 2464024H for the purposes of discussing matters regarding the appeal of the decision to expel student A, where public disclosure would adversely affect the persons involved. Executive session pursuant to CRS 246424G for the purpose of considering documents related to student aid's

267expulsion appeal that are protected under the mandatory non-disclosure provision of the Colorado Open records act CRS 24722043AI specifically and only the videos of the student misconduct recorded on August 20th 2025 and an executive session pursuant to CRS 2464024B for the purposes of conferring with the attorney for the board of education to receive legal advice on the process and procedure related to the appeal of a decision to expel student a individuals to join the board in all are part of the executive session are superintendent Brian Kingsley lead assistant superintendent Dr. Tracy Gile, Principal Joe Zappa, attorney Cultterbump, general counsel Autumn Aspen, student A, parents of student A, attorney Lenny Lucas, attorney Ellie Zwel, legal fellow Aran Adri is it Adrian Arande aiande and guardian adidam Scott Patton. >> Can I get a second, please? All right.

268Thank you, Connor. Um, Joe, can you please call the vote? >> Jim Brogish, I. Kristen Draper. >> Hi, >> Connor Duffy. >> Hi, >> Kevin Havda. >> Hi, >> Scott Shoenbower. >> Hi, >> Andrew Spain. >> Hi, >> Jessica Zamora. >> Hi. >> Motion passes 70. >> Thank you. We will now convene in a closed session. At the conclusion of the executive session, we will reconvene in the boardroom to present action item 10.1. We will then adjourn the meeting. Thank you. Okay, the time is 10:47 p.m. on October 21st, 2025 and we are at 10.0 action item 10.1 review and take action on superintendent's decision to expel student A. Can I get a motion? I move that the board affirm the superintendent September 16, 2025 decision that a student at Blevens Middle School be expelled

269from Pter School District through May 27th, 2026. that the board adopt the determination of appeal and order of expulsion as presented and that the board secretary be directed to serve the determination and order on the student, the student's parent or the student's attorney via hand delivery or certified mail return receipt requested. >> Can I get a second? >> Thank you, Render. Uh Joe, can you please call the vote? >> Jim Brokish, >> I. Kristen Draper. >> Hi >> Connor Duffy. >> Hi. >> Kevin Havda. >> Hi. >> Scott Shoenbower. >> Hi. >> Andrew Spain. >> I >> Jessica Zamora. >> I. >> Motion passes 70. >> Thank you. We will now have adjournment. Um, this meeting is now adjourned at 10:49 p.m. Thank you. Have a good night.