Board of Education Meeting: May 24, 2022

001are we good all right um thank you all for your patience thanks also for joining the board of education this evening please mute your cell phone as we begin this meeting today is tuesday may 24th and this meeting is now called to order at 6 42 p.m again thanks very much for your patience we did have a couple of things we needed to complete and now you will have our full attention and we will attend to the business of the district having said that the first thing on our agenda this evening is the pledge of allegiance so if you'd all stand and join me with that that would be great and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all great thanks so much uh would

002any members board members like to make changes to the agenda this evening all right then we will move on to our first set of action items which are a series of resolution the first resolution being that in support of jewish american heritage month can i get a motion for the resolution in support of jewish american uh heritage month go ahead and then we'll read it after sure i move that we recommend i move that we approve the resolution in support of jewish american heritage month uh from may 2022. excellent thank you very much do i have a second for that okay well i'll pick nate he's sort of in the middle there um and uh would somebody like to read the resolution aloud go ahead kristin okay resolution in support of jewish american heritage month

003whereas may is jewish american heritage month when we honor the contributions of jewish americans to the united states of america and whereas in may of each year people across the united states recognize and celebrate over 350 years of jewish contributions to the united states through recognizing jewish american heritage month and whereas may has been designated jewish american heritage month since 2006 and whereas the united states has always been a nation built on the achievements of immigrants and jewish americans have strengthened the society of the united states and contributed significantly to all areas of life in the united states since the time when jewish immigrants first arrived on the shores of the united states and whereas the success of jewish americans is a reminder of the gift of religious freedom and of the importance of a

004strong commitment to community and faith and whereas much work has been done in diverse cities across the count the country to foster transformational social change and unite people of every racial ethnic cultural and religious backgrounds and whereas countless jewish americans and jewish organizations have enriched the society of the united states and shaped this great country now therefore be it resolved that we the pooter school district and the pooter school district board of education recognizes may as jewish american heritage month and encourages everyone to seek a deeper understanding of jewish american heritage and culture and the significant contributions made by jewish americans to the united states of america excellent thank you very much um would anybody like to comment on on this resolution i think my eyes don't always focus in the same place i'm looking

005at anybody who wants to say anything i think uh i think this did you want to say something jess go ahead please um i don't have a lot to say it's not it's not a culture that i am i know a lot about but i've had the opportunity recently to read a book called night that i think most people read in middle school and i didn't have that opportunity and i think just the acknowledgement of the jewish community the history they've gone through some of the current struggles that they still continue to go through and yet persevere is astounding and miraculous and we have a very strong at least the few people i know in that jewish community here are very strong in their faith and are wonderful contributors to our community and i hope

006that in this resolution that's heard that we appreciate you that we see you and that we all could learn more about you any other comments i'll just see one please go ahead kristen i just want to thank the district for putting forward this resolution i feel like it really honors my grandmother and so i just want to say thank you all right i think the resolution speaks very well for the sentiments of the board and so with that i will ask jill to call a vote on this resolution dj anderson aye jim brokish hi nate donovan aye kristin draper aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passes 7-0 excellent thank you very much jill so our second item is a resolution in support of national school nurse day can i get

007a motion for the resolution go ahead nate yes i knew that the board approved a resolution in support of school nurse day may 11 2022 and the recognition of contributions made by school nurses every day for students excellent any other sorry do we have a second go ahead dj's got that one as a second can we have a board member read this resolution aloud go ahead nate resolution of the pooter school district board of education in support of school nurse day school nurses bring bridging health care and education whereas students are the future and by investing in them in them today we are ensuring our world for tomorrow and whereas families deserve to feel confident that their children will be cared for when they are at school and whereas all students have a right to

008have their physical and mental health needs safely met while in the school setting and whereas students today face more complex and life-threatening health problems requiring care in school and whereas the kova 19 pandemic has emphasized the essential role school nurses play in student health and academic success and whereas school nurses have served a critical role in improving improving public health and in ensuring students academic success for more than 100 years and whereas school nurses address the home and community factors social determinants that impact students health and whereas school nurses act as a liaison to the school community families and health care providers on behalf of children's health by promoting health promoting wellness and improving health outcomes for our nation's children and whereas school nurses support the health and educational success of children and youth by

009providing access to care when children's cognitive development is at its peak and whereas school nurses are members of school-based teams school health services 504-iep disaster emergency planning to address the school population and whereas school nurses understand the link between health and learning and are in a position to make a positive difference for children every day now therefore be it resolved that the pooter school district board of education celebrates and acknowledges the accomplishments of school nurses and their efforts of meeting the needs of today's students by improving the delivery of health care in our schools and offers gratitude for the nation's school nurses who contribute to our local communities by helping students stay healthy in school and ready to learn and keeping parents and guardians at work not just on national school nurse day but at

010every opportunity throughout the year therefore be it further resolved that the pooter school district board of education does hereby proclaim wednesday may 11 as school nurse day and commend its observance to all staff and citizens thank you uh superintendent kingsley i believe we have someone from the staff to speak to us about this yes sir joining us this evening to speak to national school nurse day is pst's health services coordinator miss kimberly granger joining mrs granger this evening are dana koenig mary lou devlin and lori wurtzbar three of our psd school nurses who are retiring sadly at the end of this year we want to collectively as a school system and as a governance team thank all three of you for your service along with all other school nurses that work tirelessly to support our

011students and staff in psd i can't tell you how much that means to us thank you so much i just want to share a couple of things with the board i'm hoping in the future to be able to give you more information about health services and what we do but one of the main things we did this year that i'm super proud of is we as a team met we discussed the brene brown dare to lead book and we came up with what are our core values our vision and our mission and it aligns with the districts and i just wanted you to hear because this is coming straight from the mouths of your school nurses our identified values are compassion empathy teamwork integrity and equity our vision is we see all students striving for

012their optimal health and wellness creating positive connections and preparing for success in a changing world our mission is through evidence-based school nurse practice collaboration and advocacy we promote a safe and healthy environment in the school setting now i'd like to introduce you to our three retiring nurses first of all dana koenig she has been with psd for 21 years she has worked 26 years as a school nurse and 37 years as an rn so i'll let dana be the first to address you thank you um i have loved being in psd my husband works in human resources and has for his whole life and says you know how rare it is to love what you do the way you love what you do and i have loved what i've done i was a school nurse

013for five years elsewhere before i came here and it was not nearly as put together as psd has been and so i was very thankful for that i honestly cried in a meeting right as i started because i was like oh this is what this should look like and i was very thankful for that i will say that you know as time has moved forward many districts around the state and definitely in our country have increased school nursing services and we really haven't and so i just um hope that as time moves that we will continue to increase school nursing services so that we are not spread so thin and so students actually have what they need i know there's lots of talk about equity but kids who have health needs and don't feel seen

014or understood or get what they need really feel marginalized and it's hard for them to to buy into their education or just to get through it because getting through it sometimes is the best they can do um and i i say this all the time to teachers and everywhere i work but it healthy kids just learn better and so if there's nurses in the building we can really work toward that and that's what that's always what my desire was and i think as all school nurses that's what our desire is and next we have mary lou devlin who has been with psd for 10 years she has worked 28 years as a school nurse and 43 years as a nurse she is our only nationally certified school nurse and she's held that credential for the

015last six years so here's mary lou hi like dana i came to pst from a different school nursing position and i have to tell you the team of nurses here you have no idea this is such a highly educated highly qualified team of school nurses taking care of your kids they take we work as a team we take care of your kids we take care of each other we have 23 full-time nurse health tax full-time hours for health tech sorry 13.8 are in health full-time hours and next year we'll have 17 because we got a grant to increase the nurses but only for that one year nurses when we come to school nursing most of us come from the hospital we take huge pay cuts to come to do school nursing so we school nurse

016because it's in our hearts it's our passion it's it's like part of who we are and just today one of our nurses has had to resign because she's a single mom and can't make ends meet on what we make as school nurses you support your teachers you understand the importance of being certified nationally certified it shows a passion for your work it shows an understanding and a commitment to your work but this district doesn't you probably don't even know there's national certification for school nurses out of 15 nurses we should have more than one certified nurse but there's no reason for a nursing psc to be certified so i would ask and i would advocate for our nurses because this is a great team and just to to to acknowledge that that is part of

017being a school nurse part of showing your passion for your your position i promise this is the last one thank you for giving us this platform to talk to you lastly we have lori wurtzbauer who has been at psd for 12 years and has worked 30 years as a school nurse we're losing a lot of excellent experience and knowledge this year we're bringing on several new school nurses one more than i thought so i just want to let laurie close it out and thank you again for this opportunity okay thank you kim and i agree with my colleagues this has been my greatest joy working with this team in psd they are so professional so well educated and have the biggest hearts for kids so i'm retirement's kind of bittersweet you look forward to it

018and i'm thinking what am i going to do on thursday in closing i would just like to thank the board thank you very much for recognizing and appreciating us and passing the nursing resolution it means a lot to us it truly does so thank you and the team that continues will continue to do a great job for psd thank you thank you so much we appreciate those insights and and what you have shared with us about what's going on and what's needed thank you are there members of the board who wish to make additional comments about this resolution go ahead kristen i just want to extend my thanks to you for all the years you've put into pruder school district all years you've put into nursing all the heart that you've put into the kids

019just thank you from the bottom of my heart go ahead dj i also i also wanted to say thank you and also i think this is another great example of a different group in psd that you automatically hear right away about the kids and the students and i truly appreciate that that you guys have been looking out for them and so thank you very much and uh please enjoy retirement uh hopefully it'll be a little a little bit easier for you but as was mentioned subbin's not a bad gig so thank you thank you very much go ahead jess yeah i would just like to echo the thanks for the many years you guys have continued to stick with us even through though we may not be able to pay you as much as a

020hospital um but i thank you for putting kids first i thank you for your dedication i think you know when we talk about our staff and psd we often reference the teachers but honestly i think every employee at psd is an educator in some form or fashion even though your priority might be the medical health you work with kids you help kids you guide them along just like every other person in the buildings that you work in so thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting the kids thank you for taking the opportunity as you guys walk out to still support your your colleagues and speak for them um and i i hope you guys enjoy your your one last half day and get lots lots of love from the kids and and

021are able to kind of walk the halls and and feel good about the work you've done because you've done amazing work thank you other comments all right i'll just add we definitely appreciate those of you who are retiring and i also want to say that we definitely appreciate those who are continuing it the next year and welcome the i guess you said four uh new nurses that we're going to have uh coming on uh sorry seven is what i'm seeing there now sorry i want to welcome you to psd and we want to say that we appreciate the work that all of the nurses are doing for our students and uh thank you again um with that jill if you will call a vote on this resolution dj anderson aye jim brokish hi nate donovan

022right kristen draper aye rob henderson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passes 7-0 all right great thank you jail so our next item on the agenda is a resolution in support of some proposed legislation can i get a motion uh for the resolution in support of initiative 63. go ahead jim i'd like to make a motion that the board approve a resolution in support of initiative 63. second from kristin that's great um [Music] somebody needs to read the resolution read it okay um dj did you want to say anything first all right yeah go ahead i i just want to be crystal clear that i'm stepping back from this vote at all because my name is on the res or on the uh initiative and so that there's no that it's clear that

023i am going to not vote on this thanks excellent go ahead jim well before i read it initiative 363 is about getting more funding for our schools that's the context resolution in support of initiative 63 whereas the board of education believes every student should have the opportunity to reach his or her full potential and to participate meaningfully in the civic and economic life of the community and whereas every student deserves access to inspiring teachers rigorous and inclusive curriculum individual attention quality career and technical options and appropriate mental and physical health resources especially after the challenges of kovid and whereas the board of education believes that public schools are a cornerstone for democracy the pillar of thriving communities the source of a prepared workforce and an engine for economic success and whereas great teachers are the

024foundation of great education and colorado is experiencing a persistent teacher shortage crisis and whereas colorado's investment in education is lagging behind other states colorado has fallen more than three thousand dollars in per pupil spending behind the national average resulting in teachers receiving the least competitive wage in the nation and whereas education funding has not recovered from the great recession with the loss to the puter school district in state funding has been over 317 million since 2009 and whereas reduced funding is directly impacting the district's ability to attract retain and compensate teachers and student supports professionals while maintaining rigorous and inclusive curriculum quality career and technical options and appropriate mental and health and physical health resources and whereas initiative 63 which may appear on the 2022 ballot as a proposition will provide significant additional funding for

025p through 12 public schools without raising taxes or tax rates by removing these funds from the tabor limit calculation and directing a portion of this already collected income tax revenue to the constitutionally protected state education fund and whereas initiative 63 will require that these funds are used to attract retain and compensate teachers and student support professionals and whereas initiative 63 will require that funds are to supplement and not supplant state funding to schools and the legislator counts legislative council of the general assembly shall report on an annual basis the revenue deposited in the state education fund pursuant to requirements of this initiative and whereas the board declares that initiative 63 is a matter of official concern now therefore be it resolved that the board of education officially declares its support for initiative 63 for the

026purpose of increasing funding of public education in the state of colorado uh should i finish it the board authorizes i will the board authorizes the expenditure of district funds to distribute a factual factual summary regarding initiative 63 which may appear on the 2022 ballot as a proposition in accordance with the fair campaign practices act crs 1-45-117 thank you jim are there members of the board who would like to comment on this resolution go ahead nate yes i support this resolution in this initiative i think it's a good way for us to get at least some increase in education funding for the state and i think it makes good sense so i'll be supporting it go ahead jess i think this this initiative is the epitome of trying to do more with less is trying to

027correct that we have our pooter school district has continued to serve students and serve students well and provide additional opportunities each and every year and yet we've had to do it with fewer dollars every time and teachers have often had to pay the price we don't have there's only so many dollars we have to go around so having in this initiative allow us to retain and find highly qualified teachers to continue to educate our students is absolutely the most important thing we can do kristen yeah i'd like to echo that i'll be supporting this as well and if you see somebody with a petition that wants you to sign for 63 please go ahead and do so it will allow us to get it on the ballot and vote on this so thank you jim

028you want to say something else yeah just a little more none of you were in the negotiations process that we had recently but with the administrator administrative staff and with the teachers and with the classified employees but it's just tough i mean it's a matter of who are you going to make the least unhappy and you know that no one is going to get what they really deserve it's just brutal and so i think anything we can do to increase the funding you know make the pie bigger so that we have a decent sized pie to split up it would be awesome thanks anybody else yeah i'll just say that i it's always been my opinion that we should that we should pay our teachers and other education professionals more uh i felt that way

029for a long time it's helped that my wife was a teacher so i had direct insight into into that challenge if you will and the people are the ones who educate the students they need a lot of support around them curriculum all of that absolutely true and we need quality people we need them to join us we need them to stay with us we need them to educate our kids and to do that we need to pay them as competitively as possible and the intent of this initiative is to is to provide us additional resources additional revenue without raising taxes in order to do that so i think it's a terrific idea and i'm definitely in support of this if there are no other comments jill if you'd call a vote on this resolution jim

030brokish hi nate donovan aye kristen draper aye rob pederson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passes 6-0 excellent thank you very much jill i really appreciate it so that concludes the first part of our action items here now we're going to go and hear from our superintendent superintendent kingsley will now make remarks to the board of education and to the community well thank you uh members of the board members of the community good evening i'm grateful to have the opportunity to address all of you this evening although it is with a very very heavy heart uh less than three days ago all of us as a governance team many members of our community had the opportunity to look at the hope in the eyes of almost 2 250 seniors across this district one

031who's sitting right in front of me i'm grateful to see your hope again we also had the opportunity to see an incredible exchange of love whether it was the deep embrace of families once children walked across the stage and had a chance to do their procession back into their arms or if it was a teacher or a group of teachers addressing the potential that they saw in their students the things that they've overcame love was abundant in the school system over the last week and was very visible around what that investment of teachers principals families staff members community the roi on that is pretty significant when you talk about human beings i also thought it was quite incredible how inclusive the environment was i remember clearly as i know many of you do where we

032had in one particular graduation a young adult with a physical disability who was unable to make it to the stage on their own and their teacher carried them on their back the smile that that student possessed receiving their diploma on the back and the shoulders of a teacher who love them will never leave our hearts the kindness that that gesture uh showed amongst all of the other kind gestures it's something that i hold deep in my remarks this evening because as i'm sure many of us if not all of us are aware there are at least 14 students in uvalde texas at rob elementary school alongside one of their teachers who are not going to ever have the opportunity to experience that i know we as a community are devastated i know we as a

033community are collectively profoundly sad and i'd ask if we can please as a community take a brief moment of silence and pay respect to those families of the victims and their friends at this time i would greatly appreciate it thank you i know colorado the state of colorado is not immune to experiencing grief loss and suffering especially with children and our students the this incident a week following the incident that took place in buffalo new york hate crime geared towards black americans this situation today another school shooting makes me as a leader in this community a proud leader in this community wonder how much of this will we tolerate i share with my leadership team and challenge them as i ask them to challenge me that we cannot complain about what we tolerate as leaders

034and in this nation it has become bearable for children and teachers to be killed it has become bearable in this nation intolerable for members of marginalized communities to be targeted and killed you're in my hearts and prayers no longer is sufficient it's cliche i find strength in our students our young adults we had a young adult a senior our first graduation at pga peter global academy who challenged every member of the graduation ceremony to wonder on whether we actually are brave enough to care powerful stuff our last graduation of the season uh was with the lampkins fort collins high school and i continue to be encouraged and reminded by the strength of both of the valedictorians but one of the speeches and i believe it was camden i'm hopeful i'm right on that discuss the

035story with us thousands of people about how to think about building a tall the tallest building in a community where are you going with this camden he says clear there's two ways to do it there's a hard way and there's an easy way the hard way is you bring everybody in the community together you galvanize them around a purpose that's singular a shared intent a shared goal you share your tools you work together and you build the new tallest building in your community but the easy way is to give everybody a sledgehammer and to destroy every building but one then you have the tallest building in your community camden let us know that we have a choice as a community he encouraged us and encouraged his fellow classmates to build community rather than destroy it

036and tonight like every night of our lives we as community members have that same choice too to either be a builder a destroyer or sit on the sidelines and be idle and watch life go by i am so grateful that every chair in this room is filled right now i know that there are people outside wanting to be here to speak as well we appreciate that people are leading by action tonight by coming out speaking in community comment and or listening to our presentations it is in the hope in the spirit of continuing dialogue that i believe that i believe this governance team i know we believe that it's necessary to make progress and move forward but i want to be really clear about something whether it was in my video that i sent out

037to the community to almost two weeks ago or in the story that i just told if you are here and you disagree with the decision that i've made or just you disagree with the decision that the district has made i don't believe that that's hate-filled if you disagree with the district i don't believe that that is filled with the intent of being a destroyer what i would share though is that we have a lot of work to do to navigate our differences and i don't believe in my heart of hearts that it's our differences that are actually the problem it is simply our inability to navigate them and to do that with dignity to do that with honor to do that with respect our students are watching us the hate that ensues upon our own

038adult inability to navigate our difference the vitriol that follows is unacceptable it must stop transparency safety honesty and partnership is not built on tick tock or facebook it's not it's built through creating and cultivating open civil dialogue where we can be in community with each other disagree with each other and still realize we're in community with each other we can't be selective around what we're transparent about i've heard that from you and you're hearing that from me we can't be selective around what our students are saying and what they need we must recognize that our data suggests and affirms that people are experiencing our community and this school system differently and not all people are thriving and if it's not us as a community who are going to disrupt and help fix that then who

039because people are depending upon us your children are depending upon you and you're depending upon me and this staff to work in partnership with you i embrace that but we must approach it differently we have a chance to be different i believe what makes this school system and community great is it wants so bad to be different i love that it's one of the reasons i moved my family across the country to be a part of it but those last three yards to put the football in the end zone are the toughest distance and we have a choice and a challenge to make with each other last friday pooter high school had its grad graduation it was the first of our big comprehensive high schools i was a little intimidated by that because going from

040a graduating class of 35 to 500 was whoa boy that's a lot it was my first time ever in moby arena but what was so cool about it is that the graduating class was full of aggies and techies and scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs and soldiers and teachers and culinary artists and service workers amongst others it was full of students who were legacy students that their parents attended pooter high school and their parents parents attended footer high school and they were sitting right next to first and second generation americans some who learned how to speak english for the first time in our school system and still figured out a way to overcome those challenges to navigate and succeed and graduate all different cultures all different identities all different origins and for one night for 90

041minutes we didn't see each other's differences we saw that we all supported the blue and silver and we were impalas and it was beautiful i asked every graduating class to share with me a couple of weeks before they graduated lifting up their voice what did they believe was their legacy that they wanted to be remembered by specifically pooter high school one of the things that they shared was their legacy and i really ask that you lean in here is that they believe that their legacy was their acceptance of and respect for one another even when they disagreed or couldn't find adults in their community modeling how to actually do that for them that is our young adults in our community paying attention to us i don't share that to shame us i share that to

042create hope and encourage us to lean in and reflect and do the mere work like i have to because i am certainly not perfect i make mistakes every single day but i am asking a call to action and a sense of urgency for us to do better i want us to be clear that this district is not interested in negotiating its beliefs around learning or inclusion or respect or courage or action how we approach that should be discussed through dialogue but those basic principles were unapologetic about them being human rights this spring we've had the opportunity to engage in board listening sessions across our community to discuss really difficult complex topics in some areas they were well attended in other areas we have to figure out how to draw people out of their homes in

043the evening to get them engaged in these conversations but it was a step forward across difference in community what i shared in my video a week and a half ago i stand by and commit to that those conversations will continue with the board with staff in the year ahead if not sooner we have work to do to sit down around the table and just look at each other in kindness and in community to talk to one another i would also close in saying that we believe that partnership with parents and guardians and family and community members is essential to make progress i was hired to not do work to you but to listen to you to reach out to hear you even across difference some of the differences that many of you are here to

044discuss the moment i became aware of them i addressed what i could within my locus of control immediately i promise to treat your children with this staff like they are our own our staff across every one of our schools is incredibly committed to you are we perfect no but we're committed to doing better we're committed to listening to you we're committed to partnering with you as allies in this work and not to be your adversary i ask that we try to lean in and i invite you into that dialogue for us to actually engage in thoughtful conversation with each other and i ask and hope that that can be modeled tonight our focus in this district is not just on academics but it's on cultivating healthy whole people who see themselves as being enough and

045we have to model that through our words our actions and challenge when our mindsets values and beliefs don't necessarily reach the bar for that for all people i appreciate the time and the opportunity to address our community tonight and thank you very much and i thank all of you for listening [Applause] thank you very much superintendent kingsley for those powerful words really appreciate it with that we're going to go and have our community comment i'm going to make some introductory remarks here um that are not nearly as eloquent as what superintendent kingsley shared but are intended to be in the same spirit the board desires to hear the viewpoints of all stakeholders throughout the district including students employees parents and community members and the board needs to conduct the business of the district in an

046orderly timely and respectful manner we ask that audience members attentively and respectfully listen to other speakers and do not interrupt or otherwise respond so that we may heal hear all of what each of you has to say comments may deal with any topic related to board's oversight of the district and speakers may offer such praise criticism or comment about district and school operations and programs as they desire input that is most helpful to the board of education and the district staff is that which identifies a problem and proposes a solution that ultimately improves the educational and social emotional experiences of the students we ask that you not directly call out an individual whether a student staff member or community member information relating to confidential personnel or student matters is not appropriate for community comment problems

047or concerns should be addressed to the administrative personnel closest to the problem and followed through the appropriate chain of authority in the district it is important to note that personal attacks will not be permitted the board may choose to cut off a speaker without warning if such comments are made and the speaker will thereby forfeit the rest of the allotted time finally it is important to note also that a speaker is not insulated from and may be vulnerable to a defamation lawsuit for comments made during public comment with that i will remind everyone 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 will be allowed 90 seconds

048to address the board at the end of that time if you have not finished i will respectfully ask you to conclude your remarks immediately thank you 90 seconds i said yeah so with that our first speaker this evening's sorry this evening is lonnie williams welcome ah look you're already there first shout out to the lgbtqia plus supporters that have been standing outside in the rain for over three hours you are an inspiration and the board of education sees you tonight i'd like to thank vice president kristen draper for being an elected official i can be proud of thank you for being a strong ally to the lgbtqia plus community your voice courage and compassion make a difference for our students please know that the admiration and respect for your advocacy for lgbtqia plus students and

049students with marginalized identities runs deep in this community to the board of education and superintendent kingsley i ask that you continue to remain resolute in your commitment to our lgbtqia plus students and staff it is vital in the days weeks and months to come we as a community remain psd strong be brave be a builder love wins thank you [Applause] our next speaker is deidre sullivan welcome good evening good evening members of the board cabinet community i'm deirdre sullivan parent of three kids two who are in the district and one who's a proud pooter high school graduate just across the parking lot i've been a deeply engaged member of this community for nearly 30 years volunteered on several of your campaigns a couple of superintendent search committees chaired the parent advisory board have been an

050advocate for mental and physical health of our students nutrition suicide prevention and have brought in more than 10 million dollars of funding to our community to support the health and well-being of our kids but tonight's not about me i'm here to thank you to thank you for standing up for all kids thank you for creating safe places for children to show up as their true selves thank you for committing to equity diversity and inclusion for institutionalizing this work and ensuring that it's enduring if i had had a school district as open and affirming as psd growing up in the shadows of focus on the family in colorado springs in the 90s it wouldn't have taken me 42 years to have as my daughter says have my insides match my outsides thank you for being a

051school district to show up for our kids even when their parents don't my time's up thanks yes it is thank you our next speaker is dylan lindsey welcome thank you and good evening members of the school board my name is dylan lindsay and i graduated just three days ago from rocky mountain high school i'm here tonight to thank you for supporting members of the lgbtqia plus community and ask you to continue providing the support to this marginalized community within our district but mostly i'm here to provide you with a little insight into what some parents and staff may not see i'm here to tell you what's happening in our schools i've been out as gay since november of my sophomore year and though i am not immune to bigotry the issues i've experienced have been

052limited isolated or ignorable but what is not ignorable is calls for policy and efforts to silence members of the lgbtq plus community less than three weeks ago i attended my senior prom it was fantastic and it was the first dance that i attended with a partner of the same gender i was admittedly nervous as the slow dance crime nearer me and my boyfriend found ourselves next to a group of peers donning cowboy hats and boots i knew from the things they shared on social media and from the many years that i've grown up with them that our political views tend to differ but when the slow dance came nearer i took my boyfriend's hands and my own and not a person at the dance seemed to care when the song ended and we retreated to

053the patio the group that had been next to us was out there as well we exchanged pleasantries and wished each other an enjoyable rest of the evening quite frankly kids don't care who other kids date talk to or choose to be intimate with they aren't interested in debating pronouns but are smart enough to check instagram if they aren't sure how to address someone students know everyone deserves to learn about safe sex regardless of their orientation time is up thank you thank you [Applause] our next speaker is wayne brothers welcome parents are displeased with declining academic performance but are outraged on the attack on traditional family values i'm concerned about the continued support of no place for hate program in peter school district which promotes critical race identity and economic theory if you search the no

054place for hate collection for middle school lessons addressing gender and sexism you find 13 lessons with titles such as moving beyond gender barriers in our lives and understanding heterosexism and how to be an ally these classroom lessons are for kids as young as 11 years old and each lesson provides emotion generating articles video videos and activities if your children's beliefs and values don't match what they're being told during the seven hours they spend in school each day they experience cognitive dissonance which can be caused them to become unnerved and anxious and especially vulnerable to authority figures a former psd student who is now a licensed mental health therapist stated quote i'm behind you 100 percent when it comes to the grave dangers in schools specifically i believe the connection between cognitive dissonance and increasing student

055anxiety is on point end quote so why does psd continue to implement a program that's designed to create anxiety in students and push values not supported by parents thank you thank you [Applause] our next speaker is jeff after heidi welcome thank you my name is jeff after heidi from wellington colorado whatever our political ideology is we have to agree that some things have to be above politics one of those things are the policies governing psd's administration and the other is the truth no one should be so privileged as to blatantly dismiss the rules they promised to uphold and the oath of office the board member's code of con conduct policy 3.5 states that members must have a loyalty to the citizens unconflicted by loyalties to staff other organizations and any self-interest this policy also states

056there'll be no self-dealing by a board member simply put putting your own self-interest over those you serve i've asked this board in good faith to prefer to provide your required annual conflict of interest statements however to my knowledge you're non-existent and my inquiries to you i met with silence therefore i challenge the president mr peterson and vice president draper to immediately collect from each board member a list of organizations vendors associations etc that might be seen as represented a conflict of interest per your code of conduct policy and finally i'm requesting each board member to make your calendars publicly available as an initial act of good faith that you're adhering to your own policies and directives yield back my time thanks thank you our next speaker is aaron lee welcome hello i'm here to address

057this district's increasing secrecy lack of transparency complete disregard for parental rights and the gender ideology that runs rampant in our schools that psd knowingly fosters disregarding those of us who speak up about its negative effects on our children there should not have to be so many psd parents here today begging you for transparency partnership and respect when will you take steps to repair relationships with parents be more transparent and actually address the overreach of this district psd continues to conduct gender and sexuality programming without informing or allowing parents to opt our children out these are our children not yours since my child's incident this district has instructed psd nurses to ask students pronouns and not tell parents if a child is self-harming you've defended psd staff who recruit vulnerable children into confidential programs provide their

058personal contact information to young kids and tell them that it's okay to lie to parents you've made generic posts with no context about how you're celebrating transgenderism in our schools you would even discuss sending dhs to the home of a parent who disagrees with your secret programming your actions your deceptions your condoning children lying to parents are inexcusably harming children you've not only caused life-threatening situations you would also blatantly strip psd parents of their right to care for their own child in a life-threatening situation psd board something has to change thank you our next speaker is jonathan lee good evening board members i'm sure you're aware of what happened to my child in psd last may let me be clear my wife and i will not rest until we are certain that this will not

059happen to another innocent child under your leadership your recent public attempts to justify your actions have simply highlighted your true intentions denying the truth does not change the facts i have tried my best to err on the side of trust and wanted to believe your intentions are genuine psd showed my family fake empathy and made false promises in the hopes that we would just go away you want to use our family our daughter as a president on how you're going to handle other families you have chosen wrong this is not one child that has been hurt i have sat down with families across our district that have been damaged by your need to secretly take our parental rights away from us you are leaving a wake of destruction with your attempts to do what you

060think is right for our kids these are not your children and we are not barriers we tried for a year to handle this privately with you you have chosen to be dishonest you have chosen not to listen to the parents now you will not only listen to our family but every family across our district who demands transparency and credibility thank you our next speaker is mark fuchs welcome mr kingsley after speaking with you at the time hall meeting in wellington i wanted to trust you to believe you when you said you wanted transparency and that you were here for all students that was my mistake for not seeing you for the politician you are after hearing from aaron and myself that night you asked how can we move forward i did not have a perfect

061solution but i told you less is more and to my my surprise you agreed and then the school district went viral here was an opportunity to prove what you said that night but instead of owning up to the mistakes that were made and trying to mend a rift in the district you double down on your political agenda and what's worse is that you made it pretty clear that the lee family was in the wrong and those in the lgbt community were the victims so i'm done pleading with you uh to listen i know you won't instead of my messages to the parents this district does not care about your children unless they check certain boxes so i implore you to take your kids out there are many other options where they will get an actual

062education and not indoctrination parents you hold all the power stop giving it to psd because they will just abuse it thank you our next speaker is levi bright is lee vibrate here no yes no okay the vibrate is not here our next speaker is kelly fuchs welcome tonight i'm going to address the parents here in this room and online it's been made clear that this board does not care to listen to anyone that differs with their opinions parents my plea with you this evening is to stop labeling our children we need to teach them to love and respect everyone without the labels i constantly hear you talk about inclusivity but that does but does that mean we only include those that have a special label to be inclusive is to include all people so instead

063of separating our children by categories let us teach them love respect and acceptance perhaps if we stop requiring categories and labels our children will feel more included and accepted never in my life has my identity been my sexual orientation or gender i don't introduce myself by saying my name is kelly i'm white married heterosexual female why do we force our children to why do we put such emphasis on sexual orientation or gender if we teach our kids to love and accept with respect then we cover all bases we teach our children to include everyone and then our teachers can go back to teaching academics instead of morals and values that's what his parents are for thank you our next speaker is jimmy page welcome thank you thank you my name is jimmy page and i'm

064a member of this community and it seems like just about every day all across the country we find out about another example of the indoctrination or the garbage that is being exposed to our kids in our schools whether it's a drag queen episode in our high schools or middle schools or sex books for six-year-olds you name it we're absolutely tired we're exhausted by this we're trying to figure out all the ways that our teachers and our schools are violating our values and causing irreparable harm to our children i think the simplest way to communicate tonight is this we no longer consent we do not consent to anyone teaching our children about critical race theory or any of its ideas themes principles or concepts in any way we do not consent to anyone using tactics to

065divide separate exclude guilt or shame children based on their race we don't consent anyone to anyone teaching our children that they're oppressors or victims privileged or disadvantaged racist or sexist or that their future is limited in any way based upon their race we do not consent to anyone teaching our children about gender pronouns sexual orientation or hypersexuality or revealing their gender or sexual orientation anymore to our children we do not consent to anyone exposing our children to any sexual material with pornographic images age inappropriate content or sex acts that may strip them of their innocence or groom them for future sexual abuse we do not consent to anyone giving our kids gender affirming care counseling medical advice or anything else relative to transitioning from one gender to another we do not consent to anyone having

066secret conversations with you about anything i know about anything your time is over now please step away from the podium thank you our next speaker is laura moore welcome good afternoon um i thought i'd recognize a lot of faces in here my experiences in pooter's school district has been wonderful and widely varied as a product of pooter school districts years k through 12 riffenburg lasher fort collins high school lampkin child of a career long psd teacher a former p.s teacher myself i've always been so so proud of our district and the work that we do our commitment to integrity our excellence in education and our community now as a parent of three young children i'm here with the solution this world is different than when i left it here um i'm here with a solution

067i don't want to be one of the angry people i'm here with the solution to increase trust transparency transparency and greater inclusion of parents and the education of our kids i'm here before you today requesting that trust integrity open dialogue and inclusivity of families in psd's educational programs and processes by implementing the following principles into our psd agreements and basic commitments number one provide transparency absolutely have all the programs to support all of our kids but call every club and resource and program exactly what it is be clear about the purpose and content of our programs and please make that curriculum available for the for our public for all of our invested stakeholders and our kids number two support honesty never put students in a position where they're asked to lie to their parents never

068tell them that their parents aren't a safe place that they're that their parents are the number one people i'm afraid your time is up okay um i come to you please contact us via email thank you our next speaker is jamie rasmussen all right it looks like jamie is not here in which case we'll go on to our next speaker which is shari shariaki welcome hi my name is sherry yaki i have two kiddos in peter school district i'm actually here tonight to say thank you according to our superintendent success is prioritized as understanding the population in psd who wrestle with who they are rather than if they are performing at grade level in reading writing and math he said in his video that trust is built through listening empathy credibility and transparency and tonight

069i'm here to say that you are not listening to us this is not about clubs this is not about safe spaces or reading lists it's about transparency in the policy that you are making that are shutting parents out your empathy is misdirected when you are all too willing to spread destructive propaganda in the name of inclusivity because you seem to want to wage war on parental authority your credibility is shot so why am i thanking you i'm thanking you because your total lack of transparency has lit a fire under parents we are now more motivated than ever before to call for transparency to help you understand what that means to psd parents and students and to move psd forward toward that goal thank you our next speaker is cass corman looks like cass gorman is

070not here then we will go to our next speaker which is tanya henderson welcome thank you i am the mother of two who are enrolled in psd until last october i sat on the rice sac for three years what brought me here is the is the story that you heard earlier the us department of education states nearly one in ten children in the u.s will experience sexual misconduct by a school employee so i would say that luring children into staying out for an after-school activity asking children whom they are sexually attracted to and telling children that parents are unsafe and to keep quiet is predatory behavior that doesn't belong in our classrooms in my last meeting with the sac in response to a 15 percent drop in test scores culture cultural pedagogy goji the praxis

071of race theory was identified in the uip aaron's story is another example of identity marxism entering our schools as a follower of christ i teach my kids a biblical worldview that we were born male and female according to god's design and to love all people because we are all made in god's image however true love isn't always affirmation it's pointing people to truth to guide them because the greatest freedom is knowing truth and walking in it what is going on in our schools isn't about truth or having compassion and love for our kids and providing a solid foundation for life it is about the inculcation of a far different worldview where there is more where it is more important to promote identity politics as a means to achieve equity not equality and the consequence is

072mediocrity in outcomes not excellence and floundering instead of flourishing under the weight of holding identity above love thank you our next speaker is melissa ashley welcome i'm here to stress the importance of parental involvement in a child's life at school for the lifetime of the child's education this involvement requires transparency by the school at every level my mother was a third grade teacher for 30 years and i grew up hearing how much she loved parents coming in and helping and how much better those children did the research agrees i cannot go over decades of research in 1.5 minutes but results show that keeping secrets from parents is associated with substantial psychosocial and behavioral disadvantages in adolescence family involvement improves student success regardless of race ethnicity class or parent's level of education after decades of being

073taught the phrase stranger danger the national center for missing and exploited children has campaigned hard against the phrase because they know that most children are abused or harmed by people known to the family teachers administrators and outside lecturers who blatantly tell students to keep secrets from their parents fall into that category of people that children should be taught not to trust there should never be an adult asking a child to keep a secret adults in the school system should never model behavior that is so damaging it is clear from decades of research that children have better outcomes when parents are involved any school administrator or teacher trying to thwart parental involvement in any way does not have the best interest of the child in mind and they should be removed from their post or position

074thank you thank you our next speaker is lisa mclean welcome hello i want to ask the question when did it become acceptable to you to tell kids that their parents are not safe when did it become acceptable to you to tell children it's okay to lie to their parents about what club they're attending when did it become acceptable to you to tell kids that they can't tell their parents what was discussed in these clubs when did it become acceptable to you for schools to hide what happens at school from parents when did it become acceptable to you for presenters at these clubs to hand out their personal contact information when did it become acceptable to you for the presenters to become the safe person and not the parent when did it become acceptable to you

075to label me and other parents haters because we're questioning what our kids are being taught at school when did all of this become acceptable to you educating our children is a partnership based on transparency and trust it's time to start repairing that relationship with parents thank you thank you our next speaker is barbara sorstet i apologize if i got the pronunciation wrong and welcome i moved into the pooder valley school district three years ago i left the east coast and i'm loving it here several of you on the school board were recently re-elected so you all must have a good idea of what is being taught at the schools i would like to note to what you allocate the fact that the public high school students average s.a.t scores are far below that those of

076the average students in the county's public charter schools i am right now an accompanist for the choirs at one of the leading charter schools in the area and their s.a.t scores were so far above those of the regular public schools last year i could not believe it now is that is it that the main public schools don't emphasize traditional math science and language or do you not hire as good a teacher group as the charter schools higher i've heard that the amount of money you pay for your teachers here is not time that may be one of the reasons thank you our next speaker is fred kiersch looks like he's not able to join us this evening so therefore our next speaker is bonnie moore welcome thank you and good evening i am a proud

077psd parent i am both a former teacher and a current parent and i'm sure that as educators and community members who are highly invested in education you know the research that says that of all the factors that determine outcomes for students family engagement is at the top of the list strong partnerships between schools and families improve students grades attendance persistence and motivation unfortunately some policies and practices in psd isolate students from their parents in the name of creating safe spaces for students these practices assume that it is not safe for children to talk to their parents about certain important issues i truly believe that you and i and we all want what is best for our students and that the current policies and practices in place which limit parental knowledge and participation were made with

078good intention but as we seek to serve all students our policies and practices must reflect the research that parents are the most important influence in their kids lives and they are the most significant factor in whether or not students succeed so with a shared interest of students well-being and success in mind i'm asking the board of education to consider the request for transparency there's been a petition and in less than 48 hours over 500 people have signed this petition requesting the following three guiding principles be added to the psd policies i'm afraid your time is up okay we would like to ask the school board excuse me your time is up if you want to send that to us you're welcome to do so thank you our next speaker is steve graber welcome thank you

079for the opportunity to engage uh this evening i'd like to address concerns over the district's may 13th video response in this video there is much to celebrate such as the call for engagement inclusivity and respect these are broad themes that parents across the spectrum can embrace and commend the statement however about trust is not built through hate is a deeply troubling one i'm sure that most members on the board have experienced your fair share of anger and vitriol filled emails and messages but by applying this across the board label of hate to anyone who has misgivings about the wellington events the district is utilizing a blunt shallow and easy way to simply sidestep the conversation and say we will not engage with you many parents can have extensive concerns about this lack of transparency in

080psd endorsed events and still be incredibly incredibly compassionate and empathetic towards children who are grappling with issues of identity i would challenge this board to drop the shallow and arbitrary use of terms like hate and instead boldly and compassionately engage with those whose perspective on this deeply nuanced issue might be different than your own i think we would all be the better for it thank you thank you our next speaker is cheryl jackson welcome good evening and thank you for this opportunity i appreciate it on the psd website towards the top there are three different quick links that raid staff parents students when the parents link is clicked at the very top of the page it says parenting for student success an event at psd that hit national news recently does not match however with

081psd's stated goal of partnering with parents for student success driving a wedge between kids and their families who truly love them does not partner with parents telling students that their parents are not safe is just wrong these parents and grandparents love support encourage and sacrifice for their children public education must focus on school lastic excellence not an agenda of social issues parents have entrusted their children to you to educate them in the areas of math and science and english foreign languages geography please let us leave the moral training to parents we need to get back to the place that i remember educators and parents were allies working together for the very best interest of all students we need to get back to p.s i'm afraid your time has expired with parents for success thank you

082our next speaker is laura mcwaters welcome hello my elementary middle and high schools did not support me or any lgbtsq students none of them did then i was not in the textbooks i was not in any library lookbook there was no gsas there were no supportive teachers or counselors there were no safe spaces there were no informed and supportive parents for this fifth grader or any grade after that still i was there transgender and lgbtq students were there we suffered some of us didn't make it all of us have scars of one type or another seeing ourselves and being specific specifically included and supportive means that lgbtq youth are harassed and assaulted less we experience less anxiety and depression we have higher attendance rates we learn and test better we are happier we experience much

083lower rates of suicide and attempts supporting transgender non-binary all lgbt students is not about sex it's about supporting students who are mostly excluded from conversation books media lesson plans and far far too often from their own families it's about seeing that we exist and that we are normal and as deserving as every other student student needs support needs to come from each and every school and at every level it needs to come early and it needs to be ongoing none of that happened to my 10 year old self in elementary school or any school afterwards and i'm here to make sure that it doesn't happen to any student again thank you thank you [Applause] our next speaker is kathy dumler welcome i'm sorry if there's any confusion kathy kathy dumler is first and then we'll

084have kathy van pelt welcome okay i've seen signs in many of our psd schools that say if you see something say something i'd really need about 90 minutes not 90 seconds to say what i've seen and heard this past year as a 30-year psd employee my heart hurts my jaw drops i get angry and i can hardly believe that the district i've been so very proud to support to serve and to promote for so long has changed so dramatically when psd began making national news two weeks and i were visiting colonial williamsburg an inspiring place where americans can learn about our history without crt influence and the amazing brave people sacrifice so much to create our republic each day there were speakers in full costume telling us the stories of life in early america i

085was especially impressed with thomas jefferson when he started his presentation it seemed like he was talking about our times and cur and current times and not colonial times and one of the members of the audience asked him to clarify and he assured us no i'm talking about when i lived in america at the end he took questions from the audience the last question was it seems like the times you lived in were very similar times that we're living in right now do you have any advice for us mr jefferson paused he actually choked up and got tears in his eyes and he put his hands out to all of us and he said you're right now it's your turn it's up to you to save the republic we gave you so that's why i'm here

086it's up to us stop grooming our children stop hiding the truth from parents and taxpayers listen your time is up thanks educate every child our next speaker is kathy van pelt welcome hi i'm a retired junior high and high school teacher i loved my my experience my career i taught sex education for 12 years i am not against equality i am not against diversity i don't hate anybody in this room that has a different opinion than i do but i am against subversive programs that want to teach vulnerable children and teens alternative lifestyle i'm not talking about the whole program of adversity diversity and equality i'm teaching i'm talking about a specific amount of that curriculum that is subversive and damaging to our young people i have a suggestion there's much better and effective ways

087to teach this is the national acclaim character counts curriculum has been very effective proven to unite parents community and school boards schools that program can teach respect care kind kindness in a much more effective way so i would just suggest that and i want to leave with it with what everybody else has mentioned in this room these children belong to their parents let us do our jobs grandparents let us do our jobs let us teach sensitive sexual issues at home i'm afraid your time is expired thank you [Applause] our our final speaker this evening is michelle edgerly welcome this is an abbreviated version of an email i sent to my son's principal i'm writing to inform you of our decision to transfer our son from weber to liberty common our family has been a part

088of the psd community since 2006. there was a time when psd schools had wait lists if you wanted to attend a certain school you either needed to live in the school's boundary or choice in which was next to impossible today the opposite is true psd attendance is dramatically down and charter and private schools have the long wait list psd would be wise to examine the reason behind this mass exodus we've recently noticed a dramatic shift in psc's philosophy and approach to teaching and learning my son has never had homework during his time at weber when we asked why we were told by staff that assigning homework was not equitable when did challenging students become bad when did setting high expectations for success become not equitable dylan is completing the bare minimum of work with the

089least amount of effort in receiving top grades is this excellence we would argue this is not setting up our son for success in the future shouldn't he learn how to overcome obstacles and be a critical thinker psd teaches that you can complete assignments multiple times to get the grade you think you deserve never mind the assign if the assignment is turned in late we don't agree with this philosophy we've chosen liberty for dylan primarily because excellence is valued and recognized hard work is expected respect for students staff and teachers is demanded there are no cell phones an dress code is enforced students focus on learning removing dylan from weber is in his best interest thank you that concludes community comment for this evening next we're on to board committee reports would anybody i don't think

090so i think unless somebody desperately needs it so does anybody would anybody like to make remarks on the board dj are you raising your hand go ahead i um i actually spent the time this weekend really thinking about uh the graduations and i really wanted to talk about them and and talk about uh the things to be able to see and the joy that i felt um it was a week through of different graduations smaller and and to the large ones um and and i want to point out the beauty that filled my heart was seeing the teachers the parents and the students being so excited about reaching that accomplishment the episode that happened today really throw a wrench in in my thinking and what i had written up and um and then just sitting

091through this has really changed my mind a little bit on what i feel and what i think i guess a little bit and as a parent i have gotten involved in this district for many years and one of my driving forces was the partnership because the partnership between teachers and parents i think is vital and i and i'm hurt that there is a chunk of our community that feels like that has been broken because i'll tell you firsthand i see it in our school district many times and how well it is and i think i saw it really well at graduation and i hear the stories about other districts and and the challenges of trying to make that a reality i sat on the state advisory council of parent involvement and education for over six

092years i chaired that group and um it is a huge challenge to try to get together and be with parents and and to be able to formulate the foundation for these kids for their life and i think it is very important and and what really upsets me is miscommunication i think is really what it comes down to i um i think there were there were mistakes done about not communicating sooner 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 um it pisses me off i i i you know i i think i'm probably more upset because of of that shooting and and that makes it even more irritating um we've got to get better we've got to get better

093at communicating and telling what really is the truth um and i'll shout out to molly i thank you for your article i think it was honest and it it it made the point um there were mistakes made but in reality for people to come up a year later and say that they haven't heard from us or haven't talked to us it is very frustrating and so i'm i'm a little heartbroken that our community has to to do this we have opportunities to move forward but to do that we've got to sit down and have good communication and i i will tell you that mr kingsley is not a politician he is someone that we've hired and has done a great job of sitting down with many many different groups and i i am shocked to

094hear that uh the comments that are made and and i know we can do better as a community and so i i this is i'm sorry it's gone off rails from what i planned but uh things boiled up um i i spent the last week seeing a ton of educators parents and students that care about learning celebrate and i think we need to focus a little bit on that and enjoy that i'll share with you that after reading the news earlier today about texas to be able to go on social media and see the celebrations happening in elementary schools for field days fifth grade graduations was the one thing that helped calm me down a little bit but we got to keep those kids in mind and stop stop listening to these channels that say

095this is a political agenda times have changed our society has changed education needs to evolve with it and we got to do the best we can with what we've got and but we've got to do it together as partners i truly believe that so i hope those people that have spoken earlier uh are honest and want to have those conversations because that's the only way we're going to move forward thanks all right thanks dj would anybody else on the board like to make any remarks or give any reports go ahead nate i'm going to try to be a little more concise than dj and say ditto thanks dj for your comments all right kristen do you have some remarks yeah i just want to um thank everybody for coming out tonight um and you know

096i just want to i do want to go back to celebrating this past weekend i got to go to seven of the nine graduations absolutely amazing it was an absolute love fest between students teachers parents the one of my favorites is pooter high school and one of the reasons for that is because they allow the students get to pick who gives them the diploma and it is always so touching to see a student's favorite teacher sometimes it's the school nurse sometimes it's the sro sometimes it's the janitor at one point it was and that's what the community is all about that's what we're here for is we're here to educate our kids about life and math and science and reading but it's all about life and if we can do that and prepare them for

097the life that they have in the future um that's that's what i saw this weekend and that was what was so beautiful and that's what i will keep with me right now between the news and some of the comments that's what i keep in my heart and i know that all of our students have that feeling about at least one person in their school you can see it you can feel it and it was just palpable at those graduations and i just want to again thank every educator in our district and that means teachers nurses bus drivers nutrition workers everyone because you all got those kids there so thank you thank you other comments all right i'll just add a couple of things i um i'm sorry that the as is the general practice folks

098cleared out after we were done with community comment because i i wanted to re-emphasize what i heard from superintendent kingsley and what i believe and i know the board believes and that is we are going to go forward with community engagement activities i don't know the schedule yet but you can be assured that they will exist and they will be opportunities for us to have the kind of dialogue that folks were talking about here back and forth dialogue about difficult issues and how we're approaching them so we look forward to those engagement sessions uh in certainly in the new school year and maybe before that look uh keep an eye out for uh psd channels on how to how to attend and please do the other thing i will say in terms of some of

099the details and how the district is responding to some of the issues that have been brought up i would refer you to the colorado an article today that has some direct quotes from superintendent kingsley and i think expresses some of the values maybe all of the values in fact that we're being expressed here by some of our commenters so have a look at that and like i say join us in the engagement sessions to dialogue about what you've read and what you're still seeing and what you feel and we can go from there the last thing i'll say is i am super looking forward as we move into the new year to be focused on teaching and learning and excellence in education it's certainly why i joined the board of education and i'm looking forward

100to our continuing efforts in that regard and i think you mentioned superintendent kingsley maybe it was at the dinner session but uh i don't remember right now but uh a big starter in that regard is we're currently we had just completed i guess uh a uh or we will be getting over the summer a report on our uh literacy efforts in the district and opportunities to work with our staff to move forward and improve things for our for all of our students so that's an example of how this district is super committed to the idea of improving results for all of our students and i invite you to stay tuned for that as that develops and to participate with us in dialogue around that so those are my thoughts again a little longer than normal

101but i hope that uh i hope that they're meaningful and are there any other comments before we move on to the next agenda item all right the next agenda item is our consent agenda would anybody like to pull anything from the consent agenda the answer is yes by the way can can someone can we oh kristen perhaps you'd like to pull something i would i would like to call uh where did it go 8 13 7 13 8 13 it's eight it's actually 7 13 it's okay yeah and then yeah on the novice agenda it's it's 7 13. okay well say it is the employee agreement thank you yes all right would anybody like to pull anything else from the agenda regardless of its number all right uh let's make uh that important go ahead

102yes i would like to pull the district schedule district-wide student fees and other select charges from the consent agenda all right uh with that uh let us make yeah so let us make the discussion of the employee agreement um the yes the what i have is 9.3 which is probably 8.3 on some people's uh paper in other words after the approval of the early childhood annual report and then we will make the fee schedule right after that as those are the two so we'll have four action items in this section i think that's correct all right anything else okay would somebody like to make a motion to approve the consent agenda as uh amended nate yes i move that the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for the items remaining on the consent agenda

103excellent could i have a second for that jim has a second here jill would you please call a roll call on the consent the remaining consent agenda dj anderson hi jim brokish hi nate donovan aye kristin draper aye rob henderson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passes seven zero excellent thank you very much jill um let us now uh go to our first of our action items that were there before we amended the agenda or pulled things from consent sorry and that is revisions to the student rights and code of conduct policies this is the second reading of this we discussed it at the last meeting may i get a motion on these revisions nate go ahead yes i move that the board approved the revisions to district policy j l c d

104and adopt policy j l c d b as presented excellent can i have a second kristin has a second there all right are there is there any additional conversation about this topic excellent jill would you please call a vote on this these revisions dj anderson aye jim brokish aye nate donovan aye kristen draper aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passes 7-0 excellent thank you jill our next item yeah our next item is approval of the 2020 2021 early childhood annual report the head start cost of living adjustment and quality improvement funds and the non-competing continuation grant application may i get a motion for the approval of these items nate go ahead yes i move that the board approved the 2020 to 2021 early childhood annual report the head start cost

105of living adjustment and quality improvement funds and the non-competing continuation grant as presented can i have a second we got a second from dj on that all right we can do this in either order you'd like superintendent kingsley there's a my script here says would we like to talk about the board like talk about it but it seems to me maybe we ought to have the the presentation first excellent let's do that go ahead i believe we have a guest here this evening for this yes uh we have becca benedict here our director of early childhood education to provide us the annual report presentation welcome thank you for being here this evening hello i'm so happy to see all of you i know the circumstances of today's events and the difficult conversations that we're having

106are so important to our community and and really are essential and i just also want to thank you for allowing me to present today while compliance isn't nearly as inspiring our little people are and so this work here tonight will allow us to continue the work with our littlest learners and i just feel so very fortunate if you want to fill your joy cup go check out our facebook page and our transition ceremonies and the amazing things that are happening all around the district at 22 elementary sites and and our community sites as well so our little people are so inspiring and compliance is not so much so i'm here today um with four topics for our presentation the first three are part of the motion to accept our annual report our cost of living

107adjustment quality improvement funds and our annual grant application that's the compliance stuff and then the update for universal pre-k to share some information that we're learning from the community right now so we'll start with the annual report one of the requirements for our head start annual grant is an annual report and you'll see on the left side of this slide the things that are required for us to be in compliance with our annual report the one thing i will point out is that the annual report for this grant year is not actually the year we just completed it's a year behind because our annual grant year runs from november 1st to october 31st in our federal funding it does not straddle an instructional year perfectly so this is part of our grant application every year

108but it is for 2020 2021 so just want to highlight that so remember back to a time in 2020 2021 we had a lot of different things going on and most of this story is covid related and so when we're not looking at this year but last year i want us to remember the transitions and the opportunities that we had with students and also the opportunities that we had to learn through covid and prioritize student safety and health so in the beginning of the year right before school started it was announced that the district would be remote only and so we saw in our enrollment story that we had many of our families say remote only early childhood education does not work for my family we saw a drop in enrollment but we also thought

109about how important it is to connect with families so we continued the course and we deployed ipads and mifi's to all of our families that needed them and any remote class was offered via technology with their teacher and family started to develop the relationships with their classroom teachers and their mentors at that time we also had a hundred students in person we had four sites that were open in person we prioritized the students with the highest needs and offered transportation and really an attempt to address the equity needs that remote education offered um the specific challenges for families by october when we went in-person classes our early childhood program opened four days a week and we were also awarded the opportunity to move more full-day classes into the program we went from 12 to 19

110and that was allowed by the colorado preschool program funding changed how many we were allowed to pair to make full days that helped our enrollment then towards thanksgiving the district shifted back to remote only but we recognize that our littlest learners have a different viewpoint on school and remote only is not the best method to reach our littlest people and so we shifted to hybrid when the rest of the district went remote and that reduced our class sizes and our students were able to still attend two days in person and then two days remotely per week that continued through the holidays and into january and by end of january and early february all of our early childhood classrooms were operating monday through thursday at full capacity we did follow the county guidelines and close or

111shift classrooms to remote if there was an exposure in the classroom and then our summer session was fully in person and i will note and knock on wood as we're about ready to start another summer session that none of our classrooms were closed due to covid at all last summer so we were excited about that yay there's the inspiring part and this is our enrollment story you can see as a percentage at the beginning of the year we had lower numbers than we've ever seen and as the classroom shifted to more in person you can see the jumps in enrollment and how we became fully enrolled on the head start annual report keep in mind that this report is focused on our head start funded students only it's about a third of our program so

112we do have a nod to how many students overall were served which was 947 but the ones that we are speaking of are our head start and our early head start students for this report we have in early head start 108 slots you'll notice we served 125 students and what that means is we are required if a slot is vacated to fill the slot with someone from the waiting list so that's how many families cycled through last year and then for our head start slots we have 275 but we served 338 so we had some more mobility through those slots and then our total pre-k slots available were 1070. that's how many seats were available and the numbers below there are the percentage of eligible children in the county and the catchment areas according to

113head start with the eligibility factor in the economic realm so those families meeting the poverty factor for a head start in terms of student achievement we are tracking our student growth and achievement through an assessment called ts gold our early head start our littlest learners that's our zero to 36 months we track six different domains and then we also start at the beginning of the year and measure again in the spring two things to note um the number of students that we had at the beginning of the year in early head start was considerably smaller than the number that we had at the end and another thing to note will be in the stages from zero to 36 months the the bar continues to raise in all of these domains if you think of how

114quickly children develop in the in zero to 36 months the expectations change very very quickly and so we our goal for any of our students is that 85 of our students will be within widely held expectations for these domains by the end of the school year so you can see that all of our domains met our achievement goal for early head start in 2020 2021. for head start those are our preschool little people same thing we have the six domains and then we also add the domain for spanish literacy and spanish language because we do have a program at harris bilingual that does offer instruction in spanish as well our goal is the same 85 percent of students will be within widely held expectations by the end of the year you'll notice and these are

115trends that we've seen this year and last year that the social emotional domain was definitely a concern as they came back in from being in the quarantine situations and then continues to be a concern this year as a theme another area that we study in in terms this isn't student achievement this is teacher achievement or classroom quality head start requires class coding and class coding is a tool that measures preschool classrooms in three different areas instructional support classroom organization and emotional support it's an indicator of the quality of the instruction in the classrooms the important part of this is the green bar that's our measure and then the blue bar is the measure of if we fell below that line we would have to re-compete for a grant so they would put our grant open

116it up to everybody and we would have to recompete for it the black bar is the national average and the yellow bar is the quality thresholds that headstart expects now you will see that in all three domains um our classrooms are above expectation so there's lots to celebrate of the things that are happening in our classrooms oh one other thing i would say about this is this is also if you look at the data it's from september 1st 2019 to may 30th 2020. the last class coding that we had for this measure was prior to the first closure in march of 2020 the office of head sp head start suspended the requirement for class coding because no visitors were allowed in classrooms last year to protect the integrity and the health of the students and

117the teachers in the classroom we have class coded this year so when we are preparing our annual report for next year we will have numbers for you in the fall of all of our class coding from this year so we always have an independent person come in and help us with that class quality they're looking great just let you know in terms of referral and health information this is a slide that really talks about our covid story for 2020 2021 the one thing i will highlight here is our medical exams and our dental exams have fallen far below what we're used to so as a program our medical exams and dental exams have always been above 90 percent and so this is a critical number for us because many of our families did not have

118access to medical or dental exams during this time period many dental offices were not open for anything other than emergencies and then offices for health care some were open some were not families had to prioritize and many families were afraid to start returning to their regular scheduled physicals vaccinations that kind of thing so we did see a big dip in these numbers some of the things that we've done this year to address that we have started any student that does not have a current dental exam is invited to a dental screening at fluiana twice a year so we have the health district partners with us and we bring in dentists and dental assistants and we'll do an exam at fujana for families and then we will also be having exams and fluoride available at our

119summer session so we're trying to build those experiences in if families have not been able to get back to offices the other numbers i really want to celebrate here here's where the inspiration comes in if you look at the family mentor community referrals almost 2000 the early head start home visits completed over 2 000 prenatal visits completed over 80 and head start those are our pre-k home visits 800 all of these occurred virtually and i cannot tell you how much our families craved connection nobody wanted to be isolated and it really leveled the playing field for the mentor and the parent who were both figuring out how to use the ipad to do a home visit and trying to make that connection and build that we actually experienced attendance and participation rates greater than normal

120so this is a huge celebration to our commitment to connecting and partnering with families and being there even when we can't be there in person and this has continued this year we're really proud of them and it was a way for us to help families complete those community referrals and help find doctors offices or mental health services that were open during this time and help them navigate all the new rules that existed because of covet so we're really proud of the work that that those teams have done uh the for example the 2389 home visits how many kids because what it is it's multiple visits that you're including there yep so how how many visits does a normal kid usually get or yes sir so of our 108 early head start slots 92 of them

121are home visitor slots it's 90 minutes once a week year round they have a two-week break um over this summer so they really had a chance to develop those connections and those perfect yeah i just wanted to share with everyone how many visits that really kind of was thanks and the other thing that i will i will highlight and it just makes me feel very very proud of the work that our team has has done and our parents have done together is that those home visits and the road map for what they work on is co-created we have a growing great kids growing great families curriculum and families and home visitors determine what the next topics will be every visit they they decide that together they make that path together and it's just a great

122partnership so i'm proud of them we have a fiscal update here and i would say that our fiscal team is amazing and some of them are in the room i'm looking at them thank you we are a complicated program with lots of layered funding federal funds make up almost the 5 million or almost 6 million of our budget we also have state and local funds and private funds as well and our our most recent audit had no findings so we're super proud of the work that the fiscal team does with us thank you um and there's a breakdown of our of how we spend our money so do you have any questions regarding the information on the annual report okay dj go ahead i i just i just want to clarify to you on that

123last screen that some of that well i i'll put it to you how much of that is grant based so our federal money is grant based so the work that we do with policy council for the grant that i'll share with you a little bit later is for that five million of 5.8 million cpp is not a grant it's state funding but we have certain criteria that we must meet and then we also will look at other funds or like the child care relief grant that's the state funding the 92 000. so many of them are grant not all of them our tuition base for example is not a grant that is just money that we collect from our tuition-based thoughts yeah i just wanted to be clear to the public how much work is

124entailed to get these grants to fund these kids and i i believe it's something as a community that we value and just the fact that we have to use grants to do it so thank you you're welcome other questions oops i think you can go ahead okay so that's the annual report part um and then the head start cola and quality improvement portion every year head start does an adjustment based on a cost of living and quality improvement funds anytime they're offering ongoing funds to add to our baseline grant amount we have to ask for approval from policy council which is our parent group and our board of education so i'm here asking um for your approval we are going to have a funding increase of 118 026 dollars we do not have to do

125extra work other than apply for the cola and the quality improvement and it is um credited to our baseline grant and it's ongoing year to year the quality excuse me the cost of living adjustment the cola request came in at 2.28 percent i do just want to highlight that the market level adjustment for classified positions based on negotiations that were just passed has an average increase of salary for nine percent and the funding steps and lane movements for licensed and admin has an average increase of 6.06 percent so they've offered a 2.28 increase and we plan to use the entire amount to offset the salary increase i would like to also note that the cola does not cover the negotiated raises and so we'll have to figure out a way to grant fund or make

126up the difference to continue our current funded model for quality improvement dollars the line item for quality improvement was put into the supplies section to cover increasing costs related to supplies any questions about the cost of living request or the quality improvement dollars okay and so the head start grant is i am requesting approval tonight for our full grant package it is due august 1st our current head start grant is a five-year grant it's from 2020 to 2025 and each year we renew it's called a continuation grant this will be year three of five i would also say that our goals and our five-year grant was all created pre-covet so we are making adjustments as we are learning and as conditions change our grant submission date is august 1 and then they always look at

127our grant and noodle around with it and ask for more information and then our grant funded year begins november 1st through october 31st here's our grant amounts i won't read each of them for you you can take a look at them the grant is for approximately a third of our students it has a total award it has tta is training and technical assistance that money is required to go towards professional development we have a non-federal share that the district is required to contribute for both head start and early head start we follow the head start grant program planning cycle and so this is something that many of you have participated in with us either for our full five-year grant or our yearly process it starts with a community assessment and assesses what the most pressing

128needs are we have a self-assessment that occurs from the recommendations from the self-assessment we create goals and an action plan and align our budget to meet those goals and create a training and technical assistance plan um everything that we do requires approval from our parent board which is our policy council and our governing body and we do have a board rep that comes every month to policy council that's dj thank you dj so i'm sure this seems very familiar because we do try to tackle a little bit each month throughout the year this is super teeny tiny print sorry about that these are all the documents that are required for the grant so i have included all of those for you each of these documents have been reviewed and the ones that say projected may

1292020 that's the budget the cola and the budget narrative and justification were approved at our main 19th policy council meeting on the policy council presentation side and then the whole package is brought to you for this meeting for approval so lots of documents do you have questions about the grant documents i'm sorry compliance is so not inspiring but this work is inspiring our parents and our our community have worked really hard um to get the grant ready for you thank you we're looking forward to a continuation of that okay go ahead all right so our universal pre-k update does not require approval it's just uh like here's how we are doing and here's what we know it's an information sharing at this point universal pre-k has a go it was signed into law by the

130governor on april 25th that part is the inspiring part to be that means that any family of a four-year-old will have access to 10 hours a week of tuition-free preschool it is set to begin fall of 2023 there will be a single application process they have not completed the rfp for the single application process but they're working on it it promises preschool in a variety of settings in mixed delivery so it will be community providers as well as school district providers and there it also started the formation of the department of early childhood which they have hired a director for so we're so excited about all these things they're moving forward i did want to share some information that i learned at the ecclc that's the early childhood council of larimer county they are a

131big partner with us as we're embarking on this journey this is our community readiness for 2023. we've got one year to plan and be ready and so the expected number of four-year-olds in the community that need to be served by fall of 2023 is 3100. the current number of slots available in the community right now for four-year-olds is 2188. so if you can do the math there we've got some work to do and we have a need for additional slots across the community so they also shared with us how child care slots are separated in terms of private providers and school district school district providers currently the school district provides 54 percent of those child care slots for pre-k so that will be important in our planning as we look at what we can currently

132serve and then also what the the community is going to need in terms of spaces for kids yes there is always hope um i would say um if i look at that we're looking at a third you know that that is a lot of slots um and as i look at our capacity and i look i included slides from our last presentation just so that you could see how many students we do serve and how close we are to full in the slots that we do have this was our march snapshot we're full across the board at this point the blue band right now is our current colorado preschool program footprint and so the universal pre-k funding will replace the colorado preschool program footprint so we have room that we could grow there we also

133have some room we will be expanding tuition-based slots by 11 per year so up to 100 by 2023 so we could expand we're going to have to look at our readiness to do so and the piece of information that we do not have that we absolutely need in order to be able to plan is the per pupil funding for these slots so in relation to the conversation you talked about about the overall funding of education um if the per pupil cost doesn't meet the cost of running these classrooms it will not be my recommendation that we are the ones expanding all of these slots it would really depend on what that number turns out to be and whether whether or not the district can afford to be that provider right now our state funding is

134one of our lower funded slots so if i look at our federal slots um are funded at double the rate of our slate our state slots approximately it's a little more than double but um we're going to have to wait and see on that number and so those are things that we'll all be planning for um some of the things that we're doing right now i'm just going to skip this slide and come back to it is looking at our system to identify if we're ready for expansion so some of those will be conversations with principals to see if there's space existing space in schools adding an early childhood classroom sometimes can involve construction playgrounds licensure requirements so looking at schools that already have them and see if there's additional space and also preparedness for

135workforce we'll be working on some of those those details we'll also be partnering with our friends in finance that are our best friends to tell us if we can realistically fund more classrooms and by how many another thing that we're doing as a program is going through change management training and preparing our system for change and and addressing the needs of every employee group as well as the needs of parents and district staff to help us with this change we will be partners with the ecclc and other community providers we cannot do this by ourselves so that's part of the work that we're doing and we'll want to be thinking in the future in terms of future mill bond planning once we get more of the details we'll want to look at what we want

136our footprint to be we definitely want to participate in universal pre-k and and the capacity in which we have to do that we will continue our workforce partnerships with hr with tuition reimbursement and the use of student workers to help grow our own system and as well as our futures lab track for early childhood so we're really trying to build that hope to find those slots and the community planning process we will be alongside the members of the community every step of the way to see what our role is and how we can contribute to that so the last piece of information that i have for you is about local community organizations that's the next step the application for local community organizations is open now and due june 20th we have participated in several work

137sessions if you will about who is interested in applying for the lco the early childhood council of larimer county has expressed an enthusiastic interest in being our lco the county has expressed an interest in applying as being a partner and then ourselves the school district has had would be interested in a partner role but has reservations about becoming the sole lco so the current plan moving forward is that the early childhood council of lomar county will be applying for that lco position and then as we learn more about our role the district would become a provider within that that network for universal pre-k phew lots of things to come questions dj uh yeah i'm a little intrigued by the partner aspect that you put with that is is there an opportunity to uh break some

138of that lco workload and then we could take some of that on and then help them out or is that that is one of the options and when we talked about that i think the the way that we felt we could partner is really about layering the funding we're really good at blending and layering funding to make sure we have a program that meets families needs we would offer our expertise but the consensus of the the work group was that they felt that would water down the resources that would come with the lco so they are offering some um incentives in terms of financial resources for the lco but the document i was looking at was like it said part-time staff member and i'm going ooh that's a big project for a part-time staff member

139and so one of the concerns that the community had expressed was the more partners we have on the official application the harder it will be to use those resources that would water it down and so we are hoping to participate in the community planning process we're hoping to participate as an rfp partner for universal pre-k and being a part of the early childhood council as a board member the district has a good partnership with the early childhood council so i don't believe our voice as a district will be not included as a partner we just won't be the official lco it would be the council yeah sounds good thank you any other comments go ahead kristen just a quick comment i just want to say one thanks for putting this all together i know it's

140not um probably your favorite part of the job either but it's great that we have all the information and to can you keep those cute kid pictures coming because yes those are awesome so just you know every once and i'll send one of those to the boe and it will be we'll be smiling from year to year good thank you good yes thanks go ahead jess one thank you this is always very thorough and i i feel like i should have questions but i also feel like you've done a really thorough job that i'm like i'm kind of good um but one question i have is like you we're talking at the beginning totally random but transition ceremonies for your kiddos can we be invited to those i think we can all use some extra

141cuteness in our life well absolutely and unfortunately the early childhood calendar is different than the school district calendar our our teachers have a short shorter contract and our school year is shorter so they're already done for this year however we do have an early head start transition event so we'll make sure you get invited to that and those are our home visiting families that will be transitioning into a pre-k program so those are our little littles that go to the little bitty section so um we are excited to have that so i'll make sure that you get an invite to those yeah i appreciate that thank you very much all right with that jill if you would call a vote on the things we need to approve here the motion that was made at the

142beginning of this discussion dj anderson aye jim brokish aye nate donovan aye kristin draper aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passes 7-0 excellent thank you very much jill and thank you becca for all of the work that you're doing and for that for that comprehensive presentation really appreciate it so much all right uh the next item on our agenda is one that we pulled from the consent agenda and that is the 2022-23 employee agreement can i get a motion to approve the employee agreement as presented originally and then we'll worry about amending it go ahead nate i move that the board approve the employee agreement as presented can i get a second for that excellent dj wants to second that do i have a motion to amend the agreement as

143presented nate go ahead i move to amend my own motion by moving that the employee agreement be amended by removing the pooter school district licensed slash teacher salary schedule for the to 2023 school year on page 132 of the employee agreement and replacing it with the updated license teacher salary schedule for the 2022-2023 school year that was previously provided to the board to correct calculation errors in six of 224 cells on the schedule can i get a second for that dj would also like to second that excellent do we have any discussion on the amendment nate go ahead we just had a clerical error on the salary schedule that we needed to correct so this is to correct that and my understanding further is that that was done in consultation with the with the teachers

144association so that so that it reflects what it needs to reflect and i'm seeing john nod in the back so i appreciate that that's correct excellent all right the voice from above all right so if i can get a vote on the amendment on the motion to amend that would be great jill dj anderson as someone that has a lot of typing mistakes i totally say i jim brokish aye nate donovan aye christian draper aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passes seven 7-0 excellent thank you very much and uh i will just say as it relates to the entire employee agreement and i was going to pull either this or the memorandum of understanding anyway i want to thank the teachers association the classified employees association and the pace uh

145for and of course the administration for all of the diligent work you put in uh to reaching this agreement it's critical to me and i'm pretty sure us that we work collaboratively and cooperatively to reach an agreement among all the parties that does within the limits of our uh financial ability the best we can do for our employees so thank you very much for that for that work i know it was challenging at times and and i appreciate us all working together to overcome that so thank you thank you so much um does anybody else want to add anything before we vote on the agreement as a whole sorry as amended go ahead uh uh nate well said well spoken rob thank you okay other comments all right then we will vote on the employee

146agreement as amended please dj anderson aye jim brokish hi nate donovan aye christian draper aye rob henderson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passes 7-0 thank you so much and again thank you to all the negotiators who make this made this possible the next action item that we have is that was pulled from the consent of janja is the schedule of district-wide student fees and other select charges and school-based fee schedules would somebody like to make a motion to approve this schedule and then we'll discuss nate yes i move that the board approve the recommended district-wide student fee schedule and the school-based fee schedules as presented thank you could i have a second kristin gives us a second excellent so i if i'm remembering correctly that far back nate i think it was

147you that wanted to pull this so if you'd lead us off in the conversation i'd appreciate it yeah i'm in favor of this i just want us to continue the discussion about uh consistency between schools for the same items and working on the ability for students to request a waiver to participate in certain activities it seems not really equitable that some students can get a waiver and other students can't and i want us to figure out how we can adjust the schedule so that we have the revenue to provide waivers for more students or have it come from somewhere else in the budget so that we can get maximum participation especially from those students that can't otherwise afford the fees so thank you go ahead brian director donovan thank you for your comment in charge

148i want to let the entire board know the message is received it's an opportunity i feel really good after collaborating with our two assistant superintendents in executive director of finance that some of the progress that may have been stalled during covid with the collaboration of our schools to create more consistent thresholds and prioritize access we are now positioned to be able to deepen that work and so as i've had an opportunity to learn about where we are and where we're headed i feel really good that what is being presented tonight will continue to iterate and improve upon in the year ahead and i ask scott and tracy and dave if you have anything you'd like to add please feel free brian i think i'll just i think speak for the three of us and saying

149we we have felt like we've made good progress i think carol would probably agree with us if we take a look back where we were five years ago no question kovid i think interrupted us and we went through a year where we didn't even charge um many fees so as we continue to look at what's ahead of us we're excited about continuing to streamline i i wanna also highlight though i think the other thing that we did um over the last five years has become more transparent and that's what you're talking about tonight is the transparency and and uh i think we'll continue to work on that and align the transparency with values and that's really what i hear the board speaking to is is the values we have as a system and uh i

150think i speak for the three of us and saying um we look forward to the charge ahead and uh look forward to continuing to get better and aligned and be more systemic over the next 12 months go ahead nate yeah i appreciate that and i know that uh for those of us that have been on the board as long as we've approved this fee schedule it's been a it's been quite a process and so and i appreciate that we're making progress thanks looks like dj wants to say something go ahead um i did want to uh one of my thoughts that i wanted to share with you guys and see if you guys thought it was a good idea or not was uh to approach the foundation to see if we could start a fund

151in there also as an opportunity to be able to take care of some of these fees that are out there to make sure that we can have all the students be able to address it so um at our next book at the foundation's next meeting i i will bring that up if you guys don't disagree that it wouldn't be a bad idea as maybe as a fund for them go ahead so thank you for inviting that philanthropic support i think that can certainly be helpful what i would ask is that from a school in district perspective i think we got to get really clear on what the specific need is so the foundation could be strategic in their efforts i think we're getting close to being able to name that i just want to make

152sure knowing you have a sense of we all have a sense of urgency you should i think the meeting is pretty quickly maybe if scott if i can ask you to connect with director anderson on that so he feels poised to go into that meeting i'd appreciate it all right thank you excellent in the absence of any other comments i will ask jill to call a vote on this item dj anderson aye jim brokish hi nate donovan aye kristen draper aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora motion passes 7-0 thank you that concludes our action items for this evening going the wrong way we got before that we have the dab annual report and i believe we have someone here from the dab to speak to us about this superintendent yes no no

153problem thank you here this evening to give the board an annual update on the district advisory board is brady martucci chair of the dab thank you for joining us brady really glad to have you the one thing i'm so excited about is the microphone i wish i had had that all year scott tried to teach me the hand clap to start and i could never get it to work but this would have really helped thank you hi my name is brady martucci and this year's 2021-22 chair of the district advisory board and i am going to present the year-end summary to you thank you for loading these slides for me our meetings this year the theme that was determined to be used by the exec team and with input from the district advisory board membership

154was student first eight of the nine meetings were in person which is like super exciting and seven of those were in the aspen one and two in the itc to accommodate social distancing and then our final meeting of the year was in here actually but no microphone um our our meeting topics we started it ended the year with an update from the superintendent we had monthly updates from the assistant superintendents and the board of education liaison our connection survey results and other psd data was reviewed the psd calendar committee provided an update we had an operations update the career and future readiness team as well as a representative from front range community college provided a presentation and we covered psd principles of community the membership this year was 70 members which is about a 20

155increase from previous years and we had an average meeting attendance of 32 representatives with eight schools not having representation four of those elementary schools one middle school two alternative schools and the early childhood education program and we already spoke with becca and i and we are going to set that up to have a representative from early childhood our this is the member attendance for the year as far as at each meeting our highest meeting attendance was january and that was actually our virtual meeting through teams if i'm going too fast did you needs okay we had we continued the diversity equity and inclusion ad hoc subcommittee that was chaired by lonnie williams the purpose this year was explore and learn about diversity equity inclusion and justice the work done was to explore disparities and student

156outcomes support psd dei goals and the committee members voted to read stamped racism anti-racism and you by jason reynolds and ibram x kennedy the district or the dab diversity equity and inclusion subcommittee also worked to create an end-of-year summary that was presented at the may 2022 meeting to dab membership the ideas for next year that were provided in that summary include learn more about psd professional development for principals staff board of education student advisory committee and the dab learn more about inclusive hiring practices look into the creation of a parent dei tool kit examine equity in transportation learn more about advocating for lgbtqia plus students and staff and learn more about advocating for neurodiverse students and staff thank you so much to the people on this page for presenting facilitating or participating in any way

157with our dab presentations i left one person off this list which i do want to mention which is deborah hooker and she has been posting the minutes and agendas to the psd page i didn't mean to leave her out but i had to mention it thank you to these people as well as to this year's 2021-22 district advisory board executive team and without them their brains and their hearts this year would have been not possible thank you so much to tracy marlena and scott for meeting with us monthly to set up agendas and review what was going to be covered as well as setting up speakers and just working with us that so much appreciated and couldn't have been done without you thank you to our uh board of education liaisons jim brookish and christoph

158fev and then sorry to read these but they're so important these are the recommendations for 2022 23 based on input from our district of advisory board membership and our executive team input i just want to cover them because there was a end-of-year table collaboration where all of the membership was allowed to provide feedback on each meeting and takeaways and what they want to look for for next year or just the school district in general and so this is a summary but the detailed feedback is in your board of education packet or the dab packet that was given to the board of education so the board of education the first recommendation is the board of education to utilize the district advisory board as to utilize the district advisory board as an advisory board parents want a

159way to be able to provide input engage and support psd update the district advisory board bylaws which is already in progress and hopefully that will start at the beginning of this coming year provide a resource to the district advisory board to support understanding of legal guidelines such as the colorado open meetings law and the fair campaign practices act continue to build and support the relationship between principals and the district advisory board encourage principals to select their district advisory board reps at the beginning of the school year with the expectation that the dab representatives stay committed for the entire school year provide diversity equity and inclusion learning resources for parents provide information transparently to the psd community continue the psd school calendar research and discussion continue to have the superintendent kick off the first dab meeting

160of the year with an update thank you and again end the year with a meet an update at the last meeting thank you continue to have a presentation covering the results from the connection survey as well as other psd psd data at a dab meeting annually thank you continue to have an update from the director of operations at a dab meeting annually continue to have an update regarding diversity equity and inclusion in psd at a dab meeting annually continue to have a monthly update from either assistant superintendent of secondary schools assistant superintendent of elementary schools chief equity and academic officer or chief institutional effectiveness officer those monthly updates are really valued thank you continue to support mental health of students and staff and grow family engagement that is the end of my presentation but the

161packet has more information and i'm also available for any questions thank you for supporting dab it means a lot to the parents who participate and to the community who we're trying to support thank you are there any comments from the board go ahead dj first of all thank you and um has asked someone that's been in your seat many years ago um i uh i welcome you guys take on the bylaws i was part of that two different times and uh that is a challenging effort so um thank you for uh for your time and effort in there thank you and thank you for the information that you brought to us and shared with us it is vital that we continue to get that parent input and especially to have the parents engaged with us

162throughout the year to be able to get information from our district and be able to process that information so thank you very much thank you and your team thank you very much looks like jim would like to say something i just want to say thanks brady uh i just came on partway through the year in this role and uh your leadership was just wonderful thank you so much for all that you did thank you for saying that thank you thanks jim jess i'm gonna ditto the thank yous because he did a wonderful job um and i think like the dub i don't know if many people know but it's not required for our district to have it and there's a lot of parents who provide a lot of their time and effort to come to

163it and i just i'm going to reiterate what brady said i'd like the dab to be utilized more effectively in the future because they come and they spend their time and they want to make a difference and they want to have a community with a district and i think it's a good opportunity to do that thanks ladies thank you all right thank you thank you thank you very much we really appreciate your report and the work that you and the rest of the parents on the dab have done thank you so much our last item of the evening is the presentation of our proposed budget for fiscal year 2022-23 superintendent kingsley i think this is a bittersweet update the content is solid but the presenter i think it's his last board meeting with us this

164evening if not mistaken so brett parsons our budget director i want to welcome you but also let you know on behalf of our entire staff i won't speak for the board but i know how great they feel about you too uh we're going to miss you um i want to thank you for your extraordinary leadership steady hand and partnership with all staff members in this district uh it means a lot well thank you superintendent kingsley kind words i appreciate it well as he said this is my last board meeting so i'm happy to be here tonight to present the proposed budget um you know as we as we go into the budget and actually think about it the reality is it's very very very similar to what we discussed a couple weeks ago so the

165revenue picture is only slightly changed with a couple of updates that i actually verbally discussed last month and then we have really the outcome of negotiations that we talked about earlier this evening so thinking about the state revenue drivers thinking about where we're at there um the final per pupil revenue under the school finance act has approved uh was around three dollars higher than the proposed budget those numbers are ran through and then we talked about the 2.1 million dollars for the special education categorical that are that are in the budget as well a point on put on those is the expenditure side of those resources are actually a line item in the budget to allow deployment those resources in the future as the district determines the best course of action to put those into

166the system i'm looking at the negotiations update this is probably the slide i wanted to talk the most about because i've been i've been thinking about a little bit and how we got you know to where we were at the end with negotiations and when we think about it in comparison you know 4a was the largest dollar value increase the compensation i did in my tenure here and it was still only 14 point something million dollars out of the total ballot went to compensation so the total sum of all the compensation adjustments we did this year i think it was around 16 million dollars or so stated on the next slide in a regular fiscal year granted we received a lot of additional resources to the state a lot of a lot of good things

167happen in that regard but i just want to point out that the the dollar the dollar amount both in total resources and as a percentage of total budget that we chose to deploy toward compensation in the upcoming year is extremely sizable and that goes back to having a plan starting in november we talked about budget priorities we talked about prioritizing staff director patterson talked earlier about you know balancing resources among various employee groups district needs etc so taking all those competing interests into context i think we really got to a good place with compensation this year i've heard hr mention before where the 48 000 starting salary really kind of falls among our comparables and if i attempted to quote it i would miss it badly but it sounds very comparable to some of the

168peer leaders um in in that arena as far as having some of the higher starting pay for the license staff so between that and i really want to hone in on the classified market adjustment we can't understate the amount of work that our that our hr staff did digging into those rates as we've all seen the you know now hiring 20 an hour sign at every place in town it feels like uh the work that team did there i think is going to be a big big benefit to the district as we go forward um into this new kind of labor market normal here over the next couple of years um so that's really the highlights on the compensation piece um the the license component um the 48 000 starting salary one of the big

169drivers uh largest as as far as the total cost goes largest employee group in the district um that's really what uh what led that and then the extrapolation of that percentage to some of the other areas um changed the preliminary budget to the proposed budget a little bit so just to recap at a high level i mentioned the revenue pieces primarily ppr the special education categorical that's now standalone the district priorities we went over those in detail last month those are unchanged from the uh from the preliminary budget uh the compensation number 16.6 million that's what i was speaking about a second ago so that's a little over 2 million higher than the initial proposal and what we had built into the built into the preliminary budget the one thing that i wanted to mention

170on those is just keep in mind throughout the course of the year part of that ongoing salary increase is balanced against all the open positions we have which are still very sizable so the monitoring throughout the course of the year as far as what is the relationship of ongoing salary expenses how they actually come in versus how the unfilled positions uh play out over the course of the year is probably going to be the most important thing to monitor uh you know with any luck all the compensation adjustments we did will completely fill all those positions and you'll have a good problem to discuss in the future but ultimately the district will have to see how those components play out and then we've previously talked about the itemization of reserves for some multi-year projects everything

171from the literacy curriculum high dosage tutoring that's really going to be a multi-year multi-year in nature item um like i said the the budget monitoring throughout the course of the year is going to be pretty important it's really going to be in flux at least how i've always thought about it payroll is our biggest expense close to 85 percent of the general fund budget it roughly falls in 112 increments uh so the budget revision in january this year is going to be where you catch up to reality where we see what the next really seven month springs in regard to the labor market regards to filling positions and how those numbers really play out i mentioned maintaining flexibility the reality is the district's well reserved so you know we've prepared especially thinking about 23 24.

172i'll go back to something director patterson said in spring of 20. i just put him on the spot as we talked about deployment of sr1 and deployment of corona voucher relief funds we talked about that soft landing where we wanted to get there unfortunately i won't be here to see the soft landing uh but we are prepared for it um so so that's kind of a parting parting takeaway that i have is you know we're really prepared for for that time when it comes um and getting there and getting back to normal general fund operations uh the last piece is as far as the timeline goes we have the required legal notice it's going to be in the coloradan tomorrow i would encourage everybody to get a paper copy check out the legal notices section

173it's really thrilling it says our budget's on file in the district and you can check it out and you can speak about it in june at the june meeting on the 14th if you would like so that's really the last kind of formal steps we're preparing those documents getting the stuff ready to go for the june board meeting for the actual adoption of the budget um the last thing i had uh thank you superintendent kingsley for those kind words at the beginning i just really wanted to say to the board both past and present members all the support that you've given me over the last seven years especially the last two years um very very very much appreciated and i've really appreciated and enjoyed all the work that we've done both the good and the

174bad unfortunately that comes with my role in the school district setting over the last couple years and i do thank you for that over time there any questions it looks like nate and then dj are you going to record a video message for the june 14th board meeting since you're going to be gone [Laughter] um i think there's enough video recordings for me to go around so yeah some of those some of those coveted meetings they were uh i don't ever want to listen to myself talk for that long ago dj i just want to take a moment to thank you thank you for all your work especially the last two years but also um how much i've enjoyed working with you before i was on the board on the budget uh committee and such

175it has been a pleasure and you know i'll apologize for whatever dave said to you to make you want to leave you know if you really don't know you should have heard it that uh but thank you very much thank you thank you appreciate it other comments kristen yeah brett i just want to thank you to remember we i think i had my first budget meeting when i first came on the board with you and i just you you just put me at ease i talked about that recently i remember the day you came into my that was the second office i had out of a total of probably four or five uh you came in and we talked for an hour or two and i told somebody about that just the other day i

176remember fondly as do i so thank you so much thank you for all the work that you've done your new district is going to love you as do we and um thank you also for i mean not only the hard work over the last two years but always thinking about that soft landing and that's a lovely parting gift you're giving us so thank you thank you i appreciate it jess they're all very kind i'm not okay with this um but before board before even like really participating much on deb i remember um an insight meeting where you pre-covered obviously when insight was still happening and you came and just gave a bunch of parents a general idea of the budget and i was in awe and comforted deeply just as a parent getting to see

177that let alone all of the meetings now that i've gotten to hear from you so i'm kind of hopeful that they don't like you and you can just come back but thank you for your work thank you for that i appreciate it superintendent kingsley you wanted to make a remark well i i just want to make sure i get dave out of timeout because it's really it's it's not dave's fault and honestly members of the board i i want to apologize to you because since i've known brad i've been pushing him really hard to add a dash of color to his slide decks and a bar graph occasionally or a pie chart and i think i pushed them too hard and i i wanted you know i just want to say it to you publicly

178i'm sorry no kovid was no problem the budget was no problem 15 million of cuts no problem but adding that fourth color on that chart last month that's uh that that's what took my mental health over the edge all right i'll just make some final comments here brett you and i have been working together for a long time the audit committee all these budget reports everything it's been it's been a pleasure working with you your communication has been clear and your work has inspired confidence in the finance of this finances of this district it's i'm so sorry to see you go i wish you the best in your in your new position and thank you for all you've done for us thank you so much [Applause] this is the first standing ovation i've ever gotten

179in my k-12 career i hope it's the last those i don't do well with the flaws and people thanking me so thank you very much i appreciate everything yeah okay thank you brett all right that uh that concludes our work session topics and i'm not even gonna offer anybody an alternative uh this meeting is now adjourned at 9 28 p.m still on may 24th thank you you