Board of Education Meeting: February 25, 2025 (Spanish Captions)

001e e e all right we're going to go ahead and get started so thank you for joining the Board of Education this evening please mute your cell phone as we begin this meeting today is Tuesday February 25th 2025 and this meeting is now called to order at 6:33 p.m. for those attending this meeting in person live captions are available on the TV in the boardroom and in the lobby to access the live captions in language other than English on your own device please scan the QR code on the screen or on the table near the entrance and select the language of your choice the live stream of this meeting is also available in English and Spanish on YouTube for links to these live streams please visit the Board of Education page of the PSD website

002or the PSD TV on demand on YouTube so would any board members like to make changes to the agenda okay so seeing none um we will go ahead on to the superintendent report thank you no thank you good evening everybody it's great to be in community with all of you uh we are going to start tonight or I'll start my remarks tonight by providing another districtwide quick wi celebration our video this evening uh is a highlight of our 2024 peer Summit at our peer Summit the peer Summit brings together peer counselors and ambassadors from our high schools to deepen their understanding of mental health and it creates better opportunities to equip them with skills to support their peers and as we talk about our strategic plan and our district unified Improvement plan I couldn't think

003of a better more aligned video to show than this [Music] one so we decided to come out to Colorado youth Outdoors this year for our Pier Summit because we really wanted to provide an opportunity that was a little bit different for kids get them out of the classroom out into nature doing activities that maybe they don't do every day get them out of their comfort zone trying something new and connecting with one another [Music] so we have four different rotations for the students um we're running them through a mental health kind of first aid station where they're talking about sources of strength we have them doing some [Music] archery we have them fishing and then we have them building survival skills um learning how to start fires and things like that well Personal Care is

004important because sometimes you just need to take a minute for yourself and recharge your social battery and just kind of meet your own needs so that you can be filled up and then spread like kindness and spread your energy to others I think in catching the fish and lighting the fire I needed a lot of patience and I think that's something that I'm going to use a lot in my day-to-day life with other people and and just yeah interactions in general kids were laughing and smiling and I just thought this is why I do what I do because of the kids and watching and seeing their Joy I want to thank the communications team who worked in partnership with the pier Summit and all the associated employees to help make that event spectacular I think

005what's significant about our school system in many ways is that to make quality improvements to improve student outcomes we're not just leaning on our talented Workforce but we're enrolling our students as peers to be a part of that solution building process and I really associate a lot of our great outcomes as a result of us thinking outside of the box and empowering our students to be leaders amongst themselves uh which is absolutely fantastic uh I had a chance yesterday to visit two of our outstanding elementary schools who were also in a very symbolic way uh exhibiting both Academic Press and activities that were associated with cultivating deeper uh belonging across their schools which was both Bennett Elementary School and dun Elementary School just really proud of all the work the teachers and classified staff members

006as well as their administrators are doing to just bring great pride in each of those respective communities but I saw some incredible teaching and learning yesterday uh and I just want to really celebrate that I also want to take an acknowledge you know a lot of times my remarks are focused on the positive things that are happening in the system which I do think is an important part of the superintendency but I also want to acknowledge that as I'm visiting Schools they're also reconciling with this future uh that they're facing with less students in their buildings um and we are in the process of working coming alongside our school leaders to help navigate Budget challenges that are they're experiencing and I think there's some confusion that is happening both in our system and in the

007community while we just are celebrating uh the passing of 4A in November which is providing real true trans informational change uh in our system some of those things you'll acknowledge and will vote on tonight that are in the capital spaces are not able to solve our declining enrollment challenges which mean a reduction in some positions across uh our schools and the central office which is a really challenging position to be in as a system and I want to really make sure that we're sending a very clear message to the community in the system that the passing of 4A thank you voters was absolutely transformational for us in so many ways and we continue that we will continue to celebrate that for decades to come but the Assurance is the social compact that we as a

008governance team made with the community as a result of that passing was really to slow and be more intentional about having conversations about school closure in school consolidation it was never about saying we were not going to have to reduce staff we have such a talented Workforce that we need to be mindful and compassionate about their needs every day but it's a really strange position that we're in where we're making making investments in certain parts of the system while actually I don't want to say moving away from Investments but we're having to reduce staff and that's a very uncomfortable position for our district to be in and that Duality needs to be talked about in a transparent and human- centered way and I wanted to acknowledge that today because I'm realizing that that's happening in

009real time right now in our school communities uh as they're having conversations with staff members as they're looking at their projections for the year ahead as principles are realizing those their budgets and it's it's just a really difficult time while also being an exciting time in some ways at you know simultaneously and I just want us to continue as a governance team and you've charged me uh with this you know in conversation as well to have the courage to talk about it because I think the more we can be transparent about that uncomfortable truth and be honest about it the more we can realize how to be human centered in this way and hold space for the people that are it's impacting the most uh in closing I I will share with you uh that

010I had the opportunity late yesterday or actually was early afternoon to attend the state of the city event and to watch our city manager Kelly d Martino sit side by side with our mayor Jenny art of the city of Fort Collins talk about how you know what makes our city of Fort Collins great is that it creates Community it's part of our nature and our DNA and I think one of the things that I thought both Kelly and our city manager D Martino and mayor AR did really gracefully yesterday as they honored the history of our city while talking about the necessary changes that are needed in the future and how they were tackling it and I think our system is a part of that same exercise each and every day so as we talk

011about our strategic plan tonight as we talk about Investments that we're looking to make as we're talking about creating alignment from The Boardroom to the classroom I do think it's in service of honoring the great history of a strong educational experience for our students in this community while also being brave and courageous around acknowledging some uncomfortable truths so we can have a better future where more students hopefully all students can experience the same level of success so I'm looking forward to a great conversation in that space tonight and I also want to Signal we at your request are bringing back a conversation about bell times you had uh asked us to study and provide a detailed analysis on certain opportunities I think the staff did a really nice job in working in partnership with a

012a consultant who's an expert in this space and we have a lot of experts in this space too and our local routers and local uh uh Transportation managers but that conversation I think will be very informative for our community and our governance team as well so I look forward to a great meeting and want to say thank you for giving me time to address everyone tonight of course and thank you for those remarks um so we'll now move on to um the community comment section 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

013not that the board does not generally respond to remarks made during Community comments a lack of response should not be construed to mean that we agree or disagree with what was 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 interest interests at heart so this opportunity for public comment is for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated

014deadline those people will be called on to make remarks in the order that they signed up and each speaker will be allowed three minutes to address the board so first up I have Grace Turnell welcome okay um thank you for another opportunity to speak most of you know that I'm a parent of two students at Lopez elementary school but I'm not talking about policy or budget however I am a gardener so I'm going to be speaking about what I know hopefully my benor will be obnoxious enough that it will resonate with the school board and District leaders last year was a tough year our community had to weather storm after storm ugly plants were put in then yanked out without much thought then a new slower to grow crop was considered for soil that was

015already unhealthy leadership and the board inadvertently planted seeds of anxiety trauma fear and allowed them to flourish the Harvest was com was the Harvest was contempt and anger which was bitter and rotten Stay With Me the metaphor a little bit longer the crops grown last year have soured the Earth leaving behind weeds of stress mistrust lack of connection with our students and a hopeful hopelessness of the future people are again complacent because most aren't being directly affected right now however I'm persistent the soil the district needs to be amended and more analysis of a correct way to cultivate a solution needs to be done here's the seed that I'm hoping to plant with you during my time leadership needs to pull the invasive weeds from last year's debacle and plant better Seeds of Hope trust

016and support meaning you show up where you want those seeds to grow outside of the metaphor you go to school assemblies visiting PTO PTA meetings visiting classrooms when classes actually in session and participate during during teacher meetings there is traumatic damage that I'm still feeling that isn't being addressed inviting the community to go to you when it's most convenient for you not to mention the disconnect of being in school when school is not in session is Strate it strategically disparates you when oh wait it strategically separates you from the very subject your position requires you to connect with most the students the teachers and the staff I'm still very frustrated about the lack of transparency and accountability and I'm a dang good Gardener I know that if you make mistakes but put in effort to

017have a better next year you can you can learn you can grow those pesky invasive weeds of fear and animosity need to be dealt with come to us and plant seeds of trust then nourish that relationship show our students teachers and staff that you want things to grow better thank you and I hope this annoying metaphor inspires you thank you thank you next up we have Lacy Nixon welcome wow I am short okay okay good evening board my name is Lacy Nixon I'm a pair two in the effective needs program at Rocky I'm here today to speak about the struggles that pair professionals like me face in and out of my job and I love my job I love my students but the reality is our working conditions and pay is simply not enough as

018a Payer Professional I'm there for my students every day I help them learn I support them emotionally and I make sure they have resources they need but in return I've been hit bitten punched threatened and cursed at for example in November I was with a student and he was punching and throwing chairs at me in this process I got hurt and had to go to urgent care and still deal with the medical stuff from that today I continue to show up because I care about my students and I want to help them succeed no matter what the cost is but here's the problem the pay we receive for all the work hard work we do doesn't match the demands of our job I have to work multiple side jobs to just make ins meet my

019paycheck is not enough to even rent a small Studio appointment if I did it would take my entire paycheck leaving me with nothing for food bills or basic needs I'm forced to bounce from house to house most nights I'm thankful for my aunt and my friends who open the homes by the end of the month I am lucky enough to have money to feed myself it's not just difficult it's impossible to keep doing this and I have a life outside of look I'm stressed the stress is overwhelming and it takes a toll on my physical and emotional self I love my job I love my students but I can't keep working in these conditions if I'm not being compensated fairly I've been told if you go to college you'll get a better paying job but

020I was already involved in college I am involved this year hoping to gain my degree with the open of better opportunities for me but just recently last week I had a drop out of College because I couldn't afford the tuition the cost of education is so high and with the little money I make it's simply not possible to balance both work and school I shouldn't have to choose between to continue my education providing for myself and doing the job I love we shouldn't have to choose between our passion for work we do and our ability to serve survive I'm asking for change we as PA professionals deserve a pay fairly for work we do we give everything for our students and we need to be able to live and support ourselves in return we need

021Fair wages so that we can continue doing this important work without sacrificing our basic needs or our features thank you thank you next up we have Sabrina herck welcome this is a Facebook post from February 19th 2025 my child seven who's on an IEP for disability alleges abuse by her par at school she has bruises on her arm and says the par frequently grabs her by the arm when she isn't listening she also claims others are aware of this happening including her is teacher naturally I'm livid who's my first point of contact I don't trust the school district and then someone replied to that please call the mom of the last abuse in FCO let me get her name she knows what to do 10 minutes after this post went up my phone was blowing

022up because the commenter was trying to contact me to help this mother this is the second time since November 27th 2024 a parent has reached out to me begging for advice because a child is being abused at PSD and they don't know how to make you handle it at some point in this mess I became the mascot for begging PSD to not abuse children and that breaks my heart but what kills me the most is I don't know what to tell these people I'm not the one who got zanella investigated and I'm only seeing the same side of PSD that they do what I need you to understand is how deep trust issues run with Integrated Service as parents zanella's outing as an abuser wasn't mind-blowing for us it was my worst nightmare come to

023fruition and it was validation that we weren't paranoid expecting it all along but the breach of trust didn't end there you've heard the list from me countless times and now the last item on that list is the reason for my three-month Hiatus from comments I wasn't too busy I was Trust passed from PSD property you accused me of harassing and threat of harassment and threatened me with arrest to avoid hearing the common sense statement that it's a bad look and bad policy to promote people who are being sued for hiring known child abusers so my advice to that mother was to call the cops and have them March that par out of the building in handcuffs I don't trust mlin to do right by them either but bad publicity does get your attention as much

024as I wish otherwise this won't be the last time a staff member abuses a child the only thing baked further into PSD culture than ignoring staff misconduct is retaliation against whistleblowers the district has made private and public statement saying child abuse is unacceptable who among you will prove it next time a family comes to me for help which one of you can I point to and say that one they'll handle it thank you next up we have Eric southernland welcome Eric souland uh resident of Fort Collins and taxpayer of the pter School District Parent of uh pter School dist District graduate um my remarks this evening I want to preface this I'm here as I have attended other listening sessions recently to promote a vector for a solution to the enrollment problem that the school

025district is seeing in the face of the rather hamfisted brain numbingly in aidite methodology employed over last summer to try and craft some sort of principal on that um so but I kind of had to reformat my comments tonight because I uh I ran across something in the email that was sent out acknowledging my attendance this evening the very last line of that email says it is important to note that a speaker is not insulated from and may be vulnerable to a defamation lawsuit for comments made during public comment oh oh so we're interested in defamation now huh how about the two years that pter school district spent lying that Eric southerland's lawsuit was costing the district millions of dollars the district sued me the district refused any sort of negotiation the district's own attorneys

026stated in signed pleadings filed in the district court that the lawsuit was moot I even F filed an appeal to the Supreme Court one day late on purpose to give PSD a chance to dismiss the suit and nothing happened now the real reason that there was a long delay between voter approval of the last Bond measure and issuance of the bond enough to make anybody's blood boil it's really corrupt really un unbelievable and it's magnitude when you finally get around to peeling that Endy and so uh glad we're interested defamation but um not so much in the past the other thing that statement says is that there's some interest in Fair Play I agree with that there should be I'm really glad that my son when he went through PSD got a lot of messages

027about the importance of fair play a lot of importance about thinking about others and consideration that's not the basis of our financing scheme here in PSD there is a bad actor that has completely injured the financial system and therein lies the solution to your consolidation how dare you look to for Colin schools for closure when you have an entire community that pays next to nothing and I mean do mean next to nothing to support PSD they get free schools free schooling and they got a windfall of money to subsidize their growth thanks thank you next up we have Patricia Goodman welcome no my apologies it's Patricia hello my name is Patricia gemman and I have been a paraprofessional to for a year and a half in the effective needs program at Rocky Mountain in high

028school two years ago I would never have imagined how much I would love doing this work connecting with kids being them for them in their good and bad days I love that I get the opportunity to guide and help our students and advocate for them when they are misunderstood working in the affected in the effective needs program give me the opportunity to help students with invisible disabilities these invisible disabilities often leave students misunderstood by their peers and even adults like teachers and support staff some times due to their disability students can be can become dangerous and verbally or physically harm others I believe that every child deserves an education and sometimes school is a refuge or safe place for them in order to help our students feel safe and supportive we receive special trauma informed

029training we spend countless hours building Rapport and getting to know that our students we provide direct academic support behavioral interventions emotional regulation social skills development and staff student collaboration we work closely with students to help them follow routines engage in learning activities and manage their emotions we assist students with activities guide them through um guide them through assignments and help them regulate their behavior using strategies described in their individualized education plan IEPs we Implement behavioral plans under the guidance of teachers and social workers the um these could involve using specific strategies to deescalate challenging behaviors redirecting students or reinforcing positive behaviors we help students identified and express their emotions constructively this might include guiding them through copying strategies supporting them during difficult moments and encouraging them to communicate their needs we assist students in building

030appropriate social skills which may include facilitating group activities modeling positive interactions and helping students navigate peer relationships we work as part of a team including teachers special education professionals social workers and other professionals to implement each um students IEP goals regular communication with the team ensures a consistent and supportive approach it takes a unique kind of person to connect with our kids these special people are not easy to find so when you find one you want to keep them unfortunately the reality is that a talent is um the talent is being higher away from us offers a better pay outside of the field education we all know how expensive it is to live in for colians the compensation power of receive makes it difficult to retain talented Professionals for a professionals like me work with

031students that have the highest needs we deserve to be value and appropriately compensated for an excellent for the excellent work we're doing education is not just academics but making a connection with people and making them feel seen and heard thank you thank you Patricia next up we have leetta welcome oh she's not here okay thank you uh next up we have Danny Lawrence welcome hi thank you for the opportunity tonight I wanted to speak to the monitoring report and the Strategic Plan update from the perspective of someone who helps families with disabled students in our district PSD is reporting on a positive growth effect for IEP students and when I tried to research what positive growth effect was in education examples included increased standardized test scores increased graduation rates and more student engagement and then

032I look at the statistics that I can readily find and some included in the report graduation rates continue to decline for the past 5 years standardized test scores on the CDE website look hideous after third grade uh for IEP students as low as 4% meeting grade level expectations on cmass and Ela and math for the eth grade and student engagement survey is being reported tonight as declining um in your statistics so many disabled students cannot even complete the student engagement survey because you don't offer that to them in an accessible format and so I'm left wondering how are we supporting the claim of Positive Growth effect for the IEP population as a board are you questioning what was done to achieve that effect and how it will be implemented and improved upon for most of

033the winter I have been developing my own monitoring report which I plan on sharing with all of you and I have been awaiting this year's presentation because somewhere in my mind I think that if I can show you the grade-by-grade slide and performance of IEP students that maybe you'll be compelled to be proactive and what I have learned is that third grade is the best a child in PSD with an IEP will ever perform how does that support graduation with options for this population just because you all say it doesn't make it true and I like many other parents are tired of living some delusional non-reality to appease all of you kids are struggling out here and that's what a heavily underidentified disabled population you should have hundreds more students recently I was reading your

034policy your board policy 3.1 on governing style and I think that IEP students are being denied the policy commitments to your outward Vision versus internal preoccupation future rather than past or present Focus proactive versus reactive planning and anything that is inclusive collaborative or transparent and as a board I feel like you've abandoned your commitment to the group responsibility you have to this population of students and I felt that way for the entire four years I've been in the district I've never seen a presentation here that would indicate that there was a plan any indication that that there was something thoughtful purposeful or specific that was going to be tried to help disabled students parents in this population need a sign a life and it's not coming from the integrated services department at this point we

035can't even attend their committee meetings your boardroom is the only place that we have to go it's cruel to ignore to Gaslight and to go year after year not attempting something specific to try to make it better and according to your policy you all play a part in that and so I'm asking will you please make this the year when you absorb these monitoring statistics and you task PSD Administration to prioritize these problems and help disabled students specifically thank you thank you thank you all for speaking tonight we always as usual appreciate um all Community comment we're going to move on now to board topics and committee reports this agenda item is an opportunity for board members to provide an update on committee work or to speak to board topics uh do any board members

036have something to report um Connor did you want to go first yeah really quickly um for my board topic what I'd like to do is I'd like to talk about something normally we get a lot of emails not all of them have a positive spin on them however I got one from a constituent um whose children go to Beth Key Elementary School and I wanted to highlight the fantastic work by our kitchen managers our food services staff for not only what I consider going the extra mile but doing a terrific job in exactly why they work for the district uh a student there was uh diagnosed with some food allergies and within a matter of days they took care of everything for this student their parents reached out to me and said hey they're doing

037a wonderful job and I just wanted to share that with everybody go ahead Kevin that's a perfect segue um so uh principal horta Kelly at Harris graciously invited um the some of the board members uh to uh attend a um a celebration for the cafeteria and custodial workers at Harris couple weeks back president Draper and I um graciously took that um that invitation and they were gracious with us as we fumbled around the kitchen we had hats and we got to serve lunch to the kids for a couple of shifts um I wanted to highlight exactly what um what Connor just said what what really struck me other than just the kids smiles and that was the best part of my month um was that this was a delayed start day it was absolutely frigid

038so the count was off they couldn't even do a count for the kids the food was nutritious it was warm it was inviting it was incredible and just to kind kind of be invited to that part of the day where kids are getting fed and they come together and the staff is working meticulously to make sure everyone's got a healthy meal and no one goes without want and there's different options for different kids I thought was really remarkable um and so I wanted to to to shout out the staff there and the custodial staff for the excellent work they do not just at Harris but around the district um and for inviting us uh to come in that was really it fed my soul so I wanted to say thank you for that um and

039on that note I do hope that as we're talking with our um friends and community members about whether or not we're going to continue having meals provided for free um I'll I'll State my claim that I think that should be a moral Covenant of our community and our nation um we can only control what we have here um but there are there are kids that come into those buildings that are food insecure and a delayed start means that may be the first and maybe the only hot meal that they get and so as we're talking about cuts and and things like that I want to be mindful that some of the faces that we saw um we don't know what's behind that onion Lair and so I just I wanted to make that point um

040the second one um we had our second uh board engagement session last week again I'm I'm a big proponent of these I think they were very well attended um thanks to director brokish and Duffy and chief uh technology officer butd hont who also spent time with us and also John cope thank you for helping set up and making that happen I really appreciate the out of work time that you took um and I want to thank the um the folks who showed up everyone has a different um reason for coming um and what I took away we talked both local issues with the passage of fora the repercussions some similar themes to the last session that we had um we also got a great update thank you director Duffy on what's going on in the

041state and the legislative updates and some of the laws that are going to impact how much money we're going to have and some of the decisions that we've got coming up and also there was a lot of conversation about what's going on nationally and there wasn't a lot of answers Exchange and I don't have a lot of answers um but I also want to say that I think it's a really important thing to hold space that during these chaotic times and the stress that we're seeing boil over into our classrooms and our day-to-day and our jobs and it's sort of ever present our minds we have an opportunity to come together in a forum as a community of individuals of strangers to discuss things and I can't imagine any world in which those things aren't

042made better by coming together and talking these things we have an incredible Community here this is a hate for so many wonderful things it's worth celebrating it's worth being challenged and I think those some of those challenges are very very honest critiques of how we're performing what what we can do better but I don't want to gloss over the importance of coming together voluntarily And discussing things and even unburdening yourself and having another thought exchange and having a connection with a neighbor who's going through something similar who's thinking something similar and to unburden yourself that's how we get better and so on that um we've got one more that's scheduled for Thursday April ail 17th uh we're skipping over the March because that's that coincides with spring break for that third week um so at

043Rice Elementary School and Bethy Bethy Elementary School and at the the sake of sounding trit I hope that you will come and help plant some of those Seeds of Hope thank you thank you Kevin and if I if I can I'm gonna actually jump off of of that um because we were at the engagement session at Cruz um where we had 20 people come and it was absolutely fantastic um and I just Echo your sentiments of you know what a great way for people to come and share their feelings share their concerns uh making sure one of the biggest concerns is to make sure that every child was safe in our school system and we reiterated that every child you know that is our our goal is to make sure that every child is safe

044every day um so we talked a lot about that um and again the the various um 4A and National issues and and um it was just a it was a great coming together um with those 20 and I just want to give a shout out to um all of those who were there because at the end of it there was this moment where I think people invoicing all of that um stress and all of that anxiety and all of that concern realized that this is difficult what what PSD is doing right now um and so trying to navigate those Waters and knowing that um the forest a monies does not always cover um you know exactly what we think it should or if we um you know investing money over here why are we not

045investing money over here um and so they they really took to heart what we had to say and how we were approaching this and and I think people really felt um appreciative that PSD was was going about it the way that we were so and the way that we are so I just want to Echo that um a two the the Harris lunch um I I think the biggest the most number of questions we got was where's Mr Jim right they just came in looking at us like this isn't right um but it was so much fun and the way I just want to give a shout out to the to the entire lunch crew it was amazing I mean in 45 minutes they got every child fed um salad bar was put out salad

046bar was taken back um things were refrigerated that need to be refrigerated things that were that needed to be hot things were cold that need to be cold it was I don't know how they do it in that space of time you know and as you said it was a it was a um delayed start day so they lost two hours in the morning and still everything went off without a hitch it was fantastic so it was an honor to be able to to serve lunch that day um and then the last shout out I want to give um was uh I got to see PSD and action at the um grandparents and parents Summit this past weekend um so and I got this lovely shirt of mental health matters um and uh so I

047wanted to wear that today to um just thank everybody who was there um parents who came grandparents who came kids who came but a lot of our staff spent their Saturday um from 8: in the morning until uh 3 o'clock in the afternoon um just letting people know about the resources that we provide to all students so thank you for that um did anybody else have anything Jim I guess I wanted to cover my heart filling moment for the month it was l Elementary and every year they do a fundraiser for respit care they do a lunch in and the kids are serving the the salad and dishing it up for me and and lading up the chili and those kinds of things and serving the uh the drinks and the the desserts and it

048was just a lovely lovely fundraiser so wanted to do a shout out for them too go ahead Scott yeah I just uh wanted to reiterate the crw uh Community comment was amazing uh Carolyn you and I were there um a lot of the commenters that were here tonight were there and it was actually really constructive um discussion I like that format a lot better than these formal meetings when we're not able to have an interaction and and really flesh out some of the things that are concerning people so I I appreciate that we're doing that um other big thing uh Brian and I got to go to uh a CSU event um a couple weeks ago I guess it was and and uh they uh partner with us uh as a district and invite our

049fourth grade and fifth grade uh kids to a CSU basketball game it was the women's basketball game against Utah State and CSU put a beat down on Utah State it was fantastic 18-point win and it was so much fun I literally have I'm been a CSU guy since 1990 I've never heard Mobi Arena that loud it is insane and a super fun event so I encourage the rest of the board to uh to come uh enjoy that so thank you to CSU and the athletic department for organizing that in in partnering with our athletic department so yeah anyone else all right okay we can go ahead and move on to the consent agenda would any board members like to pull anything from consent go ahead Scott uh yeah I'd like to pull 6.4 and 6.5

050for a brief discussion okay so 6 .4 will now become 7.1 and AC action item 7.1 and 6.5 will now become action item 7.2 and then sorry president trer um I do have staff coming for the bell time presentation can we push the bus purchase a little bit later absolutely absolutely we can make um so scratch that video scoreboard was 7.1 um B Scott you have a something you want to move oh sorry Kevin sorry yeah excuse me I'd also like to move uh 6.6 for brief discretion into an action item and I think what we can do is the remaining action items 7.1 7.2 and that will become I think 7.3 we'll just move those to become 8.1 after the informational sessions 8.2 well we have to do it as an action item is

051the only problem so um create 9.0 yeah let's create 9 yeah so 9.0 is we'll do action items so um and then 10 will be adjournment so that would be yes so 6.4 is 7 is s now action item 71 6.6 is now action item 7.2 and 6.5 is now action item 9.0 does that make does that make sense may I ask a question yes Dave can I ask you to weigh in on whether staff would like to discuss with the board the investment potential investment in school buses prior to the presentation on Bell schedules or following just want to be clear on the timing of that I I I think we have to put it to following because it has to be an action item and the bell time item is an informational report

052but I would confirm that with others it it is um and we could do it we could do it prior to but then it it makes people wait through the informational reports of the um unified Improvement plan um and strategic plan I I honest monitoring report I honestly think if we made the U bus purchase 7.3 we might be okay because I I know they're on their way okay all right but if we get to 7.3 I might say we need to move it again all right just reverse those two got it all right okay so can I get a motion for the remaining items on the consent agenda agenda go ahead Kevin thank you I move that the board approve and adopt the recommended action items for the items remaining on the consent agenda

053item can I get a second thank you Jim all right and then Jill can you call the vote Jim bookish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havelda hi Carolyn Reed I Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 70 okay thank you all so we're going to go ahead and move into action item 7.1 which was the video scoreboard Replacements uh can I get a motion for this I can go if you okay thank you Jim sure I move that the board approve expenditures for this project in excess of $250,000 authorizing staff to execute a contract for 1,237 $795 with digital scoreboards for installation services okay do I have a second all right thank you Jess okay and now I believe we have yes discussion on that so all right yeah go ahead

054Scott yeah I just I the reason I brought this up is I just wanted to make sure that we had um Clarity in the community of about about this I am a huge proponent and uh advocate for our Athletics and uh think this is a cool idea for sure and uh the digital scoreboards we have at the football fields have been uh really fantastic a big upgrade um we get advertising dollars from them uh experiential things for the kids that type of thing so I know that would be similar for these uh I had a couple questions um one of the reasons I think we're talking about upgrading these is that the uh state has uh shot clock or a shot clock is going to be put in place uh for basketball games um I'm

055not clear as to when that is is that in the spring or the fall of 2026 if it's okay with the group I'd love to introduce Brandon carluchi our District's athletic director to engage and we can do that together if that's okay would you mind answering that question yeah thanks for uh excuse me for uh letting me participate tonight great question shot clocks are uh mandated by the state the fall of 26 so we are currently in year one of a cycle next year next school years year two of a cycle and to start the 26 27 school years when shot clocks are mandated to answer your question I mean to go a step further on that the timing of this project is beneficial that lines up for us I would not say and wouldn't

056want to give the impression that shot clocks are a reason that we have to move to video scoreboards but it sure saves us the headache of what other districts are going through if they're not going to transition in this phase like we have the opportunity to now thank you one question I had is with that fall of 2026 could this potentially wait a year to be done so it would be spring of 26 we'd approve it if they'd be installed over the summer and ready for action in the basketball season's not even until late fall would that be a possibility it it is a possibility the only our only concern is that we have a couple of gyms and scoreboards that are on their last leg and so we're kind of been rolling the dice

057and this project is why we've put a few of them on hold um that's not the case in every gym but it isn't the case it is the case of a few could they limp through next year po possibly and and there's a good chance that would happen they're limping through this year and we just sort of service them as best we can and get them through so to answer your question could it wait probably yes he Kevin a question I apologize it just kind of came to me and I don't know if we got an answer this tonight Autumn but what's the legality of being able to advertise at our district level events for businesses around the community are we allowed to do that and receive some donations that way through advertisement yes we

058are permitted to advertise there are some guidelines and other things we have in place we also have a policy um it's I don't know what the policy is I think it's a k policy that discusses um Revenue through advertising for the district so one another question is we have a year ramp up could we be doing some work with our community members to help generate some interest in that idea I I don't want to speak for Brandon but I think a lot of that groundwork has already been done as a result of the already established video scoreboards at French field as well as our new uh stadium in Tim that is already generating about $250,000 of annual revenue into the system so we believe with this particular investment inside our gymnasiums that we would actually

059break even on the implementation cost in about five years that we would probably get about $150 to $200,000 in annual revenue beginning next year which would be really great and it's a really rare occasion that we talk in this room about making Investments that are gen that would generate revenue and that offset other types of needs in the system not just athletic related but also activity related and if it's okay with the board I'd love for Brandon to actually comment on that and how some of these monies could be used in short order if that's okay that'd be great and could I also add um I would love after that if you could speak to the opportunities for students um in this as well the education AB happy to talk on that uh yes so

060what we use some of the money for I will say that um just to put it in perspective it was it was a little bit more risky and we were more of a leader in the state on our outdoor boards than we are um on the indoor it's becoming the norm in the state for these video boards to happen in gymnasiums we sort of were one of the uh Front Runners in the state on the on the uh outdoor boards but we're quickly able to leverage that turn them into partnership packages that are generating the funds that he talks about about $225 to $250,000 a year the two outdoor boards combined ran us about $800,000 so we will we're close to paying that off in three years time and we'll pay that off before the

061end of the fourth year so just to give you an idea um when you talk to people in the industry they say actually the tougher lift is outdoor boards because although football Garners a lot of excitement there just aren't a lot of events when you compare that to what's happening in a gym with volleyball boys and girls boys and girls basketball boys and girls wrestling assemblies I mean there's just so much more action in the gym and businesses know that and they know where those impressions are going to hit and how that works and so the dollars follow Impressions and eyeballs right and so they know that the uh the lift on the marketing side which is why when Brian said we expect an additional $150 to $2,000 that's why I think if we've done

062that and more outside then we can absolutely do that uh we can do that inside as well what do we use the money for uh what's happened in my budget since we've been able to do this and we used Dave correct me if I'm wrong we've used we used old Bond money to pay for the outdoor boards correct were the ones at the new construction no at at our at our Fields yes we did okay and so rather than H having my department have to pay those back what was eliminated from my budget was anything regarding equipment so I no longer have a line item in my budget as the District athletic director for equipment instead what happens is those Revenue doar sit in an account that all of our schools and programs access so

063the way that really plays out in real time is I'll get a call or an email from an athletic director and said hey we're in desperate need of a new wrestling mat new wrestling mat cost about $112,000 usually the way we work that is we say Okay has the program done any fundraising high school programs can fund raise our middle school programs really aren't in the business of fundraising and we have to support them more uh but usually the the program will throw in a little bit of money the athletic department maybe the building principal is able to to throw in money and they might get to $6,000 and then my department and this um advertising Revenue this PSA that we have is able to uh meet that need a pole vault pit there's $20,000

064there you know you've got high jump mats I mean the list goes on and on and you can think of everything and whatever you think it is double or triple it and that's the cost as you would probably imagine right um what I can say is what this money has provided us is the opportunity over the last two or three years that I I rarely in the situation where I'm saying no we can meet the requests that are coming in to support our student athletes in that way um what I think would be a neat opportunity and what I'm excited about adding these indoor boards is not more money for athletics what we've discovered this year sort of in a giant two-year process of looking at everything from coach and and sponsor pay is we

065see a large discrepancy in how we're supporting activities uh for example example if you make the playoffs in athletics we will support you as an student athlete with a hotel room with pum uh with busing and what we're discovering and it's a it's been a blind spot in our district and the answer is why do you do it that way and it's like well that's just the way it's been done in PSD what we're discovering is a student who goes to let's say a Fossil Ridge band member who's going to State band they're not supported with the same Hotel pum busing uh they might get busing provided for them if the building principal is willing to take that out of their budget but it doesn't live in our system like it does for athletics and

066I it's it's tough to realize that and to hear that when you see that and you discover you're like wow we're really making a value statement here with with what we support and we've got kids working putting in countless hours in Science Olympiad in knowledge Bowl in robotics in Performing Arts that are going to represent their schools at a state level and they're not receiv receiving the same sort of sort of backing so I think what would be neat is if the indoor boards and that additional Revenue would provide us an opportunity we did a breakdown of what would it really look like to uh support every one of our act students at the high school level who are participating in activities at the state level if we supported that in hotels and we came

067up with a number through all of our activity directors getting us that data who's going where are they going how many nights are they staying how long are they gone that would come back to be about $100,000 you add buses on top of that you've got another hundred so you can see a world and I don't want to make promises that the Hay's not in the barn yet on this where you can say boy these indoors these indoor boards now created an opportunity where we can support and wrap around some of those services that we're providing our student athletes that we are not providing our kids in activities right now with hotel with food pum with uh with transportation we can take that burden even away from building principles in there site based Budget on

068the transportation side of things so uh those are some thoughts on what we're currently doing with the money how it operates right now and like I said I don't know that we have to dip into the 200,000 or so that Athletics is receiving in that world that supports Athletics the other money and the additional funds we can steer somewhere else and I think it'd be a great place to direct that towards our activities because like I said we've discovered that we're just not supporting that the same way and then president Draper you had another question on the educational opportunities for students yeah yes so you can imagine the difference between a scoreboard that you're used to seeing anywhere else and the education there there aren't educational opportunities you're looking for a scoreboard operator if by

069chance you were able to make it out to a football game at PSD Stadium which is at Tim neth High School this year you may have seen there is a sports broadcasting class uh that is an elective service and it's an elective course uh the teacher has given an additional plan during the day because that teacher course happens during the games and they produced every game that happened not just the Fossil Ridge games but the the uh Timnath games and the Fort Collins game it was a TV production we paid the students to be working those hours we had multiple camera angles if you looked at our giant video board there was a closed circuit feed just like you would see at CSU there was a replay and if you went into the Press Box

070upstairs you would see there there was a kid doing play-by-play there was a kid doing color commentary you had another couple of kids on the replay mixer you had a producer and a director they've got the headphones on they're talking it's like a trailer that you'd see in a parking lot at a game and super super neat so there are tons of educational opport I mean and we were just we're just scratching the surface right we would love to see those opportunities expand to other schools and if everybody has a a board in their gym uh then that just increases how many like I said because just so many more events uh I will say what that hinges on is the right staff members you've got to have the right person and right now fossil

071ridd does have that and Mr dear and I'm happy to give him a shout out because he does a great job for those kids and what really uh awesome experiences they get and and it kind of dub tails in with his sports broadcasting class which by the way is an English credit and uh certainly an English credit that I was never offered in high school it's super cool yeah that's really amazing thank you yes goe J can you just for my own piece of mind like how long does a board usually last like good question yep uh the way that LEDs are measured sort of their life cycle is when do the bulbs and when does the brightness diminish to half brightness okay what these boards are their life cycle is 100,000 hours to half

072brightness if you left a board on 247 365 every day all day that'd be about 11 and A2 years so so what they tell us is they're about a 20-year life cycle 20 years from now you there's a good chance you would look up at that board and say that thing kind of looks outdated because it's a large TV right no no different than what would be in your living room but well over 10 years 15 years is when you would start thinking about a replacement cycle so like Brian said if we are looking at a payback in that five six year window and we're coming up on year four on our out door boards and those suckers are kind of paid off and we're using additional money now right and and obviously it's the

073shell game and what we did with that but it was all money directed back towards kids in our system um one thing I have a wondering about so Tim Middle High and Wellington obviously we just built these schools not that long ago so can you just walk me through the difference between what we are buying versus what we have in those newer buildings yeah great question and they are new when the I'll I'll tell you when the when the video boards went up outside I I reached out to both of the principles the building teams at the time who were making some final decisions and I said hey we might want to look towards the future here because these are pretty awesome and this is where it's going and you could kind of already see

074that the problem was that was going to be a tough decision and every dollar late in the game was going to be a sacrifice they were going to have to make somewhere else so what we did sort of collectively is said let's put in a very basic board and if you go look at the scoreboards in at Wellington in their main gym and at they actually look older than the boards at Fort Collins even though they're not and they work fine but they're very basic boards those boards will not just be thrown in the trash we will absolutely if we put these video boards in we will repurpose those in auxiliary gyms and Middle School gyms very easy to do put them up and they're going to meet our needs in auxiliary and Middle School

075gyms really easily did I answer that Jessica or follow that was amazing that's like actually exactly what I would love to hear so I appreciate that we're reusing and repurposing somewhere else and the only other thing I want to say is I think you have some students who would be really excited to hear about your intentions around supporting activities and trying to figure that out and so I would invite you to come back and talk to them I got drilled by him a month or so ago and you think standing across the board from from the board is tough yeah be across from the students answering those questions and certainly didn't want to promise but at the time it was like we're looking and we're trying and we do see that it's been a blind

076spot in our system and would love to support our activities in that way Connor go ahead kind of I think maybe last but not least I want to say thank you again to the voters um this these items um theaters scoreboards gymnasiums Fields those were specifically called out during uh 4A um now I had a little bit of stick of shock when I saw 1 .2 million for scoreboards just like everybody else but I think it's worth noting that this is what a worldclass school district looks like and our voters approve that and they want us to do this and I think when you go into these gyms I know when you go over to the football field at Tim Middle High School you're like wow this is you know this is really good Athletics

077so I'm in support of this 100% uh I want to see him in there I didn't know any about the payback from advertising but I think that that's to me is just icing on the cake so thanks to the voters in our community and enjoy go ahead Caroline yeah and I just had a clarifying question actually for you Scott you asked about if we could wait what would be the reasoning behind that I I didn't quite understand yeah I the the way I was reading it it seemed like it was purely because we needed to come within um the requirements of the of the state that was one of the main things and so I just wanted to know that timing uh the other thing is is I feel like it's good to talk about

078these things rather than just rubber stamp on a consent thing to hear exactly what Brandon's saying uh because that's exciting that's that's really good stuff um I think it's easy for someone just reading our minutes and that type of thing to see whoa they just spent $1.2 million on this yet what about Staffing uh for more bus drivers and and things like that which is something that I was concerned about as well but from my understanding is I don't think we can spend that money on staff am I right Dave that's that's correct the debt free mevy is very specific and what it can be spent on and that's the operations and maintenance side of the house yeah so I think it's important to have that discussion in public so we can say hey we

079did ask those questions I think that's why we're here as elected officials is to ask these kind of questions so that that was the main thing I I wasn't sure around the timing and whether we could use that 1.2 million now for something something else but um that was pretty much it okay I was just Conor you said that for you it's icing on the cake for me it's actually foundational that we're going to get reimbursed for this over the next five years that it's an investment we're going to get money back that's huge for me otherwise this would be a close one for me go ahead Kevin just like to piggy back off what director Shan B said um and the reason I think we're calling some of these to have discussion is not

080because we're fearful of the number not because we're mistrustful of the need and I think you made a very compelling case I want to thank you for being here especially on short notice and um to uh uh Chief hunt who's also going to give us a presentation on the refresh and I think the reason why I have some pause um and I think it's appropriate to use your words is because if you add up and I did some quick math on our consent um and just for our community's education consent is typically different items that are completely separate in topic and subject matter but um are dispensed with summarily in one in one vote one Fell Swoop so to speak because they're they're I don't want to say no-brainers because sometimes they're not but the

081staff has done such an excellent job and this has been years worth of work to get us to this one point on consent that's a victory nonetheless um with the in total expenditures is 8,377 th000 in change that we're being asked to vote for in one Fell Swoop tonight so I feel somewhat incumbent to at least include um some discussion of the need for these why we're doing this again thanking the voters that this is not a reality at least from my understanding had we not passed for I not had the money appropriated for this specific purpose and that specific purpose is I think we just said very distinct and separate from the expenditures we're making on staff that is still a very real problem we're going to talk about more problems with bell schedules

082so there's not one easy solution that comes across our desk so I don't want the community to think that because we're voting in things in consent it's an easy call and so I just want to underscore the fact that if we if we need to have a couple of 20 minutes of discussion on a multi-million dollar expenditure I for one think that's appropriate thank you any other discussion all right well I agree with that I think this is an excellent discussion and I think between the fact that for the experience on that sports broadcasting the return on investment in under five years and it going to activities in general um and that this is we're talking again about operations money um that cannot be spent on um on other other things other than operations um

083then to me this is a this is a um an easier yes vote so um with that is I think we are ready to call the vote Jim brokish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havalda hi Carolyn Reed hi Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 70 all right thank you okay thank you so much so now we're going to move on to 7.2 which is the 2025 26 student and staff endpoint refresh and so can I get a motion on that go ahead Jess I move that the board approve of estimated cumulative expenditures in excess of 250,000 for the 2526 school year student and staff endpoint refresh can I get a second Thank You Caroline all right and is there a discussion on this item go ahead Kevin do you want

084to start off uh I think we' kind of teed that off already I think um Chief Hunt is gonna give us a little bit of a primer uh recall we had this discussion with I think a subset of the rocky feeder last year it was right around five million I think as a recall the board elected to take off some of those expenditures from the K through two and at least pause that which I think had a savings 750 does that sound right 600 about 600 we're going to talk about it in just a second yeah but that's a great great recollection yeah and the only thing I'd say is that there is a um based on the results of this year outlin the spending breakdown recommend restoration fore life cycle along with some immediate

085purchases for Rocky schools Etc so um there is clearly a need why we're going to save money by doing this now as opposed to hoping and waiting and see so if you could speak to that a little bit I think that'd be an excellent primer be glad to you thank you so much be glad to you that'll actually come up in just a second I really appreciate the opportunity to to speak about the work of the IT team and some of the stuff that we don't get to talk about a lot and then people go I wonder if if the IT team does and I hope in the next few minutes I'll say yeah we do a lot and we nerd out hard on it uh in the audience tonight I've got our uh director

086of infrastructure uh D Campbell and uh it asset manager Tyson burer Tyson in addition to many of the things that he does he is largely responsible for the stewardship of our annual spend related to our endpoint device program endpoint device is a fancy way to say uh computers that staff and students use uh every day for a lot of different things so uh if you'd allow me I'll walk us through uh that just a little bit the the current one toone initiative is something that I I don't get a chance to do this very often but I'm going to thank myself who as the dad of a three-year-old daughter who wasn't yet a phsd student uh I voted for the 2010 technology Mill which is an opportunity to uh invest in our current device uh

087program it's a one one program at the time it was marketed as such I will thank those voters then myself included I'll thank the voters now who have continually provided the support for this particular work but uh at that time uh the money that is largely used and that yall will be hopefully approving uh us to spend tonight comes from that Mill the initial use of the mill was for specifically supporting student devices and Technology infrastructure I say some because at that time it wasn't a k121 to1 initiative uh it was through the good stewardship of our team team Tyson and his predecessors the folks that I'm proud to represent that we've been able to stretch that initial investment at a on to one at the secondary level into a three through 3 through 12

088and then during covid extend that to K2 and then one of the first uh delightful things I got to do here was to help us figure out how to make that consistent for our staff as well so that it didn't matter which department you worked for or how you worked in PSD we do our best to make sure that we're providing some sort of PSD promise for a floor of consistent technology access uh that's a big deal some of the way we've stewarded that money is through annual spends our extensive bid process the opportunity to uh buy en large volume which gives us some pricing flexibility although in this Marketplace and I'll say more about that in a second it's uh it's it's very important that we time those prices well and I'll I'll come

089back around to that in a minute uh the student devices in that infrastructure uh there's networking attached to that there's some internet access really creates that foundation for district curricula support for student creation staff building and sharing of resources uh assessment needs and and really creating that space for our staff and students to connect with each other to connect with the caring adults in their classrooms and and uh to to Really connect with the world in a lot of different ways so that's that's the history of the funding source just want to overview what that looks like today in PSD right so in a kindergarten through second grade classroom the standard device there is a Chromebook we'll talk more about Chromebooks later there's also a classroom charging cart that's sitting in every classroom to provide

090power for those Chromebooks and a place for them to live when they aren't going home with the student uh third through fifth that device becomes a Windows laptop uh as well as a classroom charging cart when you move into Middle School we stop primarily charging the devices in the classrooms and they start is being issued directly to the students right and so the sixth through 12th grade standard is a Windows laptop uh and those devices are leaving the school they're primarily with the kid you may or may not have experienced the figuring out if the backpack will fit the laptop along with all the other things or if we're going to carry the laptop in one bag and the other things in another bag or sometimes just the laptop in a giant backpack and you're

091wondering what else is in there but that that device is going with the student uh staff standard is one of two devices typically and that's uh Windows laptop for the majority of Staff full-time staff we also have some program based Alternatives baked into our program it doesn't make sense for every staff member to carry a laptop with them every day bus driver isn't going to do that there's some technology that's provisioned to the vehicle and then there's some spaces for the uh staff to access that technology when they are uh uh not driving which is how we prefer they access their technology um so that program based alternative is language that allows us some flexibility in the program to make the S the most sense of the investment as to where it makes uh or

092where it works for the needs of that program uh a little bit about our devices because I think these are it's always fun to dispel this information we unlike uh many districts in Colorado but not the only District in Colorado provision and purchase our devices with a four-year accidental damage warranty we do that because we believe that our children and our grown-ups will make some mistakes and that people making mistakes is not an opportunity to uh find the children or the staff to teach them how to be better it's part of the total cost of ownership now students who abuse that privilege staff who who have abused that privilege that's a different conversation but we bake in repair or warranty into the life of the device it's a way for us to protect that investment

093during that four-year life cycle we are both providing a little bit better opportunity for the the vendors who bid us with us to have a little more value in that bid but also the guarantee that we'll have a working device for that four years it's a way to bake in the consistency of it in the life cycle now we always wish the batteries would last a little bit longer and go a little bit farther but that 4 years is guaranteed um we have seen with our Windows devices over the years that after that four years those costs to maintain go up considerably availability of parts batteries those sorts of things um but we weren't sure about that with Chromebooks last year year we hadn't had the opportunity to test it so uh I'm pleased that

094we had that opportunity we'll talk more about that again in a second but that four-year life cycle is baked in total cost of ownership is baked in and the fact that people are human beings who sometimes spill things drop things and have issues when they cram that device into their backpack with all of the other things like that fifth Harry Potter book that really shouldn't go into the bag with the laptop but sometimes we do it and you know things happen that's just a part of being uh in our world right now right so a little bit about our process uh we start next year's uh process for purchasing in the fall of uh the previous year so November 24 we issue an RFP that RFP outlines our specs our specifications and we put it

095out uh to all the vendors that we might want to do business with once we get those initial RFP informations back we take a look at a bunch of different testing units I want to emphasize that point we don't just test them by turning a couple on and putting them in the back of the shop and hoping they stay on um this is this year's uh 20page testing document that a guy on our team named Nate McDaniel I just want to call out put together for us that evaluates the specs the specifications the video life the battery life what if we install a big file slowly what if we install a small file uh uh fast uh how much uh data transfer makes sense all of those specs and things just like you'd see if

096you were going to Google your next computer purchase we're doing that in our shop with our team and then we're doing some math about the value versus the cost so it's not always the cheapest thing you want to buy you want to balance the price with the um ability of the device to do the things we want it to do usually the price wins not always but that's something we do every year and it's an important part of our process that's why when we get results back uh in December it's not until this time of year a little bit later that we're actually ready to say these are the devices that make sense because we have to test them in the real world we have to test them in our real world and we have

097to test them against our other ecosystem environments our wireless access points our infrastructure at schools uh Power becomes an interesting thing to test sometimes so we do all that then it comes to this board uh for annual review because it's all it's usually an expenditure that would require the board uh support to move forward on then we'll start trying to buy this year it's important that we're trying to buy right now you're aware of the fact that there will be uh more uh tariffs and taxes on on things that move around the world and have parts from different places we you might have seen in the previous item pric is guaranteed for a very short window of time we're uh we're here tonight in that same space and mention it to say uh we need

098to buy things now because they're going to cost more later uh and I I'll speak to to that a little bit more with the Chromebooks but just want you to be aware that's why we do that we get those and then we start preparing them for life and PSD with student and staff workers across the district and schools preparing the particular images providing them making sure they're ready shiny and delightful for the first day of school uh or the first day of work uh across the district um want to talk about Chromebooks you you mentioned this earlier director helda it's it's important for us to talk about when we were together last year we were in the largest year of our four-year cycle so we dedicate uh about three three and a half to $4

099million a year towards our endpoint devices last year's request was for $5 million that wasn't because we blew our allowance the previous year it's because that's an average cost over four years that that if we apply it each year this year's is closer to 3.8 it would have been 3.2 a little bit less except for the Chromebook issue itself you asked us I think it was appropriate do you need to spend all this money right now and in that moment it was fair for us to say we weren't sure about Chromebooks Chromebooks were an add-on during Co we uh brought them in to provide some K2 uh support as we were sending uh children home my twin sister kindergarten teacher who is teaching was teaching children to read over the internet in a teams room

100very similar to some of our environments had an extra special job that year but uh we wanted that space and environment as kids came back to schools those devices are still uh in use they're still being used for a variety of purposes at the school but we' not had them for four years and I've seen that sometimes you can get five six seven years out of a good Chromebook installation the team agreed we didn't have data to support the answer so we went and said let's try it here's what we found out uh it's probably not a good idea we took about 412 devices out of circulation due to either inability to get uh uh parts or it would cost us more to fix the thing than to replace the thing so our our recommendation

101to you is that we probably want to stick with four years on the Chromebooks the good news is that the uh way that we bid the things we didn't lose a Year's worth of accelerating value in the Chromebook we're roughly to fix uh right about where we were uh a year ago it's about $20,000 less for the Chromebooks that we need to purchase but we're going to spend a little more money right off the bat because we need to fill some holes immediately and you might have seen in your packet there's a request for some uh items that we need to buy now to make right some holes that have developed due to repair uh and warranty failures in the Chromebook so we think it makes sense to continue with those I promise you I'm

102moving to the finish line and your questions uh again I love this stuff I hope you see our team takes this very seriously we want to be good stewards of this resource and we want to do that work well um what's in front of you tonight is our uh our Fort Collins feeder student laptops at roughly $2.1 million the Chromebooks for the K2 students in that same feeder system are roughly 420 that back fill of the Rocky Mountain feeder as well as the schools of choice uh Chromebook purchase for about 580,000 uh in addition we we need to upgrade some carts our elementary carts are 9 years old um it's probably time that we think about a refresh cycle for those and were're able to do it we've got some good pricing here one of

103the fun things that we learned over the last few years is that we were buying more Chargers than we were computers because a charger goes into the cart and then the family needs a computer at home you either pull apart the cart and ruin a teacher and a Tex day or you buy some extra Chargers so that they can come and go with the child the carts that we're investing in going forward have the integrated wiring so we're not putting in a charger and doing a thing that results in some cost savings to us but it's still an investment in the carts so those carts for both the Rocky and the Fort Collins feeders need to be happening for us that's those costs there um and then our staff device costs are lower than our

104student devices obviously but they're there as well necessary materials are all the odds and ends and dongles which is a technical term that'll allow you to look up on your own it means the thing that hangs off of a computer um it dongles there I promise you that you can look it up that's fine you you can you're you're okay um but there's necessary odds and ends of materials and then this year we have the second year of our uh swack iPad refresh which is a some assistive technology that specifically supports assistive technology needs as well as center-based programs uh through some extra needs that they have we began that last year this is the second year to catch us up into a refresh cycle the original investment in those iPads was car's money it

105was federal dollars the uh evaluation of our is team is that they're need they're still needed they're tablets that are needed so that'll be something we'll continue to uh look at and explore but we won't be making a purchase this large because this is allowing us to Kickstart a four is year refresh cycle there um we've got some other odds and ends uh in there as well this this is the dollar amount I told you is the uh immediate fix to our Chromebook issue we're going to buy those and backfill where we need to to uh make sure that we have those gaps filled so that we still can deliver the PSD promise in the areas where we have Chromebooks so uh that 3.8 million is is within our current budgeted amount it's still there

106but it's where we are and thank you for the opportunity to brag on my team I think they do a great job stewarding this I've inherited a good process we want to keep it going and make sure it's meeting the needs of student staff and families thank you so much that was great I don't know if anybody has any questions after that thorough presentation go ahead Kevin just a couple closing remarks um Bud gets points for both being right and funny at the same time um and I I wanted to just be transparent for the board in our community is when I saw this again I was dubious I thought this is a huge ask and a lot of money um but I also think it's important to model for the three students that may

107be watching this that asking for help is not a vice I needed help I didn't understand the process you did a beautiful job explaining it and all the hard work that went into it of getting us to this point so I want to say thank you thank you it's also not a vice to those that are thinking about running for school board those are on you know on different type of boards have the humility to be able to change your mind and so I just want to say thank you for that and I have changed my mind this is an easy yay vote for me thank you sir anyone else J go ahead Jess so I really just want to say one thank you buds like I think this was a very similar thorough presentation

108to last year I think it's great like a great reminder um and also to Scott and Kevin for bringing these forward because I think what becomes challenging with our budget year-over-year is we have so many things and so many different buckets and the buckets have to be spent in some specific way and you know to your point this is in 2010 how many of us even remember voting for this or were we even around to vote for this so when we lose sight of like this is a bucket dedicated to this one thing like we can't just spend this somewhere else um and I think as we have hard conversations with our budget we need to to remind ourselves as well as our community that we have specific buckets that we can't put anywhere else

109and so we might as well do our absolute darnest best in the spaces where we can go ahead Carolyn so so bu um when we sent this out for vid did we only go to Dell or do we go to different no we go to multiple vendors we we push this out like we do our procurement team's great it goes on Rocky Mountain everybody can bid against it uh dell l Novo HP have all been uh manufacturers that we have purchased from in the last three years Dell happened to win this year but I can tell you that we looked at devices from all of those manufacturers in this process okay great and so like I'm just looking at the uh latitude 3140 and I just quickly looked online to see how much that would

110cost if we just bought it went to the store and had to buy it so uh we get like really large discounts when we're buying large amounts of um Hardware like this I mean I I could see that there was quite a quite a big discount here so I mean making these large purchases together gives us more buying power I'm guessing that's correct that's and you can see in your packet exactly how much but our per unit cost goes down substantially in the quantities that we purchase so it it it maximizes that investment okay thank you yeah I'd like to add that that's exactly why we do procurement is to be able to get volume discounts where we can and to get those advantageous pricing so it it's worth naming too that that that team

111continues to help us find Opportunities to maximize that investment uh it's a it if you are used to buying one or two at a time it it it's a different it's a different way to do it but it it's how we squeeze every last penny out of that dollar which to your point sir is exactly what we should be doing and we should be able to explain it and if not then we should do different well thank you um I think just the last thing I I have to to say is um and I'm sure this will be true in our next presentation um as well or next discussion I should say but just how much work goes into these um decisions that are being made and I just want the community to understand just

112how um you know it's not one staff member coming up and saying hey we should do this this is being studied this is being evaluated this is being looked at um from all different angles and then being you know it's not you deciding it's coming to to procurement talking about how we going to do that the best way so you know I think it's just really good for our community to understand that these are not um just lacad isical decisions being made and I know they're big um numbers that we're looking at but we're a big uh district and so we have to spend big numbers in order to make sure that our district is top-notch and our schools are getting our kids are getting what they need at school so uh I just want

113to say thank you uh for all that and and again I know that we've got another discussion coming up and it'll I'm guessing it'll be exactly the same for that that there a lot of hard work has gone into this and a lot of discussion um so in the moment can we call the vote Jim brokish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havalda hi Carolyn Reed hi Scott shmow hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes okay so are we ready to go for 7.3 da yes we are excellent thank you all right so we're going to move on to action item 7.3 School Bus purchase for a dfml uh can I get a motion go ahead Jim School Bus purchase I move that the board approval expenditures in excess of $250,000 authorizing staff to

114execute purchase orders totaling 2,535 551 for bus fleet rep placement all right and can I get a second thank you Connor and just so you know this is the 4A debt free Mill Levy override the dfml so that's what that stands for all right and who would like to kick this this discussion off I can I can go ahead and start it yeah so we uh we're joined by Dan Weaver our vehicle maintenance manager and he's going to talk about the bus purchase that's on the agenda we're excited to be able to present this to you um um Dan's going to get into the detail but for a while we've really been struggling with getting buses we're not going to get all these buses right away either but we do have a quicker turnaround to

115get these buses in inventory we're hoping so Dan do you want to describe it sure thank you uh superintendent board members for having me so we've been working on this for a while um as you know we have a old and dated Fleet that we're trying to update and bring into current standards so um I'm open to any questions I was kind of asked to come here last minute so haven't really prepared a whole lot so um I'll give a little background so we worked really hard on putting this together our goal was really to update our Fleet and really lower the average age of our vehicles right now we operate a fleet with an average age just under 16 years old with an average mileage of about 186,000 so uh definitely time to do

116something to kind of update them and and we'd also add that these these buses are necessary for replacement in our Fleet they're not going to be adding buses like we we literally have and I and I watch them do it on a on a daily basis we literally have buses that are failing all the time and it's a miracle that they can keep those things running but they're well past their life um so we need to dispose of some of these buses and get some of these new buses in this this replacement cycle um and getting us onto a a better replacement cycle for our buses isn't going to happen in one year either um the the fleet is large it'll take us a while to work our way through it um I really appreciate

117the way Dan has approached this um to really kind of think through how would we interject to get some some movement on the the fleet that's really in bad shape but then also keeping an eye on not creating bubbles for somebody 15 years down the road um because we purchased a bunch of buses and now somebody's dealing with a big bubble of a bunch of buses that are getting old later down the road so I really appreciate the thought that's gone gone through that and uh there's there's more detail obviously to that but um we're really excited about this opportunity great thank you I know I'm gonna do Scott first go ahead Scott um yeah so Dan I'm the jackass I'll just say that and we can mark this on the uh the timeline if

118we want to make a meme out of that but I am the guy that asked to to talk about this um at the last minute so I apologize for having you come in I meant this to be a very kind of a informative thing for the public to hear plus to ask a few questions so I was looking at the um in the packet there was a email um about Midwest Bus Sales they can get us five 77 passenger buses those are the big ones um in three months is that accurate it is since that uh time of receiving that bid now that we've talked to them and done the intent to award pending you know voter approval um I was able to speak to the the manufact or to our the dealer directly the

119sales rep over there and they actually have them on the ground already built so we actually can probably get them sooner than that that's fantastic so um and then I was looking at Dave coach that's the 14 person buses and then the Colorado West those are the like 47 and 33 passenger ones those timelines said 6 to 8 months um is is that accurate and with all of this Dave I think just said we're not going to do this all in a year but these particular buses are we going to try to have these all in place for next year yes that was the goal usually um you know being budget conscious um we we really focus on making sure we get the best product and the best bang for the buck um part of

120the reason we made the decisions that we did and went with multiple Distributors was to meet the timeline we should be able to get all 17 buses that we're requesting within un with under a year 10 10 months being about the Max uh which is a drastic change we are still currently waiting on some buses that were ordered about 25 months ago which was part of the reason we didn't go with International this time around yeah that's that makes a lot of sense and this that's the thing is that that really struck me because we've been told for a while that the those other ones have been two three years out and correct so this is exciting um I I think Dave answered the question about these replacing buses that are going be taken offline

121do you think those buses could last any longer if we needed to put them to special use or anything like that like specifically there was a talk in the budget advisory committee about like a line of buses just for athletics like for Middle School athletics because there's a big problem where kids are having to go over an hour sometimes early the games just because there's no bus that's going to be able to um get them there closer to game time so they're sitting around they miss class and they're sitting around in a hallway waiting for the game to start um I'm just wondering if those older buses could be limited for just inside for Collins kind of Transportation yes and no um the I've identified 12 buses that basically need to be immediately replaced um

122so out of the 17 12 of them we're basically going to send those right out to public auction and offload those as soon as possible I have a skilled set of team a skilled team that can help with rebuilds when we have the Manpower um so there's several others that we can do the repairs on CDE actually discourages the operation of buses that are older than 25 years old so it's not a hard line they don't say you cannot but they recommend you don't currently our Fleet 30% of our Fleet is over 20 years old so all of the buses being replaced are replacing vehicles that are extremely old um we can do our best on that but really this is going to be a one forone swap out it does already increase our capacity

123because some of those buses are already decommissioned so that will actually increase our numbers in the short term and give us more spare buses so uh yes we can do some of the repairs but really most of them need to go but this will this will give us that buffer that allows us to have more Vehicles when needed to to operate Kevin rapid fire questions I think you answered it and I think I counted right so this perch is going to get us 17 new units correct yes sir okay and of those I counted five there were Ada accessible or wheelchair accessible okay correct how many in our current Fleet do you know off the top of your head are ADA Compliant or wheelchair we have 13 wheelchair buses so this will be I apologize

12418 are any of those getting replaced with the five straight swap out are we going to have more they are so um all five of those will become route buses I am not decommissioning any of our wheelchair buses so this will be an increase for our wheelchair buses okay whe wheelchair wheelchair capable buses with lifts installed perfect thank you um the last question was and you kind of touch on this but I am curious as to what happens with those that are weird decommissioning I mean do we get an Roi on that at all I mean eBay I mean what do we do uh half kidding but yes but not very much um as you guys know when I talked to you last was at the beginning of the school year and we we were

125on a school bus that we purch purchased off of Craigslist which I am actually extremely proud of that's our team thinking outside of the box we brought it in the the seller was uh very kind he let us have it for three days straight where we went through it with a fine Toth comb it was under 100,000 miles I think it was around 86,000 miles at the time and really checked it out and it was as good as as we thought it was we purchased that bus at a great price which was only capable because the seller purchased it at a public auction for far less uh and that was a top quality vehicle the ones we're getting rid of I would not expect to get more than a couple thousand doll each I was

126just hoping you'd tell the story about the Craigslist we were all on that bus as one of our sessions we got to be on that bus and I thought that was just so creative and incredible so thank you for the hard work thank you for the short notice presentation I really appreciate it yeah absolutely just go ahead Jim I just want to say thanks for the magic that you and your team have worked with such an ancient Fleet Kudos I really have to thank my team I've I've got some guys that highly skilled highly dedicated people that work miracles all day long and so I couldn't do it without the team I have behind me so I'm really proud of who we have um yeah this this really would be a blessing for us though

127for you know to to say it lightly um they're getting to the point where we're seeing so many that need major major repairs cost per mileage is skyrocketing uh the equipment and the technology that's come along in those last few years has really changed how school buses function as well so it's not just updating old vehicles that have high mileage it's also updating our safety it's updating the equipment and how we operate and really protecting our most valuable asset which is our children it's a little like buds computers but you're way past four years yeah go ahead JZ on that note what is the ideal goal age like that we would start offloading some of these vehicles so Dave and I work closely on this I actually put together a proposal for him recently um

128before 4 a really looking at where where we need to be um again CDE recommends not being older than 25 years old that's still you know that you're pushing the limits um the plan that I put in place was a plan that was get to get us from an average age of 16 years old to a maximum age of 16 years old I feel that's a good break even point where we're not running the buses until you know they're at their last Breaking Point um and we get the full use out of them and really get our money's worth out of them uh that plan will require us to do an annual purchase of buses um depending on if you want to do it in 10 years or 15 years I gave options for both

129um that was kind of what we're looking at though is is to go to a maximum age of 16 years old and for the record we ran in the in the school year of 23 24 so the last completed school year we did 2.1 million miles of driving so currently with our our bus fleet being an average mileage if you break it down to 186,000 that was at the beginning of the school year by the end of the school year our average mileage is going to be 198,000 miles so wow that's that's just amazing um did you have another question one just context because I think like the goal age versus where we're at right now is important also what is the size of our Fleet how many buses do we just have on hand

130so that people can contextualize purchasing 17 buses we operate 179 buses out of that 179 we currently we have 12 that are well 12 that I've decommissioned we have eight that are on long-term out of service status so we're basically 20 short of that we operate currently off of 159 buses but we own 179 yes go ahead y I just wanna want I want to thank you Dan the broader team there's so many staff members that are here tonight for several presentations and it just feels really good in terms of we're representing the work in the due diligence that goes behind the work so I just want to say I'm really proud of the collective efforts in this space I do want to signal to those who are listening at home or in the room

131or in our local media yes PSD just acknowledged that we bought a bus on Craigslist and we're proud of it and we're looking forward to reading an article about that uh I also want to you know this is an important bridge to a conversation we'll have later tonight about bell times and I think it's really important just for me to take a quick second to reiterate that this initial investment is the first of several to get us into the standard level of where we want to be but if we consider to add on additional routes dis replacement program doesn't provide us that added value in the initial year of the investment and I just wanted to acknowledge that I also want to say and I know many of us have said this throughout the course

132of the night for lots of this you know really great reasons thank you voters we simply would not be able to have this conversation without our voter our voters support and I want to thank last our staff because not only are we recommending a purchase of buses but I also want to say like the last two presentations three was staff's willingness to disrupt how we've always done things you've heard a conversation around video boards to invest here so we can disrupt and acknowledge that we were investing in student athletes not in the same manner that we were for students who are participating in non-athletic activities our transportation staff are mechanics to have the desire and the openness to look at different types of buses different vendors that have different parts that's not my expertise but

133it's going to require you all to have a different level of agility and openness to solving problems in a complex way and you're open to that to doing what's right for our kids and their safety and I just want to say that needs to be acknowledged over and over again that I really appreciate the level of appropriate disruption to the status quo to enhance and move our district forward and just couldn't be prouder of of everybody's uh effort in the space so thanks again to all of you yeah thank you so much and and just before we go ahead and take the vote I just want to take a minute to say um that again thank you voters I'm really excited to be able to vote for this um because I think again in the

134last two what you've seen is that not only are we talking about doing um a replacement but we're talking about implementing a replacement cycle and that's a lot of what we had talked about in 4A was that we didn't have replacement Cycles we just did it when we had money and now we can actually look at and a prolong cycle making sure that we get every four years you know we've done we've looked at the Chromebooks and we know that they do still have to be replaced every four years our buses we want to get that down to 16 years or younger um so it's not just a Band-Aid it's a it's a deep dive into how can we um make sure that everything that we're doing here is for the long term and so

135that's going to benefit our kids down the line as well so I just want to say thank you for that and and Dan in particular thank you for coming in um last minute and for the awesome tour too that we got um at the beginning of the year it was so much fun being on the buses absolutely my my pleasure thank you thank you all right and with that let's call the vote Jim brokish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havala hi Carolyn Reed hi Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 70 [Laughter] yay I love that I yes thank you so much all right let's go ahead then and let these good people go that can go um and we're going to go into our informational report and discussion items uh

1368.1 and update on District unified Improvement plan and strategic plan in PSD yes thank you uh tonight we look forward to hearing an update on the district's unified Improvement plan and our strategic plan I want to welcome our lead assistant superintendent Dr Tracy guile and there's a broader team of incredible leaders that I'm hopeful that they can introduce themselves or each other uh really grateful for this Collective effort to advance our Core Business of learning and teaching to the next level in PSD so welcome to all of you great thank you so much thank you superintendent Kingsley president Draper members of the board and the community um we appreciate the opportunity to come back to you for an update on the Strategic plan and unified Improvement plan we were last in front of you in

137August where we talked about our intentions for year two and so tonight we want to provide a midyear update and look at a handful of the projects and programs that we've been working on since we last there we go so tonight's overview um we'll take a look at what is now the year 2 goals and strategic actions in the Strategic plan um you'll hear updates from the project team leads and staff and kind of in the theme tonight um it takes a village and so we have really some incredible St staff members here to speak to the work that's been done and um want to spend most of the time allowing you to hear from them and for you to be able to ask questions of them and so there'll be an opportunity for us

138to have discussion um with the group okay so just as you recall we really went into the year 2 strategic plan with a very intentional purpose and focus on our goals and our strategic actions to disrupt disproportionality and if you recall that termin ology of disrupting disproportionality it is really with the intention of addressing what are historic gaps for certain um student populations that are historically marginalized or historically underserved and so we don't want to see those predictable gaps in our results and so our actions are really designed and very intentional to be um serving students who need us most and that's what we're working towards and hopefully you'll hear some of the work that the team has been doing around that tonight that disrupting disproportionality occurs in all three of our strategic plan areas

139so literacy mental health and belonging and graduate with options the methodology that we have alignment on as a group to approach the work to disrupt disproportionality really lives in four areas so as a team we've been focusing on developing coherence across our system and so you'll hear work tonight around how we're developing coherence in our strategic um initiatives with curriculum implementations and adoptions and how we can create a similar experience across the system for all students no matter what school they are in what teachers classroom they're in that they do have a a shared experience and similar results that we also pay attention to how we're removing access and removing any barriers to access through the addition of strategic programming and support that are evidence-based we also continue to want to pay attention to an

140Elevate rigor that the way that we disrupt disproportionality isn't lowering the bar for some students it's actually providing scaffolds and access in all of our classrooms and maintaining the rigor and integrity of the standards and then finally you'll hear about work that we're doing to our classroom environments and our learning environments where respect for student identity where we're affirming each student's capacity to succeed and we're talking about the assets that they bring to the classroom and school Community are value ads and are a mechanism for disrupting disproportionality so tonight's year 2 strategic goals and action plans will be presented by some really incredible project team leads and PSD staff who are with us tonight so to speak to our literacy initiatives we have Amanda creger our director of curriculum and instruction and Tyler Arco um

141from Timnath Middle High School who's our nth and 10th grade English representative and also the English Department lead in graduate with options we have Tanya alcarez our director of career and Innovation and Christy Chapel from Boltz middle school and Fort Collins high school counselor and then for mental health and belonging we have Liz Davis Senior executive director of student services and Delia mahy Dei coordinator okay so I'm going to turn it over to Amanda creger who's going to talk about our literacy goals and strategic actions welcome thank you good evening superintendent Kingsley president Draper and members of the board um I have the honor of serving as theor dor of curriculum and instruction and our first goal of literacy has been a keystone metric in the monitoring report for several years additionally we have monitored

142annual growth with a target of all students experiencing a minimum of a Year's growth in a year's time with this year a particular emphasis on closing the gaps where some students are experiencing disproportionate outcomes entering year 2 our goal for the elementary literacy curriculum adoption is to deepen practice and focus on differentiation to meet the needs of all Learners we provided curriculum based educator training during fall and spring grade level days District professional learning days and offered optional onetoone better lesson coaching a key initiative will be the implementation of curriculum-based scope and sequence and assessment plans to support targeted instruction we offered learning walks with professional learning Partners to promote OTE collaborative growth and additionally we are in the process of piloting K2 and 35 data dashboards for El education along with the implementation of

143elel Education pacing guides to ensure consistency across the grades to measure progress and gather insights we will collect feedback through poll surveys from our Educators in year one the goal for the new curriculum adoption in 9th and 10th grade English language arts is to establish a strong foundation and ensure familiarity with the curriculum and online tools we've provided curriculum based educator training during both the fall and the spring focusing on scaffolding tools in the hon Mifflin how court or hmh resources and in writable while also offering opportunities for onetoone coaching with our hmh program liaison writable is the online writing compon component that allows teachers to support student skill building and provide feedback on student writing in the new curriculum a key objective is to create a collective scope and sequence that balances fixed and

144flexible components teachers will also have the chance to learn how to effectively use the online platforms with a particular emphasis on conducting a deep dive into writable throughout the year we will gather feedback through pulse surveys to assess the process and collect input from teachers regarding the units and scope and sequence after they have had the chance to use the resources with our students also in year one our goal for the new curriculum adoptions in middle school science in social studies and in math is to focus on foundations and familiarization to ensure educators are equipped with the necessary tools for successful implementation for our sixth through eth grade science we aim to provide training that enhances both planning and practice while supporting all Learners especially when engaging with complex texts additionally we will work on

145developing common pacing guides to provide aligned instructional delivery for us and world history our focus is on providing targeted training for educators to effectively utilize online curriculum components in both discrete math and data analysis and probability we will provide curriculum based educ at training to ensure consistency and depth of knowledge across the board moreover we will Implement common pacing guides to facilitate a cohesive instructional experience for our students all right good evening uh thanks for having me tonight I am excited to be here I'm Tanya alcarez the director of career and Innovation uh and I'm here to talk about just a few of the highlights uh that our teams have been working on related to our strategic plan of um graduate with options I'm also um excited to have Christy Chapel here to share some

146of the work that she's been doing to intentionally disrupt um disproportionality for students in the bolts and Fort Collins High School feeder area so our goal um with graduate with options is that by the end of the 2425 school year we will increase overall graduation r Ates towards 90% while closing gaps for students with disabilities multilingual Learners and with historically underserved identities two of the strategies that um we're highlighting tonight we have lots of strategic action teams hard at work to engage in supporting our students in not only graduating but graduating with options and when we think about what it means for our students to graduate with options um I think about my daughter all her friends who are seniors in high school right now and they're being asked one very heavy important question by

147lots of friends and family and they're being asked and sometimes it's phrased differently but what are your plans next year and um for many of our students they don't have an answer yet and I'm excited for you to engage with Christie to learn about the work she's doing to help students leave with a plan not just graduate but graduate with a plan and know what that next step is and that work has to start early um and so we're investing districtwide in starting that work early to help our students explore careers explore college credit opportunities um beginning in Middle School so a lot of the um strategic plan um insights we're going to share tonight are around those early Investments and to really take a strategic approach and align our systems we don't have great

148alignment right now around our IAP our individual career and academic plan we have a great opportunity and work ahead of us to engage in that work so the first first um strategic support we have in place that I want to talk about is updating and customizing our four-year career in academic high school plans last year uh this board adopted a new set of graduation requirements for our current e8th grade students uh that was really a a great opportunity to take a look at what we requiring students to complete in high school and to give some more flexibility um to students to maybe access an apprenticeship through Bud's it Department earn high school credit earn some college credit and um be an apprentice to work in pter school district someday in it I'm going to shout

149out Dan Weaver he's still here he's not only maintaining buses and keeping them going he's also mentoring high school students and he's supporting graduating with options our students can't get to these amazing opportunities if we don't start early and if we don't provide a clear road map so um we're updating all of our career and academic plans with the new 2029 um diploma requirements so that by the end of this spring a student who is interested in an automotive career can see what courses they might want to take in high school to become a mechanic in pter school district or if a student is interested in networking and cyber security what are some of the course college credit industry certifications they can engage in in high school so that when they're a senior they can

150be ready for an entry-level job in Our IT department so we're there we're starting that work early and it's really exciting to do that um in collaboration with our students our parents our families and our community and our industry Partners uh the second action I'd like to highlight is we are um strengthening our individual career and academic plans IAP to connect students and families to these opportunities uh our IAP is is a process we have lots of tools we have lots of experiences for our students to engage and connect in they look different across our middle schools they look different across our high schools um as as Tracy mentioned part of disrupting disproportionality is to have a coherent system we we need to have a coherent way students are accessing this information and getting this

151uh this information about these opportunities so one of the things um I'm excited to share is we have partnered with Colorado State University we've also partnered with our local Chamber of Commerce and we now have a consistent icap experience for every eth grader all 2000 plus of our eighth graders get bused to Colorado State University uh for a day to learn about the college campus life and they also get to explore two different career Pathways one of the career Pathways they said I'm interested in that I would love to be a police officer I want to go learn about you know Public Safety careers the other pathway is one they didn't indicate an interest in and so those students got to learn about computer science and they made bracelets um and learned about binary code

152and they got to learn about it from a CSU football player it was super cool um this is our second year where we are um making sure that all of our eighth graders are learning about these Pathways and opportunities connected college credit industry certifications and something we did new this year was we connected it and documented their experience into their IAP and their portfolio in pter school district we have a tool called Zell it's an electronic portfolio that houses the students career and academic plan or Journey um actually starting in in some of our schools were're piloting in fifth grade all the way through their their senior year when I started in pter school district I taught a class called critical skills it was a 10th grade required class every student had to take it

153it was our IAP class class and uh those students would i' take them down to the counseling office and um they'd learn about colleges careers interests their skills and there used to be a yellow folder in the back of every counseling office and was their icap folder and every time a student um you know got a new letter of recommendation completed an application had a resume we' build that folder was a yellow folder we don't have those yellow folders in the back of the counseling office anymore we have a tool that houses all of this information in the students portfolio and a new feature in this tool is that parents can access it and parents can see and go and support that student um through their career and academic Journey so um at the end

154of our eth grade College and Career Day we ask students what courses might you be interested in taking when you get to high school and this this day was in October uh our team took some time and and took that data and what students said they'd be interested in in taking in high school and we entered all of that data into their Z portfolio their IAP and then we sent an email to parents um in during registration season which usually happens in January and we said hey take a look your students had an experience um and they they learned a little bit about themselves take a look at their career interests um take a look at some of their assessments they took and then what classes they might be interested in so we had about

155uh 800 eth grade families access that Zell portfolio from that day so we're we're trying to um really streamline and align how we're connecting with parents families and create some more intentional IAP experiences during those transition years that eighth grade year is a big transition year the other year we're looking at um for events is that 12th grade year when that that big question um comes up for our high school seniors and then the last um update I want to share is the state of Colorado just updated uh legislation around the IAP the individual career and academic Plan and there's more of a focus on helping students learn about youth apprenticeship there's more of a focus on how do we help the family co-create that career and academic plan with students so this spring um

156we are going to take a a look at our IAP process in pter school district what's working what's not working um and we're bringing together teams from each high school and we're starting at the high school level this spring to to come together and to to dig into that we're going to spend about 12 hours together between now and May and as a school identify what's working what's not working and then as a district um come up with a a plan what's tight and what's loose what do we all agree that across our high school um experience students will Ex will will have the opportunity to experience in high school related to career and academic planning um and then what does each school do that's unique to support students because there's some incredible work happening

157and that's what Chrissy's going to share um in each school and so how do we allow for each school to you know put that individual flavor on the experience they're providing for kids and yet have a common experience so that our parents and families know what to expect uh so that's some of the work that we're starting and um excited to do this spring great thanks Tanya exciting exciting to hear from chrisy I know um so mental health and belonging great to see everybody Liz Davis she her pronouns and with mental health and belonging Brian you mentioned disruption and that's really what we're hoping and trying to accomplish more of when we think about harassment and bullying and it's all about creating a firming learning environment in our schools and Delia is GNA talk to

158us oh one second a little bit in a second in a second in a second so I'll I'll read the slide so by the end of the 25 26 school year we're going to decrease the number of incidents of harassment and bullying due to ethnicity or race religion gender identity sexual orientation disability physical appearance and other protected classes by 10% so this is all about about building coherence and our foundation to disrupt harassment and bullying it this is really when you listen to Delia speak about her experiences training and providing direct instruction you'll really hear about some of this disruption and we're excited about that but it's truly to create those affirming affirming environments for our students and for our staff and I just wanted to brag on your work a little bit you've done

159an amazing job so take it away thank you I could not do that without the support of everybody and Dr Olen back there and the rest of the people on our executive team doing this work and what I really appreciate about this is we started off with literacy um graduating with options and really this piece is about how all of our students can access those things how can our kids not just leave PSD being literate how can they not leave PSD just being college or career ready how are they Community ready how are they ready to interact with other people across differences that show dignity and respect for everyone and I think that this is the perfect wrapup because what we are doing with these initiatives here is really creating that and allowing students to

160capitalize on the self-empowerment they have and they get from their schools and their teachers and their homes to make sure that everybody can be safe and learn we can't graduate we can't read we can't do all of those things if we're constantly under threat and releasing cortisol in our brains and unable to learn for large portions of our day which is what a lot of students report to me and I I shared that with you at the last board meeting when I spoke during Community comment things that students experience in PSD around discrimination and harassment so to begin what we've started with is making sure that our policies and procedures follow state and federal guidelines for harassment and discrimination this fall we did training recognizing disrupting and Reporting incidents of bias and harassment we this

161is all based off the prevent harassment and Discrimination Act for the state of Colorado as well as F compliance with federal laws and we called our training for all staff inclusive climate and culture recognizing and responding to harassment and discrimination we trained 200 2,286 staff 179 administrators and other professionals and related support staff and students and starting three years ago I started with um three Elementary schools Bower olander and Johnson really taking a reactive approach to how we interact with students and each other around racialized harmful terms around any identity race religion ability all of those things and we work together to create lessons to provide direct instruction to students around things they do actions they take um how they treat each other during lessons and so as that has built and we got we've

162had feedback we talked about that when we look at Dwayne does a great job with the monitoring port and talks about the despair outcomes and connections that our students of color and other identities have in PSD and that includes information from the healthy kids Colorado survey and anecdotal information we receive from other students around disability which we don't always track in the same ways so anecdotal evidence from students and families in that regard and also religion we we have a lot of unkind Behavior happening to with students around religion and we don't have a way of tracking that we don't ask about that in Synergy so we rely on what students and families report to us in community meetings about that so for this part of the Strategic plan it's providing direct education in positive

163and respectful School Community environments to prevent harassment and discrimination so so far this year um there have been lessons done in 20 about almost 27% of the fourth grade classrooms across PSD almost half the sixth grade classrooms have had these lessons and they're similar until we catch up fourth sixth grade get similar lessons it's just catered to the maturity levels of each of the groups in a little bit more in depth and then we've also trained currently it's been me who's been doing them and we realize that the sustainability of that is is that's just not going to happen um you might have heard I'm retiring this this summer but um so we've trained 43 staff members and with feedback from principles and the schools where we've had the lessons it was very important that

164central office staff provide this instruction when they are comfortable and have had adequate training so often the burden for change sustainable change in the system is on the backs of the classroom teachers or the schools and we felt like it was important for central office to to have that lift plus it's also important for us to remember what it's like to be in a classroom and to to show teachers that in schools that were willing to come in and do the work also there have been 91 additional lessons in grades k through eight um around me so we there's a whole scope and sequence K12 built so for some of the schools a few weeks ago I taught lessons to every student in Preston um middle school and so that was really good and I

165we collect feedback from students so I get I talk to much I don't talk enough I should give better jelly beans we should have more candy more activities less activities all those things but the the lessons are built and constantly changed and tweaked based on student feedback and that's how we learn what to put into the lessons and what students are really experiencing that can't be captured in connection survey or healthy kids Colorado survey I find out lots of things that are happening in our schools as a result of kids having conversations with me after the lessons and um it's it's wonderful thank you Dalia um just like to give an opportunity to both Christie and Tyler to share some remarks about the experiences that they've had within on the different strategic plan areas that

166you're here to speak to tonight sure um so Chapel I've been a counselor well i' actually been an employee of PSD longer and older old than the buses in PSD unfortunately um I was been a classroom teacher social studies teacher um I've been the District Middle School lead counselor but I've been at Boltz Boltz is my heart I've been there for a very very long time um counselors in General carry the weight of a lot of this that that we presented just now um but Tanya and I have this unique relationship right now where we have a similar goal in mind I think so I've tapped into Tanya quite a few times and her team um so one of the things that um we talked about me talking about was bolts does something called get

167re days get re days are on the heels of high school registration and it's for eth graders and we have many workshops for two days straight and we invite a lot of community members into bolts um including the mental health Team um including the S peers including including SAA including high school counselors from all the high schools um including um our CTE um what's coordinator coordinator thank you who teaches our kids about these opportunities in eth grade in a very in-depth model um and I would say of all the Workshops the kids get to do our our mental health Team teaches them strategies to handle stress in high school Sava teaches them about high school pressures SAR Pierce teaches them about what to do from a student lens for high school pressures registration questions teaches

168them about what is a GPA all the way up through you know what do you need to graduate all these great things but I would say at the end of this year's get real days um it was definitely they were really excited about what they did in the CTE and what the options were um for them and seeing and talking about those options and um if you've seen Kelsey burger with kids she's amazing with kids and she really got them excited about what's possible um and so that's that's one opportunity and bolts has been doing get real days for I want to say we've been doing them maybe eight plus years maybe 10 years something like that um and it's one of our favorite um um things that we do and you're welcome to come

169at any time it's right around High School registration is when we do that so you're welcome to join us um the other thing that I I have the coolest job in PSD right now and you probably don't even know it exists and I have the coolest one sorry y'all but I do um and I am a transition counselor for bolts middle school and Fort Collins High School um it was a position that we felt has been needed for a very long time um we've been talking about it in this district for probably over 10 years um around this idea that we can identify kids who are at risk to graduate and we can hand them off in a little protective bubble from a middle school lens and hand them off to the high school and

170the High School receives them really nicely and they still fall off and we don't know where they go right so we've been talking for 10 years Fort colins High School partners with us for we've been looking for opportunities of how do we fill this Gap and void for a long time and um we started with a really small Grant um where we had um what we called it Bridges and we had a bridge on one side at bolts and we would do small things to bring high school over to bolts and we would take a field trip over with an identified group of kids and now that has grown into we were awarded two years ago the ears Grant from the Department of Education the Colorado Department of Education it was uh $640,000 Grant between

171bolts in Fort Collins High School and I get to take identified kids at bolts I have a class um called Bridges at bolts and I have 38th graders in that class and they are identified as kids who either have treny high treny rates um Behavior concerns um lacking and protective factors um or self-identify is not having a trusted adult or they don't see thems graduating through either the connection survey or our blooms sites data so we take all these data to identify 30 kids and then they go with me to high school and I teach them in lamin way same group of kids that have me at bolts get me again at for CLS High School for another quarter and then I stay with them till they graduate um I am their counselor all the

172way through it's only a four your Grant though and being on a grant is a curse and a blessing at the same time um I get to do cool things with my kids and I get to give them life experiences that I wouldn't get to do if I wasn't on a grant so like taking them to a baseball game that they've never been to before we saw Wicked at The Bu theater I'm going to tell you those boys had never seen anything like that in their lives so getting like experienced to them but the grand ends in four years so we're working on an opportunity to do this across the feeder so Liz I don't know if you want to talk about that but okay well so I know that that we're working in the

173district around trying to create this opportunity across other feeders um and it is honestly because you're working with kids who didn't see a future for themselves and you get to plant seeds of Hope for their future where where the drinking from the fire hose though being a middle school counselor for so long and now I'm a high school counselor and realizing I have to go beyond High School oh my gosh so much to learn and I got to do an an externship through the CTE where I got to go follow a plumber this summer and I follow followed a construction team um trying to learn about what careers there are for my kids and my students are so excited now about the automotive program especially the JC um the construction um the medical assistant is

174huge right now with some of my girls so we're plugged in to CTE and we're we're doing cool things and if you ever want to see what we're doing I'm happy to have you because um I think we're doing cool things so good evening thank you for uh giving me some time here I just want to start by saying we have really amazing students and really amazing teachers doing great work and listening to all of these stories is really inspiring uh all of the goals and plans that we have as a district work together and without all of us none of it sort of happens and so this is now the part where I I kind of guess at what you might be wondering about the literacy role and so I will keep it nice

175and short based on my experiences only um based on experiences with people I've talked to at different locations and then happy to answer any questions you might have uh some very clear benefits for me working in this hmh curriculum in using writable has been some of the conver conversations about cohesion our n9th and 10th grad students starting next year according to our implementation plan are going to have certain guarantees like you will have a guaranteed writing style and mode that you are all getting at n9th and 10th grade no matter what nth or 10th grade class you are in and that's a pretty powerful guarantee for disrupting our disproportionality pieces and with that the def differentiation that is built into to that for teachers there are options for within the same assignment okay I can

176select these five students who need this level of scaffolding here's the sentence that they'll get these seven students they need a little bit more they'll get this and so I'm able to do that and we're able to have conversations about the same things with the the same class over and over again and that's really powerful things for differentiation uh representation is another thing talking about mental health and belonging literacy you have to see yourself in it if you're reading things where you don't see someone like you you don't feel like you belong this program really helps us to accomplish that it has representation from all walks of life and that's also a really powerful thing along with student choice there's a lot of choice in both teacher and student places so how do you want

177to demonstrate your learning there's Project based learning possibilities there's speeches there's essays all of those are available in there and then each teacher also has their their spin right I think about it I'm a I'm a soccer coach as well I I don't want all of my players to do the same things but I want them to guarantee that they can have a first touch that puts them in in a successful place so how do all of my students how do all of teachers I'm working with how are they able to accomplish the same goals but not do it the same way and this is an opportunity that we all have that thanks to the voters thanks to all of you for helping us implement it thanks to Kelly Burns thanks to Amanda thanks to

178so many people like I have a privilege of talking about it and using it um but without all of you and that it doesn't happen so uh thank you and like I said I'm happy to talk about any any questions you might have with that yeah so feel free um our our group is here to answer any questions that you might have and just as the different um leaders talked about like this is a small sample of some of the work that we've been doing in the Strategic plan it's not all of the projects we would be here quite a bit longer if we talked about all of the projects but we wanted to elevate a few of them and give you an opportunity to talk with some of our Educators and leaders in the

179system well thank you so much I just I I love the the story there of just the intentionally disrupting disproportionality and how that is being done across the board I think that is just it's absolutely fabulous um I'm going to open it up to people who wanted to ask questions if anyone yep Scott uh thank you guys for coming here this is really amazing stuff that you're doing um I did have a question for Chris with the CTE program um have you seen how long have you been doing this with these kids and have you seen them actually have you gone through a graduating class yet when's that going to happen I'm two years in I'm two years into the grant but because I was doing it previously um at bolts um the my juniors

180and seniors were put back on my case load even though I didn't come up to high school with them so right now I have e8th grade nth grade 10th grade 11th grade 12th grade I only have five seniors left from a group of 30 that we had at bolts um so they're my litness tests as far as like what do I need to pass now I just you know I have five kids left at four colins high school which to me is is hard right but I always tell them they're teaching me and I'm learning with them so we're going through this together I would say of those seniors they have not really attached yet to CTE but my juniors we are fully into doing the automotive right now we but it's a really in

181high demand so fingers crossed my kids are getting in um there the I have a couple that have done the Behavioral Health Sciences I have multiple multiple in the medical pathway right now they're very excited about that we have quite a few that are looking at taking the HVAC at um Front Range next year so we are just at that Junior Senior Crew that's going to graduate but not so my seniors this year not so we're dragging them over the finish line but my juniors that we've been able to really dig into these possibilities and so it's it's exciting to see but the grant does end in two years so there's the curse of a grant is that I'm building this program that and by four years I think we'll have it down but then

182it ends and that's the curs part of it right and I don't know where it goes from there um go ahead we are going to reapply for sure we we will reapply and I know that some of the other feeders are wanting a similar program but um My Hope Is in this group of Juniors and watching what what they're doing but my sophomores was the first group of kids that had me in eighth grade and Ninth Grade so they'll be they'll be the class I if the grant doesn't get renewed I'll end with that the crew I started with well I'll just uh really commend you for doing this and uh we saw some stats earlier tonight about uh graduation rates and um the kids that are still falling behind and it's it's awesome that

183you're leading the program that hopefully can be duplicated around the district uh to kind of bridge that Middle School to high school Gap I think it's a big deal it is it is a really fun job really awesome go ahead Jess to pay you back I just was curious so you said you had 30 students was that 30 students like per grade in eth grade I start with anywhere between 30 and 35 but it's a pretty transient population so we try to go like 35 to Hope with starting with 30 um and so uh right now between all five grades I think I have 120 students on my case load that I'm kind of a case manager a counselor and really a mom yeah go ahead Kevin I'm very well aware we still have two

184presentations so I'll be brief um uh some of you may or may not know probably not that chrisy is a neighbor of mine um and I I bring this up there's a point to this um our neighborhood boasts an assemblage of educational prowess um including our chief institutional Effectiveness officer um an esteemed counselor Boltz Middle School former superintendent of PSD a former Board of Education director a a current city council person and also PSD employee and a current lowly Board of Education director dragging everyone down um I I mentioned this because Quail Hollow really isn't unique in that regard and um right before this board meeting I spoke to a student who lives across the street didn't get permission from his father to say his name in public so I won't um but this student

185is a junior at a Westside High School and I picked his brain a bit about what's his plans for graduation etc etc just kind of probing um the student carries a 4.2 GPA is an eagle scout uh uh is is working towards being an eagle scout most importantly for me in this conversation has already taken several college courses and is just an incredible human being and I would say this to his dad I'm going to say this to his dad later but I think the point is is I I look across the street and I look to my neighbors as this community of commitment to everything that you guys just spoke about and it's a really cool way to start in the end of the day seeing that the work that we're doing that the

186late conversation we're having has a real impact to human beings and students that are are that are right in front of us um some of our own kids um and so it was just a really cool moment I thought you'd appreciate that um and also a little shout out to Quil Hall other questions go ahead Carol so um I'm really happy to hear about the work you're doing um with the IAP because I I think that that really gives kids a good start and I'm also happy to hear that we're encouraging kids to take CTE courses I'm I'm looking here online and I see that the graduation rate for kids who are involved in CTE courses across Colorado is like 96% and so if we really want to raise our graduation rates we need to

187engage our kids in learning that means something to them and so I think since I've gotten on the board that has been a real passion of mine to see CTE grow in this district and I I'm really happy about the emphasis that we have on it now and I hope that that continues to expand even after I I leave the board you know my time is winding down here but um I'm really proud of the work that's going on around that and so I wanted to thank you for that other comments all right I just want to say oh go ahead I just had one because I Tyler I really appreciated how you described um like bringing the soccer analogy into I because we don't I think in education we think a lot about like

188we just need to write we just need to do some math we just need to do the thing and that these skill sets are far-reaching and we need to prepare a variety of students for a variety of things I just really appreciate that that's the lens that you're looking at it through so thank you and thank you for that and one thing I forgot to mention so thank you for addressing me and giving me another opportunity was uh one student of mine came up and was like Mr Arco I had the privilege of teaching a lot of them last year in eth grade before moving back to the high school and he said thank you for actually picking good books this year and I was like well I didn't do much work on that it

189was a lot of the curriculum but I appreciate you actually you know reading it so we're not going to get better at literacy if we don't read well thank you for picking good books as a librarian I truly appreciate that um I just want to say to everyone thank you so much this is um it's always such a great um experience for us to just see the amount of work that you're doing the amount of um care that goes into this and the depth of knowledge that you all have and are using to promote um what's best for our students and so just thank you so much and also it's 9:00 and like we still have two more but um thank you for being here here um and you know spending your time with us

190really appreciate it so um with that I think we're going to take 5 minutes before we move into our next um so at 9:05 we will go ahead and start our next one e e e all right we're going to go ahead and get started again thank you for being patient with us uh we're going to go ahead and uh move to 8.2 monitor report policy review de 1.0 and General District ends so yes thank you so thank you joining us this evening to provide an update on the de 1.0 mon monitoring report is Dr Dwayne schmidtz uh Dwayne we've been you've been leading this presentation in the district since as long as I've known you I think this is the earliest time that you've actually had to present and it's still kind of late

191but I'm really really grateful uh that you're here to tell our story which is really the outcome comes of the work you just heard uh from the Strategic plan right creating that alignment creating that coherence elevating our expectations and being more explicit leads to improved outcomes for uh people we have work to do in this area but I'm really proud of the work that has been LED across the system and I appreciate Dwayne's leadership and helping us tell that story jwayne welcome superintendent Kingsley thank you so much president Draper directors and many of our committed guests who are here and all the online viewers thanks for joining us tonight I do want to Echo what superintendent Kingsley just said what a beautiful flow we didn't used to do it this way and it's really nice

192to follow the presentation of the Strategic plan and the actual actions that we're taking in the system day in and day out toward the great outcomes we're going to see and as we shift gears now into the de 1.0 monitor report it's all about the ends it's not about the means but what you just heard in the Strategic plan are the means that's how we're getting the results so this is a really natural flow and it's really um I think beneficial for everybody to do it this way and I hope the um board continues to set this up in this manner okay so our purpose tonight is just to as I mentioned go over the outcomes that are related to the various Improvement efforts which is the uip and the Strategic plan primarily is where

193we document that but remember there is school Improvement plans that flow and connect with our district unified Improvement plan and so on and then to answer any questions that the board has um before I flip the screen I just want to say it is really an honor to be a person who gets to sit up here once a year and really represent the outcomes of so many people all the teachers and the bus drivers and the food workers the community that funds us the Board of Education that puts in countless hours you know all of the um administrative teams at the school level and at the district level it's just such a it's an honor and we have kids that do have very very different outcomes throughout this system we have everything from students who

194are entering 10th or sorry 11th grade and they really have their graduation requirements met and they're setting themselves up so their whole senior year is just courses they want to take to students who are struggling to graduate within four years and they actually need a fifth year and sometimes a sixth and a seventh year and everything in between um pter School District in doing this report you're going to hear me talk about a lot of high level outcomes that represent our overall student body you're also going to see some information that represents specific groups of students and we'll try and have a nice balance between the celebrations which are hard-earned and we should take time to celebrate them and we'll also make mention of some places where we have room for improvement and the work

195continues okay so we'll try and strike that balance but I want to point out at the outset that we are very clear that there are gaps and there are many many um achievements and and high levels of outcomes we need to celebrate so both are true okay so prek and early childhood excel in learning Readiness I'm so happy to be able to report that we use TS gold in early childhood um to measure outcomes for students and out of the seven indicators that we use um from that TS gold assessment on learning Readiness we meet the target of 85% or better of the students meeting benchmarks on six of those seven indicators the one indicator that we don't meet or exceed 85% was math Readiness and we're at 83% so it's very very close and

196it's been 83% for two years in a row so we're missing with just one indicator and it's real real close and it's very very stable so um by the way for the viewing public there's an entire monitoring report it's available online the Board of Education directors have read it I'm just going over highlights of the report just to be clear okay we are now going to shift from Early Childhood which has has a really strong result I was just mentioning to information about both achievement and growth and we're going to have several slides on achievement and growth so I just want to take a moment to remind people what is an achievement effect size what is a growth effect size we just heard a community comment uh earlier tonight wondering frankly what is a growth

197effect size how is that calculated that the person commenting wasn't sure so let's talk about the achievement effect size and why do we use it it's a real simple concept that the a lot of outcomes for kids have a normal curve kind of an outcome or a shape right so there's a mean and as you get out towards the tals there's less and less students with those un highly unusual outcomes as you go either far left or far right so it's that blue normal curve is maybe that represents the national outcome on a on an assessment like map or or a state outcome Statewide for all the kids in the state on a state assessment the red normal curve that you see up there in the p in the photo that shifted to the right

198a certain distance is the is representing the pter school district's population and what our outcome is and the reason that picture looks like that and is Illustrated in that way is every year on every assessment and every subject I call it the PSD Advantage it's been true for the 19 years I've been working at the district offices our student outcomes for our population are shifted to the right which is in the positive direction relative to National and State academic peers by about a quarter to a third of a standard deviation unit which is quite a distance to give you an idea of what that really means is that little box on the upper left in that picture that kind of um lets you know if if it wasn't shifted at all our typical student would

199be performing at the 50th percentile nationally or Statewide wide and that's what you would expect by chance alone but when our distribution is shifted a quarter of a standard deviation to the right which is our achievement effect size Target that's the same as saying our typical student is performing at the 6th percentile Nationwide so it's like a 10 percentile unit shift to the right that's substantial that's meaningful anyways it's all an achievement effect size is it's just saying where is the population we're talking about relative to the National or Statewide student population of academic peers and so positive numbers are a good thing okay PSD K5 reading gains um are on the rise and we have a strong impact on uh that's indicated with that we're getting with those literacy initiatives that you just heard

200us talk about the K5 literacy implementation that's been going on this is the second year um those gains show up across the assessment set which is Dibbles 8 map data that goes from second grade up cass which goes from third grade up not Pat and sat but that set that collection of Assessments we see those gains showing up and I'll show you a picture in just a minute in K3 like early literacy it's a clean sweep in this respect the the K3 students on that set of Assessments met that achievement effect size Target of 0.25 they were above that at 0. 29 so about a third of a standard deviation unit they improved .13 effect size units from the prior year so our gains were even larger in the second year of the implementation and

201the growth that they showed relative to academic peers Nationwide and Statewide is 0.11 so it's a positive growth effect as well so the achievement's high it's gotten higher and their growth is exceeding that of academic peers nationally and Statewide when we look at k five all those same types of claims are true and so and I broke it down that little that way K K3 versus K5 just to um separate them out a little bit because a lot of people think of K3 is like early reading and then you know you're learning to read and then you're shifting to reading to learn when you're getting into fourth and fifth grade and Beyond so in both cases we see these gains this picture I just shift it to that's called I'm titling it early literacy again

202is showing us data across that um of Assessments on Cass map and Dibbles 8 this is showing data for the K5 students that are part of that implementation that we're doing and you can see four years of row of data in a row on the left side on that line graph where that black line is the PSD student outcome on this achievement effect size and you can notice a couple things there's steady gains that's a big deal for us our community should be celebrating that and our kids it's a lot of hard work and and we're proud of that another piece that you can pick up on is that very last segment of that black line on the right hand side the most recent year has a steeper slope than the other line segments so

203there's accelerated an accelerated level of gaining in the achievement effect size in that se in that year of implementing our K5 literacy um adopted materials on the right hand and and by the way you can see we hit the actual growth t or sorry the achievement Target of 0. 25 so that little line graph show you quite a bit it's a very positive story on the right hand side that table data is showing the same set of years of data but Broken Out by grade level from zero being kindergarten all the way down to uh fifth grade and what I hope your eye can see fairly quickly is the red in the upper left and the yellow that are toward the upper left those are um growth or sorry achievement effect sizes that are lower

204than PSD would like and they not meeting our Target and as we get into these last couple years to the right you can see that those early grade levels of kindergarten first and second are now showing up as very very strong achievement effect sizes that's a perfect story basically and when you look at the latest data set 2324 because the entire monitoring report is truthfully about how did we do in the 2324 school year that is what we're talking about tonight you can see that it's colored blue all the way up and down because of those high levels of achievement effect size so you can just see in in a nutshell things are moving in the right direction we have strong evidence across a body of evidence multiple assessment programs that our K5 literacy rates

205are moving in the right direction and we have a lot to be proud of a quick little plug I have to do as PSD moves into the future I'd highly encourage us to continue using these achievement effect size and growth effect sizes because it's very it' be very very hard to show cmass data next to dibles 8 data next to map data in a sensible away if you weren't using achievement effect size or growth effect size because every Assessment program has its own definition of what benchmarks are and what percent proficient means and a lot it confuses a lot of Educators that's why statisticians use zc scores standard scores effect sizes both achievement and growth it allows you to pull together a body of evidence and show it on the same exact scale because then

206you can actually make sense of what's going on and whoops and you can combine things in a sensible way so like I encourage you all to like keep that keep that going into the Future Okay PSD students outperform State and National peers in reading and math achievement exceeding targets and sustaining academic Excellence we have a long history of doing that and nothing has changed we have high achievement and we have it in all our subject areas on all of our tests we have our distributions are shifted about a quarter to a third of a standard deviation to the right and I want to slow down here and acknowledge once again we have disproportionalities we have gaps there's a reason that we're leading our strategic plan language with you know um reducing and then diminishing and

207then um completely eliminating disproportionalities a lot of systems just call those gaps we're I think we're using some good language around disproportionalities so we're acknowledging that not all students are performing at incredibly high levels but on balance many many of our students are and we continue to work hard to to get these kind of results for all of our students even the ones that are not doing that currently um I think we'll move on okay this picture is another um the line graph is the achievement effect size the tabled uh data right below it is showing you the same result or the results for the different years by grade level so you can kind of scan through that and I think the story is pretty um straightforward this is reading assessment data from all the

208state assessments cmass PSAT and sat combined into this achievement effect size so that's grades three through 11 these are our state assessment scores um and what you can see is that we're basically at a a three achievement effect size which means our whole normal curve is shifted to the right a third of a standard deviation unit which is quite a bit okay and that's true for all those grade levels I just flipped the screen to the same type of picture but now we're looking at math and by the way that green dotted line going across up there just below the black line that's marking out our Target in the monitoring report and you know when we look at District ends of having a achievement effect size that meets or exceeds 0.25 like a quarter of

209a standard deviation unit so in this case in math again we're up around the 3s 32 313 pretty consistently at about a third of a standard Aviation unit and that's across again all of those uh students grades 3 through 11 on the barrage of the assessments that we call the state assessment system okay okay now let's do something interesting with the data we know in this boardroom that attendance has become a bigger issue Statewide I want to say Nationwide definitely Statewide and locally we know that we are actively addressing that in the Strategic plan our attendance challenges all right what I'm showing here real quickly and we did this last year too is I've got a picture of the data that we just looked at a minute ago it's again it's reading data or evid

210evidence-based reading and writing if it's the SAT PSAT but trimmed to only those students that attended at least 95% of the days or more and you can see that it went from a 35 in 23 24 for the overall population to a point what is that 54 so that's half a standard deviation attendance matters when student this is partially for Mom and Dad right now and kids that are I know up and watching attendance matters because it shifts that whole distribution half a standard deviation instead of a third okay it doubles our our Target instead of where we have a target of 025 students who attend 95% or more are hitting that Target at above 0 five so they're exceeding our Target they're doubling it I just clicked the screen the the slide over and

211now we're looking at the outcomes for students who have less than 95% attendance one thing that's interesting is we see that we have increasing results for that population of students I thought that was kind of interesting but we also see that they're scratching at hitting our Target of 0.25 but Fallen just a little bit short even with those improvements so basically students who attend less than 95% are not quite hitting our Target of 0. 25 students who attend 95% or more are doubling our Target attendance is a big deal okay well what is going on with attendance PSD attendance increases yay to 90% treny declines to 3.1 um so those are both things moving in the right direction and we have taken action in the system to I believe impact those outcomes it's not just

212random and and though although um our attendance does remain below the state average so puter school district has worked to continue to do in this space to increase our attendance rates okay can you talk a little bit about chronic absenteeism and and what that is and and and I see on on the report the state report that our chronic absenteeism is like over 34% and so I'm I'm guessing that's having some real effects on attendance and so yeah to students who tend some students who tend not to attend uh really uh have a lot of absences so chronic absente ism is I can think of it Loosely as having 10 or more days absent um May or maybe it's more like 10% is absent 10% is absent so it's kind of like substantial absences and

213even within that bucket there's going to be students who have 30 and 40% of their days are absent other ones are just at 11% so even within those definitions there is kind of a quite a variety but the data just couldn't be more clear that attendance matters and when students don't attend school it really hurts all their outcomes of graduation rates and achievement and growth and so on engagement at school which is no doubt one reason they're not attending they're not as engaged in school um Dr Schmid can I jump in help you with chronic absenteeism all right thanks um hello good evening nice to see everybody um I just wanted to Define chronic absenteeism is um by the state it is the accumulation of excused and unexcused absences um and so that's what makes

214it chronically absent so um in comparison to treny those are only unexcused absences and that is 10% of um excused and unexcused absences is the threshold for um CDE chronic absenteeism in our district um students who Miss for school excused activities could be field trips could be Athletics whatever would be school related those are not counted into the totals for excused and unexcused um but anything else um a trip I'm traveling I'm sick um whatever happens that you're missing school either it's called in by a um Guardian parental figure who has parental rights to excuse that or it's not doesn't matter matter they both were accumulated and it's a total over the year so it does grow so it's 10% um you know if we we're sending letters every month so the first month some

215families got letters with just two absences because they were only a few weeks of school as the school year progresses of course they have more days into that um denominator um of which to qualify for chronic absenteeism does that help Dr chaplain thanks let's drill into that a little bit more too because it turns out our treny rate for PSD on this year is 3.1% which is an improvement down from 3.5% but based on what doctor or sorry director Reed put in the room um that means that in what Dr chaplain added our parents are calling in an excusing a lot of absences that's that is happening so at any rate I'm going to keep moving but attendance we're doing the right work if we keep on working on how to improve our attendance rates

216okay PSD students receiving additional support outpace academic peers in literacy and math catch-up growth attained by many schools first of all really quickly pter school district has a system where we look at all of the standardized test data from a from the prior year and if a student is testing below the 35th percentile on every assessment score we give them maybe fall winter and spring potentially on multiple assessments that are standardized if all those scores turn out to be below the 35th percentile we recognize that student is a good candidate for additional support our schools have um uh knowledge of which students those are walking in at the beginning of the year and so we try to support those students from the first day of school on that's what we mean when we say additional

217support okay those students receiving additional support the catchup growth is a hard target it's a rigorous Target of getting a growth effect size of 0.20 now I got to explain real quickly we talked about an achievement effect size and I think you have a feel for that all the growth effect size is is the difference between the end ofe achievement effects size if you will for student minus the beginning of year like how much did they shift left right or maintain their normative position so for a student to get a02 growth effect size they have to shift to the right relative to the kids that started where they did Nationwide or Statewide by 0 2 or one5 of a standard deviation unit that is a rigorous Target but the reason we use it is we

218did our homework and if a student starts off at around the 16th percentile and they get a they make that catch-up growth Target for five years in a row they will actually be at the average median or above outcome for students their age Nationwide so this is why we call it ketchup growth for many students if they just get two years in a row of ketchup growth it's enough to put them out of the additional support category and into what I would call the typical zone of achievement so we we did our homework that's what we mean by catch-up growth and that's what we mean by additional support all that work was done to try to concretely identify and support students that need us most okay so with regard to reading data the slide you're

219looking at right now is identifying which school's group of students that were identified at the beginning of the year as good candidates for additional support as a group met or exceed at that 02 growth effect size so there are seven schools under Dibbles 8 there's 12 schools under map that are identified and there's 14 under the Cass Pat sat most of those schools are elementary schools three of the schools in those lists are not elementary schools okay at any rate the reason that we High this in the monitoring report and I'm I'm elevating it and giving it a moment to talk about tonight it's very important in my opinion for our teachers and our administrators and our teams to know that that kind of rigorous growth outcome for the kids that need us most is

220possible it's happening in PSD because I think that encourages us to keep doing the hard work to make that a reality for more and more kids okay okay same type of picture but for math and so in math in the map column obviously there's two schools and then the Cass Pat sat column there are 20 schools that met that Target of 02 or above with the data set trimmed to the kids that were identified as good candidates for additional support okay okay students supported with IEPs and English language Learners outpaced growth of academic peers that statement is based on those groups of students getting a growth effect size of greater than zero that means that they did move forward relative to other students Nationwide that started at their exact same level of achievement at the

221beginning of the year That's the basis of that statement now it is a small Positive Growth effect size but there is a positive growth effect size for students in those groups but I want to clarify something there are still big achievement gaps between our students in PD that are English language learning ERS and the population of students that are not English language Learners this statement doesn't mean that there aren't gaps and there's a lot of work to do on that what it does mean is that in pter school district um our students are making more growth than students and other environments are making okay okay um PSD graduation rate that is a celebration so it hits 87.3% for the class of 2024 that is the highest rate um I'm going out on the limb a

222little bit but I think in the history of PSD certainly in the in the history of PSD that is recorded at the State Department of Ed in any kind of a consistent way around graduation rat so probably within two decades and it's the third year in a row that within rounding ER we're at 87% and that didn't exist prior to those last three years we were um bouncing around quite a bit as you've heard me say multiple times we're setting our sites and the board of education has acknowledged this and and and worked with the with superintendent Kingsley on this that we're setting our sites on a new Target of 90% as of this class of okay real quickly I couldn't pass this one out which is putting the visual up so we have a

223series of years right there it looks like we have about seven years of data the pink line is the state depart you know the Statewide graduation rates the black line are the pter school dist graduation rates and you can see that black dotted line going across is set at our Target of 85% uh graduation rate that was our or um yeah that was our graduation rate target and you can see how we struggled to meet that Target and then we broke through that we broke through that ceiling and have been really consistently above that for multiple years in a row I do want to mention that our students supported with an IEP have a graduation rate of 6 4.4% so that's a substantial gap between that group and the overall PSD graduation rate that is

224lower than the state rate of 71.9% for the same group of students students support it with an IEP okay likewise our free reduced lunch eligible students have a graduation rate of 74.7% so again that's a pretty big like 10% uh Gap internally with psd's overall population and that rate is below the state's free reduced meal eligible student graduation rate of 76.4 so for those two student groups our graduation rate is below the state rate for comparable sets of students a celebration our English language Learners are at 78.2% which does exceed the state rate of 70.7 and has been uh an increasing rate for us for the last two years so there's some movement in the right direction for psd's English language Learners okay PSD leader in concurrent enrollment Career and Technical education CTE we just

225saw some some exciting stuff that we were talking about about 30 minutes ago and it turns out that there's growing opportunities in our community for this uh the data I want to share with the board has gotten interesting we have a problem the state um to Department uh the Colorado Department of higher education in partnership with the CDE had been providing a really useful data set for us to use and we had we had used that multiple years in a row and that data is at the top there where it says class of 2021 they have not updated that data set we've contacted them haven't gotten a response and so I don't have fresher data than class of 2021 but I did leave it up there because I wanted to point out that data is

226how we're able to compare ourselves to other districts our comparison districts and the state overall and for all the years that we have that data we exceed the state and our comparison District so that was a celebration now I knew that you'd say that's getting a little bit stale so what's the fresh data right so that's the lower half of that slide so then when we use our local data which I only have for pter school district what you can see if you look from 2021-22 on up to the year 2023 24 you can see these increasing percentages of students that are in fact taking concurrent enrollment 31.6% up to 34.8 up to 41.2 and that is an alignment with the trend we were seeing in the Statewide comparable data when we had access so

227I'm I'm I'm confident that in pter school district the students have access and are accessing these opportunities at increased rates and that again isn't by chance we're putting a lot of time and energy into making that so okay okay so switching to this slide real quick this is about um CTE data same type of comment on the top piece as of the class of 2021 and all the years before that which we have documented in our series of monitoring reports pter school district is was at 80% when the state was at 72% percentage of students uh in high school actually in the graduating class the way they do theirs that would be in the graduating class of 2021 that took um some CTE credits while in high school our local data is the fresh data

228down below and again you can see the same story it goes from 42.1% to 42.3 to 49.2 the reason the percentages are so different is on our local data that's 9th through 12th grade students that are included in that data set in the top data chunk it's just the class of so it's the graduating class so obviously by the time a group of students is graduating a much higher percentage of them have somewhere along the way of high school taken at least one CTE course does that make sense okay but I thought it's valuable to show this just to make the point with data that we again are seeing um consistently increasing opportunities that kids are taking or students are taking advantage of um and will that I kind of like the local data view

229just because it includes more students 9 through 12 instead of just the 12th grade class okay disrupting disproportionality some indicators of success we just threw that in there right at the end so you know on our strategic plan that is a big push that is how we're focusing our efforts is disrupting disproportionality so we've got some early indicators of some success I want to share with you I mentioned earlier the graduation rates for English language Learners and this is this is a picture of that the line graph on the top looks like it's five years of graduation rate data for not only pter School District which is the black line the state is the pink line the green line is Boulder the blue line I believe is Cherry Creek yep and the red line at

230the top there is St Vine basically what you can see is that we've made really consistent progress in increasing the pter school district graduation rates for our students who are English language Learners or multi language Learners and we um surpassed the state recently and we're we're kind of getting up there where our comparison districts are so that that's a good graph of disrupting disproportionality for a specific group on a a specific important outcome graduation rate um that last year was an was approximately a 10% gain in that last uh difference between the class of 23 and the class of 24 and that was a following two gains of 5% and 5% and then really quickly the bar graphs in the bottom of that picture are really the internal Gap it's the difference between the graduation

231rate for English language Learners in in the school district versus the non-english language Learners in that same school district and I know it's a little small in this graph but again black is the color of PSD in that graph and I hope the eyeball can see that those bar graphs along the bottom were much bigger those black bar graphs they were bigger than the state or any of our comparison districts on the left and as the years progress to the right you can see now that we have one of the smallest gaps that is progress that's disrupting disproportionality okay another nice quick and I've just got one more picture after this one is when we look at reading data across the state assessment system which again is grades 2 through 11 so this is the

232vast you know quantity of PSD students on an important assessment system the state assessment system plus map so really it's 2 through 11 um reading achievement what we see is the black line is the students that are not eligible for free or reduced meals the yellow line in that line graph are is the achievement effect size for um students that are eligible for reduced meal prices and the red line is the you know achievement effect sizes for students eligible for free lunch or free meal sorry the first thing that pops out obviously is like we've said we have gaps there are achievement gaps no question the the piece that I think though I wanted to illustrate around disrupting disproportionalities if you look at the difference from 2022 23 to the last year that shown on

233the right which is 2023 24 you can see that we had been very stable on for reduced and free lunch students and that both of those increased visibly um and and actually pretty dramatically like a 0.009 achievement effect size gain in that last year right and that again is the type of picture that we'd expect to see if we are being successful in disrupting disproportionality those two lines are moving up towards the student population which the overall population did not have the same big bump up right that was reading data this is the same picture for math data so it showed up in both subject areas a very similar type of a pattern and I went longer than I'd hoped but questions tried to go quick yeah I say Dwayne thank you so much this

234is I we always hate to have you go fast on this and and um this is the bread and butter of what we do and and showing you know when we're talking about the ends this is this is what the the job of the board is are we are we meeting those ends and thank you so much for showing those um ways that we are disrupting disproportionality um as well as where we still have to go obviously we haven't reached everything um but I just really appreciate that was a last minute ask um so I I truly appreciate that um and with that do you want to have questions uh comments anybody go ahead Conor one of the big gaps I see is the treny thing again um what plans do we have in place

235as far as communication I know Dr Chapman said you know we we we send a letter but do we have any other communication plans pertaining to like how important it is that your kid actually goes to school don't take him out for vacation don't take him out for you know unnecessary reasons I can answer that um so we have um Communications has sent out um we did initial communication we've done reminders we've done an update of where the attendance rate was out to All Families um we um in addition to those letters there's really a three-step process for all the letters so the first is a letter just communicating an attendance concern the second as there's um continued absences is um a request for U documentation for absences moving forward and then the third is

236really um that um request for team collaboration coming into the school really meeting with the school staff trying to figure out what the barriers are what the supports are that we can provide and put into place um and so those are all going out monthly they're automated as they um as they move forward we are going to be collecting feedback from our principles um this spring in collaboration with the action team committee and Leah Hager and the um implementation team uh to gather feedback about the frequency and um the wording within the letters uh we also um with um David uton wreath and language culture Equity we have been communicating um specific protocols to um ensure that if students are not showing up to school at the elementary level that we are having intentional contacts

237um and that is a general practice but now we've put that in place that um that either a family liais on or somebody from the school is reaching out directly to the family because we haven't heard from them and their student is not in school um and then at the secondary level we're working on communication for high schools that would focus um mostly in on um specific um language culture equity populations student services populations that might be students receiving Services um for a 504 or an IEP um so we're still working in that communication directly with families for some of those students who were just not hearing from or were not hearing from their families does that help okay I'd like to add to that too one of the things as a outside observation to

238these types of moves to address attendance challenges it may seem like letters are a technical solution to an Adaptive problem but as this chronic absenteeism is a Statewide issue it's actually a national issue postco and as we collaborate with other school systems both locally and at a national level like what we're learning that's proven to get a return on its investment are really three things one are letters as gentle friendly nudges that your attendance matters just to kind of remind and reiterate the importance that we want your children here an educational component on the significance of what Dr Smith said of what happens positively for outcomes parents care about that right they want their kids to be successful but we have to continue to educate the families between the correlation of daily attendance and improved

239student outcomes and then the last piece in rare instances um that are also growing is case management and we're really lucky to have both great social workers family liaison so those are really the three areas that we're seeing tactically are being most successful across the country and I'm really proud that we're taking a concerted effort and it's showing early Returns on that investment we still have room to grow um and changing the mindsets that attendance in school every day um is a really really important thing but I think we're well on our way on that Journey which is great I would also just add in that we have had representation on the attendance committee at CDE all year um Leah Hager has been doing that and we have signed on to the state campaign every

240um everyday matters um and the overall fiveyear goal is a 50% reduction in chronic absenteeism which for us is about 1.7% per year for the next 5 years so those are the metrics that's part of that state campaign that we're working towards and then with the implementation team and the action team they um we will be working collaboratively to really create robust um what would be Universal systems what are your attendance systems what are your positive reinforcements your your recognitions your interventions when students and then um aligned with the Colorado multi-tiered system of support the Colorado mtss model um making that into um Universal for all targeted for some and then um intensive for the few that might need some of those so that will be the next work over gosh the next four years

241is really laying that out having tools handbook structures all of that so that it's systematic thank you so much yeah go ahead Carolyn so I heard you talk about barriers sometimes that when you talk to parents that there might be some barriers to parents getting their kids to schools so I'd like to have just an example of what a barrier would look like and then I would like to know if you feel like we're properly resourced to address needs uh for barriers to to break down those barriers to help parents out sure so some of the barriers that families receive uh or have in getting their kids to school is waking their kids up getting them out of bed getting them on the bus um um getting them to come to school um even with

242home visits even with um you know collaboration with um some of our families that's that's just a reality um that that is something in there um other barriers when we're working with Transportation related barriers we do have a way to remove um if if we know there's Transportation related barriers we have a way to remove those absences from the counts so that we're not then double double impacting them like we know there's a challenge and now we're not going to send you a letter saying hey here's another challenge you know so we we have a way to to remove some of those families again with students who um may have significant medical issues or significant um disabilities that prevent them from attending regularly um those are very common mental health um concerns that keep them

243from attending school those are all very common in in the reasons um and we most schools have some sort of a student engagement survey or a parent feedback survey and that's something the committee is going to work at how would we align that how would we create some specific Proto protocols for safely doing home visits um for again trying to understand what it is that the students and the families are are facing with so that we can try to think creatively about how to support them um I don't think anybody's resourced well in any area of education so for me um the answer would be no and we do the best with what we have um and so it takes a lot of creative thinking on the on the the part of the teams in

244how they designate how we look at that work um but that you know currently we are able to utilize some grant funding that we had designated um for for Community Family engagement and we're able to re rework some of that Grant wording um to help the um next year and a half of this committee to get together and um be compensated for time uh outside of their school day to work and and really try to um address these um Universal targeted and intensive um options for students can I add to that yeah so I think we're also really hard on ourselves and what I mean by that is is I think we can like Dr Chaplan just said we can always benefit from more resources but I've worked in systems triple the size of this

245District I've never seen a district with this many family Liaisons I've not worked for a district outside of PSD that has as many Mental Health Specialists on staff ready to support when you think about the ongoing commitments of our transportation division to provide rolling supports to students in transition who are experiencing homeless where they're not having to recycle that evaluation on a yearly basis but we do that in perpetuity until their their situation that makes that's another PSD advantage in my opinion and so I just think you know there are some things that actually set us apart uh both locally and at a national level in this space again we can always and and should always think about how can we get more of these types of supports but when I look at us compared

246to others we have a lot more resources than a lot of other places other questions go ahead Scott um Dwayne I just wanted to ask like great presentation and and the uh graphs are really helpful um and the results are amazing and Brian you should be commended for having the team putting this together and and putting that together um of course we always have to look at the the negative and and was brought up to us earlier about the uh the I kids and I'm glad you brought those stats into the room um what can we do to to fix that that's a there there seven 7% Gap um between the state and Us in that area and I don't know if Dwayne if you're the one I should ask or or who but um

247what can we do better to not only meet the state average but exceed it like we do in every other category I at least I at least would like to start a conversation with that there are people in this room that I'm sure want to add to the conversation one thing to recognize also is there are increasing percentages of our student body that are supported with an IEP and that are supported with a 504 plan and so as a population those uh supports are growing as a percentage of our student body yet we still remain you know 3% or so below the state level of um students that are identified for support with an IEP so that contextual factor is always important in these conversations to remember so our population that we support we think

248correctly identifying who we support with an IEP may be just a little bit different than some other districts so that's just an important little piece a second little piece I want throw in the room when we did the work last year around changing graduation requirements we didn't just change graduation requirements to create flexibility for all these great things like internships and work-based learning and all that we also paid attention to our multilingual Learners because we have some work we can identify real clearly in that space Also which we're doing and it's getting some results and students supported with an IEP and so the IEP driven diploma is a process that lot of districts have a history of doing and we didn't and we're we're newer in that space But that is an important small piece

249of this puzzle now there are people in this room that know more than I do Dr chaplain and a few others um that might want to chime in on this but I just I just want to put those two pieces in the room and before I give up the mic we as a leadership team fully recognize that there's more work in front of us in this space we have in the board of is well aware of this because you're a big part of why we've done this too we have Flo resources toward integrated services at a higher rate and level than some of the other departments and things that we have going on specifically to address this right and that work continues so I'll stop there if anyone else wants to add anything I can

250add in a couple of things that were briefly mentioned in tonight's presentation from the leads as well as the Educators who are in the room so a couple of very intentional moves that we've made when we've adopted new curriculum is one we're we're ensuring that the quality of the curriculum is very very high and that within the curriculum that there are intentional scaffolds built into the curriculum so that the access and engagement for students no matter what level they're entering into that curriculum at that they can engage and they can participate and they can receive benefit from that tier one universal instruction and so that was kind of the first thing that we looked for is like let's get really good curriculum then let's also be very intentional in our implementation and our training plan

251with staff about calling those things out like those are things that are not optional you know to do in terms of strategies in the classroom like for example certain talk structures where students are paired strategically to engage in Concepts and discussions about topics is something you can't just not do because it's one of those things that will address access to the curriculum and allow students to participate at a high level so that's the second part of it the third part of it has been working with both our um staff who teach our multilingual Learners as well of our our staff who work with students who have an IEP to make sure that their instructional time is in alignment and in coherence with the scope and sequence of the tier one program and to not give

252them something different when they're pulling them into those maybe smaller group instructions that there has to be alignment between those things the other part of that investment in Staffing and resources within integrated Services over the last couple of years has been so that we can move toward more of a C- teing model rather than pulling students out of the classroom because of our ratios it's more of having our professionals push into those tier one universal classrooms so that students are getting what they need and they're not separated from their peers and their learning so those are a couple of the Strategic actions that we're continuing to move forward in that will you know address that disproportionality and we're seeing some early indicators of that in our elementary literacy achievement and growth goad so I love

253what Dr gu and Dr Smith's just shared and just like to simplify is that we have to recognize that our neighboring District s tabulate their graduation rates in a different way and I'm not using that as an excuse it's just a reality but I think our movement moving forward based upon the will of this board to look at our graduation requirements and level that playing field is going to be helpful but I want to also be clear the goal isn't to be competitive with our neighboring districts it's to ensure there's no Gap within this District between peers who are not on an IEP so I want to make sure that the expectation is the same for all students what Dr guile just articulated is both a short and long-term strategy and I I we collectively

254as a staff and as a governance team empathize with families when we recognize we're a high performing district and people are experiencing great deals of success and if you're not a part of that group that doesn't feel good so I want to empathize with the families who are bringing those concerns and validate and affirm those concerns and their frustration because we're frustrated too but we're doing a lot of things to ensure that our students like Dr gal articulated eloquently that they have great access to great first instruction that they're not being referred to another type of a leveled lowered level type of instruction that's significant but that's a long-term play and we've met with many families who have secondary students that haven't reaped the rewards of our highquality instructional materials that are now in our

255elementary schools so we're needing to think about that I'm really grateful that our district invested over $3 million just two years ago to change the ratios to lower the ratios from staff to students to help better support but one of the things that we can use your help as elected officials is that this population if you look at the adequacy study done by the legislature in CDE it's poorly underfunded it's not acceptable idea and which has been a part of your federal legislative platform for years is not fully funded and so that's another big area where we need to as a governance team take a greater vocal stance both at the community at the state and the federal level that we want to see these types of Returns on the academic Investments we have to

256put more money into these students and we have the data to show where those gaps exist both at the federal and state level and so anything that we can do as a staff to partner with you on your legislative platform in that particular area I think that's another important piece of this especially in the context of us declining as a system in terms of our enrollment and dealing with other types of budget challenges we want to make sure that we protect our most marginalized students in that work but I really appreciate a question other questions go ahead Carolyn so I think Brian just gave me an opportunity a segue into something that I wanted to bring up tonight and that was in our um collaborative group dynamics one of the things that we said we

257were going to do was stand up a committee to help with legislative affairs and we haven't stood up that committee yet and I think that it's really important that um even though the state legislated session is kind of maybe you know more if we're well into it but we have what Brian just pointed out we have federal legislative concerns that that we need um to stand up that committee for and I think when we were in the community engagement the other night we heard from our constituents asking what they could do how they could help out and I think that um this committee is a perfect place for our constituents to help help us out and so I think it's really important for us to stand up that committee we made a commitment to that

258and I think we've let you know we've let that get away from us and I I think in the current political environment it's more CR it's critical it's critical for us so I think that offline we need to start planning to stand that committee up agreed thank you thank you for bringing that up yeah please go ahead I I want to say thank you for bringing that up as well at my last superintendent Community engagement session what's been really great as a noticing is that both of the two sessions that I've been able to have with staff so far there's been a lot of seniors showing up from our community which I think is really awesome um but one of the seniors that our last one and uh and this is her words not mine

259and she's like all I have is time use please use me to call legislators whatever that need is so I think if there's a thoughtful way that we as a government governance team can engage our seniors in this space amongst other residents that want to help but I just thought that was a really beautiful ask of the community saying like like you heard in your particular session there are people that want to help us with this but we got to figure out a way to enroll them in that solution yeah I think that's a good way to to at least get started yeah so yeah so thank you we can talk offline about um getting that going yeah other questions or comments um I just want to then say um first of all huge thank

260you um for those of you who um are looking at this or are wondering about um you know PSD um I just want you to understand like this is the PSD Advantage what you just saw here um we still have disproportionality that we need to disrupt but we have some amazing amazing results and it really is a true PSD Advantage when you're starting out as instead of your 50th percentile being 50th percentile for the state your 50th percentile is actually the 60th percentile for the state that's an amazing um thing and so for all of you who are you know data nerds like us um this is online so you can go ahead and all 47 pages of the district ends report um there's some great um explanations in there graphs um and then also

261on the website um you can get into the bi um I'm forgive me Dwayne help me with the name of it powerbi yes the powerbi we call it the PSD analytics you know system it's available on the PSD website under community and then you just go to research evaluation whole bunch of links so you write and it's all hyperlink through the report too so it's so we're being transparent we're encouraging and we say this explicitly in the report we encourage our community members to explore that dat data and be part of the conversation yeah thank you thank you and and so just you know just remembering that when we're talking about um you know the three things that we're really trying to focus on right we're talking about literacy we're talking about mental health and

262belonging and we're talking about graduating with options and when you look at this report you see just how well that this district is doing um and that's something to be proud of and it's something staff should be extremely proud of um and it's something that the community should be very proud of because they're they're contributing to this too so I just wanted to say thank you for that and um thank you for putting it putting it um in such a dig digestible format as well so um all right with that I think we will go ahead and move on to our last um the continued study of bell schedule is 8.3 so I know right I'm so sorry before you contextualize can I do a point of information very quickly bear with me it'll be

263it'll help expedite this entire conversation if you give me some latitude um one because I'm looking at these individuals who have to get up very early tomorrow to do the jobs they're doing and they've hung with us late enough and for those that are going to scan through the YouTube video to get to this conversation because everyone wants to have this I think it's helpful after the presentation board we ground ourselves in BSR 4.1 which is one of our board policies we didn't discuss this at the last boarding board meeting but wasn't the informational and quickly the title that policy is unity of control um directives Maybe made by a majority of a quorum of the board are binding on the superintendent documents approved by official board action will not be amended by superintendent district

264staff without further board action unless board has authorized that one all directives must be appropriate recorded thanks Jill two decisions directions or instructions from Individual board members officers committees or Le or leaz are not binding on the superintendent or staff except in rare instances where the board specifically authorized it in the case of board members committees liaison requesting information or assistance without board authorization the superintendent May refuse such requests that require in the superintendent's opinion a material amount of staff time or funds that are disruptive in such circumstances the superintendent must inform the board member of the reason for the refusal a decision by the majority of the cor of the board may direct the request be fulfilled nothing the policy is intent to limit the board member's right to request access to school records

265under CS CRS 2232 103 long-winded way of reminding us I think the last conversation got away from us in my own opinion I think that it's impossible sometimes for our superintendent especially when it's late at night to understand what exactly he's been charged to do and then have to carry out that directive to his staff who are here late and trying to figure out and scramble so as we listen to round two of this discussion I would I've got some very specific things that I think would be appropriate for Quorum but if I'm the only one then we'll shut up but I think leaving here I think we need to have very Express Quorum um and show a hands pass a hat however we want to do it but I think it needs to be

266really clear I'm sorry to do that but I think that helps will make hopefully make us more efficient all right thank you yeah so do you w to do an introduction one thank you director heralda I appreciate you saying that I think as we build a bridge to this presentation uh I want to say thank you to our transportation division we have some principles that have stayed here late as well uh I want to build a bridge from the last presentation that you just heard to this because our academic success as significant as it is I Envision that some we're going to have balloons drop from this room when we have a scenario where we're meeting our Target in just about every instance I really want us to collectively think about how we celebrate those

267successes and I want to recognize transportation we our students can't experience that success without you you are the first point of contact with so many of our students on a daily basis who create either Joy or solving problems and I just want to just say thank you for all of the hard work that you're doing and I want to thank our two principles who are here in partnership with them uh to tell the story around the implications potential implications around making any types of adjustments I appreciate you not only representing your individual School communities uh but your peers as well across the system because I know you've been having robust conversations about this for a couple of weeks now so Dave if it's okay with you I'm going to turn it over to you to

268get our presentation started thanks absolutely yeah um so uh tonight we're continuing the conversation on Bell time schedules um we are joined with uh Colton Graham with first uh student Consulting um he is the one that's been helping us with the data he is actually online tonight and he will be walking us through the presentation um we will have time for questions at the end and discussion so uh Colton do you want to take it away sure uh you can hear me okay can everyone hear me okay yes Colton we can hear you great okay thank you just making sure okay so um so thanks uh to um uh superintendent Kingsley and the board for having me tonight and uh the transportation team you know for all the collaboration that we've had uh in helping

269him out uh this important project um so tonight what I wanted to do was just give an update on uh the analysis and the January 28th board meeting had some specific requests uh based on uh some uh earlier analysis we did prior to that meeting uh and this is basically following up with with those findings microphone got muted um I wanted to start off with just a little back couple background uh slides about kind of how you guys deliver Transportation today and and what are you know some of the some of the challenges and things um so so right off something that you know we have been talking about and just kind of came up is just how large uh pter school district is I mean you are seriously one and a half times the

270state of Rhode Island which when you think about it's kind of amazing I mean you go all the way to the Wyoming border all the way into the you know tips of the Rocky Mountains basically um you know you have a mixture of kind of suburban Urban rural you know you have it all um and the reason that really this is critical and is important is because your routs are long um covering this much territory especially a lot of the the rural stuff to the west and the north um is is really long covers a lot of miles and it's very difficult to um uh School Bus efficiency is kind of based on a bus being able to do multiple things um it doesn't just do one trip with you know 50 kids and and

271that's all it does it efficiency is design it being able to do multiple trips with 50 kids in each trip or or some something like that your District the routes are so long they're very difficult in some you know to connect those pieces together uh to be able to affect multiple trips G muted um a statement that I heard uh in the in the board meeting um uh video from the the 28th was was just a question about eligibility and and I I think maybe uh you know how's it figured and and you know or is there any opportunity um in in looking at that so I just wanted to point that out um right off these are the um uh uh pictures or whatever that that pter uses for its uh walking zones so

272two miles for high school one and a half for middle one for elementary pretty standard um across the country and um you guys you know hold to these pretty uh strictly uh 26% of the students uh live in these areas and are not eligible for for busing um the distances are offset by hazardous conditions so you know uh major uh four-lane roads uh railroad crossings and things like that reduce those distances um and that's actually one reason why it would be kind of hard in a lot of cases to increase those distances because you would start running into more hazards and you probably wouldn't actually be able to uh in effect get more distance if you will because the farther you go the more hazards you're going to run into and have to peel that

273back anyway um so this is just kind of a um a description or depiction of your uh current Transportation schema and and really what this is is the uh top uh graph is uh your departure or your arrival times in the morning and the bottom graph is essentially your departure times in the PM so you know you guys are a a three a modified three- tiered system so the idea being your routes are really so long or so many of them are so long because of the territory they have to cover that you can't do across the board you know three trips a bus isn't going to be able to do a middle school and an elementary and a high school uh across the board because too many of the high school and the middle

274school runs and so forth they're too long uh to do anything in in the middle so we essentially you know worked to design this bell schedule um last year I mean the the high schools and things were already late you know we didn't set that up but to to create a a situation where you could maximize the number of Triple routes and ensure double routes uh across your longest uh buses so this is how we set up kind of this you know two tall uh bookends if you will um with middle school here high school here and then what we did is we strategically put um elementary schools in this middle um group that were short enough that we could pretty reliably triple tier those across here so it creates this kind of vshape and

275what you get is a mixture of doubles and triples so we about 40 triples about 70 doubles a and a couple of singles um and you know this was all very uh deliberate uh that it was set up this way and this is you know how we achieved the 113 route solution uh that you're running now and then this is a graph and and this is going to be illustrative because we're going to show uh uh examples of this from some of the solutions that the board had requested that we look at so this is your current uh solution and what's really important here to look at is the number of of triple tiered routes every one of these well let me tell you just a little bit how to read this first of all

276this is a essentially a utilization graph that is reading the routing data so it's showing each piece of work that that bus does so 1098 does three pieces in the morning and two pieces in the afternoon um the the blue bar is livetime so that's when it start picked up its first kid that's when it dropped off kids the gray bar is driving in between so on its way to its next route and it's empty uh the white space is is the driver having a few minutes of layover or more in some instances um so the really important thing here is how many trip routes that we were able to achieve under this uh uh methodology um and and it's absolutely key you know to the 113 vehicle solution is creating as many triple routes

277as possible so so what did we what did we do uh you know based on the uh January 28th the board meeting requests um there was an option three that was presented at that board meeting which essentially said it the only thing that we can see uh well it said you need 95 minutes from the first start of school to the last start of school and you know one of the methods that we said was you could just pick everything up and move it forward a half hour so Middle School's at 8 bunch of Elementary is at 8:55 high schools at like 9:30 9:35 um so what we were asked about was you know that's you know nobody wants to see the high schools that late so what if we were to take that solution

278and flip the high school and the middle school so put the middle school late at 9:35 put the high schools at 8:00 elementaries um in the middle so we took a look at that um then we were asked to kind of do another option where we put the high school in the middle at 8:55 Elementary's at 8:00 middle schools at 9:35 so we also looked at that option um and then we were asked you know just what if we just moved everybody up 15 minutes so moved the middle schools to 745 move the high schools to 920 um what would that look like so we took a look at that as well Colton can I interrupt you just briefly for a second this is Brian I just had a quick clarifying question if that's okay

279absolutely the elementary schools to my understanding are split and divided amongst all three tiers in our current model is that correct just based upon the sheer number of elementary schools are are you suggesting that they are all in one tier I just want to clarify for the public no you are correct they they are split among all three correct and the reason behind that sir um is that they they have more than the other ones also there's a you know some strategy around some of those are shorter so they did help uh create some of the triples that we got some of them are elementary elementary high school um thank you the triple rout thank you very much so I'm gonna let uh Dave I think you wanted to uh speak to to this real

280quick yeah I wanted to let the board know and everybody else that's uh watching this that um in here we actually have some costs for what what the added routes would be and there were some questions from a couple board members at the last time um questioning the $115,000 cost per route I did go back and look at that a lot closer um that actual 115 110 that was used last year is more of an approach of an Allin cost it includes like supervisors and management and stuff like that I really do think that a better way to look at that would be to look at the incremental cost of just adding the driver the the maintenance in the um in the fuel kind of limiting that just to the incremental cost and if we

281do that that's closer to 71,000 per route so I just want to make sure that people knew that that correction has been made and that the numbers that are presented that uh Colton's going to go through are based on 71,000 as opposed to 115,000 that we were using at the last presentation okay y yep okay okay so so so what happened when we when we flipped uh flipped those round um it it did not generate uh the 113 routes certainly that we were hoping for which would have been a cost neutral uh solution um it generated 137 routes uh the way optimization works is you know we run it and we look at it and you know usually we can see some moves that things that we could do to get that number down what

282we look what we're looking for is for it to start get close and then we can manually massage it from there but 137 there's no way we were going to get uh 20 routes um you know down from that uh by massaging the data so I mean 100 it's probably not 137 but it's not anywhere near 113 I guess is what I'm trying to say so um so what we kept running into was every time we Chang the school order um the numbers just kept going up there the the school order that that you have today with basically middle school with a few elementaries in that early group some elementaries in in the middle tier and then a number of elementaries at at 905 and then the high schools at that later time it it

283it it all really functions around you know creating efficiency that that school order and the 90 minutes between um is is really what's generating that that current solution um so what did we what was it really we ran into was it's the length of school day the high school has a 22 minute longer school day than the elementary schools so what ends up happening is a high school that goes in at 8:00 it's out at 3 because 7 hour day if they leave at 37 it's about normal 7even after Bell um but an elementary that goes in at 855 is going to get out at 3:33 almost none of your high school routes are under a half hour so no one can get from the high school in that situation over to an elementary on

284time um then in scenario 3B we kind of saw the same thing happen but in this case what we've done is we put high school and middle school next to each other and they're the longest runs and so kind of the same thing happened is a high school that goes in at 855 gets out at 3:55 it's going to leave around 402 if it's got to be to a middle school at 4:30 um again we don't have any routes that are half hour so almost none of them could make it over there and the routes just ended up being additive um scenario 3C which was just what if we just moved everything forward 15 minutes so middle school at 7:45 high school at at 9:20 um from a routing perspective that you should be able

285to just pick the thing up and and move it forward 15 minutes but the one thing that I started thinking about in talking to the other to the transportation people about is there's a lot of connected pieces to the high school routes the CTC shuttles um the community connections Cooper home you know there's there's pieces that go along with that and I don't really know you know the flexibility of those programs to change their times to align with whatever the high school's doing so I think you know that is a consideration that would have to be looked at before any anything like that was uh was moved on so let me give you a couple of examples sort of why this you know didn't work and and and here here's the most you know kind

286of obvious is you can see here's the high schools getting out this is you know departing at 37 or whatever they're not finished when the elementaries get out so I mean you can just you know it's just pretty obvious in the bar graph the morning you know really was was okay the morning likely could have worked the high school Lo being the longest in the beginning is fine because it doesn't matter and then you can see that these elementaries can fit in here here fine it's just you know the PM with that 22 minute longer school day you know all this just shoves over 22 minutes so um and then kind of the same thing you know happened in the in the scenario 3B uh where we put um the high school next to the

287middle school again the high schools are getting out just leaving about 4:00 they got to be to a a middle school at just about 4:30 and again they're not they're not finished so so none of these pair and so you essentially end up with a an entire system of doubles and almost no triples which we have to get triples you know for efficiency that that's how we got to our 113 solution um so just kind of in summary you know just to you know btime changes by themselves are not going to solve 8 A.M arrival issue and and maintain a a cost neutral approach I mean and and not get exactly what you want which is you know you don't want the high schools really late um you know you don't want the other kids

288at 7:30 you know and so forth so I mean just rearranging the pieces uh is not giving us anywhere near the results that that we need um and again I think that the current School order is integral to the solution and it seems like whenever we goof with it uh it goes the other way so um so I I really think that you know to to to get what you want and and maintain that cost neutral position you you're really going to have to think about kind of a different way of delivering transportation and what I mean by that is you know a way is to make the route shorter so they fit together better um you know you know just you know those kinds of methodologies um one you know just simply lengthening the

289elementary school day to make to make it more standard um would you know would take out would remove that 22 minute differential that that is really hurting um use some group stops you know maybe for high schools uh to shorten the run times things like that Co transporting of some middle school and high school kids together uh to you know fill the buses better and you know maybe have less Middle School and High School runs and then we can do something more with the elementary you know it's all about fitting all these pieces together um possibly increasing the non-transported areas although not sure again like like we were talking about you know as you go farther you get more hazards and you really you know you can't capitalize on the distance you're going for the

290most part anyway um and then you know we talked about you know use of possible use of city transit for high school kids or alternate transportation for mckin vento kids or some other you know kids that live really far out where you have a bus going out with just a couple kids on it you know maybe there's a alternative way to transport those kids and save that bus to do something else so you know I I think that's kind of The Next Step really you know I mean to to stay cost neutral I mean we we really did a lot of work to get to that 113 buses last year and what I'm seeing is things that you do are you know it undoes that savings um you know when you you know most of

291the things that we have certainly tried and so forth so um I'll open it up uh for questions there we go thank you so much Colton we really appreciate um all the work um and time that you put into it and um for our transportation folks that are here um I I know that it's a late night and you have an early morning and I am so sorry um but I really do appreciate the fact that you're here that you've talked to us you know several times about this and it is not a simple solution and you know the more we talk the more we realize how much is intrical to the each piece you know you think you can change one little piece here and it changed 25 over here so um I'm just

292going to jump in right in and say um for me I think we need to table this until we do a boundary study um and you know at least a boundary study if we're not talking about um you know any consolidations or or God forbid closures but I think a boundary study is coming up in the near future we will have to be doing um something like that and I think that gives us the opportunity to then look at some of the things that Colton had listed on the slides there about combining Middle High School runs um having larger drop spots um for high school kids um I don't like the idea of reducing the mcken Bento um I think that to me that is off and negotiating for a longer school day um is

293a negotiation that is something that is sort of out of our control that would have to be um talked about with um yeah with the um pea so I really feel like we um we have done a really nice job thanks to you all of looking under every stone and looking in every corner and the 113 is I think as good as it's going to get for this year and to do anything beyond that is going to take um a lot of time a lot of money and very short window in which to do it in and I just don't see that that's the place that we want to put our efforts at at the moment so I'm just leading it off with that if anybody else wants to chime in um please go right

294ahead go ahead Jim yeah I'm right there with you Kristen I we've got this hour and a half window we can either put it at roughly 7:30 to 9: or we can put it from 800 to 9:30 I think if we shift it back we create as many problems as we solve so I'm definitely in favor of leaving things the way they are go ahead Jess for how long how long is T until we do a boundary study so 3 years possibly that's a really long time it's is going to take a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of effort and to redo something this major and then have to redo it again when we do a boundary Andor consolidation study yes because it's a lot of time and a

295lot of money for staff go ahead SC um one question I was trying to find in the answer to was how many rout so we're at 113 now how many routes were we at last year when we decided to change we 122 122 uh 122 or 123 yeah yeah 123 123 so times 71,000 the real savings was like 700 Grand not one and a half I do want to address that uh director choen Bauer I and the people here will vouch for the approach that we took um when I took over the position in July I was not integral in what we were doing with the routes so what I came into that with is we needed $1.1 million of savings we worked really hard to go through the entire Staffing portfolio not just the

296drivers and the routes but we actually modified other Staffing positions so that we achieved the whole $1.1 million um I would uh like to throw out in the room why don't we just go back and just apologize to the district and say whoops we we effed up this is not worth 700 or $1 million to for the kind of um as these are some of the quotes I've heard from from staff um it's a seismic ripple effect effect among staff and families there's a seething angst there's massive frustration this is staff and and parents this is coming from those schools that were dramatically affected with a 7:30 start uh for staff their contract requires them to be there 30 minutes early that's uh and a lot of people like to be there a few minutes

297early so it's like 6:55 a.m. start they have a monthly requirement to meet with their High School um uh counterparts they don't get out till late so they have the those Middle School staffers are there for a very long day while they wait to for the exit time for the high school that's a fairly small thing but that's that is important um they haven't seen much improvement on the Transportation uh performance in terms of uh field trips there's lots of late uh buses getting to them effect on kids is the most important thing for me uh kids are exha and tardy we just heard this statement um that you know some of the marginalized kids their parents can't get them up and if you damage them in middle school and get that negative association with

298going to school at 7:30 in the morning they're not going to ever come back from that and want to be in school in high school [Music] um the zero hour is now way earlier so we're losing a lot of the the enrichment programs the Jazz programs like we have amazing band and choir programs the rocky programs amazing fossil as well and when Weber is starting at 7:30 that means that jazz class that has produced some absolute superstars in in Rocky's um family uh there they're there at 6:30 in the morning it's and so they're losing a lot of participation in there they're down to two um uh enrichment uh ensembles versus three normally so that sense of belonging the development of the future that goes away athletes like I mentioned earlier waiting up to an

299hour in hallways for opponents to be ready uh with these times um for families that and I'm sorry I'm going on but these are my notes uh the tension and stress every morning to get pre-teens and teens ready to go is not healthy and I I do want to clarify something I I think we weren't clear and I'm glad Kevin you brought this up that we need to be clear with our directives at no time in my mind were we talking about flipping High School to 8 or 7:30 or any of that that's crazy talk um we know from the studies that the mental health of teenagers is dramatically impacted with less sleep and so I am completely in favor of keeping the high school start times in that 855 to 9005 I am interested

300to hear from my our principles here um what the impact would be at 920 um if we had to do that um but parents the impact of their work schedules you know dropping a kid off it they have to get in line about 7:15 in the morning to to get their kid through if they're driving their kid then they have to go back get ready for work all this stuff I feel like here's my problem we were looking to save money but it was primarily driven by not having we couldn't get the staff we couldn't get the drivers and that's a that is a huge problem but that's an us problem we as leadership have to figure that out and we're putting our inability to solve that Wicked problem as we call many things um

301we can't we we were not able to solve that so instead we put that on the backs of these 29,000 students 6,000 staffers and all those parents I mean this is tens of thousands of peop whose whose lives are affected and I know it's not every school but man I just why did we change and and I think a quote I got was if we were to go back to what it was last year where things were pretty smooth from the student and staff perspective the quote was people would just say thank God they came to their senses and that's three years man I don't know I'm sorry I just those are those are my my notes I'll just throw that out in the room and let the grenade go and I I I just

302want to I just want to jump in there for a second Scott because you know yes we saved money but that was not the driver of it the driver of it was literally the lack of drivers and the fact that the you know everybody who's sitting here was driving a bus when they should have been supervising and so then we didn't have the supervision that we needed and so that escalated and we need to make sure that the supervisors can do their job one job not multiple jobs and so by doing that you know it was it was great we act we saved money as well and we made it safer for the students to travel on the buses is it earlier yes it is is it is it a great timing situation no it's

303not I'm be the first to admit that um but it made it safer for the students to ride it made it um much more uh timely for them in the sense of you didn't have to worry about was this bus this driver didn't come up and so now we have to scramble and the bus is going to be 5 10 minutes late um there were so many other reasons that we did that and I will let you um speak to that but I just wanted to to get that into the room before um it it went um in another places I'll just I'll just throw this out that I agree and I and I don't blame you guys at all I think I think you guys were given a very impossible task to deal with

304again I think it's us as leadership we need to help find that solution we made your job job hard your jobs were very hard but we by changing this we made a ton of teachers and other staff their jobs way harder as well because now they have to deal with more behavior problems kids falling asleep and not being focused their absentees and tardiness tardiness I don't know if we're tracking as well because I think teachers tend to be pretty loose on that they they give kids a break a lot they want to be nice and like all right you're only 5 minutes late I'm not going to write it down that kind of stuff does add up and I think we're really stressing out our teachers with this again I think it's we're solving a

305small group of people's problem and it's on us to fix it we need to find incentives to hire drivers and it's not about we can only pay them a certain amount because of contract stuff there's incentives and bonuses and and like signing bonuses things like that that we can get creative with as a leadership team to fix the bus driver problem so my proposal is we go back to last year and say sorry did you okay go ahead Kevin yeah um got three main points as after we've had our two by two and then I would actually I've got one question I want everyone on this side of the table to answer before you hear any more from us um I often I often tell my six-year-old when he's getting really frustrated with something I

306always say don't get frustrated get smart um I'm going to try to take my own advice because I'm I'm I'm frustrated um I'm frustrated for different reasons but I think we've heard and I think this was nicely put fitting all the pieces together I think you look at the geographic sprawl of our district the complexity of having individual bell times all across I mean this is there is no easy fix to any problem that comes across our desks and I think we have to just acknowledge that because some of the feedback we get in emails and in community comment and others make it seem like I got it one easy fix and that's just not the that's just not the nature of the business that we're doing so but we also can't be hypnotized by

307complexity we have to make decisions as director schow said so um I'd rather be right than be quick is also what I'm hearing a little bit from the feedback I'm getting from staff I'm not okay with a free year wait for what it's worth I think we can do and having talk to Craig and you can weigh in but I think there's ways we can address this problem and be smarter in the sense of we're trying to make all these pieces fit based on this complete sprawl of start times what if we start by with the virtue of let's reduce routes Al together and this is a question I asked in our 2 by two why can't middle schoolers and high schoolers ride the same bus if we start thinking creatively about that okay well

308then maybe we start addressing start times based on the geographic proximity of various clusters of schools okay so if a CLP that cluster schools has to coordinate its start time based on that that may reduce routes I don't know throwing out an idea but I don't think that's going to be done this year I don't think we have the resources I don't think we've got the board will to do that but that's that's for a longer term kind of point the the other point that I want to make as far as what is in our grasp I think what we can have some direction tonight and which I would like to get into is this this issue of 3 C which is adjusting things by 15 minutes I think director sh Bower I Echo a

309lot of those concerns and we've said it and this is one thing I think I said loud and clear last meeting is that 7:30 is too early full stop so what do we do about that so one way of looking at it is what is the cost or what's the benefit of a 15minute adjustment what's that actually you know what's the cost of that and you know it says cost neutral so be it what are the unintended consequences we've heard some of that I'd like to reframe it another way and address it further too what's the cost of doing nothing right now and it's not just agitation I'm fearful that we're going to have worse enrollment next year because certain schools are starting later and some of those schools happen to be Charter Schools there's

310there's there's information in our my own neighborhood I'm hearing from parents that are saying olander 7:45 Weber 7:30 no thanks Aristotle campus starts much later and for some people that's the decision that they have to make and right so I before we just jump to ah will punt I think we should really examine what's the cost of doing nothing it may be a half measure but it's something and so one way that I also like to kind of wrap this up a little bit before I want to ask each of you individually the same the one question is what's your view on pushing at 15 minutes for next year is it doable what's the downside what do you what do you honestly think sitting on the side of the table what do you think about

311that but the emails that we get and the noise that we've gotten I think is I'll I'll be accountable to it I think it's because we kind of created some chaos in the conversation without true direction or to direct of what we were trying to accomplish and just because you're loud doesn't mean you're right I take that my own advice a lot just because you're loud doesn't mean you're right I'd rather have some data to instruct that so if the board will tonight is let's put a a poll to our families to ask two very simple questions first question what is your start time for your student and you get to have a a response for each student that you have so if you have a student that starts at olander and a student that

312starts at Weber and a student starts at Rocky what's your start time and would you be in favor of moving your child's start time by 15 minutes up and also have them release 15 minutes later if it was cost neutral to the district period And if we have 90% say not worth it that's helpful but if we have 90% of the folks that are starting at 7:30 that are begging us for a 15-minute window I think that also informs the decision that we need to make so that's kind of where I I I'm I'm analyzing problem what I'd like to hear at least just quick yes or NOS or however you want to elaborate that last notion of pushing it 15 minutes worth it or not and tell me why if that's okay Brian I

313think the first concern would be the 15 additional minutes to the high school and what that could do for their extracurriculars um and for our transporting some of those um trips that you talked about so like after school activities um the takes the taking the students to the next school to perform their athletic um activity and um if all schools like every single school did the 15 minutes because if anybody didn't participate it could definitely mess up the whole chain and that includes Cooper home Community connections um f lab um PCA I mean they bust on the poter high school bell but it will affect their students being 15 minutes later right because they're not moving their times so their kids are already 30 minutes late and they'll be 15 minutes later yeah so that

314would be our initial thought is the consequences of moving it later well we on the same page with um I would also add the after schools oh sorry thank you uh the after schools that we have out of like Harris and Irish are getting home now around 6 6:30 at times and that would push those kids their their arrival at home time closer to 7 o' I'd like to answer more as a parent than an employee uh because I see our department of over 100 people 150ish somewhere in that ball Park perform Miracles and do crazy stuff and make something out of nothing all the time so I'm not even going to touch that side I have a wonderful daughter who is a junior over at Timnath she does a lot of sports and I

315know she already leaves class early and misses a lot of class to go to her activities already so I think on that side of it you have more kids that are leaving the classroom for you know 15 minutes every time to go do their activities and to get on buses to go to sporting events or whatever else they have to do I guess I would say um to me 920 to 420 is a non-starter at the high school level I just don't see and I would argue that even 9:05 to 405 is way too late when I see the amount of students that are missing classes our softball students players Miss 17 of their 45 fourth periods just to play games they're getting out of school early to play home games baseball games this spring

316will start at 3:30 we're going to go to 4:20 that doesn't make any sense you heard lacy one of our Paras talk about needing multiple jobs you can't go get a job at 5 o'clock at night anywhere unless you're going to work into into the late hours tons of kids that need to go home and help with child care the amount of kids that have just opted out of the last period of the day is astronomically higher than it used to be and so we talk about graduating with options I think they are self- selecting out of some options because they can't fulfill their whole full schedule or how they going to get an internship or a job when school's out at 420 or even 405 so um it to me it's um it's it's

317a it's a huge challenge currently what we're doing and to think about moving it later the amount of students like your daughter that'll Miss third and fourth period for a home competition when we go even later to me um goes completely against what we're trying to do as a district when we talk about graduating with options all those kind of things yeah uh from a from a middle school perspective conversations we've had is like there's certainly a value in say 745 is better than 7:30 however um we can see these same consequences whether it's a conversation about what this would do to high school or a conversation of switching middle to that High School approach of Us ending at at 9:20 um really similar issues concerns about um Darkness for three months of the year

318of students walking home from school um Sports being late in fields that don't have have lights um all types of considerations that would be the same thing where we we weigh that we what we've seen is from a principal point of view and speaking with my colleagues of pretty minimal negative feedback about the 7:30 start time that might be surprising but from from our from our lens we we haven't had a whole lot of that um just some but not a lot and we've actually seen um in some cases better attendance this year my school for one better on tardies and better attendance so some of the data isn't necessarily reflecting that 7:30 is is problematic it's early but but not so early that could be handled to the to the other side of things

319getting out by 2:30 is is leading to I think after school activities and those sort of things um being beneficial and working to our favor of having that earlier uh time so yes yes in the way that uh the impact it's going to have in other levels I think it's it's it's going to be more you can hear the the detriment to some of those things on that on the like post four o'clock end yeah one thing I would add that I forgot to mention I it was not an exhaustive search by any means but I took some time to look up who are the schools we get or school districts we get compared to or compete against and just looked up their both B schedules and no one is at 9ine I was shocked

320because I thought there has to be people moved all the research and I think people did move and move back the most common time start time was 8:20 to 8:30 and the second most common was 7:45 and no one at nine especially 920 and so those are people we're competing against pushing our scores against graduation rates against go ahead Carolyn so um I'm just fascinated with what Kevin said about writing having Middle School and High School ride together um I talked to Kevin about this earlier like when I was growing up uh I lived in Wellington and the grade school kids rode with the Junior High kids we all rode on the same bus you know the grade school kids were dropped off first or I know I think the high school kids or Junior

321High kids were dropped off first and then grade schoolers were dropped off but we rode on on the same bus and and there were never any issues in fact I think that the older kids always looked out for the smaller kids and I'm just wondering like right now if we have middle school buses running and we have high schools right nearby how practical is that to to combine those routes and having them right on the same bus but maybe having a 10-minute offset like one like the high schoolers are dropped off last and maybe the middle schoolers are dropped off first how is that is that a thing is it something we could do is it something we should consider I I I'm Sor well um previous to changing um in 1920 school year to

322the high school starting at 9 o' we were busing all middle schools at 7:40 and all high schools at 7:30 and we did combine high school and Junior High we're coming to the same neighborhood we're not double busing those areas they all get on together we drop at the junior high we drop at the high school and then our elementary schools were anywhere from looks like 820 to 9 and so yes we did uh bus Ione Wellington previous Wellington Middle High um cash Le pter uh elementary junior high did go up and down the mountain mixed um down the mountain was um Junior High and high school and up the mountain was elementary and Junior High something to that effect so um we did do a lot of that previous to this late um it

323does this point in the school year um we'd start at zero and have to re do everything if we really do a big change like that this year different suggesting that we do anything like that this year I think we' need to get some Community feedback on that and and see if there's buying from the community around it and then I thought of one other thing I wanted to ask the four of you how many of you have a CDL how many of you are driving bus routs right now okay so you guys I mean I the reason I'm asking you that is um Scott said it was on us to find bus drivers I've had to try to hire drivers before myself of my business they're just not there I I mean I I

324can have 30 people respond and I will tell you I have zero people show up and it's a bigger lift to become a CDL driver you have to hope that you can get hire the person get them to get through CDL training and then hope that they're going to stay and we did try bonuses I don't know if we still have those bonuses in effect but at one point we had bonuses we were trying all kinds of stuff and I don't think that there is a district in the state that that has cracked the code of how to get enough bus drivers um I haven't seen anybody Crack the Code of getting more drivers and I have I've seen us try everything to get more bus drivers it's very hard I mean they're unicorns I

325mean when we have a bus driver we need to just hold on to them and I want to thank you guys for putting on two different hats every day and making sure that our kids get to school I mean I know it's a it's a really honorous for you you guys to have to do two jobs and so I wanted to let you know that I really appreciate you guys getting up early every morning running the bus route and then coming back and doing your other job and doing the same thing at night so I know that's really been hard on you real quickly I just like to point out that for sure the three Transportation managers in the room at the moment drove today and I'm sure all three routers in the room either

326drove today or yesterday and we'll drive tomorrow I think at the time when we decided to do that but that was a huge consideration and and and the feedback we got from you guys is that you were just dying over there and if you didn't get relief we'd even have a bigger shortage okay okay that that's before okay okay now thanks for that feed back yeah so I'm glad to hear it's helped out a little bit go ahead Kevin question then I I this is very helpful and I appreciate your honesty too is that again kind of framing what we want to do now um I'm hearing at least myself included that doing nothing doesn't feel right especially based on what we had just told our community um and I think probably we just didn't

327understand the scale of the problem that we were being asked to vote on so that's there's some shared blame there but what I'm hearing correct me if I'm wrong is that we still need to be driving at fewer routes total as a district which we're not going to solve to next year we're not going to solve right now but I think what what I'm hearing at least correct me or wrong we need to be eliminating routes which in turn will probably have some cost savings which will probably have a an intended consequence of making forcing us to adjust bell times at least for clusters of schools am I missing like are those three aims that are achievable in the next year or two at least to prevent more information so that we can take some

328action on that H I'll let go in a second I just I this is why and when I made the first statement of when we do a boundary study because I think the boundary studies need to be coming up in the next year or two um that's what we've set up some of those committees for right they're not just for consolidation it's how can we do other things but it seems to me to be a waste of time effort and money to do what you're saying and then the year later do a boundary reevaluation and then everybody gets to shift times um schedules routes again so I think if we if we want to do this smart like you had said I think what we need to say is boundaries need to come into play

329in here um reduction of routes that should be part of the boundaries um talk and then the con the consolidation of can we do elementary middle for uh for some of them CLP that makes perfect sense can we do Middle High School um you know there are other ones that will make sense for that but to do to pick off little pieces here and there to make it an improvement of one route or two routes and have everybody run around you know with their hair on fire for that year seems to me to be um a more that that's a tougher approach for everybody and having to change then bell times for parents and kids for two or two or three times in the next three to four years that's also something that is going

330to be very frustrating to me I look at this and I say this is a much bigger problem than we um understood it to be when we said let's you know just flip middle school high school kind of thing we have a lot to consider um you know combining various schools combining routes um boundaries um and let's do that smartly let's do it together and let's do it so that we can make reductions where the reductions make sense so that's my suggestion and and that's why it it may be three years because it may be you know a year in that we have the the committee say we need to change boundaries and then it takes them a year to figure out the boundaries and then when the boundaries are changed then we have to

331have a year to figure out the transportation to it I think that Transportation should be involved with the boundary um discussion so that that does not happen but I'm just saying that it this is why I said yes if it had to be up to three years then that's I would be okay with that because to me this is a huge problem that we need to be able to to write um it's not again I'm not not saying that I like the start times that's not what I'm saying but this is such a huge issue that it upsets every apple cart and let's just do that once is my suggestion is my so other than Mr Zappa I don't think there's another person in the room that has a start time of 7:30 that's effective

332you okay so two people all right and I appreciate your comments but you're also Middle School leader we don't have an elementary school leader here that's talking about 70 3745 I'm apparent of that and I can voice it as much as I can but I'm not what I what I I hear what you're saying I respect what you're saying what I don't like is making another snap decision even if it's to do nothing without including a very vocal uh component of our community that's defected the most and I understand the backend problems let's talk about the front end problems that I addressed a little bit it's too dark in for extracurriculars I get it I drive by on my way home from the gym little humans in darkness waiting for the bus for a long

333part of the year and that's just in my neighborhood okay so there's a safety concern too with starting too early so I I I understand the pull and we don't we don't we don't want to resist we have to analyze the problem that we've got right now we got ourselves into this mess with the vote last year and I know Conor smiling I want to hear from him too because the the Whiplash effect of our community of saying start this and then start and then we need to get it together and I agree with you I think it has to do with boundary modification what I'm not okay with and just so I'm very clear about this is punting a problem for three years down the road for an amorphous boundary study that I don't

334know is on the books I'm a deadline driven person I'm a litigator if we're going to have that conversation I want a deadline of at least next year where we're talking boundary modifications and we're talking this but we're doing it next year and we're having a decision point at some point other comments so go ahead Jess oh Jim what I'll go [Music] I'm I'm worried about on one hand I want to tie this together with the boundary work yes the issue is as soon as we start the boundary work there's going to be winners and there's going to be losers and now all of a sudden we're back into school consolidation discussions around that which is why I was concerned earlier about getting the committee rolling so it's I I guess I'm saying we're embarking

335on a tricky thing here and for me I would rather have that you know I'm still on board with the three-year thing and I know there's pain there's pain here no matter where we wind up so that that's where I'm at go J so I think talking about safety I agree with Kevin I don't think it's I think there's different types of safety if when kids go at 7:30 it's also dark we had a community commenter at when we talked about this last time that is a crosswalk volunteer and watches kids walk in the dark all the time and brought up safety from her perspective as well so I think safety is going to be on our radar regardless um I don't know if the answers exist but I would be curious in that 1920

336that you brought up uh Amy we had high school started at 7:30 middle school started at 7:40 okay and Elementary School was 820 to 9 somewhere in there and I'd be curious how many routes we had then Andor how many drivers or shortages I know it was a different time but I'd be curious I'm not sure how many drivers we had at the time but I believe this was 130 routes and at that time we were routing all students currently they have to apply for transportation so the numbers of students that we were're projecting for those routes could be completely different than what we really needed and that was all eligible students not all students in the district sorry I'm trying to like wrap my head around all the things um Craig I also was

337wondering so you mentioned that with the 9:00 a.m start you have a bunch of students that are opting out of their last period I'd be curious if you knew how many students opted out of their 7:30 period when we had those start times exact numbers no but it was the reverse issue students were trying to get out of their first period because it was way too early I would probably say that there's more fourth period impact now than there was first period then but that's qualitative I don't have the numbers I was more looking for your sentence because that was kind of my expectation but um we traded one for a different uh I'm not okay with a three-year weight I'll just lay that out um I understand changing bell times at this point in

338the year is near impossible right like I'm I don't want to I don't want to sugarcoat that um if I could have a 750 and go back to last year's I would take it in a heartbeat I'm also recognizing the reason that I voted to change it last year was for the sake of Transportation having a breathing space um I'm a hard cell on all this if you can't tell um I am in favor sorry I have to get my thoughts together I want to consider more options so I I could get to a point where I can live with another year I can't live with two I could barely live with one um I want to consider student levels co- trving together middle school high school again I want to consider bulk stops for

339secondary the 90minut stretch between our earliest start and our latest start which sounds like we used to do in 1920 as well is really rough um I think you know we had a lot of families that did reach out and said 7:30 is too early but we also had a number of people speak out and say it's really hard for me to get a full-time job when I have kids who start 90 out 90 minutes apart I understand that that's going to make it near impossible to have three tiers so but I want it considered I really just at this point want everything on the table and I want us to throw all of the options out there because I don't know when we decided that students should only be elementary middle and high I

340don't know who decided that there was probably a reason but I don't know what it was I don't know if anybody in this room knows so was that decision made so long ago that we should reconsider that option um I I think considering with that maybe middle school and high school don't all start at the same time right maybe I understand there's consequences with sports or after school activities but at the same time I want to get a hierarchy of priorities if it's not starting at 7:30 and that means some of our middle schools start at different times and I want it considered because right now Canard starts at I think 8:15 and our middle schools that have busing start at 7:30 right so there's already a stretch there it's I guess it's only one

341school compared to the others but I want the options at the T on the table I want to know what the consequences of those options are I want a robust decision-making process I don't I think we made a decision last year in the hopes of just doing something to give our our system a a breath but I don't think we considered all the consequences of that decision nor did I think do I think we considered how long it would take for us to back out of that decision so I'll that's my piece Connor go ahead U so this is the one that uh literally I can wake up in the middle of the night my teeth are grinding um and I'll try to be positive in some way um I think that we will be

342lucky to land this issue in a correct spot in five years there is Absolut abely no way that we are going to be able to do it in one year and what that will end up doing if we do Rush a decision in one year or even two years is make us do another change two or three years down the road from there I understand some people don't like bell times I don't personally like them either but what I dislike is more change I can go to my boss and say Hey you know my kids are going to go in at 8:00 instead of 7:30 or 9:00 or whatever what I can't do is go back to him every single year and say hey I got to start my times differently and that's what we've

343done um it's the one single issue that the community and I I I said this last year I mean it's that you know that confidence in your elected officials you know we keep changing back and forth and people I'm just like could you please just stop right just stop and I I to Kevin's point you know I think there are some people who are like those bell times are so early I want to go you know to investigate other alternatives for education I also think and I think it's probably bigger that there's a lot of people who are saying you know you guys just can't get these bell times straight I'm going to go look for other alternatives for education so I'm more than happy to sit on this how imperfect it is right now

344Scott i' rather have the imperfection of that than more change I think boundaries have to go first maybe in tandem but if we don't do boundaries first we're just going to make another change right um to uh Craig's point I would if we're going to look at it as well is I really would like to look into the 2009 19 decision about moving High School to 9:00 I know it was all the rage right all these studies oh you know and but but that's part of our problem right anytime we have something we're like the cat that follows the little pen on the wall oh new change new change new change right and the community is just sick of it it might have been good great idea but and we as directors and I ain't

345going to wrap it up because I'm getting angry but we as directors to our credit I I haven't seen one piece of data that says changing in 2019 has improved test course like it was all advertised and all of that it's it may Dwayne it may be wrapped in there it may have a a portion of it maybe one variable in there and it may be valid but to validate our decision from back then I haven't seen it right Dave I think the 1.1 $1 million and the decrease in stress levels at the transportation department it worked okay I was not on board with that but if that was the goal it worked well that was also advertised as was the first step in two decisions because we were going it was advertised as we

346could do it as one big decision to go to 8 8:30 and 9 or we could do a minor change get the cost reduction reductions relieve the pressure in the transportation department and then make another change later on after we went through consolidation that was how I took it to be advertised that's no longer possible from what I can as turn we're we're not going to 8 8:30 and 9 right so if we're not doing that then I suggest we take it big deep breath we got some cost savings Transportation seems that morale is up I know and take some time however long it takes to get it right instead of just changing again did you want okay I'm trying to I'm trying to help Brian out if it's for what it's worth it's getting

347really late I think we've all expressed so what I would like to do at least is build some kind of consensus as to what we're asking okay so that he doesn't have to piece this together and then rewatch this video multiple times right so the first question I want to see if we've got Quorum per per board policy 41 is there to put a very simple uh study together or a data point together where we can ask our community do you want to change what's your start time is there is there buyin for that so that we're not again my my point was I don't want to fly blind I agree with you use data to make our decisions not frustration not the late hour right so two points on that if we're still Flying

348Blind we need to know what our decision point is even if it's no decision I would like to see how important this is to our community right if over overwhelmingly it's not plus we have our assemblage of experts here saying don't do it then we don't do it but I think just Flying Blind at night I'm not a fan of so thumbs up thumbs however you want to do it the only problem I have with asking people would you like this if we can't deliver on it don't ask people if they want some if they want something that we can't deliver on I mean if we don't have enough bus routes we don't have busing minutes was cost neutral and it has the exact same amount of routes did I get that wrong a 15in

349shi the 15minute shift that's what I'm talking about okay so you're saying not not like asking to start at a different time and add routes and stuff like you're just saying move everything C whatever the option was it was cost neutral same amount of routes we're adjusting 15 minutes that's all I'm asking about all parents right does the board because it's not director velda's call is does the board want to see that but but you're talking about sending this out to all parents yeah to see what your start time is and what's your appetite for moving your start time by 15 minutes no I'm in favor I'm against I'm against I'm actually against because I think it creates more turn that we don't need I would be in favor um if some of the implications

350were explained like Craig's point about high school going to 920 in that scenario is really important to a lot of people and I think they would be important to make sure that they were fully informed on that at least that um before we just had a bunch of people be like hell yeah let's move it all back you know so uh I would that would be my one stipulation on that I just worry about an unattended consequence on this one as well which is um anybody who doesn't have a high schooler absolutely absolutely and then as soon as they get to high school oh my god what have we done so you have you're going to get people who are Elementary Middle who are like yeah we want to move it to a different time

351and have it be more you know in the time frame that I like and then as soon as those kids hit high school and they can't get a job they can't be around to to um watch kids after school um they they're missing two periods because of sports and there I I think you have you it's it is what I think you had both said which is um you're trading one problem for another and I think right now we just don't need the churn for that I think we you know I think right now what this I think we need to to ask is are we good for not doing anything for the next year and then as a board we need to decide um as far as a boundary um that is going to

352be discussed in the um yeah go ahead go ahead please can you weigh in on the question that Kevin posed before I just address some of the things that are in the discussion I've heard from I think everybody but I didn't hear from you and I just wanted to make sure I'm keeping score okay okay so I I I would say that my big concern about doing something like that is just what Scott said you know it's like having a really informed uh convers making sure that people understand the the Ripple effects the consequences all the way out and I think that Kristen's right like if you ask me hey do you want your grade schooler or your middle schooler to go to school at this time am I really going to be thinking about

353how that's going to affect my kid when he goes to high school I would be afraid I couldn't think that far ahead you know I just I would be concerned about that there there would have to be so many like disclaimers in that like if you do this this happens if you do this this happens and if you do this when your kid goes to high school here's what's going to happen I mean it it seems like it's it's pretty a pretty Frau um procedure I don't know if I think we've got to know but my no I would say probably not okay my only push back just real quick is that okay but we're gonna have that we're gonna have to do that anyway or are we not I mean can I offer a

354compromise yeah if if that's okay can we go back a slide Whoever has control of the presentation just go back one slide please all right so I'm just GNA keep that on the back as a backdrop I have a couple anecdotes as I've been actively and engaged in listening to all of the commentary which I really appreciate and I think what's really difficult about this situation is that multiple things are true at the same time and so as all of you are wrestling with your truth and the constituents that you've been speaking and engaging with all of that's valid so I want to not dismiss or discredit one person or multiple families realities when other people may be benefiting from the current modeling I think we've all learned uh a lot over the course of

355the past year around how our community is engaged in our Democratic processes and when they are concerned about decisions that we make they activate and they speak up and I was sh something that I'm really grateful that Joe you were uh vulnerable and sharing that I think the middle schools when I was listening to their conversation about this topic I was anticipating that they would be hearing more in a prevalent way from their families that this was a big concern and I had gleaned from them just listening to their conversation that it had not been which is probably surprising with the 7:30 start and that doesn't mean that families aren't reaching out to different people but I also say over the course of the past year I've had less than 10 families reach out to

356me directly about wanting to address this so when you director herela appropriately asked this question like how important is this to the community I do think that's a fair question but I do think we have some anecdotal data that's observational at best that we should glean insights and even thinking about how many community commenters that we've had on this particular topic I would say it's probably less than five so I think that's just important to note I think what director Duffy brought up regarding the 2019 decision is a really important question did we as a system reap a benefit from making that adjustment or were there unintended consequences of that because when we look in director shmow you had mentioned about tardies what's really interesting to in our system is that our Middle School attendance

357has actually improved since last year in first period our Middle School tardies are less this year on average not across the board but on average there are fewer tardies in Middle school at 7:30 this year than there were a year ago and you have that data in your inbox so I think that's interesting our first period in our high schools have worse attendance both for the day and tardies than our early starts so when you think about the implications of having a 905 start when many families are off to work and students are independently getting themselves to school that's a problem on the front end in principle W all articul suggested we have problems on the back end too that another move actually worsens that particular scenario and I think as we talk about who

358we're competing with and we mentioned at some level some of our district sponsored Charter Schools our two District sponsored charter schools for high school have a 7:15 and a 745 a.m. start for their high schools so I just want that to be something that's important their elementary schools start at 8 o'clock so I think that's a benefit and we've heard from families that I want to affirm 7:30 doesn't feel good 7:45 would feel better so that the the realities that you're articulating I think are important another part of the story that I think is important is we're kind of appropriately addressing entangling it with boundary studies I like that suggestion because I think what you're signaling is a boundary change requires another change but I would just I'm having a hard time envisioning in our

359system a wholesale boundary changes that impact bell times across the districts without it also including school closures or consolidations and I want to be really transparent with the community that the situation that we had at the end of last year where we had an overend roll Tim nith Middle High and we were able to think thoughtfully about Bamford and Preston I don't think we have any of those other scenarios that are like that for the next two years where we have an over enrolled school that we need to breathe health and we could help another school by thinking about boundaries I think we're all through declining enrollment realizing that we would just be shuffling students to different places but but it's still fewer students and so I just want to signal that in the spirit

360of transparency that waiting three years does require a school closure consolidation consideration doesn't mean that we would make that decision but I would suggest as a healthy compromise that we look at some of these sub bullets that are on the bottom of this screen that Colton and our expert routers in PSD realized that if we wanted to think about a different way of delivering transportation and I think director zamore you had mentioned like let's let's explore all of the options right I think these were some low I want to say I it would be inappropriate to say low hanging fruit but levers that we can explore and study it wouldn't take three years to realize if we did some of this modeling what would that look like and what would the implications be I've heard

361from our routers and our transportation leaders that the timing of this is really important and I've also heard from you that if we do this too late where we can't make change that's a non-starter too so trying trying to figure out a healthy compromise in that space is routers right now are already pivoting to figuring out what routes look like for summer school and once that comes to conclusion they are going to be on a full court press to make sure routing is spotless seamless for the first day of school to make sure we open up the 25 26 school year with great success and you do that every year so what I would like to suggest is that we pause on this conversation and exploration temporarily until the start of School allow them a

362couple of weeks of success to work through some of the Kinks because there's always a few of them and then within the first month of school charg the team to work with first services to explore those other levers to come back to this board prior to December so it has to be within the first semester to do something thoughtfully if there's anything that's tangible and we have just another thoughtful engaging conversation around what's possible before we go and Survey people because I think the acknowledgement of needing to survey people but also be able to deliver on what we're surveying them on I think is a really important Duality that you all articulated really really well but I'm curious if that is a compromise that is palatable um because I understand the changes that made were

363made last year were hard and they were for multiple reasons one it was to provide relief to our supervisors and who were in all hands on deck I still remember remember Laura looking in your eyes outside of Lopez Elementary School in afternoon last year and you were like how many more days can we do this you didn't say it I just read it in your eyes it's real and I also realized that we had to make $6.9 million in reductions across the system last year to balance our budget and we just lost another 500 students and so that challenge around needing to find Financial efficiencies I know $11 million and our total budget doesn't seem like a lot but it is it is it it's that's 10 administrators you know could be 15 teachers could

364be 20 par professionals it could be an entire division somewhere else in this District that we will have to Grapple with as a governance team are we willing to accept the trade-off if we decide that we want to put that 1.1 million back into what I would say was an inefficient system that we need to think completely differently and look at the middle school high school modeling you maybe they have more similar so I think there's an opportunity there that we can make progress I know it's not in the timeline that many of you want um but I really appreciate the Democratic process playing out here where we're trying to do everything to make everybody happy and I think most people want an 8 to three Bell time and we can't deliver on that for

365everybody as a result of just the realities of our system but I do believe we have a shared commitment to look at it differently so would that compromise be palatable to you as a governance team to come back here study these particular sub bullets about a month after school starts next year and then come come back before the end of the first semester on what we found to inform next steps so yes with an asterisk because I think even coming back in December and we want if we want to actually engage our community we're still going to end up in the same timeline problem if we want to engage our community thoughtfully after December um I also I guess I want to bring uh Co back in like what is the time frame that it

366would be necessary for this level of consider all the things um yeah it's a big it's a big project I mean the way I would approach something like this is is you know get with the team and do the you know similar to the way you know professional Consulting teams work like Boston Consulting or whatever where essentially they come in they do a lot of brainstorming they come up with a a bulleted list of IDE but but then they do some background to try to figure out what's really the opportunity behind each idea and then rank the ideas right and then come up okay now now we've ranked him how long will it take to actually model you know each one of these and and actually come up with a with an answer that that's

367the way I would kind of look at approaching it because I started thinking about it looking at these and I thought well you know some of these might if you really dug in might not be that great of an idea so really you'd want to like vet all these first and kind of estimate you know their likelihood of success and then rank them and then we'd have to figure out how long it would take I mean some of these that the issue is these deeper level um modeling like rerouting the high school and middle school together you know you have to individually take those those bus trips apart and put them back together with high school and middle school you know where whereas today they're separate and it does I mean it it takes hours

368and hours to do some of that stuff so um be a little hard to give you an exact estimate but yeah probably something in the three four months that also gives me then concern if we start come August that is December I don't I don't think that's enough of a Runway to try to actually accomplish something wholeheartedly even next year I I share your concern I just I I just want to validate the staff's workload in the reality between now and the summer and again I also want to realize that we made these changes at this particular time last year right so things change is not impossible but there it is also really really difficult and we were motivated to do what we needed to do last year on a lot of different fronts that

369were already articulated so I just want to be clear and not drawing a hard line here um I'm not an expert in the analysis process around the timeline I just have heard and I want to validate staff's perspective that it would be really difficult to start this analysis now with where their attention and workload and direction is and that will only intensify in the summer as they're rerouting all of the students for next school year so I just I want to achieve the timeline that you're suggesting I just think it would be really difficult and I want I invite you into the conversation as well that if you see a different path that I'm not articulating where we could achieve a more aggressive timeline I would love to hear from you too um like you

370said right now we're getting ready to do summer school and as soon as summer school is over we're actively starting next year um all the students that graduate up um moving all the bus stops um it changes where the stops are in the neighborhood for every school it adds um stops um it's very time consuming and um the shift of you know new students coming in in August uh the moves over the summer we are bombarded and bus requests in September we have to release bus requests and receive them for all the parents to elect for busing so my thought is if we're not doing anything for next year then I don't want to rush into trying to solve a multi-year complex problem so what I a compromise of yours instead of giving us information

371for an action item on December to get polling I want to learn more about what's aspirational versus is what's what's legitimately practical again lengthening the elementary school day that goes into an entire round of bargaining right that we have no control over so what I'd like to do is take the these sort of not lower but these other achievable units get more information on it and then the board collectively can say let's rank these priorities as far as what we're driving towards and also by the way we're going to have the long-term standing committee forming and storming this year anyway so that can be a charge of year two let's look at boundary modifications let's look at how this would all and we may be in the exact same place in three years where we

372say we're going to do nothing but I I like like the if we've learned nothing from consolidation last year go fast go slow to go fast and doing some small efficiency gains is still better for the district if it's going to save us money it's going to eliminate routes it's going to not exacerbate a staffing problem that we've already got let's be smart so if we're not doing anything for next year I'd say that's my I'm fine with your compromise as far as more informational and then get more directive once we know more and I I agree with you on that Kevin and I I like the idea of if it it does bring that um Committee in to to talk about whether it's boundaries whether it's consolidation whatever it might be because again I

373just don't I I don't want to have this conversation for us to have a discussion on or vote on or ask a you know our our um Community about and then have a different conversation a year later of like oops so sorry we got to now talk about doing something different so I I agree with that can I add a wrinkle or just a thought to this maybe it's an addition to these options when when they made the switch to to move high schools to 9 to4 they also took 20 minutes out of our day and there was no discussion with with negotiations or anything that I'm aware of it just was decided by the board that this should happen so potentially could we add back to extending the high school day slightly if that

374would help because what that did to our ability to run a late start with that did with to our ability to run intervention programs in the morning um it it reduced our class time reduced our passing periods reduced our lunch length all those things were unintended consequences that we tried to make known at the time uh so that's potentially another fix I don't know if that just creates more issues but uh as a high school person getting even 10 minutes back in the day would dramatically change what we're able to do with late start PLC time intervention work etc two quick points on that um if I was to rank the quote unquote low hanging fruit that would be number one number two um I know they're loow hanging fruit but I hear Boston Consulting

375Group and I start thinking billable hours so let's make sure that we investigate with um you know Financial prudence all right do we have a consensus for you as to what we are yes I I I think so I just want to make sure all hearts and minds are clear if anybody has anything left to say that's been left unsaid I just would invite you to make sure that you share it prior to staff kind of working through next steps anyone anyone ber keep working on those people getting CDL license uh I think I want to task Bud's team to do a oneto one for every student to get a scooter oh my goodness all right it is definitely late um I just want to take the just last minute here to say thank you

376um obviously none of this would be happening without you um I appreciate the late nights the early mornings the driving the supervising the doing everything um at the same time it's a lot of this and um we really appreciate it um and I I hope that what we'll come out with is a is a very good sustainable um you know solution for everyone so um thank you and have a good night all right yep so I will now adjourn this meeting meeting at um 11:40 p.m. thank you all good night [Music] is e e