001e thank you for joining the Board of Education this evening uh ahead and mute your cell phone if you haven't already uh today is Tuesday February 6th 2024 and this meeting is now called to order at 6:29 p.m. um let's see we will start off with the Pledge of Allegiance so if you all would stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance all right thank you all right would any board members like to make changes to the agenda yes I would Jess I move to amend the agenda to move item 5.2 on the resolution in support of Black History Month to before item four on recognitions and reports do I have a second all right we've got a second from Kevin Jill can we uh take the vote Jim brokish hi Kristen Draper I
002Connor Duffy hi Kevin havalda hi Carolyn Reed hi Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora I motion passes 70 thank you so much Jo so we um I'm going to start off the today uh with the resolution of support of Black History Month uh can I get a motion [Music] sorry there's a lot of paperwork here can I get a motion here we go mhm there you go oh it's not on there that's why I'm looking for yeah I move in support wait I move and move the that the board approve and approve the resolution in support of Black History Month I apologize thank you we have a second Jim has a second thank you all right um would anyone like to read the resolution go ahead Kevin thank you resolution of the pter School District Board
003of Education in support of Black History Month February 2024 whereas Black History Month was first established by Carter G Woodson in 1926 during the second week of February to Encompass the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln on the 12th and fed Frederick Douglas on the 14th Woodson's mission was to include African-American history in the curriculum where it was misrepresented neglected or even absent due to his advocacy and scholarship Black History Month became a national celebration in 1976 and whereas the 2024 National theme for the observance as established by the Association for the study of African-American life and history is African African-Americans and the Arts and recognition of African-Americans influence on and the enrichment of our nation and whereas the black community faces cultural and systemic barriers to an inclusive and Equitable education pter school district and its
004Community Partners strive to close the equity and opportunity gaps for black students and promise to create and uphold Equitable inclusive and rigorous educational opportunities experiences and outcomes and whereas the pter School District Board of Education Administration and staff are committed to making pter School District an equitable and inclusive community for students families and staff who identify as black and we recognize there is more work ahead of us diversity equity and inclusion are fundamental values in the pter school district and we are committed to ensuring that black students families and staff are valued seen heard and empowered now therefore be it resolved the pter School District board of education does hereby proclaim the month of February 2024 as Black History Month in pter school district we recognize the importance of black history month as an opportunity
005to reflect on our nation's complex history while remaining confident and hopeful about our future the Board of Education encourages students staff and the community to celebrate the Excellence and enriching contributions made from our black community of the past and present thank you Kevin and Lauren in Lou of Brian today um who is out sick um I believe we have some special guests joining us this evening to speak to Black History Month is psd's diversity equity and inclusion coordinator missia mahy is language and actions that impact students who are black so they can feel welcome and safe at school we will continue this trajectory into next year to work to ensure students can see the greatness in themselves and in others and now I am honored to turn things over to my friend and colleague principal
006of Weber Middle School Mr Brian Davis thank you Delia I am Brian Davis the principal at Weber middle school and I'd like to start by thanking superintendent Kingsley president Draper and the rest of school board for taking time tonight to honor and celebrate Black History Month when Delia and I talked a few months ago we uh she asked me to come up with some names of some students that would come here tonight and talk about how important this celebration is I had a lot of names and I had a lot of choices and unfortunately not all of them could be here but I made two really good choices for you tonight you're going to be very proud of these students as I'm proud of them every day they care about their academics they're passionate about
007their beliefs they're good human beings and it's my honor to introduce Cali black and Nia Johnson good evening everybody thank you so much for having me here today I'm Cali black as Mr Davis just said I'm an eighth grader at Weber Middle School my pronouns are she her I want to say thank you to Mr Davis for inviting me here tonight and to dollia for helping me prepare my speech as you might be able to see I am a young African-American woman and I am enrolled in Weber middle school and I am a musician and a dancer and I would like to thank you again for the schedule change because I do have a concert um so I will be going to that right after every everybody's speeches okay I'm speaking tonight to share my
008stories and help make a change and pave the way in the way that black history is taught in our schools today I believe that is very important to teach about black history in our schools because of the contributions that black Americans have made to America those contributions are often left out in favor of teaching about slavery a system rooted in dehumanizing and taking away the value of black individuals we don't learn about individuals who rose from a horrible time in our history and made a major impact on what America is today of course we must teach about slavery and other hardships because we cannot repeat those mistakes again today but that that's not the only thing we can teach for example Believe It or Not Martin Luther King Jr had more than the I Have
009a Dream speech and I know that because my dad Ray black is an africanamerican history professor at CSU and he taught me but not all the students have access to a resource like my father and I want to make sure that everybody in our school system has access to that information in addition to this our schools need to make an effort to address and teach many stereotypes in appropriation that happens today when this is not addressed or specifically taught to people many will act on beliefs that are heavily rooted in our society which are harmful I personally have experienced many unconscious and conscious biases along with many actions that are normalized in our society some examples is when my peers or friends touch my hair without permission and it makes me feel like an object
010or Tory when I'm not I'm a human being and my hair is connected to my head many of my teachers in Weber or other PSD schools have presented ideas to me when when I have presented ideas to them have found my actions as disrespect respectful or I've said it with an attitude or I've been rude to them or the establishment or other students and students who are not black who have often said the same things are not taken that way they are taken as leaders and I want to be a leader in my classroom and I want to be seen as a leader who speaks up for what's right instead of a Girl who's Trying to make waves and be rude I feel that we need to address the fact that incidents like this happen
011in our normal in our school and are normal in our schools and that trauma like this towards black Americans is a part of America and it's not changing as fast as I would like it to Black History needs to be taught all year and not just in 28 days 29 this year though because it's a leap year here so I feel that we need to get this education throughout more than just February and we need to learn how to improve our ability to show everybody the greatness of black history and black people who have made our world a better place for example May jerson is the first African-American woman to travel to space and Bessie Coleman is the first African-American woman who is a licensed pilot and she was a permanent fixture on my bedroom
012wall since I have been like 5 years old I feel that we need to teach black history throughout our year and interpers it in our curriculum I'm not asking us to stop everything like stop teaching the Pythagorean theorem and start teaching about Rosa Parks I'm asking to show to people that there is more to Black America than just slavery and I feel feel that the stereotypes and the prejudices that still happen today will not change unless we learn about how they were changed in the past thank [Applause] you hello and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak tonight my name is Nia Johnson I use she her she her pronouns and I'm a seventh grader Weber Middle School I'd also like to thank Mr Davis for introducing me and Delia for helping me
013prepare to share my thoughts with you I think it's important that everyone learns and understands black history not just the bad parts like slavery but also the good parts like successful musicians and artists such as artha Franklin Ella Fitzgerald Louie Armstrong and so many others these are all people who impacted and helped shape America we need to share accomplishments made by people like those so we can learn more about good stuff to build off to create a better future there's still so much that isn't taught in schools that should be and we need to learn how to make that change I think facing these problems headon is incredibly important to fix them I think it's admirable how Delia teaches people about these things but they need to be taught Beyond one person going to different
014schools they should be taught by multiple people as many as possible everywhere because black people are part of the community and deserve every ounce of respect that should be given to us I remember once my cousin had been on television news because there were people who made fun of and joked about what they were learning a in class about black history and slavery I remember I thought it was amazing that she stood up to them but looking back I think it was horrible that she had to we should be able to learn about things like that with without with without anyone not taking it seriously because it's our history and should be shared with everyone there are also other things that could be changed like others who are disrespectful even though it's not on purpose
015the thing that matters is the impact for many for example many people aren't taught things like how touching hair or even asking to touch hair is disrespectful to African-Americans some people don't have any idea and I think it's important to teach these things because they helped make a the world a better place for all people um both my sister and I have faced and still face problems with people touching our hair or simply treating us different because of how we look and the color of our skin we are a part of this world as much as everyone else and should be treated that way we all have so many similarities but many people look for differences and judge others based on the gap between us instead of how we can jump over it I think
016that one day if everybody becomes more understanding and closes that Gap we could have a world where the only thing that matters is what you can do not how you look or what you can't do teaching about black history is a way to make that world a real a real place where everyone is welcome I completely believe that we can make it happen but we all have to put in the work again thank you awesome thank you both so much that was wonderful do we well let's first do we have anything that we'd like to any comments we'd like to say and go ahead Jess thank you for coming I am always so proud to be on the board when I get to hear students share their story share their culture have you know shout
017out to their parents and how amazing you guys have raised them and have their principal be so proud of them and you guys are obviously so prideful of yourselves as you should be like you did phenomenal thank you so much for coming and sharing I just want to Echo that and say thank you for your bravery um when the students come and talk to us in the community and give us a charge and give us a challenge that resonates with us so thank you for your bravery you are a leader so thank you for that I just want to also add to that that uh I love your message about let's focus on the good accomplishment and the inspirational things I think that's something that often gets missed in this discussion and um you know
018victims versus Victors that's what I think we really need to be focusing on is the victors so uh thank you for bringing that message here go ahead Jim just want to say thanks for your your vision your humor and your leadership very well prepared thank you very much all right and I just want to say uh Calli Nia thank you so much um you are both you should be very proud of yourselves you are both exceptional leaders and the focus on the joy um bringing the joy into the history bringing the joy into the future bringing the joy into the present that's amazing and I want to thank you for that um if that's okay with you we're going to call the vote and do you have time for a picture after that okay we'll
019be quick I promise all right Jill can you call the vot Jim broken hi hi Conor Duffy hi Kevin havalda hi Carolyn Reed I Scott Shen Bower I Jessica Zamora I motion passes [Applause] 70 thank you ni [Music] oh grandparents [Music] m oh yeah okay move there you go you're good way I got you all all right good luck Good Luck Concert yeah thank [Music] you okay thank you all for that that was wonderful um we're going to go back to our uh recognitions and reports and then we'll come back to our other um resolutions in just a moment so um we have our recognitions and reports so this evening we are honored to recognize a staff member who quick thinking during a crisis facilitated student safety leading the recognition is Chief Communications officer Miss
020mine naet welcome meline good evening thank you everyone um this is one of our favorite parts of the evening um not to overshadow um the wonderful resolution we had before and all of those after um with that I would like to recog or I'd like to invite up to the lecturn um several folks who are here this evening I would start with deserie fish fiser and Sarah Mitchell if you would come up um and if I could also welcome Miss Tracy Hernandez and family as well as the Ooa Ortega family um go ahead and uh you can stand here in front of the screen um as we recognize Miss Tracy Hernandez for um some incredible incredible work that she did not that long ago so with that I will turn it over to Miss Sarah
021Mitchell and we'll go from there good evening I'm Sarah Mitchell and I'm the assistant principal of icone Elementary um I have the honor of uh recognizing Tracy Hernandez today um Tracy is a lifelong Wellington resident um she was a graduate of pter high school and all five of her children attended pter um school district schools um so she's a bit of a staple around Wellington oh and your husband sorry and her husband um I always love seeing Tracy she I is a has a smile um she's just all so sweet and the students just adore her I don't think I've ever heard anybody SP speak ill of you um she what really stands out is that Tracy calls her writers her kids so she's I mean any conversation we've ever had she refers to them
022as her kids um in late December 2023 an early morning call came in that a student on her bus was unresponsive when the bus arrived at school I got on board and Tracy was actively caring for him by holding his hands and gently shaking him to keep him awake she told me that while on the bus ride she noticed that he was dozing off and looked unresponsive but at this point she also had a whole Bus full of students at each stop she would check on Lucas and ensure that he was breathing and responsive she did this many times before arriving at school while also ensuring that the rest of the students got to school safely once emergency Personnel arrived at our school um she continued to care for Lucas even after they'd arrived she
023stayed on we stayed on the bus for probably another 45 minutes um providing them uh giving them a play byplay of exactly what she had noticed and and Lucas who is right there that's Lucas and he was he was a sick little puppy um so throughout the entire situation Tracy kept her composure this entire time she had was driving a many ton vehicle while keeping all of these children in her care um and keeping them calm which was the the thing that really stood out to me was that Tracy had an absolute calm about her she knew exactly what to do I got on and probably had more anxiety than she did um and it was just it was just a beautiful thing to see her have so many roles in that hourlong period and
024be able to manage them all beautifully so getting those students to to school safely as well as caring for a very very sick child um luckily the emergency Personnel sh showed up and as you can see Lucas is doing well well yes he's a happy little guy so um it's just with it we feel so lucky to have Tracy as part of our Ione family and I know that Lucas and his family feel the same way um and they are so grateful for her quick thinking and their her love of their child um so thank you Tracy for your love and genuine care and for all of the families that you serve in our Wellington community thank you so much good evening um so I would like to say a little bit give you a
025little more background to Tracy um personally I'm a little biased I think that all of our drivers are awesome and fantastic however some feet people really do stand out and I'm I'm I get a little emotional so she's been with us for about 15 years and um she has not this is not her first rodeo of being in a situation where she has had to think quickly on her feet and we're trying to figure out how what's going on with that but you know she she's our Lifesaver so I just want to say I am beyond proud of her and proud of the work that she does this also shows you that all of the training that they get and all of the extensive stuff that they go through it really does help in the
026long run and it it saves our students so thank [Applause] you hello good evening um so I didn't plan a speech because I didn't know I was going to but that's okay because I've never been told I don't talk so I'm really good about that as matter matter of fact you know I did attend PSD um but on my report card it was always Tracy talks too much so um yeah I've been a bus driver for 15 years um I love my job um my husband and I we've been married 32 years we have five children six grandbabies and Counting I'm sure um but I love children I do and um you know um I wasn't there the day they were born but when they're on my bus they're mine and um the motherly Instinct
027kind of kicked in that morning um I want to thank Desiree like she said we have a great training program um you never want to be in that kind of situation let alone it's not not your own child but I had good training and it all came in to play and I want to thank Sarah for being my first eyes on that bus when I got there that was pretty pretty scary intimidating but um she thinks I was calm I thought she was calm so she kept my calmness going and I want to than Lucas's family um you see the parents from the bus stop every morning and every afternoon but you don't have a lot of communication and talking and what have you but um from one mom to another we get each other
028and um his mom and dad have done a great job raising the boys um I pick up Lucas and his brother at 6:30 in the morning way out almost to the end of our um County way up North and um it's it's kind of a tricky stop you know it's 6:30 in the morning but they do a great job raising those boys and uh the communication between us and how we get them on the bus safely every morning and Antonio you're a great brother and um AA I've known her for years and years and years and even my husband's family has known her years and years back so Wellington is a nice tight little Community but I just wanted to thank them all that it's a great honor that I could stand up here and
029everybody's healthy and that's that's my reward for sure so that is all iate so much I grew up in morning too been on the bus at 6:30 in the morning yep yep yeah so thank you so much rode lots of buses thank you thank you thanks for your service would you all be up for taking a big phot for sure [Applause] yeah all right thank you so much everyone that concludes recognitions for this evening all right thank you so much meline and now we will move on to um 5.1 resolution and support of classified employment Appreciation Week do I have can I get a motion yeah I move the board approve a resolution in support of classified Employee Appreciation Week February 12th through 16 2024 okay can I get a second all right Kevin can
030I get Kevin's a second uh would somebody like to read the resolution Jim all right thank you Jim this is a resolution in support of classified Employee Appreciation Week whereas the education of our youth is imperative to our local communities to putter School local communities to putter scho School District Colorado and to our nation and whereas putter School District's classified school employees are an essential part of our education system and whereas classified school employees are involved in nearly every aspect of Education including maintaining buildings and grounds preparing and serving meals keeping school facilities clean and orderly assisting in the classroom performing and conducting research activ activities and whereas classified school employees are involved in providing information technology and Media Services administrative support functions Safe Transportation a secure and healthy environment and many other specialized Services
031where students can learn and grow and whereas by supporting the learning environment classified school employees are crucial Partners in the education system alongside teachers parents administrators and the school board and whereas pter School District recognizes the role of our classified School Employees and salutes these employees for the valuable Services they provide to the district our students and our communities now therefore be it resolved the pter School District board of education does hereby support classified Employee Appreciation Week February 2nd to 16th 201 24 thank you Jim we have a guest yes joining us this evening to speak about classified Employee Appreciation Week is Ace president Joanie Baker welcome [Applause] Joanie wow I'm sorry that just blew me away so if I get a little emotional that's what classifi is all about you couldn't ask for more
032than that so that's why they are so important um so good evening board and cabinet it's my honor to be here tonight to recognize this incredible classified staff I'd like you to please join me in a short video thank you Matt and Phil for putting that together for me um classified appreciation week is next week and I have the privilege of working with all of the different classified groups across the district and one thing for sure this group of over 1,900 employees have an incredible impact on our district I'd like to thank our transportation part department and I think we pretty much just really covered it um um they they travel over 4,000 miles a day okay a day and um they have about 8 8,500 students on those buses a day um and they
033take them every morning and every afternoon and this doesn't even include all the field trips and other extracurricular activities that they cover and we do all of this short staffed but we make sure that those are happening we take care of of those kiddos to our amazing Child Nutrition staff that so far this year and it's only February folks 5,737 breakfasts served so far lunches glad everybody's sitting down because this blew me away 1 milon 293,2mb and it's only February pretty incredible of what they do their dedication to providing our students with the proper brain food and the essential to is their essential to their success academically and physically thank you to our incredible par professionals and behavior Specialists who each day assist our students and teachers with the support they need academically and and
034emotionally for them to be successful these individuals work with some of the most challenging of students every day to assure them how important they are and how to get through the hardest things while building their confidence next we can't run our schools without our very patient and supportive office staff our office managers secretaries registrars and our health techs we simply cannot function the support that is given to all students staff and families every day is phenomenal in each School the role of our healthtech is incredible the responsibilities required when our nurses are not in school is Bar None they're there they take care of these situations as you can tell even our Paras do and our bus drivers as well every day our custodians make sure that our building sites are cleaned and ready for
035the next day of school with all the sites and District buildings the custodial staff covers 4.5 million square feet daily not only do they keep our facilities clean but they also set up and tear down for all events and also work on our weekends thank you for taking such good care and making sure that our events happen without um incident to Our IT department who assists all our employees and students every day with all of our technology needs our media Specialists help with our students and staff as well we are so fortunate to have such an incredible group of people we also have our our amazing group of Early Childhood classified who assist with our littlest of Learners all the educational and emotional support support that you give students staff and parents is so appreciated
036the service you provide is remarkable family liaison sign language interpreters translators and mentors work tirelessly every day to assure our families are supported and that they are receiving the best educational support for their students and families in need we also have an incredible operations Department that maintain our schools keep our schools looking fabulous watching over our security performing maintenance on our buildings and to those CRC ladies that answer the phone bless your hearts they take care of all emergencies coming in thank you very much last but not least is my Ace board many of you are here tonight can't look at you cuz I'll cry um thank you for your support not only to me but to all classified employees this is a volunteer position and these individuals give up so much of their time
037their evening their personal time to assure that our classified staff are taken care of and represented properly thank you so very much classic classified employees serve such a vital role in our district we are so fortunate to have such a dedicated indiv group of individuals that ensure that we are taking care of students staff and families I'm so honored to work with all of you every day you are the way thank you thank you so much Tony boards are there any comments go ahead Caroline so Jonie I would just like to thank you and and all of the ace employees for being like the glue that holds us all together I mean when I think of your group um I think that nothing happens in this District without you so thank you for all that
038you do I appreciate you very much go ahead Jess I don't really know what to say because you think you said it incredibly well but I think thank you is all i' all I've really got because otherwise I'll just be here all night but thank you Joanie and thank you to every classified employee okay I just want to say Janie thank you to you to your team um to all of the classified employees um without them kids wouldn't get to school kids wouldn't eat at school kids wouldn't learn at school kids would not get home from school so you really are the backbone of this community and I just want to say thank you and we see you so thank you all right Jill will you please call the vote Jim brokish a big I
039Kristen Draper I Connor Duffy I Kevin havalda I Carolyn Reed I Scott Shen Bower I Jessica Zamora I motion passes 70 thank you so much oh pictures thank you thank okay thank you next up is a resolution of supportive Career and Technical Education Month can I get a motion I move the board approve a resolution supportive Career and Technical Education Month can I get a second oh Scott there we go Scott's at the second um who would like to read the Scott thank you all right this one's near dear to my heart um in support of Career and techn Technical Education Month whereas February 1st through the 29th 2024 has been designated Career and Technical Education Month by the Association for Career and Technical education and whereas Career and Technical education CTE has approved proven
040record of delivering applied technical skills and academic knowledge that directly connect to career and college readiness and CTE partners with local community businesses for work-based learning opportunities including job shadowing student internships and apprenticeships that are integral to the successful skill building and Workforce preparation of both secondary and postsecondary Career and Technical education programs and whereas certain industry sectors in theed unit States including Healthcare Advanced manufacturing and information technology face challenges in finding properly skilled workers to fill open positions and whereas Career and Technical education prepare students for these and other fulfilling careers by offering integrated programs linking secondary and post-secondary education and support the attainment of Industry recognized credentials and whereas ensuring that employers have access to a qualified Workforce is a crucial step in ensuring productivity among business and industry communities as well as
041continued American economic growth and Global competitiv competitiveness and now therefore be it resolved that we pter School District Board of Education support Career and Technical Education Month and salute the efforts and successes of our students our community and our teachers thank you Scott and I believe we have a special guest yes joining us this evening to speak to Career and Technical Education Month is CTE coordinator Kelsey Burger welcome Kelsey thank you and good evening members of the Board of Education and PSD cabinet thank you so much for inviting me to be here tonight on behalf of over 170 PSD Educators committed to the important work of career connected learning through CTE I'm humbled to be the representative of the incredible work that these teachers par professionals work-based learning coordinators and counselors do every day to
042help students find their path in PSD we offer a diverse array of CTE programs across every secondary site that represent both career exploration and career preparation and 15 career Pathways these programs provide students an invaluable opportunity to blur lines between secondary education and various post-secondary options including the workforce Community College trade school military and University Career and Technical education not only equips students with essential skills for success but also Fosters for Mobility for families of CTE graduates the impact goes beyond individual students it resonates throughout our community I'm proud to highlight the tangible outcomes of increased School engagement heightened connection data and improve rates of ontime graduation among students involved in CTE classes these statistics underscore the profound impact that CTE programming has on C on Student Success moreover career connected learning and work-based learning
043initiatives within CTE not only prepare students for future careers but also instilling them a sense of purpose and Direction by integrating real world experiences into their education we Empower students to make informed decisions about their future endeavors tonight as we honor or as we celebrate CTE month on this board and this board's resolution I'm honored to invite my co-presenters to share the impact of CTE programming in their lives specifically with our Ed within our Education and Training pathway which works to expose students to careers in education and prepares them for the pipeline Within PSD um first I'm going to introduce a student and then I'm going to introduce a teacher and then I'm going to introduce our Workforce partner who happens to also be a teacher because pter school district is an employer as well
044so first we'll start with Ari from Rocky Mountain High School hello everyone I hope everyone's having a great night um I would like to start by saying thank you for giving me the space to talk tonight and thank you for those making it possible for me to be here um my name is Ari I'm a senior at Rocky Mountain High School and technically a graduate of the teacher Cadet program the teacher cup program is a front- Range Community College course at the high school level that gets students involved in educ education their Junior and Senior year before even starting College allowing them to get a feel for the teacher path and if it's right for them um at the beginning of our program we learned about the inner workings of Education like why students act
045the way they do or what motivates a classroom we learn about great philosophers and what they have to teach us as well as getting the chance to develop our own philosophies and ideas for our future classrooms as the program progresses the students are placed with teachers who want to extend their education and teach others what they have to know um what it's like to be a teacher Cadet to be a teacher Cadet is to get to be Hands-On in the classroom and work with students one-on-one or as a whole and essentially Shadow one of professionals getting to take note on the way you want to create classrooms to be your own being in the classroom at a teacher K level is getting to talk with the students every day or say hello or just say
046how's your day been you don't have to be a big part of the students world but you are a part of it and that is such a wonderful thing uh why I like to be in teacher gadet so I am the youngest teacher Cadet at my school I started my sophomore year which they were breaking a couple rules for me but um I am so fully grateful um I was going to sit down and write everything I have to know about why I love being a teacher Cadet but I realized that even being in the shadow of a teacher you cannot plan for um the program isn't just a program to me it is a lifestyle um I've gotten to sit in those classrooms and realize that what I wanted to do one year is
047not what I want to do another year I started out as a zoology major in my future and I'm now going into English or music or science or something but I was able to step into that light and figure that out for myself and that's what's special to me um every day you see those students faces and they light up just seeing you and that is such a beautiful part of your life um I'm not even technically a teacher but I still call those students my kids because they are a part of me and I hope to be a part of them as well so thank you so much thank you Ari for being a part of all of those student stories next I'll invite up Mandy Johnson the Futures lab early childhood education pathway
048teacher hi and uh um thank you for having me here tonight uh my name is Mandy Johnson and I have she her pronouns I'm a family consumer science teacher I've been teaching for 19 years the same the same stuff um and I I love my job I love sharing my job with students and one of the best things about CTE and especially because I'm in the education pathway is that I get to share my love of learning with students um it's a passion of mine for sure um 19 years strong not going anywhere soon and um students tell me all the time they can see my passion they can feel my passion and it inspires them and that to me is why I do what I do um CTE I I've been with pter for
04910 years now uh I've been at pter high school for 10 years and just started at the Futures Lab at the beginning of August so I actually am split teacher I I do pter high school and Futures lab uh about seven years ago I started the early childhood education program here in PSD um we had had Child Development classes and things teacher Cadet had existed but there was no pathway for people that wanted to work with Littles and so I started um an early childhood education program at PR High School um a couple years into that um I was able to hook up with Front Range and offer concurrent enrollment to my students uh so for the past five years my students have been able to earn college credits while taking my courses um one
050of the really cool things that that we were able to do is even before I was with Futures lab and did a real work-based learning thing that I'm doing now um through the ECE program myud students have always engaged in a program called buddy up and through buddy up they uh get to go to elementary schools and spend one day a one class period a week um with the elementary students instead of with me so that they're getting some hands-on experience with kids that they want to um to work with the the right age groups and because Elementary School doesn't start until 5 years old we also um I was I was honored with a grant several years ago to build a child care facility basically in my classroom and so I have a preschool
051setup in my high school classroom um to teach kids how to be Preschool teachers and we are able to invite real children um generally we get seven and under because you know kids go to school we like them there um but we get we get kids to come in about four times a year to the classroom who were all the way from three months old um I think our youngest ever was a one-month-old um all the way up to like age seven who come spend the day with us and and my students get to use the materials that I got through my grant to build Learning Centers to show that they know how kids develop and what they need um and then they get to work with all the ages from infancy all the way
052through up to third grade um because third that third grade is when Early Childhood ends um it's it's a really cool program that I've seen a ton of students come through who are like I just wanted to take your class because I like you or because it seemed easy or fun um who then develop a passion and have gone into gone on to be preschool teachers who never intended that in their lives but getting to spend time with teachers like um Miss Fernandez help help Inspire that that it's a job that they might want to do I also have students come in who say I want to be a kindergarten teacher and then they get the Practical experience and they're like nope never going to do that um and either way it's a real good
053benefit because they get to do this well it's still free um currently my students are able to earn six concurrent enrollment credits through Front Range and if they get the first two like I have one semester class with two college courses if they pass that they also were able to earn an assistant Early Childhood teacher certificate which is a um industry certificate that they can take to any child care any prechool and get a job with as a as an assistant teacher um to date in in PSD I've had um somewhere between 20 and 30 I couldn't pinpoint the number um of students who have now gotten that certificate and gone on to work in childcare in preschools um it's it's just a a really cool place all of CTE um I obviously am biased
054to what I teach but all of CTE is just a really cool place for kids to get their hands on experience they get to take what we learn in the classroom and apply it immediately in the real world um and it's also a class where nobody ever asks why are we learning this you know no CTE classes is ever questioned that way why are we learning this because the skills are so practical and so real world um students love the classes uh students want to take the classes more and more they identify as teacher Cadets my students identify we're this is our program we are ecers um and it doesn't matter that they Futures lab students now they're home high school they have two schools they are ECE that's what they'll tell you um because
055it really does mean that much to them and just like I'm sorry I can't remember your name right now cuz my brain just turned off are just just like Ari said um my students same thing when they go to the kindergarten so those are my kids they they identify that way and themselves as a teacher so quickly um and it's just a really cool way to to Really apply what they're learning in classes so um just thank you so much for being here and thank you for your continued support of CTE um without your support I would not have had a career um for the last 19 years and I wouldn't be able to share my passion with so many students who hopefully um we'll end up here someday doing the same job so thank
056[Applause] you you know and I'm gonna go ahead and introduce Clarissa Hernandez um a kindergarten teacher at Irish Elementary hi everyone thank you for having me here I'm excited to talk a little bit about the program and what it looks like once the kids are actually in the sites um over the last two years I've had a couple students come over and visit my kindergarten classroom um last year one of the students who was visiting and helping out was actually a former student of mine um and I think it was just so cool to witness her growth and um dedication and um also I love that we have some bilingual students older students being good examples for our kiddos at Irish and um yeah it just shows the potential a program like this can unlock
057uh one aspect that stands out is uh that it's Fosters a strong sense of community um a lot of these students are coming from similar backgrounds coming from the same school even and now they get to see these older kids come in and just be positive role models and um emphasize the importance of bilingualism and um and just show them that like the potential that could happen so I'm I'm so happy to have that opportunity um I yeah I just want to thank you for your support for the CTE programs especially the ECE ones um and yeah and thank you Mandy for always reaching out we're always happy to have students at at our kindergarten classrooms I I should I should share that over the yes over over the six or seven years that I've
058been doing this um I have partnered with almost every Elementary School at in this District except the ones that are more than 15 minutes away from pter high school I I currently have somebody at Liberty Commons at OD day at Irish I've got putam um I've got bevens not bevens I'm sorry uh I can't think of the B1 right now there's too many I I literally can't even keep track I have a list that says what schools everybody's at um but Without Partners um that that are willing to take in my kids this wouldn't never happen and so huge shout out to all the teachers that work with my students and that work with the teacher Cadet students to Mentor them because none of this would be possible without all of them so thank you
059thank you thank you so much does anybody have any comments okay I just want to say thank you so much for sharing that amazing story and I cuz that is something that I learned today that that we have this amazing program from you know all the way um bottom up so thank you so much for sharing that um it's amazing what CTE is uh is doing um with the teacher program I'm just so excited to see you in the classroom um being a teacher so I think AR that's going to be phenomenal how when is that going to happen it n PSD no pressure n PSD yes of course that was that was obvious I thought but so well thank you thank you all and um we we'll call the vote and then are you
060available for a picture all right Jill can you call the vote Jim brokish hi Christen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havalda I Carolyn Reed I Scott Shen bow I Jessica Zamora I motion passes you all like to be in the center come back all right now we're on to 5.4 resolution and support of national school council week can I get a motion J oh Connor sorry go ahead Conor I move the board approve a resolution in support of National School counseling week February 5th through 9th 2024 can I get a second uh Jessica thank you would anyone like to read the resolution all right Jess thank you right uh res resolution in support of National School counseling week February 5 5th through 9th 2024 whereas school counselors are employed in public and private schools
061to help students reach their full potential and whereas school counselors are actively committed to helping students explore their abilities strengths interests and talents as these traits relate to Career awareness and development and whereas school counselors help parents focus on ways to further the educational personal and social growth of their children and and whereas school counselors work with teachers and other Educators to help students explore their potential and set realistic goals for themselves and whereas school counselors seek to identify and utilize Community Resources that can enhance and complement comprehensive School counseling programs and help students become productive members of the of society and whereas School counseling programs are considered an integral part of the educational process which are culturally responsive trauma informed and Equity based and enables all students to achieve success in school thank you
062and I believe we have a special guest yes joining us this evening to speak about National School counseling week is K12 counselor coordinator Beth green welcome Beth thank you good evening thank you Board of Education superintendent Kingsley and cabinet for your support and honoring our school counselors during National School counseling week I'm honored to work alongside exceptional group of Educators school counselors are an integral part of our schools and have expertise and passion to support the mental health and belonging for all students and equipping students to graduate with options counselors at all levels elementary middle and high work to support our students in academic social emotional Career College and Community Readiness it is the voices of students that continue to drive my passion as a school counselor and my passion to support my fellow colleagues
063I want to share a story from a former student of mine who was unable to be here but she has given me permission to share this with you all this student is now at pter high school but at the time uh I was her counselor she was in second grade and she writes do you remember in elementary school when I and a few other girls were extremely shy and you created a group that would meet once a week or so at lunch we would make art projects eat frosted animal crackers and talk to each other which we otherwise would never do we were too shy well I never realized why you created that group or what exactly the purpose of it was until a few hours ago as I was writing an essay about a
064challenge I've overcome in my life I just wanted to thank you for creating that group and giving me the option to join and all the effort you put into it because I truly think it changed my life as I remembered when writing the essay shortly after I joined that group I participated in the talent show and the film fest and started hanging out with more people other than the few close friends I had at that time you may have made a huge difference in who I am today this is just one story throughout our schools there are thousands more similar to this showing the impact our school counselors have on helping our students connect to themselves and to their interests research shows that supportive relationships and skill building opportunities to practice emotional social and cognitive
065skills leads to academic growth when students connect to trusted adults and connect to their passions and interests they are a they are able to work toward engaging in their future options and opportunities and I'm honored to have with me today a fellow counselor and one of our lead high school counselors Brook Wagner from Rocky Mountain High School and also one of her students Edward and I'm going to invite them to share a little bit about the impact of school counselors thank you um thank you board and cabinet and superintendent Kingsley for uh recognizing honoring and celebrating um the remarkable school counselors we have in PSD uh we appreciate your leadership your support um and dedication to our staff and students um I'm going to be quick um school counselor a patient empathetic resourceful professional also
066a multitasking ninja helping students with their goals and challenges collaborating with teachers administrators and families to De to develop and Implement plans for diverse learners advocating for students fostering resilience and restoring hope so I've had the privilege um of being a school counselor for 19 years um I am grateful I get to wake up every morning and go to school I go to Rocky I don't go to work so I get to go to school every day as I'm a lot as I am a lifelong learner and our students are our greatest teachers uh this work is hard this work is necessary um and and it is so very rewarding um there is nowhere else I'd rather be than standing beside an amazing colleague and an extraordinary student Edward um to express uh gratitude and
067celebrate the incredible work we are doing as a counseling team so thank you very much good evening everybody my name is OD Reinhardt I'm a junior at Rocky man high school I'm also a peer counselor I just briefly want to thank everyone that has given me the opportunity to speak today and the gratitude that I can express to speak on behalf of the rocky Community it is an understatement to say that counselors do so much for our schools they are the engine that keeps the crazy machine running from The Nightmare scheduling to the day-to-day issues that they resolve counselors truly are the backbone to our school support system Kelly Madden and Brook W Wagner are my school's counselors Miss Mrs Wagner has been my coun celor since sophomore year and has been supporting me ever
068since Mrs Madden is the head of Rocky's peers and has taught me so much about what it means to be a leader through learning from them I've gained a small insight into their roles as a peer counselor I don't do nearly as much as they do but I'm close enough to see that they turn an impossible task into a possible one all the countless hours and work behind the scenes is vital to the success of PSD in every single one of our schools thank you coun for everything you do from all the students at Rocky Mountain High School thank you so very much do do we have any um do what anybody like to say anything Connor okay well I'll just like to say thank you not only do you do you do make the
069impossible possible but you do so with Grace and that's just an amazing amazing feat and I I see you all do it every single day so thank you from the bottom of our hearts and now chill would you call the vote Jim brokish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havelda hi Carolyn Reed I Scott shanower hi Jessica Zamora I motion passes 70 can we do a picture yeah [Applause] y [Laughter] stand [Applause] all right and now we have the superintendent report so Lauren would you like to do the superintendent report for us sure thank you good evening everyone I'm Lauren hooton I'm the chief of staff I'm serving in this role this evening for superintendent Brian Kingsley he's home under the weather and regrets that he can't be here with everyone in person
070but he will be joining us later online for the discussion of school bell times I'm going to keep my remarks tonight very brief um and share just a couple of updates on Friday and Saturday members of the facilities planning steering committee met for the first time to launch their work we are grateful for each Committee Member they're volunteering a significant amount of time and giving their energy to solve a complex Challenge on behalf of our entire District they spent two days with our facilitators from csu's Institute for the built environment and received information from staff who attended including myself other members of cabinet uh including our assistant superintendents and others who shared information and resources to support the committee's work the next steps in this process are the committee will develop possible scenarios for boundary
071modification ations school consolidations and educational program placement flow analytics and outside firm will model their possible scenarios and as staff will provide data and about the financial and operational impacts of those scenarios the committee will host listening sessions in March and April at these sessions members of the community will see possible scenarios for the first time and will provide input the committee will take that feedback and other input gathered in the process including from students and put together two to three recommendations ations representatives from the committee will present updates on their work to the board in March and April with a recommendation being made in May finally the board is scheduled to vote on how to move forward in June of 2024 the committee talked over the weekend about how this is an opportunity to
072set up our district for success for decades to come while recognizing that the work isn't easy as we move forward this winter and spring we are carefully looking at all aspects of the District budget as well it's important to continue looking for ways to be more effective and efficient always remaining good stewards of our taxpayer dollars as always we will keep the board and Community apprised as we develop the budget for the next fiscal year and with that I'd like to thank the board for allowing me this time thank you so much Lauren really appreciate it and that brings us to the community comment portion 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 commity community members
073public comment is designed to address issues not personalities or Personnel matters please keep your concerns and comments focused upon the district please not that the board does not generally respond to remarks made during Community comment our lack of response should not be construed to mean that we agree or disagree with what is said with the description or interpretation of events as presented by any speaker further even if some remarks may be factually inaccurate we generally choose not to respond or correct the record here because formal board meetings are not the time or place for back and forth dialogue as we begin this community comment session let us model for our entire Community how to listen and how to interact respectfully even with those whom with whom we disagree for we all have the students best
074interests at heart so this opportunity for public comments is for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated deadline those people will be called on to make remarks in order that they signed up each speaker will be allotted 3 minutes to address the board up first is Stephanie Watson Lewis welcome she is not here okay um now next is Anna leetta welcome good evening one year ago this week on the eve of my dyslexic daughter's birthday I reached out to Mr Kingsley via email for the first time I had taken some time to process the fact that strategies pertaining to specifically addressing dyslexia were omitted altogether from The District's revised strategic framework for students with dyslexia each of the areas of the framework can be profoundly impacted and statistically that's 15 to
07520% of our district out of desperation I requested either an opportunity to sit down and speak with him personally about dyslexia or in a group setting through a community engagement session that was specifically geared toward engaging families struggling with dyslexia in PSD dyslexia has historically been sorely misunderstood in janed and sorely underserved by integrated services in the response I received from Mr Kingsley he reassured me that the district already knew the needs of dyslexic children and that any concerns I may have around dyslexia would adequately be addressed by 3A of the framework alone with no need to say dyslexia or further discuss my concerns in all fairness this is the same response I've received from multiple members of PSD leadership which strongly indicates that PSD leadership has a very narrow shallow and Antiquated view of
076Dyslexia understanding of Dyslexia in my heart of hearts I want to believe that if you really understand the gravity of the situation it would not it would not be so easy to dismiss my concerns exactly a year after being reassured that dyslexic needs would be taken care of our dyslexic kids are continuing to be failed and misunderstood broadly they are held back by A system that will not pause and ask curious questions about how we can do better by these kids in this District again I want to ask for a chance to have an engagement opportunity geared toward dyslexia this time instead of asking for an audience of one I want to ask any of you who are willing to learn or interested in having a better understanding of Dyslexia to meaningfully engaged with a
077group of parents and dyslexic students who would love to offer a window to their personal experience with dyslexia and PSD I'm imploring anyone on the board anyone on the cabinet anyone in integrated services and anyone on the equity board to please join us for an opportunity to dig deeper and to ask curious questions be open to learning new things and ultimately to seek to understand this community as parents of dyslexic students we get that it's not exactly the topic that people seek to understand until they have a very personal roadblock and have to but as leadership in an educational environment making crucial decisions that directly affect dyslexics we need you to hold space for choosing to actively listen we need you to resist being reflexively dismissive and willfully ignorant we have asked to be seen
078and heard as allies both to the district and to our kids every hour of every day that passes for an unsupported dyslexic child results in more complex scars we're good we can't afford to not talk about it thank you so much next up we have Sarah Von welcome this is intimidating so good evening my name is Sarah Von I'm a math teacher at Weber Middle School also a very proud teacher of Nia Johnson who spoke earlier tonight I'm here to talk to you about the heat even though it's winter time I've been emailing the school board for and superintendent for the past few years about the unbearable heat in our schools because of these emails it was suggested by the folks on the board that I join the district calendar Committee in order to see
079if we could move the school start date after Labor Day so I joined and it was very eye-opening the CDE has a lot of restrictions on districts in Colorado that I had no idea about this year the committee came up with a calendar for next school year that met all of the CDE requirements and began as close to Labor Day as possible we sent out a calendar survey in October to the community the survey results showed an overwhelming wish to begin after Labor Day we thought we were successful in creating a calendar that reflected on these survey results yay and then the cabinet presented one more restriction that we did not know about Front Range Community College and Our obligation to them because of the co-enrollment yet this was the exact thing that caused us
080to not move forward with the calendar that we as a committee and the community chose since the restrictions won't seem to allow us to begin school later in August when the heat is extreme in our classrooms please allow the schools in this District without air conditioning to have early release days I know the cabinet folks have been presented with the information about how Denver public schools do early release days personally I don't know the details but the cabinet folks do uh which tells me that it's possible Mr Kingsley also talks about Equity all the time nothing about the heat um and lack of air conditioning in our schools is remotely Equitable if you want equity and won't give us the early release days then might I suggest you turn off the air conditioning here in
081the in your offices and try to work in the 90 plus degree Heat this would give you an idea of what students and staff deal with on in the non-air conditioned buildings in the 12 years I've been teaching in PSD I've collected data that shows the difference in test scores between my morning and afternoon classes my afternoon classes score significantly lower on average than my morning classes in the hot months not Equitable I know you're looking into and trying to pass a bond to put in air conditioning into all of our schools but it's too little too late we can't wait another 10 to 15 years we need the change now so please give us the early release days thank you board members for all you do for our schools thank you thank you very
082much next up we have Danny Lawrence welcome last week I was told by the executive director of integrated services that PSD staff refused to work collaboratively with my family because I make Schoolboard comments the recording of that discussion is in your email tonight apparently retaliation is now proudly acknowledged by District leadership so tonight I wanted to take a moment to speak directly to those who have written off my son because I Dar to interact with the directors of this board that I helped to elect first there are a hundred other ways that I would rather spend two Tuesdays a month can you imagine being so desperate for help that you would publicly display what was happening to your family can you imagine what it's like to watch your child hold his face to a computer
083screen enlarging the print to three words per screen while reading homers of The Iliad simply because a teacher refuses to follow the IEP and provide him with the Dignity of inclusion can you imagine listening to him cry and not feeling compelled to do something and then being threatened and coerced by ableists who refus to get professional development can you imagine sitting at an IEP table outnumbered significantly by PSD staff to create a contract that you have to enforce according to a law you didn't create while being hated for being part being put in a position that you didn't choose while you simultaneously get to worry about your son's medical future can you imagine begging for a seat at a table that you created for a child that staff refuses to interact with because in your
084desperation you couldn't make people feel ego stroked enough while simultaneously caring for your child and dealing with your outrage while is leadership can Target me as the problem I think we all know that denying access to a low vision child and violating the IEP is the least of the offenses created by the organiz by this organization to hurt disabled children I sat next to zanella's victim's families last week in court 3 hours after I was shamefully taunted in that recording for questioning why I couldn't find the license of a woman who had been alone in a room with my child for 2 years if PSD doesn't understand the palpable concern for basic safety that I families feel in this moment then you are thoughtless and disconnected from your community if this treatment is if this
085is the treatment of a family with a legitimate legal complaint and retaliation protection under OCR what is treatment like for families less familiar with their rights I get six minutes of your time a month 6 minutes of painful reality and now my son's rights feel threatened how scared would integrated Services be if I had 30 minutes can you begin to imagine what you don't know in your leadership capacity due to these threats on staff and parents like it's time to address the culture of retaliation that is alive and celebrated in the integrated services and school sites toward parents and teachers thank you to the five members of this board who have given my family more time than the leadership of this organization and thank you for the refreshable Braille display why my son's teacher likely
086can't risk the retaliation of coming here I know she's grateful and that the device will help other students in her District it came 48 hours after my public ask she had been requesting it for 2 years I wouldn't make Schoolboard comments if I could get help anywhere else my silence can be earned with assistance and law compliance not with intimidation tactics but in a sea of hostility I just literally wanted to thank you all for being a sign of Life please protect the rights of parents to speak their truth in this public space thank you very much thank you okay now we're going to move on to 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 uh
087anybody have anything they would like to discuss nope oh Kevin's got one I do um it's going to wander slightly off of board topics but um I've been feeling this way a lot coming to uh board meetings um even before I was on the board um and I just want to make a quick comment so bear with me um especially those that not in the room anymore that may be listening this room is a really powerful room in my view um I look at what's happening in the world in our national politics and our world politics and the world really seems to be tearing itself apart and I was on the border of tear five different times tonight I'm not going to tell you when they were but at seeing Community come together in a
088room and celebrate the things that we're doing well challenging the things that we not and poking it with a stick and showing our love but the people that show up in this room from the from the cabinet to the board members to the community to our presidents in the back to our police officers to everyone who's in this room you're coming here for a really important purpose and I know I I'm not going to speak for everyone else but I I'm sure everyone else feels this is that this room is sacrosanct in that regard and I want to thank everyone for showing up in Earnest and celebrating the work that we do each and every day and continuing to challenge us to make it better that's all I want to say thank you very much
089it's democracy and action Scott okay this might be controversial but I don't care um I too have been observing this and uh for a while and and to hear you say it's been a year and Danny to hear you once again I don't know how long it's been three years three years this is and excuse my language but we have to address these issues we can't keep hiding and bouncing every two weeks from one thing to another and never addressing this let's have that community meeting let's hear it I I'm all for it let's hear about it let's address integrated Services what's going on there that you're not feeling heard you're not just a loud voice like hey we all have different personalities we need to address this stuff this is unbelievable and that this
090is dragging on and I'm sorry I know this is out of line and I'm not supposed to address Community comment but come on this is too much that's all I have to say anyone else okay and I think um those things will be addressed and we will go ahead and move on to the consent agenda would any board members like to pull an item from consent seeing none would anybody like to um get a motion give a motion for the consent agenda go ahead Kevin move that the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for items on the remaining on the consent agenda can I get a second Jess okay Jill will you please call the vote Jim brokish hi Kristen Draper I Connor Duffy hi Kevin havalda I Carolyn Reed hi hi Scott Shen
091bow I Jessica Zamora I motion passes 70 okay moving on to action items and yeah 10.2 that's what I thought so the action uh items 10 10.2 monitoring policy review El 2.4 Financial Planning and budgeting can I get a motion Jim thank you I move the board determined that the super intendent has reasonably interpreted Board of Education policy El 2.4 in his internal monitoring report dated February 6 2024 and that the evidence presented supports the superintendent's conclusions stated in the internal monitoring report can I get a second okay Jess thanks and Jill can you please call the vote oh sorry are there any questions or comments on this my mistake okay seeing none Jill can you please call the vote Jim brokish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havalda I Carolyn Reed I
092Scott shanower I Jessica Zamora I motion passes 7 Z thank you all right moving on to motion to uh resolution regarding guiding principles for facilities planning stearing committee can I get a motion okay Connor Thank you I move that the board approve and adopt the resolution regarding guiding principles for facilities planning steering committee can I get a second Kevin thank you and are there any questions or comments on this item no comments I actually have a couple if that's okay um one of the things that I would like to do is just amend slightly on the guiding principle um on the third bullet down um right now it states maximize access for all students to schools and academic programs uh consider physical access and proximity to other schools geographic location Ada and curricular demands I'd
093like to suggest that we um change academic programming to educ ational programming for consistency and make sure that we add um is special education um as a specific area um when we specify curricular programming that we add is to that just so that we make sure that it is um specifically in there point of clarification Madam president So when you say curricular and adding D is do you want to say and curricular demand including is or where do you want to put yes I would say in um and curricular demand including um is or special education yes thank you one other suggestion I would make is a third Bullet From The Bottom um where it says using data from mckinstry studies PSD and other sources consider all aspects and costs associated with continued use of
094current District facilities and then it lists off um things that we could do such as efficiency score ADA compliance overall condition I suggest that we add um curricular and is or special education programming demands in there as well just so that we have that very specified so with that do I need to make an amendment there so I make a motion to amend the guiding principles for facilities planning steering committee with the following suggestions a second Kevin seconds any comments okay so we'll need to call the vote for the amendment and then we'll need to call the vote for okay so uh Jill would you call the vote for the amendment Jim brokish hi Kristen Draper hi Connor Duffy hi Kevin havelda I Carolyn Reed I Scott shanower I Jessica Zamora I motion passes 70
095thank you and are there any other questions or comments on this item okay seeing none um can we get a vote on the amended Jim brokish I Kristen Draper I Connor Duffy hi Kevin havalda I Carolyn Reed I Scott Shen Bower I Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 70 excellent thank you all right that brings us to 11.0 informational reports and discussions um and I believe we have a special guest so providing information from the larer county department of health and environment is public health director Tom Gonzalez welcome Tom good evening uh members of the board board and cabinet uh thank you for making space uh and time for me tonight Tom Gonzalez Public Health director and what I'd like to talk tonight about is what we're calling shaping the future of Public Health in larer
096County really how can we continue to make a more vibrant resilient and thriving Community throughout larer County I have with me our uh office of communications director Cory Wilford who back about a year ago we worked put this together with a third party consultant really calling it the health strategist tour uh kicked off in August this is our 15th stop uh I hope I'm getting better at this but our first stop was at the town of Wellington we've met with most of our municipalities our school districts will uh our Civic leaders and ultimately at Colorado State University and UC see Health uh next slide please or do I control it oh there we go our mission at lmer County County Department of Health and environment is to provide everyone in lmer County the opportunity for
097a healthy life simple but key words provide everyone an opportunity for healthy life we've talked about inclusion and Equity tonight and Bo that's the centerpiece of this presentation you know while this is our Department's Mission uh I believe health is something that connects us all it's a value that we all represent we all want our communities to thrive for our residents to be healthy and for our families to prosper so our presentation agenda today let's we're going to introduce what we call Public Health 3.0 the power of partnership what is a health strategist how does public health 3.0 benefit our communities are some of our programming some of the public health in action we have a great video for you that I think we'll tip it all off so let's talk about public health 3.0
098really started about a little over 100 years ago with the birth of governmental Public Health at that time it was basic disease sanitation vaccines that the health departments were involved in making sure we had safe food clean air clean water and vaccines were available that work extended the life it did a great job um the lifespan was expanded in the 80s we saw a burden of chronic disease and emerging other health issues such as HIV AIDS so Public Health 2.0 built upon 1.0 and that really became what we called Safety health clinics that went on till about 2008 and that was the Affordable Care Act and the emergence of our federally qualified Health Centers well that changed some of the Dynamics and now we're building upon that to what we call Public Health 3.0 which
099is really talking about increasing cross- sector crap collaborations using data and convening partners to discuss the health burdens and explore Solutions which we're calling Health strategist we really want to get more Upstream into that prevention mode so what is a health strategist what we're looking at is population Health we're targeting Community Health needs and building effective working relationship with healthc Care Partners other sectors our school districts are and looking really at the social determinance of health so in the next several slides we're going to talk about those social determinants of Health those are those conditions where people are born they live they learn they work they play they worship they age that all affect a wide range of Health outcomes ultimately education and learning so we have our familiar issues communic and chronic disease we
100all know that coming out of a pandemic uh our foodborn illness issues our parent Child and Family Health some of our Clinical Services that we still retain at the health department our environmental health and safety emergency response and preparedness those continue those are foundational to governmental public health and I forgot to mention uh the public health department is how they're structured we're not silos we are not uh we don't have borders we are your health department we're the city of Fort Collins Health Department Estus Park School District so uh when you think of that Health Department that's that's we are here for you what we're looking at more with the data is the social determinance of health and I know uh I I I at Dwayne over there where we look at data quite a
101bit and we're looking at income employment Child Care mental and emotional health substance use misuse Transportation education Access housing and how those all intersect into one's Health they're so profound that when you layer them on sometimes you can actually see how there's inequities within our community you know when you look at housing that's a basic necessity and it challenges their can directly impact human health struggling to pay your rent or knowing that housing costs rise you're not going to be able to afford to stay in your community be able to afford your home we have our child's uh couch surfing that all impacts health and education that creates difficult situations whether those are physical and mental another example is not having enough food to eat or being food inse insecure can me not only po
102nutrition but for children difficult focusing in the classroom those missed opportunities mean potentially losing out on Education Health and income opportunities later in life hopefully the new policy Statewide we heard the breakfasts and lunches are are helping with that but we do know we have many kids almost one and eight go to bed hungry in lur County so there's an issue that we have right there with the social determent of Health one thing I did want to mention is access we're partnering with school districts on school-based healthc care clinics I do appreciate who school district pter school district and their Student Health Centers and partnering with every Child Pediatrics we have a couple of those uh centers right here in Lincoln and at Centennial that creates that access those are those solutions to complex problems
103so where are we going I I think it's really important that we we really connect with our Civic and Community leaders something I learned from the pandemic is I can't sit over at 1525 Blue Spruce doing daily activities we need to out in the community our Public Health officials need to be working with school boards with our Civic leaders to look at how we can be proactive and on these Solutions and the biggest one here is better outcomes from our historically underserved communities and families and we look at the data lmer county is doing great for most aspects pter School District's doing great but when we drill down we see areas where we're not where there's inequities and I think that's important we need to be Bridge Builders among diverse stakeholders we need to hear
104from everyone all voices need to be heard and we need to be active Partners so how does the public health 3.0 benefit I think really important is Health Equity it's wrapped all around that and and let's not get that mistaken with equality equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resource or opportunity I'm not saying that what I'm saying is Health Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resource ources and opportunities need to reach an equal outcome if we obtain Health Equity within lmer County our poorer Health outcomes are going to be diminished which is also going to improve most of our our issues that we see and reduce most of those challenges let's talk about some of the disciplines at powerful Synergy that we currently
105have at the health department I'll Breeze through these I want to get into their actions uh and our activities but our strategic planning and Health Equity initiative this has really been transformational since the pandemic we now have an office focusing in on internal work groups process Improvement collaborating on the vision Direction and goals and recommendations for improving Health Equity and meeting the diverse needs of our residents so that's important first we have to recognize there's inequities in our community and the data shows that we have pockets within lur County where more than 40% of the population within that census block relies on government subsidies and other Pockets where I live less than 5% why we look at the demographics we look at the different access to Parks access to safety access to Fresh Foods there
106is an inequity so those are the situations issues we're talking about that play to poor health outcomes our public health planning and Partnerships this is where our data and po population epidemiology sits that's where I've got those smart folks that work with Dr Jared olssen on our data and work with Dwayne on the data our community health Improvement plan which we will be releasing the new fiveyear the next fiveyear plan to the Board of Health in April this plan is over two years of work listening to our community qualitative and quantitative data on what are the most important challenges that impact our community the one that Rose to the surface is sight of social isolation being not connected to your community being alone that's nothing new in fact in May our Surgeon General declared an
107epidemic in America of loneliness our nation's doctor says when someone's alone not connected it's like smoking 15 cigarettes a day when we look at the data we have underserved communities are communities that feel alone they don't feel connected our bipo our lgbtqia our veterans our people with disabilities and our youth often feel disconnected we have work to do there so we have our youth engagement program I'm proud to say Fort Collins and the youth action for health is proud and strong with over 25 youth involved we're hearing from the youth we're raising the youth's voices and understanding what are the challenges and what are the needs and we're going to get into something that's really really exciting Tac 212 that's been brought on by the youth our Clinical Services we still provide low or no
108cost immunizations for imits childrens and adults those kiddos that are uninsured partially insured or on Medicaid we want to make sure that we have sexual reproductive Health preventative Services for all people in our community and we still offer that and our three locations in Fort Collins leveland Estus Park our parent Child and Family Health our nurse Family Partnership program for eligible firsttime mothers we know it's so important those first few years of life so we have nurses working directly in home with firsttime parents we have our Wick program which is our special supplemental nutrition program for women infants and children that's combating that food insecurity piece and our hcp program for families with children who have special Health Care needs navigating the complex processes to get those needs so we're really their Liaisons for these
109families to get them the care and help they need our environmental health programs our environmental planning the built environment air quality septic systems water quality burn permits food safety child care and school inspections our team Works closely with your team creating a safe School whether that's we're in the kitchens or in the classrooms and the chemistry or the vocational areas PSD is a great partner in making sure our schools are safe for all kids we also look at communicable disease I'd say that's where we interact with the school district the most and over the last 3 to four years definitely uh certainly detection and investigation and management of communic disease and foodborn illness hats off to all your nurses and and health techs for doing such a fantastic job through the pandemic and Contin continue
110we still have RSV we still have covid we still have influenza and that always prays havoc on the learning environment but PSD is a strong partner in that Arena we appreciate superintendent Kings Le all the way down and in their collaboration we want to make sure that we're always giving accurate information on certain conditions and then coordinating in case we ever have another epidemic or pandemic response and lastly we work with PSD on making sure emergency preparedness plans are up to dat and we're practicing those in case of an emerging event and they definitely making sure we're working together with all our agencies if such a crisis occurs all right for the good stuff Public Health in action so we talk about we're Health strategists we're convening Partners we're looking at data and we want
111to do look at solutions that are proactive so outside of birth defs and pre-term birth sudden unexpected infant death unfortunately is one of the leading causes of INF mortality in the United States a SIDS is still one of the most preventable deaths among Colorado ones under the age of 18 this came out of our child fatality review team which our coroner uh Stephen Hanks and our Sheriff our police Chiefs our schools are heavily involved on any death of a child that is preventable and what we've learned is co-sleeping with children especially when the adult is under the influence of marijuana or alcohol is at high risk and there's tragic death so we're trying to get the word out that co-s sleeping's a risk and and we're also got our safe sleep for babies campaign we
112have safe sleep bags for sacks for kiddos and we're providing educations to new parents but not only the parents the grandparents anyone else who's taking care of the child where these conditions may arise our goal here is to prevent the loss of a child and here it is the exciting piece you know this is something when I was uh hired by the Board of Health in 2018 the first week on the job a team said boy we've been working with the youth action for health and and they've got some ideas and I said I want to hear about this well they want a teen center or a third Center a substant free Center where it's youth L the curriculum is youth L and I thought man how how are we going to make this happen
113well when you put a community like we have here in larer county and you put PSD in the city of Fort Collins larer County the Outreach uh Center and the health department together we can do great things and here is about four or five years years of work and boy these youth boy they were Relentless they never let this go and then great Community Partners to have make this happen so I will turn it onto the video and we can watch it go public health 1.0 and 2.0 started a long time ago where it was really protective in nature it was making sure we had clean water and that we had access to vaccines and it was ensuring that people were protected at the most basic level we've moved now to 3.0 now they build
114upon each other we're still doing food safety inspections we're making sure the water's clean as well as we're even down to the babies and Mommy levels where we have nurses that do home visits for firsttime parents but now we're looking at how do we become Health strategists Public Health 3.0 isn't just about responding to crises it's about anticipating challenges anticipating Health burdens and being preventative in our approach people do see Public Health at times that they're the the enforcers they're the health and specters they're the ones that made you wear a mask during the pandemic we are some of that but there's a lot more to what we do in public health our role is to look at the entire population of larer County and look at where are their first and foremost inequities and
115achieving Optimal Health outcomes I think we have seen these Partnerships and some of that light that's been shown on public health as these are some areas that are showing some disparities and some needs that we have a lot more opportuni to work together to make an impact and that it's not just Public Health doing that as an entity it's public health as a system we know that youth mental health is a real challenge in our community and we really need to step up for our youth and make resources available to them so that they can take the charge of their mental health I realized how severe the Mental Health crisis was among teens in lmer county and as a teen myself was kind of looking around and saying that I didn't really see too many
116spaces where I really felt like I could go and tottally feel comfortable and belong Tac 2 and two is what we refer to as a third space which is somewhere away from school or home that's free and just as easy to get to where they can relax and connect to their Community this project is a long time coming and the enthusiasm for young people to finally have this place is just through the roof and it's it's really really exciting to see this project come to fruition a place like this to where there's no expectations you don't have to share what's hurting you you don't have to feel trapped you don't have to be afraid it's somewhere you can really just be to feel comfortable and okay Tac 212 faced most of our programming on what
117teens have asked for from furniture to what we're going to eat here they made all the decisions I think that the best way to solve teens problems is to get teens input I think the Val ad to incorporating youth voice is innovation I think that the more Innovative we can be and the more forward thinking we can be we can create a truly inclusive environment and extremely inclusive community for teens struggling with mental health issues I think we provide uh an open space with different activities that will engage them um it allows them to find different parts ofs that maybe they haven't searched for or found yet introduce them to hobbies that can get them going and introduce that dopamine and that serotonin I think the most rewarding part of my job is empowering young
118people and elevating and amplifying their voice and allowing them to execute the vision they see Partnerships are really critical in this piece and um our ability to tell our Public Health story and to explain our role in that again we don't do this independently we know that we can't do this alone that it is an issue that involves many partners in this community I think the Big Win For Kids is systematically that PSD CSU City County we will begin to start changing how systems deliver services to kids we're taking a holistic look at the data trying to assess what are the most important aspects of it and then communicating it to folks in a way that connects to their real lives and of course one of the resources we're able to offer our partners is
119our health and well-being dashboard which provides data across a number of different themes and with those data resources we're not just hoping to provide data that might not be as accessible to our community members we're hoping to provide a platform that's a jumping off point to have the discussions that lead to policies programs initiatives and change in our community that can help make a real world impact on people's lives so we're going to be looking at a variety of Health data sets and wherever we see um inequities we're going to bring people at the table and we're going to talk about those inequities how do we get everybody together so we're not duplicating efforts we're complimenting efforts and that's where we see our role at Public [Music] Health all right well that's exciting and that's
120a pilot we'd like to see about 30 of those throughout the county we definitely need to get some in birth at Estus Park Lov one um let's see what I'm doing here but but that oh boy there we go but that's just a that's just a snippet of what we can do when we're proactive we look at the data and we convene partners and we look at proactive Solutions but Tech 212 it really does bring together the you we're hearing about their curriculums and what they are asking to be brought into that space and it it's exciting so when we talk about the data that Dr Olsson was taking we'll make sure we'll get you a postcard that you it's called Uh the lmer county health and well-being and resilience data dashboard it's got all
121the determins of Health uh aspects on there those buckets it's l.gov backal dashboard it's updated and up routinely but we want to make sure you all have have that data when you're making those decisions so it's a health and all policy landens again just wrapping this up clear communication shared vision and goals early collaboration a collaborative spirit and Innovative approaches I think the more we look at Innovation and be look outside the box the more healthier our community will be and then absolutely always looking at those Pockets where there's inequities so I'm to continue to be excited to partner with PSD I'm a little biased I have two children that go to school at Rocky so uh more and more we want to make sure we're supporting all of our three school districts and our
122communities in larer County to make sure we are a thriving Community with that I haven't opened to any questions thank you so much are there any questions no questions go ahead Caroline I just want to thank you for the presentation um there was a lot of information in there that was that was really helpful and um I really appreciate the proactive approach that you're taking um so I thought it was a really good presentation and thank you for all the information well thank you go ahead Jim yeah I also enjoyed it Tom thank you um you're an important partner during the crisis and you're important an important partner when we're not in crisis so I I really liked uh a lot of the things you talked about the um you you threw such a broad
123blanket over so many things uh food security lowcost housing there there's so many needs in our community and at first I was worried that you were boiling the ocean like we try to do sometimes in the school district um but I I really liked how you came back to um driving a lot of that through collaboration through getting the right data and getting it out there and I I think that's great stuff so thank you well thank you and I appreciate you recognizing that important partnership because PSD was a valuable partnership throughout the pandemic thank you go ahead Scott uh thanks for coming this is great um the youth center how are you getting the word out to the youth and how can PSD help spread that spread that word for you Corey would you
124Corey this is one of her portfolio under her portfolio so hi Corey Wilford um one of the most important ways we're getting it out is through the youth um that's kind of the foundation of the youth center is that it's youth L and um we listen to Youth voices in order to to get that message out so we actually run five coalitions um through our department we have five youth engagement Specialists um who are high school students that work with our department as employees and so they do a lot of the marketing and Outreach um they've got all the social medias um to to do that kind of Outreach as well so um yeah it's all very youth Le other comments go ahead Connor just briefly great presentation um seems that we have a good
125collaboration from a board perspective what are some of the things that PSD can be doing better I appreciate that question I would say the collaboration piece and I may have forgotten to say that is we have three school districts and these three school districts work extraordinarily well together which is wonderful as well as working with community Partners such as the health department that's something we do very well and we're actually I do get calls frequently from Partners around the state on how we collaborate so well from that piece we're really looking at now preventive work when it comes to substance use misuse that's a problem I know and around especially the opioids and that lead leading to other issues as well uh I would say continue the support that's coming from the regional opioid abatement
126Council that I chair and the work with CSU preventive the office of research and prevention with na Dr Nathan reigs uh continuing that work on preventive work with the blues programs and making sure that we are getting that out equitably throughout the the school district that is a partnership with Thompson pter and Estus that program works it it's got the data to show we can hopefully never get kids even using I think that's that's a piece continue those collaborations and continue the efforts on Mental Health you know I'm a proud uh child of public school um all my family Works in schools so does my wife uh superintendent coaches you name it and the one thing I always learned is teaching is actually one of the smaller pieces of what an actual person does in
127a school system there's so much more to that uh because of all the well-being of the children and not losing sight of that but definitely keeping mental health in the Forefront I know that is as part of the Strategic plan and continuing to partner on efforts uh to look at school-based healthc care clinics uh specifically around mental health how can we get more access to our youth for mental health and the biggest thing is we've got to remove the stigma that's a real issue when kids look at that as as a stigma they're probably not going to access it so uh when we look at the data we see an alarming trend of our youth visiting the emergency department for anxiety depression and suicide thoughts what's more alarming is it's twice as many girls than
128boys so I think that's the data that we got to continue to look at we need to curve those Trends we need to listen to our youth we need to understand what the anxiety is the pressures and and the The Tipping points uh and we need to work together all of us understand as a parent and as a Public Health director I think those are the key pieces when it comes to well-being of our youth thank you for the question thank you anyone else all right Tom I just want to say thank you um I know that we have partnered together with PSD for many many years now and it's it really is an amazing partnership that we have and I want to thank you for that um and I also want to thank you
129for partnering not only with PSD but Outreach uh Center for Family Outreach for TAC 212 um if you have not been to Tac 212 um here on Mount naav it is phenomenal it is run by the kids it is decorated by the kids it's I mean 100% their space and it is absolutely phenomenal um I know the library partners with them to do the book club uh there and the kids just feel safe and I think it's one of those it's a small space um it is uh it makes them feel like they belong and it's like what you said Tom we need you know what 10 12 15 more of those um just throughout Lara County let alone the state because it's a wonderful place for kids to feel like they can belong and
130I think that's something that we can strive to do um together as a community and together as a district so thank you so much thank you for having me okay with that I think we're going to take a five minute recess so we will come back here at about 8:35 e get started with our Bell and Route optimization sorry should we go yeah we're gonna go ahead and get started okay this evening we look forward to hearing a presentation on Bell and Route optimization from chief operations officer Jeff Connell welcome Jeff thank you members of the board Community um with me I'm Jeff Connell Chief Operating Officer and here is desire she is our director of transportation and thank you for the opportunity to present to you this concept that we've had about doing some
131standardization of our bell times in coupling with um a routing optimization program that hopefully will have a number of benefits we'll go through here um just wanted to kind of set the stage that you know as we went through this you know when desire came to us not quite a year ago you know you know she recognized that kind of based on our experience looking at other brous routing systems that this was not a very well optimized system just looking at and we'll go through that data but as we look at it we think about you know what what would be the best use of a driver and how would we get the most out of any one driver because as you know the nation continues to experience a bus driver shortage and we are
132not immune to that um we are not looking to put anybody down but we would say neighboring districts are shortening their bus opportunities for their students they are doing rolling blackouts um and so the the idea that if we don't do something we too could be in a situation where the general education routes that we run would would have to change in some way or we would not be able to keep them all running like we have been so with that we identified this opportunity we hired a consultant um and we put together this program and we said one of the things you can look at that's necessary in order to optimize a bus routing system is some standardization of your bell times and those would be the start and end times of our schools
133so with that we'll Jump Right In okay just some definitions we won't we we'll try not to be too jargon heavy about this um but just in case these come up you can refer back to this and and have them available to you um looking at tiers you know one one complete cycle of the buses out on the road speaking up the students dropping them off then they do it again for the second tier and hopefully a third um and our our times when we're actually picking up students versus when we're just dead head which is just drive time to get to where the students are all of these are part of the analysis that goes into um how long a bus route takes so this is the slide that we like best right this
134is Putter's uh bus route map and so it it gets built one piece at a time we have at one time a maximum of 122 buses out there running routes and picking up students that would be the we'll show you that slide in a bit that's the middle tier of our morning runs uh our buses are crawling their way through neighborhoods and driving our streets and our terials every day and and the point of this slide that we always say kind of looks like somebody spilled a plate of spaghetti is that this is a very dependent system all of these pieces interact they they happen at different times they go to different schools um and they have different drivers that cross over from one spot to the next all kind of fitting that you know
135you know how long can the student be on the bus what's the capacity of the bus what schools do they need to go to what are the bell times that they need to meet so that they can do the pickups that they need to and all that results in a map that looks something like this and so the other piece about this is if you were to take one of the buildings offline or remove a stop you can see that in the scheme of a bus ring system that wouldn't change much right we need to look more broadly at how all of our buses move through the routing system so these are the advantages that we identified why do this right so we're going to go through the the Staffing challenges the bell times not
136being structured how well we support athletics events and music of course the financial piece is really important and the other piece not mentioned but we will talk talk more about it is how do we recruit and retain drivers and make this a job worth having each route costs us about $80,000 per year now most of that cost is in the driver but that does also include fuel depreciation maintenance upkeep all the other ancillary expenses of running a busing system excuse me um and so each route that we're able to eliminate not just from one tier right we would have to eliminate that bus route from tier 123 and 123 in the afternoon but if we can do that successfully then we've eliminated the need for the driver that goes with that route so when we
137say route we mean all six routes in a day just to be really clear that in order to achieve the savings you you have to get to that level of efficiency the other piece is charter buses right so because we have enough drivers to meet right our current maximum number of drivers on the road of 122 give or take but we'll talk more about our staffing challenges in a moment um but we don't have any buffer and so because we don't have that buffer all of our drivers are out on buses generally between right 6:00 in the morning and 9:45 is and then again by 1:30 1:45 they're back getting ready for their afternoon runs and so that opportunity for us to support all of the other driving and student transport needed in the middle
138of the day for athletics and interschool transfers for programs um and Athletics and everything else is is really a challenge and because we can't meet that that we're paying charter bus companies to meet it for us because we still want the students to have these opportunities we're only trying to point out that's a really expensive thing for us to do we in transportation supporting the students in the district we want to provide this Transportation we're frustrated that we're so short drivers and the system that we have that we're not able to so staff retention stabilized schedules you know part of that goes to us wanting to create a job that allows for an eight hour or more if they want it workday because the idea of that 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours
139in the afternoon works for some people but it also doesn't work for a lot of people and that's a real hindrance to our recruiting efforts for bus drivers cuz this is what our system looks like we took a snapshot of data from from October and these are the number of people who are missing from work absenteeism each day and and they're they're missing from work for a whole variety of legitimate reasons n this isn't like just no shows right these are people who are sick or have a child who is sick or have other appointments and medical and just life right I mean we have 120 plus drivers so even if 10% are out each day you can see this is a significant number of people people so how do we cover those routes because
140we said we have 122 maximum routes we have maybe 120 122 drivers and if we're missing 10 to 20 on any given day how do we cover those routes and we cover them because our administrative staff in our transportation department that hold a commercial driver's license they jump on a bus routers and trainers and mechanics and supervisors managers and the director herself get on a bus when that's what's needed so even desire in the last week has been on a bus again now for more than a handful of times this year and that's creating a lot of pressure on our transportation system to keep it going we are that close I can I can honestly say that if the director of transportation is jumping on a bus that's the last possible person who holds a
141CDL who's available to run that route so it's a it's a difficult system to maintain at our current you know Staffing levels and then the the consequence of that is then we don't have people available to answer questions and calls we don't have people able to respond to schools about you know a bus being late or a pickup or a child and some issue that's going on and that's a real struggle because we feel the pain of that customer service missing and so do the schools um but the truth is those people are on buses and that's where our priority is and we need them to be some of the other things though impacts on staff you know it's difficult for job satisfaction we want that relationship between our bus drivers and students to be
142robust we think that's a really important part of a student's day and with this kind of absenteeism we're also experiencing 30% attrition yes which which is astonishing right but the truth of the matter is it takes two months to go from walking in the door and saying I want to be a bus driver until you can be fully trained and have a CDL with the proper endorsements and be ready to get on a bus and when you are fully trained and licensed and ready to get on a bus you also happen to hold a very marketable skill now and we lose them for other opportunities quite a bit and so this this is a a constant turnover for us we every two months we start a new group always hopefully as many as we can
143get but in the neighborhood of what 10 to 15 yes we have about 10 right now yeah so this this turnover is also really hard on our system um and so we're we're trying hard on all of these fronts to make being a bus driver a job worth having for in many different ways our bell times are not standardized that's just what we have and there's a lot of reasons why we've heard this is the way that it is um and we're we're both relatively new in the grand scheme of things just shy of a year for me um but we have as we look at our bell times across the system uh some are in what we call the first year of Transportation some are in the second some just kind of are out
144there and there may be lots of reasons why in terms of how those got set there might have been needs at the time in a different era of bus drivers and transportation options available where that was something that Transportation could accommodate it's just not very well standardized which means it's difficult for us to run the the greatest amount of runs per tier so that we maximize each bus driver's time and we'll show you what that means and then also it's not standardized in the PM so a difficulty would be something like there's 13 more runs in the PM which means given the same number of drivers you need 13 more in the afternoons than you do in the morning and that that kind of imbalance is hard right because we're not using the same drivers
145we have to have more in the afternoon available in the morning and it makes optimization that much more difficult another situation that we accept is that we have a significant number of students that we are that have legally recognized Transportation requirements and we are happy to be able to provide that for them um but it is something that in many instances makes optimization more difficult for us so this is one of the limitations that we have to keep in mind as a district is that if a student is on an ITP individualized Transportation plan or if they qualify for other special services that include Transportation then we we are legally required to transport them and we do but it is it is a limitation on optimization that we had to incorporate into what we're proposing
146tonight so as we mentioned this thing about Charter buses you know ideally part of the the benefit would be we would provide that service inhouse this would keep my bus drivers busy throughout the day for those that want to be um it makes it a more attractive job and also provides flexibility to the schools right because it's a difficult conversation to say we can support your field trip but it's got to be between 10 and 130 and we're trying hard to create um a lot more flexibility for the schools in this regard we spend over $400,000 a year on charter buses and we feel like that's money and transportation that if we could provide the service that we could save the financial piece of this before I jump into the to the analysis right if
147we can save as we're proposing 10 routes and that means across the whole day we've eliminated 10 routes 10 drivers that we wouldn't need to have for for that um there's a couple of things we want to make sure we point out um one that's $80,000 per day or per year sorry per route so that could be a savings of $800,000 if we can provide our charter bus transportation inhouse that's a savings of another 400,000 this is money that we really are spending every year this is not necessarily a paper savings this is real Sav that we feel like we could achieve um the other piece of this is that you know based on our staffing as you can see we're not talking about eliminating any people we are actually talking you know right now
148today we probably have in the neighborhood of 37 vacancies so as you can see if we eliminate 10 right we're not actually eliminating any people and so that's important to us too so we're not actually talking about having fewer bus drivers than we have today we still need to hire more to have our system work right so what we did is you know fir we hired first Consulting they're a branch of First Student a large National Transportation Company um and they analyzed our routing system with the goal of optimizing it as much as possible and we gave them the direction that they could look at Bell times because we knew they weren't standardized and they could propose what they thought might be reasonable to move bell times to achieve this optimization so really that's we'll
149get to the data soon but that's essentially what they did they looked at the data they they tried to they tried to move our routing system into a three- tier system as much as they could with the limitations that we've said this is our current this is just a snapshot shot look at what our current routing system is 109 for the first year 122 for the second 10 for the third I can say that's not terribly optimized right we would I mean the ultimate ideal if we could completely you know work from scratch would be something like 85 first year 35 middle 853d and we could you know get all the way down to that number of drivers that's not terribly realistic with all the limitations we have um but just so we see what
150ideal could look like and then looking in the afternoon the number that controls the drivers right is that middle tier of the morning 122 that's how many drivers at one time have to be on the road on a bus and so the maximum number from any of these tiers is the number that we're really focusing on in terms of trying to get them low lower so when we we have two options and scenarios here to present tonight option A and option b so um just for a little grounding right option a um is colorcoded um 19 schools don't change time at all 10 schools change 5 to 10 minutes 14 Schools change from 11 to 20 and six change 21 to 30 minutes and colorcoded you know white green yellow pinkish red um we can
151also we also on the table for the large sheet that you have has the percentages that this would be because if we add up the first two from a z to 10 minute change you know that's about 58 59% of the schools experience a relatively small change and so the the bigger change was focused um in just a few then option b is the same optimization schedule as a so the only thing that's changed is that all schools in option b were shifted back 5 minutes so some of the schools had a start time as early as 7:30 30 in option A and so the thought was that even though it's not a significant change we're not pretending that 5 minutes is is some great deal here but it is but it is real time
152and 7:30 is pretty early in the morning so if we can do even 7:35 and we can in transportation we thought that was at least worth putting forward there are limitations on that it you know one of the groups and some feedback from the parents was there's a lot of concern about kids being out in the dark at night and Athletics and other activities after school staying later was I want say less palatable but was something that they were balancing against early mornings so I'll let you look at the list of schools we thought it was important that everybody see exactly what the time shift would be for their school so in summary looking at the positives the financial savings are significant managing our vacancies and driers needs without a reduction in staff is something
153we feel good about um the limited movement of school bell times I know that's all very subjective right for people who chose their school based on the bell time that it had this can be a big change we're here presenting the data because we recognize that and we know this is a balance of interest and equities and and finances and benefits um some of the things we want to make sure we point out is middle schools are starting earlier by and large and that can be a struggle um and some elementary schools are still starting later and the last thing because you can look at the data on the big sheets I think a little better than on the PowerPoint is there is a communication strategy so in addition to going to the district Advisory
154Board and getting good feedback from the parents um a lot of things for us to continue to consider a lot of which has been kind of built into what we've talked about here tonight um we also want to get of course the boards feedback tonight in this information session um and depending on that we have a survey ready to go to the parents tomorrow to get more feedback from virtually everybody who's willing to participate in survey to help guide us um our next steps would be to take that information make whatever changes we need to make then us as Administration will consider the options and bring it back to the board in the first week of March so with that I rushed a little bit because I want to give you time for questions thoughts
155and and you know before we jump into questions I just want to add to Jeff's comments about the survey because we walked through bell times there very quickly those are available in the packet for tonight for those who want to take a look at them and they will also be included in the survey as well so you'll be able to see all of the proposed bell times for every school when you go to take the survey that will be going out tomorrow thank you all right thank you so much for the presentation Jeff this we appreciate it so starting off Kevin you had some questions um couple comments and questions uh first of all I want to thank you both for doing this work um this is tough um I'm going to maybe punt to
156Jim and see if he wants to contextualize some of those numbers a little bit more based on recent um contextualizing if not it's fine I don't want to steal a thunder but I want to note a couple things because I've I've now had a lot of time to absorb this since the first time since it was presented to us um I think significant to me some of the things that jump out um are with with option A there are 39% of the schools that have zero chains whatsoever and when they the color key says zero to four a closer read actually reveals that that's zero none of those schools have any change I think that's important so there is over a third of the schools in option a zero change whatsoever um the next large
157bucket 20% or a fifth of the schools in our district have a 5 to 10 minute window of a change and so I think that's important as far as the contextualizing there are a few that have sign significant changes we've received some Community feedback on those already um so on that note I do want to make sure that we're being mindful in this work that we're thinking about households and I I come from one that have parents that both have jobs um in the mornings are are always difficult to get kids off especially when kids go to two different schools 30 minute adjustment one way or another can can significantly change a household's life their income their job not to just sweep that on the rug and say I don't have a solution for that
158but I think that is something that we need to be mindful of is that the 5 to 10 minute negligible the 30 minute that could change someone's job um so I just want to be to point that out um and the other the other thought that I had and it was expressed earlier but I want to reiterate again and maybe get some clarity and we don't have to have Clarity tonight but something I want to be thoughtful about is that we also charging the steering committee and we just gave them a list of guiding principles which we worked really hard on I think that they're undertaking some excellent work what if anything is this going to have to do with their work and will it have any impact on some of those resolutions or recommendations
159and we don't have to solve that tonight I I I agree with the urgency of the situation and again I hope Jim sharis's context because I think it's meaningful in the work that we're talking about and these aren't just $80,000 or $40,000 routes these are salaries that we could be paying people and I'm very mindful of the traces that we how we started this night and that um we need to be guarded for those people as a bus kid growing up they were every bit as part of my education as my teachers were so I I want to highlight and balance the urgency of the situation but also be mindful the impact that could have on the steering committee's work ahead of them and add one more thing onto their plates as far as them
160navigating a whole m OD of complicating factors and I don't have a resolution for that um but I want to at least voice that thought and if I can jump in on that one Jeff um just as um it's it's a good concern and one of the things that we had talked about was um that this is for one year and one year only what the steering committee comes up with for future terms and that's 25 26 um will have make us reconsider everything that is on this bus on these bus routes um for 25 26 so what we're looking at here is simply 2425 and that is it because what the steering committee then comes up with for 2526 will shape the way that this is done again and so I just want to
161just make clear that this is a oneyear it's a savings of of 1.2 to 1 to 1.5 uh million for the 2425 school year and then beyond that we will have to go back to the drawing board essentially am I Jeff I'm sorry I didn't mean to jump in there but I just want to reiterate that that that is entirely correct we we will pivot and change with whatever the steering team recommendations are that that the district decides to implement and those changes would then be kind of you know worked on through the next school year and ready for the summer of 25 to implement all right other questions just sorry I mine kind of piggybacks or at least one of mine kind of piggybacks on that um I think as the syan committee does
162their work and we do have a something proposed for the 25 26 year I think having this conversation sooner in the year so that these decisions are made for families for programming um will be really important since we should have some sense of what our plan would be for the following year hopefully we can make some of these decisions earlier um and then I think one thing that I just I I keep saying is that I with as we grapple with this right I I understand this is just for next year and we'll have to Reg grapple as we have to do that I really want to have some concerted conversation around what is too early to start what's too late to start what's too early to end and what's too late to end that's
163not something we are going to solve this year I understand that but I do think that's a conversation that we need to have with our community as we as we have all of these conversations going forward thank you Jim uh first want to say thanks for all work I I think this is really great stuff um another comment is the fact that we have managers driving is kind of indicative of a system that just is not healthy and is not a system you know you know that it's just going to break down soon that's that's really where we're at so I just wanted to reinforce that point I guess you said it but I to me that just says something's got to change here um and I recognize the pickle you're in on these time
164slots with middle school starting early versus Sports late right if you start to slide things too late you get complaints from the sports Crews if you start to slide things too early we'll get complaints from the Middle School parents and we we may all already get some I understand that too so it it is a tricky balance there and and I think you're doing a good job of navigating that um maybe the last thing at the District Advisory Board yesterday this was one of the things that was um discussed thank you for presenting there as well to the parents that were in that group and um one of the questions there was why do we have to do this this fall why can't we wait until 2025 when we're making other changes and my responses
165to that my response to that parent last night was we're in a crisis of drivers it's a crisis and we need to treat it that way so we don't want to wait a year to do this and the driver crisis part is just part of it we're also getting close to a money crisis I believe and I hate to use that word because it sounds a little crazy but um you know we need ways to save money in the district that's part of why we're doing the whole effort that we're doing around consolidations and those kinds of things we need to look under every Rock and I really appreciate the work that you're doing here um um I asked our finance gentleman Dave what does a million dollars really mean right you're you say we'll
166say between1 and $1.5 million do a million dollars equates to about 10 teachers in the district or it equates to about 30 Paris in the district okay so we need to we need to think about this in those real kind of terms uh you know it's not just oh on a on this big a budget who cares about a million bucks We Care a Lot we need to look under every Rock and I appreciate you're doing this thank you thank you Jim other comments Scott um yeah so thank you for sure for putting this together this is uh intense work and I I value your leadership both of your leadership on this um I think both options to me for from a uh a board member and a parent seem pretty reasonable um there are
167six schools in in option A that are uh getting more than 20 minute changes but it's mostly going from like 850 to 825 so I don't know if that's going to affect um parents commuting uh as as much as it could in other other senses so I I do value that um one question I had is just trying to wrap my head around one of your statements was that we're not talking about um reducing the number of drivers we have 37 openings so if we're not reducing the current drivers where's the savings coming from you know this 800,000 that we're talking about right because as it turns out those 37 driver positions are funded right we have to budget for them and so one of the things that Finance does is you know because we're
168always kind of perennially short staffed we're kind of robbing from Peter to pay Paul were taking salary savings to pay charter bus costs right where if we could eliminate both of those we wouldn't have to budget for those extra 10 positions and we wouldn't have to write the check to the charter company then there really is money to be saved there even though it's not an actual person that's currently being paid that's great I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought that so I'm glad you were able to clarify that the uh last question I had is um with uh in the the past before we had turnover and um you know people using us to get their CDL and then bailing out to get a higher paying job how was it done in
169the past what kind of Reserve did you have of drivers above and beyond the 122 routes and was it like a substitute system like teachers have yeah here currently I'm not really sure how they did it but where I've come from before they do a lot of different things different incentiv they a they a lot of districts have been in have up the pay um or they do things like um jackets you know those when you when you don't have any accidents that kind of so there's a lot of like different incentives they they have big Christmas parties and I'm not saying that but that's I mean that's kind of the those little things that's to keep drivers wanting to come back and I haven't seen the um here luckily where they've come to get
170their CDL and left I think since I've been here in May there's only been one that's that's good no what I'm what I'm getting at is like besides if you're fully staffed and you don't have supervisors having to run out and and take over a route and somebody calls in sick like who's the person that's supposed to like in a perfect system that's what I mean it's like okay so currently we have 12 excuse me 10 leads we should have a larger percentage of those lead drivers and the lead drivers are the ones that would actually take over when someone calls in sick so right now we only have well we have nine actually because one person got promoted but we should have at least 15 to 20 to for to have that buffer thank
171you other questions yes so I don't have a question so much as like a statement because um as you guys know like this conversation has really made me struggle with my values right like there's wanting to make sure we don't start too early or end too late but budding that up against making sure students have a consistent driver that they see every day and that's the person they they just know who they're going to meet right having that consistency is really important um I think getting making sure all of our kids get to school every day not having to have rolling blackouts is a value um limiting our turnover right building community so that you guys aren't having to go out every day you can actually you know have a system that's really working and
172thriving instead of surviving right so I think there's a lot of pieces to this that as I think this will be a hard conversation to have but I think we have a lot of good reasons for why we need to make a shift for next year and I think I was probably a hard person to convince so I really appreciate your efforts in Sharing more details and sharing the information so that I could be empowered right to have enough to really like fight for what we need as a system because again like I I is it ideal for students necessarily maybe maybe not but as far as time goes but there's a whole lot of other things that are ideal having that consistent bus driver is imperative getting to school every day that if we
173don't do that we're what like doesn't matter when we start school if you can't even get there so I really want to appreciate like the work you've put in the amount of context you've provided along the way and just being open to having the conversation because I know this is not an easy one but I really appreciate um your effort there thank you ahead Caroline and I think I'm going to piggyback on what Jess had to stay here had to say here which is is that um if we do have to go to Rolling blackouts I'm I'm really concerned about what that's going to do to our attendance um attendance is already an issue this year coming out of covid and um if we aren't providing bus service I think kids just are not going
174to be showing up to school and so I'm not a big fan of that of having rolling blackouts I don't I think that's not a good idea at all and then I would just like to know Desiree what happens if if you're the last person and there's two routes what's going to happen to that route that doesn't have a driver what's going to happen so let me just start off by putting a little Shameless plug in there to my staff and how well my dispatchers and my staff are about covering so let's say there's two routes there's only one person left a lot of times we can at times put the routes together and unfortunately I'm being honest the route would run late but we would make sure we send out a message to parents
175through the messenger we call the school we let them know and we do everything in our power to make sure that that doesn't it doesn't become a continuous thing normally people can kind of accept a late once but not a late all the time so and I think the point here is is that I don't think this is a good way for a system to run is always in crisis because when you're doing that a lot of the things that that you should be doing are not are not at the top of the pile because you're on a bus running a route and we expect you to do as a supervisor do the things that we've assigned to you to get done and I I know that probably when you get home or when you
176get back from your bus route that you have to sit down and make sure that those things get done before you go home and so I think that uh running a system in crisis is really hard on the employees it it um creates turnovers creates churn and and it also creates um more expenses because I don't know how much it cost to train a driver but as a former business owner every time I have to stop and train somebody it cost me like you know almost $5,000 just to train somebody and so if I'm constantly doing that you know my service is suffering and you know my bottom line is really suffering and so I don't see how we can keep this crisis operation going without trying to do something something to create some efficiencies
177in the system so I I support the work that you guys did there I think it was really good other comments or questions I do want to point out um con I'll let you go in it just a second just I do want to point out what uh the rolling blackouts um that other local um uh school districts have had to go to this because of the fact that they don't have enough bus drivers for all of the routes and so what that essentially means is that every Eighth Day you do not have a bus and I don't know about anybody else here but there's I know that there's no way that I would be able to try and figure out which eight days my kids would have a bus and which when they would
178not um to me that that right there just makes me um absolutely crazy and so I just want to put it out there that when we're talking about rolling blackouts that's what we're talking about is the fact that there would be every eight days or so that that there would be no bus um that is not an equitable way to run this um transportation system it's not a fair way to run this transportation system for the kids for the drivers um for anybody um and I just want to make sure that that that people understand that that is what we are talking about we are not talking about it's yes it's difficult and we are getting to the point we're getting to the breaking point and that Breaking Point May mean that even by the
179end of this year we may need to uh look at that so I just want people to understand where we are at so Jim go ahead and then Conor sorry I just said one more for context the number of kids that are bused every day oh just shy of 9,000 just shy of 9,000 so we have about 27,000 kids in the district so about a third of our kids are bust every day just to get that out there thanks go ahead Connor I concur with everybody in in the fact I think it's great work and you I can I can support it I do have some reservations that this is now going to be the second major bus change to the schedules that we've done in what the last four years and four years ago
180we had a huge roll out of why that was justified too I think we're losing the confidence of the public when it comes to start times um is $1.5 million of savings important yes is it worth losing the confidence of people in the neighborhoods maybe do people in our school district parents in our school district know this pressing problem with buses not at all I don't think that they're going to learn that until there are rolling blackouts we can come up with a fantastic communication plan for this which is going to be needed but until that bus doesn't show up to pick up your kid you're not going to realize that it's a problem it's just going to be another email that we get from the district and it's going to be they're changing times
181I have to change my schedule and why can I say that because I'm going to have to change my schedule my kids uh and I think that the community can handle it right I'm not saying that it you know there some you know the sky is falling but when we continue to flip-flop back and forth on this uh people don't see it as the crisis that it is um I support it I think it's great work um by I would say definitely by the end of this school year the communication plan has to be the tightest one that we that we've seen why um I I still don't think that that's going to be enough um that that rolling blackout thing that would get people to wake up it it would for me and I
182do think that in general you know with the amount of kids that were busing in extracurriculars and all of that just my personal experience in District F there are too many kids on the bus I think that we could bump out those zones hopefully that may be an option later on when we have to change the schedules again because after some kind of consolidation we're going to be right here talking about the same thing again so when we do that I think that we should probably take a deeper look at how many kids are on the bus as well Caroline go ahead you know Connor I guess um I really didn't even think about the $1.5 million savings I mean that's great that we're going to have this savings but for me the bigger issue
183here is our Personnel issue it's our human resource issue right it's our issue it's about taking care of our people right and making sure that that uh our we don't lose more people because because our bus system is operating in crisis and so for me it's okay yeah that we're going to save the $1.5 million because you asked the question how important is that I don't know how important it is to everybody in this system but I know that our human resources are the most important thing because we're an organization of people we don't have a product you know we have students we have we have people in our organization that is our product and so we have to take care of our people or or we won't be able to to do any of
184the things things that we are are we need to do we talked earlier about how you know our um Ace employees are like the glue in our system and we need to make sure that we're taking care of that and that we have have um the employees that we need here to support our system so we can take care of our kids so for me it's the human resource part that's really important is taking care of our people that feels most important to me so that we can take care of our kids I agree I I I think you know that I I wrote it down even you know that turnover rate is is so high um employee retention on the human resources side I'm not sure if managing the times is going to solve
185that problem 100% hopefully it will help because I I agree with you I think the uh I know incentives to get more drivers into the system because uh one of the things I said in in my notes Here is you know does this problem go away if we have 200 drivers do we even talk about switching times if we could find out a way to get 200 drivers in the driver pool right I I agree with you 100% I I don't want to see any undue burden be put on the drivers and the people who work in the motor pool as well um you know that $1.5 million of savings as Jim said is is a lot of money as well I I believe that actually Brian has um wants to jump in from just
186just a moment yes thank you good evening everybody can you hear me okay yes uh so one I want just want to thank the board and the community for their deep level of engagement on this important topic and as director Duffy was just talking about trust um I think it's important that as he kind of charged us that you know the general Community doesn't yet fully understand we have a highly educated Community but we're continuing to need to inform people on the impacts of you know how covid has impacted our community how H housing prices have impacted our community cost of living increases have impacted our community just over the last four to five years um in preparation for our presentation tonight having a chance to go back and look at the presentation from four
187or five years ago look at the context uh that was presented at that particular time we were experiencing actually a growth in enrollment at that time uh we had 13,000 bus riders four to five years ago instead of the 9,000 that we have today uh the cost of running a route at that time was $660,000 in compared to today's 80,000 um so the charge that we have collectively as a leadership Community is to continue to engage the community thoughtfully on the changing context that we're continuing to deal with in this particular space as well as every other sector of the organization uh which is the reason that we're here today both with that urgency but also uh understanding that it is an impact on families and I just thought it was important to kind of
188go back in time and and recognize that that context that was shared um is quite different today thank you Brian Jee you had something you wanted to say too just one thing I would add in response to uh Conor's excellent comments was that that is exactly how we wanted to phrase the survey which is the choice isn't would you like the district to save some money and you know retain employees better the choice that apparent needs to make is is can you live with the bell time or run the risk of not having a bus at all because that's the situation we're trying to present right that's the real choice that you have to make and so not to be overly dire about it but to be realistic about what the actual choices that we're
189asking parents to make all the rest of it is just all the good that we're trying to do to keep the system running go ahead Kevin one final thought um I appreciate the discussion that we're having here too but I I want to also focus on something that might be a little more fundamental and I'll do it by by way of anecdote um when I was teaching in New Orleans at an alternative school there was a student who I'll I won't use his his real name but I'll say Mr Williams um was one of the was a great student and then one day he just stopped showing up to school and so I asked around I said why isn't he coming he's a good good student I mean he got kicked out for nonsense but
190he you know he was a good student of mine oh he got himself kicked off the bus for a fight or something and so he just stopped coming to school and so I called home and I talked to him and he said yeah I have no way of getting to school so I had to I decided to drive 30 minutes out of my way didn't have kids at that point I was single and I could do it 30 minutes there and back to to drive him to school otherwise he had no way of getting to school he has no money to get on the public transportation it was his one way of getting to school now that's something that this isn't a story about how cool I am as a teacher but I think more
191importantly there are kids in our district that if not but for the bus they're not getting to school we're talking about adults having conversations in their households about how we're going to juggle our schedules Etc as if it it it it there's there's some people that don't have that luxury and so by reducing it to that something that simple about student access to education to me it's an excusable like you said president Draper to not offer transportation to kids who need it the most will it be uncomfortable will be painful yes I'm sure it will I think messaging is important I think communication is important I don't think to me it's as complex as not being allowed to offer a student a way to get to school and I'll get off my I'll stop pontificating
192but that's I want to make it that clear and I will jump jump on to that high horse and uh and just reiterate what you had said earlier um Jim with with you know onethird of our students ride the bus and you know we're talking um Carolyn you mentioned um we're talking about attendance rates and so if we can't provide busing for those students every eth day I would predict that every eth day we will have low attendance rates for those particular kiddos and that's not something that we want to see it's not something that we want to experiment with um because I I think that would be a failed experiment um you know that that said to what I I I want to go back to how we started this day off which was
193celebrating our bus drivers who saved a life and knew the family and knew the child and knew that the child that was not be you know was not their behavior was off and they knew that and what we're providing here is that safety that level of knowledge of the students that come on to the bus and you know okay Lucas is not acting like himself what's going on here how can I help what do I need to do and they have the training and they have the safety experience and they have all of that background to know exactly what to do to call in and save a life and you know this is what we need to be to be looking at so you've got the not only are we saving a million and a
194half dollars yes are we changing times is that and is that um a difficulty yes it is and and I will say that I'm not thrilled about the earlier Middle School start times because we did do so much Research into why it is better to start after 8:00 for middle schoolers and that said I want to be able to provide that safety for those students who are riding the bus to know their bus driver to know for the bus driver to know the student um for them to have that consistency throughout so um you know like I said while I'm not thrilled about the earlier start time for middle school and I was a part of that discussion from 5 years ago um about doing later Bel time that was a you know unfortunately 5
195years ago could have been 15 at this point it was so long long and far away you know long ago and far away um and I don't want to have to go to the stop busing I don't want to have to go to to do that it is absolutely not Equitable and that is what other um districts are doing and they're doing it here in Northern Colorado um so I think that this one this one time change this this one year change um saving us 1.5 million um I think that's something that we'll need to do and we'll yes we'll readjust it once the steering committee has made its recommendations um and I also I I agree with Jess I think it's wise that we discuss and openly and have these conversations about some guiding
196principles for the transportation so um you know letting putting our our guiding principles out that we would like middle school high school is start later and Elementary to start to start earlier um with the boundary changes what is that going to look like do we have to look at distances do we have to look at length of time on a bus do we have to look at there are you know various other things that we can be looking at and that is something that we can do for 25 26 and it's not something that we can do for now anybody else have anything they would like to add all right so with that and desire thank you so much for all your hard work on this I know that this took tremendous lift um for
197for you both um to go ahead and do this to um you know bring it to the board to get it down to just these two options um thank you so much I am excited to see what um the public like would wants to tell us about various uh options a and options B so thank you so much all right so that brings us to um board superintendent relation policies review do any board members have any questions or comments on the policies bring those up I know we're all like no questions sorry no questions just point of clarification this is information item only right there's no resolution taken correct that is correct okay no questions we will move whoops we will move on to our executive session um so can I get a motion go
198ahead Kevin I move the board in our executive session for the purpose of discussing specialized details of the district cyber security arrangements or investigations as authorized by CRS 46-42 subsection 4D individuals invited to join the board are exe in this executive session are superintendent Brian Kingsley Chief officers Bud hunt and Lauren hooton director of it infrastructure and Technology Services dalan Campbell and general councel Autumn Aspen can I get a second we'll give that one to all right give it to Jess all right Jill will you please call the vote Jim brokish I I Kristen Draper I Connor Duffy hi Kevin havalda I Carolyn Reed I Scott shanower I Jessica Zamora I motion passes 70 excellent thank you we will now convene in a closed session this is the last agenda item before adjournment adjournment at
199the conclusion of the executive session we will come back to this room to publicly adjourn the meeting the adjournment will be reced recorded but will not be televised so we will stop this meeting at it is 9:32 February 6th and we will start again in let's give us 5 minutes