001e all right well good evening and welcome to tonight's Board of Education meeting um please meute your cell phones and uh watches and anything else that beeps or buzzes um today is Tuesday February 20th 2024 and this meeting is now call to order at 6:35 p.m. sorry for the slight delay all right so would any board members like to make changes to the agenda okay seeing none all right moving on then board topics and committee reports so this agenda item is an opportunity for board members to provide an update on committee work or speak to board topics to any board members have something they'd like to report then go ahead not a committee topic but I did want to say that um I got to spend some time at putam Elementary uh this past Friday
002did a school visit and uh I love ending the week on a school visit especially when I don't have to teach a class or do any grading I just get to show up it's pretty wonderful um I did want to highlight that I did receive multiple unsolicited hugs from kids for multiple children um there was I think director broker said this at one of our discussions in The Guiding principles for the long-term steering there is an energy about certain schools that's palpable and putam Elementary is one of those schools um the kids in the hallways were smiling um they were uh they hugged the principal who is you know gracious host Steve uh of mine and that shows you that they feel safe there they feel good there the energy is good I also spend
003some time in Miss moland's fourth grade uh class um it was doing a reading lesson and again 100% engagement Incorporated technology flawlessly I wanted to stay I had other things I had to do that day but I wanted to stay because it felt so good um and so for you know it ending the week was was a very positive note but also a nice reminder of the incredible teachers that we have here in this district and how lucky we are um because putham also is a title one school isn't just about the academic side of the education it's teaching the entire kid um some of the services they do there that meet the community and meet the the parents and the the students where they are and provide that safe space so I wanted to
004um highlight putam and the the excellent work that they were doing and just tell everyone if you can stop by do it because it is a it's a joy and maybe you get some hugs out of it thank you anyone else go ahead Scott yeah I a couple of things uh so before we start um just following up from the last uh board meeting um before we start Community comment I wanted to apologize for my Outburst at the last Boe meeting uh my use of profanity was not appropriate and didn't really fit with the model we're trying to have um of encouraging civil discourse and modeling that for the Youth and Community um I know and I've learned in the past week for sure that we're all very passionate about our families and our students
005and helping them where we can and I I'm really encouraged by where we're going with uh with some of these things we have a lot of work to do but I'm I'm excited about that um but I let my passions get get the best of me and I apologize for that um I'm hoping to encourage positive productive communication going forward and uh hope you guys will uh will share the same so I appreciate that on a lighter note uh just because I always like to throw some things in tonight is the start of the uh basketball playoffs and I think we need to celebrate our four High School girls teams that are in the playoffs they made the playoffs Rocky is playing right now uh and they're hosting which is a big big deal so
006let's root for them and tomorrow we have three out of the four high school boys teams playing on the road so be thinking about those guys so this will this will be an exciting week so thank you very much fantastic thank you Scott anyone else I just want to close out by actually I brought a little show and tell if I may um so thank you so I got to spend uh Tuesday night at empty bowls celebration um for the lammer County Food Bank and the bowls that I I just wanted to show off the bowls this was made by Addison from PCA and this one was unfortunately not named but uh cash Laut middle school so I just wanted to show off the Fantastic artwork that our students are doing and even more importantly
007than just the artwork and what they're learning um through the artwork is they were doing this for others they were doing this I don't know if you know about empty bowls but um it is a a celebration that's been going on for uh 40 years now uh or 40 years for the um for the food bank I think 27 years for empty bowls and every uh year the students go ahead and make bowls that they then then donate and people like any Community member can come in and purchase the bowls um and then you go around and have soup and it's all a fundraiser for um the uh food bank for LMA County but I just wanted to to show these off and you know just say a special thank you to all the teachers
008and all the students who put all their time and effort to make something that then they give a piece of their heart away CU I know that probably parents out there are like I would really like to have these so parents if you know who these are and you would like them um a small to uh you PR School District would be great that's all I have thanks right anyone else okay so we'll move on to the superintendent report uh superintendent Kingsley will now make remarks to the board of education and the community thank you thanks president Draper members of the board uh good evening members of the community good evening I'm so grateful to be with all of you and I feel warm and fuzzy after all of those announcements you know it's uh
009members M of the board as you go out into the community and speak with uh not just staff but families and our students I think collectively you know the Synergy that you just kind of elevated is that our students can and are doing hard things every single day uh I'm really proud that not only our students uh but our staff collectively right now across the system are grappling and doing and accomplishing great things that are really hard and complicated on behalf of improving this school system whether it's long range planning efforts to take a look at you know reimagining attendance areas or having the very hard but necessary conversation to consider is school consolidation something that the system needs to take on we can be thinking about how we're how are we going to continue
010to maintain high levels of service like transportation to our students each and every day tonight we're going to be talking about strategic plan efforts to continue to advance and be more Innovative in key priority areas across the system and we all know that we have all of our employees trying to continue along the way to advocate for the Improvement of working conditions across the district as well I'm just really grateful that we're continuing to stay focused on continuous Improvement you know as we Center ourselves as a system all of these things are not in vain they're they're in service of continuing to make sure that this district is vibrant not just today but well into the future and it's very much student focused sharing data and sharing our stories is a huge part of that
011continuous Improvement effort I'm really grateful that tonight we will have an opportunity to welcome staff from the state demographers office who are going to be presenting on what we're seeing across our state in terms of enrollment Trends family Dynamics uh that are all important attributes that we need to be taking into consideration in our longrange planning efforts this is another opportunity for us to continue to provide clear reliable information uh and make sure that we're continuing to be as trans arent as possible with our respective communities uh I haven't been a direct participant in our steering committee efforts but I do want to take a point to just thank uh all of those committee members I believe they've met at least three times uh up to this point just I think their third meeting was
012this past week and as they're grappling with how to look at adjusting boundaries potentially or consolidate schools think about our educational program placement in new and innovative ways it's a commitment above and beyond their daily life all in service of trying to make this District healthy uh and to Grapple with hard things that and that's just tremendous leadership uh as I said a little bit earlier later this evening as well we'll also talk a little bit about where we are with all things related to our district strategic plan I'm so proud of our Collective staff's efforts to prioritize key things that are high leverage activities that put our students in a much better position postgraduation to have options um and so tonight you know what I am hoping you as a governance team here is
013not something that just sits on a bookcase or on a shelf in a classroom but true stories around how that work is playing out each and every day those stories come with challenges they come with celebrations and as we continue to work through that it's important to continue to update uh our community and all of you on our progress moving forward you know related to our strategic plan uh the board will be asked to consider making changes later on not tonight uh to our District's High School graduation requirements that it will be coming back before the board later this spring but before we get to that stage we want to just announce to the community that we are gathering inputs in this process from our students from our staff our parents and Guardians and our
014communities and I want to just do a special call out to invite any of those members if you're just interested and want to learn more uh we have two engagement sessions being hosted on February 27th and 29th where we'll review potential proposed changes you'll have an opportunity as a community member to ask questions and share feedback and there is a lot more information uh about this as well as the longrange planning efforts and the work of the steering committee all being readily available on our district website so I was invite people to go to that I want to close my statements tonight how I usually start them you know all of these efforts as I shared are in service of improving the livelihood of our children to make sure that they can reach their potential
015and they have options postgraduation well where does all that come to life it's in our classrooms it's in our school hallways it's in our departments as they're grappling with hard things to try to figure out ways to improve service to schools I had the opportunity over the past couple of weeks to visit several schools I'm grateful that you are out there uh getting unsolicited hugs and having high fives and all those good things uh but a couple schools in in departments that I really want to celebrate uh just this past week I had a chance to go to a naturalization ceremony hosted at dun Elementary School I believe this was the 20th year uh not consecutive but the 20th year that they've offered that ceremony their fifth graders it is student-led student oriented our the
016fifth graders are all participating they were a choir they were organizing they were greeters that the whole thing was just put on by students while also having the fourth grade students observe to know what that experience is like and having an opportunity to watch 30 to 35 incredible human beings want and become a citizen of the United States was nothing short of incredible there wasn't a dry eye in the in the auditorium and I'm just really really grateful of the representation of not just what makes this country great but on our openness to diversity there was 19 different languages spoken uh through the different people that were represented and it just was absolutely amazing amazing I had a chance last week to also go to Lopez Elementary School um actually was there twice last week
017one just for a school visit had a chance to see incredible instruction meet with their leadership team and just can't say enough about the leader and me program and seeing how students using those language of Highly Effective habits and how that becomes their way of work and looking for win-win situations we have a lot to learn from the students at Lopez Elementary School uh but they put on a fundraising event uh on behalf of respit care uh it was just an incredible Community showing to see all these different people led by students and the fourth grader that wouldn't allow me to eat dessert before I had my dinner you know I it's it's okay nothing to be worried about but I had a really really good time um and and I'll close with one other
018school Irish Elementary School uh unfortunately as many of you might remember and know that I was unable to attend our last board meeting in person because I was under the weather and that meant I actually had to reschedule a school visit to Irish Elementary School and I had a scheduled informal superintendent chat do you know when they wanted me to come back on a Friday afternoon at 3:00 the dedicated staff of Irish Elementary School gathered in their Media Center to just talk with me I'm so humbled by that in terms of their commitment there was bad weather if you remember storm came through around 4 o'clock that day and their commitment to push my thinking around things that are not just playing out at Irish but across the system to make my leadership be more
019informed by their commitment what they see in the field was just nothing short of tremendous and honorable and I'm just really grateful for the level of dedication that we see from all employee groups across this great organization so thank you for giving me a few minutes to talk about that thank you thank you all right we're going to move on to community comment so welcome to the community comment section of the board meeting the board desires to hear the viewpoints of all stakeholders including students employees parents Guardians and community members public comment is designed to address issues not personalities or Personnel matters please keep your concerns and comments focused upon the district please note that the board does not generally respond to remarks made during Community comment our lack of response should not be construed
020to mean that we agree or disagree with what is said or the description or interpretation of events as presented by any speaker further even if some remarks may be factually inaccurate we generally do not choose to respond or to correct the record here because formal board meetings are not the time or place for back and fourth dialogue as we begin this community comment session let us model for our entire Community how to listen and how to interact respectfully even with those with whom we disagree for we all have the students best interests at heart so this opportunity is for public for 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 and each
021speaker will be allowed 3 minutes to address the board and our first person is Jeff afteri welcome I'm Jeff fotti from Wellington Colorado and tonight I'm here to shed light on a pressing issue regarding the Colorado open records act that demands public scrutiny and immediate action let's begin with a striking detail from a Coloradoan article dated March 25th 2021 the context is that Sandra smiser the former PSD superintendent received an early retirement package of over $560,000 to leave position one of the reasons cited for her departure in this article was a lack of transparency and clear communication there was a particular incident where a board member felt compelled to consider an open records request to obtain withheld information this board member's assertion underscores a fundamental principle the request for transparency should not be seen as
022a nuisance but as a rightful demand for accountability the Crux of our discussion tonight in involves house bill 24296 championed by representative and former PSD board member Kathy Kip this legislation proposes changes to Kora that are not only discriminatory but also pose a grave threat to the transparency of PSD operations first it enables a custodian to label inquiries as vexatious effectively barring access to public records for 30 days secondly it unfairly distinguishes news media personnel as a special category of requesters insinuating that the bill will not impede their access to records a notion contradicted by evidence from Coloradoan reporters who request information from parents who submit cor requests thirdly it aims to restrict access to the calendars of public officials a move that directly impacts the accuracy and transparency of PSD operations the pivotal question
023is this who stands behind this bill that seeks to curtail access to government held public public records and the answer is none other than pish School District itself in August he held a legislative meeting attended by current and former board members including president Christian Draper and vice president Jessica zamorro and they made it evident that there's an interest in erecting barriers to public records requests this bill's vexatious Clause is a clear attempt to Shield the board from scrutiny over past decisions and actions that they find embarrassing the silent surrounding representative Kip's visit last November especially in the wake of this controversial bill is telling and in response I requested the calendars of all board members seeking Clarity on their meetings and involvement with Kip to discuss the bill to president Christian Draper and vice president
024Jessica Zamora I ask when did these discussions take place will your calendars accurately reflect these engagements and is it acceptable for Public Policy to be shaped in secrecy away from the eyes of those you serve I close with a reminder that seeking transparency is not an act of disruption but a fundamental right and if you're hesitant to share a document because it castes Shadow on remember transparency is not the enemy obstruction is thank you next we have Anna leetta welcome good evening in families where dislike IA is present it's a role of the genetic dice as to whether one will be affected my 11-year-old is fighting with everything in her to overcome her dyslexia while my middle child latched on to letters and sounds with ease at four years old and didn't miss a beat
025she went into kindergarten already reading and has managed to be above grade level every year since in every facet of literacy over Christmas break my youngest who is now four years old confessed to me with a deep look of sadness that she only knew the number one because it was in the shape of a line I was not at all surprised to hear her say this as I had gradually observed her confidence waning in respect to to interacting with letters and numbers at the start of the school year she would proud proudly write her name but for her writing her name almost always meant that it ended up on her paper both upside down and backwards even when copying it directly off of a paper in front of her as her friends and teachers started
026pointing out that she was not doing it correctly she started to regress in her progress she goes to an amazing Cooperative Preschool that involves regular parent helpers despite observing her overall love of school the panicked look she would get on her face when it was her turn to answer a question about a written letter or number had not escaped me knowing what I know about dyslexia now I realized it was imperative to have her screened early for dyslexia given her family history and various indicators of struggle with grasping written language so in January that's what we did the results my 4-year-old is that high risk of Dyslexia as well what 3A fails to address is that many kids with dyslexia struggle greatly to consistently connect the shape of a letter to the sound that it
027makes and then retain retain that information because of how their brains are wired the effect is very much why dyslexia was initially referred to as word blindness in the 1800s despite normal vision and seeing the letters and words distinctly an individual is unable to make a meaningful connection to the spoken language it represents without specific evidence-based interventions for helping the brain to manually Forge these connections at this rate without intentionally addressing my daughter's inability to retain letters and sounds she is at high risk of starting kindergarten at a profound disadvantage even with all the exposure she's already had and with all the exposure a new curriculum will bring she will continue to be stalled indefinitely with the seemingly simple step for most kids until she gets tried and true explicit multi-sensory interventions for her learning
028the alphabet in 44 phon names will not be the Sprint that it is for most kids it will be a marathon and for every day she's in a classroom that doesn't deeply understand the precarious state of her self-esteem and Foster ways to help her feel successful her Marathon risks being turned into an ultramarathon that she may not be able to endure it's time for PSD to acknowledge dyslexia specifically by name and align with the Colorado Department of education's Dyslexia handbook thank you and next we have Aaron Rose welcome welcome Mr Show and B are asked in the last meeting what's really going on in the integrated services department and why we aren't feeling heard and I'm here to encourage you no to beg you to please please look please ask these questions please investigate the
029integrated Services Department did a community comment in November they said they compile our comments and send them back to us after winter break they have not I've heard a heavily edited version made it to seak that's as far as it went did it make it to the board if not why not why has it not made it back to the parents that were involved this community comment was highly structured requiring us to follow their topics and to respond to their questions it was not a free format and we were not invited to ask our own questions they also required us to pay compliments to them before we allowed to make any negative comments this is not an open and honest format and I'm willing to bet they puffed up our required compliments to say how
030many nice things we had to say to them while minimizing any responses that could be interpreted as criticism I'm begging you the board to ask some basic and real questions about integrated Services parents one do they think IEPs and 504s are being followed two do they trust the integrated Services Department three do they think the integrated services department is acting in the child's best interest four do parents feel like their concerns questions and comments are being heard or more importantly being act uh being addressed and affecting positive change and maybe in five do School Staff feel like they're being supported by the district level staff from what I hear from parents who are coming to you as a last resort the answer to these questions is a resounding no I'm aware of long overdue change
031in leadership is coming however in my own limited interactions with Jody this is not an improvement and our two requests from her this year they're shutting down down with resounding not because of our CDE mediation due to two School staff members telling me that our child's IEP was not being followed and she was being physically abused by the teacher in her classroom we made the simple of request to know what was who was working with our child on a daily basis to help rebuild our trust and knowing our child was safe at school again jod proudly stated the reason for the denial was they weren't legally required to do so to tell us who works with their child every day any typical child or non-verbal or excuse me verbal child could tell their parents and
032teachers um who support who their support staff is every day and they're because we request a mediation due to staff complains uh claims of abuse jod denied us this information if it's nothing short of discrimination and retaliation and she and Megan kramber went so far as to thank each other behind the camera and after ve vehemently denying our requested simple information I have another subject I will email it to you but for time this is a festering problem in the integrated Services Department which is not improved in 8 years we've dealt with this department and from listening from other parents here this problem is pervasive when are you going to do something about it why is such a systemic retaliation against parents who speak up and ask questions here not allowed why is doing the
033bare minimum legal requirement the acceptable answer when we request for transparency and personal dignity thank you thank you next we have uh Nicole Alvar Alvarado sorry about that welcome my name is Nicole Alvarado and I am a high school counselor in my 12th year in PSD for the record I am here speaking on my own behalf I have seen the understanding PSD videos that PSD is sharing regarding concerns over funding changing demographics is an issue which we are going to be hardpressed to address as there are certain Generations that are either delaying or choosing not to have children for a myriad of reasons of living lack of Parental leave lack of affordable health insurance per or perhaps the guilt and shame of being childless is just too heavy a burden for us to Bear a
034video states there are thousands of empty seats in our elementary and middle schools are there though why do the same buildings in PSD now have 30% more capacity than they did 10 years ago I am concerned that the statistics are being created with one particular outcome in mind birth birth rates are only one piece of the demographic puzzle what what about migration who is moving to our city and why our famili staying in PSD through graduation I just wonder if we are having a one-sided perspective on student enrollment as jobs and salaries are being inflated at the top my concern is that we continue to miss the bigger theme which in my purview is lack of thoughtful District leadership from those at the top these videos are helpful in understanding how school funding Works yet
035My worry is that we continue to be a reactive District as opposed to a proactive District decisions from the top such as the past Falls attempt to close and consolidate schools fail spectacularly when key stakeholder input is disregarded as we have seen this spring our admin team shared that due to declining enrollment it is very likely that most of our probationary teachers will not have jobs at our school next year when a nearby Middle High School open 3 years ago our Counseling Department lost one counselor whose position was not replaced please know that your staff is making sacrifices recently I reviewed the PSD available Financial Audits and the professional Administrator salary SC schedule in the 1819 school year there were 53 positions on this salary schedule in this current school year there are now 91
036that is a 68% increase 3 years ago there were eight cabinet members in 21 today there are 12 that is a 50% increase How are schools and staff being expected to do more with less when our own District leadership team does not heed the same advice as Leaders of our district you must walk the walk and talk the talk produced videos are fine but we are looking for meaning and proactive solutions to solve our shifting demographics perhaps that means talking to our legislators at the state level about school funding maybe it's building Partnerships with the city to consider challenges and solutions to living here I only hope that sacrifices are not only expected in schools from students and Educators PSD is a highly educated community and we do want to dig into the actual figures
037I have one quote that I would like to share and it is from General Mark Welsh who oversees more than 600,000 Personnel from the US Air Force leadership is a gift it's given by those who follow you have to be worthy of it thank you thank you and next we have Candace moer welcome hi my name is Candace moer and I am here speaking today about diversity equity and inclusion over the past 6 years I'm aware the district has been making efforts towards including diverse stakeholders in our community by creating Affinity groups and adopting resolutions to recognize observances and awareness months we have also expanded our district Dei Coalition and recently members of this group helped give feedback during the adoption phase of a new literacy curriculum of new literacy curriculum materials using a rubric
038to look for cultural representation or potentially harmful content among other things while I am in support of all of these efforts as they are greatly needed we are still lacking resources for teachers to use that allow us to share multiple perspectives in historical context in our instruction my teammates and I have worked for hours to compile lessons find reading materials appropriate for 8-year-olds and supplement the information that is not present in our literacy or social studies materials we feel passionate that all kids should feel seen and represented in an authentic and historically Accurate Way for example one unit we teach is European explorers the arrival of Europeans had a catastrophic impact on indigenous peoples living in the Americas and Africans brought into slavery yet our student readers barely scratched the surface of the impact it
039had the unit writing assignment is to tell which explorer was the most successful we do not feel this is a respectful or appropriate task my team and I recently worked for hours to find resources to add to this unit that allows students to see all sides of the story of European exploration if the curricula selected by the district does not provide accounts of all stakeholders it is the district's responsibility to mandate that supplemental materials are also provided and used I would like to ask the board and superintendent Kingsley to continue to prioritize the needs and diverse backgrounds of all stakeholders in our district and Community the importance of historical accuracy is Paramount to students feeling that their ancestors are represented and their stories are told at the last board meeting I watched a young lady
040Na Ni Johnson from Weber Middle School speak on behalf of black history month and what it meant to her just last weekend neo-nazis protested in Tennessee condemning Black History Month recognitions it is our responsibility to ensure that when our students go out into the world they are doing so with respect and a true understanding of history and the people who have contributed to it so they feel empowered to stand up to hatred and narratives that are only one-sided thank you and next up we have Chris Fiero welcome hello everyone um uh just to be again um my family and I are very very invested in this District um my wife and I are at district schools um I have this kid at Linton I have my daughter at bolts um so it's this is important
041to us um today I'm here strictly as the parent of this young F and his older sister um adolescents need to start school later as they are hardwired to stay up late because melatonin release for this age group is delayed by up to two hours meaning that they physically can't fall asleep early later start times helps this age group of students be more successful in the classroom the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of sleep medicine recommend that schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. for middle and high school students the proposed bell schedule change has my daughter getting on the bus before 700 a.m. and to her before school activities like jazzband uh at about 640 a.m. which in my opinion is unreasonable and not developmentally appropriate if we truly value mental
042and physical health you will change the start times to follow the recommendations of the experts in this field so that our students needs are better met at the other end of the spectrum this proposal has elementary students in many of our buildings without air conditioning potentially starting the school day later than what they already do which will only make the extreme heat that these students face at the beginning of the school year even worse my son attends Linton Elementary and he loves his school and his teachers he's a good student and he loves to learn the first four to six weeks of school are awful for him and his classmates because of the heat in these classrooms Zeke would you like to share how the Fe the heat affects you and your learning the heat
043makes me tired and it's hard to learn when I'm tired and it's hard to hear my teacher over all of the fans running in the room thank you Zeke please be mindful of the unintended consequence of changing start times for schools without air conditioning my wondering for you is why now we have a lot of looming changes that will deeply affect School communities I feel that making drastic changes two years in a row that have such a large impact on families and school communities will continue to erode trust in our system I understand budget limitations but this feels like another Rush decision please combine Bell School changes bell schedule changes with school consolidation and Boundary change plans one big change is easier to manage for families than multiple changes over multiple years as all of
044these changes are considered please listen to the community please listen to The Experts and please be mindful of the consequences of these changes on our students and families thank you for your time thank you and next we have Sabrina herck welcome first off I just wanted to say Scott you hit the nail on the head at the last meeting I don't think I need to clarify further on that second I absolutely agree that we need to have more meetings holding integrated Services accountable so I want to give you guys some feedback on how to have productive Community meetings based on what has failed to impress parents in the past point one scheduling is import important as Kingsley heard on January 4th because he did this exact thing scheduling a public meeting for the exact time
045parent will be parents will be picking up their kids from school severely limits attendance a variety of days locations and most importantly times that do not overlap with the start or end of the school day will result in the most participation point two notes from these meetings need to be accurate the notes from the October meetings between ISD and parents were passed on to seak but first they were adapted for positivity a fact that was only caught because a seak member attended one of those meetings and saw how blatantly different they were as you heard during the February 6th public comments committee can't do their jobs if they don't get the whole picture and everyone's time just gets wasted point three don't bother asking people to be positive and nice when 40 people turn up
046each with a thing to complain about demanding a compliment sandwich waste time as does passing around a shell so everyone can hold introduce themselves and say things they like about PSD that's not why people are there let parents talk about the topics they turned up for point four talking like a politician impresses no one as Kingsley learned on January 24th when a small child told him to his face I'm disappointed you won't say yes you'll help dyslexic kids and I'm not impressed by you try channeling Scott at at the last meeting a little bit of righteous indignation means something to people and we need to figure this out means a lot more than five minutes of well but the thing is and it's kind of complicated because fine there's stuff to sort through so and
047so needs to be looped in whatever but tell us you care enough to try effort concrete next steps and a timeline when we can expect updates matter more than excuses and telling us no that's never going to happen at least tells us where we stand point five quit channeling orwellian villains you just passed a resolution about MLK Jr Channel him Channel Fred Hampton create our own Rainbow Coalition where parents and staff work together with the same goal safe and educated children if you quit treating parents who disagree with you like adversaries maybe you won't feel the need to lobby for laws that feel like groundw work for the ministry of Truth so that's my guide to have more productive public meetings and a better culture around criticism in general give it a go it can't
048make things worse thank you and that I believe uh Dan's not okay that that does conclude our community comment speakers thank you to everyone who came out to speak next we have our consent agenda would any board members like to pull anything from consent okay seeing none um can I get a motion Jim thank you I move the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for the items on the consent agenda and do I have a second and Jessica gets the second Jill will you please call the vote Jim brish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havelda hi Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 60 okay that moves us right on to our informational reports and discussion items so we have the state demographer presentation and Brian would you like to
049introduce that yes thank you uh this evening we look forward to hearing a presentation on population Trends and transitions from our state tomographer Nancy Gideon who joins us via Zoom welcome Nancy we're glad to have you here thank you good evening and I am ready to start I will share my screen oops I have a message saying host disabled participant screen sharing otherwise I do believe that you have a copy of the presentation already so whichever way is easier we we do have a copy the board has a copy um and I'm wondering if we can okay we give give you a minute there I've got it okay sorry about that no problem okay so confirmation that you can see the presentation there we are we are good thank you okay excellent okay so tonight
050we are going to talk about population Trends and transitions in larr county and specifically within the pter school district here we go so over all there are some general trends that have been going on in Colorado population is growing but at a much slower rate than it has been recently and a lot of that has to do with a decline in births and an increase in deaths migration and Mobility which is a big component of population change in Colorado has been slowing as well and this has started even before the pandemic the growth in Colorado is very concentrated Prim primarily along the Front Range also aging aging is one of the most important characteristics of a population because it affects everything and we'll talk about the specific Dynamics occurring in lur County and our fifth
051major trend is that there is increasing I'm going to interrupt here cuz we are seem to have lost sound now so if we can maybe have a moment to try and fix that Nancy yeah Nancy I don't think you can hear us either just Nationwide yes oh you can't yeah we lost sound there for a moment I'm so sorry if you could start on I think this Slide the beginning of this slide would be great okay thank you so the slide with the map of the United States yes the big picture growth is slowy okay okay so growth is slowing in Colorado but it's slowing even more in the United States as a whole again a lot having to do with decline in births um 18 states lost population just in these past two years
052from April of 2020 through July 2022 and Colorado's growth over these past two years has not been as fast or as large as it was in the previous decade I mentioned that growth in Colorado is concent of the 64 counties had increases in their population from 2010 to 2020 and those with decreases the D the counties with decreases are shown in shades of blue and those that are red orange and yellow are increases and of course larer County did have an increase and it was one of the larger increases in the state in 2022 this is our most current population estimates lammer county is the seventh largest county in the state but in terms of year-over-year growth from 2021 to 2022 lmer ranked fourth behind it's neighbor to the east WS County which ranked first
053and then other counties in metro Denver and finally El Paso County in where Colorado Springs but when we talk about school districts especially ones that do not contain the whole County we need to look at the municipal level population now looking at a map of the pter school district's boundaries it appears to be the northern half of larer County and it contains Fort Collins Wellington timn and a large part of unincorporated lur County this chart is showing all the municipalities within larer County and I've sort of ordered them so that those that are in the pter school district are the top top ones so for Collins sington Tim overall from 2010 to 2020 we already know from that previous map that larer County had an increase in population it actually increased nearly 20% with an
054additional almost 60,000 people over that 10-year period from 20110 to 2020 but the last two years from 2020 to 2022 the most recent information the most recent data shows slower growth rates still growing but not quite as fast as we were last decade overall the growth rate in population for lur County as a whole over these past two years was 1.9% now all the different municipalities in the county grew at very differing rates you'll notice uh a place like timn over the past decade from 2010 to 20 20 it grew almost 1,000% it increased by almost 5,000 people where it had started at about 600 so we have some very drastic differences in the growth rates in the different parts of the county now Fort Collins which is the largest city in the county had
055the largest growth by number but a smaller percentage change likewise Loveland is the second largest city in the County and it too had a large number increase but a smaller percentage change so some of those places like Tim that grew very rapidly like Johnstown and berd and who's the other one even Windsor and Wellington had very high growth rates comparatively far over the countywide average but they were much smaller places to begin with so the absolute number is not stay quite as large as the gains that were made within Fort Collins but this is very important to note because future growth depends on where that growth is happening within the county and we'll talk about that more in a bit so some right now we're going to go over some just brief principles behind demographic
056change we're starting at the state level and we'll go down to lur County First population will change for three reasons so someone is born someone dies someone moves in or out and this chart attempts to show all three of those variations back to the year 1970 so over this 52-year time period we had population growth due to natural increase which is the blue bars and natural increase is quite literally births minus deaths and it's been relatively stable over the past 52 years but the red bars are indic ating net migration those people moving in minus those moving out and that varies quite greatly year over year you'll note in the late 1980s was the only time period in this past 52 years where there were more people moving out of Colorado than moving in but
057if you look in the middle of the chart in the 1990s we had several almost a decade of large inmigration almost 80,000 people per year but this idea that growth is slowing if you look to the far right of the chart these past few years about past seven years from say 2015 onward to 2022 both that natural increase those blue bars and the net migration the red bars they're increasing they're positive each year but each year for the past seven years they have been less each year so less natural increase less migration meaning the change in our population each year is growing but not as fast as it was in the previous year we have these charts in this data for all 64 counties in the state and here we have lmer County one of
058the most obvious or uh dramatic things about this chart is just how large the net migration is especially as a share of the annual population change yes there is natural increase births minus deaths and like the Statewide numbers it's fairly stable over the years but it's the net migration that can vary greatly year toe now like the state as a whole we look to the far right we do see positive increases but less each year starting at about 2015 or 2016 ler though just has some steps up ler typically has been growing faster than the state as a whole and has had uh increases in its net migration it has not been less each year it has a bit of some stair steps some years up some years down but you will note that the
059natural increase births minus deaths has been declining each year for the past few years if we separate out births and death instead of looking at it as as natural increase as a whole but look at the differences between the num the births and the deaths we see some Trends this chart is showing Colorado as a whole back to 1970 but also looking to the Future to the year 2050 that's the dash lines the blue line is births and it goes up it levels out it goes up it's been going down we anticipated to go back up again and this is absolute number of births this isn't a rate this is not measured against the number of population or women of childbearing age this is just an absolute number of births for the entire state deaths
060on the other hand typically is just going up now during the pandemic from 20120 through about 2022 there was an uptick in the number of deaths but is we anticipate and I think the most recent data is showing that we have returned to a pre-pandemic level of deaths so still increasing but not at that height rate that we saw during the pandemic now this in increase is Perfectly Natural Colorado's population is aging and this is exactly what we would expect as our population gets older we'll talk more about this forecast that why do we anticipate this increase in births Statewide and we'll see the chart for lur in a bit as well so one of the reasons for this decrease in births has to do or some of the interesting things we can find out
061is that there have been differences in the number of births by the age of mother so from 2011 to 2020 for the state as a whole we have found that there have been fewer births to the youngest mothers and an increase in births to women over the age of 30 so there have been great decreases over that decade of time in teenage mothers in women of births to women in their 20s but this increase peing at about age 30 4 or 35 in births to older mothers now the gain from the older mothers is less than the decrease from the younger mothers so we do still see a decrease in the total number of births but is very important to see these changes by age of mother because there is a lot of differences in
062explanation for that one of which is that long acting reversible contraception became available for young women and that program definitely saw uh a lot of young women taking that uh participating in that program and so there had been this reduction in birth to the youngest mothers but this trend in decrease in births is not unique to Colorado in fact in the United States as a whole from 2010 to 2020 there were 1 million fewer children in the United states there were 1 million fewer people under the age of 18 in 2020 than there was in 2010 even though the population as a whole in the United States increased by over 22 million during that time this map of the United States shows those States shaded in blue that had a decrease in their child population
063over that decade and those shaded red orange and peach pink color had increases now Colorado did have an increase but you'll note it's sort of that beige peach color so it had a smaller increase but it still did have an increase you'll note the areas that have had decreases are the New England states the midwestern great lak States some Southern States but also California so this trend has been happening Nationwide and within Colorado it's been quite variable the uh counties shaded red orange and yellow had increases in their population of children between 2010 and 2020 and you'll note that ler is red it had some of the largest increases in the child's population over the last decade along with Wells and some of the metro Denver counties but what's been interesting is that even though
064some counties in metro Denver had an increase in their children pop in their child population others had a decrease most notably Boulder County and Jefferson County now throughout the rest of the state in the rural areas and the ski resort areas it has varied as well so we talk about births and deaths that third component is migration the number of people moving in minus those moving out and one Trend we have found consistently over the decades for Colorado is that when Colorado has new jobs when there are jobs tend to draw people to the state there is this correlation between the number of new jobs and the migration to the state the blue bars on this chart are showing that change in jobs while the red line is showing the net migration over these each
0655year period now it's not absolute they don't match exactly completely you'll note that in 20 2005 and 2010 that time period there were hardly any new jobs you may also recall that that was during the Great Recession where every state in the country was having a recession every state lost jobs but Colorado continued to gain population prior to the pandemic this chart looked a little bit different that the bar for 2020 and 2025 were actually about the same height we had to reduce the number of new jobs in that 2020 to 2025 time period because of the pandemic effects in those early days of 2020 2021 many jobs were lost in Colorado they have all since been regained but that had kind of thrown off the the nice line the nice uh bars that we
066had that's why the 2025 bar seem so much higher prior to the pandemic if that not had not happened we anticipated our forecast showed an almost equal number of jobs for each of those 5year time periods but going forward to the future 2030 through 2050 you'll note that we do anticipate new jobs in the state but that that line showing that migration is actually higher than the number of new jobs being created that has to do with the fact that because of our aging we are anticipating a large number of people to be retiring or leaving the workforce and thus opening up existing jobs so in addition to all the new jobs that might be created in our economy due to expansions or new Industries we anticipate there to be an opening due to people
067in those older age groups retiring therefore we would expect more people to migrate to the state to fill all of those jobs now typically Colorado over the past several decades has followed the same Trend that the people who tend to be the net migrants to the state are between the ages of about 25 and 38 this chart along the bottom we have every single year of age from babies on the left to Elders on the right and these blue bars are indicating the net change the Colorado's net migration by age from 2010 to 2020 but as I said this trend this pattern has held for the past several decades Colorado typically attracts people in that 25 to 35 age group we attract young adults now if we were looking at this for the say the
068State of Florida or Arizona it would look quite different because Florida and Arizona for example are retirement destinations they attract people in those older age groups so we would see net migration in a state like Florida starting at age 55 and it would look very different from where we see in Colorado we tend to attract these younger age groups and we know that there's this strong correlation between the migration and jobs so let's talk about age age affects everything it affects your preferences it affects whether you're in the labor force or not it affects what services you need what we're looking at here is a chart of Colorado's population in 2023 by a single year of age so again uh age across the bottom babies to the left Elders to the right now the one
069thing that stands out is that Colorado has more 31 year olds in 2023 than any other single year of age more 31 year olds than 14 year olds more 31 year olds than 65 year olds the other thing to note is that if you look on the left those younger the children population you will see that slowdown in births in that there are more 15y olds than 14y olds on down the other thing to point out besides the large population of people in their early 20s through 30s is the purple bars those are people who were born between the ages of 1964 in 1946 typically called the Baby Boomers and there is a large group of them who are approaching the age of 65 some have already crossed over by having birthdays by staying by
070Aging in Colorado but Colorado typically has not had a very large population of those older age groups so this large population of baby boomers moving into those older age groups is somewhat unprecedented for the state now overall in 2023 the share of population in Colorado that is 65 and over is about 16% hang on to that stat because we're going to look now at larer County now larer County the first thing that stands out on this chart is the high number of people in say about 18 through 24 that of course is Colorado State University so to take out the student population because in terms of demographic change we consider that student population to just replace itself each year so to the idea that it doesn't age they don't give birth they don't die so
071if we take out that student population that is sort of a constant in larer County every year it ends up looking like this you still do have a bit of a peak of 20y olds but when those students are removed we do see a different age distribution we do see a larger population in those red lines sort of those mid 20s through about 40 which actually correlates to what we would call the millennial population we see that slowdown in child population that from 20 down to zero there are fewer kids each year for each age group but that older population larer County actually has a higher percentage than the state as a whole of people 65 years and over and you can kind of see that in this chart as compared to the one for
072the state as a whole but there's more in those that baby boomer age and that those people are approaching or have crossed over into the 65 years and over one of the tools on our website is a map where you can select different time periods and different age groups and see what the forecast shows for the change in population for all the counties right here we're looking at a change in the school age population for this we it's Age 5 through 19 so not quite a high school age but it's because it's 5-year age groups that's what we're going with but in this population we see most of the counties are sort of that shades of blue meaning that they have decreases in their school aged population the one County that we see with a
073large increase is weld also El Paso County where Colorado Springs is is anticipating an increase but many of the Metro Den counties anticipate a decrease in their school age population in 2030 as compared to 2020 laram M County also has a small decrease and we'll talk more about that in a moment but overall if we look to 2030 and break out the population by various age groups we see some different things looking at Colorado as a whole between 2020 and 2030 we would anticipate the population as a in in total to increase about 10% but different age groups are increasing or decreasing at different rates for the state as a whole that school age population this time we're looking at age 5 through 17 Statewide we anticipate a decrease about 4% in the number of
074school-aged kids in 2030 as compared to 2020 but that zero to four-year-old population babies who are being born during that time we do anticipate an increase at about 8% still less than the total population as a whole but the very prominent bars on this chart are at the bottom the older age groups specifically people AG 75 to 84 their population is expected to increase 75% from 20120 to 2030 and those 85 years and over are expected to increase 50% now the same chart for lur is pretty similar those large increases in the oldest age groups um lur as a whole we anticipate to grow faster at 133% as a total population compared to the state which as a whole increasing about 10% but that zero to foury Old population our forecast is showing about a
07514% increase essentially in babies and preschoolers the school age population those 5 to 17 we expect to be about flat between 2020 and 2030 the forecast would expect there to be about an equal number at each time period so implications from aging like I said we said believe it affects everything so in terms of the labor force we would anticipate that the labor force would continue to be tight in Colorado especially as we are anticipating over the next 5 years that there will be 200,000 retirements people leaving the labor force because they are aging which will have an impact on our migration and other things but obviously age would affect consumer demand but also Services again do we need more senior centers do we need more schools things like that so knowing these uh Dynamics
076for each County are important it affects housing and interestingly enough it affects the rate or the racial and ethnic diversity that the youngest residents of our state tend to be more racially and ethnically diverse that is that there are more people of color in the younger age groups than in the older age groups so some other ways of looking at this aging phenomenon this is the exact same data as those previous bar charts but here we're looking at only five age groups not the seven or eight that we had but this idea that Colorado typically attracts people who are aged 25 to their mid-30s we saw that on that migration chart so when we look at these changes in age the change we see a big change for those people that group of 25 to
07744 year olds so those are those two middle bars in the chart the blue Is 2020 and the Orange is 2030 we would expect through net migration that Colorado's population as a whole will increase in that age group because we typically attract people in that age group but the other age group that has a large increase we already know is that 65 years and over so on the right we see the blue bar for 2020 and an increase of nearly 300 thou no not that's not about yeah 300,000 we expect an additional 300,000 people in 2030 that are 65 years and over but all this is contingent on the various assumptions we make when we are doing a forecast and one of those assumptions is that people will continue to migrate to the state and
078that they will typically be in those younger age groups at 25 to mid-30s or 40s so if we if the migration Trends continue between 2020 and 2030 we would expect about 175,000 additional people in the state who are between the ages of 25 and 44 we would also expect this large increase in the 65 years and over age group but most of that has to do from aging but what if there is no migration what if for some reason nobody moves to Colorado between 2020 and 2030 which we know is not the case because we're already into 2022 20 oh my goodness it's 2024 we're already four years into the decade but this next slide will show that if we did not have this typical migration that we are expecting we would not have growth
079in the 25 to 44 year old age group in fact the only age groups that would see an increase are 45 to 64 a small increase but that 65 year and over age group so there Statewide we would have a decline in the prime working age population and basically all growth in the state if there was Zero net migration over that 10-year period would be 65 years and over but that's not what we anticipate we do anticipate going back a slide that we will continue those migration patterns that we have seen over the past decades so let's talk about lur County specifically we the next few slides are very detailed about the changes we anticipate in larer County so fertility rate we've births is a big topic for school districts but for demographics as a
080whole and what we're looking at here is the change in fertility rate now previous charts were like absolute numbers there were this many births but this is looking at the rate compared to people and people of childbearing age and what we're seeing this goes back to that idea that there have been fewer births to the youngest mothers and an increase in births to older mothers the lines on this chart go from 2010 is the palest blue line to the darkest is the forecast for 2035 and essentially we've got age across the bottom so from the age of 10 to 49 and the rate for fertility for each of those age groups we've seen the rate decrease for those youngest mothers so teenagers 10 through 13 up until about even the age of 28 that line
081each 5year time period is coming lower but when we get over the age of 30 we see these increases in the rate of fertility so we are anticipating an increased rate of fertility for women over the age of 30 another way of looking at it well okay that was future this is looking past so this this is very similar to the previous chart but this is for larer County only and so this is age across the bottom so 15 through 44 typical considered childbearing ages so the change in the number of births by the age of mother so decreases in births to the youngest mothers but even unlike the state as a whole a slight decrease from mothers in their early 30s but definite increases in the number of births to older mothers those in
082their mid-30s and up through the age of 44 so we talked about net migration for the state as a whole and for the state as a whole the state tends to attract people between those ages of about 25 and 37 38 it's quite different for lur County and that has to do again with the university and the student population larer County's net migration shows its peak at around the age of 19 so from about 18 through about 25 that's where lmer County sees the bulk of its net migration by age then from about 28 29 through the early 30s there's net out migration now that net outmigration is not anywhere as large as that inmigration so yes some of the students who come to study in larer County leave but the out migration for the
083those older age groups typically people who have completed their education is not as large as those coming in now lore County also sees positive net migration for almost every age from about 36 onward to about 90 so because of this we can anticipate the change in the population by 5 your age group for larer County from about 2022 to 2030 and in some ways the only age groups where we anticipate a decrease are those between the ages of 60 and 70 and basically from 5 to 15 now again this is looking Year from 2022 how many people there were in each of those age groups to what we would expect to see in 2030 we already know that there's going to be a large increase in the population 75 years and over and that is
084shown definitely in this chart so on the far right but we anticipate this migration Trend Statewide to continue and therefore we are anticipating an increase in larer County's population for those age groups 35 all the way to 55 and of course the increase on the 25 to 29 year olds as well so what does that mean for lammer County's births again this is similar to the Chart we saw before that was for the state as a whole here we're seeing births and deaths births are the Blue Line deaths is the red and the dashed line is the future that's the forecast the projection so larer County actually had a peak number of births in 2009 and you can kind of see that at the chart there's this little peak in that blue line around the
085year 2009 Statewide that happened to be in seven but since 2009 some stability but it's gone the number of births each year in lur county has decreased a bit but you'll notice that we are anticipating an increase now again this is absolute numbers this isn't necessarily about rate but this whole idea that there has been an increase infertility rate for the older mothers those basically 30 and over and because we would anticipate migration to the state to continue in those people about 25 to 37 we would anticipate lmer County's population to increase in those age groups in addition to the increased fertility of those age groups that's where we're seeing this increased in increase in the absolute number of births deps like the state as a whole are are continue to are projected to continue
086to increase but again it's that aging of population and we know that laramore county has a larger share of people in that 65 and over age group to begin with but overall the natural increase the births minus deaths which is essentially that gap between the blue line and the red line it came to quite a narrow opening there in 2020 as deaths increased during the pandemic but we do expect there to be some natural inre increase births minus deaths due to that increasing in the number of births in larer from about 2024 to about 20 4 years so overall the Statewide forecast we anticipate in Colorado that the population in 2050 will be about 7.5 million and we're about at 5.8 right now so that additional 1.6 million people the vast majority of them will
087be located along the Front Range again in this map those counties shaded red orange or yellow but of course this is a forecast there are lots of things that could affect it that we have no control over one of which is international migration one of it is this slower National growth that if the United States as a whole is growing more slowly will there be competition for labor will we get those net migration for the jobs we have will that continue in the next few decades how will Colorado compare when it comes to cost of living or housing costs if there is this competition among states for people in the in their working ages so all sorts of things that are these uncertainties that may affect the forecast but when it comes to pter school
088district as a whole we know what we are anticipating for lur County but demography is local this is really going to depend on where within larer County growth is occurring and one of those determinant is where new housing is being built we saw earlier that there were several communities in larer County like Tim nith like Wellington and Windsor like ber it and Johnstown that had huge amounts of new houses constructed from 2010 to 2022 and those areas saw large changes in their population so looking forward for the pter school district it's important to know exactly where new housing is forecasted is Tim what are Tim's plans that's not something that we at the state have details on but the zoning and the land use plans for the various municipalities are really going to be quite
089key to determining where some of this growth is going to go that we're anticip ipating this population change but where they actually settle where they actually live will likely be determined about by where new houses are located and that overall we if our migration patterns continue and we do attract people in the 25 to 37y old age range and if lmer County increases its number of jobs which we expect as I mentioned earlier the forecast for lmer is at a faster rate than Colorado as a whole at 133% compared to 10% population change so we would expect larer to have new population net migration and in those age groups that are experiencing rates of higher fertility so that concludes my prepared comments do feel free to contact me if I have not answered your question
090today or any other time because we're here at the state to help you understand what the forecasts are showing for population in Colorado thank you so much Nancy that was great um I'm going to ask the board if you have any questions uh Nancy is it okay if we ask them now uh if we have questions yes okay fantastic thank you so does anybody want to kick it off Jim go for it well take a shot so just to settle little context that maybe you didn't said in your presentation um PSD is about 2third of larer County that's rough numbers based on the some of the other demographics data and Fort Collins is about 3/4 of PSD that's just some other rough rough data I wanted to get out there um you highlighted the two
091key factors as birth rates and migration rates all of which I agree with so um women waiting longer to have children and that uh what I also heard was the increased births from older women not completely making up for the drop in births in younger women which all makes sense to me I guess a big point on birth rates that I wanted to make was uh I saw your slide with with a projected increase in lmer County birth rates um you know um which which might make me think oh why are we doing this effort why do we need to do anything I think we do need to do things because uh I think it's important to not that projection is a gradual increase from the current dip and when you really think about how
092long it's going to take to those for those kids to get into kindergarten and for those kids to get into fourth and fifth grade and really have a material impact on our enrollment um it is further out so I think it is still important important to note that um that's that we need to continue the work we're doing and then the second key thing that was discussed was migration rates um you talked about how migration and Mobility are slowing and that the key factor around migration is jobs and I think another key factor is affordable housing and of course those two are uh Interlink right so for companies to move here and stay here they need to feel that their Workforce can live here and it's difficult to afford a for home in Fort Collins
093especially for young families with Elementary age children are you know the ones that we really want to grab I mean I have two daughters who both live in gedle where houses are um at least somewhat more affordable so appreciate the presentation those were just the two notes that I wanted to make around birth rates and migration rates yes thank you very much and those are exactly as you stated yes does anybody else want to I have a question go ahead and this didn't come up I apologize this didn't come up my pre- review but it did come up tonight on slide 13 of 33 uh the slide that's entitled jobs or people um can I ask that if you could unpack a bit the trends from 2025 to 2050 and what that Decline and trend
094is based upon if you could just elaborate a bit on that I'd appreciate it um in some ways it's just sort of the maturing of the economy that uh these are additional jobs each year this is not total jobs in the economy it's the increase each year and so uh as with the population of the state as a whole it's not increasing nearly as fast as it has and so yes Colorado is anticipating new jobs every year but not nearly as much as there had been so this is it would be like a um probably if there was a 2% increase each year it would be sort of staggered that way and so our population also looks that way that there's less increase each year as we get out further into the into the Millennium
095guess no into the uh Century okay thank you other questions Scott go ahead I don't know if you you'd be able to answer this but um I'm just thinking about how hot the real estate market was just a couple years ago and um if interest rates drop and the um I guess delayed sellers decide to finally put their houses on the market will that how will that impact some of these projections um I don't know it's kind of a hard hard thing to predict but is that something that you guys think about in your in your projections because it it was kind of amazing how things were flying uh just a couple years ago right and that how quickly especially Builders retracted or uh contracted their inventory when the interest rates became very high in
096late 2022 23 that changes to the construction industry are quite variable and are very much influenced by the economy things that we don't not not necessarily jobs but interest rates availability of money um Nationwide Trends so in terms of this actual demographic change these births deaths and migration our model is not looking at cost of housing per se we know it plays a role and we know that the construction industry plays a role that when there are new house and actually we have this whole other chart we're tracking the number of new houses built each year and how that compares to the change in population that would live in houses our household population and oddly enough they do not match very well that say during the 1990s there was a lot of IM migration to
097the state but the number of new houses being built for the early part of that decade didn't quite match the number of new population whereas during the Great Recession when building stopped almost completely not completely but building contracted drastically so the number of new housing units being completed in 201 10 2011 2012 was very low the population still kept increasing and so we're seeing this odd mismatch so that when it comes to doing our forecast when we're looking at Birth deaths and migration the amount of housing the uh when it's being constructed and the number of units do not play a role in our forecast but we do know that they affect individual counties individual cities things like that thank you yeah Caroline go ahead I I think I have a similar question um how
098does um Child Care affect that I mean there seems to be a shortage of child care and What Child Care there is is almost prohibitively expensive do you can take that into consideration at all not directly but we do know and we would anticipate from um other scholarly articles and things that perhaps that is already contributing to decrease in the number of births that if parents are not financially secure if parents do not feel confident about their resources in terms of if they have a child will they be will they continue to be able to work because there's available child care because they have say family believe that they can leave their job to have a child and still go back to their job all those types of things all these Financial uh considerations that
099people might make when they decide to become parents we think that so that cost of child care and availability of child care we know probably throughout the country but definitely in Colorado that that is a huge factor and so we think that's coming in earlier that's coming in with people's decisions we believe to have children and so that's more reflective I think in those fertility rates other questions yeah Briant go ahead Nancy this is Brian Kingsley the superintendent thank you so much for your comprehensive presentation I really appreciate that I I have a question around the data point that you shared that suggests that we are trending to have a 14% increase between 2020 and 2030 between children ages 0 through four uh we are about three months away from high school graduation season and
100I'm so excited with partnership from the board and the team to probably shake the hands of just under 2300 seniors and a migration Trend that I have with witnessed as a member of this community for the past two and a half years is that local demographers have underestimated the migration of older aged children into our community uh we have declined in our student enrollment over the last several years uh but we have unanticipated older aged children entering our system so much so where we actually have over 100 seniors for the first time in our school district sitting in our seats this year my question goes to incoming kindergarten students right now we are projecting just about 1,600 Elementary age 5-year-olds coming into our doors next year for the very first time the difference between 1600
101and the 22 or 2300 students I'm about to shake hands is quite significant as you can imagine I guess the my question rooted in your projection around the increase at 14% of children in larer County from ages Z to four knowing we are already in 2024 do we have statistics through our Hospital systems and things that you're tracking to show that we're on track to meet that 14% increase uh the reason why I asked that question is as those children matriculate an age they will certainly obviously come to kindergarten um and we haven't seen them come to through our front doors yet so I'm just wondering when you might be seeing a large influx of students at that age group coming into school age facilities across the County great question yes and in terms of
102just a comment on the older children those who are probably 15 16 17 the idea that lur County had its peak number of births in recent years in 2009 so those kids are 14 so as if they're the largest number and as they're moving through junior year senior year that you would expect to see a continuing or leveling of those kids in high school right now but every class behind them is smaller and so this idea that if there's going to be this increase of zero to four year olds between 2020 and 2030 that in 2030 there's 14% more it's still going to be a few years before those four-year-olds would matriculate into kindergarten maybe just a year or two but so you might begin to see that Leading Edge in 2031 2032 um but
103these the babies that are born by 2030 it would still be another five years before they would enter kindergarten but I can talk to our my colleague who does the forecast and who is very well versed in birth rates and tracking births and get more details on that for you though that would be wonderful thank you I appreciate your response and I I just had one question NC to and that was um how is the state looking at um migration expectations for those who are new to the US I know that that has changed drastically in the last six months um you know let alone past couple of years yes it's again international migration is not something that Colorado controls and conditions can change drastically in fact during the pandemic in 2020 2021 we had
104perhaps the lowest amount of international migration um in talking to my colleague before I gave this presentation she sort of said we kind of hit rock bottom when it came to levels of immigration in 2021 so any increases that we're seeing now are definitely adding to the population but in the news when we're hearing about uh Asylum Seekers and Refugee Seekers and uh people being people coming to Denver it's difficult to count ALS Mo mostly because we don't know how many are actually staying um the most recent data we have we get our immigration data and migration data from the Census Bureau and we are going to be receiving the data for July of 2023 so almost a full year in AAR um rather soon but it's difficult to track and with these more immediate
105changes of things going on at the border it'll take a while before it funnels into our data before we can understand well how many of the people who have shown up in Colorado are staying in Colorado um just because they happen to be here now does not mean that this is their final destination so International immigration is UN unfortunately rather tricky to count but we do know that we are seeing this difference especially considering the fact that in 2020 and 21 we had some of the lowest international migration thank you and any other questions going once going twice all right thank you so much Nancy that was wonderful and uh really thank you for your time and um have a good rest of your evening thank you enjoy your evening as well thank you all
106right we are going to move on to 7.2 board consideration of revisions to policy JC School attendance areas first reading and so aumn were you g to kick that off for us or Brian okay I can do that all right so just as a reminder policies that are approved by the board are typically done in two readings this will be the first reading for the board tonight uh this policy is fairly short um but it does address uh School attendance areas policy with the proposed revisions are in the board packet and it shows all the proposed changes so I'll just highlight those briefly and then allow for any time for conversation or questions on the proposed changes uh basically the the main change would be to change it from currently under the policy uh any
107sort of attendance area changes are right now recommended by District staff and approved by the superintendent the proposed changes would change that to be approved by the board and uh the policy with proposed those changes would also explicitly state that a committee could be formed to review attendance areas um and that feedback would be provided to the board although it's not a requirement but it does provide that option moving forward and um in the policy currently it already does state that there is feedback provided from community and other members as well so that's already in there but the committee part would be added um just wanted to note that under Colorado law uh the board has statutorily provided the power to be exercised in its own judgment to fix the attendance boundaries of each school
108and district and uh I think just also worth noting when I was looking at other districts in the Front Range uh looking at their policies a majority of what I saw is that all the districts have the board as the person or the entity that's approving any attendance areas um I think only one other District I saw had the superintendent so if this change is made it would be aligning with other districts along the Front Range as well so if there's any questions or comments or proposed other edits to the policy we can I discuss those now great thank you Autumn are there any questions or concerns or proposals or J just in the same way that the board is the approver for any school consolidations it makes perfect sense to me that we would
109also be the approver for uh boundary kinds of issues yeah thank you go ahead Jess I really appreciate the context around other districts doing similar work um I think that alignment will make us more effective but thank you very much for providing anyone else all right sounds great thanks Autumn I think that was you know it's going to be um like just said it'll be more in alignment with everybody else in in uh Colorado so that sounds great thank you all right and then we're moving on to 7.3 PSD strategic plan year One update Brian would you like to do the introductions for that yes we have a whole uh Army full of people here tonight for this particular item and I'm excited that every single one of you are here uh I want to
110introduce a few of our cabinet members that will take be taking a leadership role in this presentation and I would invite all of you to introduce your respective guests uh at the time that it's appropriate in the presentations uh but members of our community and members of our board providing tonight an update on the Strategic plan are our assistant superintendent Dr Chapan Dr guile and Dr Olen as well as our chief institutional Effectiveness officer Dr schmidtz and we also have our senior executive director for student Support Services Liz Davis that will be a part of the presentation uh at some point as well with the other supporting casts and I'm again really proud that you're all a part of this effort with our system so welcome and thank you for being here thank you superintendent
111Kingsley um it's our pleasure to present an update on the Strategic plan tonight to president Draper members of the board members of the community we have several guests here who are ALS also going to contribute to the presentation having um launched a strategic plan this being our first semester has um a lot of celebration in in it so one of the things that I'm most excited about is the transformative work that's happening in the district because of the efforts of many of the people who are joining us at the table tonight as team leads people who are implementing the work that we've envisioned but having a strategic plan is transformative work we're talking about making shifts in structures making shifts in materials and and they're significant and they require a heavy lift on our staff
112but we're doing it all in service of what we believe is right for children to improve the outcomes that we envision for them and to get us closer and closer to that goal so tonight we're just going to go through the agenda so we want to provide you an update on the Strategic plan and where we've been so far since we've launched the year one project s in August of 2023 we want to share our celebrations our key learnings and some deliverables that are on the horizon that you can expect before the end of this school year as well as discuss the process for identifying your two projects so one of the terms I just want to explain is a deliverable so the way that we're using a deliverable is something that you would actually
113see that's tangibly in our system if you think about it as curriculum materials it might be structures or guid books or tools that we provision so when we talk about deliverables that's the work of the action teams is to prepare and deliver on different aspects that help our staff to implement the work that we envision will best serve our students so a little bit of a reflection and this was a compilation from all of our project teams across the Strategic plan that we feel like there's several elements that are working well within our project teams so one of the things that um we feel like is working really well is that we've got explicit goals oh it's a celebration all [Laughter] around it's okay so we have um we have some really explicit goals and
114a theory of action that theory of action essentially is a a statement of like we think this is a really key strategy that if we implement it to a high degree then we're going to tie it to an explicit student result that we believe can be achieved if we execute well in this strategy so that's in short a theory of action the other thing that we feel like is working well is we're creating timelines for deliverables we're creating this Cadence of being able to execute on different things that are highest priority but not to the degree that we can't shift and respond to where we're getting feedback and we'll we talk a little bit about the feedback loops as we get into the pr presentation we are really trying to be very strategic about gaining
115ownership and Alignment within the project team as well as with within the district so it's really important to us as we transform work that people feel like they have a voice and have a say in how that's going because ultimately it requires the um commitment of our staff to implement something that's new and transformative so we really want want to make sure we're being authentic and checking along the way um we're also creating explicit system processes so it's not so much that we can just launch something we actually have to be very thoughtful about the implementation so that it sticks and we also have to be careful not to go so wide that people can't do just even the the most basic aspects of the implementation so we have to be very focused and very
116deep and intentional and then the other thing that the Strategic plan has allowed us to do is to really Cascade and align our system priorities so it feels like one thing rather than several things and so if you think about this strategic plan as being the guide as the one thing it feeds our unified Improvement plan which is required for us by the state it feeds our school and professional goals it feeds our professional learning plan and ultimately that should feed improv student outcomes okay so another part of our reflection is that we do have some challenges like it's not all smooth sailing throughout the whole first semester so some of the things that we've reflected on is to transform to the degree that we are we are are in the middle of 11 different
117projects right now with the Strategic plan that is time and workload and it is a heavy heavy lift on our staff on our project team leaders and everybody is I'm just so truly impressed with the commitment of the people who are who are really um being very intentional and very purposeful about the work but it is a time and workload commitment we're also um disrupting mindsets and structures so when we talk about this degree of change and the number of things that we're transforming so disrupting mindsets is really um being able to look at maybe a practice or an approach that we've been using year after year and evaluate it with new data evaluate it with new research and evidence-based practices to say hey is this really the best way to continue to do our
118work so disrupting our mindsets takes time and it takes intentional structure and it takes intentional work so that again is something we have to pay attention to um also one of the biggest challenges is the degree of change that we're asking and working through requires some cross- system collaborative processes collaborative processes take time and it takes time to have systemic change so patience I I know all of us want to see things be um great for kids immediately but we have to be patient that things are just going to take a little bit of time and then we have to continue to Center on and reflect on relevant student data that as we go through the implementation ultimately we want to do better by kids and if that data isn't showing us that we're doing
119better by kids then we have to adjust and make a change okay so some of the feedback loops that we have integrated into the Strategic plan process our um our cabinet sponsors in particular as well as our project team leads are paying attention to feedback we're getting from our stakeholders to make those course Corrections so we have conducted presentations and input sessions with staff stakeholder groups we've done presentations and input sessions with parent stakeholder groups and we've also done staff surveys and you're going to see some examples of those different feedback loops tonight okay so with that we're going to get into a few details um on our strategic project teams and so the first project that we're going to learn about tonight is our diversity equity and inclusion project and so I'm going to
120turn this over to my colleague Eric Von Savage our chief um Human Resources officer right thank you Tracy um so um our diversity Equity inclusion year one um one of the things that we want to to um Express um as we go through this presentation tonight is that our PSD value is to incorporate Dei in everything that we do and you'll hear that from um all the sections of this presentation tonight um the Dei groups has put together um our Dei Equity framework um and input uh will continuously be gathered from student Equity Coalition staff Equity Coalition equity and diversity um advisory uh Council and other groups and uh that Dei Equity framework incorporates both our values and our principles of community here at PSD so going to the next slide um what we want
121to do is talk a little bit about some of our accomplishments some of our key learnings what things we are excited about and some upcoming deliverables um so some of the things that we're excited about is that we've um developed and rolled out that Dei values and Equity framework that um that frame work was presented to the board um not re recently um and um another thing that we have developed is a Dei decision-making tool and uh as a tool that's a practical way to provide guidance uh to employees uh when and how to apply our Dei um Dei in our decision-mak processes so it's really a way to operationalize the Dei principles um another accomplishment is is that we've developed and uh started implementing uh training on how to reduce bias in our training
122process we've rolled that training out um ahead of our comp plans and our recruiting season here with our uh administrators and we've trained them on how to reduce bias in our hiring processes um we're also currently working on rolling that same training out to all of the hiring managers throughout PSD with the goal of creating awareness about our own biases and how we can reduce their impact on our hiring processes and increase the diversity of our Workforce some of the key learnings that we have um learned this year is that we need to utilize our subject matter experts within PSD and our committees in a different way to operationalize our district Dei work and expand on the inclusion of voice so uh utilizing groups like dab edac students and other in other areas as well
123um something that we are excited about is uh creating a districtwide network of site-based designes who are a resource of uh for our Dei committee and can utilize our Dei committee to operationalize our Dei work across the district um some of the upcoming deliverables that we will be working on um in as the Dei group is a Dei guide book so what that is is basically a centralized One-Stop shop uh place for employees and leaders to go to uh where all of our Dei guidelines resources tools and trainings can be found all in one place um so that's just to serve as a as a good and easy to find resource across the district um another thing that we will be uh working on this year is providing training on Dei principles and tools with
124our cabinet and with our Board of Education and with that I'll turn it back over to Tracy thank you so I am the proud cabinet sponsor of the literacy project team so just a little um coordination of terms so a sponsor of the different project teams the role of the sponsor is to Champion the project to monitor to help guide the work and to maintain focus on the most essential and critical aspects of the project the team leads that are reflected in the literacy project team um represent members of our curriculum and professional learning team and so those team leads are largely responsible for creating the deliverables and keeping that Cadence of implementation setting goals setting timelines and then ultimately being the ones to deliver and provision whatever the solution is that it's provided So
125within the literacy project team the primary theory of action really has to do with provisioning high quality materials so if all schools consistently Implement high quality materials systems and pedagogy then every student will have the foundational and critical literacy skills needed for Success that major Improvement strategy is to adopt and Implement high quality standards based literacy instruction materials that are representative of multiple cultures and identities within literacy there are four primary projects the first one being adopting a ninth and 10th grade English language arts materials and that recommendation is um scoped to come to the board of of Education in March so next month um also this year we have worked to implement K5 highquality instruction and materials the new materials that we introduced this year are K5 amplify ccla and K5 El education curriculum
126we also have been focused on De implementing materials that are not aligned to evidence-based reading instruction and then the fourth project is working to implement a teaming protocol to design high quality tasks um that are focused on a complex text so within the literacy year one projects we have some accomplishments that they're we're really proud of we have provisioned high quality instruction materials for all of those K5 classrooms and we've got some guests who will speak to that implementation tonight we've implemented professional development and support for staff and administrators within that implementation we've also de implemented materials that are not aligned to the evidence-based reading instruction we facilitated curriculum selection committee to choose highquality instruction materials for 9th and 10th grade language arts and we've had students on that committee and we've also developed a
127protocol to create rigorous tasks which rely on a complex text so the key learnings within that space is we've really um known that we needed to provide more time for our K through five literacy implementation particularly the professional development as well as the work time that it needs to implement and for teachers to plan the curriculum we adopted um both El education and ccla have um a very very comprehensive set of teacher instruction materials that takes time to learn to understand and to prepare and so one of our key learnings is we need to find ways to provision more time and we needed to have done that earlier in the year um we also um as we went through the programs we became more explicit about what implementing with integrity means and what we have
128really tried to help our teachers with is that doesn't mean that you have to read the textbook page by Page or the the program materials every single line that it says to say but what it means is being tight and aligned to the scope and sequence that are in the materials as well as knowing where the materials are going what the assessment is pointing it to and what the standards are saying are most CR critical for the development and so not disrupting the Integrity of the scope and sequence as well as the building blocks as they come unit after units so being very very explicit and intentional about um keeping to that scope and sequence the other pieces that um we we are excited about is within the nth and 10th grade adoption process they
129have had students on the committee and having the student voices and perspectives at the table and hearing what they want to experience in their curriculum how they want to experience literacy and in their English language arts classes was really such an incredible value ad we even had some of our Publishers say I can't believe that everybody doesn't do this you know we're going to tell other people about this but it's been a really valuable part of the process so upcoming deliverables within our project teams um we've held this spring some curriculum engagement nights with the community and then also again we're forecasting that we'll be bringing um to the Board of Education nth and 10th grade language arts curriculum selection adoption one of the other pieces of data that we want to share with you
130in terms of those feedback loops that we're talking about is this is an example of the survey that we um gave to all of our K through five teachers who participate in better lesson so better lesson is our professional development provider that we use for El education materials and so what you're seeing is a compilation of three professional development events one of them in SE in August one in September and then another grade level day where grade levels came together in the fall so kindergarten teachers came together first grade teachers came together this is their feedback on the professional development that they received so the first section being overall engagement that's the number of touch points of participation in the professional development um and 81% survey response rate of the people who participated and the
131engagement is 59% um came out of those training saying they would like additional support including coaching or courses so with better lesson they do provide OnDemand coaching so our teachers can access that at any time as well as our administrators can also access access on demand coaching within the alignment aspect 80% of the survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the learning experience that they had will help impact student outcomes and then from confidence 85% identified as moderately very or extremely confident that they're able to try what was learned during those professional development sessions the overall feedback is that teachers are most confident with the modules which is more of the comprehension and knowledge building aspects of the curriculum they're less confident with the K2 skills block and the 35 all block and the all
132block stands for additional language and literacy block and so those are areas that are helping us to point toward our year 2 implementation support based on that feedback and so with that I'm going to turn it over to my colleague inun Olson to talk about Mental Health belonging good evening um I get the honor of being um one of the sponsors for our strategic plan area of mental health and belonging along with Liz Davis and mateline noblet we have 12 team leads for this particular area as the work is complex and layered um and really our um year one and continued projects is focused on foundational structures so that we can build on and prioritize um our resources and support to schools moving forward and so our theory of action is if we increase access
133to mental health supports for staff and students within a multi-tiered system of support framework then we can we will create a learning environment that Fosters inclusivity connectedness and well-being which will increase student engagement and improve academic outcomes the major Improvement strategy seems so simple in the short in this short sentence but has a lot of complexity to it in that we want to increase student access to Mental Health Providers our four main projects that came from this work um the first one is to refine and continue implementing a comprehensive Community partner partnership strategy which would require um a streamline process and um specific really targeting like Tracy talked about let's go deep into Focus areas so really honing in on mental health and belonging we are also hiring and training additional mental health staff and
134trainees to support students promote awareness of PSD and Community Mental Health Resources through a multilingual communications project that is driven by student input and our bullying prevention and education project next one um so some of our accomplishments um so far um is that we have developed and implemented a streamline process to engage with our Community Partners which you'll hear a little more detail here in a moment um the next bullet is something I want us to persever not perseverate but to um maybe perseverate on the fact that um we have an amazing Grant a mental health service Prof professional Grant um awarded to us for 5 years um and $9.7 million in order for us to um Implement our work systemwide um and so staying within the guidelines of the grant requirements as well um
135we have also been able to hire and supervise 10 master of Social Work interns we have updated our bully prevention and education policy and have pushed the policy out to every staff member in our district um launch District mental health marketing communication and materials in multiple languages some of our key learnings is as you increase Community Partnership and engagement and though we created a streamline process more is more so more people to um look at the list more people to filter to schools meaning more time is needed um to do that so the workload increased even though we streamlined the process we also recognize that within our bullying prevention and education framework that trying to run that all alone isolated um is probably not the best implementation strategy and that we really needed to embed
136it into the work that we are doing not only um behind the scenes but also getting ready to launch with our schools what we're super excited about is that 9.7 million they'll be a little less after this year um we still have four more wonderful years of this grant to help us continue to embed systemic responses and supports but also to create that sustainability piece um where we will then have to take over that funding piece in order to continue the amazing work that we have started our upcoming deliverables um this spring um we've been super busy with our mental health interns and also preparing them for their fellowships for next year um within that project we also are developing and proposing our social emotional learning standards so we are going off the castle standards
137um the five major standards are self-awareness self-management social awareness relationship skills and responsible decision-making I think we could all use some additional supports and resources in that area and um we will embed that into our framework as we continue to move forward and we are getting ready to launch um a full day of framework analysis and training for our schools um and invite teams to come in so that we can truly start the work um and take that big step forward as a system um because we're we're aware that systemness um is something that takes time and energy and purposefulness and we are very fortunate to have a strategic plan that can help us create this framework so that we can get super clear on what is for all what might we need to add
138as additional and then of course the most intensive supports possible and creating that Community engagement um not only within our schools for our schools but also as a community and I'm going to hand it over to Liz Davis who can give us a little more detail around that community engagement piece hi can you hear me okay great okay let me get situated um I would like to start by noting Community Partners we are currently working with and working on some working in process on some contracts so I'm going to read this it's G and I'll try to do it fast so bear with me so we've been been busy and I'm looking at Whitney Bennett clear over there thanks for your support Whitney um so current partnership agreements three hopeful Hearts Alliance For Suicide Prevention
139caring k9's haboc which is human animal bond in Colorado Matthew's house minds matter Partners mentoring youth pause for tail safety smarts SAA which is sexual assault victim Advocate Center the Center for Family Outreach um on that end we say all the dog agencies have been so we saw them at one of our board meetings recently so in process we're working with the CSU prevention Research Center CSU School of Social Work uh health district and summitstone Rotary Club after work yo Collective Department of Human Services housing Catalyst Matthew's house and other partners and out Boulder so just a few we've been a little busy in this on in the this one area but excited to share a couple more pieces with you all um the Community Partnership work is another example of system alignment that helps
140to demonstrate Equitable access for our students and families to have more access to Our Community Partners it is critical that we work together with our Community Partners as we don't always have the ability to support students and families with their mental health and belonging needs beyond the school day we need to work together in this space we've had the incredible support from many of our Community Partners and have worked over the past year with the youth serving Community partner group that has been that feedback loop they've provided feedback over the past year um and help develop the Community Partnership application and provided feedback on our updated processes that are now embedded on our website so thanks to all the partners out there that have supported us through the process so a quick highlighted example of
141a streamlined process just to be concrete um so we were contacted by both the health district and Summit Stone to collaborate regarding services and referral processes to support our students and families in order to gain access to mental health and belonging Community Resources we needed a streamlined process for these referrals and we needed to have one referral system not two so together we were able to identify a small group of staff from both agencies and PSD to meet and create one referral pathway making it easier for PSD staff to make Community referrals that work is in process so we are currently meeting to work together and again instead of having two processes for referrals we will have one that is more efficient and hopefully more effective for students and families to receive support more quickly
142in the community the systems approach is a true partnership and we truly appreciate the collaboration and support as we update all of our systems together so I'm going to hand it off to Dr chaplain for graduate with options all right good evening thank you so much I'm excited to be here and talk with you about one of my favorite topics uh graduation from high school and graduating with option for postsecondary Success so um I have the honor of being one of the sponsors along with my colleague uh Joan schmidtz and andun oen Olsen and um we have six team leads that work with us on this um strategic plan um action and our theory of action that really guides our work is that we believe that if we expand options to meet graduation requirements and
143by expanding those options it's looking at giving flexibility for student choice and agency in terms of what they take as those requirements um and um thinking differently about uh maybe what we tell them they should take and having them have a little more voice in that process um also implementing Equitable grading practices uh this works starting at the U Middle School level and will um be quite a lengthy I think a six-year plan um for um implementing that um starting in sixth grade and going up through 10th grade um then we also believe that we need to look at decreas absenteeism um this lift requires um analyzing our system looking at what we need to tweak in terms of how we process how we collect how we track data and then of course also the
144actual interventions and supports that we would provide to families and how we would engage with them as well um as well as some automated systems that we think we can do to streamline some of the processes so if we feel like if we do all those the graduation rates then um we will see um increases and that students will be prepared better for their future future opportunities our first strategy that we focused on this year heavily is updating those graduation requirements to support multiple postsecondary Pathways um ensuring students are supported in attaining all the credits necessary that they would need to have those options after they graduate um we have three specific projects um the first is that graduation requirement um proposal and draft of of maybe what we would recommend or um how we
145might adjust those recommendations so that students um are supported in multiple Pathways including 2-year and four-year military options um career Workforce Readiness as well as including um and adjusting our graduation policy to include processes um that allow diverse Learners such as students with IEPs the ability to obtain standard diplomas um which has not been uh a part of our process before um and also um looking at um the same similar supports for multilingual Learners as well so we're adjusting some of that um we're beginning um conversations about um graduation ranking systems and we anticipate that to carry and definitely into year two with no um concrete um actions in in that space right now um the second project is working with those Middle School principles to gain Readiness um and the alignment of Equitable grading
146practices across those middle schools again starting in sixth grade and then uh the third is that um addressing those uh a chronic absenteeism absenteeism absent chronic student absenteeism and treny there we go um and looking for strategies to address those those different pieces as we go forward so we're GNA outline our accomplishments and I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Dwayne thank you Julie I want to say first of all I'm just honored to be here I'm just so proud of like to be part of this team I love that our strategic plan has real life breathed into it okay graduating with options we're going to go over five key accomplishments that we've attained during this school year the first one is we have increased system awareness and Equitable access regarding career connected
147Pathways and four-year High School planning um we are just getting started but we've made big strides in that space I want to mention three particular um items that are related one is that we have a physical Presence at the mall in the future ready Center and it is heavily utilized and it's very exciting the programming that's going on there and that reaches a lot of different student and family um groups and profiles we also have an update at Future Ready website that was revised substantially and provides quite a bit of guidance and ease of use we also ran the first ever eighth grade College and Career Affair uh in partnership with CSU which the students gave tremendous feedback on that they really appreciated that experience so that's an example of graduating with options and the
148planning of that for families and students going into to Middle School not just starting in high school the second thing I want to highlight real quick is that we have drafted and gathered feedback as my colleague Julie was just mentioning on our graduation requirement recommendations and the related policy revisions that's been an iterative process I'll show you in a little bit some of the groups that we've met with it's been quite a few and we have in fact revised that recommendation several times we're still in that process and we have a couple big nights coming up with full community participation the third piece I want to highlight under our accomplishments in this space is that we have aligned our attendance codes and usage systemwide and we have created an automated truancy and attendance notification system
149reduces workload increases accuracy and is a is a very specific approach to help us with attendance and increasing it okay we have also um piloted targeted and intensive attendance interventions in four of our high schools we'll be studying those interventions and their effectiveness and we'll SP spread the best practices as we learn more about them the last piece I want to mention is we did revise our attendants handbook and we made a shift towards a digital resource or digital resources in combination so moving on key learnings because whenever you do work you definitely learn things along the way so um we have learned more about the multiple facets and complexity of increasing student family access to enhanced four-year planning um it is Shifting as my colleague Julie had mentioned or I'm sorry Tracy had mentioned
150mindsets is involved in and shifting some of this work so we're working through that um we have also the community has expressed broad support for specific requirements such as our financial literacy course that course is unique to pter school district we developed it um and the community and I'm I'm talking about students themselves uh parents and staff have all strongly weighed in that there's a lot of value in that course we've also learned that there are inconsistent atten tracking and notification systems that PSD can address and is in the process of addressing we also have had insufficient guidance on attendance and intervention supports that again PSD can and is addressing okay what are we excited about you know we had the first ever PSD 8th grade college career fair day as I had mentioned that
151was a huge effort in combination with CSU and there were so many partners that played a part in that for all of our eighth graders we also the grand opening of the Future Ready Center I know there's a few people in this room that were at that and it has just been such a fantastic um facility and so well utilized and then we've expanded the work-based learning opportunities and maybe when we talk later we we can expand on that a little bit but that's um an ever expanding and that's a national tent Trend a state Trend and PSD is Alive and Well in that space we also um we're excited about the meaningful stakeholder engagement regarding graduation requirement ments and the related policy we've held uh at least 13 or more meetings at this point
152and we have quite a few left and so people are really meaningfully engaged in that and it's been a really good public deliberation and dialogue that we as a district are learning from that experience and I think that uh everyone who's been involved is appreciated that we also um the implementation of the districtwide system to relieve attendance notification workload in schools is a good move anytime you can reduce workload in schools and increase the kind of systemness and the I'd say the um robustness of a process you're moving in the right direction and that is something we've been able to do upcoming deliverables March 19th is our you know when we land a graduation proposal to the board of education for the first reading and then about two weeks later is a second reading in
153June we'll be evaluating the attendance Pilots that we mentioned earlier and the intervention and resources that we're using to support students all right we put this this slide in the deck just to give a little bit of tangible um you know a tangible slide that you can see the the different types of feedback that we've been gathering in the iterative process the feedback we've got 13 before that first bright green line there's about 13 different groups and they represent everything from parent groups with the district Advisory board and the district accountability committee to um staff groups that are different departments within the district as well as different stakeholders that are working out in the schools and it includes um I think I I didn't mention yet the student advisory committee and so we have lots
154of different there those are 13 meetings and we're continuing that work on the 16th which was just last Friday the full action team for this graduating with options you know um proposing a change to graduation requirements that full team met to review all the themes that had emerged from all of that feedback that we have gotten and I personally read had every single written response to go through that work to come up with those themes and share it with the team and there was some very clear feedback and So based on that that action team revised the proposal which is still just a draft proposal and we're moving into that space under that first bright green line into those next seven meetings that you see there and all of the meetings we're doing aren't even
155represented up there but those will all be completed by the 8th of March because that's when the action team gets together again and does yet another round of looking at the themes of all that feedback and deciding if there needs to be any last minute not last minute but like final tweaks before the proposal goes to the board of education on the 19th for the first reading after that first reading on the 19th that action team will review once again what the Board of Education may have um you know brought up during that first reading to then have a final reading on April 9th and so that's the process and I want to kind of highlight two important meetings coming up on the 27th which is next Tuesday and on the 29th the F that
156Thursday um there will be two Community sessions the first one on the 27th is here in the boardroom the second one on the 29th is in the future ready Center at the mall they're both um being held from 7:30 to 9: so I just want to take this chance to mention that and I want to give you a quick feel I want to mention that the the use of that time is to gather feedback on a draft proposal for the board of educ ation we are not unveiling a graduation requirement proposal because it is still being developed but this is the opportunity for anybody in the community including staff or others to come and give their input and we'll start off the session by spending about 20 30 minutes to make sure there's some facts
157in the room and everyone can ground themselves and what the conversation is then we'll run a Q&A session with a whole team of folks that'll be there from PSD to answer questions and make sure people understand what we're proposing and why it maybe makes sense and then we'll spend the bulk of the time with a public deliberation process and we're utilizing the CSU Center for Public deliberation to help us with that and then uh we'll take that feedback that's gathered back once again to the full action team to again look through what were the themes that emerged so just want to mention all that and say thank you very much I'm going to pass the mic now to Communications my good friend meline all right thank you Dr schmidtz um now we're on to Communications
158around the Strategic plan uh and uh you'll hear a little bit more from our colleagues about how the uh plan is coming to life for our students and that's something that our team Works to support so I will divide my update into really two schools of thought tonight um one is around the website so as you may remember we have a website that's dedicated to the Strategic plan so we will be working through um updates to that in line with the information that you've heard here this even evening so that our community can see uh progress that's been made as well as challenges we've faced and all of the information that's been highlighted here this evening um the other piece of this is really to help um show and bring to life again um the
159work uh and examples of it as it plays out across our system you've heard her this evening so a couple of examples that I would Spotlight from our team uh some of you may have seen this read the story from um and Flores on our team around what does the uh implementation of the elementary literacy curriculum look like for our students um in classrooms and so she went and spent some time with uh one of our wonderful colleagues uh cat jro up at Livermore Elementary and got to see um what it looks like to put those skills blocks and some of those different things um into play in a classroom she talked to um parents um and heard what the impact has been for their students um worked with our curricul um Team uh to
160help uh our community to understand what it means for this to be rooted in the science of reading and um to break down some of the jargon that we use in education and as a first grade a parent of a first grader myself um I learned from that story even above and beyond um the great experience that I've been able to witness in my own child um other stories uh include one that's coming forth um from uh our wonderful colleagues Matt and Philip the Jr OTC program um and that in its first year up at pter high school um we also had a story a couple of weeks ago about the U multiple grants that our career and Innovation team and others in the district have acquired um aligning with graduation with options so being
161able to expand our work-based learning our apprenticeships internships um and other career connected opportunities there um and then we've done multiple stories around uh mental health and belonging in our schools from the peer Summit um this fall um to the mental health uh campaign that you heard about earlier and being able to provision um posters and conversation cards and um bathroom stall information to all of our schools and then being able to build on that um with the input of more than 200 students and staff um throughout this semester to make it bigger and better and uh more refined to what they say they need in terms of supports um so we will continue that work um and uh like I said we'll be um updating the Strategic plan website um with all of this
162good information so that we can point folks there um and helping share out uh a clip of this presentation as well so folks who want to dive deeper can uh obtain that information in its entirety all right I will turn it back to Tracy now thank you meline so just to recap a little bit about about where we've been and where we're going so as you can see the timeline we're continuing through the rest of this year working on the implementation of the various projects simultaneously we've also started to engage different stakeholder groups in identifying our projects for year two and to begin to look at emerging student outcomes and get feedback on those outcomes to design projects um that best reflect what's needed in our system so the next steps that you can see
163is we'll work on completing those year one project goals um you'll also hear from Dr Schmid's in the monitoring report some of the student outcomes and things that were're starting to point toward and look at and pay attention to for those results ultimately all of this work is to align to better and improve student outcomes um that we want to see in the system so we'll refine those year two projects based on that feedback we're getting also from the monitoring report as well as our stakeholders and our staff um we'll share the updated year 2 strategic plan project s with the staff and Community you'll see that um in around May or June we'll be back to the board to give you a progress update and over the summer we'll continue to review and reflect
164on the data um to make progress adjustments um the best part of this presentation I feel like is going to be our staff remarks and so we're just going to take these um in a group so I'd first like to introduce um for literacy Kristen broadbelt principal at Ione Elementary and Emma canella teacher at Ione Elementary are here to speak to the elementary literacy implementation welcome thanks for having us we're really excited to be here I'm going to continue um to use the language that Tracy presented and all of the presenters used um at Ione we are implementing El education and um the things that I have been very very excited about was looking and comparing our Maps data for reading only from middle of the year last year to middle of the Year this
165year and um we had 14 points growth in third grade eight in fourth grade eight in um fifth grade and so it really does speak to the Integrity that the teachers are taking with the curriculum but also what that curriculum is putting in front of students um I I feel like that's a perfect Apples to Apples comparison um I also anecdotally walking through classrooms you have a very high amount of student voice and much less teacher voice that's happening in the classroom and I think that that's one of the the things that we wanted to see from any curriculum I personally am taking advantage of the better lesson coaching as an administrator and then I'm able to deliver those learnings to my staff which has been um absolutely wonderful and I I keep asking for
166more and John pantino keeps giving me more so I'll keep taking it um at istone we really focused our school Improvement plan on student ownership and that's how we aligned all of our teachers professional growth plans and the use of el really promotes student ownership and so the the ease in which teachers have been able to really tackle those professional growth plans has been beautifully aligned um and then finally I think it's very obvious if you follow any of our social media platforms but the amount of family engagement in the school taking part in what their students are learning has increased due to that curriculum there are two learnings I'm going to call them learnings they're not pain points that's what I was going to call them um the um what I what I hear
167from teachers and what I see teachers doing when I'm sitting in planning or sitting in a classroom the materials management is quite difficult um it could be because this is the first year and we don't know where to put things or where to find things um there are beautiful books and amazing tasks that are going to be presented but that's a lot of moving pieces especially when you have moving 5-year-olds or six-year-olds and then um just to put it out there the El days are fantastic teachers are coming back with new learnings and they're able to implement them immediately but with a school that has five tracks across each grade level that is very taxing on a school level when you're taking away five five teachers but again thank you so much for letting me
168share Emma is going to share um what she's learned from her classroom okay um I teach first grade just to give you a little bit of context this is completely solely my experience with some feedback from my team and some colleagues it will not in any way embody everybody that has implemented El and what their experience is um initially especially at the beginning of the year imple implementation was difficult stressful overwhelming as it is with anything that's new um I think you hit it in the key learning moments of not having that plan time and understanding how cumbersome it really is um I have noticed a huge Improvement um in the last two El learning days and I attribute this to the staff surveys and uh being able to sign up for the PDS of
169our choice uh that align to the session that we would most benefit from especially being in that survey for the better lesson impact survey we were actually on the opposite the the vast majority said they felt most comfortable with modules whereas um in first grade we had really dove into the skills block knowing that that's where the foundational reading skills where we that's where we spent all of our time planning so we felt very confident and comfortable in that so it was great to be able to sign up for looking at the standards of modules and picking a session that was going to be the most effective for us in the implementation specifically in the area of skills for our first grade team at Ione we have had an average growth um from beginning of
170year priority assessments to the middle of year priority priority assessments with two full micro microphases of growth 83% of our first graders have made at least one um full microphase growth and then 60% of our students that middle of year were at or above grade level in El microphases so it is definitely working it has wonderful differentiation to meet students where they're at an area of implementation specifically in the area of skills that has been what it wasn't a pain Kristen but what was it a learning space a learning space was specifically doing with newer teachers and having perhaps a lack of experience with science of reading or um lack of understanding of how because it's so cumbersome and so much to look through knowing how to pull out that explicit instruction of which fings
171pattern they need to teach um both in the ONG grade level uh skills lesson and in the microphase at their differentiated lesson and knowing how to do that some stuff that the district provided that I think has been very helpful with alleviating this is the skills block cycle plans document that was huge some areas that are still lacking in materials within the differentiated skills block rotations students are expected depending on the day to do word work writing accountable independent reading influency response sheets most of these are not provided by El or it's given you a bulleted idea of what you can do or it's just not an age appropriate thing that you can put in front of them that they can independently do which is leaving teachers having to either create or purchase materials already
172uh in the area of modules I also fully agree that it has created and built so much academic discourse my first graders can speak to it Dr guile got to see they are absolutely rocking it um it is difficult to navigate to purposeful portions of lessons especially with some extremely redundant topics uh but then getting into those standards and knowing and having that mind shift of understanding the teaching with integrity and knowing then how to pull out the standards and which lessons line up and how the units go through that has been very beneficial the materials in relation to modules the recommended and required text that we are given for each individual class is unprecedented in any of the previous literacy curriculums I've taught I think that is absolutely outstanding the amount of multiple student
173text that they can be put in front of them granted some are better than others as always um and some are more age appropriate for them to do for their research and understand how to use those text features but the amount of books that we have access to is absolutely outstanding the student workbooks uh could still use some tweaking of being more student and grade friendly and uh more effective uh then then also at you know at the beginning of the year we both schools teachers District both ways didn't really know what materials we were going to need and so some of the materials got sent out um a little bit later like you needed seeds for a random module or pliers and you just don't know um and we so we got some of
174those a little bit later but now the module materials list document that the district went through and made for us is huge that teachers can just go and look and know oh all of these lessons these are the materials you're going to need this is where you can find it or it's being sent or it's in lab kit and just having that for this second semester so far has been so beneficial and help helped alleviate and make that more effective overall I would say um the staff surveys in having professional development of choice have been the most beneficial in attempting to um Implement El with Integrity so thank you so I'd like to introduce Holly so uh your last name you'll have to make sure sure I'm saying it right I know Holly oh right
175I know so Holly rews rewards yes and Holly is coordinating our grant and apparently I've never said her last name out loud so this is what we're practicing and then Heidi Thompson who's stepping in for em Wells we're having a Rocky Mountain high school highlight Spotlight on the grant so Heidi thank you for being here Heidi's a mental health specialist and Holly's a mental health specialist as well with that focus on the grand but I do want to just shout out quickly we have some interns in the audience this evening so yay if you're an intern with the grant can you raise your hand hello thank you for being here Holly yes will you share a little bit yes of course so my name is Holly I'm on the mental health Team historically have worked
176in school supporting kids and I am just so honored that I've had the opportunity now to be on the grant supporting our student interns who are now supporting our students in schools so it's been a great year of growth learning lots of successes lots of exciting things to come as well um we have a partnership with CSU um in which we are working with their Master's level Social Work program to hire 10 interns as classified staff in our district they're with us for 24 hours a week um paid as classified staff and working as their in their internship role they'll be graduating in May um with their MSW and um from them moving into a fellowship position with us we're under the grant we're able to hire them as 7 so there'll be 10.7 SSP
177staff in our district providing Mental Health Services to students um within the grant we offer a lot of supports for our interns which also help them be successful in working with their student students they have group supervision weekly they have individual supervision weekly they have amazing task managers at their school sites to help support them in navigating the buildings um and they have a 16 week course built in in which they learn about different Community Resources modalities and things like that um once these interns will move into their Fellowship year we'll have another cohort of interns come in from CSU so there'll be 10 more interns with their following toye fellowship and then a third cohort that will come in over the 5 years total um so a lot a lot of support for our
178students in schools um looking forward to next year I think one of the most exciting things that I've heard recently on this working in this grant is we were doing interviews for um our interns for next year and we had a handful four of them are already PSD employees and a couple of them um identified that the reason that they're going back to school was because they have the opportunity to now because they have they can stay classified employees under PSD and they're able to go and get their master's degree to become social workers so it's pretty powerful four of them are also part of a um BSW cohort to uh program and so that's really cool too that we're having this continuity of our interns across the years moving into um professional SP cases
179in our district having these interns just allows diversity into our Workforce it um is increasing the amount of opportunities students have to interact with mental health providers connections all sorts of things which lead to better outcomes in school overall so I'll let Heidi talk about Heidi is one of our task managers and I'll let her talk more about the um day-to-day things our students are doing in schools and I can answer questions at the end too you're going to wish this one not as loud as that cell phone I so apologize for that I turned my ringers off but my husband's phone somehow got in my purse and then it's like taking a phone away from a teen he's been calling his phone I think to so I promise I turned mine off not here
180to defend no and then I couldn't yeah so thank you for your patience um but I am a mental health specialist at Rocky and also at Johnson Elementary and I am fortunate to be Tas supervisor and get to work with will you um Eric Benson and Blake mcclaflin and they are a huge support at Rocky and so I'm just going to speak from personal experience for what it's like to have um extra support in a building which I hope we could spread this out that every building deserves and needs extra support So as you can imagine um we are clearly facing a mental health crisis and our mental health ssps those are school counselors School psyches social workers and then Mental Health Specialists that are assigned to each building we're pretty overwhelmed by the need
181and the need is rising every day it feels like and yet the Staffing the funding for mental health support isn't necessarily keeping pace so this grant gives us a tremendous opportunity to increase access for Mental Health and Social em emotional learning support for our students and so a typical day for Eric or Blake um we have a really robust uh Wellness Center at Rocky and that's often where um interns or Amore workers are housed and so it's kind of it's a hub there it's a first point of contact for a lot of students and it's a place that counselors or teachers will bring students when they're concerned students are struggling and need some more support or just somebody to talk to and with this grant we're able to fully staff that Wellness Center so that
182it's open and accessible to students all day long um it's a great it's a safe place a calm space for students to regulate um for a really short amount of time and connect and often they're connecting with Eric or Blake in there and then um that might lead to case load for for either of our interns and so they are able to keep a small case load and they're able to provide consistent support if you can imagine the manal health ssps in the building we're doing a lot of Crisis Support and we never know what day is going to look like so it's really great to have extra support there for our students and um counselors and the rest of us can continue on with the crisis support and be available for that as well
183they um co- facilitate a men's group and so it's just another resource for students another place to um to connect and um they also are um Blake is involved in our SED program and so he meets the three days that he's there he's meeting with our school social worker and um with the Positive youth development class they start first period and it's a lot of connection in social emotional learning and Blake lead's activities and um they both are able to survey our staff and find out what the needs are and then um we kind of adjust what the roles or their or their niches are depending on what the needs are and um so that leads to some seal instruction for both of them in the classroom or activities again just increasing access um I
184think it's it's just been invaluable and I'm really excited that next year as they continue in their training they can get more involved in The Crisis Support part um be be extra hands on deck for that and then the interfacing with parents and connecting with Community Resources Blake's been doing some field trips with the pyd class um seeing these community agencies so it's just a wonderful tremendous support and we're so lucky to have them all right so graduate with options we invited a couple folks to come um more of a Q&A if you've got some but I'll have them do a couple of previews on some of the programs um want to introduce I'm going to first start with Sarah fonte um and she's a teacher at Lincoln middle school and we wrangled her in
185because we went and did a a feedback session with um world language teachers and also music educators at their DCT meetings um when we were uh in that meeting um you know we were gathering feedback on these graduate with options and while yes she has the perspective of a World Language teacher she also um was just an amazing spokesperson for um some of the concepts we've been trying to think about when we talk about graduate with options and we talk about making space for Choice um and exploring your interests and passions some of our students who need the most support in our schools um are filled with schedules that have required Support classes and those take up their elective spaces for options to do exploration and so because they're in their required Support classes they
186just don't get to have the opportunities that other students do and so I'm just going to throw the mic over or actually let her speak over and Sirah do you kind of want to talk about like your perspective and what you see and what you've learned through um some of your own programming and learning outside of World Language okay thanks for having me everybody and um yeah so this list that uh Dwayne showed of all these meetings that they're doing it they really do the meetings and I ended up in one because of a committee that it's a part of our DCT and so it's like uh these are leadership um groups in different curriculum areas and um first I do have to say as a shout out and they did not pay me or
187anything to do this we really just met but um they kind of presented this like there's this possibility we're with the graduating with options team and these are these we're working on this proposal draft and um they were such good facilitators because this was a pretty big group of people and they had done this many times but um obviously when you bring up like something might change there's everybody has something to say about like the change that's about to happen and it was just so apparent to me and I was just S I didn't I wasn't talking I was sitting in the back just thinking like wow they're really able to like hear what the people are really saying and so if you haven't got to be in one of their sessions like that's like
188a special talent that I feel like this team has in facilitating um but I did have to say something at the end and that's how I got roped in because um I'm besides I teach Spanish Heritage language at um Lincoln and I've been a bilingual educator for over 20 years I also taught at Harris back during another literacy adoption time I did both languages literacy adoption um but I'm also a PhD candidate in education equity and transformation at CSU and I don't think any of you thought when you are working on the Strategic plan committee I actually did a qualifying exam examining multilingual Learners and how they fit into this strategic plan and so I have 20 Pages written about this I know that website pretty well um but the reason that I want to
189give you this background is because what was really apparent to me when they um brought up this plan that you'll hear more specifics about soon was that the goal is to provide Equitable outcomes especially for the kids who aren't graduating at the rate that they should in this District including multilingual Learners and kids in integrated services so um and one of the things that they figured out which I had also kind of come to that conclusion too was like what classes are the kids allowed to take and so we have to back up like a little bit because there's a lot of frontend things that like are bigger issues that the district can look at in other years but a huge percentage of our multilingual Learners or definitely disproportional percentage to monolingual kids and as
190well as kids with IEPs and supports Visa like the Colorado read plan what's going to happen is because of the mandated Services especially when you get in middle school so say you have all your core classes that might be six and then you might have four electives um depending on the school there's little tweaks but it might be that you are it because of all your mandates that you are in a reading skills class a math skills class El and in the case of like Lincoln Middle School we we try to encourage the language for everyone and for multilingual Learners that class would be your heritage language class which actually on a bigger picture should be just able to replace the reading support in English because it's a literacy support long story but basically we're
191getting to a situation where kids for example are having like behavior problems and then you're like they don't have a single elective like they don't have PE they don't have art all their electives are academic electives so it's just like it wouldn't be fun for me I really don't think it' be fun for like a seventh grader and when we look at the graduating with options and in terms of attendance I just imagine we can all see how a student that doesn't have a single elective that isn't academic a single Choice starting in sixth grade how that is going to really decrease Um passion for coming into school so that all fits into it starting at a pretty young age um but then those are the same kids that need to be in school more
192and um so that's going to contribute to high school truen and even understanding the options like when you're not in school and middle school you're not going to hear what options you have for high school and um then it's the same thing is sort of happening in high school so the front-end things would be like PSC is a huge District we could really talk to the state of Colorado about how we assess multilingual Learners with the read plan that's a whole another ball game right we um could also really look at internally could we streamline um is and elel services and make sure that admin really understand the exact minutes and requirements that these different programs are needing because what if you could have all of these things stream line in a way that the
193kids have now one more option one more option um but then on this back end this idea a of being able to open up um graduation requirements so it's not like in my mind this isn't dumbing this down at all um it's just um as uh Dwayne sort of talks about it is like there's all these buckets to fill boxes you have to check and because of the supports and requirements and the mandates and all these reasons that these Learners with these intersectional um I'll say marginalities are placed into they don't have all these other options which ironically it's the kids that probably most would benefit from the career path raise program and options to get into University with a well-paying job already and the same kids that could benefit the most from more like
194language classes for example aren't even getting the chance to do them and um on that graduating with options end this idea is that um for multilingual Learners the higher your level of multilingualism um first of all being bilingual is what's going to get you the job but being biliterate and the higher level of um biliteracy that you have is going to get you the better pay in your job and it's there's a lot of data backing up the fact that um higher levels of multilingualism leads to higher educational outcomes so that's just like a specific part um of all these options is like allowing multilingual kids more time to get into language classes is one of the things but even already as soon as Middle School some of the a lot of the multilingual Learners
195can't even take Spanish Heritage because they're in so many of these other buckets so to me I just had to tell them at the end like this would be like a recommendation I would have made after writing that 20page test um was that just being able to open up the options because I don't think most of us in this room maybe just a couple but most of us don't have our own kids that are in the situation where they don't actually have these choices um but for me like the majority of my students are in that situation see why we loved her and we told her she's got to come and talk to us and yes um echoing a lot of conversations that um just so you know we're also having with integrated services and
196um and David at wreath and his team on how do we how do we weave in some of those supports so that they're not pulled out three times today um how do we think about um English language um development um reports and what they can count for and why they're not counting for things that would make sense to count for so love it all thank you so much Sarah appreciate it um and then um with James dilato he's the assistant director of student Outreach if you I think you've seen him a few times around the block but um really I brought James in just first of all if there's any questions um and we're happy to fill any in general about graduate with options or um any of the work but specifically with attendance treny
197um I wonder James if you wouldn't mind talking a little bit about when we talk about the pilot at four high schools which is Rocky Collins um pter and fossil um what we're talking about when we say additional supports that are team supports and then even those um in in like even higher level supports do you mind g a little quick rundown of that just so they have some clarity yeah for sure and uh yeah thanks for introducing me Julie hello everybody and and good evening um so the the pilot groups that we've been running uh we started with uh two sites uh that being pter and Collins In the Fall thank you in appreciate it I could also speak louder too but um and we were adding uh currently uh you know fossil um
198and um sorry spacing and is R Rocky right now um currently um and so we put in tier 2 interventions which are targeted interventions with a mentorship program with check and connect um you know CD endorses that work Works clearing house uh endorses that um and uh it's run out of the University of Minnesota and then we also um are putting in tier three targeted and intensive interventions um uh with a Community Partnership with the Matthews house um where we have a treny transition facilitator who is um helping to do home visits um with students um provide some you know academic supports and also connect them with other community agencies um and and helping to identify resources um and needs that those families might have um in looking at our data from fall semester uh
19965% of students in those pilot groups increased their attendance rate from a baseline of last school year and that average rate of increase was 15.1% um so you know we had obviously some early success in that pilot um we're hoping that continues um and as both Julie and Dwayne talked about um also having conversations about what does that look like you know in scaling up um especially as we have new pilots um and we had learnings from those pilot groups as well how do we make sure that this work is done efficiently without um you know provide without creating like an overbearance on specific um individuals and how can we share that workload within the schools especially when it comes to that mentorship group so some of the learnings we're already starting to implement as
200we you know introduce um our new pilots at Rocky and fossil so thanks Julie thank you and I think we're wrapping it up with questions and comments that you might have for us so all right well thank you all for an amazing presentation this is this is yeah I know seriously um and so I I I know that we probably have a lot of uh questions and I want to encourage people to ask them and I just want to also be mindful that these lovely people here do have to be um at a Belle schedule of 7:20 yeah so so you know I just want I just want to put that out there so qu yeah go ahead Carolyn I guess I I just really want to thank you all for coming and talking to
201us tonight um so much of what you had to say about your personal experiences really resonates I think I can speak for the whole board really resonates with us and helps us really get our heads wrapped around what you're going through and and what you need and so um I just really appreciated hearing about your experiences tonight thanks I didn't mean to cut off all conversation sorry Jess I mean it's not so much a question but I really appreciate that you guys contextualized your experiences and not just gave us sunshine and rainbows but you gave us like an authentic IC account of how the experience especially with the illiteracy adoption like it wasn't always easy still has like things to you know work out but the fact that you've advocated for yourselves you've gotten more
202of what you need and then it's starting to feel like maybe it's going to be great I appreciate that feedback because obviously we've heard a variety of information so it's nice to know that it's kind of it's working its way out so I appreciate that thank you go ahead Jim yeah it's about a year or two ago I remember superintendent Kingsley saying when everything's a priority nothing's a priority and for this group to be able to fly the plane and on top of that do all the special work that you're doing it's just nothing short of miraculous so thank you go ahead Scott I I just had a question on the literacy you'd mentioned how uh parent engagement has improved uh dramatically what about the literacy program do you think has has caused that or
203helped with that sorry yeah I I was a coach so I don't microphones an I um [Laughter] people the answer to that question is the amount of the performance tasks that the students create at least at Ione is significantly increased and the pride that the kids are taking in that work they want to show it to their parents and so we've just opened our doors and welcomed people in and to piggy back off of that I think um because elel has such depth to it uh their understanding as is so much deeper that they feel confident in sharing it and one to thank you go ahead Kevin uh a question that I don't need answers tonight but one question i' I'd appreciate if you would if if you feel so inclined to email the board
204um and give us some some insights um I appreciate the well how how' you phrase it the questions the positively framed the uh learnings Lear learnings there you go learnings um want I want to probe into that and hear specifically from the leaders of these teams what is Warner two significant challenges that you did not anticipate going into this work um which I think goes into the learnings that you want to overcome in year two and again we don't have to do this tonight because I think it's late we still have exec session but that's one charge and I would I'd be very interested in that that feedback as a board member um and then my charge is to keep it up I mean this is incredible work not only to to have this huge
205these three big hairy objective goals that guide all the work that you do and you articulate that very well Dr G appreciate your sort of setting the stage on that but also having that informed everything you do and then demonstrating and showing us the evidence of the measurements of how far we've come already in one year what it's doing to to students and that to me just I'm just overwhelmed with the whole presentation I wish we could have done it all night um so thank you uh sincerely for all the work you've done and for the presentation tonight I know it's hard work and it's late but thank you I really appreciate it thank you and I Conor did you want to nope okay excellent I just wanted I just wanted to oh Dwayne did
206you want to say something go go for it I feel like I have to clean something up I I realized that I think I said it was 7:30 to 9: on Tuesday and Thursday night those Community sessions and it's 7 to 8:30 just want to clean that up thanks thank you no and and I just I just want to close out by with a huge thank you I I just um I want to Echo a couple of things the the learning points as you called them um I think to come in and be able to talk to us about those knowing that the reason you're doing that is to make it better for next year and for teachers the year after that and the kids the year after that that's that's impressive it's be it's
207to be able to say this was a struggle and we overcame it and we're going to make it better for you know for the people ahead of us that's fantastic and so don't lose that and I just love the fact that you're talking about this is how we're going to make our improvements um the student engagement is just huge and you talked about student engagement in everything that you do from literacy to Dei work um to graduating with options and what we're learning from that is just incredible and I think that's something that we need to keep up um and so one of the things that um I just want to make sure that we do anytime we're putting forth year two year three um that we are talking to our students because they're the
208ones who are impacted the most by this and I think they're probably the ones that give us some of the best feedback I know having been on stack um that they give us amazing amazing feedback um with the mental health I just can't the couple of things with that one is I think Carolyn remind me how long ago it was that we were always talking about we need to bring in more Partnerships to the to PSD more Partnerships with PSD and that list was incredible that is what needs to be happening here and I I'm just so proud that you are doing that and um you know just let us know what you need to to keep that going cuz it's amazing um and and then we're the growing your own I mean that just
209touched my heart that was one of those things where that is an amazing thing um and the fact that we can continue to do that absolutely amazing it it grows into that Dei it's and and that was the other thing that I just wanted to point out is you can see just how all of this is interconnected and that is huge and I think what's really huge on that is that every single one of you sitting here sees that too and you see how yes I'm working on a piece of the project but you're you also see where you fit into the larger puzzle here and kudos to all of you for doing that kudos to all of you for putting in that extra time and effort Beyond just your you know regular job and
210use air quotes and that um it's it's huge and um yeah you're doing a fabulous job thank you so much yeah yeah go for it I I'm I'm overwhelmed with just Pride on on so many different levels and you know members of the board two years ago which I would refer to as year zero of the Strategic plan this was just a data informed idea we're coming out of a pandemic still experiencing a pandemic we're looking at our data trying to say what is our data telling us in terms of where do we prioritize systemness in PSD and literacy and mental health and belonging and insuring all of our students not just graduate but graduate with options emerged immediately in terms of our focus and push forward to where we are present day when we
211have incredible professionals who are in the field not just using the language of the plan but able to give us explicit feedback around what they're learning what they need more of less of like we're elbows eyelids deep in implementation and we're learning from each other we're trying our best to support one another and I think if there's anything that I can submit as a result of everything that I heard is that this plan attempts daily to be investments in people and process to ensure that we promote and improve performance and you know Emma I think you shared and and I'll close with this that the curriculum is working I would challenge you to know that the curriculum is a static object it's you and your peers and the leadership it's the people that are representing
212these ideas and pushing our group to think big based upon your research and it's it's the human component of this plan that's making it work for anybody and I just don't want that to be lost in the shuffle I'm just so proud of all of you so thank you for being here well done yeah um thank you all and you may run good night um we are actually going to go into um uh to sorry um eight .0 executive session so can I get a motion all right I'll go I move at the board in executive session for the purpose of developing the strategy thank you of the school district for negotiations relating to the 2024 2025 collective bargaining agreement or employee contracts as authorized by CRS CRS 24-6 42 subsection E3 individuals invited to
213join the board in the executive session our superintendent Brian Kingsley Chief officers Lauren hooton Dave Montoya mine net Eric one Savage and general counsel Autumn Aspen thank you can I get a second excellent thank you Scott all right Jill can you call the vote Jim brokish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havelda I Carolyn Reed I Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 70 okay thank you we will go ahead and take a 5 minute recess we'll get go back into executive session at 9:45 and then we will be done