Board of Education Meeting: October 24, 2023

001e thank you all for joining us uh at the uh pter School District Board of Education this evening it's October 24th and it is 6:30 p.m. uh if you would join me in muting your cell phone so that we don't uh have uh unnecessary interruptions that would be really terrific I'll do that on here there we go um and with that we will start with asking the board members whether anybody would like to change the agenda seeing nothing uh we will go right to the superintendance report Brian we'd love for you to make remarks to the board and to the community yes thank you good evening everybody it's an honor to be with all of you tonight I want to thank many members of the community for being here in person and we know many

002members are also watching online so good evening good evening and welcome uh tonight we have an exciting agenda we're going to hear updates on the work that's related to our strategic plan I'm super excited about that focusing and updating our community on our Core Business uh you will hear uh first an update on our integrated services department and its efforts to improve uh the student experience es and teachers experiences supporting uh some of our most important students in the district on path and also an update on Pathways for students uh to ensure that all of our students can graduate with options uh we know that whether a student intends on aspiring to pursue a four-year degree a two-year degree go directly into the workforce or the military it's our job collectively as an organization and

003as a system to make sure that we make those options clear and we support and their families and pursuing them uh aggressively uh I had over the last two weeks the pleasure and honor to visit many of our schools where I saw our strategic plan uh coming to life in various ways I saw tlli Elementary School had a great opportunity to see how they were uh focusing on some of their most marginalized students ensuring that they were participating uh in extracurricular activities to Inc improve uh the connections to their personal interest I I really appreciated that uh had an opportunity to visit Dunn Elementary school this week and had a very thoughtful conversation with our principal Abby Highline around our curriculum implementation specifically to how that plays out in our IB schools and I was

004thought I thought it was incredibly thoughtful how our district leadership and the leadership at that school and partnership with teachers were sitting down looking at their IB planners looking at the modules that are embedded in the curriculum and the various skills and all block to think thoughtfully over time around how we can address all three of those areas with Integrity uh had a chance to go to putham elementary school and I just smile every time I walk in the front door of that school and I see that proud Banner talking about high growth for all students you know when you think of putam elementary school and it's principal Steve aoda uh there's an exemplary level of leadership that has two-way respect between teachers and the leadership in that school they're co-learners uh they're thought Partners

005in the work and as I had an opportunity to spend a little bit of time with him he shared uh you know out of all of the schools where you think about heavy concentrations of poverty and there's an assumption in America that if you're teaching or working or attending a school uh that has concentrated poverty that we shouldn't have the same expectations and I just don't believe in that I don't buy into it at all and neither does Steve and neither do the teachers and the parents at putam elementary school and when you think of all of the schools around the state of Colorado and you were to look at students where you have concentrations of poverty at 90% or higher putham Elementary School is the highest performing Elementary School in the state in the

006state and it's in our backyard and it's one member it's one school in our district that I'm just super proud of uh there's a lot of great things that are happening uh and it is my job to not only celebrate that but to address the real challenges that exist in our system and I want to talk a little bit about that too you know there's no doubt uh that the last few weeks AC cross PSD uh it's there's a range of emotions that uh people are experiencing all of them valid uh and it's not only things that are happening in PSD there are things that are happening in our country they're happening across the world and the range of emotions and how people are engaging or not engaging showing up or not showing up and

007talking or not talking and thinking and reacting all of those things are very real valid and it's an opportunity for not just thoughtful leadership uh but collaboration uh earlier this evening actually just got maybe 20 minutes ago I sent a video message to our entire Community to update them on next steps regarding our long-range plan knowing that's one thing that has provided opportunities for emotion and reaction that we want to be thoughtful and bring people along in Partnership as I've shared with you know this community before and I'll reiterate it again uh our birth rates in PSD have been declining since since 2016 and our student enrollment has been declining for several years and we're going going to make clear to this community that we have to provide reliable data and make sure that that's

008visible and we are putting together a long range planning web page on our district website where we are going to share all of this data uh with the entire community and members of the board what I'll share with you is I'm actually going to start tweaking how I provide superintendent commentary at our future board meetings where I take a stance on not just celebrating the work that's happening in our community but play the role of teacher and Lead Learner in this community and educate in digestible ways the various aspects of these data points that we want to bring the community along in understanding and that'll start as early as our next board meeting which I'm super excited about and I'm also excited about having the opportunity of going to our upcoming District Advisory board meeting

009to begin providing that opportunity uh sooner uh than that sooner than our next board meeting so I'm excited about it I also wanted to reiterate something that I shared in my video message to the community is that you know this can't be smoking mirrors where we listen to people in inauthentic or disingenuous ways and we just end up doing what we said out to do over the last couple of weeks we truly want to engage people the ideas and the proposals that I put forth I still believe in them they're still on the table but we do want to engage the community thoughtfully and listen to other ideas to think about things differently to poke holes at them to think about ways that they can be done maybe more seamlessly or think about different things

010Al together so in order to do that I think it's really important that the district hire a third party entity to help facilitate this process over the course of this year um that facilitator would be responsible for leading a steering committee which will have Representatives both at the parent level and the staff level across all of our feeder patterns they won't just represent the schools that were proposed in the initial phase of changes for this District uh because we know that as the steering committee has an opportunity to look at enrollment data or demographers projections or facility use information and other data that will will again all be made available we're going to have the challenge of also considering attendance areas and boundaries needing to be redrawn to continue to put us in a financially

011healthy position moving forward so there's more information on the message that in the video message that I sent out to the community I don't think it's appropriate to reiterate all of the all of those details tonight but my commitment that I hopefully was emphatically clear about two weeks ago I just want to reaffirm that commitment to continue to engage the community in good faith to think about these processes but also recognize that these challenges are not going away and we as a governance team and as a leadership team have incredibly hard but necessary decisions to move forward and I'm grateful for the opportunity to be the superintendent of this District in this time because I think it's a moment in an opportunity for us to come together in extraordinary ways to make our district even

012stronger so thank you for the opportunity to address rested Community this evening thanks Brian appreciate it so our next item on the agenda is community comment and I want to remind us all for our hopes for this section of the agenda the board desires to hear the viewpoints of all stakeholders including students employees parents and Guardians and community members input that is most helpful to the board of education and District staff is that which celebrates successes that support the educational and social emotional experiences of our students or which identifies a problem and proposes a solution for us to consider that ultimately improves the educational and social emotional experiences of our students public comment is designed to address issues not personalities or Personnel matters please keep your concerns and comments focused upon the district it is

013important to note 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 or with a description or interpretation of events as presented by any speaker further we recognize that some although by no means all of the remarks that have been made are 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 although we may disagree on some things I know that we all want the best educational experience for our students and as we participate in this community comment session we should model for our students how to listen how to interact respectfully even with those with

014whom we disagree and generally had to show up each day this opportunity for public comment is for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated deadline those people will be called on to make remarks in the order that they signed up and each speaker will be allowed three minutes to address the board our first Speaker this evening is Danny Lawrence welcome okay later this evening uh you're going to get an update from the integrated services department and since 2021 I've personally been asking all of you to consider public participation as part of the seak committee you'll see that again it did not make the cak charter in the Charter's language in the verbiage quote represents students with disabilities and impact educational decisions made on their behalf and quote and again I ask

015how can a committee represent anyone without an opportunity to hear from the community that they represent the unwillingness of the integrated Services Department to hear the comments of parents strugg willing to use their services impacts each of you we have no place to ask for help but in this very public meeting furthermore the charter proposes the committee exists for nothing more than to Plate it will have no advisory capacity to the board or the superintendent despite advisory actually being in the name so I ask you to please request something more substantial from cak there is clearly a need at this time when lawsuits and civil rights investigations for is are at an all-time high early in my life I was taught to Define integrity in terms of what we do when no one is watching

016and in the past 6 months once I've observed this board make some decisions that I find astonishing not because no one was watching but because the community impacted was denied access to the information their representatives didn't respect them enough to get input on this voting season I vow to change the mistakes I made previously when I voted two years ago I am no longer voting for representation that doesn't read resolutions before voting on them do you know how utterly infuriating it here it is to hear that three of you didn't read the casby resolution regarding accessibility before your vote and then you paraded a visual impaired child around this this boardroom in in observation of vision impairment month did you not equate that that sweet child might not be able to access his school website

017or his school's newsletter or maybe he has even lunch options or his grade because of that accessibility in the August legislative meeting to hear you all laughing about accessibility without honoring the why or the need of the visually impaired Community to belong here was repugnant and arrogant you should be ashamed of yourselves because belonging matters while Mobility disabilities don't impact my immediate life I'd never go around voting or laughing or destroying about destroying wheelchair ramps in in the district because I didn't appreciate the meaning to that Community we need a board to put the human back in humanity please a board that might try to understand that you represent a wider range of people including those people you don't like my Angelou said it best when she said people will forget what you said people

018will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel zanella's victim's families feel it the is community feels it I feel it my son feels it and I see a bigger community struggling to forget that you made them all feel insignificant by denying them access to needed information input is the Cornerstone of democracy and of elected representation if hearing it is so offensive I think you should step away from board service the stakes are too high and the damage to Children is too great to continue going on like this thank you thank you our next speaker is Joe Shor I I apologize if I got the name wrong okay well welcome all right hi everybody I stand before you today my name is Joe I'm a parent I'm an involved

019um member of the community and I'm here to advocate for critical thinking when we approach the decisions that we're making about changes to our school district recently we announced an initiative to dissolve some schools that had some smaller grade sizes and spe or sorry in favor of more specialized schools that have potentially larger grade sizes this doesn't necessarily align directly with the board strategic priorities I would propose an alternative so I'm here to advocate for smaller grade sizes with continuity between grades I think by moving toward a model of smaller neighborhood k through eight or K through 12 schools we could do something that would align I think perfectly with our strategic aims which should be to focus on mental health literacy and to focus on graduating with options so in alignment with that fostering

020community and support small grade sizes with a continuity between grades can establish a sense of community within our schools I think when students know their teachers from an early age it creates an environment that they can foster relationships with those teachers and it's going to promote well-being and it's crucial for our children's mental health and their overall development effects on academic success I think smaller grade sizes also enhance the quality of the education students can learn more effectively when they feel a sense of belonging and support this is essential for improving academic outcomes and ensuring that our students can graduate with options I think there's benefits to the community in learning or in continuity of learning sorry continuity between grades ensures a seamless transition from one level to another so students can focus on their

021studies without the disruptive changes that can sometimes occur when you're switching between large specialized schools so I think that's good for mental health is it cost- effective and sustainable I think that's a big question so contrary to some common misconceptions I think small grade sizes and continuity between grades can be cost effective I think by focusing on the local K through 8 and K through2 schools there are opportunities that you could allocate your resour ources more effectively within those schools and I think that we need to explore the potential Financial benefits of small grade sizes and continuity as it might not be as expensive as we think it is in closing I believe that we have an incredible opportunity to make a positive impact on our district by pursuing smaller grade sizes and a continuity

022between grades in our neighborhood schools it aligns perfectly with our strategic vision of improving mental health literacy and providing our students with a wealth of options upon graduation I urge you to consider this approach to think beyond the status quo and to embark on a bold yet sustainable path that prioritizes our mental health academic outcomes and the future prospects of our students this is an opportunity to keep the district yeah your three minutes Rob sorry oh sorry that's okay well thanks everybody well thank you appreciate it uh thank you our next speaker is Sabrina Herrick welcome when it comes to creating communication plans casby's Schoolboard member leadership workbook recommends quote recognizing citizens have a right to know what is occurring in their school district unquote I started attending school board meetings in June of this

023year after my daughter was assaulted by Tyler Zella at that time I already had my suspicions about the school board's dedication to setting responsible policy policy because this board's policy not only allowed for the hiring of a known child predator but also allowed for complaints against him to get swept under the rug until there was three months of footage 11 victims 164 abuse related charges and a civil suit with an accusation of sexual battery since then the following has happened my first face-to-face conversation with any of you was a few days shy of one month after I learned my daughter had been assaulted and that conversation only happened because I turned up here and listen to you give Kingsley a raise Kingsley told me how important he thinks it is for you to get public

024feedback then 24 hours later fist bump Pon because a website error prevented a friend of mine from making public comment you asked casby to Lobby to make Kora requests more expensive for concern parents that same night you asked casby to lobby for more time before you had to be accessible for blind students then a month and a half later you did a proclamation for blindness awareness I also learned you've spent over $100,000 on lawyers to fight against changes such as fixing the signs at Rocky Mountain High School so blind students can reach and read them and to top it off I find out that you asked The Coloradoan not to write about the building consolidation plan and only told District parents the plan after The Coloradoan refused to stay quiet the building consolidation plan is

025what upset a lot of people but it's not the issue only a symptom the issue is this board does not respect the opinions and experiences of people who voted for them to run this District look I get your volunteers and this takes up a lot of your time but if you aren't going to try maybe you should just resign so we can get a board that doesn't need to meet an angry mob before they actually respect the rights needs and opinions of the parents and students you're supposed to represent thank you our next speaker is Chrissy green welcome okay good evening board members I've never done something like this before so I hope my presence and words are valued as a heartfelt plea this is my six-year-old daughter Everly who attends olander and is part

026of a very successful integrated learning support program there called ILS over the past two weeks it came to my attention as well as other ILS families that the board most likely knows very little about the ILS program at oer as a result Everly and all her friends would like to officially invite the whole board to come and spend a day walking or shall I say rolling in their shoes at olander we all know the amazing work of Miss peacock who manages the ILS team there she would be happy to arrange everything for a visit Everly wants you to come join her and see how critically important that ILS kids are in the family of olander students Everly would like you to meet her peer Janet sorry you got to grab her um Everly would like

027you to come meet her peers who love her not because she's special but rather because she is their classmate and friend the olander Isis program is lifechanging for children like my daughter because it is at olander this is because the whole school teachers students parents everyone intentionally makes it a priority to be a family to the ILS kids upper grades lower grades all of them alike value the ILS students they know their names they hug them and they go to their birthday parties to take apart or rearrange this learning ecosystem is to disrupt and risk breaking something that is working at its very best the ILS program is woven into every part of this school my daughter is a different kid because of this program her learning has taken off to new levels because of

028the well trained and well-led ILS team that supports her at olander don't believe me come see it Everly will show you lastly you can come up with as many methods for changing curriculum or doing learning based projects as you want but nothing nothing can replace the learning a child gains when integrated with children who are handicapped or special needs that is already happening at olander the learning is life shaping and lifel Lasting all I repeat all olander kids are blessed mutually by the presence of the ILS program that is there please hear our plea and come see it feel it experience it before making decisions that could destroy it I will end with a quote from Miss peacock's email signature block children that learn together learn to live together and this is a special invitation

029that Everly made for all of you to come to her school and see what it's like for her Miss peacock's information is on there and she will arrange everything everything so we hope you will come and take her up on that thank you thank you our next speaker is Anna leetta again I apologize if I got the name wrong okay well that's good and welcome I am a parent to three kids 10 8 and four I am here this evening to let PSD know that amongst the other observances mentioned this month October is also National dyslexia awareness month I am here as a parent Who removed my kids from the district because unlike a number of other districts in Colorado dyslexia is still treated like a taboo word in PSD and almost exclusively generically referred

030to as a specific learning disability dyslexia is in fact the most common specific learning disability affecting 15 to 20% of students K through 12 according to the CDE however it is critical that dyslexia be identified early and addressed intensively and specifically with an evid evidence-based multisensory sensory approach proven effective for dyslexia when this occurs within Integrity dyslexic Learners can learn to read and go on to thrive academically with psd's current stance toward not saying dyslexia we and a number of other families have had no choice but to go outside of the district for our children to learn to read this is not Equitable for many families in the district who are unable to do so our experience with dyslexia started in kindergarten at our neighborhood school I had deep concerns well into my kindergarten my

031K daughter's kindergarten year when it was apparent that nothing about reading was clicking with my daughter who's very bright I expressed my concerns to her teacher about dyslexia but contrary to the science I was quickly dismissed and told it was too early to tell when we walked through the doors the last day of school my child proclaimed that she had failed because she couldn't read we changed to a district Charter School the next year in hopes that a new philosophy would help by the end of first grade she still had not made progress and once again science was denied as I was told it was too early to tell if she had dyslexia unfortunately those first two years were the most crucial window for efficient dyslexia intervention the summer following first grade we took matters

032into our own hands and started having her privately tutored specifically for dyslexia this has occurred year round outside of school hours two to three times a week something that other Colorado districts are able to provide five times a week during the school day this has been a financial hardship for our family yet it has had to be prioritized because there was not a facet of my dyslexic child's life that wasn't negatively impacted by her struggle to read especially her mental health and sense of belonging out of desperation we pulled her from the district a year and a half ago and moved her to a private school with a healthy culture around dyslexia awareness it is in this environment that she has finally started to thrive in every facet she has been academically challenged in every

033course yet appropriately supported as she gains more confidence as a fluent reader as District leadership please encourage identifying dyslexia and struggling readers and give parents an effective and clear path for navigating educating and supporting challenges specific to dyslexic children from K through 12 if you can do this with Integrity you guys can have us back thank you our next speaker is Joe gansky welcome thank you um if those in power continue to procure curate and disseminate data gathered from sources outside their communities they run the risk of making poorly executed decisions that get our community and our country no Clos to closing the gaps they allegedly want to address with a passage of no Child Left Behind in 2002 we hoped to close achievement gaps so we can maintain our competitiveness as a nation in

034response schools and districts quickly became data driven this Quest became data this Quest hit high gear with the passage of Race To The Top in 2009 when the US was not seeing improvements they had hoped for and this is when we began stack ranking our districts our schools our teachers and our students using this big data now we're here 14 years later and the gaps remain largely in place and it doesn't seem as though we're advancing any competitiveness if anything we seem to be slipping in many ways while simultaneously increasing our children's mental health struggles our inability to close these gaps do not rest in the hands of the people in the trenches rather responsibility lies with those in decision-making positions that make ill-advised decisions using this big data last year's request for proposal that

035went out to solicit de demographers makes for flawed local example the RFP that went out at this time last year was called analysis of district-wide boundary building utilization school choice patterns and curricular program study the decision makers that put this out there to solicit demographers provided background information about PSD program we told them of our unique programs they were listed as such International Balor core knowledge bilingual dual language hybrid online Expeditionary Learning and stem however within the school programming analysis section of the RFP uh what we asked the demographers to to analyze was the following PSD program programs core stem steam IB campus or High School select CU select dual language special ed Center based programs and other special programming at sites no mention of Expeditionary Learning the exclusion of Expeditionary Learning seems concerning given

036that is allegedly a program that PSD is interested in seeing spread it's also concerning because uh it was mentioned that we had a robust waiting list for the entire program which was false and it was also concerning because El was a lynchpin program for the movement and absorption of six different schools since the PSD en enrollment projections have been touted as the reason behind such decision I wonder if the final report even mentions Expeditionary Learning and if it was not analyzed then why was such a disruption created to begin with this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to some of the concerns with how our decision makers procure curate and disseminate data in order to support their predetermined blueprint for school Improvement at any given time thank you our next speaker is

037Sarah Beth lanquist welcome hi I'm a parent of three Elementary age students in PSD and I'm speaking to that perspective although my intention is to amplify the sentiment of others in the community tonight first off I'd like to thank the board and Mr Kingsley for Del in The Proposal on the school consolidations and restructuring I also want to recognize and thank the greater School community that United our voices to share concerns about the proposed timeline we wouldn't be here tonight without your courage and engagement at May at the district Advisory board meeting Mr Kingsley openly addressed that Co had damaged Community Connection many of us still feel that disconnect and now our trust in PSD feels fractured and yet here we are our PSD Community is coming to together asking you to take the time

038to listen and be transparent in the last 3 weeks I've had the opportunity to listen to parents in the transition Pathways program share their concerns about feeling like their children will be institutionalized and placed into a building with serious accessibility concerns I've talked to parents at Levens who have had their school unify under new leadership and are worried about the repercussions of another school change on the mental health of their children I could go on and on with examples of students and caregivers who have have been willing to connect with me about their community and their concerns we choose to send our kids to PSD schools we choose to trust the teachers par professionals Administration and School staff to nurture and educate our children we are not siloed it is not my school my kid

039it is our schools and our community we are not ignorant the problems facing our school district because we keep hearing that this proposal is to address Al looming financial and student enrollment CR crisis here are some specific questions what other school consolidations or closures are being considered what is the target per student cost for large versus small schools what is the cost differential for a child in elementary middle and high school and which schools are top performing financially in our district I ask the district to bring back fiscal transparency and accuracy in data reporting and I'm hopeful after your remarks at the beginning of the transparency that you're proposing that this does come to fruition and our community will be here to make sure that it does thank you thank you our next speaker is

040Sky Miller welcome hello hi I'm Sky Miller uh I'm transgender and I am a Polaris graduate and thank you all for your time so believe it or not I was a quiet kid and then Middle School happened I cut my hair short wore boy clothes and then finally got access to the internet online I would uh pretend to be a boy as a joke and then after that joke lasted for 2 years I uh realized I did didn't want to be a girl that I was trans uh when I came out online I lost friends and I was afraid of losing friends too at school but they accepted me when I worked of the courage to tell my teachers they respected my pronouns and Polaris accepted me and it changed my life this happened because

041of intentional Community created by small class sizes and opting in if you put Polaris in the middle of a big School uh vulnerable students will lose the safety of that community so I have suggestions first please find a place for Polaris to keep its school together give us a bigger building or remake our current one so that we can house more students without compromising our culture second please keep a school or please keep it a school of choice so that we can keep the safety of optin culture and last please put a queer student on the committee so we can have my voice in the changes uh Mr King kingsley's data shows 30% of PSD is lgbtq plus and according to the Journal of interpersonal violence 84% of trans people are have contemplated suicide and

04240% have attempted it trans youth have higher rates and uh without the safe space which is play's I may have ended up as a statistic too as a trans person in a safe accepting environment I am a rare case your plan for Polaris as it stands today takes away C queer spaces and it will have consequences once again two in every five trans people have attempted suicide and I know there's a budget crisis but taking away safe spaces for queer youth could cause a loss of life not just loss of funds there is no amount of money worth a kid's life thank you thank you our next speaker is Jim wein brener welcome Mr Anderson on May 24th 2022 you publicly said I think there were mistakes done about not communicating sooner but for people

043to continue to say things that are not true and to drive that wedge between parents and teachers and the educational community that really upsets me Mr Peterson you seem to affirm Mr Anderson's not true narrative at board meetings when you introduce speakers from the community your introduction includes we recognize that some although by no means all of the remarks that have been made are factually inaccurate would Community commenters saying things that are not true be the same as making remarks that are factually inaccurate is there a reliable source of factually information factually accurate information how can we know the truth I suggest there is a concrete way to present factually ACC accurate information directly to District stakeholders have Mr Kingsley participate in regular discussions on KC radio KC radio Mr Kingsley would respond directly to

044questions from Jimmy Leakey and callers to his show not a carefully scripted and edited video presentation just on the record back and forth dialogue about important issues communication that has long been promised by this board of education would Casey be a radio be a comfortable safe space for Mr Kingsley probably not but then again some of us speakers might not call this Podium a safe space however we still speak out I appeal to this board not to drive Mr Anderson's wedge between parents teachers and the educational Community make pter schools a regular feature on kco radio provide information that is factually accurate straight from the leader of the district your choice provide thousands of PSD stakeholders factual accurate information on kco radio or focus focus on more Community engagement sessions like a recent one with

045five people in attendance which makes more sense to you thanks for listening thank you our next speaker is Amelia leetta welcome um I'm I'm Amelia leetta and I have dyslexia I don't feel comfortable reading this speech aloud so I'm having my mom do it for me it's going to be harder for me to read it than her in some ways before I knew what dyslexia was I believed I was dumb and stupid I felt like I had to hide that I could not read or write I lost so many opportunities and chances to write which I really enjoy because I didn't feel comfortable trying in front of people who didn't understand why I struggled starting in kindergarten I tried to hide my strengths because I didn't ever want to draw attention to myself myself and

046to be called on to read in front of my class I first started to learn to read in tutoring when I was in second grade by the beginning of third grade I was just barely able to get by with reading what I needed to read my reading interventionist at school was kind but very confused as D wasn't making progress working with her throughout third grade I was not supported in my classroom by my teacher and I wasn't seen as smart I felt really misunderstood I felt like I always had to hide my dyslexia and I relied on two or three friends to help me try to spell words and get by I started to struggle with depression and had big feelings wishing I could leave school and never come back I thought I would never

047be able to succeed in life in fourth grade I moved to a private school that accepts my dyslexia full-heartedly it acknowledges my strengths and supports my weaknesses it has helped me flourish and grow and learn to love school I have also learned that I am not the only one with dyslexia knowing I have other friends who understand dyslexia is encouraging and knowing other grown-ups who also have dyslexia gives me hope I feel like the wounds from my early painful school years are starting to heal and I'm starting to feel confident and I believe I have opportunities too for the first time I trust my teachers my private school ends at fifth grade that's this year for me at this point we don't know where I will be able where I will be able to go

048and not have to go back to covering and hiding my weaknesses PSD please stop forcing us out but instead please invite dyslexic Learners back into the district with new awareness acceptance and support so we can Thrive openly as dyslexic Learners please create a culture of understanding and stop making us find other safe places please educate every dyslexic student every day thank you our final speaker this evening is Carolyn bores bores sorry welcome okay first I would like to thank the board for listening to our respective communities and taking more time regarding this decision I'm Mariah bores and I am a recent graduate of Centennial High School and what I learned about when I learned about the plans you have for these schools my heart broke I worked very hard to get my diploma and if

049it wasn't for a centennial I wouldn't have Brian you watched my graduation and you told us you loved our school and you wouldn't change a thing about it now I feel light to these plans are unviable in many ways including the Centennial Building being far from ADA Compliant however I will not tell you things you've already heard I am here to offer help I would like to come up with an alternative plan that will both help PSD meet its goals and save our schools I do not believe these schools should change and though Polaris needs more room for more students this is not the way to do it our community will always need these alternative options and without them families will leave PSD will F which will further increase the issues you currently have today

050not only this but I know for a fact that if Centennial and PCA merge your high school dropout rates will rise which will also increase the issues you have today Centennial will always have students and that is a guarantee the culture at Centennial is so strong that younger siblings and children of alumni plan on attending bypassing the larger high schools and I know Polaris and their alumni are very similar I also know that PCA is often the alternative option for Centennial or Polaris because some students may not be able to meet centennial's criteria especially with attendance and that is why PCA may be an option for them not only this but I believe everyone is wondering what will happen to the Discovery program Centennial has worked so very hard to keep and perfect Discovery is

051the framework of of Centennial it is what keeps and maintains the amazing culture that this school has everyone both students and staff have to go through Discovery in order to be there will a current students at PCA go through Discovery will a staff because it would be unfair to everyone at Centennial if the staff and students at PCA don't have to and it will also H harm the culture Centennial has worked so hard to maintain however the goal is that none of these questions matter because we need to keep all of these options open all three of these all three of these options in order to do that we need everyone's participation the boards the students the staff parents and alumni and any outside sources we may find now that you have mentioned outside sources

052I have personally been speaking with Rachel at for colins Community Action and they are more than willing to help us come up with an alternative plan that keeps our schools as they are and meets psd's goals thank you thank you that concludes Community comment for this evening uh our next agenda item is board topics and committee sorry committee reports is there anybody from the board who would like to make a report well I'm not seeing anybody else but I'm going to mention a couple of things uh one of them is that the next Community engagement session uh that is open to the public to sit down with a couple of board members with superintendent Kingsley and uh with uh usually a couple of other members of senior staff is going to be on November 15th

053yes the uh two previous ones have been attended by a relatively small number of people but we welcome people to sign up the sign up will be begin opening on November 2nd and uh please please join us you know we do we we heard that people want to have back and forth dialogue about the issues that are important to them uh I know that has happened in the previous two sessions small though they may have been and I'm sure it will happen in the next one so I uh hope that you will sign up and join us um I know also that there are uh special engagement sessions for the integrated integrated Services uh um communities uh that are going to be coming up that maybe is even going to be mentioned in the integrated

054Services presentation and certainly look for you uh to participate in that uh and as we talk continue to talk about um community community engagement uh stakeholder engagement with respect to any changes to the schools or boundaries um we look for uh your constructive engagement in that appreciated hearing some of the ideas that were mentioned today and uh in the community comment and uh the the process that's going to go forward will look to seek out other ideas uh and uh compare what the right thing is to do it is in my view highly unlikely that the answer is do nothing and just leave everything the way it is I don't think that's going to work so somebody something is going to have to change and I know uh every school feels strongly about the culture

055that they have and the the uh successes that they have with their students and uh we that's important there's no question about it that's important and and we've heard that certainly with respect to the specifics of The Proposal that had been Advanced previously uh nevertheless we are going to have to the the future board as seated after the election along with the senior uh Administration and the rest of the stakeholders in the district we'll have to figure out what the right next steps are and we look forward to your participation in that looks like Jim wants to say something there if I keep talking long enough then somebody else will say something go ahead Jim I'd just like to build little bit Rob on what you talked about with the community engagement sessions last year

056we had Community engagement sessions I think and they were very tightly controlled and I think a lot of people that walked away from the sessions felt you know I didn't really feel like I got to say what I wanted to say and so this year we decided to do something different we decided that we would have signups we didn't want to make it a hundred people because you can't have an good discussion with a 100 people and so what we did was we had a sign up of 20 people that seemed like a good number and then we'd have two board members there and Brian and some of Brian's staff we thought that sounded like a perfect plan right and so we have the first meeting we have 20 people signed up and what happens

057five of them show right that's what happened um I was part of the last session and we had another sign up for 20 people and about five people showed up so obviously we need to change the how we're doing these but I I just want to address some of the comments about five people showing up I think our intent was exactly right what we wanted was to have a great discussion with about 20 people now it turns out we had a great discussion but it was with only five people it was still a great discussion and over time I expect us to make changes um to continue to have uh great Community engagement sessions with more folks there that's it thanks Jim it looks like Kristen has something to say now yeah and I'll just

058I'll just follow up on that because I know that um there are a couple of speakers um tonight who had come to that engagement session and um I'm hoping that they felt as um engaged if you will as as um as I did with that we had a wonderful conversation um we learned um some new things um this is a learning board as well well this is what we are we're a learning organization so we learn things every time we go out um and a lot of wonderful things were shared with us and that's what we're asking um because we don't know it all here and that's okay we're going to ask for for help um and so thank you to those who did come um for those who would like to come to the

059next one please go ahead and sign up um and yeah I don't know if we need to make a larger pool to you know if our um reservation uh size needs to be slightly larger I'm not quite sure we'll we'll look at that but um if you'd like to have an intimate conversation with the you know with the crew it's a great way to do it so thank you all it looks like that's it looking around here all right uh with that we'll move on to our next agenda item which is the consent agenda would any board members like to pull any items from the consent agenda it looks like not if that's the case then can I get a motion for the consent agenda go ahead and eight I move that the board approve

060and adopt the recommended actions for the items on the consent agenda can I get a second looks like Kristen Jill if you would please call a vote on the consent agenda I'd appreciate it DJ Anderson I Jim brokish I Nate Donovan I Christen Draper I Rob Peterson I Carolyn Reed I Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 70 thank you so much Jill uh our next uh items are informational items uh the first one on integrated services and the second one on graduating with options and uh I'll turn it over to Brian with respect to the integr integrated services update thank you president Pon I appreciate that joining us this evening to present the integrated services update is our executive director of integrated Services Mr Dennis rater Dennis welcome and I think you're also joined by Dr

061schmidtz our chief institutional effective officer to talk from a data perspective this evening welcome uh both of you thank you thank you and good evening uh president Peterson vice president Draper Board of Education members superintendent Kingsley and cabinet and Community who are here for uh the presentation today I'd like to start by saying you see um I just heard vice president Draper talk about us being a learning organization and so um you'll see at the presentation in the boardroom tonight that closed captions are turned on as part of the presentation we are trying to get better as an organization and uh so are trying to make our presentations more accessible to folks in our uh in this room specifically and then out in the community through our YouTube close captioning just kind of want to

062say that close captioning doesn't always work 100% perfect and so just want to be aware of uh what might show up uh on the screen uh might not be accurately of reflection of what I've just communicated uh verbally so I just want to be clear on that so so anyways welcome it's my pleasure to be here with you all tonight um to talk a little bit about integrated services and so I want to start by talking a little bit about kind of who we are as a system as an integrated Services systems and our intentions of our work so we serve approximately 3,000 students of differing differing abilities across our system the different abilities uh represent a wide range of needs and vulnerabilities across our entire system as a leadership team and as a district

063team and school teams that support these students we intend to do everything we can so that students can access high levels of learning and positively impact student outcomes those are our intentions our vision is to focus on improvements that allow us to rethink our adult practices to improve systems that better support our students we work to ensure that students with differing abilities have options like every student want to remind you all that our students with special needs are general education students first as part of our system we also are responsible signif for significant compliance issues per per legislation uh both federal and state legislation so we also are responsible for the oversighted implementation of the individuals with disabilities Education Act which is often referred to as the idea and the exceptional children's educ ation act

064which are Colorado's rules and regulations around the enforcement of the idea you'll often hear that to referred to as the ecea why that is important and why compliance is important because as teams work and IEP teams work together individualized education plan teams work together to create good IEPs those good IEPs Drive good instruction for our students there's a direct connection between those um let me talk to you a little bit about our staff that Serv our students in our community we have approximately 188 special oops let me change the slide sorry about that we have approximately 188 special education teachers including those who teach our students with visual impairments and those that are deaf in heart of hearing we have 32 Early Childhood special education teachers 63 full and part-time prep par professionals uh in

065our early childhood programming one disability specialist in our early Childhood Program and one Early Childhood uh special education coach who works with all of our teachers and staff across the Early Childhood programing we also have 141 special service providers those include speech language Pathologists School P psychologists School social workers and occupational and physical therapist we employ approximately 340 PA professionals seven administrators eight board certified Behavior analyst five registered Behavior technicians and I say that most importantly all of these folks are partners with general education staff working to improve student growth for our students with disabilities I'm going to have my friend and colleague Dr Dwayne Schmidts talk to us a little bit about the achievement data that those folks work uh to help support our students on thank you so much Dennis so I basically

066heard you say you have a very large Department yes that is a a lot of people doing some complex work great work leads to Great outcomes and now we're just going to go through a little bit of data on how we're doing with our students that are supported with individualized education plans okay so we'll start with reading achievement and growth so everything we're going to see for a few slides is going to be about reading we have a few different measures that we use in Reading um in pter school district we're going to start with Dibbles which is an early reading assessment we're going to look at data associated with students from kindergarten through fifth grade and specifically all the data we're seeing is trimmed to only those students that are supported with an IEP

067okay so when we look at multiple years of data um we we can see some line graphs up there really quick let me describe those and and that'll stay pretty consistent as we move through these slides the bottom or dotted line is the beginning of year measure okay that's generally given early in the fall the solid darker line that's above you know oriented above the dotted line that's the end ofe measure and so the difference between those two lines indicates the increase in the percentage of kids who are doing what we call meeting Benchmark so the Dibbles assessment has set what they consider grade level benchmarks or expectations and the numbers we're looking at are the percentage of kids that met those benchmarks at those different test occasions so you can see a couple things

068fairly quickly that are indicated um above and I'm just going to describe those for every everybody really quickly um students that are supported with an IEP IEP are just demonstrating strong achievement gains from the beginning year to the end of year and we see that fairly consistently we also see an increasing Trend in the most recent couple of years and we also see if we look at the last year displayed there is 2022 23 so that's the last year for which we have matched data beginning of year and end of year we see that the achievement levels exceed the achievement levels that we saw preco so there was a dip in coid there's been a bounce back and in fact current levels are exceeding pre-co levels I also want to re point out real quick

069before I go to the next slide that these data are what we call match data so the endc count for the data point on the bottom in the dotted line is the same number of students as the uh you know the associated data point in the in the black solid line okay and we can see those end counts and such are given on the right side of the slide but I'm going to move along to the the story the last year for which we had match data was 2022-23 because obviously we haven't got to the end of this year 23 24 so the next slide I just clicked over to is just um indicating to us that those gains that we saw that increasing Trend in achievement continues so fall achievement based on Dibbles grades

070K5 um increases yet again at this fall in 20232 24 moving along we have a couple different assessment programs we use so we also use nwaa map assessment so we're also looking at reading or we're still looking at reading this assessment the data we're looking at is for grades 2 through eight so it's a little bit different grade range than the K5 we were just looking at but the story is similar we see that there's increasing achievement in 2223 and we see that there's a a positive movement to where the latest um data we have exceeds our pre-co achievement levels so this is a celebration and and as we go through this look for that convergence of evidence it's a different assessment it's a different age or grade range of students but it's showing the

071same kind of recent high achievement gains that are ex you know exceeding our preco outcomes okay moving on to the next slide this is just again showing us now fall achievement only because we don't have the spring achievement so we only see the dotted line not the solid line but what you can see is that from 2022 23 to 2324 the current fall the increasing Trend continues so this is a positive story moving along the cmass data which we get on grades 3 through eight it validates what we just saw in the Dibbles data and what we also saw in the maps data that there's a convergence that we have an increase going into 2223 for our students supported with an IEP in their reading levels of the percentage of students at or above grade

072level and we also see that these levels of achievement exceed our pre-co levels of achievement all right one last slide Pat sat so those are our tests that go up into the 9th 10th 11th grade Pat is given in ninth grade and Pat is also a different Pat version is given to 10th graders sat is given to all of our 11th graders and once again the p sat data validates what we saw in the Dibbles and the maps and the Cass data which is our students supported with IEPs have an increasing achievement trend on the percentage of students that are meeting Benchmark all right we're going to switch gears so to recap basically reading achievement is moving in the right direction and those many many people that you just mentioned in your department are doing

073great work kids are are you know moving in the right direction on reading achievements so let's move into math achievement and growth so we don't have Dibbles in math so we basically start off with the map data in math so again this is grades 2 through eight and we can see that in that we have an increase from in the 2022 23 school year between the beginning of year percentage of students who are we can just say meeting expectation versus those at the end of the year so that's that's you can see growth and you can see an increase in achievement and you can see that the achievement again in math is higher than pre-co levels as we click along and we see um we have the fall or beginning of year data for map

074so we see the dotted line on this next slide we do not see the solid line because we haven't gotten there yet that'll be this spring but as far as the fall goes that we just got the data back from that increasing Trend we just looked at is is continued positive story moving on to Cass grades 3 through 8 because we do have that for math um again it validates everything else we've seen where we see an increase in 2223 so for the spring of 2023 our most recent test there's an increase in our achievement and again those achievement levels exceed pre-co levels every single indicators move in the same direction okay this is the last slide on uh achievement data so we're up to the pat sat remember this is grades 9 through 11

075collectively um and we see again that there's been a pretty consistent increase in the achievement levels of students on those measures and these again are students um support it with an IEP um so kind of a nice convergence and once again higher than pre-co levels so Dennis good job department is definitely moving in the right direction all right we we could spend all night honestly digging through data there's so much that's interesting to look at but we don't have all night so we're going to close out with some graduation rate dat data right because that's big important um information for us I do want to mention before I switch into graduation rates that all the positive reading and math achievement data across all the different assessments that we just saw um doesn't change the fact

076that there are gaps between students that are supported with an IEP and students that are not supported with an IEP so I don't want to I don't want this presentation to come across as we're glossing over that gaps exist but everything we just looked at is accurate and true that achievement is increasing across all measures and across multiple years and that we've we've come back not just two pre-co levels but we've exceeded pre-co levels okay we're going to move on to graduation rates so we see some substantial increase in graduation rates two years in a row I want to point out something in this picture on the left hand side you see graduation rates and we right now what we're looking at is fouryear ontime graduation rates rates what you see that's on the left

077side of the two the two graphs that we see on the right side the graph is indicating what we call completion rates completion rates will always be at or above graduation rates because everyone who graduated is a completer and then if there's any type of a certificate that's not a regular diploma that type of certificate does get included in the completion rate so generally it's a little bit higher not by much but it's a little bit higher than graduation rates those rates tend to travel together so at any rate a couple things to point out we can see clearly the last two classes for which we have official data that we can compare ourselves to our state for 20 the class of 21 and the class of 22 we haven't gotten the state's official class

078of 23 data yet um we can see big increases for PSD which on the graduation rate just brings us right to the state level we had been traveling below the state level for several years on the completion rate you can see that we're actually a little above the state level and I want to just point out a little pattern there that that I want everyone to pay attention to we're going to see as we go through now fiveyear rates six year rates and maybe seven-year rates there's a consistent pattern there that PSD is a little bit below the state on graduation rates and we're a little above the state on completion rates and so there's a learning there okay going to the next slide these are the fiveyear rates and you can see as I

079click to the fiveyear rates it's like we traveled back in time one year because say you need one more year in order to get the data on a 5-year rate when I click on the six-year rate graph we're going to go back in time to the class of 2020 does I hope that makes sense to the viewers at any rate what we can see for the class of 2020 and the class of 2021 and is there was a big bump in the graduation rate for students supported with an IEP we can see that the fiveyear graduation rates are just at but just below the state rates but when we look at completion rates on the right we see that our rates are just above the state so the point there is that PSD appears to

080do a little bit more with certificates than what's going on Statewide that our Statewide colleagues are finding ways to recognize the hard work in the achievement of students supported with IEPs with regular diplomas okay next next slide is the six-year rates and again we have the positive story for the class of 2020 where we see those increasing rates for both graduation rates and completion rates and once again you can see the graduation rates just below the state and the completion rate it's hard to tell but it's the one that's just above the state by sliver the last slide before I hand this presentation back over to my colleague Dennis is graduation rates not for PSD and the state but rather PSD and what we use as our three best comparison districts which is Boulder St

081FR and Cherry Creek we say they're our best comparison District districts because of size demographic makeup and so on and their they at any rate we can see we have a lot to celebrate with the black line which is PSD the the blue red and green are the other three districts we have a lot to celebrate in PSD with those increasing fouryear ontime graduation rates for our students supported with IEPs and we've come a lot closer to in the mix where our competitor or comparison districts are but this slide also indicates we have more work to do there's more room for our processes and our system to um move this metric a little further and it's not about the graduation rate metric it's about making sure every student every student all of our students graduate

082with options and you have to graduate to graduate with options okay and with that I'll will hand the slide presentation back to my partner Dennis thank you Dr schmidtz so I want to spend a little bit uh time to wrap up the presentation really talking about kind of what the work we're doing to move forward specifically around continuing to improve student results so as many of you recall last uh spring um State categorical funding was increased uh to help us support uh expand expansion of supports for our students with disabilities and so what that allowed us to do as a district was to improve the ratio for allocations meaning how we allocate staff to school buildings both teachers and Par professionals based on student needs and numbers one of the biggest changes we're able to

083do is really look at and consider student needs uh and number of hours of and we base it on the number of hours of service that they were receiving on their IEP traditionally lots of districts including our own used to do just kind of a how many the number of students you have on a case load would Define how we would allocate Services really trying to move that model more from a that just numbers-based allocation of Staffing to to a numbers and needs based allocation of Staffing um again Our Hope by improving those student ratios um uh is to help uh you know improve student results continue that upward Trend both reading and with literacy and math as well as our graduation rates we also had the opportunity to expand some supports through support through

084our Medicaid funding um where we were able to offer pair professional coach positions this year what we heard from uh staff and community last through the course of last year was that our pair of professionals were having a hard time feeling supported as they were being hired on and hired into our uh mostly our Center based programs which support our kids with most most significant needs so we've uh um designated support folks former PA Professionals in the district to take on new leadership roles which we're super excited to advance those folks in our community and in our uh School District to help them provide leadership roles and support support to new PA professionals who support our kids in those Center based programming um we're also able to add some staffing to whoops and I'm on

085the wrong slide sorry about that my apologies so I was also able to add uh some Specialized Service professional support so those are folks around our speech language pathologist our occupational therapist our psychologist and social workers so we're able to give a uh a bump uh in FD allocation each of those areas as well um additionally each of our Center based classrooms were given a small little uh budget to buy additional classroom surprise which is super exciting for a classroom teacher who needs U something small and just to have the kind of the freedoms to say yes do get what you need for your kids to support your programming and the education you're providing for those kids allowing them a little bit more of an opportunity to have to to be able to do that

086was super exciting and all of that was made possible through our Medicaid funding extern Aly working to improve student results uh we um continue to work with our special advisory committee which is our cak committee around um uh bringing items of uh that where we're seeking feedback from them on as an integrated services department and getting feedback uh from those uh from specific an issue specific to integrated Services as well as uh other departments across the district so they bring things to our cat group and get feedback from them uh for consideration which we appreciate and obviously we couldn't do all of our work externally without our Community Partnerships so we are excited to open our CSU Campus project which is a new new Endeavor this fall which is a partnership with Colorado State University

087where allows our 18 to 21 year- Old students access to community a CL or the CSU Community a classroom on the community as well as we're a membership member of a community transition teams and uh provide internships uh transition pathway internships and job Shadows with over 50 Partners in our community uh as the community employers so we're really thankful for all those Partners in our community our last slide I want to talk about is really those process improvements uh hoping to make a difference and on this slide there's a um 4X two table so four rows horizontal two I'm sorry yeah four rows vertical or four rows horizontally two rows vertically um in each of those eight uh are is a specific topic that I'll speak to I'm starting in the far left corner um

088one of the issues we're working on is disrupting disproportionality and so um we are aware that we currently um over identify students that are Hispanic as having a specific learning disability and so we are working across uh our school district with multiple departments to help uh work to put in systems of support to address that issue um we are uh moving now uh horizontally to our right in the in the top uh row um to improve graduate uh graduation with options um or graduate with options part of our strategic plan we're instituting or would like to propose and Institute individualized education plans or IEP driven diplomas and so what that will allow we hope uh part to what Dr Schmid's talked about those graduation rates earlier to help improve that is by allowing um IEP

089teams to more have more flexibility in determining kind of a graduation pathway for a student with a disability it also is about Equity because it allows each and every single one of our students in our school district the opportunity to earn a high school diploma and so uh we're working with our graduation with options team to recommend that moving forward talked a little bit at the beginning my presentation again moving right on my slide now to the third column on the top row to improve IEP compliance and so again um compliance is important because a good IEP drives good instruction and a good learning plan for students right and so the CDE annually requires that we do 30 annual reviews um just as part of their monitoring process for us as a district we're taking

090on an additional 40 so we're randomly pulling 10 per quarter um to uh do our own internal reviews of those IPS again just to make sure that we are in compliant with what we need to around the idea and the ecea again the individuals with disabilities Education Act and the um exceptional children's education act so working towards that we also like we've heard from our community this evening and from all of you folks we continue to strive to improve family and community outreach now as I move in my presentation to the fourth box uh uh on the top row um to improve family and community outreach and the way in which we've done that is we've hired a fulltime parent family community engagement coordinator to really work both with the F with families with seak

091and with our community to help better un help us better understand the needs that currently exist in our community that uh we might be missing on and so we're going to improve those uh opportunities for our families and communities I'm going to move back now to the far left of my slide in the second row uh First Column um really working to elevate Universal instruction to improve student results and so we are very excited that we've adopted a new literacy curriculum in our district and are working to make it an expectation for all of our students that they have 120 Minutes of uninterrupted access to that first best instruction so we're super excited about that for our kids and then we'll be able to collect good data from that and then plan intervention responses through

092IEP teams or mtss teams to help support student students uh that way again we continue um to refine so moving sorry moving to my right now the second um second column bottom row second row is to refine and build systems so that's really again working um uh thinking about kind of that tiered levels of support and where integrated Services role is within that tiered level of support making sure that tier one and tier two levels of instructional supports are in place appropriately before we considered tier three levels of supports through special education moving further to the right my uh third column now on the on the second row really working on our professional development um and continuing to offer um thorough um and rigorous professional development classes both in the areas of instructional instruction around

093mathematical instruction and literacy as well as Behavior Uh so that students can uh better access their uh educ education academic education and I want to just kind of leave today with uh saying that students in is are all of our students requiring collaboration across all of our departments right so I'm honored and privileged to meet a department that interacts with literally every other department in this entire School District which I'm honored to be able to do because that also means that departments across our district recognize that spe students with special needs are also uh part of their work and their responsibility as well so I just so we've done a lot of work specifically around that this year we've worked really hard with our transportation department to improve communication strategies to talk about behavioral supports

094on buses uh and really worked hard with them we continue to work with our language culture and Equity Department uh specifically around our significant disproportionality to make sure we're really teasing out what's the language based need versus a learning need through a learning disability or other type of uh special education consideration uh we continue to work with our professional development and curriculum Department student services is a huge component of the partnership we have HR Finance like I said literally everybody in this room we touch and I'm very thankful to be able to do that um so I just want to say thank you um for your time um and before I turn it over to you for any questions I did just want to comment on our community engagement sessions that are open to our

095community the first one is no and registration is still available through uh nove uh through October 26 which is rapidly approaching our first meeting though is uh November 2nd at bacon Elementary School and that's to serve families in the fossil and Tim nith feeder systems uh our next session is November 7th at shephards and Elementary to support our families in the Fort Collins High School and Wellington feeder systems and our final session is November 13th at Weber Middle School which will support our families in the Rocky on in putter uh system hopefully all families uh of students who have uh we serve inrad Services have received an email already with a link to a register for those evenings uh but just a friendly reminder to please do so we look forward to dialoguing with you

096further with that thank you again very much and are there any questions thank you very much are there questions for members of the board Nate yeah I'm a little unclear about the purpose of the cak and wondered if you could go over that again and um kind of educate us on what an agenda for one of those meetings looks like and and how that works and who you solicit input from and who who attends those thanks I sure K happy to do that so cak is um an Advisory Group to M me and the integrated services department so the way the communication flow works is that either I bring issues that have been brought to my attention by other District leadership uh to those meetings as an example if there are policy revisions that are

097being considered um uh we might have a presentation uh on that policy revision to seek input from that cak group that is then considered by that department within our district um uh Andor uh it is a direct recommendation uh from me to the seak committee of trying to seek feedback on specific issues that impact the integrated services department so before we get into what an agenda looks like and what a meeting looks like um how is it determined what is the makeup of cak and how is it that determined who those people are yeah so cak is uh we try and it as a diverse representation as possible so it's a combination of school-based and District based staff as well as parent staff we uh or parents and community members so we try and get

098representation from multiple um disability categories uh you know we have Ida requires that we identify 13 areas of disability in our school district for to be eligible for special services so we try and get as a diverse representation of each of those 13 disability categories as we can as well as a diverse representation of of parent sorry of parents as well as um different you know early childhood representation early or Elementary School U middle and high school representation from kind of the parent side from Community side we have members um from The Arc of larer County um and other community agencies that help uh be members of that committee and then there is District uh membership as district and building level uh leadership and participation as well so we have some teachers uh across a

099white special education teachers integrated Services teachers uh again we try and get a wide range across elementary middle and high school we also this year lucky enough to have one General Ed teacher as a member of our team um and then we have uh building level leadership so we have uh two principles on the committee as well so does that answer that question kind of around members so the process for that sorry is an application process uh an anonymous application process so we send out an email to uh District staff uh as well as uh parent community and to solicit interest um through an application process those applications are then brought forward in an anonymous manner so we don't know who's who right and we uh the uh we being the leadership team team on

100integrated services so myself my director and our assistant director team reviews those and scores those applications based on a rubric so we try and be as uh consistent as possible in responding to the applications questions that we get and then based on kind of the there are two considerations at that point kind of those who score the highest and then uh the diverse representation so we try and balance those two components those who do best on the rubic and then trying to make sure that we have a diverse representation on the committee so to get that diverse representation how many members are on this committee so there are approximately don't 100% quote me on this but approximately 30 people or so on the committee does that make it tough to have a meeting um well

101I have a good facilitator so it can yes it can but we have you know we kind of structure it so we have small group table groups working together to and there is a process of the kind kind of maybe go into your next question how's an agenda formed and what does the meeting look like so the agenda can be formed multiple ways so either there's an uh something that the integrated services department has a specific interest in seeking feedback um uh or some other folks in our department I'm sorry or in our district have a specific request as an example uh Dr Julie Chaplan came to our last meeting because she was interested in getting feedback on the graduate with options conversation around the IEP driven diploma so she came um Lauren over there

102our good friend Lauren came and talked about the calendar committee right calendar so calendar issues this coming uh meeting uh this Thursday um Autumn is going Autumn Aspen our legal council is going to bring our bullying prevention education policy to the seak committee to seek feedback so that so so and then the way it happens is they typically do a presentation to inform the seak committee of what the nature of the top IPC is and why we're coming to seek feedback from them and then the teams are allowed to um U discuss and of what they think their recommendations back to us should be or advisory back to whoever presented or the integrated Services Department representative bring that information back to them uh or back they sorry I'm Lo it's late long day today so

103they sit and and talk and then uh provide us back advice on what how they think we should move forward and so that's how that process works thanks and is that committee required by some rule or legislation it is not a requirement is a recommendation from the Colorado Department of Education and they have yeah so we have a lot of guidelines that we also there's a state seak committee as well and so we do a lot of our work in alignment with what the CDE recommendations are around how to run a cak committee okay thank you you're welcome other comments or questions from the board Kristen sorry yeah go ahead Jess and then we'll do Kristen thank you very much sorry I'm like all in on my questions um I was looking at slide number

104seven for starters and I don't know why it didn't occur to me before but we have like a 1.5% increase from 2122 to 2223 which sorry let me go back to slide number seven also and we have like an increase over time sorry so we ended 2122 at 17.8 and then we jump to 19.2 the next year like is there what's how does that happen like what's what happens over the summer that causes us to jump because other year sometimes we're going down year-over-year we now have this consistent hopefully consistent increase going forward like is it our summer programming that's kind of maintaining that is it do you director Zamora I thank you for your question while the team is getting ready can I ask the team to try to pull that slide up just

105so we can Orient the community to the question thank you there we go yeah so I mean you know from 20 21 to 2122 we kind of it's balanced right but then from the end of year of 2122 to the beginning year of 2223 we also see a jump do you see what I'm saying so like do we have like a thought process on why we're seeing a jump at the beginning of the year from the previous year there now it's on that is interesting right so a lot happens in the summertime time and to some extent they can be different groups of kids obviously cuz you know so there's a little bit of that in the mix but things do happen during the summer and I suspect especially because we're talking about reading here

106and we're talking about Young Reading um a lot of parents are able to and a lot of students do continue to learn and grow during the summer um if you remember back in those years too we did some pretty intensive summer programming um with lots of different groups that were fairly targeted and how we applied that training and so there's a a high probability that there's a disproportionately high number of students that are in this data set that may have been getting those kinds of supports during that summer so I wouldn't want to go too far with that and claim that's what did it but I'm just mentioning there were some very intentional efforts during the last couple of Summers yeah I would I guess be curious going forward I almost want to keep it

107in back the back of my mind to kind of keep an eye on if we continue those processes or we see those jumps from one end of year to the next we must be doing something right right if we do have that summer programming M um totally different topic but uh we also usually get zc scores and I just wanted to remind myself a Year's growth in a year's time is 0.2 zcore is that wrong let's let's say it like this you do this better than I do this is a good topic I'm glad you brought it up so we're not looking at zc scores in this graph right just for the viewing audience because people can track real easily this percent of kids meeting Benchmark but there's a different way to look at data

108the stories come out the same that we can see this kind of growth that I kind of demonstrated throughout so the story doesn't change based on the way we gra graph it but so when we calculate a zcore on the pre-test or on any test zero would indicate exactly the average outcome among National or State academic peers okay like zero is the average score so then when and if it's above zero the student did above average on that assessment if it's less than zero like a negative number they did less than average right on that assessment so then when you take a post test and you do the same thing you calculate a zcore and to get Z gains which you just brought up you subtract that pre-test from that post test when you do

109that if the number if the difference came out to be a zero that is truly a perfect definition of a Year's growth in a year's time because it would mean the the the sort of distributional or positional change of a student the exact L held their ground normatively and we know that as groups all kids are growing over time so if a student exactly holds their normative position they which is what zero would indicate from a pre- to a post they gained exactly as much as we would see nationally for that grade level right and for students furthermore who started where they started if there was a negative we would say they lost ground and if it was positive they gained ground so zero in that Z gain metric is a perfect definition of a

110Year's growth and a year's time and it turns out out that in response to a board question we had received earlier we' calculated those annual growth effect sizes or Z gains and it turned out in for both 2021 22 and 2223 those were positive Z gains for our students supported with individualized education plans meaning that in PSD those students did in fact gain ground on their academic peers same grade same uh starting point compared to and this was based on maps data MH and so compared to national peers that was a mouthful but I think you tracked that that's kind of what that's what I was looking for where am I remembering 0.2 yeah so we have a Target okay because we are PSD so we are high achievement high growth so we have a

111Target and 0 2 or above starts to get you kind of what I would call katchup growth got it thank you that's what I was looking Forks thank you um so do you want me to keep going I think I only have like one more question in a comment go ahead okay um let's see slide 16 is my next one there we go um so this one also has like a similar what's the title on it so that they can get make sure they get to the right what's the title on the slide just so make sure achievement increased spring 2023 cmass math 3 date okay thank you reading y and reading is there any story on what changed from 2122 to 2223 since our 9% is higher than it's been in this entire graph

112and that's double where we were before I know these are like questions that I'm not sure you have context for yeah I I so I can speak in generalities in that and so um one of our instructional coaches in integrated Services is specifically trained in U math interventions and so she is has been doing both schoolwide trainings around good mathematical instruction and as well as partnering with our general education staff and she offers a 4-day intensive professional development class for our integrated Services teacher around good mathematical instruction so that's my hypothesis as to why we see that and my hope that we will continue to see that because what's intentional you know makes a difference right and she's being very intentional in her work and support in that area I like I appreciate that you

113have like some inkling of an idea because there were some other graphs where we jumped up and then we kind of just leveled out again so I'm hoping that's that's that is the story um and then my last thing was just a comment is that I really um appreciate that you are changing our ratios or at least trying out changing ratios to need based rather than just the number of students because I I'm hopeful that will make a huge difference thank you you're welcome other uh Kristen was next that's right yeah so um and just following up off of what um Jess was asking um you we had mentioned summer tutoring but I was sort of wondering if there was some um High um high-intensity tutoring during the year that was also happening that we

114were allowing to see that large growth um if if you know of anything there what I'd like to say in response to that is we are right now we have a a research evaluation coordinator who's not me Dr Ranchi she's wonderful and she is new to our district but she's working on a couple of evaluations for us and one of them is the summer programming in general and then another one is specifically high dosage tutoring so as those become available and she wraps up that work which I think will be during this fall semester we'll get back in touch with the board on some of that information awesome thank you um another one that I had is I just wanted to to um sort of point out to people that they graduating with options um

115that when we talked about um the let's see improve graduation with options IEP driven diplomas I just wanted to point out that other schools are doing this already um and that this is this does not lessen the degree it simply makes it less complicated for people to get um the degree so I just kind of and I'll let you speak to that uh well said I would just 100% agree right it's still it's just about offering alternative Pathways while keeping High stand standards for all of our Learners awesome thank you and then just one last uh question is um previously uh last year um both Carolyn and I had been to the cak meetings and wondering if um you could send us invitations for that again be happy to do that great thank you yes

116you're welcome that's terrific other looks like Jim yeah just as supporting data to the alternate Pathways is this to make up on the graduate on the graduation slide we could pull it up it's 22 I think the rates yeah one more keep going yeah the comparison with our comparison districts yeah this is it so I'm not sure we've drawn a clear line between this slide where the our increases are nice on the black line but we're still about 10% behind some of our comparison districts right and the reason I'm speculating that the reason that we're looking at this different path for IEP students is to make up some of this do our comparison districts already do some of this and could you speak to that please thanks for asking that question so this will not

117this change I I don't think we'll make up a 10% difference and and Dennis may have more information than me or a different view on that but um I think relevant to this question is when I was pointing out those slides around on our graduation rates we were at or slightly above the state but consistently on whatever year rate we were looking at the four the five the six on the completion rates we were below the state right there was a consistent pattern that's a flip that difference right there probably will definitely get wiped out based on what we're talking about IEP driven diplomas um we we we had a practice in the past about if a student took a certain version of the state assessment system that they would get a different type of

118a credential than a regular diploma that was that we have rethought there's in this IEP driven diploma there's a few little pieces that are going to add put us more in alignment with what other districts and Statewide folks do and so that will clean up a little bit but then I think there's going to be room for improvement in some other spaces too that are going to have to do with this next conversation we're going to have tonight around Pathways and other engaging type of changes that psds or improvements that we're making and I think those will also contribute to some of those changes to bring those rates up even higher good deal thanks okay go ahead Carolyn so I'm going to ask the same question I ask every year about um our um IEP

119percentages about when I look at the percentage of children that are on IEPs in pter St district and I compare that to our comparison districts I see that we fall below what other districts are identifying for IEPs so two questions like how are we identifying kids with IEPs I'd like everybody to know how that process works and then any ideas about why we would be so below all of our comparison districts when it comes to identifying kids with IEPs so the process begins with a um a recommendation or referral for a consideration of a special education evaluation that referral can can come from Community parents and what I mean Community it might come from a physician a daycare provider somebody a uh it can come from a parent directly or it can come from a

120general education staff member or really quite frankly anybody right so a referral comes to the uh uh multi-tiered systems of support team uh at a building where they really start to dive into Data around how a kid is achieving and where their gaps are um when you look at so there remember I talked about 13 areas of disability category right so it gets a little tricky because it's not the same per every disability category it differs based on what area of suspected disability a team or a person might have for a student so specifically uh when you look at I'll start with specific learning and I won't go through all 13 I promise we'll be here all night but um when you look at really specific learning disability and serious emotional disability those are the

121two areas that the law requires the ecea requires that are that we um do a multi-tiered system of support process or response to intervention process where we are required by a law to put kids into evidence-based interventions collect data around and this is all through the General Ed process right collect data on how those kids are responding to those interventions uh and obviously if they are respond responding positively Yahoo success right we just keep maybe keep going with that intervention and and the referral doesn't go forward for special education services however if we find that a kid doesn't respond to that uh intervention that's put in place at the school level typically we actually do another intervention try something different it's not just a oneandone uh process typically right we really want to try and

122intervene with the student uh um and have good database to make make sure that we uh are sure we want to go forward with the special education evaluation in those two areas once the team if again another time the kiddo doesn't respond now we have two or three data points that has shown different instructional strategy where a student hasn't responded to um we then would consider a special education evaluation at that point the special ed team has two options they can accept the evaluation and move forward with the eligibility the evaluation process and eligib determination or if they uh still don't believe that a student might be have a disability they can respond with what's called a prior noce and again I won't get into too much too much of the weeds here but so

123that those processes are similar for specific learning disability considerations and for serious emotional disability considerations so so the mtss and RTI has to be in place and has to be a part of that process per the law for the other 11 disability categories they're more formulaic there is uh some that just require doctor diagnosis right that we would consult and get uh have get doctor reports on um uh others are just other bodies of evidence and data that we would collect you're considering a student might have autism there are specific assessments that we do that are autism specific assessment that help us determine eligibility and I say that in all of those different 13 areas of Eligibility determination it's also about how a kiddo accesses uh can access their general education environment so it's very

124possible so that a kid could have a disability but not need an IEP what an IEP but for the law requires a specially designed instruction right outside of general education and so through each of those 13 processes we have 13 eligibility categories we have to make sure that that kiddo needs specially designed instruction because if they don't even again if they have a disability and don't need that specially designed instruction to access and progress through their general education curriculum they will be not found eligible for special education services so so so I say all that to say that could be part of why our numbers are a little bit different I know our school psychologist group takes pride in uh being thorough evaluators of student needs right and really making sure that uh per the

125ID EA and per the law that kids actually qualify for special services so that's a pretty consistent persistent process uh that's that uh kiddos go through uh to in in order to determine eligibility for special ed services does that answer your question did I miss anything there I might have no it does answer my question and I just you know I so for my daughter she was identified by her teacher as needing um speech and language um therapy right and she received 4 hours of with a speech therapist every week yes that kind of help I've come to realize it's very expensive but was critical for her and so I guess that early intervention is so so important and and identifying kids correctly early is so important and I just thought it would be good

126for our our community to hear what that process is and how how our kids are identified yes and to add on to that 100% agree early invention is critically important we have a child find coordinator whose responsibility for the login is to help uh identify uh students who may need uh may need to go through the evaluation process to determine eligibility so so yes I thank you for saying that and I agree so I mean there is a difference between us and other districts and I always wonder so I will say it I've always wondered if we under identify fair enough and I think that's a fair question and so I so I so know that part of the convers so if you remember back to the slide where I talked about disrupting disproportionality so

127disproportionality Works in two ways either you over identify One race or ethnic group or you are under under identifying another race or ethnic group right and so part of our action plan to help support that significant disproportionality work is to make sure that we have um good data uh collection techniques in process as uh as well as similar evaluation um methodology in place across our entire District right because to your point we might be significant disproportionate we don't know this for sure but we might be significant disproportionate because maybe we under identify students of other race and ethnicities versus over identifying those that are Hispanic that's part of what our our team of folks who's working on disrupting the disproportionality issue is really knee deep in trying to figure that out so yeah I I

128appreciate that right so we just we have to dig deep and we have to look at ourselves and be honest and I appreciate that other comments or questions from the board doesn't look like it uh Brian you'd like to say something yes please um a couple of thoughts here one I Dennis and Dr SCH Smith I want to thank you for your thoughtful presentation uh members of the community who may be here in person uh or watching online may have recognized uh that both of our presenters tonight were very careful in their attempts to try to describe accurately the information as it was being displayed on our screen and and on the respective slides and I want to say thank you publicly for modeling what it looks like to provide presentations that are an attempt

129to be more accessible in sharing information um we are all Collective AC ly learning uh as an organization in this particular space and your leadership uh we recognize it it's needed and it feels different right to both people who are the viewing public and as we're sitting here in the room uh but it's an important aspect of our Behavior to help students and adults who different need content presented in different ways to feel like that they belong uh and have access to this important information you know so I just want to say thank you for that uh I also want to offer just at a very high level and very brief you know just some perspective you know we look at the multitude of these data slides you know and I think about how other

130districts across the country across the state of Colorado are performing there's very few systems coming out of the pandemic that are seeing results higher than pre- pre pandemic rates the data is deserving of Celebration it is an incredibly hard time to be an educator or an employee of a public school district today and I want to publicly say thank you to every teacher to every principal and assistant principal to every par professional to every bus driver every kitchen manager and kitchen staff member every parent who trusts us with their children all of your leadership and central office staff who have been working in conjunction to operate and operationalize a Playbook that takes our strategic plan moves it to our district uip and individualize and highlights the power and necessary just action of inclusivity in all

131things that we do when we focus on improving our first and best instruction our instructional core all students benefit from that especially our most marginalized our schools have been working incredibly hard to identify students who have differentiated learning needs and doing everything that they can above and beyond the instructional core to ensure those students whether it's high doit tutoring summer programming they're enrolled in extracurricular you know when we think about many of our families who spoke here today the family from olander elementary school who spoke to the importance of the ILS program because it's a part of the school Community she's right when we talk about trying to build the trust back of members of our community who may be making a different choice and their students are brave enough to come here and be

132courageous and share with us I believe trust is one and loss through three things benevolence credibility and reliability and we have a lot of work to still do we have a belief system in this District that all students can learn at high levels while these data points are rising and they're Rising rapidly we have further spaces to go to continue that Improvement so don't be mistaken my congratulations and my job well done as complacency that we've arrived but I am so proud of the hard work of the people in this community that made those results possible and people believing in something bigger than themselves and you deserve a congratulations and a job well done so thank you yep absolutely thank you and thank you for coming tonight to present this information to us I know

133uh we've been we've been looking forward to it and we want to thank you the next item on our uh informational reports is on graduation with options an update on that and again Brian whoa uh Brian yeah I think I think I think you're going to introduce this yes I am thank you so uh we have a little bit of a shift in presentations uh presenters tonight but I'm excited we have really strong people that are here is is Tanya joining you yeah so as we are transitioning and having some of our co-presenters come and join Dr Schmid you know we had a thoughtful conversation and our welcome it's so great to see all of you thank you for being here yeah you steal the show go for it can I take the mic back

134for a second please all right thanks just I'm G to give it right back to you in a second here I just you know members of the board uh we had a thoughtful conversation listening to members uh in leadership of our student advisory council tonight and I want to reorient ourselves to that conversation because one of the things that I think we all gleaned is that if we can provide greater visibility into the various Pathways that allow students to see honor and dignity into the options that they want to pursue postgraduation the more likelihood that we can not only connect students to their interests but ensure that they're experiencing success before it's too late and that is the spirit of this presentation and the collaborative effort that's happening under the guise of our strategic plan

135more specifically the priority that's outlined as graduating all of our students with various options that are important to them allowing them to have agency and choice but being able to actually realize those choices based upon the experiences that they have in PSD so presenting uh on this particular topic tonight uh is our chief institutional Effectiveness officer Dr Dwayne schmidtz we have Tanya alcarez our director of career and Innovation uh we have uh Josh weitman our technology engineering and trades education teacher from pter high school we also have many of our other students uh that are representing pter High School in the PSD Community welcome to all of you really excited to have this conversation with all of you tonight thank you so much superintendent Kingsley I love the way you set the table great it's

136really great so um this is a very exciting topic I'm really happy that we're sitting here talking about this tonight so career connected learning Pathways and some related topics all of which fall within our strategic plan and we have three priorities as you know literacy mental health and belonging and graduate with options tonight we're talking within that space of graduate with options and we're going to before I move on I want to mention that we do have a PSD website that um superintendent Kingsley had mentioned a little earlier this evening um that does provide for the public some information regarding our strategic plan and as we move through time it'll become more and more populated with timelines and outcomes and various things at any rate I just want to point out we have that information

137and we are going to drill now down into The Graduate with options component of that that's what this update is on within graduate with options we have a couple different efforts that PSD is engaged in the one that we're going to be talking about tonight very directly is our career connected Pathways work and some like I said related topics I just wanted to point out that there are other pieces to the graduate with options that we won't highlight as much tonight around Middle School uh Middle School is kind of onboarding some grading for equity some absenteeism work and so on um so they are important parts of the Strategic plan and the graduate with options but tonight we're focusing on Pathways as our launch point for this update okay so what we're going to see

138and do tonight is we're going to Define career connected Pathways and what those and kind of describe what those benefits are nobody better to do this than the lady sitting to my right Tanya alcarez she knows so much about this she's been with us a while I'm sure quite a few of you have had time with Tanya so I'm just so thankful she could join us tonight we're going to then demonstrate the career connected pathway planning and that's where we've made a lot of progress in the last couple months and put a lot of energy and so we'll be talking about that a little bit we're going to then talk about the importance after you've got the pathways and you've made some progress there around the marketing component the Outreach component the how students and

139families come to be aware of these options and these possibilities so we'll talk about that a little bit because efforts have been made there as well and then we're going to talk a little bit about piloting a digital platform that a single digital platform uh that we can use for both career exploration Pathways exploration and for course registration and right now we really have two good options for that so we're going to talk through a little bit how we're going to narrow that down to a single option in the near future and that gives you a highlight of what we're going to walk through thank you welome hi good evening thanks for having me tonight uh excited to be with you and to um highlight and do an overview of our programs and then go

140a little bit deeper into a few of the programs that have been uh developed recently um over the last few months so uh first just want to level set a little bit and talk about our programs can tend to be feel like some alphabet soup in education so um starting with CER and Technical education CTE uh in pter school district we have over 18 Career and Technical education Pathways and our programs start in middle school where students are exploring and they're dipping their toe into all of the different career pathway options um so that if that light bulb goes off they can jump in and go deeper in high school into those pathways um we have Career and Technical education Pathways at our home high schools um and we have a wide variety and a

141great depth of experience for students to experience at their home High School uh and for students that don't have that we have a um designated career campus in the Futures lab and that program is accessible to all high school students in pter school distri district it's a half-day program where students are busted for either a morning our afternoon session so we're going to look at a few of those Pathways that have been developed um and are brand new um at that Futures lab program we're also going to talk a little bit about concurrent enrollment concurrent enrollment is how students earn college credit while in high school it is one of the great Equity levers we have for our students to know they can do college while in high school and feel confident and have a

142Front Range student ID number know what the system is like concurrent enrollment supports our students in making that transition whether it is to a 2-year four-year um military or into the workforce so we'll highlight a few programs again alphabet soup we have the ascent program accelerating students through concurrent enrollment that's a fifth year program that's tuition free this year we have 187 PSD students that are at Front Range in Ames Community College tuition books and fees paid for um many of those students are working towards uh an associates degree to transfer to a 4-year others are working towards programs like an automotive degree or EMT certificate um also in PSD uh the associates degree pathway so students can earn an associate degree while in high school we're going to highlight that and how that's connected

143to Career Pathways um and then tonight we have some student guests here from our jrc program brand new um it's housed at pter high school but it is open to all students in pter school district and um and dig a little deeper into that military pathway option all of these Pathways include and what we want to demonstrate is they all include work-based learning experiences they all include an option for students to earn some sort of Industry certification or College credit as they're Exploring Careers awesome thanks Tanya okay so what are the benefits there's benefits for students there's benefits for families um there's benefits for the community and so I've got bulleted out there just a list of things that folks can take a look at but the reality is it's about student engagement it's about

144supporting kids towards the future that they want a lot of young people do know kind of where they want to go and how they want to get there and they really just want our support and they want the flexibility and sort of the respect if you will on the student agency to pursue those things whatever those things are and when we provide that which we are providing that pter school district has a one of the highest rates of career teched engagement Statewide we've been a leader in that and I'd like to say we're just getting started because I think this is a big push through Middle School and High School Nationwide Statewide and PSD are leaders and we want to remain leaders in this space and so the really the bottom line is when a

145student's going to school and they know that it's going to what they're doing is going to um result in a credential you know is going to result in a fifth maybe even a sixth year of schooling that's actually free and at the college level engagement goes up saves Mom and Dad families and students money helps students stay engaged absences go down engagement goes up achievement growth all everything moves in the right direction when students are engaged walking into school every day and that's what these programs are about moms and dads I'm a parent of three kids get to have richer conversations with their kids about what they're doing at school and how it's aligned to where they're going and it kind of gets you a little more involved gives you a pathway or an entry

146point to Rich conversations with your kids about their future and what what they're doing why they're doing it that's really what the benefits are there's Financial benefits there's engagement benefits there's achievement benefits and so on to demonstrate that a little bit just concretely there's a lot of data points we could cherry-pick but we're going to move this conversation along a little bit but one we chose to kind of highlight is we just got done talking about graduation rates for students that are supported with an IEP and so now we're looking at a little bit of data around graduation rates for students who are what we call concentrators in Career Tech Ed it means if I remember this correctly had four or more courses yes four or more courses in CTE so their concentrators are kind

147of involved they're invested the graduation rates for students that meet that criteria which of which there's 1,258 it's not a small amount in 2021-22 their graduation rates were at 98% that's that's much higher than our district overall rate for students that are um English language Learners that um was 100% graduation rate for students supported with an IEP and our concentrators that graduation rate is 72% um one of the directors asked earlier how do we close that 10% Gap and I said you know some of the things we talked about earlier will make a small bump no doubt but the bigger bump comes from student engagement and that's this is what I'm referring to so free reduced lunch students that are concentrators 97% graduation rate that's much much higher than our regular free reduced lunch rate

148and GT is 100% so how do we get there great so what you're looking at at the screen right now is um historically how a student and a parent might think about high school and how to plan high school out and you can see on the left side um those are our graduation requirements so how many credits do you need to earn in each bucket um over 9th 10th 11th 12th grade year to fulfill the 240 um credits so we're looking at at this as a template and a guide um and we're looking at scaffolding over the top of this more of a career connected plan to help our parents and families who maybe have a freshman that they know I want to be a future teacher or they know they already have an interest

149in learning more about the military what could a more detailed plan look like and how can we provide that support we have heard loudly from our community our students our parents our families that there's not awareness of all of these options in our system we have amazing options you're going to hear kids talk about it um we've got to do a better job of helping our community break that down into bite-sized pieces so that they can jump in and lean in at different points throughout their academic Journey so that leads us to some samples that a really talented group of counselors teachers and Industry Partners collaborated on to look at some career and academic plans that can be a resource it's just a resource guide to our parents to our students and our counselors um

150so that if this is an interest or a pathway you can see the next step um it doesn't lock any of our students into this pathway students change their minds all the time which is AOK um so this pathway I'm just going to take a little bit of time to orient all of us to to what this pathway is along the left side we have those graduation requirements similar to the other template um we've got 9th 10th 11th and 12th grade across the top but we also have a another column because now education in pter school district is P20 it's not K12 um and so we've got to show that Continuum for our students Tanya that was a great comment will you educate the community on what the term P20 means yes P20 preschool through

151age 20 um so our students that are headed into that Community College thank you um so you'll see those graduation requirements um and then you'll see the blue shaded column that's related to the career pathway or the row um related to the pathway any of those courses that are in bold and blue mean that college credit is awarded for those um courses and then down at the bottom aligning those work-based learning industry certifications and degrees um so that those are also aligned with that Community College connection so this is a brand new pathway launch launching January uh 2024 Behavioral Health pathway at the Futures lab in partnership with Summit Stone um and we've got a teacher ready to roll and students signed up to start in January in the intro to behavioral health class where

152they'll earn five credits in pter school district and they'll earn three credits through Community College and start that pathway towards um a career in Behavioral Health Tech if that's where they land so you'll see the certifications you'll see the associate degree and then in that last column the ascent program which we we touched on already that's that fifth year tuition books and fees paid for by pter School District so students that want to continue on can continue on either at Front Range or the Community College of Aurora has a great Behavioral Health pathway um for those students to to jump into so our intent with these is to have these available in counseling offices to have these available on our website so that parents and families can download a road map um to help them

153get to their hopes their dreams and and achieve their goals the next pathway I'm not going to go as far um into as much detail into this pathway um but we chose the education pathway because we need future Educators yes uh we also have a brand new program that came from the Colorado Department of Education called TP teacher recruitment education program that program provides a fifth and sixth year free for our students we currently have 13 students in the t- program at Metro State and Front Range Community College so we have a cohort of five students in the fifth year right now and we have a cohort of six students in the sixth year they'll be graduating um with their associates degree one of our students will be transferring to UNC yeah the next pathway

154um is is an exciting one for pter school district we had JC many many years ago and it's back and this fall was the first cohort of students um and we got some students here to speak about this pathway and again it's all four years students have embedded college credit um they have embedded um they're meeting the graduation requirements and then at the end of their senior year they have a lot of choice whether that's to continue into an Roc program at a four-year College um they can also continue into the ascent program uh Military Academy or Enlistment the next pathway is Automotive again um super exciting this is launching in pter school district this spring we have 32 students signed up for the automotive program um and this is through the Futures lab so

155we're showing a scope and sequence what would a freshman take Junior a sophomore and then junior year how you can engage in the Futures lab continue on it's articulated through Front Range Community College to get to that certificate level um all the while students will be earning their ASE certification and participating in um work-based learning experiences currently PSD is one of those Partners we have a student who is employed um in in PSD in our transportation program and we're looking to expand that as well and the last one I'm going to turn over to Josh Weissman who is um our our amazing amazing PTEC teacher he's done a lot of work to get this program off the ground and is really passionate about it um and again another program that allows for that fifth and

156sixth year for a student to have that that College tuition paid for so Josh I'm going to turn this one over to you uh thank you Tanya um thanks for giving us the opportunity to speak tonight I'm really passionate about career connected learning um the pathway model I think the data is pretty compelling um the student engagement goes up student performance student outcomes um it's just too good to pass up so the PC another alphabet soup another acronym uh started by IBM in collaboration with the New York City School uh School District um to try and fill give student options and try and fill a talent pipeline in computer coding and cyber security um we followed the ptech model is now International and um we've adopted that model uh focusing on Advanced manufacturing because according

157to the Department of Labor Manufacturing is the number two most key industry in Northern Colorado what's number one beer beer I was going to say that um it's Healthcare Healthcare uh Healthcare that's a good guy uh pek is an acronym it stands for uh Pathways in technology early college high school and each one of those words is Meaningful we're trying to give students a pathway we're trying to give them a focus kind of like a major but it's got easy onramps and off ramps students don't have to make a decision and choose that for life um we're using technology because it's powerful and that's what I teach and students grab early college credit and that is so meaningful we take students who College may not even be on their radar and we demonstrate that they

158can have Early College Success um so if they want to um exit High School uh they can go right to the workforce they can continue uh developing uh their academic career get get an associate degree or transfer to a four-year institution and I don't want to talk more about it I like to introduce two students we brought with you um Mr Cody Bradley is a junior currently at pter High School in the PC program Cody would you come on up for a second there you go um I'm Cody Bradley I'm a junior at pter high school I was made aware of ptech as my an a freshman um I wanted to get like a Hands-On learning and everything everything um and then was accepted into the program uh went through some nice CAD training with

159Mr wisman right here um spent a good amount of time doing that uh but the main reason I really enjoyed it is the opportunities it like takes me out to in the world um I actually got an internship at Woodward uh through the program um and that itself is a really cool opportunity to just be working for that um there is a couple of things that would be nice if there was a little bit more um consolidation on like getting through some of the key requirements for like the high school part of it um my freshman year I was pretty ahead of the curve as far as high school credits um which was really cool because then we had the college credits that I could take up um but there was a lot that I

160felt like I could have taken at the same time um together to kind of knock out both of them and be able to finish my my program faster so at the end of it uh we get an associates degree that's the hope at least an associates degree in advanced manufacturing which is what I'm excited for it's what I'm looking to go into after after high school so congs thank you can I jump for a second here uh uh Mr Bradley works at Woodward um a proud partner with our PCH program along with Front Range and PSD and uh I'm not going to embarrass Cody to tell him um as a nth grader sometimes his attendance suffered a little bit there were some you know there were some issues there uh but right now um speaking

161his supervisors are so impressed with his work ethic um and what time do you got to be at work I'm there at 5: in the morning and then I come to school what what time you get up to get to work at 5: UH 4 3:45 makes me feel comfortable getting up getting to work so I got a young man that sometimes struggled with attendance in in uh you know getting to school at 8:50 um and here he is getting up at 3:30 in the morning uh to make it to his job which was connected through his school and that's part of the power of career connected learning um thank you Cody hang around hey we got Zoe ha coming up Zoe is a sophomore at P High School yeah I joined the PCH program

162because um I've wanteded to become an engineer for a while and I feel like this program will really help set me up for s ESS by learning about the um manufacturing field ahead of time so I know like everything that I would need to know to get a head start when I transfer to fouryear University so I can get into the um Workforce quicker and start making money much quicker I really what I really like about the PCH program is the most of the classes I'm taking I can see how they connect to a real world applications and how I can use the skill in a future job and like as Cody was saying like the consolidation of some classes such as having to take economics and personal finance it's a bit excessive whereas they

163could just be combined into one class allowing us to take more engineering classes and finishing the program faster and I want to conclude with with that point that Zoe just made as well uh thank you Zoe um we've got two students here that represent a pretty broad spectrum of student Pathways uh Cody uh you know do you love school I think it's pretty pretty fair to say that he doesn't all the time um uh but he's connected with a potential uh High wage earning potential um connected through his schooling uh with a a local employer that is going to is going to allow him to walk across that stage in in May of 25 and graduate um with some serious wage earning potential um to go straight to the workforce or continue on his college

164career if he so chooses it's going to give him a real chance to really graduate with some very authentic options uh thanks to the power of this career connected learning um at the same time in the same program Zoe said she's wanted to be an engineer since she's been in third grade um I feel like uh this pathway um all the best Engineers that I know have a strong background in actual Materials Handling Machining and uh Material Science um not just textbook learning of simulations the beauty of the PCH program as we introduce Zoe to actual real Engineers doing real engineering where I have a lot of students who graduate from pter high school who say they're going to be Engineers who've never taken any of my classes and they do that because they don't

165have the flexibility in their schedule they would like to take Machining they'd like to learn how to weld every human should know how to weld it's not that hard but they can't do it because they can't fit it in their schedule um by allowing Zoey to partake in in the ptech program um we're going to graduate a pre-engineering student um who's going to be a really high value recruit to any engineering school because of her background in the machine shop and that is a powerful option uh for that career connected learning thank you students for being here thank so much sinc awesome Junior Roy yes all all right next we have some students here from the J OTC program I'm going to have Ella Estes come on up she's in 12th grade at pter high

166school and then also here supporting Ella um is Clara Tomba she's in uh junior at Fort Collins High School and Maria Mina Montoya um is in 12th grade at pter high school all right Ella um I'm G to turn it over to you to share uh with a group about your experience this fall in the JROTC program all righty um hi I'm L Steves hi I'm H Steves um I'm a 12th grader at pter and I am in the JROTC program it started this August but like you said it was here before but now it's back um Junior Roc was brought back to teach kids leadership skills public speaking skills um and just Community uh I attend this class every day I get to see all of my fellow Cadets and we have a total

167of 16 Cadets and we have four schools to represent in our class um our motto is to motivate young people to be better citizens I think they're doing pretty good um why I joined was in my senior year uh I had a lot of free time and it was pretty much just core classes that I was doing and I wanted to do more to fill my schedule than just coming to school doing core classes and then going home so I went down to the Futures lab I looked at Aviation I looked at everything they had to offer didn't really speak to me that much because it narrowed in on something but I heard a teacher talking about jotc upstairs went upstairs talked to the teacher and he discussed with me they're looking for people to

168join his class um I learned more about it and I immediately went to my counselor and I signed up for JC uh moved around a few things all worked out I'm able to graduate in December um what has impacted me the most about this class is attendance and grades and I see it in my fellow Cadets um I used to be a c and d kid just doing enough to get by enough to get the diploma get out of here my attendance was very poor through my other three years and when I joined Roc my grades most of them were High A's High B's and my attendance was a very common thing the structure in the environment and the want to be in class was very strong um in public speaking that was a huge

169thing I learned I wouldn't have been able to do this last year um the two Cadets that I brought along with me Maria and Claire I've seen huge growth with them Maria I've known since elementary school she's grown so much I'm so proud of her uh with Claire I just met her this August and we've grown so close through jotc that we hang out outside of school within class we talk regularly check up on each other um and we have this amazing opportunity to grow closer between all of the cadets um that's pretty much all I have to say but I think you guys so much for the opportunity for me to attend this class just changed a lot about me um I'm very excited to see how far it [Applause] goes that's awesome thank

170you all right back to you good okay hey before we go on I would really like to thank the students who showed up tonight to talk to us and tell us your stories and share and share your stories with us I think I speak for everybody on the board like this is the thing that touches us the most that kind of fills our our tank makes us feel really good um I'm so proud of all of you and the things that you've done and I know you're all going really great places you're going to you're going to excel in life thank you for sharing your stories before we continue I also wonder if we should let Cody go to sleep uh he's about to get up in a couple hours um but to Echo uh

171director Reed's commentary you make us so proud to see you Sean you know just lean into your light and your joy and your purpose through school and through through connection not just the way that you were talking about each other not just your Pathways uh was something that I think collectively touched this entire community's heart so just really we're really proud of [Applause] you okay so powerful right so powerful so the next question is how do we share this with more Families how do we share this with more students and get more teachers involved frankly in this process because this is where middle through high school education is heading right it's about student agency it's about economic Mobility for some it's about uh credentials and having some flexibility in our scheduling in our requirements to

172allow students to pursue these interests and passions right so how do we share this we've made some progress in that regard too have a good evening everybody from our hearts thank you so much for coming in thank you for us the opport absolutely that was very impactful Kathy thank you too I want to just thank Kathy McKay as well building such programs bringing in those repoter high school students just thank you Kathy for everything you do great leader okay so the next stage of this presentation is how do we share this information right how do we make make an easy butt so more people can tap into these opportunities so we have a Future Ready website we're going to talk about a few different tiers so it's not the only answer it's part of the

173answer but the Future Ready website has been around for a bit it's gone under some revisions it will continue to go under revisions it's going to be an iterative process we'll see you in a second we're Gathering feedback we're making changes but right now live um for PSD when you click into this website and you can click and choose the high school that you're attending currently because these offerings Career Tech ad and career connected learning and Pathways they exist at all of our high schools it is not just at pror High School in fact if I'm not mistaken some of the other high schools have more students involved in Career Tech Ed right so it's not just concentrated at pror high school just to be super clear when you get on the Future Ready website

174a parent a student you click the school that you're attending that drop- down list of the dark blue buttons on the right will populate with the pathways Pathways that are avail ailable to get engaged in at that school when you click one of those Pathways it opens up a lot of information to connect you into what we just heard from students how do I get started because I'm ready to I'm ready to get going right originally we wanted to take you on a tour of the website tonight but we're not going to do that for time sake and it is getting late so I'm going to move along okay the next slide is just to remind us that Tanya and her team that have a lot of get a lot of credit for this work

175in in collaboration with others they're Gathering feedback they visit it with the DAC they're going out and gathering this information from different groups that we work with and this will continue and so that's a real QR code if you were to take a picture of that and click it you would be able to go in and give us some feedback on that website yeah the the next layer to the website is part of The Branding um so that our parents fam Community know where to go to find these options is to have a public facing space um and we have a brand new space that's just opened in the Foothills Mall um and this space is a future ready Center so a space where our parents families and even our staff members come for professional

176development to learn about all of the options available but in addition to that it's also a Welcome Center in partnership with the city of Fort Collins um all of our newcomers this is their first um stop in town and they have support there um with a digital literacy liaison to help them understand what resources are available to them not only in pter school district but in the city of Fort Collins it's it's been a beautiful partnership um watching the level of support um that our community is getting it's also a Partnership Center we can't do this on our own we need Woodward we need pter school district to employ our students and so the more opportunities that we have in Partnership um to not only um support our students with work-based learning experiences but to

177help fund these opportunities so that students can access these opportunities um is is another primary goal of the space um and one of the the coolest things I've seen lately L is on Fridays our transition pathway students they have Future Ready Fridays and they come over from 1 to three and they're learning Workforce and Workforce Development skills resumés um and they get to use a space in the community um and it's a really really cool opportunity so come check out Future Ready Fridays between 1 and 3 than oh yeah um and then the next component or the next layer um in working with uh our Communications team is to have a high school planning guide that has all of this information and resources that we can distribute so website um a physical space and then

178in print um a a physical print [Applause] guide okay so that's some of the efforts that are underway in this update around graduating with options to get the word out about the pathways and the opportunities that are available so um we also are looking at career exploration through the registration process so we have students who get shoulder tapped by teachers by counselors and that's how they often hear about opportunities we heard from students earlier tonight in the dinner session we heard it again here students often hear about things from other students so the shoulder tapping component right but there's also this digital exploration this digital platform exploration that's available through zel recently Synergy another data system we use for lots of purposes in PSD has some additional capabilities and those additional capabilities um start to

179allow it to potentially do things that are similar to what we're used to thinking of zel is doing which is really allowing students and families to explore Pathways and the courses that they would take and what those courses would lead to so what we're going to do in pu School District this registration cycle is we are going to going a pilot a study using both of those digital platforms at each of the schools on a small number of students to gather some input some feedback and test their capabilities and then moving forward we're going to be moving as a district to one platform or the other we heard again earlier tonight in the dinner session from some students a different set of students how the registration and exploration processes vary from school to school as

180a district we want to move towards a single digital platform we want to move that experience erience of exploring your career possibilities into our schools in a more concrete fashion and then give the students and the families the tools to do that which is going to increase the number of students connecting to these career opportunities and so you can see where we're going with this we're we're moving on all fronts to just message and make available the types of great outcomes and opportunities that we just heard students tell us about that's what we're doing okay before I close this off and I I will mention again that we're going to Now dial back out and remind everybody we're talking about the Strategic plan with three big priorities tonight we kind of drilled into graduating with

181options as an update and within graduating with options we drilled into Pathways and I think you can see why it's a very powerful presentation in my opinion there is other work also happening right now in the graduating with options but this is this is what we're going to update you on tonight I want to mention that my friend next to me here Josh who I don't see often enough I if I'm not mistaken Josh we ran into each other my very first day as a PSD employee I think I only met a handful of teachers that day Josh is one that really stands out and I remember and the reason I remember Josh is because personally for me I grew up lower income but I did grow up in a family where autome mechanic skills

182were kind of the norm and we fixed stuff right so I tinkered and I fixed and I learned well those Automotive skills were enhanced through a program at the Blen High School where I went to high school all those years I I did all the automotive classes and we had great shops and great teachers I went into State and National competitions and won some of them for automotive type of stuff and so that was a big way of in which I paid for my college which lands me here in front of you find people all these years later so when I met Josh we connected that day pretty quickly on this kind of shared experience with trades if you will and um as I look back all these years later I feel I've had a

183really good career in PSD I I know for a fact you feel the same and when I look at what Josh has accomplished and I look at what I've accomplished he's accomplished more you have and I I've had a big and great career here in PSD but what Josh has accomplished you will only appreciate if you take a tour at pter high school and walk through that that area it is amazing it is mind-blowing and this partnership with Woodward is real and the equipment and the shop and the plans and what you do with kids is just incredible and Kathy again tip of hat to Kathy cuz that kind of great teacher leadership doesn't happen without great building leadership right it's a it's a definite partnership and then you throw Tanya in the mix at

184the district level and you've got a perfect storm for just great things for kids and all we have to do as a leadership group is figure out with our Community Partners how to elevate and amplify this work we have got to spread this work it has to grow and and that is what we'll conclude with and go to questions does anybody from the board have comments or questions it's amazing looks like Carolyn so um I would just like to say that since I've been on the board this has always been a priority for me uh Kathy and I have talked about this from I think day one when I first got on the board and first met her about what this could look like and what this could be and seeing here almost 10 years

185later seeing this come together and seeing all of the community connections and the Partnerships um I'm just really blown away I mean it's taken us a little while to get here but wow we've gotten we're here and it looks wonderful and you're right Dwayne we we've got to grow this and we got to get the information out there so I I congratulate you all for the work you've done and Josh I just love your exuberance really you're it's just infectious thank you for for coming here and talking to us tonight everybody thank you for all that you do for our students well said Carolyn other comments questions you want to say something CHR go ahead again yeah no just thank you I I plan on I'm G to try and come by on Friday um

186and see and then I want to go ahead and set up in a a walk through with you Josh so I'm excited about that um it is amazing I I I wish it was something that we had when I was in high school um one of the things that I love about that you you talked about is the easy onramp easy offramp because I think that's so important for um students who are thinking about I want to try something and then they half the part of learning about something is if you don't like it and you that's a win I can eliminate that I'm not going to do that I wish I had done that as an engineer before my third year of engineering school and yeah exactly and a lot of money um so

187it would have been great great for me to be able to do that I think a lot of students are going to find that really accessible to get on try something okay that wasn't for me it wasn't what I thought it was let me try something new and can I try you know when I try that is that something that is speaking to me you know as Ella said this something that really spoke to me and that's what we need so thank you so much for doing this I can't wait to get this out into uh the community and let people know how to access this um let the students know how to access this let the parents know and it's going to be fabulous thanks Kristen I want to I'm inspired by what you

188said to share a little bit here I think one of the things that I I I had two kids come through the system here in PSD uh for most of their uh School careers and as a parent I had a particular model in my mind of what what it means to be successful in school and one of the things I've learned being on the board and volunteering in the school district for the years that I have is that that model in my head was way the heck too limiting frankly there are so many ways to success and your the programs that you've talked about today are are super important elements of that and we really appreciate the fact that you're sharing them with us here tonight and more more importantly that you're finding ways to

189share them more broadly as Carolyn was talking about with our students and with our parents because I suspect I'm not the only parent who has fixed ideas we'll call it that about what success looks like and sometimes those align with what our children our students uh actually want and sometimes they don't and it's important that both the parents and the students recognize the plethora of options that are there so thank you very much anything else from board what looks like DJ wants to say something yeah Kristen inspired me too um I one of my wonderings uh because I've had an opportunity to tour uh some other CTE or U buildings and other districts here last year and uh cnrs and and you guys mentioned a little bit about being at at all the high schools

190and and one of the things that I have a real uh wondering if it would help and would open eyes for more students is if if we had a capability of giving um quarter classes in every High School of stuff that's the higher level is going to be at the Futures lab because we have all the equipment or such uh some you know and some things we can do them at all the high schools but one of the things when I was touring was how many students they were bringing in and this was for manufacturing and a lot of these students were talking about how they really hadn't had Tools in their hand before and I just I know my experience of um wiring so Network wiring but electric wiring and stuff when I first

191got in and got my hands on it it changed my view of how it was done and and what my possibilities could be and so I just want to throw that out there that I I just think it would be awesome if we could get to a spot where all of our high schools maybe didn't offer that the first year but at least that taste in all of those and you know the other one is the automotive one which uh when I did grow back in my day uh we did have a small small engines in our high school that you know we did lawn mower stuff and and you get a little bit of taste of that too and I just I think the Cody and can't remember her name but the talking about

192combining classes and having opportunities in other classes I think that is really important and I and I wonder if if we have ways of giving these students Taste of these different uh Pathways in little chunks so that you know it's it's it's only a quarter or something so the it's the on onramp off-ramp that Kristen was talking about that I just think is so vital and and doing that so it's just a wondering that's gone through my head and I have an opportunity to share it so I'm going to share it uh but thank you for all that you guys are doing I think it's it is fantastic did you want to comment on that go ahead no I I think we are in complete alignment Josh is shaking his head as well um all

193of the pathway when you look at the Future Ready website start with an introduction exploratory course so principles of Construction principles of manufacturing and principles of engineering are three courses that are offered at every high school and that's where you dip your toe in and so then there's a few more courses to go deeper at the home high school but then if you figure out Automotive HVAC or Building Trades electrical as for for you that's when we're looking to hop over to the Futures lab or Front Range Community College or ases Community College um in in in those Partnerships so agreed thanks for cl yep awesome thanks for clarifying that other comments or questions from the board no absolutely go ahead Brian I I just want to thank you uh I'm inspired you lit a

194fire in my heart and my mind to kind of keep moving this train forward in the ways that you all see fit because you truly are the experts and you are so well positioned to figure out how to scale this thoughtfully based upon how you're collaborating with each other and you know as you participate in the action teamwork through the lens of the Strategic plan uh another win that's not necessarily explicit here is you're bringing the priority of graduating with option into Focus you're giving it meaning you're insuring ing that we're not lowering the Integrity of our standard diploma that you're we're actually elevating it by trying to figure out ways to provide more visibility and more access to Career connected learning and I couldn't be more proud to be a partner in this work

195with all of you so thank you and if you get a chance members of the board the members of the community Josh is one heck of a TED Talk speaker uh when I first joined this community a couple of years ago his proud principal Miss McKay shared a a video of him uh doing a Mountain Avenue you the Ted Talk experience which inspired me then and you inspired me now and I'm really glad that you're part of our team thank you all very much for coming this evening we really appreciate it as you've heard we're all inspired and we look forward to continued greatness from you thank you all right the last item on our agenda tonight is an executive session on legal advice can I get a motion with respect to this go ahead

196Krist yes Nate yes I forgot to highlight in our last presentation the fact that on the slide it said we're looking at $1 million of benefit from Medicaid and for those of us that are bruised from a period of time when we were wrangling over whether we were going to participate in the Medica aid program I appreciate that now we're seeing some fruits of the decision to go ahead with that so thanks to everyone who forged ahead on that absolutely Fair Point thanks for sharing that now Kristen I believe you have a motion for us sure I move that the bo I move that the board enter executive session to receive legal advice on specific legal questions relating to Human Resources procedures including procedures on hiring practices as authorized by CRS 24-6 42 subsection 4B

197individuals invited to join the board and executive session are superintendent Brian Kingsley Chief officers Lauren hooton Eric Bon Savage and Jeff Connell and general counsel Autumn asman do I have a second oh looks like DJ over there okay um can I have a vote on this motion please jail DJ Anderson hi Jim brokish hi Nate Don no Christian Draper I Rob Pon yes I Carn Reed Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 61 okay um for the members of the public uh this will be the last thing we do in public it'll also be the last thing that's broadcast on television uh the only thing that we're going to do after the executive session in public is that I'm going to come out here and pound this gavel and adjourn the meeting so we uh appreciate that

198you've taken the time to join us this evening our next meeting is the second Tuesday in November which I believe is three weeks from now if I'm remembering correctly which is sort of unusual break just because the way the calendar works and we look forward to having you join us then thank you very much for theard members we will start in the