001all right welcome everybody to the February 21st uh pooter School District Board of Education we're going to start this part of our meeting at 6 30 P.M as usual if you would please uh take this opportunity to mute your cell phones which I will also do here um we can have a smoother meeting yeah maybe okay um so the first item on the agenda is to ask whether any board members would like to make a changes any changes to the agenda this evening seeing none we will go on to the second item or actually the third item on the agenda and that is to hear from our superintendent who's going to share some remarks with the board in the community good evening everybody I'm excited to see all of you I really like this Workshop
002format to be able to kind of engage in some complex adaptive type conversations about our work today as you know I've had an opportunity to continue to get out into our schools over the last couple of weeks and celebrate the incredible work that's happening in our system and I think if you think about the spirit of how we're spending our time this entire evening what makes me incredibly proud is we just left a conversation that is solely focused on ensuring that our students see themselves as enough and have the resources to reach their dreams and that conversation being led by students with that with solution oriented makes us nothing short and just proud right and we're also going to talk about how we can continue to be good fiscal stewards knowing that we are resource
003constrained and we have to be incredibly creative and think about Partnerships and think about opportunities to leverage the little resources that we have to do incredible things you're going to hear tonight not just about our budget but you're going to hear about the incredible results that are happening in this school system each and every day and when you think about the various members of the community that are in this room right now whether you are just a citizen of our school district if you are a parent sending your most prized possessions through our doors each and every day you may be a principal a teacher representing teachers or a classified staff ever everybody plays a role in the strength of this school system and if you think about you know a year for a year
004ago if I knew that we could forecast that this District would have the highest graduation rates in 17 years I would say that would have been a pretty darn successful year when you look at the various other indicators that we're measuring both academically and socially emotionally we're making incredible progress across the entire system in significant ways and I'm asking us today to approach that conversation one through the lens of Celebration making sure that the stakeholders who are both in this room and back at home preparing for how to come back to work in the next few days thinking about how we can continue to take it to another level that we really make sure that they feel honored seen and heard that the work that they're doing in an environment post covid that has been
005incredibly contentious at times unstable at times and in spite of all of those complexities still strive to make incredible academic progress that puts us as a front leader across the Front Range I am a superintendent tonight that is speaking from a place of strength and I'm just really really really proud of that I had an opportunity last week to visit Dunn Elementary School they were interacting with each other in modeling County Commission meeting and reenacting a County Commission meeting and it had an opportunity to see them all play their various roles in parts and them to learn around the role of governance the role that we all play in this room each and every other Tuesday is really significant and having opportunities to see our students learn from us learn around how other local governments
006interact with each other was just really inspiring as well had an opportunity to go to bowder elementary school where I saw some of the best math activities that I've seen over the course of the Year their teachers and use of math manipulatives to help develop conceptual understanding of really complex math topics was nothing short of amazing I had an opportunity last week in celebration of Black History Month to see one of our teachers Jason Powell who I'm really proud is a part of the Rocky Mountain High School School faculty organized a panel discussion with many black leaders who have lived the majority of their life in white spaces to talk about the courage it's taken through their lifetime to find their voice and find success in those particular areas and so I share all of
007these particular things because I really believe what makes this District special is we're not just targeting and focused on improving Reading Writing math and arithmetic we're really careful and thoughtful about developing the whole child and making sure that we are Unapologetic in doing that in an inclusive format where all people can feel seen heard and valued and we recognize that we have work to do while there's a lot to celebrate there's a lot of articles that I'm hopeful Kelly will have an opportunity to have some really great headlines we also want to make sure that we're continuing to focus on continuous Improvement modeling vulnerability and hard conversations with each other because while we are incredibly successful as a school system we're not shy or bashful around realizing that we have work to do and that's
008what tonight is about so almost honored to be a part of this conversation and I really look forward to celebrating all the people that have been a part of this incredible success I'm honored to work with them each and every day so thank you for the time great I appreciate it um our next item on the agenda is community comment I want to remind everybody for all all of us for our hopes for this section of the agenda the board desires to hear the viewpoints of all stakeholders including students employees parents and Guardians and community members input that is most helpful to the board of education and District staff is that which identifies a problem and proposes a solution for us to consider that ultimately improves the educational and social emotional experiences of our students
009public 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 comment our lack of response should not be construed to mean that we agree or disagree with what is said or with a description or interpretation of events as presented by any speaker although we may disagree on some things I know that we all want the best educational experience for all of 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 with those even whom with whom we disagree and generally how to show up every day We should strive to be respectful of
010one another and our individual views please do not degrade others for what they share in this space with that I will 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 on to make remarks in the order that they signed up and each speaker will be allowed three minutes to address the board and I believe it will be over there right so our first Speaker this evening is Jim weinbrenner welcome foreign on May 24th after parents expressed concerns about the sexualization of our students you called out those parents saying but for people to continue to say things that are not true and to drive that wedge between parents and teachers and the education Community I get PO'd wow
011you suggested the May 24 speakers were driving a wedge between parents and the educational community Mr Anderson we have Traditional Values parents that believe in the Bible that teach their children they are created in God's image male and female yes binary Hooter schools on the other hand Advocates lgbtq viewpoints throughout the curriculum students learn that in PSD that engender is fluid that they can choose a new gender identity change clothing adopt new pronouns use different restrooms students have a right to keep their gender identity secret from their parents and schools collaborate in that secrecy all this teaching is in direct conflict with traditional biblical parent values Mr Anderson you said the parents were driving a wedge between parents and the education community no sir this board of education is driving that witch if a student
012says mom is a secretary at church she'll kill me if she finds out I'm gay and polish schools is on board to keep that secret from parents does the students visceral fear of his mom's reaction with his decisions tell you anything can you understand that what this boy was taught in pooter schools drove the wedge between his student and his mom teaching students confusing gender Alternatives is just none of your business Mr Anderson this board's policies are driving that wedge between parents and the education community thank you our next speaker is John fields welcome foreign to speak Wednesday February 8th my daughter first grade six years old at the bus stop waiting to go to school was grabbed by both arms by two fifth grade girls and sorry if I get passionate two fifth grade
01311 year old girls and Drug towards the street off the sidewalk they told my daughter they were going to throw in front of a car my daughter jerked Away Paul went back to the sidewalk and curled up on a ball the two girls went again tried to grab my daughter my daughter was screaming for her life my son at the same bus stop now heard the commotion and got it stopped immediately thank God my daughter got on the school bus crying hysterically my son couldn't even get out of his own sister what had happened she made it the school and thank God she trusts her first grade teacher Mr Dalton she doped him exactly as soon as she walked in the school room what had happened Mr Dalton perfectively recorded the situation time date stamped
014it gave it to the principal approximately 8 50 in the morning at 309 I get a email from Mr Dalton asking me how Caroline was if I had heard anything from Caroline 309 in the afternoon that was the first acknowledgment I've heard of the situation more than six hours later not given the opportunity to protect my child to be back on the school bus to face those two demons to face our own demons she was not given the opportunity to feel safe when she came into my home she was shivering in fear shivering the next morning I called the school was given notice that the principal had found out first thing in the morning she had the very first question I asked she acknowledged she found out first thing and I asked why I was
015not informed she said well I didn't talk to Caroline either she had talked to the two girls two twins and they told her that they were play fighting my daughter is very timid my daughter's six years old and the excuse was that she was play fighting with two 11 year old girls if you any of you ever met my daughter you would know how this is impossible she's not going to play fight with anybody am I out of time is that what this is um so during my conversation Thursday morning the principal let me know that because this happened off school property that I needed to talk to the transportation department for any type of discipline because I was asking for the girls to be suspended from the bus so my daughter could ride the
016bus because she felt scared to be on that bus the principal told me I need to talk to transportation department when I called the transportation department they said well we don't do discipline you need to talk to your principal and page number six the code of conduct it says very clearly that the bus stop is its extension of the school that's my first point I need cleared with the with this principles I need yeah you are at a time now so I need you to wrap up okay 51 schools in the department in the district there's only seven schools I've reported any incidences those seven have reported 22 incidences so seven schools 22 instances that's average of three per school I would expect to see 160 incidences across our 51 schools we have 22 incidences
017our problem is here is lack of reporting parents aren't being reported as aren't reported of the situation that we have in our school's availability thank you very much our next speaker is Becky woodcox welcome thank you my name is Becky woodcocks and I've been part of this staff at shepherdson Stem Elementary since 1998 and I love working there shepardson is one of the older buildings in the district and from the outside there is nothing flashy or unique about it but when you step inside you will immediately notice that our staff students and parent communities make amazing things happen inside if you would like to learn more about shepardson contact me anytime and I'll be glad to share I'm here tonight representing myself and the views and opinions I express are my own in the past
018two weeks on top of our normal teaching duties which we are deeply passionate about we have added the burden of a budget discussion for the 2023-2024 school year this is not really what we want to be focused on with our four months of school in the current year still to go but due to a missed enrollment projection for next year we're forced to have some serious staff discussions right now we're facing a budget shortage of over a hundred thousand dollars next clear now you might say well that's not a huge deal that's not a big dollar figure but let me put a human face on that amount we'll have to cut positions should we cut a counselor a behavior para or four or five instructional Paras or should we cut certified staff in kindergarten and
019first grade where the enrollment projections were missed should we decide to have kindergarten classes with 27 children in them maybe we should cut literacy and math intervention Staffing reduce our music and media positions eliminate GT support or reduce stem and pbl programming all positions that directly affect children and how we learn help them learn and grow at shepherdson every one of these positions that we are discussing for cuts or reductions represents an individual who makes a difference in a child's life dedicated people who daily further further the vision of educating every child every day and all of which are miracle workers in children's lives a growing concern for me is watching The District administration grow to so big so fast new cabinet members have recently been added in their two full Pages listing administrative professional
020staffs salaries on that list um what what message does maintaining a top heavy Administration send to District stateholders in a period of declining enrollment so my question here is where would you find the greatest outcomes for children within the walls of our administrative offices with an ever-growing top heavy administrative team and dozens of positions with six figure salaries or inside the classrooms of our neighborhood schools where one of the administrative salaries would cover the all five of the paraprofessional positions we are faced with cutting if you can't answer that the most important outcomes happen in our classrooms in our schools then maybe we've lost sight of our vision to educate every child every day I know the budgeting process is complicated and much control comes from the state but I urge you to use wisdom
021as you work the budgeting process for the 2023-24 school year make the amazing schools in your District your top priority because they are psd's greatest assets thank you thank you our next speaker is Jaden Putman Putnam right yeah I apologize if I got that wrong welcome good evening my name is Jaden Putman I am a sophomore at Fort Collins High School and I'm also I swim for Fort Collins High School and I also swim for Fort Collins area swim team year round um I have grown up swimming here in this community I took swim lessons at Mulberry Rex Mulberry pool I took swim lessons at Adora pool I've grown up loving these pools that we have um in turn my mom is also grown up in Fort Collins she swam for fast she swam for
022Collins she grew up swimming in both of the same pools that we have now but right now nothing has changed since the addition of Epic in our pool space um I know most people when people ask me what sport I do for high school I say swimming they say most people I get will say oh I swam in high school or I swim at some point in my life and because of this right now with the pool space that we have we do not have a suitable space for people to swim for public swimmers for Club swimmers and then for high school swimmers which is a very important developmental stage because it teaches people to be accountable as a student athlete accountable in your swimming accountable in your grades you have to keep your grades
023up to be a student athlete and just overall being a good person investing if we were to invest as a district into building a competition pool at the proposed new rec center in southeast Fort Collins would be a great um have a great impact for countless generations to come because they would get to have that ability to swim which is something everyone I most people would love to do you know you can go to summer go in the winter you know if it's indoor or whatever go swim go have a good time Splash around with your friends and all that so it's great to have that it would be great to have fun but then also you know swimming is a great lifelong sport you need to have lap lanes and competition pools for that
024to be a possibility so thank you for your time thank you our next speaker is Kurt Castine I apologize if I pronounced that wrong oh okay good well welcome good evening my name is Kirk Castine my wife and I have been residents of Fort Collins since 1994. we have three children who are PSD graduates in the last 10 years I am an engineering director in the computer chip business and I served on the Fort Collins city council from 1999 to 2007. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you this evening it's easy to see that the PSD board of education has put a great deal of emphasis on moment on the mental health of students I understand the urgency kids are suffering today the reasons are numerous and the problem is serious and difficult to
025address yes the district has a role in mental health care for students but parents own that role and their responsibility is for the physical and mental health of their children the actions taken by PSD must increasingly involve parents and families a counter example is a bill being considered by Colorado lawmakers today House Bill 23 1003 is titled School mental health assessment concerning the creation of the 6th through 12th grade mental health Assessment Act the bill requires participating schools to provide written notice of the parents of students within the first two weeks of the start of school in order to allow parents to opt their children out of participating in the mental health assessment the very next paragraph of the bill specifies that a student 12 years of age or older May consent to participate in
026the mental health assessment even if the student's parent opts out that's odd in one paragraph parents can opt their kids out and in the next the kids can opt the parents out that provision is bizarre and seems indicative of the state's lack of of thoughtful consideration in recognizing that parents have the primary responsibility in the health and well-being of their own children PSD strategic plan States this under mental health and belonging its strategy to be develop and Implement inclusive engagement strategies for staff students families and the community that increases trust safety communication information connection and belonging good goals PSD is amping up mental health Provisions the state recently granted 1.6 million dollars to PSD to supplement Mental Health I implore the board to consider plans that include parents in the mental health care of their
027own children plans that not only keep parents in the loop but that pull parents into the solution instead of alienating parents by giving means to shortcut their Authority as suggested in House Bill 23 1003 include parents to clearly have the god-given role and responsibility for the health of their children I'm here to ask PSD to stand against House Bill 23 1003 as written let's agree to defeat the bill and agree to address the student mental health problem by first including and then empowering parents thanks thank you our next speaker is Jeff afterheide if he's here is it you're there he is okay welcome thank you my name is Jeff laughter hottie from Wellington Colorado I'm here to comment on the district's strategic plan Mental Health Services and potential conflicts of interest recently pooter disc School
028District announced a grant award for over 1.5 million dollars it has come to my attention that Summit Stone Health Partners may have contributed documentation in the district's application process it is my understanding that summitstone may play a role in The District's strategic Mental Health Service offering for our children Carolyn Reed who is the board member of both Summit Stone Health Partners and put a school district identified Summit Stone as a conflict of interest on her board of director disclosure form in November of 2022 the situation creates a potential conflict of interest if Miss Reed has any decision-making power or influence over the district's Mental Health Services it's important to ensure that Mental Health Services are provided in an impartial and objective manner without any conflicts of interest therefore I ask the following questions did Summit
029Stone pursue a formal agreement with the district as a condition of the grant if so how is Summit Stone selected will they benefit financially from the grant and if so how much to this grant bypass any formal procedures normally used to procure services for the district is there any is any of this information available to parents of the district or the public to review finally our decisions for mental health services benefiting the students or some at Stone thank you for your time and attention thank you our final speaker this evening is Reagan Gravenstein not here okay then that concludes Community comment for this evening our next part of the agenda is board committee reports or comments uh does anybody from the board have something they'd like to share yes no okay I'll just remind folks
030that uh for March and April we're still going to be on board meetings on the first and third Tuesdays of the month as opposed to our sort of historical Norm of the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month we will resume the second and fourth Tuesdays in May starting in May and the reason for that is simply that we wanted to make sure that the staff and the public had uh spring break week off sorry in may we go back to second and fourth yeah it's because there's a three-week gap between April and May and so then we can squeeze it to two anyway whatever so uh yeah so nothing else in terms of board reports all right in which case we're on to the consent agenda what agenda sorry would any board members like
031to remove any items from the consent agenda seeing none I'll ask for a motion in support of the consent agenda Nate I move that the board approved and adopt the recommended actions for the items on the consent agenda can I have a second looks like Kristen today and uh Jill would you please call a vote on the consent agenda DJ Anderson aye Jim brokish hi Nate Donovan all right Kristen Draper aye Rob Peterson aye Carolyn Reed aye Jessica Zamora aye motion passes 7-0 excellent thank you very much now we're on to our informational reports and discussion items and as Brian alluded to earlier we have two of those one of them is a budget update and we'll turn it over to our superintendent to introduce that thank you uh here tonight presenting our Board District
032Board District budget update is our District's Chief Financial Officer Dave Montoya Dave welcome thank you Brian um good evening board tonight we're going to get the presentation up here tonight we're going to be presenting a budget update um for those that have been on the board for a while you know this is the Cadence we get into with the legislative process so this is one of our first updates of many through the uh through the spring as we uh as we learn what's happening with the legislative process and how our budget's going to come together so tonight we're going to do some foundational setting uh we're first going to talk about the school Finance formula as it currently exists spending just a little bit of time with this to orient the board around how the
033school Finance formula currently works because as you're going to see later in this presentation there's going to be possible changes on the horizon so setting foundational understanding is helpful we'll look at some possible Revenue scenarios I think it's really a scenario and I'll talk about the options that may come around there we'll revisit our budget priorities that were established and we'll revisit our budget timeline foreign so starting off let's just talk about the revenue sources that the school district gets and when we when I'm talking about Revenue sources primarily we talk about general fund Revenue but we also do receive federal state and local grants at times so um so those are an additional addition often to the general fund but tonight we're going to focus mostly on general fund as it's the the biggest
034driver in our budget and and general fund is our our fund where we do most of our operations out of so this is our general operating account when we look at the the general fund there's a couple categories of Revenue that we that we receive the first one is and I put it under state revenue but School Finance act actually has both state revenue and local property taxes which we're going to see that in some detail um so School Finance Act is one of the biggest drivers in our budget and when you look at the general fund budget about 73 percent of our budgeted revenue and general fund comes from the school Finance act as you heard me open this presentation up and as I'm going to be mentioning along the way there's an Avenue
035an opportunity for some major changes to the school Finance act that's why we're spending a little bit of time with it tonight um so again that makes up about 73 of our Revenue um some of it is state revenue but some of it is also property tax and I've got a graphic that will help you understand that later in the presentation um under state revenue we also get categorical funding we don't talk about these as often that's about five percent of our general fund Revenue but there is program specific funding that we get and it's called categorical funding um moving down below we have local property taxes both property taxes and specific ownership tax specific ownership taxes the tax that um that's the question I get I think most people understand what property taxes are
036but specific ownership tax is primarily vehicle registrations there's other things in there but primarily driven by when we go and register our vehicles there's a tax there um over on the local Revenue side we do have additional revenues that come into general fund Beyond School Finance formula or the categorical funding um and this this this section has grown some especially after the 2019 milliv override in our local Revenue we have Mill Levy overrides now totaling about 17 percent of our general fund Revenue so it's really important to to pause for a second to think about the funding that we get from the state formula but also the additional support that we get from our local taxpayers and that comes in the form of Melody overrides and again it's providing a 17 Inc or 17 percent
037of our budget that would not be there otherwise without local voter support and it really is what makes PSD who PSD is from a financial sense um we also have other revenues Within These categories but if you are keeping tabs I talked about 73 coming from school Finance Act five percent coming from categorical and then about 17 coming from Melody overrides so we've talked about the majority of our Revenue pretty quickly there in those categories I do want to point out we do get other local Revenue like building rentals Athletics there's a whole host of items and you can see those outlined in our budget budget document again we do get federal grants and we do have state and local grants but the the Big Driver there is the federal grants but we do get
038grants at times so the first step I want to do is take a a broad lens approach to the state's budget and I thought the best way to do that would be to look at a pie chart and what this pie chart represents is the breakdown of the state's budget because this is important it feeds into our total program and about 13.9 billion of the state's general fund is displayed on this pie chart when we look at the big drivers in the state's budget you can see that education makes about 32 percent of this pie Health Care policy and financing makes up 29 percent higher education 10 percent Human Services eight percent and judicial and Corrections um total up about 11 in total together and then there's another category all or other of which includes
039all sorts of things at the state budget that are multiple little pieces in there the takeaway from this graphic though is that education has and continues to be one of the primary drivers in the state budget you can see right now that education is making up about 32 percent of that 13.9 billion dollars that I had mentioned um it was interesting to look back at this graphic I've done this presentation many times over the years and I was able to look back at a prior year and I went back to the fiscal year 13 year and at that time education actually made up 39 of the state's budget and so interesting what we've seen over the years since fiscal year 20 or 2013 is we've seen some decline in what the state is providing as
040far as total percentage of the budget and in education so it went from 39 to 32 that we see now and where did that go it primarily went to Health Care policy financing so the healthcare side of the budget um just interesting to point out that there has been an erosion of the state share for some time and that has been partially set offset by some local property taxes but this Dynamic that stands between what the state can fund and what we can raise locally continues to be a problem for us and the state so let's focus on the school Finance act itself and uh I've intentionally put the um the site where this comes from it comes from title 22 article 54 of the Colorado revised statutes and in here this is um the
041public school Finance Act of 1994 and what this act does is that the public school Finance Act of Colorado is a formula used to determine state and local funding amounts for the state's 178 districts total program is a term used to describe the total amount of money each School District receives under the school Finance act so the big takeaway here is that this section of the law drives a very large percent of our percentage of our budget again 73 percent comes from the school Finance Act the other takeaway is that this this funding formula not only applies to us but it applies to all 178 districts in Colorado so those two pieces are important and this is going to be where a lot of focus is with the legislature around possible changes in this in
042this school Finance act itself so at a very high level and this graphic doesn't quite do the formula Justice there the formula is actually fairly detailed there's a lot of blinds there's a lot of calculations behind it but at its core this graphic describes the components that we think about when we talk about total program and you hear me talk a lot about the the first two here and that is funded people count and our per people funding amounts so our funded pupil count is one side of this equation that drives that is multiplied by the funding amount so it is very important that's why in October when we do our October count it's important for us to count the kids we report those to the state and that becomes part of this calculation that
043the state uses is funded pupils that is then multiplied against total per pupil funding of which includes multiple components base funding it includes our at-risk funding and then there's a layering on of online funding of which gets treated a little bit differently we're going to see this in some more detail when I look at the funded people count the key takeaway from this graphic though is that really when we think about it 73 of our budget comes from taking our funded people count times a per pupil amount to drive the total per people Revenue thank you so let's look a little bit closer at the driver of the total program formula and understand maybe some of the things that might be moving around on us as the legislature takes on their their work this this
044session the um the first thing is that all 178 districts start out with base funding so all funded peoples in Colorado get a base funding amount and for our current fiscal year that's 7 478 dollars so every student theoretically in the state is funded at this level um on top of the funding on top of the base funding what the state does is they begin to layer in adjustments to base funding because if we just stopped at base funding everybody would get an equal amount per kit but the state makes adjustments because not all districts are alike and we have 178 districts in Colorado so this is where in my opinion we have the most opportunity for change in the legislative session and is in these factors um under the per people funding so I
045want to talk through each one of them um in some summary fashion I want to talk and but the takeaway is that what I'd say today may change as the legislature does their work the first one is a cost of living factor and I also added and Personnel cost Factor those two go hand in hand and what this adjustment in the school Finance Act is trying to do is to recognize that there are cost differentials across districts and so the state does a cost living study every two years um uh there's probably some politics bound up in the cost of living study because Peter School District typically we do get a cost of living adjustment and it has been increasing a little bit over time but our cost of living adjustment as we compare to
046our peers um in the Metro areas specifically DPS Aurora I mean you can count all the big districts in the metro area um most of those are getting a much larger cost of living factor which makes it harder for us to be comparable to them and and that factors into our budget so we get less budget potentially from the cost of living Factor um that is definitely one that I would I would earmark that we may be hearing more about as the legislature does their work um they're they're likely will and have been in the past when the legislature has taken up this this task of looking at the school Finance formula there have been some talk about adjustments to the cost of living Factor um so that might be something that's on our Horizon
047oh I'm sorry that help yep thank you thanks Jim all right so uh cost of living factor is the first one there and it's um and so that's what I just talked about there the second factor is the size factor and the size factor is one again we don't really make a lot we get a size adjustment but we're very we're a large District so we don't get a very large size adjustment what the size adjustment is doing in the state formula is it's trying to compensate for efficiencies of scale so larger districts can cover cost theoretically more efficiently than a smaller District that is maybe operating on a large geographic area or maybe only has 60 kids in their entire District the cost drivers are very different as you look at those two entities
048and so the state is trying to adjust for that in a size Factor again we do get a size Factor but our size factor is on the small end because we're a large District um some of the the small districts especially on the Eastern Plains they get a significant size adjustment because the efficiencies the the efficiencies running those districts is just enormous when you think about having a geographic area may be as large as pooter school district and running transportation and everything else for 60 kids the costs are much higher than it is for a larger District to kind of absorb those the last piece that I think is probably up for some adjustment is the at-risk well definitely the at-risk funding adjustment and the state here in the formula is trying to compensate for
049the understanding that districts have different concentrations of at-risk students and why this is so important this year is I think most are aware that in on the ballot Universal feeding is going to be a thing next year the state recognized that and I think they even had an interim committee looking at this they were already understanding they probably would need to adjust the at-risk factor because if you think it through logically yes we're going to be able to direct certify a number of kids for national school lunch but we won't have all the free lunch applications potentially that were there in the past I just don't think the incentive is going to be there for students that aren't directly certified to certify and I think the state recognizes that and has begun looking at alternatives
050to the at-risk funding and when you think about it that's really what's causing this legislative review of the school Finance formula they first started with the at-risk funding and then I believe in November or December we got noticed that the legislature was going to take on more than the at-risk funding and actually look at the entire formula so I think there's a lot of opportunity for a shuffling of how these resources are determined in the school Finance formula and we're going to have to pay really close attention to that as it develops in the legislature um there we do get funding for online students it's a little different it's a it's a separate per pupil amount I don't I haven't heard much about changes there so I don't think there's going to be a lot
051of change there there is some budget stabilization Factor so there's a this concept of a budget stabilization Factor where and we have a Graphic on this but this is long and short of this this is the the amount that the state cannot afford to pay us and has been withholding from their state Equalization um so yes I would imagine and the governor has proposed some changes to this already um but I think again the rewrite of the formula is going to be the first three um factors the cost of living Factor the size and the at risk and to just kind of come back through that again cost of living we do get a cost living Factor but it's not like the ones that Boulder Denver and our other peer districts get size Factor we
052get a small size Factor because we're a large district and at-risk funding we do have at-risk students in our district but we don't have high concentrations that you might find in some of our other peer districts so when you total all that up we come up with a calculation that is provided across also 178 districts and just some statistics here for you to understand kind of the the magnitude that range of the formula goes anywhere from nine thousand four dollars all the way up to twenty thousand five hundred and sixty five dollars per student again the twenty thousand dollars district is going to be the the the small District on the Eastern plains that probably has 50 60 kids in it most of those higher funded districts are going to be those smaller districts the
053majority of our larger districts are closer to the bottom range yeah average across all districts is 12 257. but it doesn't end there is actually a provision that's been in state law for a while now that gives Pruder school district and 13 other districts a little additional money in the way of what they call a minimum program funding and so in this idea here um what we do is we take those those calculations the state again the state has a really big spreadsheet that they track all 178 districts in but what they do is they calculate an average per pupil across the entire State and the state law what it dictates is that 95 percent of that average will become a minimum and so that's how pooter school district and you've heard me refer to
054this before has become a floor district and so what's happening is when you take all the cost of living Factor the size the at risk the base funding what's generated in the formula for US based on the factors that we have does not get to 95 percent of the Statewide average and so we get a little bit more of a bump to get up to nine thousand sixty eight dollars per pupil and this is all after the budget stabilization Factor there are 13 districts that are currently projected to receive minimum program funding PSD is one of them and I was actually talking to our lobbyist about this the other day we've actually been on the floor since the Inception of this law um I remember when they passed it uh and we were one of
055the first districts on the floor and we have not come off the floor since we have always been a floor funded district and it really goes back to again those factors cost of living at risk and size and how they play out for us okay so we've talked a lot about total program funding and how we get 73 percent of our budget there's another point that I want to make the board aware of because I think it will become something that's talked about during the legislative session so we need to just keep our eyes on it um and I alluded to it earlier total program is funded by a combination of State share and local property taxes and the way the formula works is we determine what the program amount is we subtract out what
056our local property taxes are and then the state equalizes or backfills the difference why this is important is when we look at this pie chart that shows our general fund total program so this isn't general fund this is just total program and when you look at the components of it you can see that about 43 percent come from property taxes or specific ownership taxes the majority of it is property taxes you can see 40 percent there that brings in about 105 million dollars to The District 8 million for the specific ownership side on the other side of this pie chart so 43 percent is property tax 57 is the state share or the state Equalization so this is state revenue that is coming to our school district to make us whole under the total program
057formula and why this is important is and we are we know that this this year is going to be a reassessment year so um we've already heard that property tax values valuations are going up um I Heard Governor polis talk during one of his addresses where they recognized that assessed valuation is growing at a very fast pace what happens in that environment sometimes is that the property tax section or the you know the 40 40 percent of the pie there the yellow or the gold bar that'll grow and sometimes that means that the state has a decision to make we can reduce our share or we can continue funding our share and that will be a topic that comes up during the legislative process this year as well as to how much of that property
058tax is going to be supporting next year and how much State Equalization needs to fill in on the other side if you look at it from a purely formulaic standpoint you would expect that the gold pie or the property tax portion of the pie would grow and that the state Equalization would shrink but I think that's going to be a topic for the legislature is is that really what needs to happen um and and I guess that we're going to have the the politicians at the Capitol figure that out with some input from us obviously um but we obviously would like to keep that state Equalization where it is and allow the property tax to even float us up higher so that was the point of the graphic there and um again I want us
059just to to have these be armed with some of these facts so that we understand as they're rolling out from the legislature what what it means to be complete on total program I would be remiss if I didn't come back to the budget stabilization factor or for us old people we used to call it the negative factor way back in the day and this graphic is a it's an interesting chart um what it does is it represents the percentage of negative factor but excuse me budget stabilization factor that was applied to each fiscal year and it's presented in the form of a percentage so you don't see the bars growing because Revenue would be growing but what it does it does show us how the budget stabilization Factor has changed over time when it was
060first brought into existence back in fiscal year 11 the budget stabilization Factor was about 18.8 million dollars for pooter School District it got as deep two years later in fiscal year 13 to being 32 million dollars in one fiscal year now roll the clock forward from fiscal year 13 all the way forward a decade and you can see that that has shrunk quite a bit it's now two percent of the PPR funding and this is a very concerted effort on the state's part to be buying down the negative factor and we've seen that happen a couple years in a row next year's forecast or budget proposal from the governor has even further reduction to the negative factor so I think we're seeing this trend where we're trying to move away and get past the budget
061stabilization idea the biggest takeaway from this graphic and it kind of threw me I kind of fell out of my chair a little bit when our budget director brought it Forward is that over time we have actually lost 336 million dollars as pooter School District from the budget stabilization Factor and that's not that far off from our annual budget so that that's pretty amazing when you think about how much we as a state have not been able to do since the recession of 9 10. so I've talked a lot about total program I do want to hit some categorical program funding elements because they are also going to be topics for the legislature this year some of them are already out there in draft form we do have six primary categorical programs that we funded
062in pooter School District or that the state funds us on special education English language proficiency act gifted and talented Transportation vocational education and small attendance centers um most of them are self-explanatory the small attendance centers is a very small amount of Revenue that we get for operating some of our Mountain schools and so the state continues to fund that it's not a big piece of our budget but that's one question I get a lot is what is that um for the for the legislative session this year the focus is going to be primarily from what we can tell now on special education and this is a continued effort from last year in our current fiscal year last legislative session the legislature made a very noticeable change to the categorical for special education and that actually
063yielded about 2.1 million dollars for us this year which is allowing us to increase our ratios for special education and doing some amazing things there the takeaway for this session is that there is currently a bill out there that is going to further enhance that categorical even further that's good news for us um and so I obviously appreciative of the legislature for moving forward in that direction we're going to have to wait and see if it passes it's in it's a bill out there right now I did hear in talking with people at the Capitol that most decisions on bills that have money will not be made until the forecast comes out in March the state forecast March 20th so that might just be in limbo for a little bit until we see what that
064forecast number comes out at the state currently this might yield another million dollars for us in pooter School District so over the course of two years that's a 3.1 million dollar increase to a program-specific categorical the other note is um I am hearing some rumor of possibly some conversation about changing the transportation categorical but I think it's more rumor at this point but we'll be paying attention to that see if there's something that gains some traction at the state so I can go through this quickly because I've been threading this all through the presentation um so the governor uh potential legislative changes the big pieces the three bullet points that I think we're focusing on are the governor's continued strategy to buy down the budget stabilization Factor by 20 he's slated a year of 25
06526. um so again you saw that that was that budget stabilization Factor has been slowly being been lowered and this would be a continued effort on the governor's behalf there the second bullet point is potential changes School Finance rewrite um we don't have a lot of details right now and I did call to see if there were any more details before the board meeting tonight we're anxiously waiting for bills to get dropped there's a lot of rumor there's a lot of ideas of what these new formulas might look like and we're going to have to wait and see so I've heard all sorts of different options but we know something's coming so we're going to be paying attention to that the reality is this is being influenced by the need to re-look at the at-risk
066factors so I think it's going to be something that the legislature has to take on um interesting in the past there was a point where the legislature redid the school Finance formula some may even remember this it was sitting in in Colorado law for a while but it was dependent on a revenue or ballot passing and so there was actually another formula in the law for a number of years it ended up sunsetting because the ballot never passed so they have taken attempts at this before they've actually got them into law so I do think that this one is going to happen though unlike the other ones in the past and then the last point is that we do expect that there will be continued enhancement of the special ed categorical okay and so that
067gets us through the kind of the foundational setting of how the school Finance work formula works on a very basic understanding so that I think you can be conversant as changes happen at the at the Capitol I know many of you are plugged into those efforts down there um so now what I'd like to do is shift gears to looking at a possible Revenue scenario this has been updated since the last time um we may have talked uh and it's it's going to be new for some of the staff that um that we've been looking at budget internally so this is a new document and what what we're looking at here is the first piece remember I talked about there's two components that we really need to know we need to know how many kids
068we have and then how much they're going to be funded so we're first looking at how do we calculate number of kids we're going to be funded at um we continue and you can see on the data here that we are projecting a decline in enrollment next year but the good news from a school funding formula perspective and that's not that's not good news for us as a district because that is going to have an impact on us eventually but the state does slow that progression some and what they do is they allow us to calculate an average and so what we've done here is we've just calculated that average based on our prior and our current projection that gets us to a five-year average of 28 556 kids um the averaging only applies to
069certain kids there's a number of kids that we count that it doesn't apply to and so we group those into another category because it doesn't apply but early childhood fits in there Ascent is another program where we get funded for kids and then our online program of which doesn't necessarily follow the exact same formula but it ends up being very similar in the end but the important number for us is to understand what that average might look like and so as we look at this the our projected average for next year would be 29 214 with the state averaging calculated in okay that would be a 179 funded pupil count decline from the current year about a point six percent decline so we need that piece of information to go to the next slide and
070what this next slide is going to do is it's going to again we're talking about 73 of our Revenue here so and the reality is the calculation while there's a lot of detail behind the big calculation the state uses it for the most part will land in this vicinity we can see that we've taken that 0.6 percent decline in funded pupils what we've done is compared our current per pupil revenue and the state recently provided what they call a run it's a calculation it's that big spreadsheet I'm talking about and in that run we were able to pull out the revised Governor's budget proposal around PPR and right now that is looking at looking to be about 9956 or about a 10 percent increase and the Big Driver behind the per pupil Revenue increase there
071is the inflation rate that's applied to the base unit so every year the base is increased by inflation right now um and the inflation rate is going to be out real soon here but right now the projection was that the inflation rate was about 8.2 percent so we'll fine-tune that once that's actually released but what you're seeing is about eight percent inflation and then there's the the differential is the buy down of the budget stabilization factor that the governor proposed in that proposal if you do this basic calculation and again I want to emphasize this is basic there's more to it we get an estimated increase in revenue of about 24 million dollars okay which is a very big number for us that's larger than we typically are talking about in our budget forecasting and
072planning and it's really being driven by the inflation rate the eight percent inflation so that's kind of what we know at this point um I would expect that there's going to be a lot of information coming in the next couple weeks and the next two months specifically around what might shake out with the school Finance formula and we'll be paying very close attention to that I'd like to orient us back to you as we wind down this presentation our District budget priorities so as we think about new Revenue coming into the district we have a number of priorities that we need to consider um we've been talking about the the top four priorities for quite a bit but I'm going to focus on them again and they're the ones that are aligned to our strategic
073plan so we have four literacy graduate with options mental health and belonging and safety we also talked about having some other budget priorities integrated Services is one and that was in direct uh in relation to understanding that categorical was in categorical Revenue was increasing there competitive compensation and benefits is a big portion of our budget 86 percent of our budget is people or salaries and compensation and benefits so for that not to be on there is is it's hard not to have that on there um impact of universal Pre-K and Universal feeding are other budget priorities and we're continuing to work through those as the state gives us more information around how those programs might develop next year and and how they might work we also have some other we also have another with a
074question mark behind it for priorities because there are other priorities that are being identified as we go through our budget process and and we wanted to make sure we had an Avenue for those two come forward as needed but again we I think we um visited these priorities in December um and so they haven't changed since that time the last part of this presentation I just want to briefly go over our our timeline um just orienting the board that we really started our budget process back in November um where we started to have cabinet identify budget priorities we also had negotiations starting up at that time and we had the negotiations you can see at the the green bar way at the bottom we had negotiations uh compensation committee start up in November as well
075to start talking about compensation early in the budget process um we've moved past January where we continue to fine-tune those those items and we began convening uh budget the budget design team um also working at the same time down at the bottom you can see that we have the strategic planning efforts being taken place during the over January February and into March and then we have January and February where the DAC and sacs are providing some budget input to us and then the blue bar along the bottom represents the legislative session of which I talked a lot about how that's going to be something we're paying attention to during the budget process so now we're in February and a few things have happened we have released budgets to schools based on the projected counts and
076those went out in the form of student-based budgeting we have been visiting with schools about preliminary allocations for integrated Services representing an increase from some of that categorical so that's that's good news that's been happening in in real time as we're talking with our principals and then we're going to continue our efforts around BDT the Strategic plan efforts to to work the budget process going forward negotiations is a big part of that obviously taking place in in March April and May while we're also going to have the Strategic action plans working in March and we're going to be reviewing comp plans from schools in March so that would be um when our our schools take their SBB plans they bring their comp plans in and then the assistant soups myself and other folks in the
077district work through those plans in real time and ask questions and provide input what we're trying to get to is a budget that we can put together by May and my hope is that we can get there the big question is is the legislature going to give us enough information to make that decision I'm hoping that we can forecast that with some confidence and that we can make some decisions before then but I want to prepare people that the legislature could change that and so we'll just have to pay very close attention to that our goal would be to wrap up both negotiations and the budget process by mid-may and if the session ends when it should that might be possible there is the possibility if the legislature goes deep that they might go past
078their their end date and that would push our date back a little bit further as well at the end of the day we need to adopt a budget by law by the end of June before we start the next fiscal year so we will have a budget that we bring forward and I'm hoping that we'll have all the pieces by that time in June that we should and then we can bring that that budget forward for to the board for adoption at that point um that's a overview of the budget timeline process and where we're going I can take any questions at this point any questions from board members go ahead Carolyn so you talked a little bit about how the recession affected our budget and how hard it's been for us to recover from
079that the state economy has come roaring back so can you explain why the school financing didn't come back as quickly as the economy yeah and so I think um there's a lot of complication to the economy and how much of that gets to be spent in the budget um currently the state budget is forecasting Tabor refunds still and so Tabor is a big portion of that that there's a certain amount that the state can spend um and and Tabor is a big part of that um also I think as we looked at the state budget picture we see that the state is re-prioritizing where they're putting resource we saw education declined a little bit and we saw that well quite a bit and we saw Health Care increase so I I think that there's a
080lot of answers a lot of pieces to that but those are the two that really drive to the top of my head other questions from the board DJ um I I don't expect you necessarily have an answer for this right away but uh can you are you able to run to show how much we are missing out from federal dollars by not having Ida fully funded is that possible with our system I do I do do a calculation I've done it before in the in the fall where we calculate the revenue coming in and the costs were specialized so I could revisit that and see if that gets to Witcher but I don't think that's your question yeah I'm I'm I I want to be able to hold up I guess in front of some
081of them how much money should be coming into our community into our school system and for our students so I don't know if that's and that's based on what the federal government at one point had promised 40 percent of the funding to special education and that's the the so I can look at that and see what the differential is between that yeah and we're like at 13 14 so yeah okay cool thanks other comments Kristen do you have one yeah I just wanted to say thank you so much for that like really clear presentation I think to the community about how the dollars come in and how they can get spent and I think a great uh overall Takeaway on that is that over the last 10 years we've gone down seven percent um in
082spending and education from the state um so that's quite a bit um and I think it's really good for our community to understand that so thank you yeah I I do want to make sure because we we saw the state decline but some of that will is in the form of property tax so there's that dance between property tax and state share that's taking place in there too so so it's important that I was looking at a state chart um we did get some of that funding in the form of property taxes though so but what I'm saying is that the state as a whole did 37 or 39 of education and now it's doing 32 percent that's that's exactly yeah so that's that's a big takeaway yeah anything else go ahead DJ I I'll
083just hop on back that too is that it's these are services that our community and people want and need and there is a big fight for those and and in that pie chart you know higher education was at 10 uh somewhere in the last 10 years that was down to eight percent too at one point and so you know they got a little bit more back but you know that and and the human sources are are huge ones that we need to take care of our people and so again this comes down to how our tax policy Works a little bit at the state level and how we need to adjust that and update it but uh as I just wanted to point out all those other aspects and and how important it is to
084get our our public education funded correctly so that we can not only take care of our kids but it also it takes care of our communities by making sure that funding is in our community so yeah thank you thank you all right seeing no other comments I will add my thanks to you Dave and to your staff uh very uh very educational presentation well done and we appreciate all the work that goes into the work behind the slides you know actually getting the budget together so thank you and thanks for all the folks on the on the budget development team and and obviously in the finance department so thank you our next item on the agenda is uh uh our monitoring report uh for district and 1.0 those are the General District ends I I
085look forward to this report every year and um we'll have part one this evening and Brian just who will switch the presentation that Lauren thank you Lauren so as Lauren helps us kind of transition the presentations I'm excited that for our GE 1.0 monitoring report our District's Chief institutional Effectiveness officer Dr Schmitz here to present and he's alongside both of our assistant superintendents for both secondary schools and elementary schools and I'm incredibly proud that I know there's a lot of staff that are here that are all part of our Collective success when we think our primary goal is to make sure after students spend you know 13 plus years of their time with us through you know experiencing a really strong public education is that they have an opportunity to graduate with various options and
086I'm really grateful that the high school principals that represent our various comprehensive high schools are here tonight if you remember they were here about a year ago uh being challenged by us around what was needed in order to improve those particular rates and I'm really grateful that they're on the other side of that equation tonight as a result of their thoughtful leadership their data informed leadership and then working in partnership with their various teachers and staff members to mobilize the various supports that students need it's a team effort it's not just because of a leader or a group of leaders but I'm really grateful that all of you are here tonight so thank you Dwayne thank you all right well I gotta say we want to ask the principals to come to the table to
087their what was that with the Q a piece okay yeah that's fine if that sounds okay okay um I want to say I think this is the first time I can remember and doing this type of report for multiple years following right on right on the heels of um Dave doing a budget update and I like the flow because I thought maybe I should have changed the title of this report from the monitoring report to how psd's Learning Community does more with less um because we have a lot to celebrate there's a lot of great outcomes our kids our community our teachers our principals you know our various folks in our district the bus drivers the food workers everybody's involved in these wins and we have a lot of them so but it's it's interesting
088hearing how we're on the on the bottom consistently of that funding J formula and yet we have these amazing outcomes Okay so um first of all what we're going to accomplish tonight we're going to illustrate the alignment of the continuous Improvement system that pooter school district is living and will continuously be committed to we're going to provide an outcomes update in particular it's going to be a numbers night between finance and now various types of student metrics right kind of heavy on the numbers but we're going to show how those numbers are related to these different Improvement efforts and these different plans like the district uip and the school Improvement plans and so on and try to tie it all together a little bit we're going to also highlight the accomplishments the the work that
089our staff is doing the related to the Strategic plan and the you know the unified Improvement plan specifically steps in those four areas that Dave had mentioned in his report we'll answer questions and by doing all this hopefully we'll just increase our ownership our alignment our cohesion around all these Improvement processes okay so this is just a quick visual we've used before just to highlight real quickly that there's a strategic plan and I know everyone is aware that that's in development there's action teams that have met repeatedly they're filling out the actual action steps that's been a real concentrated body of work that's continuing the district unified Improvement plan is on a little shorter timeline and a strategic plan and the uip will be perfectly aligned so we're not running two different independent plans out
090there the school Improvement plans we have to leave some room for flexibility because schools have to and their teams have to respond to their unique environments but at the same time we want some systemness in our planning and so there's kind of a dance between the district uip and strategic plan and then the school uips they have to work together this report tonight where we're at is the de 1.0 monitoring report which is really about the district ends from the 2122 school year important piece of information and Report out related to all these Improvement efforts and then the PSD data analytics platform is all the dashboarding systems we have and just in case anyone viewing isn't aware we have those analytic systems operating at the individual student level for our teachers and our counselors and
091folks in our schools we have other levels of that system that are you know pushed out to the public on system Insight on our Dash or on our website rather and we have some other levels in between so information is really at the center and making it transparent and useful is at the center of all these efforts okay now we call these things priority Performance challenges following the state law if you will and the improvement process that the state outlines but pooter School District leadership teams like like to call them priority performance opportunities so you'll see both you know phrases being used tonight because they really are the same thing and like David mentioned earlier in the uip we had identified three of these priority performance opportunities or challenges literacy mental health belonging and graduating
092with options as we develop the Strategic plan we added in safety and so that's that fourth one okay the board this board approved these as the right areas of focus for this 2223 school year as well as the district accountability committee back earlier this year so we're just setting the table a little bit to wrap our heads around this whole bigger picture of unified Improvement and how this process kind of works at the end of the day what pooter School District most directly you know invest in controls supports is adult practices the students come in we do all the work that we do we have all different levels of adults working in our system it's our practices as adults that are going to impact the outcomes for our kids right and so we have some
093key student outcomes that we're going to talk about through the remainder of this report but this bigger process that we're really talking about is about influencing adult practices to optimize things you know our systems for our students so under literacy we've got three different measures we're going to look at early literacy achievement growth and additional support and I'll go into a little more details we actually roll through this graduating with options we have four different indicators graduating and completion rates dual enrollment which includes concurrent enrollment Career and Technical Ed some people call that CTE so often they might forget what it stands for post-secondary and post-secondary outcomes which are real important right if you're going to talk about graduating with options not just graduating and then mental health and belonging we have two main measures
094that come from the healthy kids Colorado survey and from our PSD student connections survey which includes some measures on social emotional learning a super quick high-level overview of uh targets and kind of outcomes table is what we're looking at right now and you can see that we have these key indicators and I just kind of ran through early literacy achievement growth additional support graduating with options in mental health and wellness and there's multiple measures in several of those and so collectively we have a set of 15 targets we can see that from the green versus red color coding in those middle-ish columns that we hit our Target on 10 out of 15 of those measures what you can't see by looking at that table which will go into a little more depth tonight is the
095middle two that are in red that have to do with additional support growth like students we've identified as good candidates for additional support the Little Numbers in the red table under the 2122 outcomes is 0.16 and 0.1 those are actually positive numbers meaning those students made more growth in their academic periods Nationwide on those assessments they just didn't hit our Target which is pretty rigorous that we had set at 0.20 or higher but I just want to point out not only did they exceed the academic the growth of their academic peers Nationwide you can see from the column on the furthest right with the little green arrows pointing up that that 2122 outcome was an improvement over the 2021 outcome so there's some kind of positive signs quite frankly even associated with those red cells
096okay we're going to go into these uh different targets and measures uh one at a time and go into a little depth in the past when I've given the monitoring report presentation I've tried to go through a pretty comprehensive quite frankly fast but kind of comprehensive for um you know overview and it is a bit much I think we all agree so it's a 120 page report and that's that's just too much right so what I've done is pared it down just selected what I think are some key visuals and we're going to try to spend about 30 minutes or less going through this and then open it up for conversation Brian's looking at the clock and laughing let's let's see what happens all right no promises but we'll try to keep it a little
097quicker at any rate to ground ourselves a lot of the information we're going to look at and that we have looked at in the past and we want our community to be aware of are these things called achievement effect sizes they're a tried and true statistical way of showing acceleration if you will in this context learning acceleration and so I have a quick graphic just to help us wrap our heads around what is it an achievement effect size there's two normal curves superimposed on one another up there in that slide the blue normal curve is centered at a mean of zero on a standardized score it represents the national outcomes on either a map assessment or an acadians assessment okay the red normal curve that shifted to the right about one standard deviation unit in
098this example is the PSD outcome it's it's our distribution of scores from our students and that whole distribution is shifted to the right now traditionally I used to call this the PSD advantage in fact I still among friends call it the PSD advantage because what we see is year after year in every subject Reading Writing math science everything we measure and all the tests CMAs TCAP p-s-a-t-s-a-t-a-c-t acadians Maps we see the same thing which is our normal curve of outcomes achievement outcomes are consistently shifted about one quarter to one-third of a standard deviation to the right and that's a pretty big shift it's kind of like moving our saying our typical student instead of being at the 50th percentile our typical student is at the 68th percentile which means they're doing as better as as
099well or better than 68 percent of their peers instead of 50 and that's our typical student right at any rate it's a way of measuring learning acceleration I'll leave it at that so now when we look at early literacy K3 and our measure and PSD is acadians we're going we've got two line graphs in front of us the one on the left is the percentage of kids who met the Benchmark like the grade level expectation the line graph on the right on its vertical axis is the effect size that we just talked about when you look at those two graphs you can see that the shape of the line is is similar right those two shapes are similar it's just that the axes we're measuring them against have changed and so that's why they look
100a little different even though the overall shape is the same the one on the left that tells us the percent of students that met or exceeded Benchmark tells we can see we had a slight decline year over year for those three years that are shown that are kind of pre-covered years then we have the dip that is the covet two years actually because one year of data is the 2019-20 year is not displayed in this in this illustration and that's because we didn't do spring testing that year because of covid right so it's really two years there and then we can see a bounce back up in this most recent year of 2122 so there's a couple things that we can we can see that additionally by looking at the norm referenced graph on the
101right around achievement effect size because the graph on the left you cannot see how we're doing compared to national peers the graph on the right we can see how our students were are performing through those years relative to pre-coved National groups of students in the same grade levels that took the maps test so it gives us a real measure of like the impact of covid and how we're doing right so the last thing I want to I guess mention about this is we can see that pre-covered slide down which justifies pooter School District's focus on literacy in our achievement I'm sorry in our strategic plan and our unified Improvement plan right what we can also see the bounce back which is a positive and we can see that on the graph on the right that
102PSD was consistently scoring well above National averages and we're right back at that negative 0.02 that furthest point to the right on that little black line graph for 2122 puts us right at the national average of what kids were scoring pre-covet so our kids we're back on the rise and what we'll see in 2223 is that graph that line graph continuing to move up and we're going to be back up in that positive growth or achievement effect size that we were used to seeing okay so achievement growth and literacy moving a little bit out of just Pre-K 3 to a little broader View and we're going to switch gears to the state assessment system the state assessment system includes CMAs grades three through eight and then PSAT and sat through grades 9 10 and 11.
103so collectively working we're looking at grades 3 through 11. we're looking at pretty full data sets you know lots of students are taking these assessments and have been taking them and you notice that the table is full of green colored cells that's because we're hitting our growth Target very very consistently in those cells and they're well above zero which means we're outperforming what we typically see Nationwide or sorry in this case Statewide in Reading but there's an important little component I want to point out to the board directors in particular when we look at cmass data like this we're looking at students Statewide that also took the test in the same years that our students took the test we're no longer looking at pre-covet norming groups right so what we're looking at is different than
104the map data and the acadians data and they're both really important stories what the state data is showing us is that the students in pooter School District maintained their PSD Advantage their approximate 0.33 standard deviation shift to the right that accelerated learning consistently through all those years including the coveted years relative to the other kids in the state that were experiencing the same type of environments so that's a big positive in my opinion and a lot to celebrate we maintained our advantage through these challenging years switching now to um did that switch that did not switch thank you this is something new we haven't done before in the mining report I just thought was kind of interesting and and you'll see the reason I went here is because Statewide attendance rates have declined slowly and
105consistently and then recently a little sharper drop pooter school district has experienced a similar type of a pattern and so attendance is important and we're spending some energy in pooter School District reviewing our attendance policies and practices right so I took the cmass data we were just looking at and I filtered it to to include only students that have less than 95 attendance in our schools and I'm going to go back I'm going to click back one time this is our full student bodies achievement accelerated achievement outcome this is the same picture same year same data but for students that attended less than 95 percent of the school days and you can see that PSD students are still showing up strong relative to National or sorry Statewide outcomes do you notice that all those effect
106sizes are positives except for that 2021 covid year and yet you also saw those effect sizes drop from that consistent 0.33 down to the teens to 14 11 9 like that so what's the what's the takeaway message attendance matters you know teachers matter and contact time with staff matters and so we can see the impact of that here and I think that validates psds energy that we're putting into some attendance practices and policies now I'm going to click the next picture which is the other half of the student it's not really half it's a little different than half but the other portion of that same student population but this is the portion that had 95 or better attendance and you can see that even during the covid years these students accelerate it and actually increased
107their their achievement effect size over all those five years that we're showing in this illustration um and you can see that's like a half a standard deviation or more that their normal curve is shifted to the right of their Statewide grade level peers so again attendance matters this is the a quick picture to kind of ground us a little bit and what I had just mentioned around attendance rates the red line or pink line hot pink is the state of Colorado's overall results in the black line is our pooter School District's results on attendance now these attendants picked the the graph the line graph we're looking at is from the state data set it includes our Charter Schools all of our schools okay the data that's on the right that's tabled is from pooter School
108District's Synergy system and does not include our Charter so there's just a little bit of information there to kind of contextualize this nonetheless the takeaway message on this graph besides the slow decline in attendance Statewide and locally with a bit of a sharper drop in 2122 the 2223 data on the right side that's tabled indicates because it's split by male and female and they wrote both right at 89 percent which is very very close to the 89.3 percent that we have as an overall District including charters in 2122 meaning even our current attendance rates seem to be aligning somewhat at this point in time with those 21 22 rates we see in the illustration so again it's just validation that pooter School District would be justified in in just looking into and optimizing our attendance
109practices and policies we're Switching gears now to map data we were looking at State data I'm going to go see Mass through sat so now we're switching to map Reading data we always look at map data just kind of validate what we see in our state assessment data and recall that this map data is normed against student groups that were you know pre-covered so it gives us a real picture of how we're doing relative to students prior to covid nonetheless you can see even though there's a lot of green in that table so again our growth effect sizes are or sorry these are not growth effect size these are achievement effect sizes these achievement effect sizes are well above zero meaning again pooter school districts PSD Advantage right we have this high level of achievement
110across our entire student population and yet in Reading with map data we can see that decline even in a positive space prior to covid again and then we can see a flattening out in 2021-21-22 and we can look forward to seeing an incline in 2223 as we bounce back even relative to these pre-covered norms I also believe that this slide is a celebration in that pooter School District students are achieving at such high levels and yet it's also good validation of our focus on literacy in our strategic plan in our uip these are the type of data views we were looking at when we were all making those decisions about what to focus on before we switch to growth and I slipped up a minute again and I went into growth effect size I love
111looking at growth but um there is a difference between achievement effect sizes and growth effect sizes achievement effect sizes that we were just looking at really are we're visualized as two normal curves that slide left and right of each other right because it's a norming group like a state outcome or a national outcome versus our local outcome on this on the same assessment and grade levels and stuff but a growth effect size is a little different there's two normal curves again but this time I put those normal curves I they're they're vertical in relation to each other and that's because the top normal curve that we're looking at represents the standardized scores or Z scores of the PSD student population of students okay on some particular test it wouldn't really matter which one it is
112um in the bottom normal curve is the post-test the TA I think I left off the top normal curve is the pre-test so if we're looking at Maps data the top normal curve would be like the fall or beginning of year score and the bottom normal curve would be like the spring or end of year score and so what we're looking at is our own students movement from a pre-test to a post-test which is what makes this growth not achievement right now why are there three different colored arrows there's red green and black and that's carefully selected so the green arrows are indicating places where the post-test is a higher score than the pre-test on the standardized score what does that really mean it means that those students with the green arrows made gains moved
113ahead of their academic peers Nationwide or Statewide that's what we're looking for that's closing gaps if we're if we're looking at kids who started kind of behind on the achievement levels right the red arrows are showing students who slid backwards in their normative position from their pretest or their post-test the black arrows are holding the normative position and I purposely put one of each type color below zero as a starting point and one of each color above zero is a starting point because the meaning of Positive Growth or or negative growth is really the same regardless of where you started growth is about where did you move during the course of the school year relative to your academic peers and we coined that phrase I want you to know in Colorado academic peers and now
114it's used Nationwide to mean exactly this students in the same grade range that had the exact same prior score on that assessment system that's an academic peer so they're not just grade level peers when we say academic peers they're in the same grade level and they're the students in the state or nation that have the exact same prior score so it's kind of like a group we're saying where do you move compared to kids who start it where you did That's the basis of the Colorado growth model and it's the same basis in this growth effect size okay so when I put this picture in and I appreciate you letting me Orient people to this and taking it because it's so important as we just keep going through this work together to understand these metrics
115a little bit this picture is in here just as an illustration there's a preponderance of green arrows meaning students are making tremendous growth in fact you could say they're making more than a Year's growth in a year's time because those black era lines are pretty much a perfect definition of a Year's growth in a year's time green arrows are more than a Year's growth in a year's time as demonstrated by peers with real data red arrows are indicating less than a Year's growth in a year's time right so if you looked at a particular teacher or classroom or school or district and you could see this picture for all the kids in it and proportionately you saw that many green arrows compared to red or black what would you say that represents and I would
116say that represents tremendous growth and a probably a school setting that I would love to see my own kid go into I don't know how they're getting these results and maybe as a parent I don't care but I can see the evidence that they're getting more than a Year's growth with the preponderance of their kids and that's got to be a good reflection on instruction and all kinds of things right what would it mean if you saw this picture that's not a positive story more kids are sliding back this picture would be related to a negative growth effect size we're about to switch to tables and numbers this picture would be related to a negative growth effect size the picture we were just looking at would have a positive growth effect size like 0.23 or
117something right okay without understanding when we look at the fall to Spring third to eighth grade map Reading growth with these growth effect sizes as I just described them this is what we see first of all notice that all of the years other than the covid 2021 and again notice 1920 is not available to display because we didn't have spring testing they're all positives those are Positive Growth effect sizes that means that psd's picture looks more like those green arrows the preponderance of them sliding to the right as opposed to kids holding their own or sliding back that is our basis when we say PSD is a high achievement high growth District we can back that up you also see this is in reading that we had a slight decline going again in growth just
118like we saw in achievement effect size pre-coved right the drop in covid and then the bounce back up post code I'm going to call it post covet even though I know covet's still around okay we're going to switch gears because we're trying to move kind of quick there's a there's a group of students in our district every year that we identify as good candidates for additional support and their students who started the year a little behind their grade level peers on a body of evidence and so we're going to look at the growth that we get with students that we knew were good candidates for additional support this set of line graphs is to just help ground ourselves in what what do we mean when we say a good candidate for additional support and I
119realize this is hard to see from your seat possibly but the top line graph is got in fact both line graphs have a percentile metric on that vertical axis and what we've got is an individual student being represented in the top line graph and a different student represented in the bottom line graph the student represented in the top line graph and this is all real data by the way we're seeing achievement outcomes on on a percentile metric on three different test programs C Mass map and park over multiple years it looks to me like five years of data that's a body of evidence and you can see how all those scores line up pretty tightly across those years traveling below the 35th percentile that's the classic trajectory and profile of a student that we identify
120as a good candidate for additional support the bottom graph is the is a profile of a student we would call we have a group we would call Exceptional outcomes and their body of evidence is traveling in that 95th and above percentile kind of GT kind of criteria the students were going to look at the data for in just a moment they're the students that we have identified as good candidates for additional support okay so the question is if you start with a group and a group of students you carefully selected that are good cans for additional support achievement outcomes are obviously going to look low on average right that's how we selected the students the question is what is the growth what's the change over time during the school year so that's what we're looking
121at here third through eighth grade map growth filter to the students who are identified as good candidates for additional support in that 2122 column the most recent school you'll just focus on that because it's the it's the main focus of this report you can see all those positive effect sizes blue is even a higher kind of a level cut Point than the green you see one year I mean I'm sorry one grade level where it dips into a negative effect size but on balance it's a 0.16 so that's 1.16 of a standard deviation additional growth if you will Beyond a Year's growth in a year's time couple things I want to point out when you look at the line graph you can see that psds staff and students have consistently made more than a Year's
122growth in a year's time relative to academic periods which means other kids around the nation in this case with maps who started at similar places so PSD is doing a good job of moving students and getting additional achievement gains the question we kind of highlight on the right is how many schools are meeting are 0.20 or above Target for growth for students that were good candidates for additional support in 2021 there were only eight L eight schools in that list in 2122 we have 22 of our schools who met that Target of moving additional support candidate you know students more than one-fifth of a standard deviation compared to their academic peers Nationwide that's a celebration now moving a little quicker through the next two because there's similar slides but this next one is the same
123type of a view but it's based on acadians data for first through fifth grade and once again you can see the the amazing growth outcomes for students who are identified as good candidates for additional support in the table and on the right you can see that we had out of our 24 of our schools who met that 0.20 and above Target and we had 15 last year which in and of itself was a celebration but we've increased those numbers based on both the acadians and map Reading data then the last of the this series of slides we'll look at in this case is for map math data to have that up there yep and um once again we can see that 2122 was a year with a lot of green in the column 2021 was
124rough right that was a challenging year academically and we can see that in the numbers on the right side with the schools that we have tabled out in that we only had one school that met our growth criteria for additional support candidates in 2021 but we had 13 schools in 2122 okay graduating with options please in this math aspect of it I guess is math the Z gain for like the schools is that then is that an average of those uh seven students or 40 students is that how that that's exactly right okay thank you very good perfect okay we're going to switch gears to graduating with options I kind of promise you we're just going to kind of hop along and look at a few key slides and visualizations from each area so graduating
125with options we're switching into first of all huge celebration highest rate in in easily over a decade I don't even know how many years back it goes it may be more than uh 17 years I I don't know the state changed some of the ways they calculate graduation rates with regard to Ascent program inclusion or not and various things so at some point it's kind of hard to like go back too far right but we know this that 87.1 percent graduation rate is the direct result of the effort our counselors our teachers our high school schools and principals and leaders put into supporting students so we're really super proud it is a big deal obviously the completion rate Rises when the graduation rate Rises so there's a celebration there and I think I want to
126jump right into the fact that those increased rates were evident for virtually every subgroup that we traditionally you know look at and track and monitor I want to be careful here and mention that we're not brushing over the fact that there are gaps right in achievement in growth in graduation rates and in other outcomes we talk about we're not brushing past that so gaps exist but celebrations exist too and those gains that we um you know are seeing in graduation rate appear to have impacted virtually every one of the subgroups that we're tracking so that's a celebration so I have some of the numbers there and I'm not going to take our time to just read through them or anything at this point we do have one group I will mention that went down by
1278.9 percent which is our black or African-American students So that obviously catches our attention and that's and and our Asian students really held steady but other than those two groups the other ethnic groups free reduce English language Learners and students supported with an IEP all had substantial increases okay we're about to shift gears into some post-secondary outcomes and when we do that we're going to I believe yes we are we're going to add some context to that by comparing psds outcomes to our comparison districts we selected as comparison districts for multiple years now we've been using these same districts same vein Boulder and Cherry Creek the reason that we select these districts is based on those what is it seven demographic type factors that you see on the left side of that chart enrollment size
128which clearly Cherry Creek is not a great match first on that one factor they're larger than us they're quite large free reduced percent and then various ethnic breakdown percentages and then English language learner percentages and when we look across those characteristics you can see that these districts are fairly comparable to pooter school district and it turns out that the most comparable to pooter School District in the state and they all have outcomes that are worthy of comparing ourselves to so as we look at graduating with options not just graduating we're showing this data to get some and and I want to back up real quick and say again pooter School District recognizes there are many excellent post-secondary options and that college is not the only one right nonetheless we have data that's comparable between ourselves
129and other districts on these post-secondary college you know outcomes so we're using them here as a data point okay so when we look at dual enrollment which is students earning college credit while they're in pooter school district schools right we are the state leader and we have consistently been well above the state and all of our comparison districts and there's a lot of work and energy that's gone into that and I would love for Tanya Al cares to be able to come in here we asked tonight but she couldn't make it because I would love for her to be able to really represent what's been going on for multiple years we're super proud of this outcome I'm flipping over to remediation rates when pooter School District graduates go off to college what percentage of them
130need to you know attend a remediation course in English or math our rates again are the lowest in the state year after year consistently so our programs are rigorous our instruction is great we do more with less and there's evidence of this both math and English first year college gpa I bet there's more than a few parents in this room and I know I'm watching that with my daughter real carefully my son's finishing up his journey he's got one more semester he's finishing now at Boulder he's done fine my daughter's in her freshman year I'm watching this one carefully like how's she really doing right pooter School District again is a leader in this and uh and that's some tough competition with the districts that we're putting in here as comparison districts they are high
131achievement districts as well at any rate pooter School District students and graduates do earn high gpas first year into college what percentage of pooter School District graduates finish their college degree within four years again we're leading the pack year after year I think that matters to People Too college is expensive and if kids are well prepared they can finish in time you know in four years um so this we brought up we highlighted this last year I remember um financial assistance for post-secondary it's a big deal college is expensive our FAFSA a federal financial aid form that really everyone should fill out who's going to college because you never know what you might be eligible for our participation rates are completion rates in FAFSA have been traditionally a little bit lower than the state and
132some of our comparison districts so we've put some energy behind this and we're not seeing that energy reflect it because you'll notice that the data we have that I can get Statewide comparable data on is the most recent is the class of 2020. so it'll be a couple years out before we actually see the fruits of our labors at our principal teams and such have been working on now at any rate the graph on the right the line graph on the right is the same picture but again it's filtered or trimmed only to include only students who are free or reduce lunch eligible because a question might come up maybe pooter school district has less graduates with financial need so they're not filling out the form well I don't think that's the answer because when
133we do the graph on the right every one of those students absolutely has financial aid a need I know the Schmidt's kids did and we filled out the FAFSA you know what I mean and so we can see that even among that group we're still showing up kind of low so we're pretty confident that again our Improvement strategy of putting some focus is correct we're going to finish real quick with a just a high level uh highlight on some improvement plan action steps that have been completed and then we're going to invite some of our principals up for the Q a session to add a little depth and breadth to all of this I'm not intending that people can read in detail all the different items at this point but I do want to mention
134this tonight we're just talking about two areas that are within the unified Improvement plan which is really the literacy and the graduating with options we're going to have a second session with the Board of Education where we're going to go over to mental health and belonging section okay so there's two unified Improvement plan major Improvement strategies related to what we're talking about tonight the first one is literacy okay literacy instruction and practice the integration of literacy instruction throughout all subject areas and all grade levels and and what you see here is just some action steps that's the virtual almost all of them that we wrote Into the uip with a check mark next to them because our teams have been doing this work in things that are deliverables have been done so just kind of
135an update that these pieces of work are underway and being done we didn't write them stick them on a shelf and forget about them people are hard at work out there and I just clicked the screen over to the other one the unified Improvement major Improvement strategy number three which is graduating with options which says Implement practices to ensure graduation rates are commensurate with students demonstrated levels of College and Career readiness this one I do want to point out because we're going to invite the principals up now there are some very concrete action steps that have been going on for multiple years um that the principles have been leading with Scott Nielsen as well that we're now seeing the you know the benefits of in this graduation rate increases so I would say at this
136point if the principals who are here tonight want to come and visit you know come up and and be up in the table with us and I've got this one last slide just to kind of reiterate that I haven't seen I've been doing this for 15 years and we used to have a lot of green all over our chart at one point remember that and then there's been a couple years in a row I'd say where we had a lot more red than we had green and I feel like we've turned a corner and we're back to seeing a lot more green than red and like I mentioned the two red cells that are kind of clustered in the center which are also about achievement and growth those actually are Positive Growth effect sizes meaning
137the students we're looking at in those groups did grow more than their academic peers Nationwide they just didn't hit our rigorous Target so there is a lot to celebrate so I want to click this to discussion open it up and invite the principals to jump in as appropriate and you wish to do we have questions or comments from the board go ahead Nate yeah how do how do we determine our PSD targets when we're looking at those different aspects thanks Nate so that's a great question so we as a group have over time established many of them right and so they a lot of our targets have been pretty stable for a while now and I remember five six years ago being in front of the board and asking can we just land on the
138cons the metrics and the targets so we can organize our system around those and mobilize and not have a shifting landscape if you will right and and it's been great so we've done that so most of those targets go back multiple years like that right so how did we set them though we were looking at traditionally and historically what are our outcomes what's a stretch but reasonable goal to get to we put those in place but here's a very important statement I want to remind everybody when we say all kids we mean all kids in PSD right we mean each subgroup of students that you can think of free reduce IEP ethnicities whatever and we mean all kids and so we've held to our Targets in our metrics because even if we're hitting it across
139the whole student body there's subgroups within our population for whom we're not hitting those targets and we can hold to those targets until we in fact are hitting them with subgroups and overall and the other the last thing I want to leave you with is setting Targets in and of itself is not going to improve our system monitoring the targets longitudinally like we're doing and holding them steady so we can see where there's improvements where they're sliding down which is how we landed on literacy as a goal we're still in a really positive achievement spot with regard to literacy right but we noticed over several years that we were sliding down so I'm I'm saying that I think our Target setting and our metrics they're doing their job they're indicating where we have room for
140improvement and they're indicating where our successes are and at the end of the day that's that's what this is about and we won't celebrate too loudly until we get you know outcomes that we're proud of for all different various subgroups of kids as well as overall but we did come up with them collectively and we have held to them pretty steadily yeah other questions go ahead Kristen I if I can maybe ask all the principals I just I want I want to know what do you think is the one thing that your school did or that you did as a team in your school that made the biggest change um in their in your graduation rates that everybody wants I can speak to that um I think you know one thing that we did was
141uh really the teeming approach of monitoring students and you know I think that speaks to the collective efficacy of um you know teachers when they get together to talk about students that they need to support so we built in within our late start periods time for that progress monitoring where teachers who all serve the same student uh you know talk about you know what works what doesn't work and and they do that intervention work uh every couple weeks and so we've tried really focusing on 9th and 10th grade over the past few years as more of an upstream approach rather than kind of that reactive like let's get them across the Finish Line once they're in the 12th grader and so I think that's really um yeah just change just change the mindset of teachers
142that you know it is a team approach but then you know really kind of like I said focused on that Upstream work I can go Julie Chaplin Fossil Ridge um and so I think um much of the same I think a lot of us do much of this similar monitoring for grades every few weeks but I know um quarterly I've been monitoring our grades and students that are failing now for a couple of years and so last year I started to really track the students who were failing multiple classes in a quarter then multiple quarters then really kind of targeting them and moving them up on radar you know of our counselors to meet with and then ultimately last year came to the staff with a list of I'm gonna say it was less than
143100 but I think it was like 90 some kids that I just called mtss tier 2 support kids and I said we're not going to take the staff Staffing to write individual mtss plans for all these kids all these kids are on the list and here are the accommodations they get period And so that was extended time no penalties for late work allowing them to look at ways to maybe redo problems on a test or revise something or come in for Learning and earn some extra points things of that nature and so that that started pretty consistently and then every quarter I've updated that and it's worked and the staff have they think they feel like there's buy-in like all teachers and they really took the collaborative approach of at a 2000 and well last
144year was 2050 kids we can't help 80 80 kids in this building you know I think everybody understood that Collective lift and now we're less than 20 this quarter so you know I think we're seeing some you know Improvement and feelings from kids and and hope and things like that so just one awesome very similar we I don't have a context for what happened prior to my arrival at Fort Collins but what we've been doing over the last year is just being super intentional around crosswalking the power bi report on off track to graduate with with the report that shows kids who are currently failing classes that they're scheduled in for the semester we've held regular work sessions that are in our calendar between counselors and the admin team we're talking about students by name
145and same thing Julie in the last column we are coming up with a mini action plan is this a student who needs to be partnered with Matthew's house tutors um do we need to offer high dosage tutoring I mean just anything you can think of should they have Push and support for from our ELD staff um is there something we don't have right in their schedule and while we're doing that work we're cross-referencing whether they've met whether our seniors have met the requirement for the Plus and sometimes finding surprise there's a 12th grader who hasn't met the plus and then you know trying to figure out how we're going to make that happen so very much of the same things I think my colleagues are doing right the only piece that I would add or
146doing a lot of the same monitoring and um cross-referencing all that kind of thing but we have also added some depth to our intervention pieces and so we have different people in places the mtss team has always been I think the strength of what we do at Rocky and being able to add an academic interventionist who literally can go around all day long pull kids out of class check in on them adding Equity diversity Specialists just adding people to add depth to those interventions I think has made an impact as well one thing that they're not saying that I just want to make sure that they get credit for and it's not that you're seeking credit you're actually some of the most humble people that I've ever met is their personal involvement in these efforts
147their fingerprints are on the pulse and the temperature and they're mobilizing their staff in ways in partnership with them they're not delegating they're not directing those things are a part of the work but it's your personal involvement and passion around this work is what inspires your staff to do this with you and I just want to make sure that you are acknowledged for that and there's the other smaller Boutique high schools that alternative type high schools that we have are doing the same exact things and deserve to be recognized for their efforts too and showing those particular improvements but to me when I think about the responsiveness like Penny I don't have context to what things were like prior to me being here but I know when there was a call to action you all
148collectively responded with your entire faculties and I'm just really really proud of that yeah I'd I'd uh I'd second that I I did want to ask the flip question though and that is to maintain this level of of success or to even improve it particularly for the subgroups which I did notice and you didn't say this explicitly Dwayne but the fact of the matter is for most of those subgroups obviously not the black and African-American group but for the other subgroups they actually grew larger than the than the white subgroup so there was some some closing of the of the traditional gaps that we've seen and I think that's terrific but uh the question is to the extent that we want to do better which we obviously do and what next steps do you all
149need to take and at least as importantly what support do you need from the central office to take them one of the conversations we had today about that was committing to looking at our ninth grade transition process because we we do spend so much time looking at our seniors that are off track and what do we do and we all know that it it starts when they when they get in your building or well before really but we need to continue to commit and even enhance the supports we have in place for those interventions and that transition process when they get there because when students start buying in to your school to your culture to success to anything then then you got them but if they don't find that home and they don't feel any
150success early those are the students that end up dropping out you don't realize it and then when your graduation rate is lower and you wonder why it's because of those students thank you other thoughts from the principals yeah I think um you know looking at how you purposely Target and and create interventions around that so we do three week grade checks and you know there's a list of students that counselors will meet with and so for the last couple of years and it's in our uip students that are because we are our big sub Gap groups are Hispanic and students and black or African-American and are students with IEPs and so it's intentional focus on when those students get two F's and not three we're going to move them up we're going to move them
151to a higher response level sooner because we know that their ability to recuperate by the end of the by the fourth year is significantly lower than the other students that we're seeing I think the other is to continually think about and continue to look at how you provide additional supports how you think outside the box on instruction and so you know we've piloted this year a credit recovery that's like geometry and algebra and it's kind of a mix of kids but you could try to do a recovery that way um and that was really successful we had kids that had failed twice and were were able to go in and they had absorbed so much knowledge they could do some pre-tests and then test out and then learn the rest pretty quickly instead of sitting
152through that whole semester or year long again for a third time or a second time when it just clearly wasn't working and so um I think in terms of Board District support I think flexibility around how we're able to do that authentically I think some of that comes to play with CDE in attendance but our ability to think outside of the box sometimes we need to be able to bend those structures of the traditional nine to five four block schedule great Kathy or Penny um yeah I would add I think mental health support uh is really needed you know I saw that Dwayne and his monitoring Port uh pulled out some of the student feedback just on why they were struggling in school and we see it every day you know those are some of
153the students who are chronically absent that we don't have a ton of interventions for you know that requires home visits uh you know and and so a lot of those positions that we have are Grant funded folks so that's something that's hard to sustain and then you know like Julie was saying I just think you know some options for kids I think you know we have kids who you know really thrive in you know construction or in agriculture but it doesn't meet the you know the math bucket or the science bucket um you know but if you've met you know an FFA kid man those kids know science and they know math and you know and they're brilliant in that in the that world and so I think some flexibility around how kids can get
154academic credit through some of those CTE Pathways I think would be huge you know there's lots of data around you know students who are in CTE courses that they graduate at a higher percentage than you know other students and so the other thing I read in Dwayne's like 120 page monitoring report uh was uh I know I did we love it did um but it showed that that our students who are black African-American Hispanic Latino are actually um seeking those types of classes more at a higher rate than their peers and so you know that just tells me that there's interest and engagement there and so can we lean into that with some of those graduation requirements penny okay the only thing I would say is honey the only thing I would say is I'm
155glad we're digging into attendance because attendance does matter and I think we saw that pretty clearly so I'm excited to be a part of that work I appreciate your answers I appreciate your ownership of the problem and you're digging in the schools and I appreciate your willingness to point out where this central office and we need to help so thank you other comments or questions yes follow up to the where are you guys finding the ability to discuss with each other your successes and what could be used elsewhere and then kind of even if you've tried something and you're like that didn't really work very well so you're telling each other what not to do as well are you finding the time in the space to do that and like how what is that looking
156like I say yes um I think I think we I think we're I feel very comfortable reaching out we'll send group texts just randomly about hey what's this have you done this before what's this are you facing this issue so I think just collegially like we feel like we're we have a trust amongst each other but then it's very purposeful I think in our district leadership meetings that we do talk that we do come together that we do share practices so that we can learn from each other not spend time recreating the wheel um collaborate you know all of those things like the math courses that my teacher put together for credit recovery should are now the district-wide credit recovery math like that's what we should be doing right shouldn't be everybody recreating all these
157courses so um so I think I think yes I think there's intentional time and then there's just our own ability to to reach out and we do so that'd be mine yeah I'll give you a good example of that Fort Collins is moving to the 4x4 block and I think we've poached people from every building to come to come and work with our staff or just be a part of the problem solving and thinking through so that that feels really good and it's just it's built a nice sense of community I think just between our buildings all right looks like no yeah go ahead Jim maybe it's more of a thank you but I remember very vividly a year ago that we were all sitting in this room and when we came into the room
158the it was all the principles were going to tell us what they're doing around graduation rates and I thought oh my God it's just an Inquisition and as he started to tell us all the different things that you were doing around graduation rates I I vividly remember the board just bursting into spontaneous Applause because you do so much so thank you for everything that you do in this area other questions or comments from the board I don't know go ahead Kristin go ahead and jump into it to piggyback off of what Jim has said um yeah just thank you so much and thanks for sharing um all what you do and what you've been doing um and I think it was it was very evident that what you're doing is very personal and you're you're
159loving on those kids and making sure that they get the best of what we have to offer and so thank you for that um and we hope that we can go ahead and help you with those next steps and see what we can make happen to um to have that go even further but it's very evident in the just in in the monitoring report that what you're doing is working and it's I know it's been really hard work I know it's been really tough um a couple of years if not much longer than that of course like last week felt like a year so um but it's you know the point is is that you're what you're doing it matters it really does matter to those 80 kids who you know what we can't get
160the school to to help those 80 kids it mattered so much to those 80 kids and it mattered so much that now you're down to 20. and that's fantastic news and you can see so you know we're seeing it in the numbers and um I just you should all be so proud of yourselves and so proud of your staff and I am extremely proud so thank you so much anything else Carolyn yeah I just wanted to say that that I'm really impressed and I'd like to thank you but I will tell you that I have always been impressed every time you guys come and talk to us I'm always impressed with the feedback you give us with your insights um and with and with your recommendations and so I appreciate all the feedback tonight and
161thank you yeah go ahead Brian so I I just want to Echo what you're saying but also build off of that there's a lot of people that are not in this room that deserve that same thanks and I know the spirit of all of your sentiments are passed on that you know our graduation rates are a community celebration uh you know families trust us to bring our children or their children into our schools and so all of our elementary leaders our Middle School leaders who help make sure that our students have the opportunity to experience success in our high schools I think are important to name you know two weeks ago I think it was where we were celebrating classified appreciation week and thinking about the importance of the role of the backbone of this
162district and organization of making sure people feel supported and have what they need to do the things that they're doing whether it's helping their peers or their other employees but also people who are providing Direct Services to students and you know I think we'd be remissed to not Elevate the importance of our our classroom teachers you know our administrators clear the path to allow teachers to be focused and do their Artistry and their magic with our students and I'm just really really grateful and really trying difficult times for people to Rally to make sure that these things are happening across the system they didn't happen by accident it happened by Design but you're creating the conditions for people to come together and believe in something bigger than themselves and I'm just really grateful for everybody
163that's doing that whether you're a teacher whether you're a parent whether I don't want to go and name all the rules because I'm going to leave somebody out but the spirit of this is It's a team effort it's a district effort and I'm really really proud of all the people that made this possible and you know the future is bright yeah I appreciate those remarks and I and I I also obviously add my thanks uh to those in the room and to the rest of the district in in achieving some of the great results that we've seen seen and talked about here tonight uh recognizing that there's more work to do and I I do want to I don't really expect an answer here and I don't want to start a thing where we have
16430 Elementary principles come to the meeting just because the logistics of that are impossible uh but I am I am curious uh you know you you pointed out on the slides Dwayne that the the number of schools in the blue with respect to the growth effect sizes in particular on the on the uh kids who need additional support is is a growing number of schools um I I am interested as you know from from the email that I sent that that to understand um roughly the same kind of question I asked the high school principals here which is what do we need to keep that list growing uh and uh what role does the central office need to play in that and and to follow up on the question that somebody asked I'm sorry I
165forget who uh Jess it was just asked you know how much sharing of best practices are there in terms of the schools that are of comparable demographics even with our own District ones that are doing well and the ones that are doing less well are they sharing information along those parallel lines if you want to call it that so so uh I'll look to have that conversation offline we don't need to push it here tonight I just wanted to sort of throw that in um any last remarks from anybody from the board DJ I had a technical question and also just wanted to shine a little light on this in the report uh the homeless student percentage that you have it's um unfortunately we are a leader there in looking at the other districts and
166my wondering is has our district Personnel or anybody asked how they identify if there's any identification differences that those school districts are doing I it's just a I'm a blown away that it's you know two times more and so I I'll tell you that unless someone else in this room has more expertise and wants to jump in that um my understanding is that is not a data anomaly it's not a measurement thing it's real right and we know that housing is one of the key characteristics that impacts so many things in a young person's life right and housing instability homelessness has a lot of different versions right everything from doubled up to you know literally unaccompanied Youth and there's a lot of different categories but no those those numbers DJ I believe are relatively comparable
167District to district and across the state it's not like attendance rates right where a demonstrate can really really vary based on local even between schools differences in how that's collected but know that Homeless information because of the mckinney-vento program is quite tightly you know monitored and and the benefits that families get and youth get from it so they you know our whole system all of our principals and teachers counselors try to do a great job to make sure kids are connected to those resources if they need them so long-winded answer I think it's real and I think housing in this community is something that I think all the city leaders and everybody knows is is something we have to deal with yeah it's it is a unfortunate number to see there though for sure so
168thank you DJ I would just add that you know I think that the identification piece is tough too at the high school level I would say that we probably under identify you know that's a position like I was saying that we've used Grant funds to have someone that who is focused specifically on identifying our mckinney-vento students and then providing services to them prior to that we you know you'd use a registrar or a counselor who's already you know gotten a ton of things that they're they're doing as well and so just that identification piece is is really tough um and it's real I mean I was you know looking at pooter's data and you know we had 50 seniors last year who were identified as as homeless and so when you think of that you
169know among you know 400 you know graduating seniors or you know around there that's that's a huge percentage um so yeah I mean that is another area that we could do better in terms of identifying and supporting all right I'm not seeing any other hands from the board I want to again thank the principals for taking the time out of their evening after a busy day to uh to come in and speak with us and share your your wisdom and your insights and I hope you get some rest tomorrow with the snow uh maybe you have to shovel I don't know but uh anyway thank you again for coming in and as always Dwayne uh I want to thank you for the tremendous amount of work that you put into uh uh this monitoring report
170and collecting all and analyzing all the statistics behind it and we look forward to part two of the report uh later in March so thank you again appreciate it [Applause] all right with that the next item on our agenda is the final item on our agenda and that is that we're going to have an executive session on negotiations can I get a motion to go into the executive session go ahead Kristen I move that the board enter executive session for the purpose of developing the strategy of schools district negotiations relating to the 2023-2024 collective bargaining agreement where employment contracts is authorized by CRS 24-6-402 subsection 4e3 individuals invited to join the board in executive session our superintendent Brian Kingsley Chief of Staff Lauren Hooten Chief staff officer Dave Montoya Chief Human office Chief Human Resources
171officer Eric Von Savage Chief Information officer Madeleine noblett and general counsel Adam Aspen excellent do I have a second from Jess I have a second Jill could you give us a vote on this please DJ Anderson aye Jim brokish hi Nate Donovan aye Christian Draper aye Rob Patterson aye Carolyn Reed aye Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 7-0 excellent thank you very much for members of the public this is the last item on our agenda the only thing that's going to happen in public after this executive session is I'm going to come out here and bang this gavel so uh we look forward to seeing you at our next board meeting uh in our next regular board meeting in in March and for now we will stop this meeting at 10 of nine still on February
17221st and we will convene in the superintendent's office in five minutes