001e e e all right so thank you for joining the Board of Education this evening um go ahead and please mute your cell phone um as we begin yeah is is this on yep there we go um so please mute your cell phone as we begin the meeting today is Tuesday August 27th 2024 and this meeting is now called to order at 6:35 p.m. for those attending this meeting in person live captions are available on a TV in the boardroom and in the lobby to access the live captions in a language other than English on your own device please scan the QR code on the screen or on the table near the entrance and select the language of your choice the live stream of this meeting is also available in English and Spanish on YouTube
002for links to these live streams please visit the Board of Education page of the PSD website or PSD TV on demand on YouTube and moving on to 2.0 approval of agenda would any board members like to make changes to the agenda okay so we are all set there so moving on to 3.0 superintendent report superintendent Kingsley will now make remarks to the board of education and to the community welcome thank you president Draper and the members of the board STA and members of our community good evening really excited about uh all of the things that we have planned for public discussion tonight I want to start my address by talking a little bit about things that have been happening around the district over the first couple of days or if not first week or so
003of school um and I want to re reassure you in the community that every single day our district tells a story of Hope and optimism and I think the more and more that we can be intentional about just looking for what that story shares the more we can celebrate the incredible successes that are happening in our classrooms across our various departments and across this incredible School District uh I want to introduce um our Communications team to launch a very short video around what that might have actually looked like over the first couple of days of school Matt thank you [Music] lots of smiles there folks lots of smiles I'm so proud of all of the things that our parents our principal School leaders our classified staff and our teachers have done to put smiles on
004all of our children's and young adults faces to make sure that we're starting off the the school year with joy uh we recognize it's hard right now whether you're uh wherever you are you know we're constantly having these conversations around difficult things to move us forward and sometimes that we can be centered on migrating whether we want to be the cynic or we want to find hopeful and you know hopeful optimism in the things that we're grappling with and I think it's normal to be kind of Shifting between that but all of the intentional efforts that our staff and families have done in partnership with each other to to celebrate a joyful start of the school year I couldn't be more proud to celebrate them I've had an opportunity in addition to what you saw
005here over the last couple of days to go to several schools I want to talk to you a little bit about a few of them uh on Friday it was a little wet at the end of the day at bacon elementary school but they had their ribbon cutting at their brand new Outdoor Classroom uh and it was so great to see how well attended that was and I want to thank the school Community for uh persevering uh during the rain but the the grounds crew of our district in partners ship with both the PTO and other Community Resources to make that happen it is so pristine there is not a blade of grass that is out of place um but I had for the first time the pleasure and the luxury of meeting uh the
006person that that school is named after Bob bacon uh and it was so profound for me to get a chance to know about him his story both as an educator as a former board member I also learned that he is a former uh Colorado Congress person both in the Senate and in the house but I think I think his greatest point of privilege and pride was that he was the former teacher of board member Carolyn Reed and he shared that he was you were a great student so I want to make sure the community you did all of your homework you raised hands when you wanted to participate in classes but but he sends his love and he just really appreciated having an opportunity not it was never about him and the school being named
007after him it was about his legacy of making sure that the work and serving students in this community Contin to pay it forward so I just thought that was really awesome uh just uh yesterday an opportunity to visit Three incredible elementary schools and I want to be mindful these all three of these elementary schools at one point or another last year was named as potentially uh part of a consolidation plan or a closure plan and I was so proud to both walk into mcra elementary school and I will say mgra Elementary School is the highest performing Academic School on the west side of town in this District I'm so proud of the leadership of Amy Smith and her leadership team getting a chance to sit down uh with princip Smith and learn a little bit
008about her leadership story you may or may not know that she was the principal of Mo elementary school a school that last closed in this community and she as the proud principal of McGraw this is the first time her kindergarten class is two tracks not three and so that concern and consternation around what that means but she was really really uh incredible to get a chance to know a little bit better I've known her for three years but I've got a chance to learn a little bit more about her leadership story of moving and migrating from a core knowledge school to an IB School and understanding the both the importance of content but service and the IB philosophy and I think merging those two things together and the teachers and the communities bu Buy in
009is what makes that school uh a real academic success in high performing school had an opportunity to go to Harris bilingual Elementary School uh Noah herera Kelly the principal there this is her last year before she retires after an incredible career um and she recognized and told a story that last year made their school Community stronger it also in some ways gave them permission to tell their story more broadly and more assertively in the community around how amazing they are I had a chance to meet many of their interventionists their English language development teachers uh it was incredible to watch some of their uh elective teachers uh who were both modeling different incredible practices for students but it was just incredible Spirit of joy and inspiration and if you have over between now and next
010Saturday I'd really like to invite the community to give a special just thought in their heart to Mr Fuentes their fourth grade teacher he's a teacher that every time he speaks every student at some level in the class leans a little bit more forward in their classroom uh but Mr Fuentes is the proud graduate of not just Colorado State University but also the University of Texas and they're playing football together this weekend and he's really conflicted about wearing burn burnt orange and green and gold at the same time but he is just such an amazing teacher and it was great to get a chance to see him in action uh and then I finished my day at Lopez Elementary School um not only is that a new uh newly awarded Legacy School in terms of
011the leader and me program but I think the leader and me program is probably one of the highest most qualified social emotional learning programs that you can find in public education today there is not a student that you will walk by at Lopez Elementary School that won't take a moment to smile at you and greet you and welcome you to their school in fact they actually have leadership roles when you walk into the classroom that there's a student or two that's designated to welcome you and tell you about what they're learning where they're headed in they're learning uh which is just a really incredible way of work and I want to give a special shout out to another fourth grade teacher Miss Johnson I saw her in action the Artistry of Miss Johnson as she
012was reading a book in a read aloud that was a part of our El education curriculum uh called pinduli uh it's a this book and story about a spotted hyena and how they're experiencing across the African Savannah these unkind words being told to them by zebras lions and dogs and how the hyena had to look inward around how not lose their identity and recognize the actual survival of the hyena was based upon being very proud of who they are and what they do but also taking every moment to breathe light and Harmony into their Community as you think about our agenda tonight togetherness and Harmony is a real part of the conversation we're going to talk about our ecosystem of the various committees that we have across this District not just to say hey we've
013figured it out but to make sure that you as a board in the community recognize this is the current State we may have as a team uh desire to change that as a future State based upon feedback and Curiosities I know many of you as members of the board have already talked about that but I just want to say huge thanks for the overwhelming amount of interest that we have for members of our community to ele Elevate their voices provide us a level of advisement around our way of work moving forward it's just really important that we continue to figure out creative ways to work together so really excited about that conversation at those types of practices as we continue to refine and iterate them and I'll close on this is really what's dependent upon
014this District having a very sustainable Healthy High performing future you're going to hear tonight about our strategic plan and make no mistakes about it the priorities of making sure that all of our students graduate but and have options postgraduation that is a part of the work that we're not pivoting from but it's bigger than that we want to make sure that our students not only graduate but they have the skills to get a job in our backyard and they have a chance to earn a living wage and have an opportunity because they're proud graduate of this school system to achieve and attain economic Mobility to pursue a pathway forward that requires us to innovate and really think about what are the classrooms of tomorrow not just the ones that we have today and I'm really
015really proud that this board of education tonight is going to Grapple and recognizing that the needs that we have the vision that we have for the future of the system in many instances we do not have a clearly defined funding source to achieve them which requires us to think really differently about curriculum our Career and Technical education programs how do we ensure that we're retaining the most talented and highly qualified Workforce how do we make sure that we continue to tend to the various infrastructure needs that when you look at whether it's our maintenance our brick and mortar everything in our blings from cooling systems HVAC systems boiler systems roof replacement programs none of those things which are essential to move our work forward do we have a recurring annual funding source to achieve and
016the overall estimate of the cost today and today's do is about $700 million just in maintenance and that does not include our irrigation systems everything outside our buildings that are under or top of our asphalt like our playgrounds so this is a work that's in progress in just the beginning as we started the school year we talked a little bit about having 32 of our 49 schools not having proper air conditioning if this board and this community wants to entertain the idea of putting air conditioning in every single one of our facilities we're going to need to think creative around how to achieve a Funding Solution that's going to equate to about 250 to almost $300 million to achieve that goal I'm really proud that you're having conversation tonight I also know that we're looking
017for figuring out different ways to be more sustainable and energy efficient whether that's solar whether that's looking at how we take some of our systems or our computer systems and Technology systems to be more efficient those dollars add up too uh and we want to make sure that we're continue to think about all of these in their entirity and I want to invite the community and the districts that if you want to know what this means for your individual School please go to our district website today psdschools.org click on the community link and you will see a hyperlink that is very specific for a proposed mil Levy override for this year in 2024 and you can click on a link that will let you know each of the individual projects that we have aspirations of
018achieving and finishing and completing across this entire District so not only across the district but school specific information is there and I just want to say thank you to this governance team I want to thank you for the community who has engaged with us thoughtfully asked really hard but necessary questions to move us as a system forward and I'm looking forward to having uh those types of conversations in partnership with you tonight so thanks again for allowing me the opportunity to address the community thank you so much that was loud now all right we're gonna move on to our next section of community comment um so welcome to the community comment section of the board meeting the board desires to hear the viewpoints of all stakeholders including students emplo employees parents Guardians and community members
019public comment is designed to address issues not personalities or Personnel matters please keep your concerns and comments focused upon the district and appropriate for a K12 audience please note that the board does not generally respond to remarks made during Community comments our lack of response should not be construed to mean that we agree or disagree with what is said or with the description or interpretation of events as presented by any speaker further even if some remarks may be factually inaccurate we generally choose not to respond to correct the record here because formal board meetings are not the time 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 intera interact respectfully even with those with whom we disagree for
020we all have the students best interests at heart so this opportunity for uh public comment is for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated deadline those people will be called on to make remarks in the order that they signed up each speaker will be allowed three minutes to address the board and the first person we have is Tori papis welcome hi I'm Tori papis co-chair of batty Elementary's PTO our current kindergarten enrollment is 43 students nine higher than what PSD project did for this year batty qualifies for Title One funding that PSD doesn't currently provide to us while other PSD kindergarteners go on multiple field trips batty students can't even visit the library every week try explaining that to a six-year-old who's obsessed with books it's hard to explain School boundaries
021as well their a friend across the street goes to another school because the boundary was drawn assuming that swallow would be a major road someday by the way they've installed speed bumps on swallow in the last few years according to our city based on submitted project Concepts and property zoning Batty's surrounding area is expected to have 700 to 980 new housing units constructed in the near future Swallow Road has the biking and pedestrian infrastructure for a designated safe route to batty when you review committees and choose a path forward please use this opportunity to create a boundary committee that works closely with School principles staff community members City Planning GIS Specialists and safe routes to school in order to review boundaries regularly there are multiple issues with bat's boundary on just about every edge of
022it I look forward to what PSD can do to responsibly address those issues and I invite any all of you to come and visit batty anytime I'd love to give you a tour we have student L tours it's uh a great I mean you all know yeah so it's um we're here for you whenever you're ready to come visit thanks thank you all right oh there we go thank you Tori uh next up we have Danny Lawrence welcome thank you for the opportunity tonight I wanted to express my concern over violations of Sunshine Law and the agenda for this meeting first you list no casby resolutions agenda item 7.1 for the public View and last year at this time you were holding legislative meetings that you no longer appear to be holding since casby uh
023received $37,000 of Public School District funds in 2020 3 and PSC spent over $64,000 to create legislation to obstruct Kora rights with casby while some of you were also serving on casby's boards and committees transparent information seems necessary anything you discuss here tonight the public was not given an opportunity to read or comment on which feels intentional and destructive to public trust any vote you make on resolutions will be done without a public process two by two meetings were never intended to circumvent the need for public business to occur in the public posting the information after the meeting is both a Sunshine Law and an ADA violation those at home cannot participate in real time in your meetings and I caution you that it's a liability to continue to run public meetings in this manner
024next in the committee discussion that you have tonight agenda item 8.1 the Eda committee's information cannot be accessed on the in on the online materials which would sound shocking right except I feel like I say it every couple of weeks there's something inaccessible about your agenda every single public meeting clicking on that link T you down a rabbit hole of required access that members of the public don't have of all the Committees listed there edak is the only one with this problem while searching the district's website the committee information online is from 2021 so it's no wonder that parents who asked you for an equity task force for disabled students last spring weren't aware that the district even had a committee clearly a steering committee for consolidation who had members serving on it from the
025edac committee we're still also asking for an equity task force so it makes me wonder how effective the current edac commit is recent policies for cell phone and attendance very vividly depict the need for some interaction with the disability Community before creating such discriminatory policies your graduation rates for Hispanic students have fallen below State average that's being presented in materials this evening but you aren't addressing equity and certainly you aren't listening to the community's demand for it the equity discussion feels dead with this board I feel like all hope is lost the community outcry wasn't big enough to move the hearts of the people we elected so because you intentionally deny the community information regarding your lobbying efforts your Budget Transportation reports you violate Sunshine Law nearly every meeting and you completely disregard the community's
026cries for a sincere effort toward equity and inclusion I will not be voting for The mil Levy or any of you for public office again the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome and here at public at pter school district we proudly kicked the can down the road for decades at a time I encourage the community to stop voting for this type of BL blatant disregard and will willful disrespect thank you thank you next up we have Sabrina herck welcome on August 15th Kingsley did a first day of school tour he rode a bus visited some elementary schools and visited bolts Middle School I noticed something interesting about this tour when I watched the video he happened to ride the bus route where Tyler's Anella abused 11 children including
027my daughter he happened to visit both elementary schools and Ella's victims attended and he happened to visit an Autism classroom that now includes one of the victims but specifically at a middle school where staff weren't as close to the situation and wouldn't be as likely to think about the connection he also commented on this as though it had nothing to do with anything and this was all random chance Kingsley I don't know how many of the victims you met on Thursday my general suspicion is that Shepherds and staff would rather tackle you to the ground than allow it but you rode the bus with some of them and I don't know if you bothered to tell Scott what you're were dragging him into but you visited my daughter's classroom that day you know her name
028you've asked about her by name you acted surprised when I said I intentionally didn't bring her to our meetings because she didn't need to be involved you heard me say her name at Zella sentencing and her name isn't exactly common so it's easy to recognize 3 days after kingsley's tour I heard that bus driver are already reporting abusive Behavior by their Paris this year Otto von bismar once said anyone who's looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on a battlefield will think hard before starting a war and now I wonder was this tour a moment like that for you did it impact you to see the circumstances surrounding zella's abuse do you have a new understanding of how much Shepherds and staff love and appreciate the children zenel abused did you look my
029daughter in the eyes and see someone worth fighting for do you finally understand wide burn every bridge I've ever built just so she could feel the warmth has this been my biggest failing all along preventing all of you from meeting her preventing you from looking her in the eyes and seeing a human being who deserves better than being pinched and slapped and mocked by a known child abuser in a position of trust and Authority did you need that moment in order to know autistic lives matter do you need that moment in order to do better well she deserves peace so I'm still not going to introduce you but this is a photo that I showed judge McDonald during sentencing this is my sweet daughter who enjoys Legos purple Mohawks and listening to drag queens read
030the snitches this is what she looked like when she was being abused by zanella look at her now and tell me that she's not worth change thank you I've still got a few seconds okay thank you next up we have Taylor Unwin nope okay um next up we have Anna leetta nope nope next up we have Amy Healey welcome good evening um my name is Amy Healey AKA fra Healey um I am the German teacher at ferridge high school and I'm the department I'm it it's all me um and my program is very much my own um I'm really fortunate that I get to develop relationships with students over multiple levels multiple years and they don't really have a choice um I'm it that like if they want to take German they're stuck with me
031and I love it I get to see my students grow but this also means that I get to see or get to have multiple preps meaning I have different plans for German one German 2 German 3 German four German five and sometimes depending on the numbers I have a combo four five class which means I have to differentiate based on the level all within one class period I even take upper Lev students on an immersion trip to ess's park with other schools from around the state of Colorado for the opportunity to use the language for an entire weekend the school district recently has started offering the Seal of by Literacy for um ways for students to show that they're literate in English as well as other languages this past May PSD had 384 graduates who
032earned the seal by literacy meaning they can put the seal on their resumés on their applications for jobs trade schools and higher levels of Education the seal is attracting the attention of families because even middle schoolers are asking me how they can earn the seal by literacy now why am I speaking about this very specific thing with languages because the district and the community value multilingualism I believe we should but I'm a little bit biased now with this being said this is a wonderful part of our values as our community and our district just last year year the district started recognizing this value by offering a stipend for employees not just teachers who are multilingual but German and French were excluded I'm not sure if the board members are actually aware of this it hurt
033to have students of mine being awarded the seal by literacies sealed by literacy in my language some even being accepted to University programs in Germany in part because of my Tel and yet I'm not being recognized in the same way as my wonderful colleagues and co-workers for my contributions to multilingualism I have more preps than the majority of teachers in secondary schools as most German and French teachers do yet I don't get the same stien as other world language teachers the district explained that it was because of funds and I accepted that begrudgingly but this year that was increased so now there is more money going to people who have earned that multilingualism point yet German and engl German and French are still excluded please consider adding those languages for the bilingual sient thank you
034thank you next up we have Jeff Ari no and next up we have Aaron green welcome good evening superintendent Kingsley members of the board later on you'll hear staff uh discuss the special education advisory committee and as a volunteer member of that committee for the past three years I thought it was essential that you hear a parent perspective on how that committee operates the primary purpose at least uh to me for that committee is so that the district can pretend that this Administration and the director of is value stakeholder input it clear that the structure of the committee is designed to limit and silence its members and the public while maintaining the ability to claim stakeholder engagement members of this committee are hand chosen by the district through a secret process like the Knights of
035Templar as opposed to a public meeting Forum or a public school committee staff members uh substantially outnumber parents on that committee and the parents that are chosen there's a significant percentage of PSD employees unlike the state seak committee which this committee is supposed to be modeled off of these meetings are not public there is no opportunity for public comments and no ability for committee members to bring topics to be discussed we are only given hand selected vanilla topics to provide input on we were never given the opportunity to discuss consolidation transportation safety seclusion or restraint the absentee policy or the abysmal graduation rates for integrated Services students that are trending downward and are below the state and National averages we never discussed The Chronic underidentification in this District of is students or the problematic and
036arguably discriminatory overidentification of Hispanic and Latin American students we have though discussed the district's challenges in hiring is Staff 3 separate times during my time on that committee last year several of us volunteered additional time to serve on subcommittees to be parent mentors to lead parent help sessions and trainings to improve the experiences of incoming students and parents and to help parents navigate the transition that their students are having going into the different uh Elementary School to middle school middle school to high school is Administration never followed through on taking us up on the volunteering of participating in those subcommittees and volunteering extra time my recommendations for this committee are more po parent members I know people who have applied multiple times trying to be on this committee and they continue to be rejected transparent
037Recruitment and selection process it's a public school for goodness sakes why are there secretive uh processes for selecting these individuals and support subcommittees in their work allow the group to vote on at least 50% of the topics that the group discusses that seems really reasonable to me and request that the committee present to the board at least once a year talking about some of the major initiatives that we want to see this community is full of people who care and want to contribute why that's so threatening to the administration and is I don't know thank you thank you all right thank you all for speaking tonight we going to move on to 5.0 board topics and committee reports this agenda item is an opportunity for board members to provide an update on committee work or
038speak to board topics do any board members have something to report go ahead Kevin um again to my call for this part of the agenda I'd like to hear the whereabouts of my colleagues about the board of directors and what you've done the last couple weeks I don't have much report other than I got to join superintendent Kingsley uh at a first date uh at Linton spent some time there um and I love the energy and I wanted to if I haven't told the rest of the board this um we spoke with a teacher who was retiring and it was her last first day ever and so superintendent Kingsley wisely asked her for some input as to you know what we're doing well what we could do better and she said more of this get
039in schools talk to teachers talk to us more and I think she met superintendent Kingsley but I also think that she might have met the board as well so um that was a wonderful um visit to Linton I always like going to to Linton and I encourage everyone to keep going to their school visits and I'd love to hear what you guys did last two weeks any go ahead Scott yeah uh I got a chance to uh to visit bolts on the first day of school and it was amazing uh Josh and his team do a fantastic job over there you can tell uh there's a real feeling of family there the longevity of the staff is unbelievable um actually just ran into the assistant principal uh at a lacrosse game this weekend down in
040uh eie and uh and he came right up and we were talking about more stories about bolt so I was really excited so thanks for the invite for that um I don't know if you guys remember the last uh board meeting we had the assistant coach from uh Lincoln Middle School come and and talk and I followed up with him after the uh after the meeting and went over and watched a practice or the end of a practice um of their team and got a chance to check out their facilities and really understand some of the issues that he brought up and it really brought to home you know there there are things we're talking about with funding and and things like that uh that are you know everybody can agree on uh but there's
041a lot of things that maybe people think are boring um field maintenance uh weight rooms uh installation of equipment things like that but it's super important um to those uh those people at the schools the students especially there's a pride that those kids and teachers have about Lincoln uh even though their facilities are not you know bright and shiny like Tim neth in in Wellington so it's really good to to see that to see how he gets around um he's got an ADA van that he drives right out to the field and uh and he's out there running uh running uh quarterback drills and things like that this kid's amazing it's James and uh um anyhow so it really brought to brought home a lot of things uh to me to be there in person
042so I encourage all fellow board members to to get out and visit your schools and uh and learn about some of the challenges they have so um that was that was my week thanks go ahead Jim uh I'll move it back Kristen and I visited are we there Kristen and I visited Harris and PCA together and both were great visits uh in the Harris bilingual visit we had got to meet with a number of parents there and one of them a Spanish-speaking parent spoke to us in Spanish for a bit and although my high school Spanish is not that great um I did pick up Familia and corazone and Familia is family and cazon is heart and the the family and the Heart totally came through in this visit it was just uh amazing uh
043one of the English-speaking parents talked to us about uh how they were able to help some of the Spanish-speaking parents navigate some of the systems that are frequently difficult for Spanish speaking parents to to do so it was uh it was just a really heartwarming and fantastic business visit and they're doing fantastic things academically so that was one visit uh the second one was to PCA pter Community Academy uh Alternative High School and um things that struck me there were the the things this place is doing with their limited resources in the building the two principles there share in office so that there can be a room for uh for the mental health counselor the um the academic counselor was actually out in the hall on a bench uh counseling a student so I was
044just uh so impressed with I mean sad in a way with the limited resources and so impressed how this group is uh working miracles to make that work that was it and I'm going to jump in on that Jim because um yeah we got to it was fantastic visits and I just wanted to um give a shout out to um Aila and Kao who um were the students who showed us around um and a Aila was um guiding me through um through Harris and oh my gosh that she just had so much confidence and so much energy and she was absolutely fabulous um and one of the things she had told me was that um she had gotten her confidence um as a Spanish-speaking um student because she was helping her teacher pronounce things correctly
045and then she has been just standing up and speaking ever since and she's she's going to go places I I just know it um so I just wanted to thank Norma for that fantastic visit um and then for PCA you know and this is going to lead into a couple of other things too um the things that they are doing with their limited um funding and and the building that is um believe the oldest in the district if I'm yeah I want to say the oldest in the district we'll fact check that later um but certainly in the most need um and so you know one of the asks was um we'd really like to just focus on the educational aspect of this and not have to worry about the holes in the ceiling that
046leak that then we have to worry about what's happening is there mold growing is so there's a lot to go into that kind of thing um also got to talk to to Kristen suty at at Linton who you described having a meeting um with a lot of people um was it Pace that you were meeting with and IR thank you yep and so you know and then it started to rain and then everybody just picked up a bucket and started going around and feeling okay well you get that leak and I'll get this leak and um so as you know you'll you'll hear um as part of our discussion later um these are the things that we're we're currently dealing with and yet we are focusing so much on our academics and the kids are
047getting um such a wonderful wonderful education um I just want to give a shout out um to you all who are doing that um got to visit Warner Elementary as well and that was just a um what a fun visit that was it was like a old home week for me because I got to meet I um uh Hayden Camp has basically stolen all of the student all of the teachers from tlli from when my students went at to T so it was I was like I didn't know you were here and you were here it was great and the the kids were just I mean what they were working on in the first week of school was absolutely amazing so um I just want to give a shout out to um all of the
048schools that I got to visit the students I got to meet the teachers that are doing such wonderful work work already um and the principles who are keeping a lid on it so thank you go ahead Jess so I haven't gotten to a school outside of my own kids so not there yet but um Scott and I had the chance to have our first student advisory council meeting um and they were really grappling with trying to make sure that they keep the group tight so that they can be really effective but also taking a really strong leadership role and making sure that all the schools can be represented and making sure that they have a plan for if students do apply after the deadline but they're from a school that's underrepresented to still make sure
049that those voices get into the room and I really want to do a shout out actually for Dwayne because he has done a really good job and I'm trying oh sorry I don't know how I missed you um he's done a really great job over the course of the last couple of years building the kids capacity to be leaders in that room and in that space so that they get to actually have ownership of that group and they're bringing forward their thoughts and their ideas and you know their experience in our district because they're who we serve first so that was a really amazing experience and I'm really looking forward to another year anyone else wanted all right go ahead Scott I forgot um speaking of of Dwayne uh uh we had DAC our first
050EC meeting and I have to say I absolutely absolutely love that committee um I was on dab for many years and and really enjoyed my time there DAC is is fantastic as well and um we have a several new members and I'm very excited for what's coming up I think it's going to be really good you guys will see some of the feedback or uh from just this one meeting uh really a group effort to uh to give some feedback to us for the uip so uh that'll be coming up later in the meeting but uh again Dwayne's leadership on that has been really helpful to to make that an effective group thank you all right going once going twice all right we are going to move on to uh 6.0 consent agenda would any
051board members like to pull anything from consent okay seeing none um can I get a motion I can go I move that the board approved the proposed whoops I'm off one I move that the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for the items on the consent agenda can I get a second all right thanks Kevin and Jill can you please call the vote Jim bookish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havelda hi Carolyn Reed hi Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 70 all right thank you uh moving on to item 7.1 casby resolutions can I get a motion okay Jess I move that the board approve the proposed pter School District Board of Education resolutions to be submitted to the Colorado Association of school boards for the upcoming legislative session
052as presented can I get a second than thank you Connor all right would any board members like to discuss the legislative and policy agenda I know I would yes all right so we had um a couple of casby resolutions that um I had drafted based on our previous conversations with the legislative commit uh sorry with the legislators when um we were talking to them um when was that in May uh so um this first one here is actually the new me new teacher mentoring and this one is actually the same from last year um and we just wanted to keep that in this year um the um the teacher mentoring grant program has been we we are down to I believe one um new Mentor um so the grant has just been dis has disappeared
053and so we would like to have the state put into some yearly funding for this so that we can go ahead and keep that mentoring um did you have anybody have any comments on on that go ahead Jess I mean it sounded like a great program when we've gotten feedback from teachers and the mentoring team so I'm really glad that we're continuing to push for this anybody else okay so that looks like we can keep that in there and the second one and this is the newer one this was coming this was coming from our legislative discussion in May um is the rural school funding um and right now just looking at it um between a new Finance formula the fact that we are not a rural District yet we have rural schools uh we
054are looking at trying to engage um both casby and the legislature to looking at how can they fund rural schools within Metro districts at a higher rate so that we as a district don't have to support um the fact that we have you know 35 kids going to a school and the busing is you know consistently a larger area that kind of thing so that is the gist of what we have up here at the world uh rural school funding and I don't know what y'all have uh thoughts on that go ahead Kevin so is the is the trying to distill this as best I can so what we're pushing for is a legislative action item that would give rural schools the funding they need while not being categorized as a rural School District so
055that we as a district are not providing the sub not Subs hate that word but providing additional monies where they otherwise would be eligible from the state that's but that is not currently included in this the school Finance act this would be a separate issue yeah Dave did you want to take that yeah this would be a this would be a modification to the new school Finance act that they're talking about so there's the new formula um in there there's um criteria where local and um rule is defined and right now we would not be participating in that because we're a large District um but this change would actually provide some funding for those schools that would meet certain criteria as being rural um and then provide additional funding to the district for that he
056Conor I think that obviously from what I know about it is going to be a very heavy lift um to get that done because it seems like quite a complex formula at the state however the thing that I would like to highlight I have become um more educated on this issue because of involvement from people in the community um some people who are here this evening um I think they've done a tremendous job and I'd like it noted also that they're not in the rural community they're from the city and they see this as a problem and an issue of equity and I'd like to thank them thank you may absolutely go ahead Jess um on this note I think that in the last year when we were talking about long range planning there was
057a very consistent message from our community and from our board that we wanted to maintain our rural schools and so I think this matches the values that we've already set forth and so I'm really supportive of this other questions or comments all right Jill can you call the vote Jim bookish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havelda hi Carolyn Reed hi Scott Shan Bower hi Jessica Zamora I motion passes 70 thank you all right moving on to 7 point to you ballot issue for 2024 coordinated election can I get a motion go ahead Kevin point of clarification are we amending should we have the discussion should we make the motion for the amended first we have to make a motion and then we can vote to amend this part is that's what I
058the original motion first okay so make the fir okay I move that the board approve the resolution is presented in the board agenda packet call an election on November 5th 2024 authorizing a ballot issued for a debt free schools M Levy setting the ballot title and content for the ballot issue and providing other matters relating there to can I get a second thank you Jess all right um and then let's go have a discussion anybody want to kick that off and yeah can I yes please if it's okay with members of the board I'd like in a second to invite our chief finance officer Dave Montoya to set a little bit of context for the community around what the board will be discussing and why we're here and I just want to take just a
059brief moment to kind of reiterate some of the remarks I made uh in my superintendent report earlier is that what I believe as a governance team you are attend attending to tonight through conversation and maybe a vote is really trying to tend to significant District needs that this this District does not have financial means or financial resources to tend to and we need help um whether that's maintaining our aging infrastructure and our buildings trying to find creative ways of attracting and retaining a talented Workforce both our teachers and our staff as I shared with you the needs of our classrooms today are different than what they were 50 years ago the workforce is constantly Dynamic and evolving in our career Pathways in our classrooms and our curriculum materials and our Career Technical education offerings have
060to continue to evolve with that Dynamic Workforce to not just meet the needs of our local community but a global Community I think that's really important and collectively we've heard loud and clear from our community over the last 12 months that they want us to continue to figure out Creative Solutions to continue to support our neighborhood schools and so again I just want to reiterate to the community as you're listening both to the members of the board and the conversation that you're hearing tonight that our district does not have a sustainable funding stream today it's not a future problem these are problems that are in our district today we do not have a funding stream for any of these particular needs that need to be tended to I'd love to invite Dave Montoya our chief
061finance officer to talk a little bit about context not just in terms of the need but around how School finance and uh debt-free Mill kind of function in its capacity prior to the board engaging and thoughtful dialogue was that okay absolutely I think it's very important that we understand um because this is a new way of looking at raising some money uh some funds for the schools um what a debt free Mill versus a bond versus a m ofy override is and so I think it's extremely important for us to kick it off this way appreciate that yes welcome Dave great thank you for the thank you for the introduction there uh so yeah you hit the three the big points there there's a lot of feedback on that thing um you hit all the
062big points on that uh on the the opening there let I wanted to start off with maybe just grounding us a little bit in school finance and why Mills bonds debt free mivies are even a thing in Colorado um we talk a lot in budget about uh total program and the board will probably remember we talked a lot about funded people count times a PPR per people revenue and that provides us what we call Total program for the district um our general fund is primarily 75% total program so that's the largest revenue stream we have um many years before I was doing this um that the state realized that the total program funding was not going to be adequate for district needs across the state and um so they created mechanisms within the statute that
063allows districts to go out and seek additional revenues for Capital and programs and we'll talk about how uh there's different options there um I I before I dive into it though I want to just ground Us in understanding that these options um are where where districts will go out and ask their voters for local support and and there's some really big inequities across the state in the ability to do that um and it and it has a lot to do with property tax wealth in the district has a lot to do with voter support in those districts um but there are districts in the state of Colorado that would have a very hard time passing anything because they just don't have the property wealth there to do it um and so this has been a
064problem for uh for school districts in Colorado for for decades and um and the mechanisms that they came up with uh kind of further create these uh these inequities across districts because some districts do have the ability to do that and and those that do often do go out and ask for additional support um so the there's basically three mechanisms that I want to highlight tonight that are that are kind of in this Arena um let's take the uh let's take the the traditional mil Levy to start off with a traditional mil Levy is what our school district has had most history with um and it's a it's a request to go above and beyond total programming for programming so we'll often go out and in in the past we've uh we've done mental health
065we've done security um Tech refreshes or other things that have come from prior milies um and and why that's important for us is that since 1988 we've actually had voter support and approval for six voter overrides um and I gave you kind of a flavor of some of those that this goes back all the way back back to 1988 so it's it's we've been doing it for a while um and that generates about $65 million of additional Revenue to the district to be pter school district um without that additional Revenue we would be a very different District we would be talking a lot more about being a floor funded district and and we just would not be able to do the things that we're able to do in pter school district without that voter support
066so always shout out and appreciate that um in context I I mentioned that total program is about 75% of our budget general fund budget the overrides that we've already passed from 1988 to 2019 the six of them um if you total those up they come up to about $65 million or or 15% of our budget so so that's a sizable addition to what the state is providing Us in total program and and again it is really what makes cter School District what it is compared to what we would be without that funding um we would be a floor funded district and we would not be off in near the programming that we're able to do now um because of that can I interrupt you for one second can you explain to the public what a
067floor funded means yeah yeah sure um so floor funded means when we talk about total program um what floor funding means is just looking at the dispersement of the per people Revenue amounts and the floor comes into the into the understanding that there are certain districts that are at the bottom of that funding stream when you look at a per pupil amount and and there's a couple reasons why we we hit the floor um and it's really and I'm going to talk about the current Formula that we're under now um at a future board meeting we're going to come back and talk about formulas in much more depth um so the first thing is is that the state adjusts so everybody gets a base funding and so so that would be kind of that that
068floor idea um then there's items where the the state starts to differentiate for districts so for example there's a small school adjustment that currently happens in the in the current Formula so District that are extremely small um think about districts on Eastern Plains up in the mountains things like that um they will not they will be getting a large size adjustment whereas pter School District were the eighth ninth largest District now um we would not be receiving a large size adjustment so that's one of the things that pushes us to the floor one of the biggest differentiating things that happens in the school Finance formula and the new formula starts to get at this a little bit is the cost of living adjustment and this is really what creat creates a big disparity between us
069and other districts in in the the state especially those large districts that we compare to so when we when we look at other districts especially in the metro area Boulder um St Vine to some extent um there's adjustments in the current Formula that provide additional funding for um cost of living and so if the cost of living and and the state does a a cost of living report every two years and they differentiate the funding based on that that cost of living adjustment pter School District has historically not gotten a large cost living adjustment based on that study that the state does and that's another reason why we get pushed down to the floor the last one is um the last big piece of the current funding formula is our atrisk funding and yes we
070have atrisk students but we don't have a high concentration of at risk students like you might find in aora or DPS so we don't get a lot of funding from that so you take kind of the summary of that we don't get a large size adjustment we don't get a large cost of living adjustment um and and so those those pieces end up pushing us to What's called the floor so the floor basically is defined in the current School Finance act as being 95% of the Statewide average so they take the Statewide average of that perp amount and they calculate 95% of that and no district will receive anything less than that as it turns out P pter School District sense Inception of the this idea has been at the floor so we've always been
071at the floor I I'm very accustomed to it because I've been presenting about it for a long time um but this new school Finance formula has an opportunity maybe change that a little bit so so that's a little background on what a floor funded district is does that help okay thank you very much you bet okay so uh coming back to the traditional Mev override just wrapping up there um one of the things with the traditional mevy override is that there's a certain percentage that you cannot exceed when you go out to the voters for that and and prior uh prior to the last legislative session that was 25% of total program so again that per people amount times the number of kids 25% of that would be your max there were some legislative changes
072last uh spring that have extended those caps out a little bit I think it's like 27% but don't I'm seeing a shake of the head back there okay so 27% is the new cap um so uh we do have a little bit of capacity in there but again we've we've authorized six voter approved uh traditional mevy overr rights so our capacity is somewhat limited there the second item that I want to talk about is bonds and and um we have in this District uh issued many bonds over the years uh for Capital Construction that's typically where we get um am I still projecting there seems like I just lost it there okay um so the uh for the bonds uh what what what that is is and this is how we've been dealing with maintenance
073in the district for since I've been here um there is no dedicated Revenue stream from the state for maintenance and operations so what has often happened is school districts and we're not the only one that does this um what we would typically do is we go out and issue a bond um what happens with the bond it's it's very similar I'd like to explain it almost like a mortgage payment at home right so a bond is where you go out you ask for some money um in the form of cash and your obligation is to return that money over time by paying principal and interest um so very similar to how a mortgage would work at at home right and so bonds are very very specific in the fact that there's a certain dollar amount
074that's collected they need to be expended in a certain amount of time and they come with principal and interest so you're actually paying interest um to do a bond and those are typically amortized over 20 24 years um so so under the bond scenario and we have done that uh typically what you'll see is a lot of Capital Construction comes from bonds of which makes sense you go out you're going to build a new school you issue bonds and then those bonds would be sold you have the cash to build the building you build the building and then you pay it back over time um so so that is something that we have done and um and we we actually had a cycle where we would go out and issue a bond every couple every
075eight to 10 years and that's how we would kind of bridge this Gap with maintenance um again I'm really highlighting the problem with this is the fact that you're you're actually typically charging things that are maintenance oriented and then you're amortising them over 20 to 24 years which doesn't make a lot of sense and and I've even had public uh presentations around elections in the past where people have called that out say what do you you know that doesn't make a lot of sense so we have issued bonds um we we have a a large bond that will be paid off soon and so that will create a little bit of capacity in the in the taxing Arena to actually go out and ask the voters to retain some of that um and that's part
076of what we're going to be talking about tonight um so again bonds come with this idea of amortising over over time with principle and interest um which has that problem I mentioned so then that comes into this this third category that uh that really is a newer category and it was something that was passed in the state legislature back in 2019 and it's called a debt-free mivia override and the idea is to get school districts out of this bad habit of issuing bonds and paying interest on things that shouldn't be amortised over time um so it's an ongoing Revenue source to provide ongoing Capital maintenance needs um so you don't have this cycle where you expend it over 8 to 10 years and then you're having to go back out and and try to renew
077that every time um so so this is a mechanism that would allow us to actually Target those ongoing needs um and to not pay interest with it so that's the idea is that there's an ongoing Revenue stream you we have ongoing maintenance that's never going to end um and so you line those two up and and the idea is that you get out of this this cycle issuing bonds for things you shouldn't be doing hope that helped with some of the understanding yes thank you very much that that that really does help um to hopefully that that helps people um watching at home and who may have questions later um of why we're going for the debt free Mill versus asking for a bond um this would allow us to not have to pay interest
078on it um on what we maintenance that we need to do anyway so I feel like that's a um it's a very important distinction for for that um so with that um is there anybody who would like to go ahead and start or do we want to is there um do we I don't know if we want to start with the discussion on that and make an amendment or if there was an amendment first that we wanted to go ahead and do okay discussion first sounds good all right um and I can kick that off um so I think Dave you you nailed that right we are a flora funded District and what that means is when the state decides how much money um districts will get we get the lowest amount uh Boulder gets
079more because of the cost of living adjustment um everybody around us gets more we are the floor funding we are the lowest um I hear a lot um from people saying but my property taxes have gone up so much and the school district gets that and unfortunately that's just not true um the property taxes go up it goes to the state and the state says Nope you still get your floor funding and that is what you get and then the only thing that we get on top of that is the M Levy so you know what we ask for um I think it's an oversimplification but it's um it's generally you know the best way to describe it if I'm you know um I'm looking at you Dave like yeah I I I I think
080that that so basically what happens is that um total program is made up of two things it's made up of local property taxes in state aid and so the local property tax is collected and it's actually retained by us that would be the disting distinction I'd make there okay but the state knows how much we're getting right and so then the state does a calculation on their side and says okay you're bringing in this much property tax we only have to give you this much State Equalization to bring you up to the floor I always think of it as you know there's so the money coming in we we are ceilinged so the money coming in no matter how much money is coming in from local property taxes this we have a ceiling and so
081the state can only give us so much till we hit that that ceiling if that's does that yeah y okay so I just want to make sure that I'm explaining that um to people because it is it's a complicated process and it's hard to understand how with our property taxes going up how is it not going to the schools and the the answer is because it's it's just being adjusted so that we are always at floor funding so no matter how much is coming in from local property the state just pays gives us less to make up for that so I would say maybe down to even further what you were talking about the the ceiling is created by that Dynamic of those two variables I was talking about funded pupil count and per pup
082Revenue if you think about those two they don't have anything to do with necessarily property tax and so that's you multiply those two together that gives you the total then that total is paid from a combination of property taxes and state aid if property tax goes up state aid goes down because you're still coming back to the funded people count times per people revenue of which we're at the floor yeah so go ahead go ahead Kevin absolutely sorry I've got some clarifying questions I might be helpful to frame this too it's exactly what you're talking about Dave um so the first thing is can we go back to what did we certify in January as sort of a primer for a community can we talk about that and then where the numbers came from for
083this for this specific Mill of the override 49 yeah sure so going back to the certification in January um we certified A M Levy for total program so that's required for that that part of our share of total program we also certified A M Levy for all of our M Levy overrides I mentioned the six that we have me makes up 65 million and we also certified A M Levy and this shows up separate on our property tax statements for the bond and so the bond is servicing the debt service the principal and interest payments on all the bonds that we've issued over the years um so that that's how that's what we did back in January okay um what was the next part of your question so the in between question was what do
084what was that number I think it was 35 is what we're set out in my L 35 or 37 uh for the bond yeah hang on and we can come back to that what driving where did the 49 come from So So currently I i' see where you're going with this um yeah no no I follow you now um so the the bonds that uh so one of the things that happened and I mentioned it quickly as I was talking is that we're retiring or paying off a bond right and so in the past um and even in this this certification that we did we're still having Debt Service of around just over $50 million right around there when this Bond retires that's going to drop down to closer to 32 million so part of
085this thing that we're talking about here is capitalizing on the fact that there's going to be a little bit of capacity there we're also talking about a tax increase of which goes beyond what I just talked about there so those two are bundled Together part of what you're going to be thinking about tonight is taking advantage of that drop in debt while also asking for some more property tax at the same time step on you madam president no I it's such a complicated issue that I think the more we can go ahead and talk about it in very um broad terms and and understandable terms it's all the better um and just to point out too on our website here um there is a um understanding psds budget formula there's a video that uh has
086been put together by Brian one of Dave's uh team members and it is fantastic it just really does a great job of explaining how it is that even though you're paying more um property taxes it is not affecting what we receive at all and that we are still a floor funded district and so I think that's one of the most important parts for people to take away is that um regardless of what is already being um no matter what we are just getting that floor funding and I think that that's a very important thing and so go ahead and take a look at that at that video um and it just makes sense too that as we are um paying off that bond which again we're paying interest on that that we can take some
087of that and we can roll it into the um or use that capacity um to use that for the debt free Mill which allows us to do some of the same things of Maintenance and buildings and that sort of thing without having to pay any interest on that so I think that's an important distinction too okay are there other um discussion items that we would like to go through yeah go ahead Connor well first and foremost I'd like to thank Dave and his team for you know providing all the education that they have um as well as audit committee who uh takes a big chunk of this as well um they've done a great job um not getting into the weeds of floor funding and bonds rolling off um I'll be supporting this this evening
088because our teachers our staff people in this room are not paid at market and that's not right and we listened to the voters all during the consolidation process last year who who adamantly told us that their teachers their pa professionals everybody is worth us going to the voters to raise some taxes for them we need to provide them safe learning environments we need to provide our students safe buses to school we just have to do this as a community it is going to be a hard lift but it is one that is well worth it excellent thank you Jess sor I love everything you just said and I'm going to totally put my math teacher hat on because that's how I roll so what I just heard from Dave if I'm breaking this down we're
089adding $17 million of new dollars to our budget I mean if we roll the 32 as far as 17 million in new taxed dollars right so bring it in but we also have $700 million in infrastructure needs which if we divide that by that 49 million that's about 14 years and I don't know about anybody else in our community there's not a lot in my own personal house that lasts for 14 years so even if we just took care of the things that are just currently in our needs this this money would go really far it can do a lot of good and we can make our schools safe we can make them good learning environments um the other thing I want to make sure we bring back is when we did the bond the
090last time there were some dollars that were set aside specifically for improving infrastructure at some of our older buildings when we go for bonds that list is usually relatively short and I think if I'm correct the last Bond only had about $40 million in it that's a drop in the bucket of the $700 million in need right and if we're only doing that eight to every eight to 10 years we're not even inching forward so and I remember my kids were just starting out in the district at that point right and I remember hearing a lot of families CU I live in Midtown they live in older schools and they really wanted to know like okay we're going to go for this Bond and we understand kids need these new schools but my kids school
091needs stuff too and I think this is an answer to that question that was asked eight years ago right so while I know that a lot of the reason that we're pushing for this and some of the pieces in this puzzle are because of the conversations we've had in the last year this conversation spans a decade of need and so I really encourage I will be voting for it I encourage everyone to vote for it not just because of the conversation of the last year but really for the conversation of the last decade and I will Echo that and just throw in there too um you know one of the things that we really got to see up close and personally last year was the fact that we have $800,000 in maintenance set aside every
092year and the first week of school Fort Colin High School's Chiller went out and that cost us a million dollars to replace so when we don't have you know when we are looking at that and we're saying well okay not only is it now we're of a budget but we have an entire school year to go through and we have no maintenance funds with which to do anything else but replace that one Chiller and when you start looking at it in those kinds of um little bites if you will um what you realize is how much need is out there how much we make do I'm thinking about you know krisen the story you're telling me um at Linton where you're having a a meeting and casually holding trash buckets so that you can catch
093the rain that's coming through the roofs um you that kind of need has been pushed off and pushed off because we wanted and rightfully so to keep everything that we possibly could um at to at the Forefront for our um our students our teachers our principes our nutrition workers our our bus drivers our par professionals we did not want to have any of that um lacking going there we wanted to you know so it it falls onto the buildings well we can do the rugs next year well we can do the roof next year and it just perpetuates and perpetuates and now we find ourselves quite literally with $700 700 million dollars worth of need just to fix things and we had a conversation the other day about you know that billion dollars that you're
094throwing around seems like a a loose number and a um you know just sort of a rounding error if you will but it is it's $750 Million worth of um maintenance and if you look through the mckinstry foundations um and that's a link on our the website as well you can see what every school needs you can see what we would love to be able to do in our fiveyear plan we would love to be able to not only just fix the leaking roofs but put solar up there we would love to not only make sure that the buses are running but get electric buses we would love to be able to do these things and we are band-aiding things and duct taping things right now so that the students do not see or feel
095any of the um implications of not having enough money um the other 250 so that's the 750 million the other 250 million is if we're looking at putting air conditioning in and you know we've heard arguments too about well if we're going to do that maybe you know move the calendar and we can talk about moving the calendar absolutely and I look at putting in air conditioning into elementary schools and suddenly you can start using those buildings in the summertime whether it's for summer school whether it's for year round school whether it's for um the um what you know whatever needs might be coming up in the summer um for students we would be able to use them right now they're not usable uh when it's 100 degrees out so there's a lot there um
096that I know it feels like a heavy lift I know it's coming at a hard time um for a lot of people and I just you know I I just want to say that um we have a plan for this too um one of the other things that we had heard uh was that there was a lack of details of how you know what is going to happen with that $750 million because that's an awful lot of money and that seems like an awful lot of need and again on that website what you'll see is there is a list of every school and whether or not this money is going to help with small school funding whether or not this money is going to help with um prioritizing um teachers teachers AIDS par professionals bus
097drivers um nutrition workers um principles APS um whether or not this is going to put um I learned what rtus are rooftop units for HVAC systems um so it has a very specific list for every single School of what you can expect to happen hopefully in the first five years and the reason I say hopefully on that is because we're going to be limited to the people who are capable of doing the work for us I think that would be the limit on this so I understand the questions I understand the um the concerns and I just want to say wholeheartedly that I support this I think this is going to be a great great thing for our schools and um you know the other thing that I I want to throw out there is
098that I have heard well why do yall need this because you're doing so well already you do such good work and to that I credit our staff who are magicians I swear that they can literally take a dollar and make five out of it I don't know how they do that um but we are at a point where we cannot do that anymore we are at a Breaking Point and it's not looking to the Future as Mr Kingsley said that we're going to see a breaking point we are at one right now it is here on our doorsteps and to Jess's point we had talked about this for quite some time for the past decade and you know this is one of those things that it just it's here now and we have to do
099something now so go ahead Caroline so as I've been sitting here listening to everybody talk about being a floor funded district and about how we have a finite amount of money to split upon amongst so many competing interests but I think we in this conversation I don't I think we kind of need to get back to being more student centered and what it's made me think about that is during the 80s my daughter went to batty Elementary and she had an IEP and I think a lot of you have heard me talk about it that she saw a speech and language therapist three hours a week and after a few weeks of having speech and language therapy they thought that she needed another hour of speech and language therapy and I wonder if now with
100all the competing interest and the finite amount of money that we have if my daughter would get that fourth hour a speech and language therapy that she needed so badly and so I also think that we have to understand that when we don't have the money to do all these things that are competing interest you know are we going to be robbing from our kids' needs and so I'd like us to focus back on that what this money needs for fulfilling our children's needs too thank you Jim go ahead yeah I love what you said Carol and I'm totally supportive and I ALS also support the uh the debt free Mill I'd like to Rift just a little bit more though on Justin and Kristen's numbers because if we we had mckinstry go and do
101a study that study's been around for I don't know six to nine months and they came back and said oh you need 600 to 700 million in um in maintenance over the next 10 years so if we take that number and just divide it by 10 then I need 600 then I need 6 60 million a year right if I take the low number 60 million and that's a a big number and now if this would not pass we have to ask ourselves well um where would that money come from I I mean let's say we didn't even spend the full 60 million a year let's say well we're going to we're going to skimp right like we've been barely getting buy for a long time let's say we only spent 30 million a year
102um one point I'd make is I in my own home I've had an experience where I've I delayed replacing my water heater on schedule and I wind up flooding the basement for a much bigger expense uh so I think we wind up with some of those kinds of things but in addition we have to ask ourselves if even if we just spent half of the 60 million per year where would that 30 million come from it comes from one place right we we're 85% salary isn't that right Dave so it comes out of salaries it comes out of people so we wind up not having as many people or paying them less neither of which are good options to me and that totally gets back to Carolyn's point of um that that results in cutting
103services and those kinds of things so um I'm just and when I think about $1 million that's roughly 10 teachers or roughly 30 Paris so 30 million is roughly um do them at 300 I mean it's yeah I don't I don't even want to do it right it's it's a huge number of teachers and so and and we're going to get stuck in a spot where we're going to have to do some of this maintenance so um I'm strongly in support go ahead Scott I'll let Kevin have the last word because it'll be an hour I'm sure got okay all right um sorry I should not insult this is serious stuff so um I wanted to remind everybody what we went through last year um with the talk about consolidations uh we heard loud and
104clear from the community slow down explore all the options you can possibly explore don't rush this um I see this M Levy as a way to buy time to do all the things that we heard we heard from thousands of voices about this and um you know we need to we'll be talking about a longrange steering committee a permanent committee I think that's something that I'm definitely in support of uh we need to be talking about that and having a plan for when we Face challenges like we're facing right now what do we do we need time this buys this time um I think it's also important to note that our schools are crumbling like there there are some really um desperate things that are going on there's teachers that are buying their own equipment
105to keep their their room functional um we owe it to them we owe it to the students to uh to step up and uh and work on that um I think the uh the big thing is is is that Community voice uh we're there are seven of us here making huge huge decisions that are affecting the whole Community um I'll go into little Civics I always try to remind my kids to pay attention to the Civics we are not a democracy we're a representative Republic even in this little area um but at some time at some points the people need to be heard and they deserve a chance to to chime in and and really let their opinion be known on this very very important issue in the community so I am in support of
106getting it on the ballot and let it let the people have a chance rather than it just be left to us um I guess the the last thing is is to Jess's point we have been kicking the can down the road for years in this district and that's why it's so desperate that um you know we're we're putting pressure on Brian and his team to to make Cuts because the budget it's a big budget you know there's room to to cut and he's he's done uh some initial cuts that are really significant but we're going to keep that pressure up so as a good Steward we're going to be pressing pressing from that side but just like Jim was saying there are some maintenance things that just have to be done uh and the the
107need is immediate so I will be supporting this as well go ahead Kevin um thank you I'll cut my hourlong comments down to 30 minutes director shanower um the joke is well taken I'm fairly verbose um so I've been organizing my thoughts around this I've been thinking about this obviously this topic we all have for months now and it's a huge decision and like any big decision we've been doing our processes talking to each other thinking talking to our trust advisers I seek input from our community from our leaders some of whom are in the room um the emails that uh we've all read I even went back to some emails from May when we were in the throws of consolidation because I know our vernacular tonight is it was last year it was three
108months ago so I want I want it feels I don't feel completely emotionally over that that whole period And I know our our teachers and our staff and our administrators don't either um because it was very recent and so I think um as I'm organizing my thoughts and thinking about the world we're in um I also think the reason I asked Dave for a little presentation about how our schools are funded is because so much of this is outside of our control so much of this is outside of the purview of the people that are sitting around this table tonight and what I mean by that is that um we are cabined by the the student and the school Finance formula that we've all inherited that is the law um and so a lot of
109this the concerns from our community are well founded and I'll get back to those in a moment but the quarrel is not necessarily always with the seven of us it's with Denver and I'm trying not to make eye contact with our bond Council who I know prac in Denver um even as we speak there's a special legislative session going on right now that will absolutely impact whatever decision we make and we can't control that um the presence of 108 and 50 on the ballot potentially could have negative consequences or positive for what we're contemplating tonight which is difficult I can't control that so I go back to my my stoic thoughts about I can't control the things all the things that happen to us but I do I can control how I respond to them
110so let me start with um some of the concerns I've I've heard from our community is that there still is a um not an absence but I think there is a growing need to close the gap of trust in our community um and that starts with people in my shoes saying I'm sorry again and again and again until that message is heard and felt and resonates with our community um again I don't think any of us created the storm that we were trying to navigate last year and a lot of times it felt like we were boiling the ocean or trying to but nonetheless we had a role to play and so I could have done things better earlier on I could have been more shrill in some of the concerns that I that I
111may have expressed too late and so for that I'm sorry I'm sorry for my board members I'm sorry for leadership I'm sorry to the community for letting that process go as far as it did without getting some guard rails on so I wanted to make sure that the community heard us heard me say I'm sorry for my role in that and for the stress that that played um but the one theme I think that emerged and this gets back to our conversations I think everyone's touched on this is this need for great greater trust and transparency in our decision-making what we're doing so I appreciate everyone's thinking on this matter because it helps inform my own a lot um and I think one thing that I think will help us rebuild that trust is communicating
112often and early not only the need for why we're asking for this money but what purpose we're going to use the money for and equally as important how much we're going to use for each category I can't ask a voter to vote for something to raise their taxes when taxes are already too high I mean taxes are too high and you're going to make life just that much more difficult for people that aren't top wage earners in our community and I can't tell you with alarming Precision how much we're going to use of your money to fund various mechanisms I can't look the interest groups the professional groups we got in the face and tell them how much paa is going to get as far as that slice I can't tell Ace or Pace the
113same thing and I don't think any of us in our room can I don't think with the numbers you've got Dave I don't think you could do that with Precision again with a lot of what we're going on with the special session so there's going to have to be a little bit of trust on our part and Trust in the community um and there's concerns still that we're not spending money adequately and a lot of that may be public perception versus what's the actual um truth of the matter but it's our job I think to to trumpet ourselves and say we are spending money appropriately and I think we're going to hear in our uip presentation tonight how well we are doing and so I think the proof is in the pudding in there and
114so I think I go back to something that that director Duffy said sh director Shar I think it's been sprinkled throughout which is I'm wrestling with all this and is now the the appropriate time to make this ask because of the being on the the coattails of where we were in May with consolidation school closures with the crowded nature of the ballot that we've got in November I have a lot of trepidation I have a lot of concerns that we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot that said the wisdom of people that that know more than I do say this is the time we have to do this and so where I go back to is exactly what you guys touched on which is our community has asses for this and so prudent or
115not and I've got my own concerns about passing the hat around for our schools even more so than we already have but I think that we owe it to our community to respect that ask and then let the let the community tell us whether they truly trust us with that uh Endeavor or not and so I think there the trust is going to flow both ways I will do everything I can to trumpet this to to pump up um the reasons why and how this is going to help our students uh uh first and foremost but I think we also have to trust the community to make good on their own requests to and I know it's going to make life uncomfortable for people I know it's going to be hard for people but I
116think that's the ask and that's where I fall on it too so I absolutely do support this um it's it's not an easy decision it's never it's not something that we take lightly and I think we have to wrestle with all those competing factors of still rebuilding the trust that the community is putting into us to use their money wisely and also to make our schools what we the vision that that superintendent Kingsley knows that they can be and so I think that's the balance and that's where I come out I'm sorry for being long-winded about that um but I do think we've got a social compact I think is what is where we're striking is that part part of this part of the ballot um measure is that we're asking our community to entrust
117us with greater funding so that we can saave off some of this consolidation um and closure talks with the understanding of what we've got right now and I know we can't make promises that we cannot keep but I think I for one am going to be asking for that money in part to saave off that consolidation talk or to place a moratorium on that for a period of three to five years and that's where I'd like a little bit more clarity from the board as far as do you view that social compa the same way because I think that's going to be something that we need pretty close alignment when we're going to our community and asking them for money so I'll leave it there I love what director Reed said and almost got choked
118up simplifying all this this is about students we're going to be the hot seat because we're the ones entrusted to spend that money appropriately for students so we've got a tough ask and a tough tall Order ahead of us and I'm up for the challenge but back to what you said that resonates with me because this is about students this is about the students and the vision of students that we the school system that we want have for our kids for not just next year but for 5 years 10 years down the road we want to be the preeminent school system in Colorado and I think we can get there so that's I'll get off my Pulpit but that's that's where I want to leave it for tonight well said it's about the students and
119I think that's that's what we are looking out for in the interest of the students so other comments guess go ahead Jess so I want to piggy back on what director F just said because I do think the apology is important and I think the I'm saying I'm sorry is an important piece of the puzzle and I think it's the subsequent actions that come after the apology that are exceptionally important as well right so it's when we ask for the committee the longrange planning committee and what that looks like and making a commitment for if we do get these dollars how do we ensure our Runway to making those decisions is it that three to five years right if we can get the dollars and again I I don't want to pigeon hold us because
12050 and 108 terrify me if they pass and we have to Grapple with entirely new problems but if we can pass our Mill and not have to have a massive new problem on our hands because of other things that are potentially on the ballot I think three to five years is reasonable because we have then a committee that's dedicated to it they're we're not trying to make them make a decision instantaneously which last year is what that felt like or three months ago that's what that felt like and so I think that's part of our commitment is staying on that and saying we're going to do something better than we've done before I think the other piece of that is going back to uh director Shar we've talked about doing a deep dive on that
121budget that need still needs to happen I do think now is our best opportunity to pass a Mill and I wish we had the opportunity to do the Deep dive before we made that ask I think that would be very trust building and again our our people that are advising us are telling us now is the best opportunity to pass it so I we have to do those things in conjunction um oh man I have so much after what you just said so I think as far as specificity goes I with a with a bond it's easier to be specific because you only have so many dollars they're onetime dollars with a mill it's going over and over if we get two specific in year one year 10 may have entirely different needs so I
122like the idea of having some level of specificity but I also am nervous to get so specific with every single one of those dollars that now the the future board and the future employees and the future cabinet of our district have no room to make their own decisions right for the needs of the students in the buildings at that point so I do like having specificity and I I want to make sure we're responsible with that level of specificity um and one thing I kept forgetting to mention earlier because we've gotten a lot of feedback on is this fiscally responsible and I think to what Dave was saying earlier we get dollars and we spend them year-over-year because we spend them on staff we spend them on getting the curriculum that we can we spend
123those dollars as responsibly as possible because our needs are great and we do focus on students because we do a phenomenal job for students academically right that's what our numbers are going to keep showing us I think with these dollars we can now do a phenomenal job for students in all of our buildings to provide them the facilities that they deserve they are getting the academics they're getting an amazing education now let's provide them the building the CTE Pathways the new opportunities that we're not able to provide because we don't have the money so I havelda I really appreciate the lead in there thank you other comments no you're it's great it's great question sure so this is a big question Dave this may not be fair and anyone jump in uh Brian actually you
124might be better suited for this but I had this this sort of wondering because I'm I'm anticipating questions we're going to get to um one is what happens if we don't pass this mevy that's a big question it's a good I think I know but I'd like to hear a little bit of clarity and anyone wants to jump in please I I'll jump in take a stab at that first um if we don't pass this miv and I'm not trying to create fear here but it was pointed out earlier our budget is 86 85% staff right and so we are we are functioning off of bond cycles and so as mentioned we have a finite pot in the bond we're reaching the end of that really quickly here and so when that Bond runs out
125which it will and if we don't have something to replace that we will have to start cutting programs and there's no way that we're going to avoid not cutting people to balance things out um it will be a very uncomfortable budget cycle where we're going to start undoing programming to put to maintenance and I just I've been here for a long time that is not a discussion or a direction that we that I think we want to go go ahead Brian I I just want to build off of that and I appreciate the question I think director Brook has tried uh not tried you started this conversation around like what's the tradeoff if this doesn't happen and I think you know whether it's listening to uh our valued Community commenters tonight or staff that's in
126the room that we've all been having conversations everybody appropriately is wrestling whether they think this is right for the district right now whether it's right for their family right for them and their employee group and their colleagues and I think it's incredibly important that we're continuing to show the level of empathy to understand why they're wrestling with it right I think leading with I'm sorry I I know I've publicly apologized myself uh but the and this is not to make excuses around what transpired over the past year I think the intentions were really good but to speed in the pace in which we were trying to tackle transformative change it was in service of fiscal stewardship but it lacked human stewardship and we've heard that from our constituents and I think what's really important to
127understand around what happens if this doesn't move forward is what is the human Story related to that as we've heard from many of our neighborhood schools who were caught in the conversation around potential consolidation and or closure what's lost on that is the size Factor adjustments that we are providing small schools today those are dollars that are coming from the other schools so director Reed as you talked about wondering if this could benefit a student like your own child in integrated Services setting you know we provided an infusion of $3.1 million in additional integrated Services Staffing two years ago it could have been significantly more than that if we weren't having offer size Factor adjustments so when we think about the different data points that we're going to see and the disproportionality that we see
128in our data our ability to tend to those things comes with a trade-off based on the limitations of our budget you appropriately uh president Draper talked about a meeting that I was at at Linton Elementary School with all of our employee group presidents a month ago on a Friday afternoon when it started to rain and it wasn't just a drip it was everybody find a bucket and figure out what to do now and I want to ask this community with this being the only method the singular opportunity to address that need is having buckets in not just that school in that classroom what I've he heard is it's the entire Delaney models of schools is that acceptable in our community that we are going to ask our teachers staff and principles to hold buckets rather
129than teach and lead and in some inst instances I think our students are doing that too that's not acceptable tomorrow I'm headed to Weber Middle School the hottest part of the day tomorrow is supposed to be the hottest day of the week the teachers and the leaders of that school and the students who are sending me pictures of their thermometers in the high 80s and the low 90s this is their singular opportunity like Linton Elementary School and the other 30 other schools that I didn't name this is the singular opportunity to address and create a cool work environment and learning environment so we never again have to consider in the future closing a school early due to heat is having our current reality acceptable that's where I think people need to lean in those human
130stories I had a community commenter today appropriately talk about me being on a bus on the first day of school it was one of the best highlights of my day the part that you didn't hear about in my speech or in my video is that his first bus that he was supposed to take me on a ride had over 200 50,000 miles and it didn't function when he when I showed up and he with his Partners had a Scramble with the superintendent I felt bad for him to find another bus that was working so he didn't have his students that he needed to pick up be late on the first day of school so for our transportation department who's wondering whether we are going to be able to improve our Fleet and be able to
131do that on a recurring basis for efficiencies and Effectiveness and make sure that those are safe this is our single singular opportunity to address that need our facility staff are magicians somebody said that earlier I think it was you we can't continue to solve $700 million in need with duct tape I mean we have extended the shelf life of every mechanical system in this system $800,000 if we were to put more of our general fund towards Capital it comes at the expense of programs and people we are already balancing our budget on the backs of cutting people the $6.6 million in reductions was not program it was people how much longer can we continue to do that and the expectation still be that we are going to have a high performing District because it isn't
132our buildings it's the people within our buildings that are making those performance happen I'd also share with you and I appreciate director Duffy talking about paying all of our employees at market and not falling behind and he was so spoton in acknowledging that we are not paying our employees at Market this is our singular opportunity in this current fiscal year and future years to continue to be competitive with our neighboring districts so if you are an employee and you're not sure on whether this fits in the mold of something that you want to support I want to ask you to ask yourself does that matter to you do does your working conditions matter to you does the equipment that you get to use matter to you because I believe that it does but this I
133believe as a board you are setting up the as the singular opportunity to address those needs and I am super grateful for it but as we continue to engage and you engage post tonight with our respective constituents I think it's really important not just showing humility around what transpired but also how how do people see themselves and what this actually means for them moving forward is a really really Mission critical to ensure that we can continue to appreciate the gem of a district that we have I've worked in three other school systems I'll close on this we are higher performing I love the places that I've worked I love this District I am a part of this community we have a gem here people know it we don't talk about it enough but we have
134to protect it we have to cherish it we have to nourish it we have to feed it and these needs don't get met we continue to be put in hard positions like we were a year ago like we did with just Dave talking it's not about stoking fear but we are continuing to just stretch limited resources and we're doing a great job but we are coming to a shelf in that space where I don't think we can continue to sustain that and expect the same experiences the same level of programs the same level of high quality staff Andor resources so I appreciate the conversation I appreciate director avda you launching uh in partnership with director brokish Shon what does what does this mean if it doesn't pass I think we need to continue to Center
135that on the human story of everything that we've heard not just this past year but for the last decade right so again thank you for the conversation thank you really appreciate that yeah go ahead Kevin couple quick follow-ups I really appreciate your comments superintendent Kingsley um I was I don't know if principal stty heard this too but in your remarks it it stung a little bit smacked a little bit you said the best part of your day was not the 45 minutes he spent with us at Lenton but um I'll move on um I I want to I want to make one more heartfelt pitch too and I want to be mindful of something that's been on my mind too about self-fulfilling prophecy of something decisions that we make and some of the rhetoric that
136we use too and I'll I'll be anecdotal I know that that where my kid goes to school and their their their kindergarten numbers aren't what they were last year now we could point the finger at a lot of causation arguments but perception matters and our community's perception of self-fulfilling prophecies including my friends at blevens are going to have take some umage with us just skipping over that fact so I think the apologies also need to go to these schools it seemed like it felt like they were targeted for these conversations and so that's why I want to extend my AP the most but exactly what superintendent Kingsley said is that I'll use another anecdote in my my alma moer law school two years after I left its um decrepit falling hallways they invested they put
137$54 million and made a brand new saate of-the-art facility and guess what their rankings went up right so it is it is an investment not only in education but the the values that we're placing in that so it's not just brick and mortar it's not just HVAC units it's we're trying to get our numbers enrollment to go up on I'm one of the people that moved here from this community in very large part because of the reputation of PSD schools there are more people like me and they may not have one year olds and two-year olds but they're coming in middle school they're coming in high school and so the reputation of what we're doing now matters and so I put it back to our community and say this is all of us and if
138we want enrollment to go back up and to continue going up we do have a 600 more or less student Delta which is difficult and that's a huge number to take on especially if it rolls through for 12 years so I think that these building blocks are what's going to get that self-fulfilling prophecy turned back in our favor that's what I think and that's why I'm going to vote for it tonight but we do need to talk about amending the language yes and I just want to add I think that's that's brilliant Uh Kevin I just want to add to that that you know one of the reasons that we moved here um I'll be at 25 years ago now was because of the school district right and so that reputation has continued and it
139evolves and it has become one of the reasons why this is such a gem right to live and be to be able to work and live in Fort Collins is amazing people will come in from all parts of the state all parts of the union and say you don't even know what you have here it's just that good and what we want to make sure that we're doing is not waiting until we start to see a downward turn we want to make sure that we are contining on that rise that we have the best in you know for our students because our students become our community members and if we can have have are the best and brightest in the Stu as uh in our classrooms they stay here they live here they work here
140and so it's what we're doing here is just continuing that that that rising of all boats making sure that all of our students all of our students and we'll see that in our uip later that all of our students are be are able to get an amazing education whether that's CTE programs whether that is academics all of it that they can go ahead and become amazing productive members of our community and they can continue this work so thank you for bringing that up I truly appreciate it and with that did you want to go ahead and yeah so I do I did have one wondering are we going to read the entire text or it's long no we we actually I I had checked legally if we needed to do that and because we have
141it up on the board and it was put into the packet we actually don't need to do that okay that's that's good think it's important that we we look at some of the language um just so the community knows we do have specifics in the actual language of the middle Levy talking about supporting our neighborhood schools uh keeping those running um also talking about uh electrical HVAC that type of thing uh CTE that's the career in Tech education that's really I think the future of this of this District um and then this seems small but it's so so important uh providing um Arts music library and physical education supplies and Facilities so students get that well-rounded education I know those things meant a lot to my kids and I know they mean to a lot
142to others uh the one area um that I I just have a small suggestion um is talking about uh the language right here says attracting and retaining highly qualified teachers and support staff by maintaining competitive salaries and providing necessary classroom materials I worry that support staff uh and we've talked about this um might feel like it's real specific about classroom support and leaves out um you know uh bus drivers maintenance facilities grounds crew I think it's important for the community to know this is not just hey we're going to throw all this money just at teachers and teachers do deserve more money but so to the rest of the staff um so if we could remove the word support um and just say attrac and retaining High highly qualified teachers and staff by maintaining so
143on um that would be my suggestion I think integrated Services that's an area I'm passionate about that we need more more help in um and I would include principles and APs too yeah for sure yeah yeah absolutely um I have official language if if that's okay if people are on board with that idea we want to have discussion on that or is that something that [Music] oh I was just going to suggest if there is a proposed change to make a a motion for it first and then there can be a discussion on that proposed change and then a vote sounds good all right um so I move that the board amend the resolution by striking the word support in the first bullet on page three so that the first bullet reads attracting and retaining
144highly qualified teachers and staff by maintain competitive salaries and providing necessary classroom materials do I have a second just for the second thank you okay sorry now we can discuss Kevin you look like you had a question it it was you had mentioned it president Jerry for I just want to make sure that it was somewhat clear and that um inclusive in that word staff now that we've um removed support or if we choose to remove support um would be our our principles and admins um I think it goes without saying what maybe it doesn't go without saying that um not only teachers but um our classified staff our professional staff are still under market and um I think there's metrices we can use and I've we've had this conversation at our Retreat about apples
145to oranges and cabinet salary but at least for right now cabining a conversation with um our principes and the the additional staff I think that's important because when we're when we're talking when we're asking our community for their support and their money they ought to know again where it's going and I think that that's it's a huge important component to this so I just want to make sure that was very abundantly clear that that's at least we're aligned as to what we're thinking that language means and then Bond Council can win if we've um uh deviated from that thank you anybody else go ahead Jess yeah I just want to say I agree with that sentiment entirely all of our employees whether you're classified staff licensed staff professional staff like you're all under market and
146therefore when we go for this Mill or if we go for this Mill I shouldn't say yes yet right we haven't voted um we need to because that's also how we support our students with the best and brightest of our staff right that's how we maintain the gem of a district is through people 85% of our budget is for the people we don't remain an amazing District unless we remain having the most amazing staff along the way so I just want to make sure I am an entire agreement I just want to make that abundantly clear um that all of our associations deserve to be at market rate and we're going to do our darnest to get you there and the famous words of Nate ditto Liv he lives on yes yes no it's extremely
147important that we that we do that um that we are all a rising T you know Rising tide lifts all boats right we need to make sure that our students are surrounded by our best principles our best APS our best bus drivers our best nutrition workers our best teachers our best pairs all you know our our students deserve that and our our staff deserve that so yes go ahead um I also just want to acknowledge that I believe we already have that too I think what this is doing is this is adequately or making an attempt to continue to adequately compensate those do and I again I'm anecdotal but I'm a parent and this is emotional for me um is that I I followed my son um to I took him to school yesterday and
148and sat and ate breakfast with him the very first person he interacted with from PSD that wasn't dad was um the the people working in the lunchroom in the in the cafeteria and that was the very first thing and now he's going to be riding the bus as another show of support for our transportation system but at the end of his day when I picked him up today he met his bus driver and their staff and I can't tell you how much that matters to him and his little brain and and me as a father too so it's I acknowledge we want the best and the brightest it's also to me an acknowledgement that we've already got those and I want to keep them and that's just it and we want to keep them absolutely
149okay so all right so with that we um need to get we got a second for the amendment so we'll need to call the vote on the amendment correct all right go ahead and do that Jim brish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin Hava hi Carolyn Reed hi Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 70 okay and is there any further discussion on the original motion okay seeing none Jo would you call the vote Jim brokish I Kristen Draper I Connor Duffy hi Kevin havelda hi Carolyn re hi Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 70 thank you all right this is this is very exciting thank you all um and I just want to say now the um okay sorry I know moving on celebration um yes yes it's a
150lot of work and so um actually I'm going to open an invitation to people who would like to um help with this help get this passed um to contact Connor um and we will set you up so thank you we we're going to need a lot of help to get move this forward so thank you moving on to 7.3 Career Tech Center contract with GH fits um let's see can I get a motion I move that the board approve the GM or sorry cmgc agreement with GH Phillips to begin preconstruction Services I get a second Jim thank you all right and then um Brian we have presentation yes we do have a short presentation uh here to present information about our Career Tech Center contract is our Chief Financial Officer Dave Montoya and I also
151have our chief institutional Effectiveness officer Dr Dwayne schmidtz to work in Partnership on this thank you welcome both so Dwayne's Gonna Take It Off from the first part and I'll catch the last part of the presentation I've got the clicker Dwayne how about you click I'll just say well first of all thank thank you so much hopefully this is coming through I appreciate our time tonight and considering this important project um the CTE programming that PSD has is truly excellent right and we all know we've seen some presentations in this boardroom about the big impact it has from the students themselves and the teachers involved so at any rate keeping up to speed on on facilities and the quality of the facilities to offer worldclass programming requires that we invest in those facilities and that
152we update things and reconfigure so one of the pieces that PST has been working on is the reconfiguring of um some facilities that are located at the pter high school and the Career Tech Center these are important for Student Success and growing this Talent pipeline in our own local community um much of the money that we're talking about tonight and the M you know the construction project that'll be taking place is to support that What's called the ptech program right so it's Advanced manufacturing I think there's approximately about 50 students enrolled in that program this year and it's been a growing program over years and with this kind of an investment it'll continue to grow um it supports the space the space that we're reconfiguring at pter high school is going to allow some Machinery
153that's been donated to pter school district from some of our industry Partners to be installed locate you know and utilized um for the students learning spaces and the the key key piece here is just these authentic Hands-On experiences that students are able to get with the equipment which we need to reconfigure the building in order to to support this type of learning space so the donated equipment has been utilized and is lo some of it's located currently at another school so we're waiting to move it into this space at pter high school we're ex excited for this construction I imagine Dave you hit the point on the timeline and when things are kind of starting and such and so this industrial grade type equipment is large and so we have to knock out a few
154walls and we have to create some world class spaces okay so the next slide the industry Partners you know that we've interviewed and talked to about their experience with this program and our students have I just kind of um cherry-picked a couple of specific statements I just want to read these two bullets um the first one says that the Community Partners enjoy you know um and want to lean into the benefits of increased student engagement improved graduation rates higher postsecondary enrollment in relevant fields and ultimately a more skilled and competitive local Workforce so this is one of our Community Partners interstates Inc Rocky Mountain Regional Office that is telling us this is their experience with this program and the students a different quote from a from a different individual reads as such establish Partnerships with
155local Industries providing students with real world experiences mentorship opportunities and potential Pathways to employment and I don't know if the board remembers but when we had students in here in staff talking about these experiences last year those mentorship opportunities are very powerful and a lot of these um students that get involved in internships and mentorship programs and then have um the experiences they're having on our school sites they have what are called these Mastery moments very very powerful for young people so it can really change your directory or trajectory is what I meant to say okay next slide so the focus of this project is really this reconfiguration or originally we had envisioned expanding the footprint of pter high school and through careful analysis and with lots of team members involvement we realize we can
156reconfigure some of the spaces there so that's really what the Grant and the money is being used for in this project is focused on so it's renovation to the existing welding Center and surrounding classrooms providing new layout for better circulation use and function and modernize and improve and expand the ptech program located at pter high school and the school you know the Career Tech Center so with that Dave maybe you want to jump into some of the specifics yeah sure thanks Dwayne um so I'm going to just gonna I'm going to catch the tail into this and talk more about the the contract and the scope of work that's going to be done um and this is kind of a twep process that uh that the board will be asked to uh to um actually
157approve so I'll talk you through that um first let's just look at the scope uh Dwayne mentioned that the uh the focus of this is to pre uh create a new layout for better circulation better use and better function so when we think about what that really means from a project standpoint what we're talking about is updating HVAC systems um for sufficient temperature control ventilation so that there's that the air that we need to move in these spaces um it's uh removing a large majority of the walls that exist in this area so um needing to do construction to remove walls there's electrical there's all sorts of things that are entailed in that as well as adding a new exterior garage door to help facilitate the placement of the equipment so those are kind of
158the highle um items that we're going to be doing in this in this um this uh project um Dwayne had mentioned I just want to come back to it the funding for this project is is really um Grant funded so um we talked a lot about not having dollars to do things with this is an area where we have gotten some support from both the Bohemian and lurmer County um they are our major Partners in this and they are funding this project about $2 million a million dollars a pieces coming from those agencies um tonight what we're asking the board to start setting off is the Construction contract I'll walk you through that in a second um right now construction with GH fips is is projected to be $1.5 million um when we come with
159a Amendment Amendment later um we'll we'll fine-tune that number um so that's the the funding stream for this now let's just talk a little bit about what action you're taking tonight and what those steps are um so tonight uh we're asking you to approve the uh cmgc contract with GH fips and cmgc stands for construction manager general contractor and it's a type of agreement where we actually engage the contractor early in the design phase so that we can work with the design and the contractor at the same time to resolve some issues that um this is going to be a complex project and I think in the cover page we had talked about we know that there is some equipment that's needed there's also some questions that we need to get in with a contractor
160working with our designers to determine exactly how that's going to be so tonight what we're doing is we're actually asking you to take the first phase of that that step and that is to approve the the pre-construction services of the cmgc contract and what that'll do is set off basically about $95,000 worth of expense to work with our to work with our designers to get a finer point on that over the next two months and we're targeting October of 2024 um so that's the first phase we we do the design work we work with the con the contractor works with the designer um the second phase will be coming back to the board with what we call a guaranteed maximum price Amendment so this first contract sets up the contract and that's why we're bringing
161it to the board for approval tonight because in the end you're going to be asked to take appr as to approve a larger contract with an amendment that is actually going to solidify the contract so it's really a two-step process um so tonight we're asking you to take that first step to engage in the preconstruction services again the cost is about 95,000 to de that part of it when we come back to the board in October with the guaranteed maximum price Amendment we'll know exactly what that project looks like in more detail and a fuller understanding of what the costs are they will have bid the pr prices out and it it literally is a guaranteed maximum price that means that that's the price that we would not exceed um given most of the conditions
162in the contract um GH fips was uh selected out of four contractors that we uh that we evaluated um and we looked at U because we're looking at preconstruction as well as fees that'll be charged during the general contractor phase so we looked at qualifications as a very high level like that's we want quality people um but we also looked at the cost of the work uh the general conditions costs as well as any fees that the general contractor will be charging to evaluate what cmgc we wanted to go with again this is the first step that sets off that preconstruction Services we will come back with more detail about the actual project cost in October okay any questions on that yes Kevin is the um the money that's earmarked that we got as a
163grant is that we think that will cover mostly what we're talking about or how talk we do believe it's going to cover most of what what we're talking about I I think that a project of this complexity the devil's always in the details and so when we get the contractor on board they're going to be talking about structural units and what the roof can support what they can't um so our hope is that it stays contained under that but if it doesn't we'll we'll need to talk about that and what we do um I I think we would can continue with the project unless there was some really big problem off that and I GL gloss over this but the grant money I was referring to is the be I'm moving closer Lauren sorry um
164is the Bohemian grants that we were awarded yeah so there's actually two grants um one comes from the Bohemian directly the other is coming from lmer County um and it is part of some of the um Esser funds that were um distributed a while ago and the county is providing about a million dollars to US from that source as well as Bohemians providing the other million dollars this is my pitch to say thank you to both of those entities immensely for their faith in us and for this investment yeah absolutely and it's no better way to to show our gratitude than to go ahead and get this yeah get this built so yes Kev sorry I just want to Echo that this the collaboration between the county the Bohemian foundation and other partners like Woodward
165Governor um NOCO Works Chamber of Commerce has been a very slow thoughtful burn to be able to get to this particular point and one of the parts of this specific project that I'm most proud of is we're not waiting for the summer if given board approval we're wanting to execute on this construction now so our students can benefit from it as soon as possible I think it's really important to acknowledge the work that former County Manager Linda Hoffman current County Manager lorenda vulker and the County Commission put into this work around expanding the trades expanding workbed learning opportunities and partnership with our District staff and I also want to say a special thank you to the striker family Cheryl zimick the Bohemian board who has continued to not just be a partner financially but be
166a convenor and a collaborator and a connector in a regionalism type effort because Thompson School District is benefiting from these grants as well and so that's a really really important part of this and many of you as board members have asked you know our partner Woodward Governor uh three four years ago provided us $500,000 worth of their uh Advanced manufacturing equipment and today it's sitting in Timnath Middle High School this project is required to put it at our Career Tech Center and so I want to acknowledge wward Governor not only for their contribution but their patience uh their commitment to also utilize this facility for their own employees to upskill uh and res skill I think is a really important part of this Regional partic this project uh but I just there are so many
167important Partners in this and I probably didn't name all of them uh but I'm just so grateful that we're able to capitalize on the vision of former principal uh Kathy McKay and our current principal uh Carrie Christensen it just feel really good about this effort and which is the reason why we're bringing here for your uh review tonight go ahead Carolyn and I I would just like to also mention how this project can be a real benefit for our students when we talk about ontime graduation rate so um our internal Studies have shown that kids who take at least four CTE courses um will have a 98% graduation rate and so if anything um this is an investment in our students and in their future and and also in our community so I'll be supporting
168this and I'm really excited Brian that you have um accelerated the schedule to get it done as soon as possible get it done this year so we can get kids in there go ahead TW can I give a couple quick shout outs you guys we met in this boardroom Josh wisman who's up at pter high school that guy's been up there working out 20 something years he has built out this ptech program it is amazing right I want to Echo what um superintendent Kingsley said and I love the way that superintendent Kingsley really understands the lay of the land on all the networking and stuff that's going on on these massive projects that you mentioned that that collaboration with Tom School District we have industry Partners in this city who want to utilize that that
169space in the evenings to help train their employees and they share their expertise of their employees which is hard to find with our staff and so they have these ongoing meetings and stuff so like the the network of benefits for something like this is just huge and lastly I guess I'll throw out uh Tanya alcarez has played a really central part and uh she's being honored later this week is one of our great leaders in our community but this is just another example of her Visionary leadership along with Kathy McKay and others and Josh and there's so many people involved in something this beautiful it's really a big deal for our kids thank you yeah go ahead Scott yeah I had a couple questions I I Echo exactly what Dwayne said Kathy McKay U tarez
170just superstars in terms of advocating for this and and to have these Community Partners and um the Bohemian foundation's amazing we're so lucky as a city to have them here um so uh couple questions how long is this going to take to build out uh that that's the number one I you already answered my question about are we waiting till the summer or when we starting um and then for Dave have we used GH fips before for anything um was that part of the uh bid process or okay I'd be curious I just want I just want to make sure we had a good experience um I I just I'm getting custom to my new role over there too so I thinking about it I I think we have used GH fips multiple times on
171projects the the not only our internal team that was evaluating um but we also uh used our uh our um owner's representative answer advisory services to help us select this contractor so we kind of had did it internal and external to to make sure we got a good fit yeah go ahead B he has two questions I just want to go go back jwayne can you comment on that thank yeah the timeline my understanding of the timeline is it's about a one-year project and I know that um the current Administration I don't know if Julie might want to weigh on this or not but the current administration at pter high school literally scheduled classes and did quite a bit of thoughtful work to allow us to move in there as quickly as we can and
172and get this project started so if we can you know get going um in the middle of this year we can actually have kids in there probably by the end of next year great news and one more yes go yeah just another question in terms of like you know we've all had construction at our houses it can be kind of a pain um how much of a uh burden is that going to be on the students the staff um it's a tight fit over there at PHS uh in terms of parking and all kinds of things so what's what are you anticipating in terms of that I would say that the construction is going to require um this is a complex project and so we're having to be very thoughtful about how we're doing the
173construction while classes are still happening in the building um that's part of that other half million dollars beyond the construction cost is making sure that we're taking care of all those things and making sure that the dust is staying where it needs to stay and all of that so if I could just add this real quickly the team up there has thought about this carefully and like I said they've literally taken in busing into account you know student classes where they're scheduled they've done a lot of work to prepare for this so it's it's been a big deal it's worth mentioning real quick too it's not part of this contract on this build but um part of the Bohemian funds also supported the auto program expansions that we've had which I'm telling you if you've
174seen what's going on over there it is amazing and so yes so thank you Bohemian and thank you County because it is even a little bit bigger than just uh PTEC but tonight we're just talking about the expansion of the you know the actual facility so that's pek okay any other thoughts okay um so Jill can we can we please call the vote Jim brish hi Christ hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havala hi Carolyn Reed hi Scott Shan bow hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 70 fantastic thank you we're gonna go ahead and take about a 10-minute break and then we'll come on back so we're going to um at 8:49 uh p.m on 8:27 we will go ahead and take a break and so let's try and be back here at uh we'll call
175it 9:00 e e e all right we're going to go ahead and get started again at 9:00 on 8 2724 so we are on 8.0 informational reports and discussion items 8.1 Community Comm Community committee's overview say that that three times fast you good yeah I'm good excellent so thank you for this uh joining us this evening to present is two-thirds of our entire cabinet uh really grateful that all of our assistant superintendant Dr Julie chaplain Dr Tracy guile Dr insun Olen our chief institutional Effectiveness officer Dr Dwayne schmidtz our chief finance officer Dave Montoya and our chief of staff Dr Lauren hoot and I want to welcome all of you to talk about this really important discussion of all of our existing committee structures and how we best partner with the community uh for the
176board as a governance team to Grapple with next steps moving forward so again welcome and thank you for this presentation thank you superintendent Kingsley president Draper and the members of our board um we are bringing forward to you um a request that was made last year at the end of the year around could you please give us an update on our district committees and so we have that presentation for you today um we will be highlighting seven Community um committees that um are part of our feedback loops are part of um ways that we engage with our community and stakeholders and we have organize the presentation today to highlight um Within These seven committees their General general purpose any policies that might be attached board sponsored or not um how the sessions are public or
177not who makes up the membership and the dates of the meetings again this is a highlight an overview of the seven committees and we are going to start with our district accountability committee thank you all right the DAC the district accountability committee I'm pretty confident that the board is familiar with this committee the committee is required by state law and it is in policy as well we have um um a policy AE around this the purpose you know there's several purposes to this committee and again those are kind of designated by the Colorado Department of Education there is a website on the PSD uh web site we have a web page for the district accountability committee so the interested audience member can go in there and learn quite a bit more just by reading through
178that information um they have multiple purposes I'll just highlight a couple um the the most recent one we just did with our first meeting is we review the unified Improvement plan which is tightly aligned with the Strategic plan but the the Dak officially actually recommends that to the board of education and we'll be doing that tonight they take a vote on that they also put together a spending priorities report for the Board of Education each year um those two duties are pretty Central and they do a lot of work throughout the year at their meetings to keep up on things like the monitoring report the state assessment data the connections all these things um in their meetings so that they're well informed and able to give good input the committee also reviews Charter applications should
179those come up they um can decide to study particular areas of interest that the committee May surface for themselves um they also serve as our 1338 committee I don't know why the state calls it it's probably a house bill 1338 or something like that but basically they oversee and give some input They Don't Really oversee they give some input on how we calculate um educator Effectiveness growth ratings so our DAC and this is common for many districts serves that purpose as well um and they help us with family engagement which we now have a family engagement policy KB and the DAC helps us to you know give us advice on that and and breathe life into it with us I guess I'll mention real quick that there's a co-chair kind of relationship ship so myself
180and a dab member um co-chair of the committee we create our agendas together uh and lastly just a shout out the DAC is really awesome they've had several years of just excellent service to this District that deserves some recognition they they have they get a lot of input on that uip they always give us good information they push on each other's thinking in that committee it's a very very tight-knit professional funloving group that has real deep conversations and they push on our thinking and so we're very very appreciative of them and I think with that I will flip the slide over to the date so you can see there that we meet almost once a month there's a couple months where we don't meet just because uh you know it's a choice that the DAC
181has made um December you can notice isn't in there because of Christmas break and various things or winter break and various things going on at any rate um they monitor the uip throughout the year so in that first meeting August 21st they went through the uip and gave substantial amounts of feedback that we integrated into the uip that you'll be seeing tonight um in these upcoming meetings part of that task will be to monitor the actual implementation of that uip and to give us feedback on various aspects of that they'll also um inform PSD leadership on other topics as needed and with that I think I will move on to the next committee yes please I'm sorry I was just wondering like how many people are on the committee is the committee full and if
182somebody wanted to get on it how would they do that thank you so right now there are 14 members on the committee that's 10 members that are community members and there's four members that are school-based staff um there's particular um types of spaces that we have so that we make sure we're representative there are a couple openings on the committee right now and like I said the PSD website is the best place to get the details on how to um put in an application to be on that committee I do want to mention though that all of the we have two open I think site uh spaces right now and we have applicants for both of those spaces that the committee is going to be reviewing on our next meeting so we will probably be
183coming to the board because we do do that we come to the board to say can we officially add these members to the committee so will probably happen in about a month thank you okay good evening I have the privilege of talking about the district Advisory board so the district Advisory Board is uh a group of parents who are chartered by the Board of Education to be an important feedback loop for both the district and the board and to the superintendent on behalf of current students in the district so one of the aspects of da be is that um the membership requirement is that um it must be representative of a current student in the district so typically how the membership is determined is each School identifies a dab representative oftentimes that parent representative also
184serves on the school accountability committee and so each school is asked to have one primary representative from the D as well as a secondary representative and the purpose again is to serve as an important feed back loop as the parent perspective um to the district that committee is chartered by policy AB as well as board policy 3.6 to be a feedback loop for the district um there is a monthly meeting it's two hours every month there is a daab chair who is voted on by the group who is a parent of the daab and this year the um dab president is Taylor Richie who is a parent at olander elementary and my myself along with director brokish um we work together to collaboratively plan the agenda based on the interests of the group on topics
185that they would like to hear as well as um topics that the board are interested in hearing feedback about um that meeting is closed to the public and again it is a board sponsored committee the dates for this coming year um that the dab will be meeting will have our first meeting coming up on September 16th and again that Cadence of a monthly meeting you'll also um be expecting a daab report to the board of e education at your May meeting so that's one of the aspects of daab is to provide an annual report about the topics that were discussed as well as any additional feedback for the board or for the district all right so the next committee that we'll share with the board and the community is the calendar committee the calendar committee
186is not specifically called out in policy IC IA but policy ICI does re reference the creation of the calendar which is the responsibility of the superintendent so this committee exists to provide a recommendation to the superintendent around the school year calendar which is then brought to the Board of Education usually every year in November um with the idea being that that calendar is then approved for our community each year in December or so so that folks can plan ahead the calendar committee is led by a Elementary and secondary administ minator those are nominated by the assistant superintendent and then as you can see here we have several different groups of members so we have one representative from each of our employee associations as well as three licensed staff members two classified staff members two gu
187parent guardians of students currently enrolled in the district and then a representative from Human Resources facilities or operations and it um these meetings are closed to the public as well and then on next slide these are these year this year's dates for the calendar committee to meet as you will see they primarily meet in the fall for the purposes of developing that calendar recommendation to come to the board in the fall as well I'm going to lean in so okay uh for the calendar committee typically with the recommendations fall not for the following Scholastic school year but the the year after for implementing do I understand that correct so for example we will bring a calendar for the board's consideration for the 2526 school year this November yeah yes okay the student advisory Council so
188the student advisory council is not required by policy or law it is a choice of the Board of Education to have creat at this committee uh several years ago I think 2021-22 was the first year the Comm the student advisory committee is generally about 15 to 20 students um we do our best to get a representative group of students from around the district so we actively try to um recruit students from each of the different High Schools they're 9th through 12th grade students um we're always a little thinner it feels like on ninth grade and a little heavier on 11th and 12th and and 10th um at any rate the purpose of the student advisory council is to provide input to the Board of Education they also sometimes the Board of Education might signal they
189they want the input of students on a particular topic or the students might raise the topic themselves and bring that forward it has um evolved over time and it has become a leadership experience for the students involved which we're proud of that they do in fact the students go off to a leadership or a subset of the students go off to a leadership conference and they have grown in their own leadership ship of the committee itself which has been great and they also um work on projects usually and a project they worked on last year was providing the district with some recommendations around syllabi and how that would help them um in their uh coursework basically and their experience with school so the um I mentioned they're 9th through 12th grade students they meet for
190an hour and 45 minutes also about once a month they um it is closed to the public and and um I guess I would brag on them just saying they are truly a wonderful group and they do get it's an amazing thing because they get the the the a of the board and the cabinet at dinner session so they get to share with you all back and forth what they are working on all right the dates for student advisory Council are listed right there so we're through the first meeting we used August 19th to actually go through a process with the leadership group um within the student advisory committee to our Council to select new members all right see okay the next committee that we are going to talk about is the special education advisory
191committee this committee is not uh not in not required by law nor in policy it is um it is a subset of our state uh special education advisory committee although districts are not required to do that it's a um recommended practice best practice and uh something that pter school district has had for a number of years now um the purpose is really to um look at um how we uh inform and are we get feedback from our community on um information that um is presented by the integrated Services director um that they would like feedback on or are looking for um and it also is informative as well trying to help members understand certain systems within the district policies programming um and then ultimately um the members provide feedback um to uh various presenters as
192they go so um what happens is they will go through a very structured protocol U whatever the presentation is and then they will deliberate in small groups um to come up with recommendations and then they will coal those into um recommendations as a whole from the group those are then presented to um the different pres the different um Personnel who came in to present on the topic in the form of an action letter um those action letters can also be found on the seak website um as they're posted and and some examples from last year um one was um regarding graduation requirements uh Dwayne and I presented uh two different times to that committee um one uh informing them about the change to policy allowing students uh who have taken the alternative assessment first state
193assessment to um be able to earn a high school diploma which was a change in policy and then the second was um get gathering information and feedback about the specific graduation requirement changes um as a part of that process other topics that um they were presented with um and gave feedback on were bullying information and education um another month focused on um training and staff development along with transition support So as students move from level to level and then exit out of our system um helping understand integrated Services roles um and how families really um Can engage with that understanding and then the final presentation uh was from the curriculum Department related to dyslexia services in the district and so all of those are just examples of um topics just from last year with action
194letters of recommendations that followed and so um the committee has uh approximately 25 members um the charter which is also on the district website outlines um exactly who is selected from representative areas it is representative of the 13 educational identifications um specifically five parents so one parent from Early Childhood one parent of an elementary student with an IEP or disability a middle school student with a parent of a middle school student a parent of a high school student with IEP or disability and then a parent of a PSD student so those are the parental um Representatives that are looked for um we also um strive to have a student or a former student um with an IEP or a disability and then for there are five school-based staff um same represent representation as parents there
195is Early Childhood school-based staff member an ele elentary a middle school um and a high school school school-based staff member transition program staff member as well um and then we have participation from PSD Community organizations um some of the notable ones we have representatives from the state um special advisory committee who are also do who also does work within our local community um we have had represent representatives from um our community center board which is Foothills Gateway and so really uh looking at some of those those community members that support the work for um students and adult with disabilities and so as um as they begin to do that they generally serve two year twoyear terms um I I don't know that it's um you know I don't know that anybody's ever said that you
196have to stop at two years I I know I've served for more than two years at a time um just based on you know uh kind of the interest that's there it's run and coordinated by the parent family community engagement specialist in the district uh we have a new employee in that role her name is Barb moing former employee of PSD um in integrated Services meetings are closed to the public because it is a public um public deliberation uh format when they're looking at topics and then giving recommendations um so that was um and that's stated on that website as to the reason why board members are invited to attend and do attend so that is also at that has been a new edition over the last um probably three years I'm as my memory
197maybe serves um and so that's also part of that 25 um 25 member committee so um as we look at the dates uh this year there will be seven meetings um really six formal meetings one meeting is really a um new member orientation so those that have never served on cak before to go through again the process and the purpose of that um and it's pretty pretty clearly outlined as well that um the the responsibilities of cak aren't to advocate for individual students or family members um or you know uh take up individual arguments or pieces really looking for um actually those holistic pieces that are either um determined by the special education leadership team um and um or the district as at large on information that we want to educate um families about so
198those are the board meeting or those are the committee committee meetings and the first one starts on September 19th okay so I'm going to talk about the audit committee uh the audit committee is a uh a district committee that's been around for quite a while now um it is set off by District policy di EA um the committee is board sponsor sponsored uh the purpose of this committee its primary function is to assist the board with fulfilling your financial oversight so um the the people that the the board uh the actual committee is made up of two board appointees um as well as five community at large the five community at large are selected based on application um these are people that have actual experience in a CPAs audit they understand the complexities of those
199things um so so those are the five communities that are or community members that are uh that are selected from that uh currently we have four community members uh right now so we have do have one open seat um for those that have served on the audit committee uh for a while you'll know that we've had a hard time getting community members to join the audit committee um so we actually have four uh that's unusual for us and and I actually got an email from somebody else that's interested so uh we might be able to get up to five so that's kind of good news there um the audit committee is it meets four times a year uh minimum of four times a year I think we actually meet five times a year there's three
200times in the fall and then two times in the spring um the three times in the fall are primarily focused around the external audit that's the oversight that the committee is helping with is the technical nature of our external audit um and the findings that we haven't had findings but if there were findings we would discuss those in in the audit committee um the audit committee is um is uh chaired by one of the community members so uh so the audit committee is uh we currently have markk Hartman he's the chair um and he's been doing that for a while for us uh meetings are open to the public um although they are at 7 in the morning so a lot of people don't show up at 7 in the morning but it is open
201um the folks on the committee really like doing it in the morning so they can get done with the the the volunteer and then get back to their jobs during the day so that that works well for us um yeah that's the audit committee uh I would also say that the um the audit committee has been very helpful not only just in oversight of uh the external audit but also items of internal control um technical nature again like how we do processes procedures I was just talking to director Reed about a little bit of experience on the audit committee we have three board members that have served on the or currently serving or have served on the audit committee now um so appreciate all the support and help there um this year's dates uh we
202just had our first meeting on Monday 7 a.m. um we did set dates for the rest of the the fall so we didn't have those when the presentation came in um that is October 16th and November 21st is the next two dates and so so we'll set those and then at the end of November we'll set the other two dates out in the fall time or in the springtime that's the audit committee the last committee that we're going to talk about tonight is our equity and diversity advisory Council this is a group of school and community members committed to the work of confronting and challenging and changing inequitable structures and procedures in PSD this group serves as a conduit feedback system for our Dei executive committee and academic cabinet to ensure that we are listening
203and addressing areas of concern brought forth by this committee this group was created to increase representation of groups we have traditionally underrepresented or underserved when it comes to policies practices and procedures and we work very hard to create a psychologically safe environment to have these conversations this group is just over 20 members um and it is just a little over onethird staff and the rest are made up of parents and community members alike um the prerequisite is just to um talk to our three facilitators um to see if um there is a need or a gap in our current group and someone can fill that spot um it is close to the public due to some of the conversations that we have and again just really wanting to stress the psychologically safe environment to have
204these conversations um it is not a board sponsored um committee and there are no policies directly attached to this committee um they do meet every month um we do try to accommodate um people's schedules so we do meet in person every other month and in turn virtually on the opposite months um we do have meetings set for the year and um even though we should have had one on August 8th um we are also very responsive to this committee's workload and um the capacity to meet outside of work day and so there was a significant request to not have the August 8th meeting this year and so our first meeting will be virtual on September 12th and then you see the subsequent dates from there so we would like to end our presentation today over
205the seven committees by asking you all two questions do we have the right committees and do we have the right feedback loops and then we'd love to open the floor to you fantastic thank you so much for um clarifying and just letting us um see what's going on there and the dates and all of that great stuff so um I'm going to open the floor up to see what people think on those two questions do we have the right committees and do we have the right feedback loops who would like to kick it off go ahead Scott I have a a couple committees I was thinking to talk about the first one though is cak um I really appreciate this information this is good for me to know um I think I've mentioned before I've
206been on dab DAC and now stack um and it's just great to see what our community is doing and and the kind of feedback that we get um I would make a suggestion based off feedback that we've heard I think integrated Services is probably the number one area that we hear criticism of our district in in that area I think there's um all of us here on the board have heard from parents that are just desperate for help and um and I think those are probably the most vulnerable of our students um so I would like to see a change in terms of the right feedback loops I think we should have a permanent board liaison uh just like we have for um DAC daab um so that we can be hearing back um I'd
207also like like the ab to have a annual report to the board um from that group um in terms of membership that I one idea I've had is again kind of model after DAC where um I don't know if you could have each School I mean this could get big it's already big it's 25 um but you know you could have the principales nominate a potential representative from their school um to be on this committee and and I can guarantee just knowing what we dealt with with da daab you're not going to get all the schools represented um Tracy how how many open seats do we have on dab right now I don't know if you'd know that off the top of your head um I don't know for this year last year we probably
208had give or take about 15 open seats out of 50 right so so it would maybe increase I think it would be similar in this situation um so it would be a bigger room but I don't think it would be bursting um but I feel like that would allow for more feedback from families that um aren't being heard um and would allow for more um input from the people that know um they're closer to it the principls or or some other representative at that school can nominate a parent to be that school's representative so those are my three things I would throw out there I'm throwing a grenade in the room go go for it well one thing I will mention Scott is that we do have um two board reps um scheduled to go
209so um from what I can see on the website is Kevin and Jim um and yeah and so we do sorry yeah yeah and I think too um you know we don't have on here alternates I don't know if we want to you know throw those into the mix that if somebody can't make it I think sometimes when we have two people set up to go that we don't need an alternate but you know that's something to to consider as well but yes I just wanted to make sure that we all knew that we did have representation there at the at the meetings that's okay that's all right so other questions or thoughts go ahead Kevin oh Caroline well I would like to actually hear from you Kevin about how you think things have been
210going um when I sat on cak I kind of felt like there might be a missed opportunity there to get more meaningful feedback from the members there um I think I struggled in my first few meetings there kind of understanding what our goal was and so I think we like we have an opportunity there to get more authentic feedback from that from that group and I think maybe taking a deeper look at how we're doing things there I I think I just hear that as an opportunity right now just based on my experience and that's why Kevin I'm kind of um looking forward to hearing what your experience has been like and what you think I could yeah I've been there too and um I feel like I guess the topic selection is um I
211mean it's decided on it feels like it's decided on basically by the administration and to get feedback on whatever topics you know Julie talked about the different kinds of topics that there were this year um there there could maybe be a little more um opportunity for authentic feedback but I haven't been um super displeased or anything I think it's been pretty good overall so that would be my take on it good yeah I actually had a I'm going to answer the question yours with a question um which is I've never really understood why cak Falls in this category too why certain committees aren't open to the public because my one feedback I think as far as a loop would be and we've heard this over and over which I think is well found of criticism
212is that it does I'm not sure what what the what we're trying to accomplish then again I haven't been on it that long I've only been to a handful of of meetings one of them was two of them were the presentation on the graduation requirements which I thought was great because that's getting a touch point from a different committee that represents different people so I think that's good I think the cross-pollination of some of our district ends and some of our policies in cak is really important to get feedback I do question I think this is where you're going this too director Reed is I I do question some of the the robustness of the feedback you're going to get if one you're you've got a closed group of people that you're limiting that that
213club to and also is it a reverberation Echo chamber or are we getting actually good feedback from other parents and the reason I joined quite frankly is because I wanted to volunteer and also I've got a kid with special needs so it really you know it resonates with me so those are my sort of questions and amings so I can tell you from the history that I know um it was created as a working group and that was the rationale as to having it be as a closed meeting so that it could be a working group that actually um can function some when you get to a certain size some of that um can be difficult to facilitate I think so that would be my historical understanding of um cak when it was created um
214many many many years ago when Sarah Buu was here I believe she's the one that actually created the committee um at that time uh so that would be excuse me that would be how i' uh look at that and then um the your second [Music] question because it was a just because it was set up as a working committee to discuss different topics and um as the members on there they they're divided into collaborative groups and then there's structured prompts that they then talk about um based on the information they hear to develop recommendations as a small group and then the small groups kind of share out and then there's a larger um Collective process to create the final recommendation out of all of the small groups that gets compiled into that action letter can
215I one more that's that's that's the so here's some some other feedback is that these committees I want us to press our thinking a little bit and be a little more not be a little creative too in that they're not just formal recommendations for us to act upon for very specific items uh I'm thinking about a parent that would come um with maybe new to the district with uh student with special needs and that may an opportunity for them to build some Community too so there are some sort of intangible other items that we're getting from dab that we may be getting from DAC these are people that are willing to show up and volunteer what little time they have to do something that they're passionate about so I don't want to I for one
216wouldn't want to turn people away I'd want to bring them into that club um regardless of how much they're going to participate how often I don't think it behooves us to be quite so rigid in our compositions of our our committees and that's one where I i' I'd ask for a little bit more flexibility as my my feedback go ahead and I guess when I was at when I was sitting on that committee when I went to the meetings for the year that I was there that um I found that yes there was really great like when they're asking for information about like graduation and you know graduation requirements and getting feedback from everybody but there was also like a yearning there for parents to give feedback on different stuff that the group group was
217interested in and so I that's the opportunity I think that we're missing is getting feedback from them about the things that they think are important not the things that we're telling them are important I'm not saying that we don't need feedback from them on certain things but of giving the them the opportunity to give us feedback on the things that they find important I mean I think that's what's missing in that group is is getting that's what I said about authentic feedback like tell me what's important to you tell me work on something that's important to you because of what you've seen something that I haven't thought about or something that you feel like I need to know about I I just think I would get more from that right we could get more from
218that committee and Caroline I would agree with you on that because we were on that one together yeah go ahead Jess so the dab also used to be information flowing to parents rather than parents flowing it to the community to the district and so I don't know if there's any cabinet members that were sort of part of that transition because I think that took a long time to get to the point where parents actually took ownership of those meetings and became chairs that decided on the agendas and really got um heavily involved that way and so I'd be curious if there's a way for cak to model some of the pieces of dab and having a parent leadership piece and they get to influence the Cadence of the meetings and what the meetings are about
219it doesn't mean that we never have something that we want to bring to the table and say hey we want feedback on this specific thing because that still happens in dab but it gives them the opportunity to also have more voice and Power in what they're talking about um and I also the other thing that da sorry because this came up in our community comments is dab has subcommittees too that are also voted on by their members so the members get to decide on the subcommittees and then they're the ones kind of moving that work forward and if that's an Ask of the parents in that group anyway I don't really understand I guess why we would turn around free volunteers and then just to add on in dab over the last year I felt
220like we did a good job of polling the group what are the things you'd like to discuss and then really working to get those onto the agenda and carolly to your point I can picture that possibly working in a seak kind of environment where let let's do a survey right what are the areas that you really want want to talk about and that U may give some of those more authentic discussions that I think we're going for great other thoughts so I'm going to throw out there the one for do we have the right committees and one of them I think we are um very much lacking and we've heard quite a bit about it in the last um you know six months or so um but that is a boundaries um SL long-term planning
221committee and I do think that we need to try and figure out a way to um have a committee there that involves all of the schools um parents and is not done at a time when it's just our highest need that it's a continual process of con constant evaluation what do the boundaries look like um when are we getting to a point of um you know what's the projection what what are we looking down down the road as far as you know we're looking okay right now but years two and three we might need to start looking at trying to do something um I feel like that's really important for us to um to figure out a way to do that and whether that's a boundary committee whether that's a you know long-term planning whether
222that's a combination of the two I think that's something that we need to to work on to figure out the structure for but I do feel like that is something that we need that is consistent and you know it can work in a in in favor in all of it whether it's downward trending enrollment whether it's upward trending enrollment um whether it's both at the same time one on the west side and one on the east side how do we manage that and so that I I think is something that's extremely important that we are missing at the moment um and I just want to I don't know if anybody has any comments on that yeah go ahead Connor I I support having that type of committee as well um if we can in conjunction
223look at filling that position um full-time in planning I know quite recently there was a planner in there um it's it's needed um I don't know how senior they are um but from past history that person who was in that role prior did a very good job with community outreach as well and organizing with all the other planning departments across the kind of the district and across jurisdictional stuff that I think we're going to need go ahead Caroline I'm gonna agree with you Connor because um I often would show up at different Community meetings and our planner would be there right so went to a meeting with C do and there was our planner you know go to a a trustees meeting for the county there was our planner so maybe we're missing a little
224bit of that feedback loop you know maybe there's a blind spot there in the information we're Gathering so I could see that that might be helpful to have that position filled Scott yeah I think we should um also honor the uh the long range steering committee that we that we had um and one of their big recommendations was make this a permanent committee and I think that's something that we need to hear and I don't see any negative of creating that committee I think it it goes a long way to building that trust that we need to rebuild with the community um I would also recommend um a lot of those people that were on that committee as our first uh class of um of this committee because they know they've done the work they
225they we don't want those hours to be wasted so I'm I'm all for it absolutely we can reach them out reach out to them as our first level yeah go ahead Kevin I was just going to say this is also goes with a question I had I want to redirect quite yet but with um presence of board sponsored committees versus not and what the kind of the wisdom and thinking in there I think that one needs a board uh uh member even if it's rotating I volunteer myself as tribute um as a as a wise Chief Information and Effectiveness officer once said um enrollment is like a breathing cycle of a district it it breeds in and it breeds out so we need to have that as a per fixture not just for the when
226we're going to breathe in but to think about when we exale we have expanding enrollment and we tax our resources that we've already got so I think it's eminently reasonable I think we should do it as soon as possible agreed the one other thing I'll throw into that is um how do we do this with Equity um at first in mind and one of the things that we haven't quite gotten there yet um it's in the uip but I loved the um psd's Equity definition that was in um the uip presentation and I feel like if that's something that we could use as um our base for how we go ahead and and um use equity in our again boundaries long-term planning whatever it's decided um to be called but I feel like that was
227a great um just setting the bar coms sorry other comments go ahead Jess I just would like to reiterate Connor's point of both having the committee and ensuring that we have a planner so we have the expertise that's a both and other thoughts on do we have the right committees and do we have the right feedback loops I have other wonderings it's okay cycle back um one I'm noticing that I don't think we have any consistency in our membership applications for these committees which may be appropriate but I do think it's something that we should look at and consider if we want to do it differently dab has a recommendation from principles our stack has an application process DAC has specific buckets they need to fill so that one maybe Works differently um audit's the
228only committee that is open to the public the rest of them are closed I just I don't know if we want any consistency in amongst these and to hang on to that also some of these committees report back to the board like dab and DAC through the work that Dwayne does with them do we want to feedback loop for any of the other ones I mean stack also comes I should keep thinking stack comes back relatively regularly or as needed to our dinner sessions but some of these um if I'm remembering correctly Eda is not specifically report to us uh cak does not specifically report to us we might get their feedback through cabinet members but we're not hearing from them directly so I don't know if that's also a want it would be a
229want for me but I think that's something to consider I do want to emphasize though that we do have board members that attend the meetings and so I feel like that could be something that um again if we set aside uh time for in the meeting um particularly when we're doing um in the beginning there um board sorry it's getting late and my brain has stopped working um but when we when we start talking about what we've been doing over the past couple of weeks it would be really great to to be talking about that um what I would like to see is if we're talking about the boundaries SL longterm is to have some board representation so they are hearing um those meetings and what's happening in them um to report back because I
230feel like that's really important to know um and then if there is some sort of recommendation that they would like to give to the board to have them be able to do that um but I wouldn't necessarily want to force them to present to the board and they the boards you know they say we got nothing this year all is all is well so I think it would that could be dependent on the needs yes go ahead Scott um just C out of curiosity what would the next step be I mean we've got a lot of Fe back and um seems like some agreement on some things um follow through on this stuff I think is going to be really important um what would the next steps be on any changes to the committees or
231additions to committies Brian I'm GNA Let Brian take that one yeah I really appreciate the question um I'm not sure if there's more feedback to come but I think uh we can reopen back to feedback on other committees based on the questions or other questions that you might have I want to codify tonight that I think that we heard what you have just shared so when it's appropriate I want to kind of state back to you this is what cabinet and myself are walking back with as a charge I believe that we have cabinet representatives and liaison in partnership with the few board Liaisons for the various committees that they board sponsorships that are working in partnership with these committees throughout the course of the entire year I'd like to take the feedback to go
232back to each of the respective commi uh committees and say hey after this conversation tonight this is what we've heard each of the Committees should have a committee Charter in terms of their purpose their function their meeting structures and their design your feedback is going to help us iterate on that um so what if you know once I cify that I'd like them to go back and especially cak um I think that's where we got a lot of feedback today but we also got feedback on potentially thinking about uh the role of consistency with an application process uh the RO of how their meeting structures whether it's through an annual report or another uh vehicle to come back to this board um and Report out and I think I would like a little bit of
233time to work with each of the Committees through cabinet on that particular thing and then come back with an update um where we could also come up with an update on what I would say is a I'm not married to this name but a comprehensive planning committee um so I think we have to take this feedback go back and work in partnership with the respective committees so we're doing this with them and not to them I think that's your intent as well and then come back to you with an iterative process of this is what we've come up with based upon your feedback and goals does that feel right okaye Kevin can I ask uh cabinet who are here tonight what what are your observations about what's going well what could be tweaked with our
234communities you've been living with these longer than I have so one thought I was having while I was listening of this conversation is I do like that the DAC has a web presence you know having a web page for some reason it's solidifies it's like um superintendent Kingsley mentioned the charter it solidifies this is what it is this is its purpose this is you know it gives you and I think a web presence is a good idea for virtually any committee we have and they have to be managed a little differently for instance the student advisory Council that we have we don't want to post student names on that and we don't want to post locations and times because we don't want someone showing up there right we have to keep our students safe the
235DAC is different we do Post our meeting times and we do Post our members so there's going to be differences right but I do think like a web presence and we we have to think through that as a big team of everyone sitting around this table like what are the component pieces that we would want consistency on but I just want to throw that out because I feel like that's uh it would be helpful I I would Echo some of the sentiments from different board members who have served on dab Jim Jessica Scott um maybe others in the room have been part of dab the last forish years I think one of the things that has worked well is soliciting um from the membership what do you want to learn about what do you want
236to give feedback about what are you curious about and then we designed the agenda collaboratively um to meet that need from what the dab um is most interested in providing a feedback loop too so I think you know having that mechanism within the Committees seems to feel um like that committee has that sense of purpose and that their time is well spent and that they feel like it's valuable and want to have agency in voice in that process um I would say in the area of special ed advisory committee um you know I know that we can definitely look at um you know I'll share this with um senior executive director Liz Davis and the current director of integrated Services jod Romo um and um you know we can look again at all the resources
237from the state special Edge advisory committee and some of their their Charter examples and things put forth and do a review of the charter um which just based upon you know what um what we're hearing tonight for feedback from you would be something we would want to put into place um even from the selection process I think um in terms of the timeline of that um I know applications are out and the selections were happening um that happens uh with a um I think it's in the it might be coming out yeah I think it's already out um and then because we have that first meeting in September so the turnaround of making a quick hey every school's going to have a rep I think we may have to walk into that with with the
238goal of that um and right now looking at the um selection process um I didn't clarify this in there when the applications are are are sub are received the names are removed and so and there's a rubric used for scoring um from a multi-disciplinary team that has Representatives um for all the disability categories um service providers um assistant directors um so it's not just um it's not just like the um director of integrated Services making all those um so I think we would have to look at how we would transition from that selection process into something a little bit different um but you know definitely able to you know talk about structures with uh jod and with Barb moing about um Gathering feedback on topics and things of that nature and how we might adjust
239some of those pieces I think those are pretty pretty easy um move forwards I think what works well there I think the I think the engagement process in collecting feedback and putting forth an action letter does does well I would say similarly to feedback from dab um is the the what happens then so the letter kind of goes out and there's not a clear Circle back as to what the result was from that feedback so um I'd say that's probably in several of our committees as to that Shoring up piece but I think we can all collaboratively talk about that as well thank you other questions or thoughts all yeah go ahead I have one and it's kind of random but I do want if any parents are paying attention and they're looking through these
240committees as the Lees onto the Early Childhood policy Council and they're always looking for members I feel like I have to say it so I don't I I kind have some wonderings on why it didn't show up here I'm guessing because it's sort of own special thing but I still would be remiss if I didn't at least call it out as an opportunity for parents thank you yeah and Brian go ahead did you want to well I just wanted to cut fire our conversation just so we're all leaving on one Accord if that's okay um I'm going to start with what I heard and then I'm going to come back with a suggested timeline for feedback if that's okay because I just think you know we all should be able to anticipate when this iterative
241process continue so I think Julie or Dr Chaplan excuse me just did a really nice job of codifying some of if not close to all of the things that we heard regarding cak um just to be clear I think we're going to go back to seak and review the current existing Charter formalize uh board leaz on membership as a part of that begin to identify a specific way whether it's through an inperson presentation or written report figuring out a way in partnership with the board of the asons and staff for there to be an annual report in that process I really want to say that I think we should ask that of every one of the Committees around what they think that best should look like based upon history as well as the future so
242we can continue to get the word out with each of those respective committees in a consistent way and I appreciate the feedback in that particular space I think we're also asking CX specifically to wrestle a little bit around how to thoughtfully expand membership and do that an appropriate way while also trying to figure out how to have avenues for the public to be a part of that both from a learning standpoint but also from a network standpoint um and that may be some of the meetings it may be all the meetings but I think having the committee kind of wrestle with that concept so we can continue to EXP and how people are engaged and involved I think could be really really thoughtful I think we heard loud and clear and I don't think this
243was specific to cak but as we are thinking about how the agendas are designed for those meetings to make sure that there's at least some level of balance between what are the needs of the district and or the needs of the membership to make sure that we're elevating their voices and tending to the things that they are seeing as priorities not just what we as staff are seeing as priorities um I think we can take that back to all of the Committees but obviously that was a specific ask of cak um there I'm going to move off of seak for a second is there anything that I missed on that particular committee that you want to bring up before I move on to the planning committee are we good all right cool so again I'm
244naming it a comprehensive planning committee just because I think it was all encompassing of not just boundaries but looking at enrollment projections I would say that while it might not be named I think facility utilization uh with our existing portfolio of facilities is really really important making sure that our district planner architect all of those particular key experts are a part of that process what I would like to have uh in partnership with our cabinet members is come back to the Board of Education with a draft Charter for that proposed committee for you to react to uh but take into consideration the feedback we've already received from the long range planning committee knowing that they had very specific ideas around what the future uh and they codify that in a report and writing so I
245feel good that we don't need to reconvene that Committee just yet uh but take the lessons learned that they put a lot of time into uh producing that report and we should be able to elevate where their recommendations are showing up in the charter that we're proposing to you okay uh and then the last piece and I think director vice president Zamora talked about like what are the consistencies across the Committees of looking at membership applications looking at reporting structures to the board corporate like as an entity um and whether that's in partnership with the board liaison or a part where membership is having a role similar to how dab presidents come here once a year um and speak to their work in uh in a summative type way uh we heard from and I
246appreciate um director havelda inviting cabinet leadership to talk about what's working well I think we need to talk about how you know do we have a consistent web page present some committees might like I think Dr schmidth said that you know that wouldn't be approp for one committee over another but really having some level of consistency and systemness where all of these things live on our website and figure out ways that we can help them that's a workload lift but we can try to figure out uh how to address that over time um I think those are the main takeaways that I have uh as you saw there's different meeting consistencies and structures I don't think you can solve this in the next meeting uh it takes an opportunity to say hey this is what
247we heard I want you to go back and think and then probably the next meeting they probably get into the uh the thoughtful weeds of grappling with this so if it's okay with the board what I would like to propose for a cabinet timeline of coming back to you uh is prior to Winter Break um I think that puts us in a there's a lot of things that are happening in this community in the next 90 days uh and I think just gives us a little bit of a Runway where we can say hey we've had multiple engagements on this same topic in addition to the work that has to be moved forward so it it'll be hard to clear calendars for these respective committees to answer I think it's not going to have the
248same level of impact on all of the Committees I think seak is going to have probably the most in the comprehensive planning committee if that's what we call it um that's a new design that you need to react to so just that's a draft agenda or draft timeline if you think that doesn't meet your needs please let me know or if you feel like I missed anything or staff feels that I missed anything or should be considerate of something in the timeline I'd love to hear from you all too go ahead Kevin yeah just real quick I I don't want to be an alarmist I know the hours getting getting late but I would really push at least to have the long range steering committee bones in place for November just in case because we're
249going to need that sooner rather than later regardless and I'm I'm saying they're mutually exclusive about the ballot measure but I think having the bones having something in place and I think the work's already done I think Scott was saying that so was Connor so if we could expedite maybe the the getting that assembled sooner rather than later I I that's my thought yeah sorry I'm making that face because I'm like oh you're right we we need to do that J oh sorry I'm seeing a lot of body language that was affirming what director havela said just just suggested so would it be acceptable to the board to come back in a upcoming dinner session Sometime Late September early October with a draft Charter where we can kind of grapple with that in a dinner
250session we obviously want to bring that into a public meeting it dinner session is public but in this particular regular or Workshop type session too but at least allows you to get some of those early ideas I think we in anticipation of this conversation we have some draft ideas already together so I don't think it's a heavy lift to come back to the board in the next two or three meetings in a dinner session to tell you what our early thinking is which does put us on target if we want to launch something in November that we can execute on that yeah let me offer to help too I don't want to just throw work and just say you do it and come back if you need some help collaboratively I'm more than happy I'm
251sure the other board members are too lighten the load a little bit for yourselves okay thank you I'm clear on that anything else Jess you had something and I just I want to clarify I think that the long range planning or figure out what you just called it so comprehensive um I think that timeline needs to move up but I would say the other ones I'm still fine with those holding because they the members need to meet they need to Grapple so it's only this one committee that I feel like needs to get more urgency thank you other thoughts on that no we're good wait Scott you got one not to be a pain but um I'm just looking that's uh three and a half months on it the only committee it seems like there
252would be changes other than adding a new committee would be cak um that's a half a year I don't know I to me I would urge you to do it faster among all the other things that are going on but that's um it's like six or seven meetings between now and then so obviously I think September we would have opportunities to go to a meeting hear your feedback um October get some uh get some plans put together and then maybe that November date I don't know I'm like I said I don't mean to be a pain but I really think that the community would appreciate urgency on that so Carolyn you sorry I was just going to say it's not just our schedule it's their schedule I mean because Brian you were right we don't
253want to do this to them we want to do this with them so we get it right so we have to respect I think their meeting schedule right now and so I think we're not constrained by our schedule we're constrained by their schedule and so I want them to have the time to do the thoughtful work before you come back to us I I think I would like that sooner but I think L logistically that's probably pretty quick for them is my thought that's Julie yeah go ahead thank you Carolyn yeah I I would that would be my only plug for special advisory committee because there's only three meetings before winter break um and um that that this will just take some time um so we want to be able to in invite people into
254this process so well and I want it to be done right and to stick so I totally respect that um but I would not be upset if it was done sooner is that a good way to say it all right other thoughts all right and you have what you need yeah fantastic yes thank you very much appreciate the collaboration absolutely thank you so much and thank you everybody for taking the time to present we're going to move on to 9.0 action items uh 9.1 strategic Plan update and unified Improvement plan can I get a motion oh yes go ahead Kevin I move that the board approve the unified Improvement plan as presented can I get a second Carolyn thank you all right and um I believe we have a presentation for this as well yes
255forgive me I'm just organizing myself here not a problem at all okay so we have several people that are continuing to be here in Partnership uh with each other and with the district and our respective schools to talk about our strategic Plan update and our un ified Improvement plan and those are our assistant superintendent uh Dr Julie Chaplan Dr insun olon Dr Tracy gu and our chief institutional Effectiveness officer Dr Dwayne schmidtz um I am going to actually help us launch this presentation tonight because I think uh what I want to ground us as a governance team is and and I know we've continued to talk about this in different iterations since I've uh joined the district just a little over three years ago is this goal Collective goal of creating systemness across the district
256from The Boardroom to the classroom and really really doubling down on what our Core Business of improving learning and teaching and at the time three years ago uh the charge not only coming out of the pandemic uh but this District at the time prior to the pandemic was on a negative trajectory academically and socially emotionally and I don't say that as a uh an indictment on the district um but I think we came to a realization that we're better when we do our work together and there are incredible experts in this district from The Boardroom to the classroom in all of the positions and departments in between and we have to figure out thoughtful ways of collaborating with each other and with our community to honor and Elevate the expertise that's here while also narrowing
257down our focus on what our data is telling us is most important and in year zero over strategic plan and we're entering year two uh we really focused on coming out of the pandemic of doubling down on literacy mental health and belonging and ensuring our students graduate uh not just graduate with a diploma of high integrity but they graduate with options um we are an incredibly successful District we have turned the curve in a lot of different areas uh in terms of having a negative trajectory to a positive one none of us in this room or in this community are yet satisfied because we haven't met the needs of 100% of our students so I want to be really clear that's the goal it's not some we're going to be proud we're going to take
258a Victory lap here and there but we're also going to need to have hard but necessary and honest conversations around why are we not meeting the needs of certain students and let's be frank about it it's predictable the students we who we are not currently as a district meeting their needs it is predictable by race it's predictable by sexual orientation it's predict Able by socioeconomic status it's predictable by whether they are receiving integrated Services supports or if they're multilingual Or Hispanic um and so we have to have thoughtful hard conversations with each other around what are we not doing what could we be thinking about differently what do we need more of what are the resources what are the opportunities that we need to consider to think about to ensure that we continue to make
259quality high level improvements for all students not just some and so that is the goal and I'm really proud that in partnership with staff there is a Dei executive committee that's working in partnership with edac that has begun to Grapple with the concept of equity through the lens of how that plays out in pstd um and they have a working definition and I want to emphasize working there's a lot of thought and a lot of feedback that went into the current definition and I want to be respectful of the work in where the DI Dei committee has been but I'm also really grateful that they're open through learning opportunities with our districts around how do we improve this like what are this isn't this the work is messy and we want to make sure that
260people see themselves in it so I'm actually going to read the definition not just for the board but for members of the community and ensure that this is accessible to all but according to our district in its current form our Equity definition suggests that educational Equity exists when all students have access to to the resources and opportunities they need to be college career and Community ready what's great about that start is they realize that access and opportunity is insufficient just offering more opportunities just saying hey friends you got access to this resource you got access to this class is not enough to walk somebody across the finish line of success which means we have to do some really heavy lifting the work is around looking and being introspective persective around our mindsets our values and
261our beliefs to ensure that Equity work includes actively identifying and addressing discrimination and disparities removing barriers and implementing inclusive policies and practices for all students and staff again this is the starting point it's not the end but as this becomes and gets more traction and we continue to workshop and take a stance of learning and become the true learning organization to build internal coherence around this work we want to make sure that we have a a a strong starting point we have not populated the this definition in all of our other presentations not because we don't have the desire in fact staff does have that desire but we want to take a stance of learning and not just do this to people we want to do it with people but we thought we'd give you
262a preview that this is a driver of our work and we're starting to actually make that happen you will see as you go to the next slide that our priorities around our strategic plan in year two are coming more into focus on not just extending the work that's already in place but having a lens and an intentionality that is very hyp specific on disrupting disproportionality if we know that our student outcomes today are predictable by the various factors I outlined earlier we now need to be thinking about what are we doing to disrupt that predictability and so as you hear the presentation from the incredible staff that's here tonight that is the lens that is the goal and I will tell you it's not a one one year goal we have a found this will
263be the work in perpetuity to be quite honest with you and it doesn't mean that we're not going to ever arrive and get there it means that if we're not intentional about tending to this work not just from a student standpoint this isn't about testing our students more this is not just about looking at our curriculum this is about taking a stance of adult learning around how we partner across the organization with each other to be intentional around how we're showing up for our students how we're reflective of Who We Are as people but how we're also honoring the assets and the Brilliance of the diversity of the students that walk through our front doors every single day so our priorities remain unchanged but tonight you'll hear in this presentation an overview that has four
264specific points one is a review of our year one processes and the outcomes that we've achieved as a result of implementing with Fidelity and integrity our strategic plan but also talking about what's on the near Horizon in this school year around year two and how does that align with the uip the Strategic plan and the uip need to Cascade from one another they have to be aligned that's what allows role Clarity that's what allows deep ownership from The Boardroom to the classroom but it also has to allow for some level of differentiation because some of our schools in their data points reflect that they need to focus on some other things that are not yet represented in this particular strategic plan and that's important too and at some point we're going to need to have
265some more systemwide conversations about math we're not ready for that tonight uh but and I know my math teacher here she smiles I like that um we're also going to talk about your two goals and strategic strategic actions um and I think I'm proud of all of these bullets and the work and the partnership and the leadership that it's taking to talk about this presentation tonight uh but one of the things that I'll take just a real brief point of privilege and pride is that our team is recognizing that we can't just talk about this work and expect different outcomes we have to change the way that we do this work and we have to do it with people so the lessons that we learned in longrange planning we're learning and applying those same lessons
266to our academic Core Business too um which means that we have to think differently about our learning structures we need to think about our feedback structures from the schoolhouse to the boardroom and so I'm really grateful again you have a Allstar team here in this presentation I'm going to turn it over to you but thank you for allowing me to open this up tonight thanks Dr schmi thank you all right hello everybody so I'm GNA grab this first piece which is about the year one processes and outcomes we're going to move kind of quick it's 10:00 at night there's a lot of information um the uip itself is a pretty big document right so we're just going to highlight some stuff I want to mention that um there's a theme through through these next slides
267right and and we're talking about district and school Improvement processes continuous Improvement right and so the theme is we're going to talk about the three priorities you're going to see that there's strong evidence that the big needles that we monitor are moving in the right direction on all three of those priorities that's because the system has be able been able to organize themselves around those priorities right and so we can see the result of that and that's not to be taken lightly because you can't take that for granted that that evidence is going to emerge the way it did I'm also just going to quickly hit some of the highlevel action items that our system and our community have done during that last year that we believe are related to associated with right this type
268of an out come so that's what we're going to do on these next couple slides so the first one we're going to start with is literacy that we're looking at here and on the left hand side there on those bullets you can see that some of the big action items everyone's aware in this room that we implemented new curricula really it's three different curriculums at uh for the different types of schools because we have um you know El education at most of our schools and we have amplify ckla at our core knowledge schools and we have Mar marav wonders at our dual language school so really but that first bullet's about we implemented new K5 curricula and we've said this before a lot of people would expect some type of an implementation dip and we
269saw just the opposite we'll talk about that the second bullet there is this de-implementation that's in my to my knowledge it's the first in PSD where we put some real energy into behind de implementing what we want to get out of the classrooms so that we made space for and provided the investment in our people our teachers and our other staff to really deliver on the promise of the new curriculum so that was an important step the third bullet there is about uh supporting the licensed folks and the other staff in their professional development to use these materials and I just want to mention a couple of um facts in 2324 all of our K5 classroom teachers had 24 hours of dedicated PD associated with this curriculum implementation we also had um 12 to 18
270hours of PD provided for other staff who weren't the direct teachers we also had 22.5 hours of personalized one-on-one coaching for administrators and licensed staff so there was a lot of effort put into the investment and our people to deliver so when we say curriculum we're not just talking about crates and materials at PSD delivered right we've moved way past that it's a bigger process um the outcome data on the right I want to just point out really quick the top graph that you see all the data that you see up there is dibles 88 K3 K3 eight that's because we give that test to all of our K3 students and not to all of our fourth or fifth grade students you can see the top graph with the green line is showing the percentage
271of students each spring that met or exceeded what they call the Benchmark so you can think of as a grade level expectation and I think the big point is to notice that each successive year um we have seen for the years displayed like a 3.6 and then a two and then a 2.3 percentage unit increase so year-over-year improvements right in the percentage of kids that are meeting that Benchmark in the spring that's great evidence superintendent Kingsley mentioned and it's true prior to covid we had a slight but but consistent decline in our early reading scores and that is reversed so we have a substantial and consistent increase the graph on the bottom I want to you've been oriented to before but I just want to mention real quick um that's the achievement effect size and
272the reason we use that so predominantly in this district is that it it shows you the same type of information regardless of the test PSAT sat cmass Acadian dibles 8 when you look at this graph it's really telling you and giving you a meaningful normative interpretation of how we're doing zero always means the national or state typical outcome for those grade level peers right so whenever we're above zero that's an a achievement level of our PSD students that's exceeding those kind of norming groups we should be you know interested in knowing how we're doing and obviously that black line shows the same type of upward trajectory that you see in the green line the big story there not getting too deep in the weeds is just that we see clear evidence of improvement and that's
273not just in dibles even though I'm using that to highlight that type of pattern it's in our Maps data it's in our cmass data it's in the other data we've got too the last thing I'll mention is we have seen um information which is accurate um that we have some substantial gains that are more in the in the neighborhood of um 22 what was that 22% basically gains uh 22.1 percentage units and that is like a fall to Spring kind of a metric and what we're looking at is a spring to Spring to Spring just to point out okay all right the the last little piece I'll give people we go back real quick because we're going to use this metric in the future slides to ground you a little bit that 0.25 like a
2740.25 effect size is equivalent of like a 10 percentile unit change and so when we're when our students are testing like in that last year 23 24 at that 0. 28 effect size that's like our typical student being at the 60th percentile relative to National Norms it's high it's high achievement okay um next slide so literacy was going well we're moving in the right direction mental health and belonging on the left side we've got some highlighted actions that the system and the community have taken and then on the on the right side we describe some of this healthy kids Colorado display data that we're going to look at in just a second to make a high level point but let's talk about on the left side what are the actions our community has taken it's
275not just our District staff the first one is that we've increased access to Mental Health Providers through the use of interns and new hires and through Liz Davis and her team and others they brought in a massive amount of resource at $13.9 million over five years right and it's been deployed it's being it's impacting our schools our kids are benefiting from that right now they also another ma major effort has been to increase access to Community Partners not only through the staff that that 13.9 million has helped us with but also by creating alignment um across the different systems and with our partners like CSU so there's a there's an internship program they're building the pipeline of well-trained people to help our youth and so the team has done an awful lot and that team
276is massive and it's embedded all throughout our system we're going to look at some healthy kids Colorado data it's probably our best source to look at year you know every other year we take this assessment or survey as does the whole state and you can really see impact we're not causing we're not claiming causal impact there's a lot of things that have changed over the last two years but certainly these bullet points on the left are I have to believe moving helping move things in the right direction when we flip over and look at that chart it might be easier to look at the chart as I describe those you know that the bullets that were on the right the the items real quickly again the board has seen this before the items written in
277red are written in such a way that are uh they're like negatively written in my opinion right they're so lower percentages are better because you don't want kids responding to that item in the affirmative green items are written in a positive manner so higher percentages are better because they're written in such a way that you would want students to affirm that statement that makes sense right then really the the the other piece is there's some asteris in that column of blue um blue highlighted numbers those asteris indicate a statistically significant difference from 2021 to 2023 outcomes the fact that those columns are colored blue instead of yellow is indicating that all those changes are significantly positive the items that we're looking at in that entire chart on the top half of the chart are items
278from the high school respondents and on the bottom half are from middle school respondents right for 2021 and 23 and the moral of the story is it's very visually obvious that the change from 2021 to 23 is very very positive it's things are moving in the right direction and that's a significant change but I also want to point out if you look at those percentages in that in that column of blue and you think about those red items being negatively worded statements we would want those percentages to be close to zero or actually we would love them to be zero right and so there's all through this talk that I'm doing on these three slides literacy mental health and graduate with options yes we've got strong evidence that we're moving the needles in the right
279direction and we've also got strong evidence that our focus is in the correct area there is more work to do and we're not even breaking it out by different subgroups right now this is still Collective information so we can drill Deeper by looking at subgroups right which we're not going to do at the moment so I'm just trying to point out there's a pattern we're moving things in the right direction and we are definitely focusing on the right stuff there's more work to do um I want to mention that the response rate for the high school survey was 66.9% from the Middle School was 85.6% for the high school respondents there was about 6,000 students giving their information that's a lot of student voice and for the middle schools there was about 5,227 students so
280I'm just pointing out that there's a lot of data here from a lot of students who took their time to talk to us and that's what we're looking at right now okay um all right let's move to the next slide graduating with options on the left hand side we can see some of the actions we've taken my um friend Dr Julie Chaplan mentioned earlier reminded us that we did a lot of work last year in this system with the board and lots of Community Partners in our our system to actually change your graduation requirements why did we do that because we believe the changes that we made and that the board voted in actually open up opportunity for our kids and it's going to increase student engagement and help more kids be on the pathway
281way towards their IAP right their individual career and academic plan interest and passions which increases engagement increases learning and so on and so forth but we did that last year it's kind of a big deal as a system we all did that together the second bullet point we updated again was mentioned earlier the diploma process for diverse Learners which includes not only students that are supported with an IP but also included our multilingual Learners there were some changes for both of those student groups that are going to benefit them them in reasonable and important ways the third bullet there is increasing the availability of post-secondary articulated programs we increased we added two programs last year the auto program and the mental health program right and we've got another one that they're working on right now
282that is a it's not nursing it's a medical assistant or something program so there's this continuous effort in PSD to keep expanding these career connected opportunities for our kids at lead important things like nationally recognized credentials and so on right so that work has been going on and that articulation with our community colleges we have whole teams of people working hard to make sure that the courses we offer and the types of time the ways we're spending our times with our kids aligns with what the community college system and the university system needs to keep moving kids forward as long as well as internships and work-based learning opportunities uh the the last bullet there is increase student family awareness I brought in a poster tonight and I'm not going to ask Bud to hold it
283up but it's sitting right behind him and uh he's going to hold it up I think it's um it's just a small signal of like the kind of communication effort that we're putting out there's uh school specific posters of this nature that now posted in all of our high schools and thank you so much bud that kind of helps um families and students become more aware of the opportunities that are available we also revamped the website and and took other steps right with the um Future Ready Center and so on so that third bullet well graduation rates are kind of a lagging indicator right they take a while because kids are in school for four years before we find out if they hit that ontime graduation in four years nonetheless as you all know these
284last two years 87% with an rounding eror of 0.1% is a great um number for PSD historically also I don't know if the board noticed this but the target is set in this graph at 90% not 85% because with two successive years like that and looking at that existence proof idea and some other of the very best districts in the country we believe we can hit that 90% or better graduation rate in the next couple graduating classes so at any rate we have moved the needle in the right direction we definitely have more work to do right there and we're continuing that work can I hit pause this for a quick second so the last time that you've seen this we were presenting at 12:30 at night it's 10:30 now and I just wanted to
285take a brief pause to just allow us to digest what we just heard because I cannot find another school district around that has these kind of results and I want us to take a moment to thank our teachers our classified staff our school and District leaders for their intentional effort around buying into something bigger than themselves and getting dialed in to make sure that our students are reaching their potential and I don't know if it would be silly but I'd like for you to join me and actually considering giving them a round of applause because this didn't happen because of the boardroom it happened because of was happening in schools I appreciate that thank you Brian thanks for the pause and before I hand over the mic I have to say it was the medical
286assistant program that they're building up there right now so it's an incredible thing that's going on and we heard about the investment earlier I just want to also say thanks Brian for saying that it is a huge celebration like we heard earlier from several of you Karen and I moved here specifically no jobs in hand could have moved anywhere in the world and we I'm serious and we chose four Collins because we want to raise our kids here but one of the biggest factors is we looked at schools all over the country and we believe in PSD so we moved here with no no jobs and we had two little kids at that time Kai hadn't been born yet and man I'm telling you we made the best decision and this school district has been
287fantastic for my personal kids and the fact that we can come in and name Brian when you came in with your leadership you named three priorities the board got serious about letting us settle in on those priorities the system has organized itself we have some big major points that we just ran through on each one of these spaces and we're seeing all the big needles move in the right direction and now we're going to turn it over and my colleagues are going to go a little deeper on each of these pieces and we'll see there's still work to do but I think I love the celebration because that is a community celebration thank you so in preparing for the year 2 strategic plan and unified Improvement plan develop development we really leaned into doing this
288in a collaborative manner so I want to just describe how we went about identifying the goals and strategic actions that you'll see tonight for year two so part of um the year one strategic plan was us learning about the experiences people were having through leading the project teams as well as also monitoring the outcomes that we were seeing that students were EXP experiencing so you'll see two pieces of information that collaborative development so on the left hand side you'll see that we in conducted some very intentional focus groups with different constituents in our system we started those focus groups in November of 20123 so we had just launched the Strategic plan had been working in it for maybe a month or two and then immediately went to um our stakeholders and asked okay so this
289is what we're going going to do and what continues to be on your mind in terms of outcomes for students and experiences that we need to be paying attention to as we move through the work so we met with our principes our assistant principls our Deans our learning Services team as well as our project team leads and team members the project teams there were I think 12 of them that were working in the year one projects and so there was an extensive group of people moving intentional work forward and so we were continuing to um seek their input and feedback about what were other things that they were seeing and hearing and noticing as they were doing the work of year one um strategic plan work and then also very intentionally as Dr Schmidt's talked
290about our district accountability is an important constituent in this matter and that they um their feedback on our unified Improvement plan is closely tied to the work that we're doing in the Strategic plan so having them as a feedback loop is another important part of that collaborative development process some of the themes that emerged from those focus groups really spoke to our incredible system of teachers and leaders and staff who told us that we appreciate that we feel like we're doing well for most of the kids but we don't feel like we're serving our kids who are furthest from Justice and their outcomes and in their experiences within the district and we want to do better by all children in the district so those were some of the common themes that emerged from those focus
291group protocols is we want to do better by the kids who need us most and so in support of that we also looked at our data analysis alongside of that feedback that they were giving and as superintendent Kingsley stated you know there are predictable outcomes in our system you'll see it in the three-year Trend analysis you'll see it in our graduate and Dropout profile you'll see it in our healthy kids Colorado and connections data you'll see it in our gaps that will show you in a minute of that fall to Spring growth so we had many celebrations last year and we're still committed to doing more work so that we're doing right by all kids in the system so the next piece is just to really talk about the the approach that we used in
292identifying the Strategic actions that we're working toward so the overarching goal is to disrupt disproportionality for those groups of students where we have predictable outcomes and the means at which we intend to do that is by leaning into the research base on how to go about that that this is such intentional and focused work that we can't waste time on trying too many things like we really need to be very dialed into what the research says actually works and so there are four areas um that the research supports paying attention to and strategic actions the first area of research speaks to this idea of coherence and as superintendent Kingsley has talked about is that alignment that system alignment is really important but not only the system alignment the alignment in the students day and experiences
293that if you think about a student who might have vastly different experiences in a particular course or even within a particular school that one of the ways that we address that is through by creating greater and greater coherence for that student in in their daily experience and so transitioning between classes transitioning between teachers transitioning between content areas or even within a single content area speaks to the need for greater vertical articulation with ourn our system as well as articulation between our schools so we have a coherent experience for our children also for children who are highly mobile who transition between multiple schools and environments they have to have a coherent experience in order so that are not having a disruption to their learning the next piece is around access and we've talked about in our
294Equity definition the importance of access but this speaks to the removal of unnecessary barriers for students to programming and it could be a barrier such as Transportation so trying to provide transportation for all of our students to participate in enrichment and extracurricular activities and then also within that access that we want to provide Universal supports for students so that they're experiencing those within their core instruction rather than having a scaffold or an accommodation that happens outside of their core instruction it happens within the core instruction and actually is a scaffold that um can be beneficial to all students who are in the classroom the next piece being rigor so also within the research it speaks to not lowering expectations for students based on a mindset or a belief about who can achieve at what levels
295we believe every ch has genius and worth and potential and so our classroom should reflect that that we continue to have rigor in our classrooms but also it should be motivating to learn that aspect of rigor is not just harder it's new and interesting and it's exciting and it's relevant that's an important part of the experience that we want to create through our strategic actions for all children and then the last piece being environment so research also shows that when students experience places of belonging and they feel like they are affirmed for who they are and how they show up and that they contribute positively to the classroom and to the school that those um aspects and and how our words and our actions and our displays communicate who has the ability to learn and
296grow are really important aspects of creating a culture that creates success for every child and so those four components are the foundation of the Strategic actions that you'll see in each one of our um strategic priorities so I'm going to move us into then talking about literacy and the year two actions for literacy so as you'll notice the two goals that you see for literacy have been um part of the district ends for many years and these are two Keystone metrics that we've monitored in PSD but I want to call them out specifically because they'll be ways of for us to gauge whether we're making progress toward disrupting disproportionality so the first one that Keystone metric is 85% of students achieve grade level benchmarks in literacy and math so as Dr Schmidt showed on that
297previous graph around literacy we do have that threshold and that line is marked as 85% and that continues to be the achievement Benchmark that we strive for and also within that metric students with disabilities multi Learners and historically underserved identities exceed a Year's growth in a year's time so that growth effects SI of a zero or greater and so in the next slide you're going to see a some examples of how that shows up currently in our system and I want to take a minute and Orient you to this particular graph so again as Dr Schmidt showed us the K3 dibles 8 literacy data this slide is actually pulled out um showing the the different trend lines for students who have an IEP or are supported with an IEP and students who are not supported
298with an IEP so that black line is showing you that students who are not supported by an IEP their literacy achievement and that red line are students who are supported by an IEP so the disproportionality that you're seeing are those two lines are far apart okay so that's what we're trying to disrupt when we talk about dispropor orality is those two lines are far apart a celebration is is that if you take those two lines and the distance between the two lines starting in 2020 21 the distance between those two points was roughly 1.4 if you look at the distance between those two lines in 23 24 that number is cut in half so we halfed that distance over the course of the last three years and we're not done yet okay so until we
299get that next line to be closer to one another and ultimately that point of zero is that black dotted line that you see that's what we're striving for so we've got more work to do and that's why we believe that this is an important goal for our system the next graph that I want to orient you to is again that disproportionality but this is by elll level okay and so our elll level that this graph is showing you is that this is literacy achievement for students whose predominant um language is not English Okay so the teal line down at the bottom represents our non-english proficient students so those students have not yet um gain the skills and Proficiency in English the black line represents limited English proficient and then the yellow line is full English
300proficient so full English proficient is determined to be students whose primary language or her predominant language is not English but they no longer require daily support through um English language development services okay so again another celebration on this slide that that yellow line for our full English proficient students has surpassed that black dotted line which is the goal that we're striving toward however this is not true for all groups of students that's why we believe it's still an important Focus and an important goal for us to pay attention to closing the gap between those groups of students and ultimately why we chose the Strategic actions that we did so the literacy year 2 strategic actions so the primary driver within this strategic plan area is ensuring that we have access to high quality instructional materials
301and pedagogy for all of our staff and students Dr gule I'm so sorry you're in the middle of incredible flow I think you skipped a chart that I think is important by ethnicity no no not oh thank you yes no it's okay just yeah it's okay yeah thank you sorry I missed that one um the next chart shows this similar data point um K3 dibles 8 by ethnicity so again you're going to see those same trend lines with the blue slide are the blue um trend line being Hispanic students and then the black line being are um students who identify as black or African-American and then that red line being our white students so again a positive and increasing slope in our trajectory um into that 23 24 school year and there's still a gap
302between those different ethnicities that we want to close so again indica that there's more work to do in this area okay thank you so now the Strategic actions within literacy so the driver in this area is are access to high quality instructional materials and pedagogy so that pedagogy piece being the instructional practices that help the curriculum come to life as we talked about those experience of making on the curriculum have new and interesting ways that's that pedagogy part of the work and so it's it's not just provisioning the materials it's providing the professional development so that experience for the student does make the learning come to life and so that those Concepts and those skills become part of their um continued application throughout their academic career and so that first bullet being the implementation support
303for curriculum adoptions and that includes that professional development that's really important um also that um as Dr Schmid's talked about that we're providing dedicated time for people to be able to access that as well as the resources to support their own professional learning the second one being an analysis of future curriculum adoptions and so right now this year we um are adopting and implementing a 9th through 10th language arts curriculum at the high school level we have world history also at the high school level and we have discret mathematics and statistics and probability at the high school level for Middle School the adoptions are middle school science and eighth grade social studies so those teachers will be experiencing a high level of professional development and support for those adoptions and at the same time the
304curriculum team will be evaluating what are the next series of future curriculum adoptions that those teams will begin meeting this year to identify what's the high quality instruction materials that will be implemented for next year so the third bullet then goes into looking at student access to rigorous grade level instruction and programming so when I talked about removing barriers and to access that's what that bullet is is that we need to do an analysis of you know where are students able to access grade level instruction and where do we have unnecessary barriers in programming then the fourth one being developing an instructional coaching support system and so we know that teachers need job embedded support when they are designing lessons that require new and different ways of thinking as well as providing scaffolds for students
305to access curriculum within the classroom rather than rather than pulling students out so that they access the curriculum that instructional coaching support system is going to be an important piece of that and then finally to research and Implement scaffolds and accessibilities for all Learners that Universal Design is a really important aspect that all Learners benefit from um supportive scaffolds that aren't just for students with disabilities they're not just for multilingual Learners they're for all students and so a team will be working on developing and delivering that and so the next series of slides will go into our strategic actions for graduate with options and Dr chapen will'll explore those with you thank you Dr guile that was you did a nice job that was a lot of uh lot of information there so thank you
306um so pivoting to our other strategic plan priority area graduate with options um as Dr schmidtz uh alluded to already um we um have raised the bar here on our district goal and so um we specifically are looking um to increase overall graduation rates toward 90% while closing the gaps for students with disabilities multilingual Learners and those that are historically with underserved identities hope you're seeing a theme here um that of focus and so um again just illustrating our overall graduation rate um around that 87% Benchmark um but as we go to the next slide you'll see um excuse me in this slide it demonstrates um really um the black line is pter School District student IEP supports um and then the pink line is um really with our state totals and remember keeping in
307mind the overall rate of 89% um we identify a gap here um while we have um made progress in increasing uh the graduation rate steadily over the past several years um which is great news we're coming closer in line to the state IEP um graduation rate however we are not there we're not there and we want to strive for 90% for students who have IEPs as well okay some of the actions that you know we've taken into account already or have already been discussed with graduation rates and the IEP diploma diploma process um allowing some of our students um that have historically Tak in those alternative State assessments um to now um get on a path towards um you know earning their diploma um when traditionally they were given a certificate of attendance all right
308in the next slide when we look at our uh students who are again um those that are are not have do not dominant English speakers um we have uh the um English language learner graduation rates here you can see a similar pattern in that um we we remained um you know a little slight decline for a few years but the last three years we have been increasing um and we are really close to the State graduation rate um for this group of students and again just emphasizing we're not there yet and we're want to hit that 90% measure the following slide uh focuses on um one of our um subgroups and that's our students that are identified as Hispanic within our system a similar story as well um you can see uh that we have
309had uh you know some a little increase a little decrease hasn't been very steady um in recent years uh the last two years we had a significant increase in graduation rates that has held fairly steady slight decline um and we are edging closer and closer to that state total and again not at the 90% measure um and so some specific actions U really have been the use of family Liaisons inclusion inclusion practices um you know so that um students that need additional support are not being pulled out of pulled out of their instructional core classes so um you know in order to close these gaps we really have three areas um that we are approaching system alignment with under our focus of graduate with options um and so they are graduation requirements um Equitable grading
310alignment um in middle schools and priority content and um then system alignment on attendant processes and supports prek-12 so let's start with graduation requirements um so the work for the the work of the team this year will be to take those established career Pathways that were developed districtwide um and create versions uh for each high school so at Rocky what does that look like based upon the courses that they offer uh within their concurrent enrollment systems certificate options for industry certifications um and the like and uh also work-based learning options as well uh so those would be um on the agenda for creating for each High School the second would be really helping focus on supports for students with disabilities and multilingual Learners in completing their individual career and academic plan having lesson plan and
311IND and intentional uh check-ins for Progress to ensure the plans are really being um actualized created used to help guide uh in in cases of students with disabilities it's helping inform that course plan of study within their IEP um and so we think that that will be intentional alignment and work within the system for those specific students and then the third is really continuing on uh uh the alignment that we've started with grade monitoring of students throughout our system um and then in high school the credit AC cruel um to provide supportive measures um for Student Success so um you know looking how those PE how those things all intertwine um and the the final pieces that I just want to kind of highlight here are that um you know we talk about Career Tech
312Ed credentials and Pathways I want to make sure it's really really clear that these programs s have very high levels of Standards um by no means um are these Pathways um that uh might be should be seen as a path of lease resistance or something that does not lead towards postsecondary um College admissions um or direct Workforce military all of these pathways are very rigorous um and really can help contribute not only to student engagement but to their academic graduation outcomes all right the next area of system alignment Falls within our Equitable grading practices and this work will take multiple years we will start with the work uh beginning in middle schools in uh this first phase and there's really you know as we look at those pieces um we want staff to think about
313how they grade students performance in a consistent way um clarity through what they're grading um and how often they grade these would be examples of things that we really would be looking at and then within what students are learning identifying priority standards uh in certain subject areas if I were to take language arts for example the amount of standards in language arts um is um o a little overwhelming uh if and if you were going to say we're going to meet every single standard so how do we really focus in on those um really ones that we want to um we think are really gonna be get the biggest bang for our bu Buck by course or content level the final area of our alignment with work would be within the attendance and treny domain
314and so attendance is a key lever um aligned with coherence and access and research is very clear that uh students with higher attendance rates have higher graduation rates and we see this in our data as well uh within PSD and so you know as we look at creating system alignment um we want to develop alignment with systems and also supportive measures uh related to attendance and treny in working with our students and so specifically uh we are implementing a an automatic iic absenteeism and Trent letter notification system I want to be very clear this is a notification system this is our communication so that families are aware here's where your student attendance is at overall we're here to help you we want to partner with you that is the theme of what those letters should
315be focusing on in our intent to focus it is not trying to be a gotcha it is not trying to throw throw out some sort of idle um you know statements that you know you're going to go to court I mean that is not the place we're coming from we are coming from we want to make sure you're informed as a parent um and as a school these are impacts on your students learning and so we want to partner with you in that system uh and uh we also want to be really clear that letters are not interventions so so uh because of that the next two bullet points are really really clear um and that are the next three are really what we need to continue then is one um developing and and continuing
316to implement um Family assessments student assessments to gather feedback from students and families as to the barriers they're facing things that we may not be aware of um that we can help problem solve and partner with either within the district or community supports and then um next would be curating a menu so as we're looking at you know providing targeted supports for small groups of students that are having higher numbers of absenteeism and then even individualized supports for those students with the highest levels of absenteeism we want to create um options and research-based supports of supportive excuse me of supportive measures for schools to access and be able to implement with their teams and this would all be part of a comprehensive uh revision of you know the previous attendance uh guide book which I
317think has been 2012 so it's been a while it's time so uh so that is the work in the space of graduate with options and now I will turn it over to my colleague Liz Davis to talk through mental health and belonging hi everyone great to see you yes it's late you're doing great okay so thinking about mental health and belonging and our goals and our work we're excited and Dwayne's going to partner a little bit in this space too so thank you Dwayne okay so having access to high quality literacy curriculum ensuring all students are connected to their interests and all the opportunities of their own future we must continue to pay attention to their mental health and wellness this requires foundational strategies and working together with our staff and students to build capacity
318while recognizing and addressing harassment and bullying in our schools by building our capaity students and staff will have more skills to support recognize report and response so everyone feels safe and welcomed at school so our goal by the end of the 25 26 school year and I'll come back to the 2526 because as you'll know that's two years so we hope 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% okay just let that sit for a minute so you'll hear where we're focusing our efforts right so you'll notice that these goals are again those two years and this is really due to our state and federal laws and regulations related to harassment and discrimination were
319updated in July and August of this year and to align our processes this year will consist of training in our system you hear the coherence and the following year we will review our progress so collect the Baseline data see where we're at and the following look at our look at that data so we'll look at data consistently and we're mapping this as a two-year goal so Dwayne's going to walk us through a little bit and then I'll come back to talk about the actions okay thank you thank you Liz all right let's talk a little bit about where we sit today with some of the data so again we're looking at healthy kids Colorado survey data we've got two tables up there we're going to talk about the top one first both tables reflect High
320School respondents data okay the the top table is focused on racism items their racism subscale and the bottom table is on bowling items or the bowling subscale and the top um the top scale I want to just point out real quickly that we have positive improvements or improvements in the right direction on um one of the two items and not the other and in both cases we're doing better than the state and yet when you look at those percentages you know we want to get them down to zero so there's still work to do there when we look at the bottom uh table we also see that we are have improved on about half of the items there's a couple of the items in the middle and especially the two that are flagged yellow that
321it appears we are moving in the wrong direction from 2021 to 2023 so this is why sometimes it's valuable data right to not just look at the overall numbers but drill it down and look at it um sliced up a little bit like this but there's a story to this that I want to share with you um before I do notice that when we have the PSD uh 2023 compared to the state 2023 on both the top chart and the bottom chart those little colored exclamation points are there to show you if it's green PSD has got a more favorable number than the state and if it's red we've got a less favorable number than the state so when those two when two things Collide like we're moving in the wrong direction and we're we're
322doing less well than the state I'd say that's a flag right that's a that's a flag for us to pay attention to but here's the deal and that's one there's one reason I'm getting to talk about this slide tonight on the second table look real carefully at the whole bottom set of items because it starts off saying among teased and then notice those end counts that went from about 5,000 on the right down to like 899 so those responses the way the healthy kids Colorado survey delivers this information to districts it's kind of confusing because it's it's a it's a linked item where first they ask the students have you been teased and if the students say yes then they go on to ask and why were you being teased right so it's a percentage
323being calculated off of like a subset of the students not representing the overall population when the cabinet first looked at these numbers we almost fell out of our chairs and we were looking at things like among te's te's because of religion 18.8% and the casual observ might think that means that 18.8% of our kids are being teased because of religion and that isn't what it means it means of kids who raised their hand and said I'm being teased 18.8% of those kids said and it's because of religion you with me so the next table so we can make more sense of this as District leaders which everybody in this room is we took the denominator of all the students that are responding to the survey and we took the numerator of the number of kids
324who said yes I'm being teased because of religion and we did our own Division and so on this table you're looking at now on that PSD 2023 column those are like the actual percentages of students in our population who said hey I'm being teased because of religion or because of disability or because of my physical appearance and so on okay now I'm not talking to you to to state that those numbers aren't alarming because they are they're too high we have work to do in this space but one thing I want to point out that's like a cool lesson in statistics is on that prior slide you know those two cells I had highlighted yellow they're not just PSD didn't just move in the wrong direction we move significantly in the wrong direction according to
325that prior slide but when you look at the the data broken out like this as a true percentage and you look at those same two items teas because of religion and teas because of disability psd's numbers actually moved in the correct direction just like the other ones do you guys follow me this is why it's important sometimes to slow down and be careful about like what data is really being displayed and what is it really telling you so you're not chasing down wrong signals I want to be super clear we're not trying to dis you know dis uh regard the information or say that there's not an issue to be addressed there is we're just trying to get an honest look at the information so things are moving in the right direction but you notice
326that those redex exclamation points in the right side of the chart they're on all the same exact rows as the other chart so we are not doing as well as the state overall on several of those items within this High School subscale on bowling hence it's worthy of our attention if we go to the next slide real quick this is the last one of these slides in healthy kids Colorado data the yellow highlighting again is showing you things that are significantly um less favorable blue highlighted cells are showing you um cells that are significantly more favorable than what than the overall population column on the hard left which is the 2023 overall outcomes this set of tables is breaking down the data by different student group as opposed to doing a 20121 to 2023 comparison
327or a state to PSD comparison the this these tables are all PSD data the top table is high school data the bottom school is Middle School data both sets of data are are the bullying subscale but what makes these tables different is that we're just looking at it broken out by different student subgroups including in the First Column after the overall numbers is the is the gender queer and non-binary students who self-identify as gender queer and non-binary and then the next column over are students that self-identified as gay or lesbian and so on down the road Hispanic Latin x black African-American and Asian so the patterns is what I just wanted to point out real quickly we see um very clearly in this last slide that gender queer non-binary and gay lesbian students are experiencing
328significantly higher levels of bullying due to holding those identities period recognize that these two data are independent of each other there is no kid that's in both the top survey data and the bottom survey data these are different sets of kids the other thing I want to point out is Hispanic black and African-American students and Asian students those three different groups are experiencing significantly higher levels of bullying due to race and ethnicity period that we've seen this data now in multiple times from healthy kids Colorado we've seen it at middle and we've seen it at High School the the outcomes I'm flagging them with color coding are significant they're not just different they're significantly different which means not likely due to chance and I'll stop there just indicating that we're well aware and everyone in
329this room is aligned around we're serious about improving these self-reported outcomes for our students hence I'm going to turn over the mic back to my colleague Liz Davis who's going to tell us about some of the things we're doing to take action to improve our students experience in PSD yeah thanks DNE um so as we think about mental health and belonging actions we really want to focus on creating those affirming environments that help our students feel safe and supported and create system actions for intentional change so this is really right about supporting our students who hold diverse and historically underserved identities we've heard that consistently tonight and educating all of our students and staff about harass assment and discrimination in our PSD system so those actions thinking about creating affirming environments we want to be
330providing direct education in fourth and sixth grade classrooms on positive and respectful School Community environments for all students with a focus on diversity equity and inclusion we'll also train and support staff and students in disrupting and Reporting incidents of bias and harassment and align the system around investigation procedures targeted responses and a tiered approach to interventions and supports additionally we'll provide additional training for mental health staff on supportive measures and supports for students reporting higher incidents of bullying and harassment so what you're seeing here is is that alignment and the coherence that we're talking about in the system and doing the alignment and the training so so with that I'm going to hand it off to in soon okay fine all right um so you've just heard about our areas of focus under our three
331strategic plan goal areas and that through coherence and Alignment increased access to programming fostering rigorous learning opportunities in an environment that affirms and welcomes every student is a part of our diversity equity and inclusion efforts Equity centered actions are woven throughout our strategic plan but we wanted to take a moment and highlight a few action steps for our system again centering on creating affirming environment ments so we um will be and have started already um that all staff will receive professional learning on inclusive climate and culture our leaders throughout our system will receive professional learning on Equitable leadership practices um and our school administrators and central office leaders will receive professional learning on harassment and discrimination investigation and decision making so again thinking systemwide not just certain groups or certain levels we're talking about everyone
332across our system and so I get the privilege of um rounding out our presentation tonight around our learning and our feedback structures and so trying to be a little snazzy with a little animation at the end of the night um bear with me and and I'm going to try to walk you through the diagram that I'm sure is all inclusive on the page you're looking at and so really talking about system alignment and the flow of how we go about our business as we approached this year we were provided with a lot of feedback that we must take an aligned system approach with our work we are doing more intentional and deliberate work and therefore our structur shouldn't look the same as what we have always done this diagram is intended to show the flow
333of how we move from a strategic plan uip and the through line to staff and Student Success so I'm going to start on the leftand side um with a gray Circle that includes ah there we go um our strategic plan and District unified Improvement plan that really guides our work for the Year this first blue Double Arrow and first group that comes into play is our cabinet team this is represented by the double blue arrow that you see after the gray Circle following cabinet comes three team groups um we have our academic cabinet we have our learning Services team of directors and our Dei executive committee these three teams are critical in viewing um work that cabinet has looked at to provide that initial feedback loop towards the strap plan and uip the second double
334blue arrow then represents our newly formed District teams a multi-tiered system of support advisory team which is made up of 40 individuals across six departments and our multi-tiered system of support uh implement ation team of 133 individuals which includes three principles this work is structured by Colorado Department of education's multi-tiered system of supports framework the next Circle represents um shared learning opportunities and co-creation within instruction and operation departments it is vital to us that we have shared learning and that we provide time and space for Co collaboration where it deemed appropriate again we started some of this practice with the bus safety launch at the start of this school year this is a significant shift from past practice and structures and principal meetings will also start shifting to a shared learning model the final Double
335Arrow represents our department leadership teams meaning everyone needs to take or move forward from the shared learning and co-creation and start looking at aspects of the project or expectations through the lens of their individual Department the final Circle represents our building School leadership teams it is vital that they are also part of this flow as they are um key um leaders in our system with moves with our staff and our students the last of this row is a star because we want all our students to be successful and our staff to also feel that success what you see popping down at the top is a little stop sign that represents that we must always look at our data what does our data say and then based upon all the different groups of feedback loops what
336do we need to adjust or not and what do we need to continue to celebrate along the way at the very bottom of this diagram you'll see that there's words stated that infus throughout our structure our opportunities to engage with collect feedback from and co-create with again where appropriate with and then we named them District staff principls assistant principles Deans building department leaders teachers students and community members it is important to us that we have a constant and consistent feedback loop groups so that we are really moving forward with a living working plan and we are adjusting and monitoring closely where we need to even though this diagram is linear we must ensure that we have a cycle and that we continually embed opportunities for our teams to not only provide feedback listen for feedback
337but also ensure that we are using data to drive our decisions so how will we know if our work is moving toward Equitable outcomes for students and staff I believe this was a question asked of us quite a bit last year and therefore we wanted to Pro provide an explanation of how we would know that we are moving towards more Equitable outcomes equity work will be successful when student and staff identities including those of race color creed religion national origin ancestry sex sexual orientation gender identity gender expression pregnancy and related condition age disability veteran status genetic information and citizenship are not predictors of outcomes we really appreciate the opportunity to share um our successes from last year How We are continuing to Center on disrupting disproportionality and how our actions will continue to create alignment
338and system supports so that everyone in our system from the board to our classroom are able to meet the needs of our students each and every day so thank at this time we would appreciate any questions that the board may have once we have done once we are done with the discussion and our questions we will ask the board to approve our uip thank you so much um I just I just want to start off if I may um this was one of the most concise wonderfully written uips that that I have ever seen on my tenure of on the board um it's exactly where I hoped we would go um it's a beautiful representation of what has been done in the past year one of the things that I love about it is it
339shows just how far we came in this last year and to everybody's credit here and to our teachers credit and our staff's credit nobody stopped and said look at us we're so good and paused you went right on to the next thing and said yes we did great and there's so much more to do and we have to do it for all of our students and that to me is just incredible um you know this would not have happened um years ago I this is to me this is an incredible feat it is um an absolute pleasure to see um and I just want to thank you so much for listening to the community listening to each other listening to the students who are asking for this um I I just when I read the
340the uip over the weekends I was like this is the best thing ever I mean how many times does a uip bring smile to your face and say yeah this is great but this was absolutely amazing and I'm just just so proud of the work that you all have done and the work that you um just I can tell the passion that you have for it to bring it to every single student and that just it's it's incredible um and that's why we're here so I just before I open it up to the floor I just felt like I needed to say that to you all so thank you thank you thank you now are there any questions yeah Carolyn I I think it's not a question but I think to kind of echo what
341you said I think the transformation here is and how we've been approaching this problem which is we are really owning it right we not only owning our successes and celebrating it I love that but we're owning the issues that we need to address and then we're looking at our subgroups I mean those are students in our system that deserve our attention and deserve to be successful and I'm always going to go back to the students um I think this IP is centered on the needs of our students and um I I really like the direction we're going in with the ownership of of the issue and being positive in the aspect that we can we can do better so I I was really happy with the report too other questions or comments yes Scott um
342could we go back to the bullying uh like one of the earlier ones sorry oh no the anime yeah it was a grid that talked about how many people uh let's see sorry I'm looking for the oh slide 28 I don't know I'm just kidding I don't know uh no I'm just kidding okay actually go back one this is riveting sorry uh sorry go back to the grid I'm looking at people feeling bullied electronically there it is what's that number on the far right how many my eyes are bad far right column electronically bullied it's a second row 5600 okay that said which is like 560 600 kids okay so that's a big area for bullying right so I think I'm very proud of the district for reemphasizing the the cell phone policy I think
343it's something that we need to stay focused on uh because I think it can really impact that uh that's that's huge right there and we heard from our principles who've had cell phone banss leer and bevens that they incidences of um you know discipline dropped dramatically once they did that because it was mostly related to the cell phone so I think it's really important that we stay on that and I keep saying this but it's a free thing that we can do so doesn't cost us a lot of money to implement something that simple and I think the kids will thank us in the end and uh so I really encourage us to keep on that path expand it to the high schools I know we have to be a little um you know cognizant
344of of differences between middle schools and high schools but I thought that was a really uh big Point um so I wanted to just reemphasize that you I'm I'm glad you brought that up because I noticed that too and that was one thing that I thought about I wonder how much that cell phone policy will help to continue lower those numbers right so we we think about how many times during a day a a child might be using their phone to bully another Child by you know taking videos and things that would have just been happened and been forgotten get get immortalized on the internet and kids you know um get taunted and teased for a long time and and then that kind of stuff never goes away and so I agree with you I
345think that's important other comments all right J would you call the vote Jim bookish hi Christen Draper hi Conor Duffy hi Kevin Hava I Carolyn Reed hi Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 70 thank you and thank you everyone for staying this late presenting this late and for just the incredible work that y'all have [Applause] done okay so now we get to move on to executive session um can I get a motion Kevin thank you I move the board enter executive session to receive legal advice on specific legal questions relating to investigation by the office of civil rights regarding Liberty common school as authorized by CRS section 24 6402 subpart 4B individuals invited to en jooin the board and executive session are superintendent Brian Kingsley Chief of Staff Lauren hudon and general counsel
346Autumn asman can I get a second thank you Jess all right Joel can you please call the vote Jim broish hi Kristen Draper hi Conor Duffy hi Kevin Hava hi Carolyn Reed hi Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora I motion passes 70 thank you we will now convene in a closed session this is the last agenda item before adjournment at the conclusion of the executive session we will come back to this room to publicly adjourn the meeting the adjournment will be recorded but not be televised and we are going to take a 10minute break in between so it is now 11:24 we will convene at 1134