Board of Education Meeting: March 21, 2023

001foreign all right everybody good evening welcome to the uh March 21st 2023 uh business uh session of the Pooter School District Board of Education uh tonight we're going to be doing several things we're going to be celebrating some uh our transgender Community we're going to learn more from our district ends 1.0 monitoring report on the mental health connections and belonging of our students and we're going to do some other uh financial and and other kinds of business um we thank you for joining us this evening and we would ask that you mute your cell phones if you haven't already so that there are no interruptions during the meeting with that we'll move on to approval of the agenda with any board members like to make changes to the agenda all right great seeing none uh

002our first action item is a resolution in support of transgender day of visibility can I get a motion with respect to this resolution go ahead Nate I move that the board approved the resolution in support of transgender day of visibility March 31st 2023. excellent can I get a second Justice got a second there that's great and I believe Brian we have some uh folks here to talk with us about this resolution yes thank you joining us this evening to speak to the resolution is our lgbtqia plus coordinator Ms Shayna sidechek welcome Shayna well hello uh I am Shayna sidechek pronouns are she her and I'm the lgbtqia plus coordinator for the district and I'm here to introduce two of our amazing Rocky Mountain High School students who will be speaking to the resolution itself so

003before that thank you to the board and superintendent for always striving to support all of our students so make sure that they feel welcomed and affirmed in our schools and for calling out those students who hold identities that need some additional and intentional efforts because of historical marginalization and discrimination against certain communities of folks so and thank you for uh to our students families and support systems for being here tonight and for sharing your student with us and absolutely thank you to ahead of time to our two student speakers for allowing us to witness your story your experience and your advocacy tonight and it it always is an honor to to hear and see student stories in the way in which you're striving to make your schools the district and the community better for folks

004so thank you too for being here as well and I'll go ahead and introduce our first student speaker um so first excuse me one point of order thanks very much for the introduction we I made a mistake I wanted to get the resolution read before we actually did this can is that okay can we do that and normally and normally we I mean I didn't want to interrupt your flow but I think it's important and normally we have the resolution on the screen as well so we want to make sure that that's that's there as well to support uh to support what's going on here all right so go ahead Point uh just clarification that might be good is that we are meeting Quorum because we have people online yeah so you we have enough

005yeah I just announced it okay and that's where yes uh would somebody would one of the board members like to read the resolution go ahead Jess we'll let Jess uh resolution in support of transgender day of visibility March 31st 2023. whereas transgender day of visibility is an awareness day that is internationally recognized every March 31st to honor and celebrate the achievements contributions and activism of transgender non-binary and gender non-conforming individuals while bringing awareness to the discrimination and violence and Community the community phases and whereas pooter school district is committed to providing a welcoming supportive inclusive and safe educational environment to our students employees and community members regardless of gender identity and whereas the board wholeheartedly Embraces pooter school districts transgender non-binary and gender non-conforming students employees and community members for the prospective experience advocacy and

006diversity they bring to our schools and workplaces and whereas the board Administration and staff recognize that there is more work ahead of us as we strive to ensure the inputer school district transgender non-binary and gender non-conforming students employees and community members do not face discrimination or harassment based on their gender identity and instead they are seen accepted and celebrated for who they fully are now therefore be it resolved by the Pooter School District Board of Education that March 31st 2023 is proclaimed transgender data visibility in pooter School District the Board of Education encourages students and staff to recognize honor and celebrate the dignity humanity and courage of our transgender non-binary and gender non-conforming students employees and community members thanks for reading that Jess and again I apologize for not getting things in order and I

007turn it back to you to introduce the students thank you yeah thanks what's the resolution that the students are going to be speaking to so our first student speaker is Ash whose pronouns are they then Ash is a trans and non-binary activist and Advocate from Rocky and they previously successfully advocated for the now implemented updates to the Colorado social studies academic standards to include history from folks holding diverse identities so please join me in welcoming Ash to the podium [Applause] we're here we're queer we deserve to be heard and seen as a genderqueer transgender and non-binary individual I know what it's like to be ignored to be erased local governments Across the Nation are trying to eradicate us from public life they're trying to stop us from being safe they're trying to stop us from

008being ourselves and schools are at the Forefront of this battle acknowledging trans day of visibility may not seem like much but it's an important step it's important that they see that not all of us will be intimidated by state persecution and bigotry I speak here for my brothers and siblings and sisters in Tennessee in Utah in Texas in Florida and North Dakota I speak for my comrades who cannot I have friends in these places trans friends whose right to be existing is taken away we cannot let this happen to our state or to our district I'm imploring the board to adopt the resolution because I believe that we deserve to be seen and known for who we are we deserve to know that we have allies who are fight for our ability to be seen

009and recognized this is history repeating itself those who oppose trans rights and recognition are failing in open note test we are at the Forefront of a movement and we will not be erased please recognize us take a step towards the few future show the world that we are accepting of diversity in pooter School District show the world that we will not be silenced because silencing us is violence recognizing trans day of visibility isn't going to single-handedly stop the persecution of trans individuals in this country but it will send a powerful message to those who wish to intimidate us we will not be intimidated we're here we're queer and we deserve to be heard we deserve to be seen thank you [Applause] our next student speaker is Roman I'm also from Rocky Mountain High School and

010Romans pronouns are he him and they them and he's going to share more about his identities and experience in his speech so I won't share any of those now but also now join me in welcoming them to the podium thanks [Applause] um I'll have to apologize beforehand that mind is a little bit longer than ashes so just everyone sit tight because I think it I have a lot to say today so I'm really excited to share um hello everybody thank you so much for having me here today my name is Roman cedris as Shayna said and I am a transgender and gender fluid student at Rocky Mountain High School I'm a leader and my school is gender and sexuality Alliance and I attend a few other lgbtq plus groups outside of school hours I'm here

011today to talk about the trans community and what the benefits of having a trans day of visibility could be for a little bit of context I've been out as trans for about five years now from seventh grade to 11th grade if you were to ask me what I thought the biggest challenge I've observed the transgender youth Community to face five years ago I would have said dealing with transphobia from parents today I would say dealing with transphobia from parents so in that regard nothing has changed and my time participating in lgbtq plus activities I've met around 100 to 150 transgender individuals and the majority of them also have another shared trait one that's more unfortunate to think about and that's the complicated relationship they have with their parents because of their transgender identities I won't

012get into too much detail for the sake of their safety but I've never known stories about accepting parents to bring tears to so many people's eyes stories about parents who do not ghastly or question a kid about their pronouns and who Instead try their best every day to get them right stories about parents who do not restrict their children from gender affirming care like binders or bras cutting or growing out hair or in some older cases starting gender affirming hormones these stories often don't happen nearly enough as they should and so they often strike a chord of grief and many transgender people because they have been denied the same basic necessities for so long by their own supposed caregivers I myself am a rare example of a transgender individual whose parents let them start testosterone

013at age 15. and let me say I've never been more comfortable and my voice and my body than I am now I have not once regretted my decision to do it either I feel like the luckiest kid in the world to have parents who listen to me and my needs at the time now at this point you may be wondering to yourself why are they talking about parents and a board that you know regards schools instead of parents well my lovely board and staff members I say this because we sadly cannot change the way that many parents choose to raise their children but we can realize and acknowledge that for many transgender kids school is their escape it may not feel like a completely safe place for these kids but it is commonly a place

014a kid would rather be than at home this is an exceedingly integral fact to keep in mind as we make our schools safer and something we absolutely need to highlight as we think about having a trans day of visibility in our schools right now you have the power to take steps to make our schools safer and more welcoming for transgender youth you have the power to make sure teachers are educated on and held accountable to making their classroom and activities transgender friendly whether that be from calling out cisgender students when they make transphobic jokes or say transgender slurs asking students which name and pronouns to use in class versus with their parents or even simple things like knowing where the gender neutral bathrooms are and being able to point out where they are to transgender

015youth foreign to go beyond making the schools safe for transgender people but you can also make sure that they are welcoming and friendly to trans people one way you could do this would be to encourage your teachers to learn about and teach transgender transgender history on the notes to many transgender and non-binary individuals or those from cultural cultures with similar Concepts have been around for Millennia and many different forms Erasure has been a long-term form of Oppression used against a vast variety of marginalized communities and the transgender Community is one of them so by not including this in the historical curriculum as packed as it is schools become part of the problem I myself have been taught so little about transgender identities and the schools I have attended we may as well just not exist

016and if I've learned anything about being trans from my cisgender peers it would be not to come to school licking gender non-conforming or you may be either obnoxiously laughed at whispered transphobic comments app or more strangely meowed or barked on and that's just sad right that the most I've been taught about my identity at school is the fact that I deserve to be made fun or persecuted for it it would be a miracle at this point if we even had one day to talk about these things oh what's that you say there's a chance for us to have a day like that a day where we can one focus on the importance of long-term education of teachers and staff members on how to be better allies towards trans students and two take the time to

017learn and share about transgender history a transgender day of visibility what a brilliant idea once again thank you for having me here and listening to what I had to say I hope you all keep in mind the points I made today because I truly believe that they are beneficial to a safer environment for the transgender community in our schools thank you very much really really uh really thought provoked again inspiring remarks from the students thank you so much really appreciate it are there board members who wish to uh ask questions make comments with regard to the resolution go ahead Jess well not really with the resolution but thank you so much for coming and sharing your story advocating for yourselves and your peers thanks for holding us accountable as the adults thank you absolutely that's

018great Jim or Jack or sorry Jim or Kristen do you have something you want to add they're on uh remote yes if I could sure all right um Ash and Roman um thank you thank you thank you so much for sharing with the board and our entire Community um your authentic selves it is so important um that we see and hear and um it is just it's it's an amazing thing so thank you so much um I just I want to say a couple of things if I can so I may take a minute or two if that's all right um the reason that transgender day of visibility or one of the reasons transgender day visibility is so important is we have to be talking about a couple of things um one is with our

019staff I just want our staff to know that supportive Educators save lives end of sentence supportive Educators save lives it has been shown that even knowing that lgbtq allies exists at schools creates a more welcoming safe and environment for students to learn and that's why we're here so if you get nothing else out of this I want staff to remember supportive Educators save lives for parents um I know this can be a difficult thing sometimes that parents may be struggling with there are ways that there are groups out there that can help with an education piece of it and can help with an education piece for staff members too luckily this Saturday P flag will be hosting a what they're calling figuring it out group and that is just a group from 10 30 to

02012 30 that is learning the very basics of what it means to be transgender the vocabulary that comes with that it's an educational opportunity for the entire community so I encourage parents and staff members and community members to join people in that and educate yourself on what this is um to the students um Roman Ash all of your peers I know how scary it is right now um it is disheartening sit down and watch the Nightly News read the paper hear the hateful rhetoric that is just about everywhere I want you to know that you have support I want you to know that you are seen heard loved valued and we need you here we need you here in PSD we need you to continue doing what you're doing to advocate for yourselves for your

021peers continue holding us accountable and for those of you who are are not comfortable coming and speaking that's quite all right find someone in your school who you can talk to find an adult in your life a coach a teacher a parent a family member somebody who you can reach out and talk to because you don't have to go through this alone um those are just some of the reasons why Transit visibility is so important and for the community at large remember this is about our children's lives and about their safety to learn so thank you very much thanks Kristen other thoughts yep go ahead Brian so Ashton Roman uh thank you for being brave for being vulnerable and for modeling for all of us how to be Builders of community rather than Destroyers once

022a month in this room we passionately look to the flag behind me and say the Pledge of Allegiance which talks about all of us collectively standing under one nation indivisibly with Justice for All not for some not for a few not for the most of the majority but justice for all and I question our community do we really mean it when we say it the things that you shared today are basic human rights for us as a society as a community as a school district to see you simply as valid as human to treat you with dignity and with respect to welcome you to make sure that you are belong and are Affirmed and I couldn't be more proud to be in an organization that not only has a day of visibility but takes through

023action not just words ways to be able to support you and others who identify similarly to you so thank you so much for being here you make us very proud all right I think with that then we will call for a vote on the resolution Jill if you would do that please DJ Anderson aye Jim brokish I Nate Donovan I Kristen Draper aye Rob Pederson aye Jessica Zamora aye motion passes 6-0 excellent thank you very much and we're gonna as we've been as we've taken to doing now we're going to have a photo if that's okay uh with the speakers and then we'll resume the meeting foreign thank you so much I'm sorry to be doing this one from home all right thanks again we'll now move on to our next item which is the

024report from our superintendent uh superintendent Kingsley will now make remarks sorry to the board and the community Brian thank you president Pettersen I really really appreciate that I uh good evening everybody it's great to be back I hope everybody had a restful spring break and time to recharge with family and loved ones it's hard to believe that the end of this school year is close by soon sooner than later we'll actually be starting to approach graduations which is unbelievable as I'm visiting with schools and staff members I do want to let everybody know I continue to visualize and first-hand experience have firsthand experiences that there's an excitement and a joy that is taking place across our schools and our school community that deserves to be celebrated it's not happening by accident it's happening by Design

025as I see teachers this week they look a lot more rested than they did the week before spring break but I continue to just be really really proud and inspired by our shared commitment to not only accelerate learning for all students but to be truly committed to ensuring that all members of our staff and all members of our student body feel like they belong and as we close out this school year we're going to continue similarly to that resolution that you just heard and amongst all of the others we're going to make belonging and acceleration of learning very visible to our community and to each other that is our shared commitment as a district um I want to recognize and take a moment to acknowledge the members of our Muslim Community who will be starting

026Ramadan this week we're going to begin fasting and reflecting I want to acknowledge that we see you I want to acknowledge the members of our Christian Community who have been engaged in Lent many of them fasting and reflecting I want to acknowledge that we see you so members of our Jewish Community who in early April will begin to celebrate and have a happy Passover I want to acknowledge that we see you our students and staff represent so many cultures so many beliefs so many traditions and so many identities and it's really really important that everyone every single person is seen as human is Affirmed and belongs here and the work that we do as leaders and as members of this community we all have responsibility in upholding that value system uh you know the worst

027thing that you can do as a superintendent just before spring break is decide you're going to go on a bunch of school visits but as we talk about belonging it's not just acknowledging through my superintendent remarks it's seeing it in action seeing it in the classroom seeing it in our policies and our processes I've had over the last couple of weeks the opportunity to visit many schools and I've set a standard for myself around talking about them that I don't know if I can uphold because there's so many exciting things that are happening a couple schools that I'd like to elevate tonight our cash laputer elementary and middle schools there are special schools that serve a very special Community many of our members of our Mountain community and other members of the surrounding Community there

028we know that that school actually our Middle School just recently served as a voluntary shelter for members of our Mountain community that we're experiencing horrors of fire just a couple of days ago when I have an opportunity to acknowledge the leadership of Alicia Bono the principal at the middle school the work that's happening there around student ownership and agency and empowerment is really super impressive I'm impressed by their peer mediation group and having students take a leadership role in how the school leadership team defines their work in their various interventions they have bypoc Affinity groups for their students for them to feel like they belong and connect but also for their leadership teams and their teachers to learn about their experiences to make sure that they are more inclusive and feel more deeper sense of

029belonging I had an opportunity the second the last day before spring breaks have been visiting LPS Elementary School and Landis Boucher the principal there takes very very seriously accelerating learning and belonging and I had two of their students Bryant and Hattie that gave me a tour and some of the most beautiful things that Brighton Hattie shared with me at CLP Elementary School is that there's no bullies there I really pushed him on that because I know some school is tough but they they really felt that there's a family feel in that school environment I could tell you that you felt you could feel it they actually asked me to perform not perform but participate uh in some meditation exercises and I would tell you that my downward dog pose needs a lot of work and

030I shouldn't have done it in a three-piece suit but I had a lot of fun visiting those particular schools after those visits I had an opportunity to go south and visit trout Elementary School one of our core knowledge schools and I was really proud to see the work that Alyssa Kendall was doing with her team and it was really fascinating to learn that one third of every one of the second grade students at trout elementary school as a first generation American let me say that again one out of three second graders at trout Elementary School is a first generation American and I had an opportunity to participate and observe their celebration of the history of immigration in the United States and listen to second graders seven-year-olds talk about that it was this country's hope Liberty

031and freedom is what inspired their various families to come to this country it was beautiful I had an opportunity yesterday to visit Beatty Elementary School and I have a lot of great things to say about principal Dave Patterson and he's going to be retiring at the end of this year the school is in solid hands and the future is bright but had an opportunity to play math games with a third grade student named Emma she took it really easy on me which I appreciated had an opportunity to go to fourth grade classrooms where they were participating in circles many of our community members who participate in community engagement sessions know the various aspects of circles to ensure that all voices are heard to have students be reoriented to their community in their classrooms is really

032important the day after spring break to make sure that all of them can talk about their experiences talk about what they remembered from what they learned prior to going into spring break and now how do we want to ensure that there's classroom Community moving forward and then I ended my day at Warner elementary school yesterday and principal Hayden camp and that team I did two things I met with six student council members of their fifth grade who take very seriously planning School culture activities and planning activities for their school to make sure people feel like they belong but I had a beautiful story where one of the students asked me if there's one if there's two things you can do as a superintendent what would they be one said have more ice cream days and

033I said I'll try and the other one was I'd like to have more unstructured play in PE and I thought that was really fascinating because as soon as the students suggested more unstructured play the other five fifth grade students fifth grade students immediately and politely said I don't think that's a good idea and I said well why do you think that's not a good idea well then Coach Jay who was our PE teacher wouldn't be able to do his lessons lessons on cooperative play if it's all unstructured Coach Jay wouldn't be able to talk to us about fortitude and empathy and do his unit that is focused on physical education that develops Trust these are fifth grade students that are talking about their teacher in a way that is just absolutely beautiful what makes this

034District strong and we'll continue to talk about our monitoring reports tonight because it's not just great anecdotes that I could tell a great story it's really talking about how do we look at The Human Experience and pair it with what is our data and the signals in our data telling us we've already had de 1.0 the first part of it where we talked about our academic success I'm going to ask our Chief Information officer Madeline NABA in just a second to cue a video that we just sent out to our community to elevate the things that we're going to to that we have been succeeding in across this District academically but tonight we're going to focus on the social emotional aspects of our students and how how much they feel connected it's a both they

035are not on either or but for members of our community that challenge me appropriately so to focus on our Core Business for members of our community who say we need to focus on learning teaching writing and arithmetic I want to let you know that this video is for you Madeline so as I'm queuing this up just one note for everybody in the room because we have a split kind of experience here um in the room it will be a little bit louder because we have the volume queued up on the screens here so that we can have the computers volume feeding to our colleagues on the zoom call so just so you are not alarmed if it is a little bit louder in here than usual hello PSD Community it's Brian we have so much

036to celebrate I'm talking about the kind of Celebration where we shop for the mountaintops about how incredible our public schools are closed on ESD if you only take one thing away from this message I hope it's this our students are learning they're growing and our graduation rates have gone up significantly PSD is one of the strongest school districts in the state of Colorado recently the research evaluation and assessment team finished our annual monitoring report think of it like our District's report card more than 100 pages that show how we're doing around our priorities of literacy graduation with options and mental health and belonging data help us learn how adult practices lead to better student outcomes are there things that we can get better at well absolutely but right now I want to focus on the

037wings a couple of things that we should all be proud of safely put students who have struggled with academic performance are catching up faster than the Statewide and National academic peers and our entire student population has made substantial academic gains over the past year among districts are size we are also a leader when it comes to getting students ready for colleges and careers PSD has some of the highest numbers of students earning college credits and Industry certifications during high school and they're taking Career Technical education courses too that's what graduation with options really means now let's talk about graduation rates a class of 2022 earned psd's highest graduation rate in 16 years let that sink in and PSD students who go on to college continue their success with very high gpas even in their first

038year this is a community celebration a team effort by our students families partner organizations and our amazing staff as we're giving each other high fives and padding each other on the back can I ask for your help let's lead from a place of strength it's not enough for one person to talk about these things let's commit to telling each other about what we're doing well let's celebrate our colleagues in our schools publicly and often our staff our students families and communities should know just how strong we really are we are PSD and that means something thank you so much for all of your support [Music] Thank you Madeline for every employee in the school district that contributed to making those achievement results possible I want to say thank you for your incredible effort your hard

039work and your commitment to this community's youth for every parent in this community that has trusted us with their most prized possessions to send them through our front doors I want to say thank you for your trust for every Community member that has partnered with us volunteered for us to make that happen I want to say thank you tonight's second half of our monitoring report focuses on the humanity of our students how they show up how they feel how they're experiencing our schools and our community it is equally as important as the academic successes that we just talked about and I look forward to having a more robust conversation later this evening thanks again for the opportunity excellent thanks for those remarks Brian um we're going on now to our period of community comment um

040I just want to get my notes right here okay I want to remind us all for the hopes for all our hopes for this section of the agenda the board desires to hear 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 the 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 important to note that the board does not generally respond to remarks made during Community

041comment our lack of response should not be construed to mean that we agree or disagree with what is said or with the description or interpretation of events as presented by any speaker although we may disagree on some things I know that we all want the best educational experiences for our students and as we participate together in this community comment session we should model for our students how to listen how to interact respectfully even with those with whom we disagree and generally how to show up each day with that I'll remind folks that this opportunity for public comment is for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated deadline those people will be called upon to make remarks in the order that they signed up and each speaker will be allowed three minutes

042to address the board our first Speaker this evening is Jim weinbrenner thank you uh welcome sorry let's examine the March 8th article in The Coloradoan about pooter's gender identity policies their headline begins with fact check they start with pooters allegedly quote secret plans to defy parents wishes on transitioning their children's gender unquote The Coloradoan concludes that there is no secret because District policy states that parents can be kept out of the loop at the transgender students request no secrets just following policy The Coloradoan notes parents can request their child's individual gender support form parents have no way of knowing if their child filled out one of these forms but under PSD policy they can request it no secrets just following policy the fact director tells us that PSD cannot provide hormone therapy to their students

043however PST follows Colorado law so 12 year olds are deemed old enough to make these medical decisions without parent knowledge a 12 year old student can obtain gender blockers and start the journey to our general genital mutilation and a lifetime of sterility all without parent knowledge no secrets just following the law suppose you're a 12 year old boy that decided last week he was really a girl trapped in a girl's body did The Coloradoan start at your website and verify how few clicks are required to connect the 12 year old with a sympathetic trans affirming doctor starting gender blockers without parent knowledge I didn't find an analysis from the Colorado one on that one in The Coloradoan Madeleine nolbrit no blood excuse me noted individuals selectively shared a handful of emails and unverified or incomplete

044information as fact we encourage our community to consider the source and the accuracy of that information MS noblett show us the truth release the full email strands and provide complete information so we can know the truth I would just really like to know the truth or support the back and forth dialogue that Mr Peterson promised thank you for listening thank you our second speaker is Susan shably I apologize if I got that wrong please correct me what should I believe okay Susan Shively welcome as was said my name is Susan Shively and I am the mother of two gender non-conforming young adults I am doubly blessed both of my children are recent graduates of PSD and one is about to complete the ascent program at Front Range Community College I am here to commend the

045board of directors for taking time to publicly acknowledge and support transgender day of visibility and for making space for students like Ash and Roman to share a little about their lives it should not require bravery for any trans or gender non-conforming person even a young student to come to this meeting or to attend their school and be fully and openly who they are it should not require bravery because our society should already live up to the values stated in this resolution all students of any gender identity should be welcomed supported included and safe it should not but it does and I think we should all once again commend Ash and Roman for their bravery for speaking here tonight across the country there are school boards who instead of taking time to pass a resolution such

046as this are creating rules and boundaries that purposefully exclude transgender students not here across the country chance transgender students are being told by their schools that they do not belong that they cannot use names and pronouns of their choosing that a core element of who they are their gender identity and its expression is not just unwelcome but invalid not here across the country curricula are being redesigned to erase transgender people by removing books from libraries and prohibiting teachers and counselors from even saying words like gay and transgender not here trans and other non-conforming students will know that every single person of this board tonight pledged to see accept celebrate and protect them as they are not just on March 31st but every day here our children can ask questions and find resources they need to

047thrive socially and academically without hiding fundamental parts of themselves from their Librarians teachers and counselors this is no small thing you've done tonight signing your names to this resolution in March 2023 it matters to transgender students teachers employees within the schoolhouse walls and to the larger Community who will see the examples set here and know that it can be done we can raise the visibility of the transgender community in a way that honors and respects their Humanity and we are all better for it I need to ask you to finish your remarks last sentence again I commend the board for living up to its own motto educate every child every day thank you thank you our next speaker is Jeff after Heidi welcome my name is Jeff fosterhutty from Arlington Colorado I'm here once again

048to express my concerns regarding the potential conflict of interest in pooter school districts Mental Health Services a recent core request revealed that Carolyn Reed a director for both Summit Stone and pooter School District served as a planner for the exclusive invite only state of Our Youth Event where nine Summit Stone employees were invited to participate in the last meeting I brought up questions about director Carolyn Reed's connection to Summit Stone Health Partners and the grant Award of over 1.5 million dollars for addressing mental health services within the district unfortunately my concerns were not acknowledged and no answers were provided the board's lack of response may indicate a broader problem within pooter School District's leadership your silence on this matter is troubling for several reasons number one stakeholder trust a lack of transparency and accountability can

049erode trust making stakeholders question the board's commitment to students best interests stakeholders May worry that similar situations will be ignored for other damaging trust in the district ethical standards number two school boards are expected to adhere to high ethical standards and act with Integrity when it concerns when concerns about potential conflicts of interest or other ethical issues are not addressed it can give the impression that the board is not committed to maintaining these standards number three decision making silence on matters of concern can create doubts about the fairness and objectivity of the decision-making process leading to skepticism and mistrust if the potential conflicts have highlighted in my previous statement are indeed valid they could seriously undermine the Integrity of the mental health services provided to our students this is particularly concerning given the significant increase

050in suicide risk and threat assessments which I mentioned in my last statement the board's failure to address these concerns reflects a pattern of decision making that seems to prioritize the interest of a select few rather than the well-being of our students and it's crucial that our school district maintains the highest ethical standards and ensures that all decisions are made with the best interests of our children in mind and therefore urge the board to do the following one provide a public response to the concerns raised regarding the potential conflict of interest involving director Killen Reed and Summit Stone Health Partners number two make a conflict of interest make those conflict of interest statements and grant information available on the public website for inspection as I requested and number three take proactive measures to ensure transparency and

051accountability in all future decisions affecting our students transparency and accountability are crucial for maintaining public trust demonstrating that the district operates with Integrity openness and responsibility and I hope the board will take these concerns seriously thank you for your attention thank you and our final speaker this evening is Danny Lawrence welcome foreign with you a couple of images I plan on describing in my comments thank you for looking at them the first images of a man standing in a white T-shirt with the words I heart shape the colorblind in the heart you will see the words secretly low than a camouflage way that someone with color blindness couldn't see this is a slide from a presentation that was submitted as psc's exhibit to a pending civil rights investigation for our son's access to this board

052space in that explanation given by PSD apparently you all have an accessibility Guru in the I.T Department that uses this slide in their presentation to staff the materials have been given to Early Childhood communication Finance Athletics language culture and Equity departments yesterday I had a discussion with web aim the company who created the presentation to ask for the slides removal they indicated that it had been removed in 2018 because it was rampantly offensive and that PSD had not agreed to their terms of use or asked to share their proprietary information for instructional purposes they communicated that the presentation lacks meaning without their experts doing the presenting mockery of my son and his medical condition for your instructional purposes is revolting Sawyer struggles daily in general education with color blindness and a lack of ADA and

053a lack of access due to color gradient issues which is why your grayscale packets provided here don't accommodate his Ada requests will this board would this board allow the dissemination dissemination of instructional materials by staff that said it secretly loathed other protected classes like Jewish Or Hispanic students House Bill 21 1110 determined that by July 1st 2022 PSD had to submit to the governor's office their own accessibility standards there should be no reason for using outdated presentations from an organization you didn't get permission from the second picture was given to me in a restorative process with the integrated Services leadership and a handout about communication types the images of six blind men standing around an elephant touching different parts of the animal the parable is trying in a lame and discriminatory fashion to explain that

054each individual would have a different perception based on what part of the elephant they were touching what it fit what it feels to understand is that for visually impaired people perception is about more than not being able to see or tactically touch this ableistic viewpoint fails to consider that smell auditory cues echolocation are excellent examples about how folks with without Vision can perceive I have many blind friends I assure you they could sense and perceive an elephant in a room people are capable of perception without sight after leaving the restorative process and feeling truthfully taunted by the delivery of this handout I confronted the administrator who gave it to me and let me just say it wasn't the learning moment I hoped it had been I want you to see why office of civil rights

055complaints are necessary so again I'm requesting for sensitivity and inclusion training to be made a priority for your staff although you've ignored my previous requests my son is a beautiful human being sorry and he deserves to be treated with dignity and respect and not loathing and ridicule he is more than a learning Parable or a funny meme to educate the ignorant thank you thank you our next action or sorry our next piece of the agenda is board committee reports and remarks would anybody on the board like to make any uh remarks or uh reports nope nope uh Kristen or Jim all right well that was a fast one we will now move on to our consent agenda with any board members like to remove any items from the consent agenda yes go ahead Nate yes

056I would like to remove the 7.3 2022 to 2023 School Bus purchase excellent thank you yes thank you very much we will make that action item 8.1 before the executive limitation policy anything else anybody would like to remove from the consent agenda looks like not in which case can we have a vote oh sorry we have a motion in support of the consent agenda I move that the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for the items remaining on the consent agenda excellent can I have a second looks like DJ Jill would you call a vote on this please DJ Anderson aye Jim brokish I Nate Donovan aye Kristen Draper aye Rob Patterson aye Jessica Zamora aye motion passes six zero excellent thank you again Jill um so now we will move on to our

057action items and the first one is our new one on the school bus purchase policy uh from a procedural point of view can we get a motion uh in support of this action item in a second and then we'll have discussion go ahead Nate thank you yes I move that the Board of Education approve the bus purchase from McCandless Truck Center in the amount of 688 163 dollars for five buses and authorizes the district to execute the appropriate purchase order thank you Nate do we have a second looks like a second from DJ and Nate since you pulled this if you'd like to raise whatever questions or comments yeah I just wanted to have a little bit of discussion about why we decided not to proceed with purchasing or seeking the purchase of electric buses

058rather than diesel or other forms of fuel for them and there was some discussion about cost and I wanted to know all right I just hope for the Public's benefit that we could talk about what the relative costs are what the infrastructure is needed and whether we're continuing to consider that possibility with future bus purchases go ahead Brian so thank you for those questions we have here tonight in attendance our director of Transportation Mr Michael guijano as well as our chief of staff Lauren Hoon I'd like to invite both of you to add any commentary in a response to Mr Donovan's questions Michael uh I guess I'll try to address the first one we're talking about you asked about the cost the current costs for um an EB an electrical school bus is about a

059400 000 over 400 000 and the current cost for a diesel is about 124. that's not even without that's without options so um and then as far as the infrastructures uh above the 400 000 for the for the bus alone uh it's about twenty five thousand dollars for a fast charger and it's one per bus um and then the we also have to estimate the battery replacement in eight years which is another hundred hundred thousand dollars and then uh maintenance right now there is no dollar value on it yet because they're still so new to the to uh to The Fleets and stuff and then they um annual range for uh for electricities about or over the for annual range for the uh electricity is about five thousand to ten thousand dollars for annual per

060bus how does that cost for the electricity compared to the cost for diesel for a bus uh the the fuel uh for a bus and that's about uh it's about five dollars a gallon and the buses usually get about eight miles per gallon and uh I have the calculations for a 16-year life cycle it's about 137 000 in fuel all right thank you nated is there more you want to follow up on here no I just wanted to raise the question because uh I know that there was some interest in it and I'm not sold on it I think it's a little early in the in the uh life cycle of considering electric buses but I just wanted to have the uh figures out there so that we could get an idea of where we're

061going and and I think there was some mention that we're doing a feasibility study to incorporate these costs and estimates and grant money so I appreciate that we're doing that study so that the next time we're buying buses we can uh consider it so thank you thanks Nate Lauren did you want anything okay DJ you had a question yeah I had a a different area of question that I was wondering about and it's the process of selecting the buses and is there other factors that rate versus just being the least expensive uh meaning kind of I'm also wondering why we didn't necessarily look at propane ones versus we went with the diesel also we went with International instead of Thomas or Bluebird and stuff like that is there anything that is there any factors in

062those things well one of the biggest factors like you mentioned was that the cost Internationals the the cheapest one on the market right now but it's also we kind of like to standardize our Fleet so getting them all Internationals that way we can keep more parts in inventory Vice having to buy parts for four different type a model series and also the fact that the engines on Internationals are Cummins and it's kind of that being the same throughout the fleet we can order more parts for that engine model and training's a lot easier for our mechanics because it's only on one engine Vice several engines as far as propane I think right now we're at our limit for propanes just because of the fueling options we have one 10 10K tank and it gets fueled

063about every other day for the 13 or so propane buses we have in the fleet right now all right in the follow-up real quick is that I you just mentioned like 16 years and we have talked somewhere before about like 20 years is kind of our limit usually on the buses is there and you've we're reaching some that are 23 years or more is there what do you think about the life cycle let me put it that way do you what do you think should be the life cycle of these uh I think the life cycle should be about 15 years because when she's once after 15 we start getting to things that are we don't normally change rusted out step Wells uh you know parts that we don't expect to break and and they're

064costly and then by the time you get to that age you're you're looking for the parts and you can't find them and then you have to manufacture them which is even more costly or the fact that you can't get it then you have to retire the bus and it's premature because we didn't plan for it all right thank you any uh yes Nate um on the on the brand or the manufacturer so when you said that we're trying to standardize the fleet does that mean that we're probably at this point we're no longer gonna plan to buy any more Thomas brand buses is that the idea currently this time and for the past couple years Thomas's and Bluebirds have been way more expensive than a international okay so it's a cost thing um and I

065would add that in addition to wear and tear mileage becomes an issue with life cycle so sometimes buses that are used frequently for field trips and Rural routes will accumulate more miles faster so thanks and for those in the viewing audience that don't know Nate is a bus driver for a neighboring district and so has a lot of experience in this area Dave did you want anything I was just going to add that we do ifbs on these invitations for bids and so typically in a bid all things being equal you would go with low cost we do factor in variants that might provide value but typically what we found is these ones have been low cost anything else you want to add Brian oh I'm sorry Jess go ahead I'm looking this way you're

066good [Music] when we're talking about electric buses and how costly they are I also think we should make people aware of what the possible rebates are because I know that's been something we've talked about a lot and that rebate doesn't get us down to where it's comparable but I think that needs to be known so does anybody have that kind of ballpark rebates for electric buses handy for the grants I can go and say say that the last rebate program that uh from last year we would have qualified for about 250 000 for a bus uh we weren't selected it was a lottery system and we weren't selected for it there's another one coming out in uh April it's going to go open up for take uh input for that and see if we can

067get on that one I don't know the grant that's going to come out of that one because they haven't announced it yet what the prices jmrjat or uh I keep saying that sorry jmr Kristen do you have anything else you want to add you want to go Kristen actually just you you asked the question that I was um waiting for so thank you um so my question Michael thanks for your comment that the your Optimum age for the bus fleet or the time we start retiring would be 15 years can you tell us what percentage of our current Fleet is over 15 years roughly in rough numbers uh I could tell you uh let me see what I have here real quick sorry give me a second here real quick um I have about 55

068buses that are greater than 18 years so about a third so a little little less than a third okay okay thank you yes Nate yes assuming the question but I just wanted to thank you for all your service to pooter school districts and the community so appreciate it thanks and and thanks for taking time out of your evening to join us to talk about these things yeah anything else on this all right good I'll just I'll just say that I'm as folks who know me uh know I'm I'm super supportive of electric vehicles and I'm glad that we're going to study uh the feasibility of uh uh uh bringing them into the fleet at the right time at the right price points for the for the fiscal responsibility for the district so thank you Jill

069if you would call a vote on this I'd appreciate it aye aye Nate Donovan aye Kristen Draper hi Rob Patterson aye Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 6-0 excellent thanks again uh Jill so our next action item is now 8.2 which is the executive limitation policy 2.8 uh and may I get a motion with respect to that uh executive limitation well I'll try it oh it's easy now I move the board determined that the superintendent has reasonably interpreted Board of Education policy 2.8 excuse me El 2.8 in the internal monitoring report dated March 21st 2023 and that the evidence presented supports the superintendent's conclusion stated in the internal monitoring report thank you do I have a second ah Jess has got a second there for the public pardon me for the public the executive limitation we're

070talking about is Communications and support to the board you can see the uh details of that executive limitation policy uh on the website under the board directory but fundamentally what it says is the board sorry the superintendent shall support the board in its work um is there any other discussion with respect to this executive limitation policy it looks like not in which case Jill may I get a vote on this DJ Anderson aye Jim brokish I Nate Donovan aye Kristen Draper aye Rob Patterson hi Jessica Zamora aye motion passes six zero thank you again Jill and now we move on to uh the main uh well a main piece of our meeting both in terms of time and as superintendent Kingsley talked about earlier in terms of uh a lot of importance around the social

071emotional uh mental health and belonging of our students and we're looking forward to hearing more about that information from Dwayne and I'll hand it over to you though Brian to introduce the the information president Patterson I really appreciate that here in a moment Dr Schmitz is going to present the second half of our District's annual monitoring report as you remember his first presentation to our board a couple of weeks ago focused on academic data as I suggested in my opening remarks tonight we're going to go over our data that's related to students mental health and their feelings of belonging as a member of our district as a member of our various schools a member of our community and their families members of our community may be wondering right now why is PSD focusing on Mental

072Health why do we believe it's so important in fact why is it one of our district's main strategic priorities this presentation is going to outline the why behind those questions we know as a system and as a community that research shows that students who report having better mental health to better academically they're better socially and emotionally they're simply put more successful this work is not just about promoting emotional well-being it's about promoting community and it's also about doing it in partnership with families and with Community Partners to ensure that all of our students have healthy connections with each other with our staff and with their families the data that you're about to see and the story behind them that Dr Schmitz will share here shortly are incredibly important in fact that would tell you that

073they're Mission critical that we lean into they help us to understand what adult practice is can ultimately help improve in these student outcomes that we're aspiring to attain as a community the data that are being used by teams developing the district strategic plan are also using this data to ensure that our work is headed in the right direction so we're paying a lot of attention to this as a school system and if there's anything that I want any member of our community or a member of our staff that's paying attention to this presentation right now I want us to all remember that these data points represent human beings they represent children young adults and we need to make sure that we're committed to supporting all of them not just in their academic success but in

074their well-being and in their Humanity with that I'll turn it over to Dr Schmitz welcome I'm glad you're here thank you superintendent Kingsley okay very happy to be here for part two of our monitoring report I'm proud to be able to give voice to this information which is really the voice of our students our families and our staff really our community around these important issues so let me see if this is not working this is not working real well yeah so if somebody can either click those or figure this out thanks okay thank you so much um so picking up from last time it's kind of interesting doing a two-part presentation in the evenings thanks um really our purpose tonight as superintendent Kingsley mentioned is we're going to provide a mental health and belonging outcomes

075kind of update that's tied to our modern report our de 1.0 ends as well as our priorities right we're going to update um on the associated PSD actions that were taken around these different ends to achieve them and we're going to increase cohesion and understanding throughout our system around our improvement process okay excellent so tonight this slide again is just to kind of lay a little context the other night we talked about literacy and graduating with options and tonight we're going to zero right in our mental health and belonging this slide is just kind of There To Remind us that what we really want to talk about is adult practices because the adult practices are what we believe influence the students the student outcomes and we're going to measure specific outcomes and tonight we're going

076to focus on the ones that are written in red at the bottom of that slide around mental health and belonging there's two main sources for really three outcomes that we're going to measure and we set targets around one of them one of the sources is the healthy kids Colorado survey which happens every other year Statewide and the and the other source is our local Student Connection survey which includes both student connection subscales but it also includes five sub-scales on social emotional learning so those will be our data sources we'll work through tonight just a real quick overview of the Target attainment because this is part of the monitoring report so we set targets and we monitor each year and this is part of our systematic Improvement efforts so we have three measures and targets that

077we set with regard to mental health and belonging and if we meet one of those three as you can see and that's the cell composite score is eighty percent or better which it has been for the last three years but hadn't been prior to that we'll see a little more detail in just a moment and the two Targets we have around student connections and the healthy kids Colorado survey money mental health subscale we did not meet we also see for the two of the three target areas for which we have data for multiple years we actually see a slight downward movement in those metrics so again that just supports frankly it supports the idea that PSD move this some energy into supporting students in the mental health and belonging space which is why we do

078this kind of data review and update and Report we're about to launch into a lot of survey data on the last presentation we were looking at achievement data and college you know post post High School data and all kinds of things that were very concrete and measurable we're going to look at survey data tonight so I had a few things I wanted to talk to you real quick with the board and the listening public whenever you start looking at survey data people want to know how representative is it can we trust this is there a signal in the noise is this and so on and so forth right so keeping in mind a few things all the survey data we're looking at tonight the respondents number in the thousands not in the hundreds but in

079the thousands so we're looking at student voice from thousands of PSD students we're looking at um on both the connection survey and in the healthy kids Colorado survey no matter how much survey data you collect it is still a sample you really virtually never get the full population that you're trying to make inferences about right so it's a sample it's just a question of is it a big enough sample is it representative enough and so I would say just to the board tonight that we can rest assured that with the thousands of students that have responded to these different surveys we have plenty of information to trust that we're seeing real signals in this data okay with with regard to the inferences I just mentioned you know you're making inferences about a population the student

080population of PSD or possibly broad more broadly the Youth of our community okay and this is just a sample that we're using to glean some insights as we do that tonight we're going to see some information there's going to be some places in this presentation where statistical significance is flagged so I really quickly wanted to hit that like what is that why do we do that we do that because we've gathered a sample of information we're making an inference about a population we know that we don't have perfect information and so sometimes we're trying like tonight we're going to do a lot of this where we compare two populations and we're wondering is one population really different than the other population not the samples the populations to answer that question you're really looking at how

081different are the sample data points are they different enough are they different are they spread far enough apart that we would believe doing some kind of rigorous testing that the differences exist in the population itself not just the samples so when we flag things as statistically significant that's what we're saying another way to say that briefly is that the differences are vast enough they are unlikely to be due to chance alone if they're if they're different but not statistically significant it could just be chance variation but if they're significant the differences are unlikely to be due to chance alone and they're likely to exist in the population this is important because we'll just hit that later so I just wanted to cover that up front okay the last thing I wanted to mention is that

082this presentation probably more than anyone I've ever done it's going to feel kind of unnatural not to stop and really talk more deeply about some data that we're going to just see briefly so I just want to remind the viewing public that the board is read the 119 page monitoring report and has the full set of information and my job tonight is just to kind of get some shared understandings into the room relatively efficiently and then we're going to open up for a conversation on all the data so I just want to sit up front because it's going to feel a little bit strange to just move through data that's really compelling and that we want to speak to more deeply okay so moving into the student connection survey information we set a target of

08390 percent okay on on some of this connections data that we want our students to feel connected while they're at school to adults to their peers into their interests and passions so we we gain insight into that by giving an annual Student Connection survey we had a response rate of 74.4 percent overall that's 14 132 respondents that's a lot of information that's a lot of student voice the you can see from this slide that the response rates are higher for elementary and then they go down a little bit for middle school and down at the high school level we've seen that every single year we've done that and that would be typical of probably any survey that we'd give out to these different groups and there's a lot of reasons for that I won't go

084into tonight but rest assured all those response rates even by level exceed 60 percent which is kind of the cut point that the healthy kids Colorado survey the state agency that does that gives us as guidance to say as long as you're hitting 60 or more response rate you've got good information to look at so we do hit that in all these and I also want to point out that there's you know 3600 to 5700 basically responses per level so even by level there's a lot of information we give this student this survey to Fourth through 12th grade students while they're in school okay it's an online survey the higher the response rates the more confident we are that the information represents the whole population that's why we spend a few moments to talk about

085that at the outset well PSD sets a Target on our overall composite score which is kind of an aggregate of the three different subscales to hit ninety percent or better so in other words we want 90 of the students responses to items to be affirmative that they feel connected and again those subscales were connected to adults connected to their peers connected to their interests and passions you can see from that black line graph on the left that we're traveling right at about 84 percent and it's been it's gone down a little bit but really it's um it's about 84 percent year after year after year well we set our Target at 90 percent which is about five percentage points higher than that and we haven't seen the bump up that you'd expect and that we

086hope to see with the successful implementation of the Strategic plan some of this strategic plan items are built specifically to help our students feel more connected while they're at school so this is a nice Baseline set of data against which we can measure our Effectiveness with that on the right side you see three different colored lines and what they represent are the three sub scales I've mentioned a couple times now we can see that very consistently every year the student to adult subscale is the highest scoring so kids respond positively that they feel connected to adults while at school the next highest one is the student-to-student connections or you know connections with their peers and then the lowest scoring subscale is the students to their interests and passions while at school I just will remind

087everybody that the year 2020 yeah 2020 that's in there right now that was very much a covet year and so that survey year had a lower response rate and there were other anomalies which kind of in kind of you can see in those bumps up on the upper two subscales and a bump down on the lower one okay what's really of Interest like what am I pulling out of the monitoring report to really highlight with us tonight and get into the room I want to go back to something superintendent Kingsley just said I want to I want to really cement that for us academic excellence and progress are positively correlated with mental health and belonging that's a fact and you're looking at data that affirms that fact because what you're looking at in those line

088graphs that line graph up there is each colored line that you see across those six years of data collection on the connection survey are the are the are the outcomes for the student to adult connections that kids feel so higher percentages indicate higher levels of feeling connected Broken Out by what we call the levels of support system and just a super quick recap on The Last Mile report I showed you some graphs I'm not going to show you tonight to remind you that you know the levels of support exceptional outcomes students they're traveling along on the maps data and the CMAs data and the Acadian State and all the different data We Gather and in the 95th percentile and higher on their achievement outcomes right it's kind of like gifted talented Terrain the additional support

089group is traveling consistently below the 35th percentile so those are the two extremes okay the meat outcomes or or meet targets or met targets is traveling right between those two zones they're anywhere from the 35th up to but not including the 95th percentile consistently so that's that wide meets Zone okay keep in mind this is all academic outcome data from multiple years it's going into these determinations okay it's not one test on one day the team awareness group they have scores that bounce between the meet met targets and the additional support and that's why we call it team awareness so so that a local team can identify which group do they better fit into I took a minute just to run that down because here's what's important to understand those colored lines designate different levels

090of academic performance that are longitudinal trajectories of either excellent performance relative to peers or lower performance relative to National peers not just local peers okay the fact that they layer like that that they layer cleanly that the blue line of exceptional outcomes is always traveling higher on the percentage of response that's positive that's affirmative around these items of student connections to adults shows you that there's a correlation between academic outcomes and students self-reported feelings of connection can we all see that pretty clearly and when we say correlation positive correlation truthfully all that means is as one one variable increases so does the other so obviously what this is saying is as students feelings of connection increase so do their academic outcomes students would lower academic outcomes tend to have lower self-reported feelings of connection that's

091all I mean by positively correlated okay we see um we see a similar outcome for the student to student connections I'll move a little more quickly through this one it's the same picture it's amazing how that just layers the academic with the connections data but this is student to student connections and I would say that not only is there a relationship but this pattern kind of validates all the conversation this community not just our district has been having around creating and enhancing safe spaces for our youth to connect right because as this data showing us that as student students that feel more connected to other students also do have higher academic outcomes now just to be clear I'm just saying this language in the terms of Association and correlation I'm not talking causation because I

092don't want anyone of you in public to be like that guy was overstepping his bounds I'm just saying there's a clear Association so when we do student to interest connections we see the same exact type of an association between academic outcomes and connections to the students interests and passions it's a lot it's less clear in this one right than it was in the other two nonetheless it's there this piece indicates that we may want to and if you remember of the three different subscales this was the subscale the students were being least affirmative around that kind of indicates that PSD and our community at large is putting their their energy in the right place if we're enhancing opportunities so we'll be talking about that later when we talk about the Strategic plan and different actions

093PSD is engaged in okay we're going to switch gears because one of the other targets that we formally have where we have three targets regarding mental health and belonging the second one is around social emotional learning and that Target is that we hit 80 or better on the composite score from the cell component or composite score of the connection survey one might ask why is one of the targets set at 80 80 and the other one said it 90. should have pointed this out when we're looking at the other one each of those were set back several years ago when we were when we set that Target it was about five percentage points higher than where we had been consistently traveling now on the connections data we're still traveling around that 84 percent and our

094Target remains at 90 we haven't hit it yet but on the social emotional learning Target we had been traveling at around 75 percent right pretty consistently so we set the target at 80 and sure enough we did put some energy and some effort behind this and we saw that bump up and we sustained that bump but you can also see that we've got a slow downward Trend back toward that 80 percent Target so if we're not careful we're going to slide back under that Target but that kind of tells you how we set those targets and just because we hit the target for social emotional learning like one year and then two years I don't think we want to just dramatically you know automatically bump it up we actually want to see that we can

095sustain that level then we should talk as a as a board about maybe we want to up that Target the line graphs on the right are again just breaking out that composite score on the left across those five different sub scales so in in social emotional learning we use the castle standards and we have a real simple survey with about five to maybe seven items per subscale on those uh five different sub scales and I guess what you can see from that is there are differences just like they were on the connection survey on how students respond to those different sub scales so they're not all measuring the same thing in other words the lowest two that you see there are self-awareness and relationship so anything our system can do to support students competencies that's

096what they call these things in self-awareness and relationship would be a move in the right direction to know what those sub scales really are and how we're measuring them I would encourage anybody listening to this if they're interested to get online and look at the connection survey it's there and you can see the exact items we're asking within those subscales okay just like we did before if I take this cell or the sorry this didn't click if I take the cell composite score and then I look at those sub scales that make up that composite score broken out by the additional or the levels of support you know designations you can see a somewhat similar pattern where the exceptional outcomes in met Target students are self-reporting higher levels of these social emotional learning competencies this

097one is the self-awareness and it's it's the lowest one along with relationship I'm just going to move through these kind of quick because the point I'm just trying to make and reiterate for us is there is a definite Association a relationship between these kind of social emotional learning and student connections survey responses and sort of academic trajectories we're based on you know a standardized assessment scores from a body of evidence over multiple years okay so I think that's just uh several slides that are making the same overall point just broken out so we can see that it's true across those different subscales we're going to move in now we're leaving the connection survey and we're going to move into the healthy kids Colorado survey and spend a little bit more time here the healthy kids

098Colorado survey is given to our middle school and our high school students not our elementary students in pooter School District we really gave it to all of our schools and we choose to do that the state selects a certain number of schools that they say are representative we want this information so we actually gave it through all our schools which are listed there the response rates are 66 percent or 5870 respondents for high school in the in the most recent survey which was 2122 and for Middle School the response rate was 78.2 percent at 4920 so I mentioned those two sets of numbers just to point out again there's a lot of information here of student voice we can count on this as giving us some meaningful signals that we are right to respond to

099okay something I thought was interesting I put in there in blue on the bottom note I don't know if you can read it but when I was looking at well what's the state's level of response in Middle Schools it turns out Poudre school district has 4920 respondents of a total in the state for the Middle School level of the survey of 7436 so in other words our responses in our district are 66 or two-thirds percent of all the responses for middle school so as we go through the rest of this presentation I just want to point that out because I'm going to do some PSD versus State just to give some context and I'm only doing that for the high school because if I did it for Middle School it'd be kind of like PSD

100versus PSD and everything would look like Hey we're doing exactly the same as the state which wouldn't be exactly um you know honest or whatever I don't know meaningful I guess is a better word okay before we launch into this just a really quick slide because a lot of we're going to look what we're going to look at is break down by a demographics just to remind folks our total enrollment and PSD and this includes our charter school students is 30 105 students you can see there the breakdown by ethnicity and you can see counts in blue and percentages next to that okay you can also see our breakdown by things like free reduced special education and so on various important subgroups we often talk about some of these subgroups are highlighted in the slides

101we're going to look at so I'm just providing it here in case a person wanted to go back and take a look at it and because you just passed the resolution you passed and we just had the presentations we had I want to point out because I don't know if this is common knowledge and these two numbers I'm going to these percentages I'm gonna give you right now hold pretty consistent for both our middle school and our high school populations on the Colorado healthy kids Colorado survey in this most recent surveys the first year they asked these questions so it's the first time we've had this kind of information but our non-straights gay lesbian students group is self-reported as large as 17.4 percent of the overall student population and if you kind of just back

102that up and look at that compared to some of the other special groups we've called out above you would come to recognize like that's a substantial student group right size wise I'm talking about in the genderqueer group is self-reporting at 4.1 percent of our population so again that's a substantial number of students that's 1 234 students approximately in our district and for this gay lesbian group that's about 5 238 students that's a lot it's a lot of kids we care about okay so let's look at some outcomes first of all to set the table right for this all of the outcomes we look at are disturbing they are eye-catching they are disturbing and so we're going to do some comparisons between PSD and the state and by doing that we're not trying to say oh

103gosh look at our numbers are a little bit better than the state let's all Pat ourselves in the back we're not doing that we're just pointing out so we have out of nine items on the mental health subscale in the healthy kids Colorado survey out of nine items PSD scores more favorable on three and it happens to be the only in the exact three items in the healthy kids color out survey that are worded in the positive so like a higher percentage is a better thing but the other six items on the mental health subscale are worded such that a higher percentage would be more disturbing more concerning you with me so at any rate the three that we score slight you know slightly better than the state on is stress level is manageable most

104days at 54.8 percent think about it that's 45 percent of our over all population saying that is not manageable that's concerning the second item have an adult to go to for help with serious problems we score at 76.1 percent of our students say they have an adult that's a very good protective Factor but that also means that we have 24 percent of our kids who are saying they do not have an adult to go to that's concerning the third item is can can talk to a friend about feelings 58 percent but that means that 42 percent do not they say they do not have that that's concerning PSD is committed to supporting the mental health of all students so they can live their best life and effectively learn that's worth reading okay so real quickly

105I'm not going to walk us through every one of these tables I'm just providing this and these tables are color coded as we go through them the items in the upper left are color-coded green because as I mentioned a moment ago those are the three items that are worded in the positive so higher percentages are a good thing you want kids to affirm that those statements but the lower four items one two three four are not color-coded green because they're they're written such that higher percentages are not a good thing and then I have some I'll call it pink shading on the table that kind of indicates where psd's numbers are relative to the state and what our counts are and where the numbers are concerning and eye grabbing okay and just to point something

106out on all of the lower four items pooter School District scored higher which is not a good thing than the state overall so again this kind of supports our energy and our effort towards supporting students in their mental health and belonging space okay when we look at differences when we look at mental health we see differences based on identity okay and so I want to point something out this is another theme to look for so the First theme tonight that I wanted to get into the room so we're all making sure we talk about it when we get to conversation the first one just to remind us was that academic excellence in progress are positively correlated with mental health and belonging that I think that's pretty clearly established the second one we're going to see

107right now which where we already just saw community-wide community-wide not just within the district multiple indicators tell us that youth all youth need our support in the space of mental health and belonging okay that's some of those numbers we were just looking at and now what we're going to look at where we're going to we're going to delve down into segments of our population is that there are segments of our youth community that are facing bigger challenges and less favorable outcomes related to mental health and belonging and that these differences are significant and by that I mean statistically significant okay so for example this slide that I've had up here for a moment differences Exist by student ethnicity genderqueer non-binary gay lesbian Hispanic and black students are experiencing higher levels of all three of those

108bulleted items not having an adult to go to for help with serious problems avoiding usual activities due to sadness or hopelessness and attempting suicide in the past 12 months compared to the PSD population overall those those items are significantly different for those populations I just mentioned again I'm not going to read the whole table off but I do just want to point out the really dark red in those columns those are indicating significantly less favorable outcomes and the lighter pink are just indicating less favorable outcomes just not significantly so and the The Columns in there the First Column really where there's results is PSD overall then there's a genderqueer non-binary column followed by a gay lesbian column followed by Hispanic column then black or African-American column in the final column is Asian students and so

109these are just some of the subgroups that we had a big enough end count that healthy kids Colorado provided that data to us for some of the other subgroups we have the and count gets so small they don't they don't provide that data so I just want the viewing public not to feel like we're showing some groups but not others okay it's just a pattern that we want to notice now we're Switching gears a little bit to the racism subscale seven percent of PSD students reported experiencing racism you should pause and just ex just sit with that for a second that and it is in and of itself is very concerning right and worthy of our efforts and our strategic plan being built around addressing that but then you go on and you and you

110look at it broken down by different groups of students 31 of black or African-American students are indicating experiencing racism 24 of Asian students and 20 percent of Hispanic students and all those rates are significantly higher than that seven percent rate overall so racism is the real issue that we need to address okay when we look at racism those racism items that are the first item is treated badly or unfairly in school because of their race or ethnicity in the past 12 months the second item is we're assumed less intelligent because of the race or ethnicity in the past 12 months and the third item is saw family members treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity in the past 12 months those are the three items in that top table and likewise in the bottom

111table the top table is comparing PSD to the state the bottom table is all within PSD but it's PSD and then broken down by different subgroups I just include that for completeness so you have the data to look at but basically those bulleted statements I just read were pulled off of that table so racism is it exists in our system and it it's affecting some groups of students more than others we're going to switch gears to bowling 13.7 percent of PSD students indicate being bullied on school property bullying has been an issue for for a long time that school districts all over the country contend with but 13.7 is the PSD estimate from the healthy kids Colorado survey High School respondents and again when we look down below it's a different set of subgroups 37

112percent of gender queer non-binary students indicate being bullied 23 percent of gay lesbian students indicate being bullied 24 percent of black or African-American students indicate being bullied so those are the three subgroups that popped out the most as having the largest differences from even the PSD shocking value of 13.7 all of those rates are significant they're not which means again what it means that there is a systematic difference it's not it's not chance alone you're not it's not flipping coins there's something driving that is what that means okay now this item's interesting and you have to be careful as you read it and interpret it because it starts out if teased and then it goes on regarding race in the past 12 months so it's kind of a subset of the data set if kids

113clicked that they have been teased then they go on to this item which asks them have you been teased specifically because of your race and ethnicity okay so it's a subset nonetheless of the um so 24 a quarter of our students basically have been teased and and they were teased being because of race okay that one 25 percent jumps to 90 percent among Asian students 70 percent for Hispanic students and 96 percent for black students and just to be clear that doesn't mean that ninety percent of Asian students were teased about their race it means ninety percent of Asian students that have been teased were teased because of their race nonetheless those numbers indicate that and all those rates are significantly higher than the overall PST rate they all indicate that we should do everything

114in our power to educate our students and minimize teasing in other forms of really discrimination okay this table is again provided just to visually show you the patterns from which I'm pulling those bullet points so that a viewer can go back later and look more carefully if they want to I'll remind the viewing public these materials are all made public the day of the board meeting okay mental health and belonging PSD staff voice so so far we've gone heavy into two student surveys with thousands and thousands of students giving us their thoughts we're Switching gears and we're going to look at our outcomes from a staff survey which is the teaching and learning conditions Colorado survey from 2021-22 which is the most recent survey 70 of PSD staff indicate they are moderately or extremely concerned

115about the decrease in student emotional well-being health happiness and comfort so the students are kind of signaling this is a big concern for them the staff are validating that they see it as well what do families tell us so that we have the family engagement survey we're going to look at a couple pieces of information real quickly one thing we ask is we ask parents about the above and beyond are there students experiencing their Above and Beyond in our school district and without be laboring it too much and going into too much depth above and beyond is basically students um you know learning living growing breathing accomplishing doing great things my own personal children each had big events throughout PSD and clubs and things they were part of that helped develop them in tremendous ways

116they I can say Dwayne Schmitz is a parent of three PST students they have all attained their above and beyond thanks to pooter School District in very different ways it's been awesome but what we asked parents that in the family engagement survey and what we see here is that back in 2018 19 in that table on the right we were at like 85 86 86 percent across elementary school middle school high school took a big dip in 2021 and that was no doubt due to the pandemic a lot of activities got slowed down and they felt different we were all wearing masks we had all kinds of protocols we just heard earlier tonight from one of our band teachers that music just is still rebounding and that this was probably the first year that felt

117pretty normal so anyways we see that in these numbers right but then in 2223 we see we're back up to 82 80 and 83 percent we're not quite back up to pre-pandemic level levels but we're real close the reason I put the above and beyond part in here is that's again a protective Factor just like having an adult a student can talk to on trust being engaged in activities that support your experiencing and expanding your horizons and your above and beyond that's a protective factor for mental health and well-being and student connections and belonging accessing activities out of school because it's not it's a commuter community and these kids were talking about our communities kids it's yes we're the school district but we're a community so 46 percent of the Hispanic families on our survey

118indicate that their children are not taking advantage of opportunities outside of school private lessons and so on this was 35 percent across all PSD students so to the extent that we can continue as a community to build these opportunities again that's energies going in the right direction I want to hit a high point here volunteerism interestingly I get to work with the the board of education's student advisory Council and it's been awesome they tell us all kinds of valuable stuff right well one thing they brought up in a meeting a couple meetings ago was that they felt they noticed that there was a reduction during the pandemic era in the amount of clubs and things that were happening and available to kids that all the way from elementary on up and as they talked about

119it the students they noticed they surfaced that they thought it was probably because there was less volunteerism going on less people were wanting to come in with masks and all these things going on and they were right that's true that had gone down a bit but I'm happy to report is on the rebound and so we now have this Raptor system of data collection going on and one of the benefits of that is that we have this kind of hard data we're looking at in this slide that we had 3569 active Volunteers in PSD right now that we have 20 866 860 volunteer sign-ins this school year so that's incredible that's 64 631 volunteer hours logged into our schools that's a big bounce up from last year and and when you start valuing that and

120I guess there's a study in Colorado at what that might be valued out and they came up with 31.51 that's a two million dollar plus value add from our community and our volunteers our parents so I just wanted to put that in here and give a shout out say thanks and let's keep that going because that is again a protective factor for all the things we're talking about tonight with regard to mental health and belonging okay psd's priority actions I'm just I'm on the family survey how many families responded and kind of what were the demographics and how many languages was that survey given in I don't think I talked about that tonight yet and I don't even think that may not be in the modern report itself and I'll have to look it up

121so I don't just say things that aren't totally accurate so I'll have to look up some of that information for you but I'm happy to do that yeah but it's a lot yeah it's not just a few it's like every year it's really gets quite a good response but I'd be happy to get back to the board with some detail on that okay okay thank you yeah for sure I appreciate that question um and maybe I just jumped okay okay nope this is good this is where we want to be I'm just going to hit the tip of the iceberg here because then we're going to invite up some friends and we're going to have a richer conversation with people that know more than I do about all that's going on in the system but

122real quickly I know that Brian Kingsley and others have gone out and interacted with lots of different student groups including the Board of Education and this is just a quick summary of some of the things we heard that the students are telling us that they think they have needs and these are them regarding the stuff we're talking about tonight opportunities to explore interests and passions remember we saw that that was a sub skill that always travels the lowest and dipped during the most during the covet time so that kind of aligns right spaces of belonging think of that presentation we heard earlier tonight kids just want to know when they show up into spaces that they're welcome for exactly who they are and when they show up they bring their whole selves and they're they're

123invited and they're there access to Mental Health Providers we've heard about lots of different you know wait times improved awareness of mental health services and destigmatization so we're actively working on that training for students on self-regulation and coping skills that's somewhat in alignment with the social emotional learning competencies they call them right that's in that's somewhat in alignment with that all of those things we're going to see reflected in our strategic plan as that continues to get rolled out some ways in which we're responding to these expressed needs psd's marketing campaign and elevating awareness and Mental Health Resources for students Madeleine is probably the best authority to speak to that one tonight if we get interested training for students on self-regulation and coping skills like the DBT training is just an example Marlene and her

124team are well suited to talk to that one tonight creating and renovating spaces of belonging one example is the Cooper home adjacent to Rocky Mountain High School and there are others but actual physical locations for kids to get together and have safe spaces to connect increasing access to pursue interest because we continue to see that as you know everyone wants we all want that every parent in the community wants spaces and trainings and things for the students that match up with their interests and passions so partnering with Community organizations to expand access to Safe spaces for youth I Brian Kingsley is the best person to speak to that one probably because there's a lot going on there the PSD Futures lab expanding career Pathways increasing apprenticeships CTE and dual enrollment and so on and so

125forth there's a lot happening there and has been happening in the last couple years that we're proud of so at this point I'd like to invite my partners that are here tonight to be part of this conversation to come on up and turn it back over to the board and Mr Patterson and thank you very much thanks Dwayne thanks very much welcome to the principles that are joining us we appreciate you taking time out of your evening I know it's uh after a busy day and another one going to be tomorrow so thank you very much Brian did you want to do anything to introduce this okay fine um I actually what I I think I'd like to do to make sure that we get the principal voice in the room is give each of

126you a brief opportunity uh to share your perspective on the the data and information that Dwayne is uh provided an overview on and if we wanted to do that with particular reference to your own schools that's great or if you want to do it from a broader perspective that's fine so if we could start with you Don that'd be great if you'd introduce yourself to that it'd be terrific there we go don cottonik principal at Leicester Middle School two big themes were kind of in my head in regards to what we do at lesser to make an impact number one is talking to our staff about Mental Health consistently mental health for staff cannot be an awareness week in January it has to be every staff meeting every leadership team meeting every individual mid-year conference

127meeting with a staff member and we ask them how are you doing what support you need how is life outside of this place how are you taking care of yourself giving them permission to take care of themselves because they will not do it if they don't have permission from their boss to take a day to say no to something if you model that if you allow that if you say it's okay they're more apt to do it then you start to build trust and then Staff feel supported by their their admin and when you have staff that feel supported and refreshed those 60 to 70 staff members at Lester then have the capacity to impact positively the 750 students they have the capacity to coach to advise a club to build a strong relationship to

128go above and beyond for a kid because they're not burned out and I believe this year we've done a really good job mentioning mental health at every single meeting and really building that rapport with staff and I see it in the kids this year the second thing that came to my mind was how you handle situations that arise every single day giving students always a voice making space for them whether it's a silly concern in your mind or a very serious concern providing them a voice and with families too whether it's an email or a phone call actually picking up the phone and calling them inviting them into problem solve making sure that you're problem solving together to come to a resolution that best impacts the kid and admitting when you made a mistake goes

129a long way with a family and with a student I believe we've done a great job at that this year and we're starting to build a reputation that this is a staff this is an admin team that kids can go to that kids can trust families are vouching for us I believe we have positive results on our survey because of mental health of staff and how we're coming with resolutions for issues that arise on a daily basis thanks Don appreciate your remarks on the work you're doing in the building Josh good evening I'm Josh Ritchie principal Boltz middle school and I really it's his chance to celebrate things that my staff are doing in my building and one thing I really want to highlight is um restorative circles and what we've done with restorative circles

130and I think this group has heard about that um really the work that Leah Hager has done in the district and with my Stacy souders who works with me and that team went created a circles team developed a scope and sequence and we have 14 days out of the year that we flip our schedule and all kids go to a circle and during that time is it creates that safe place for kids and we start easy with easy questions like what's your favorite food what's your you know and that over time Progressive getting excuse me getting deeper and deeper and but what that does is that builds capacity for students to talk about emotions and I'm going to say that with um in humility as a product of a male of the 80s where we

131didn't talk about emotions we were told to not talk about emotions and it's still prevalent with our students today and so this is our first year in that and you see that six months in where students want to problem solve by going hey can we have a restorative Circle to problem solve and and still students are initiating that and the exciting thing about that is that's happening in elementaries across the district so as that capacity builds over years though that skill set will exist with our kids to be able to problem solve in those circles and then another thing this is um I don't know we're piloting a program called Bloom sites and so we get that that survey data every other year right for some of it and so Bloom sites is similar to

132that but it's we're piloting it in-house and we use it quarterly where it asks two two things it's students what are your friends in the building and what are those connections and it gives us this grid of like hey I'm friends with Don and it shows me that but Don might not be friends with me we're working on it but it shows that in this and so as a teacher I get to see this grid of the connections that are so intricate and middle school and those Middle School connections and then also it asks some of those other levels of or do you feel safe at school and it gives that that Red Zone versus green zone then my counselors are able to Target those kids in the moment versus every other year so quarterly

133we can do that intervene quarterly and make sure those students are feeling safe and connected and and then just one thing for me that I think we don't talk about enough is and I'm going to say is I have a little app on my phone that says my phone's been open two hours today it's a free app and it gives me the minutes and my challenge to myself and my families to be on my phone less I'm going to tell you racism hatred exists on this phone with our kids in the middle school and high school and the things that happen in apps such as Snapchat and Tick Tock is is very dangerous where we're giving kids who don't have complete frontal lobes access to all information on the internet and hatred that exists on

134that and I think if our survey data started to ask them those questions we would see some of that and so I'm going to challenge my staff and my students in the fall to download a free app that keeps you off of your phone and if you get more minutes than me I'm growing out my stupid haircut so that I'll shave my head and I'm going to buy food and I'm all those things to celebrate it because I think this is a pandemic that we're not aware of what's really happening right now with our kids thank you thanks very much thanks for sharing your perspective on that really appreciate it it's it's something we've talked about before and you spoke strongly to it thank you Christine thank you for having me um I'm Christine Hendricks

135I'm the principal at tavelli and we have really worked really hard to build a culture of belonging at our school it's it's just an embedded in the work that we do every day with our students and with our staff we really focus on building relationships with everybody that's kind of the center of the work that we do every day is looking at how are we building those relations and those connections with kids on a daily basis our classrooms our students will tell you they're like a family and part of that is because the students have the capacity to do a social contract is if it's how they operate in their classrooms they also think the staff is very supportive and they they go through and ask questions and they have a growth mindset and they

136support each other and those things but they also teachers greet their students every day before they go into their classroom and they either have cute little handshakes or different things but they get a feel the minute those kids walk in the door who's having a good day or who might be a little bit struggling that day and the other piece is that we do morning meetings and good things our kids are constantly sharing every day things that are happening that are going well and that's another way that we can look at how things are going in the classroom or with this particular student one of the key things that I believe that really make a difference at tavelli is we have a 1.8 we have a 0.8 counselor with a 0.1 school psychologist when having

137that meet those those needs of those kids and I will tell you that they each bring different things to the table when working with kids and it's super important this year we also added a para for SEL to work with our kids as we built protocols and the calming room and calming boxes to help the kids self-regulate and those kind of things to teach them those skills when they're not they're having a hard time so those are some of the things some of the the things that we do to build that capacity with our students we do tiger training which is teaching our kids the expectations of our school school so there are there aren't unknowns you know they don't they know how to behave they know what they're expected of them we also do

138a kindness challenge we have student ambassadors when we have parents tutor our school we always have a student a fourth or fifth grade student go with a staff member on a tour like so for example we had a parent today looking at our school for school of choice and we always like it to be what's the perspective from a student about our school what does a student say that sells our school how do they feel about their school and so really it's not Christine's school it's really their school so we're trying to make it their school we also have a dream team in the mornings which is a peer tutoring our fourth and fifth grade students are peer-tutoring our younger students that happens Tuesday through Friday those kids show up and their those kids are

139teachers to them they're mentoring them they're building those connections um we do restorative practices also one of the fun things that we do is we do a positive office referral and I can't tell you how many times I've had a positive office referral and the student comes down to my office we call their parent together I think the parent thinks they're in trouble but when I finally tell them this is a great thing then the parents are usually crying on the other end because they're so proud and so happy of that but that's that connection we're constantly at the universal level getting parents involved and collaborating with them when we have concerns about their kids we also do a golden Bell to support our custodians we do a golden trash can so our kids are

140doing nice things for other people so they can see that so those are some of the things you know we do our binders that we you all hear about and so forth but you know in our binders we do a lot of SEL work and we ask our kids to identify five adults in our building who they can go to if they need help and that's really key because when I they come to my office I'll say who are your five people you can go to and they can tell me who their five people are and so and if they don't have five people we go help them find five people so it's really important to do that um our goal is really to empower our students to take ownership in their learning but also

141their social emotional needs and to build that leadership you know and then as we get into tier two we're looking at small groups um you know one-on-one this is a lot where our our counselor and school psych are doing and special ed actually are doing a lot of um like me like programs to support our students but it's also we always build a really strong mtss program or process for these kids because if we don't have a plan in place then it becomes loose and we want it to be where that we everybody's on the same page so we really really look at everything as a team approach we try to figure out we kind of like wrap our arms around these kids to try to help them as far as like tier three um

142I think we're always looking for mental health support we use our our person that's there once a week to support that but I also I appreciate the support we can reach out to the district for the support that they provide for us when we're struggling with something in the building and so then we can ask for that help and then they can give us the training or whatever help we need so I think we're we're doing great work I think our teachers are doing great work I honestly can't stress enough how great it is to have that support that's working you know the counselor and the school psychologist there it's just it's key it really is thanks very much for sharing all that I really appreciate it I guess I would just uh particularly thank

143you for sharing the your efforts in terms of getting parents involved directly and also for intentionally asking the students who the adults are that they that they feel they can connect with I think that's an important important thing thanks Amy would you like to share yeah thanks for having me so this is a passion of mine um I don't have data quite like Dwayne has to share but I did do my Master's thesis we won't talk about how long ago on the significance of a sense of belonging and the impact on student achievement so this is kind of exciting stuff for me to hear I it looks exactly like Dwayne's almost just with different numbers um but yeah thanks for having me and shout out to some of our mental health professionals in the back

144here who have helped us Bennett with a lot of the things we need help with um so when I was thinking about the connections and the things that we might do a lot of them are the same I think in a lot of our elementary schools but I was kind of looking at it as the people that need the connections in the community so staff to staff kids to kids and then staff to kids and families so those were kind of the three I had in mind and um what I think is the biggest first of all I should say I have the um a program at my school of Center's based program for students with significant emotional disturbance and it's the best thing that could ever happen to schools to have that program I've

145had it in every school that I've worked in and it just helps teachers get the training and the experience working with kids who have significant emotional needs and we have experts on staff that help us with that and so also our other students are so empathetic and you know know how to help kindergartners will say it looks like he's having a bad day um so it is so amazing to have these kids in our in our schools and work with them um I think the biggest thing that we try to do is take all labels off kids at Bennett we my staff is amazing in that we own all of our kids so we implemented a few years back wind time which a lot of schools have or they'll call it I.E time we call

146it when what I need and we share grade levels so K1 share kids two three share kids and four five share kids so those kids what we do is we split them up and they go you know to whatever they need so it could be intervention it could be enrichment but I think the key point is we mix kids so some of our SED kids kids on IEPs will be with Gen ed kids it has nothing to do with their labels it has to do with the skill they need help with and so they see each other in these groups they might go to a teacher for intervention they might go to an interventionist for enrichment we switch up the adults that work with them as well so they feel the same as everyone else

147it's not just that we're pulling out kids that need additional support you know by themselves at a different time everybody goes somewhere and they all go to the same adults at some point and also with other kids at some point so everyone feels the same which I think I've heard a lot of feedback from parents that that's been a big deal for their kids self-esteem and so that's something that we're really proud of we do video announcements and we have kids on there who you know want to share something we do student leadership much like you guys do um and I have probably 30 student leaders um Tracy came out once and saw one of our meetings they're amazing probably 10 of them are on IEPs and three of them are in our SED program

148and they're phenomenal and then I will recruit kids that I need like I need a bilingual student leader because I have this kid that I need help reading to in third grade I tap into our kids in our SCD program to help other kids when they're feeling frustrated to show them the strategies that they use so we just try to build the the self-esteem of all of the kids they apply to be a student leader and they all get chosen but they don't know that um so it's it's great um I know I was like they're probably all watching I'm sure that yeah I'm sure they're all watching tonight I thought so I was worried um so they um they also are able to choose a passion area so we We Gather our student leaders

149that we choose and then we ask them what they see as a need in the school and that they would like to help with and then we group them according to kind of their passion area so they feel very helpful in the school I have kids getting dropped off early to watch walk preschool kids to their classroom from the bus and help them get ready for breakfast and kids that are helping you know after school with things and um so it's just it's it's a great way for them to feel involved and to get that student to Student Connection it might not be peers sometimes for these kids but it might be with the younger kids that they're helping and they're very helpful with them um so I would just say like there's other people

150that also help with it the district level um like I say the mental health professionals also our family Liaisons are amazing we had our Arabic family liaison have a group meeting at our school with our Arabic Families my family liaison that works with our Hispanic group has brought probably 15 families to my Sac meetings and it's been phenomenal um we have teacher reps that go to our parent organization so we just try to tap into that connection with everybody kind of shares everybody and we all know each other and the last thing I'll say is something we tried new this year was we printed out class lists and had teachers initial next to kids that were not in their class but that they felt they had a personal connection with so they don't just wave

151at them in the hall but they might talk to them or know something about their family and then we took it was actually surprisingly few kids that had just one or no names next to them and we developed plans around intentionally making sure that they have a connection so that's been something that we're trying out new thank you thank you thanks for doing that intentional work appreciate it all right members of the board would you anybody like to ask questions of either our principal guests or of Dwayne go ahead DJ ah first of all thank you and congratulations to Don losing the interim um no no oh I'm the wrong School sorry no I'm just you know screwed up yeah uh but I your expertise that you guys got I I would love to um

152touch into it a little bit to find out what do you think we can do about uh the teasing or bullying aspect of it and as as a school district and as a community what what do you feel needs to move the can move the numbers a little bit on that aspect and and how could we grow that uh openness and we're surrounding them how can we do that so I just kind of want to open that part up to you guys and see what you thought I guess I will go back to what Josh talked about in regards to cell phone use because really like 99 of our teasing and bullying and talking negatively about other shots of tick tock or SnapChat that's seriously every case I deal with thank you oh y'all jump

153in I I think getting parent Community involved with that in education on the cell phone use I think there's and I'm a parent and it's um I want to know what's my kid is doing at all times on their device I have a young child but you know and I think there's a lot of trust is at 16 you get to drive a car but we have nine eight-year-olds who have phones and that's a scary thought and not knowing what they have access to so how can we involve the parents in that conversation I think also just continuing to increase the diversity amongst the adults and staff members in our schools for kids to see grown-ups that look like them that are teachers our staff um I can just see a difference in them you

154know to see someone that they can identify with who they can look up to and I think it not only feels good for those students but also the other students see that it's okay to be you know identified with this other community or whatever because Mr Ferris does we have an English music teacher who um uses the pronouns they them and a lot of our students are more accepting of it I guess because it's a grown-up or someone in the position of power maybe um but I think that just making sure we're looking at people who represent a wider variety thank you I think that at our school having the five people really helps and that students will talk to one of their five people and maybe talk about a situation that happened or they'll

155go to their teacher and talk to them and at that point then we we collaborate with our counselor our school psychologist and then they have that conversation with the child and then the student that possibly was doing that and then have that conversation and we try to do a restorative type conversation but we always include parents before that happens in telling them this is kind of what's Happening you know we always ask parents to get back to us on after they talk to their kids to see what's happening and you know because we don't always get the whole story so let's do this and then we try to work together with parents and but I think our kids are really good about advocating or getting better about advocating for themselves when there's a problem like

156that and we try to address it head-on when we hear it from the moment it starts but that's just at our school other questions from the board go ahead Jess I'm curious how what's being done at the elementary school transitions into what you guys do at the middle school because it sounds like all of you have really good plans but if you and you mentioned earlier Josh like they have skill sets that are they're coming to school with how are you making the most of those skill sets you're asking specifically about transitions well not the transition itself but like utilizing whatever they're learning at elementary school your feeders predominantly I'm guessing what what the elementary schools seem to be doing well or I presume all the elementary schools have something they're doing really well in

157this area maybe a little bit different flavor everywhere but how are you utilizing that what's already happened and making the most of that so that when you're not Reinventing the wheel when they get to your school you know I'll probably be a little transparent I think that's an area for growth for us is using the collaboration and we we use this term and actually Mr Kingsley brings it up a lot as we're a district of schools not a school district and I think we've as a leadership team as the principals have started to go how could we be collaborative in that and looking at so we meet feeder or Elementary to high school so that we can start having those conversations and that's the first year that this year we've really done that so I

158think there's growth to be honest with you yeah yeah I have seen the difference in um the explicit teaching of social skills having our sad program when there is a group issue on the playground for example the student who is first to do an apology will always be my student in my SCD program because they've been taught explicitly that social skill or how to follow directions you know they know you look at the person you say okay and you do it right away and you check back like they know all the things um I think it just is really evident when there's kids that have been taught specifically and you would think it would be opposite right but it's actually the kids in our program that like know how to manage the social aspects so

159what I'm thinking is the same is it's just getting better in systematizing that what we're teaching and I think how you had mentioned the restorative circles you'll start seeing that come up I think that's how it will get better I'll add one more is um a big thing about restorative practices has changed the first question is when there's a behavior is what happened and thinking about that is often we we used to ask kids why did you do that but if you change that to one question to what happened and if you think of if you practice this with your own child or a conflict in your life it's amazing the narrative that switches because a a why is a defensive question and a what happened gives a chance for a student to tell a

160story and own that behavior and that that is probably revolutionized teachers interactions with kids switching that question and that's a in restorative through Elementary again so and I encourage you to try it if you haven't it's it's a pretty amazing thing yeah thanks for sharing that that's that's that's really interesting and I and I also want to say that I really appreciate the support that you're you all are showing here for the uh I guess uh Amy said systematizing of uh some of the work in this area so that we can get get uh learnings across uh across levels go ahead so I think you know I want to build off of what you just said and thank you all for your exemplary leadership in working a partnership with your school communities I think there's

161a lot of power in the monitoring report monitoring pork can't be something that we just talk about it two nights of the year and we don't revisit it's an opportunity to create systemness it's an opportunity for us as a district to model what data informed leadership looks like so if you are a parent or a staff member or a supporter of Bennett Elementary School or to Valley Elementary School or Boltz Middle School unless you're Middle School I want you to really know that your principal is not here at a board meeting tonight because they just had availability and nothing better to do these four principles were asked to represent their whole school Community they are ambassadors for a lot of people who have bought into something bigger than themselves but if you look at our

162monitoring report where we measure SEL composite scores when you look at a school district like ours who measures connection survey data these four schools are in the upper right quadrant if we plot all 50 of our traditional public schools these schools are in the upper right corner of showing that they're outliers in moving this work forward for us to move from a system of schools to a school system it requires identifying practices that are proven to work tell those stories and push people by through leadership practices and encouragement to scale these in other places the power of your story is more than what you're sharing with our board tonight this needs to be shared with your peers it needs to be shared with your parents it needs to be celebrated and I want you just

163to be publicly acknowledged for your leadership and the people that you represent because you are showing us a way to a better tomorrow for kids who need us the most and in addition to the SEL composite survey or SEL composite data and our connection survey another highlight amongst these four schools is they are proven to show practices that are moving the needle for our most marginalized students our diverse students that is another reason why these four schools were selected and deserve to be recognized so I just want to publicly acknowledge all of you for that word thanks for giving voice to that so eloquently and and thank you all very much for the work you're doing it's it's just critical for our district other other looks like Jess wants to say something else well on

164that note how did you guys get there what was your path to know that this was so valuable so important to be that top quadrant in our district to be honest I didn't know really I didn't know I was doing those things because it would I was we were doing the things because that's what we do and we were so happy that we got there but we don't often stop and reflect on exactly why it happened it just kind of happens because that's the work that we do and the people we have I need a map I'll try to make you one we actually were very intentional in the way we did this we really looked at um starting it was really twofold at the beginning where we really focused on academics and then the

165social emotional and then we really working again I cannot stress enough the having the counselor and the school psych there full-time basically having that to bridge into the classroom and to start really where it's not separate anymore it's totally embedded in everything we do I mean so it's not okay we're gonna do social emotional lesson today it just happens all the time it's very fluid and that's how it is with our data and how we do our business at tavelli but I think it was really the practices that we use to support our academics were the practices that we use to do the SEL part but with just different people involved with that and having those people really have that voice and really looking at where we were going really helped we put our money

166where we needed to put it I think we're just constantly having these conversations and every class of kids coming in looks different so we're constantly tailoring what we're doing to the individual needs of the grade level like next year our sixth grade is going to be 290 right now and they're all coming from very different elementary schools we had 160 School of Choice so what that class needs next year will be very different what the current you know eighth and seventh and sixth graders needed so I just think we're always thinking about the needs asking kids what they need and constantly asking teachers what do you think is best for kids right now uh I'm gonna say it's how we're hiring teachers and looking forward there's and this isn't my brain this is I'm stealing

167this but three things I look for in a teacher is can you build relationships with kids um because content's there but if you can build a relationship with kids kids will do anything for you and they will learn um are you growing as a professional every day I say the day I stop growing is the day I retire and humility I make mistakes every day and I model those mistakes and if you model mistakes in front of kids and show that humility they'll grow with you and I want adults in my building that do those three things so that's what I'm looking for [Music] I don't want to oversimplify it because it is a lot of hard work but I think it comes down to everyone wants to feel important and be valued and you

168just have to make that happen for every person yep I just want to identify a Common Thread amongst your stories is that all of you are focused on what the adults are doing so our theory of action as a district is that adult practices improved adult practices lead to improved student outcomes and all of you as you begin to tell your story our monitoring report doesn't have measurements for adult practices so it has all the student impact data that we know but what is setting you apart and it's the reason why you're here beyond the data is where your focus is because you're recognizing in partnership with your faculty not to your faculty that you're identifying ways to move the needle and you're iterating not everything through humility not everything's going to work and that's

169okay but being really really clear around what are the three or four adult practices that you're doubling down on and you're going to move as a system and you're going to learn and you're going to those are the things that you're modeling that from a data informed leadership perspective that's the power in the Strategic plan for us to identify the correlation between those two things and I just want to make sure I Elevate that because that has implications around the work that we're doing as an entire school system moving forward so thank you again I know that Jim would like to contribute to the conversation Jim master class and how to build an effective School culture that values social emotional learning and it's just been wonderful you know that was all in less than an

170hour and and I just uh honor each of you for the work that you've done and couldn't thank you more thanks that's great uh Kristen you'd like to share some thoughts thank you um things that we're having space to have this conversation um because it's just so invaluable um you know I like to when when people question the mental health and belonging aspect of of school I I always point to kids can't learn when they're hungry and I think this is sort of the the equivalent of that right kids can't learn when they're dysregulated and so we're working with ways to get them regulated so they can proceed to learning and that's what y'all are doing you are allowing space for the kids to learn to regulate themselves for teachers to notice when kids are

171dysregulated and how to get how to then guide the the child back and you're allowing space for your adults to do that too I mean the fact that Don you're asking your teachers on a daily basis how are you today and what can I do to help is an amazing thing because what you're doing there is you're modeling that for your staff and then your staff is going to model that for your students um so I just want to say thank you for that and for thank you for having the space to talk about this in such a a serious manner because it really is um I really do believe that this is um sort of the foundation um on which we can build some great academics thanks Kristen any other thoughts from the board

172all right well I will just say that um uh I have some statistical type questions but I'm gonna save them for a discussion offline with Dwayne uh to not take away from all of the great uh the great uh stories and the great work that's been highlighted here tonight that you folks are doing in your schools so I think we should I think we should uh celebrate that and we should sort of end this segment of the of the meeting on that on that high note I will say from a procedural point of view I made yet another mistake we were supposed to have a motion uh before we did all this to accept the monitoring Port because it is a monitoring report and we need to accept it or not um and Nate do

173you have a motion with respect to that I do I move that the board determined that the superintendent has reasonably interpreted Board of Education policy de 1.0 in the internal monitoring report dated March 21st 2023 and that the evidence presented supports the superintendent's conclusion stated in the internal monitoring report and I might say that I think this is an appropriate time because we might have been pre-judging things if we'd had a motion at start okay thank you for that I appreciate that support has anybody got a second here we've got a second from DJ is there any more discussion on this looks like not um in which case Jill would you please call a vote on uh the monitor report DJ Anderson aye Jim brokish I Nate Donovan hi and thanks everyone for your contributions

174Kristen Draper hi Rob Peterson aye Carolyn Reed aye Jessica Zamora aye motion passes 7-0 excellent thanks so much Jill and thank you all for uh the work you're doing in your schools and thanks Dwayne for all the work you uh be putting this together I want to I was reminded I want to make sure that we did something right since I'm sort of making mistakes here tonight did we actually have a vote on the bus purchase or not we did okay good excellent thank you I want to make sure that's right we don't want to go spend money we haven't approved so thank you very much okay so the last item on our agenda this evening is an executive session to receive legal advice can I get a motion with respect to this executive session

175Nate I move that the board enter executive session pursuant to CRS 24-6-402 4B to confer with the district's attorney for the purpose of receiving legal advice on the following specific legal question the board of education's legal rights and remedies to pursue potential claims related to alleged breaches of contracts and overpayments to contractors individuals invited to join the board and executive session our superintendent Brian Kingsley Chief officers Lauren Hooten Jeff Connell and Dave Montoya and general counsel Autumn Aspen do I have a second on that from Jazz excellent Jill can I have a vote on that motion D.J Anderson aye Jim brokish I Nate Donovan aye Kristen Draper aye Rob Pederson aye Carolyn Reed aye Jessica Zamora aye motion passes 7-0 thank you again Jill for the viewing public I would like to let you know

176that we're going to go into closed executive session now this is the last item on the agenda other than adjourning and you should know that the only thing that's going to happen after the executive session is that I'm going to come out here and pound this gavel and adjourn the meeting so thank you for joining us this evening and we look forward to seeing you the first week of April if you're going to come watch us again