001hi good evening thanks for joining the board of education this evening please make sure to mute your cell phone as we begin the meeting i think i've done that today is january 25th 2022 and this meeting is now called to order at 6 33 p.m um at the beginning of the meeting here i'd like to take a moment to say a few things um i apologize if it feels like i'm reading some of this but that's because i feel like this is important and i want to make i made myself some notes and i wanted to make sure that i say things as clearly as i can so the first thing i'd like to do is share the gratitude of the board we live in a community that is engaged people here like all of
002you in the room not only pay attention to the governance process but participate in it you share your ideas and experiences and that is not true in every state city or school district and we appreciate that participation secondly i'd like to express a personal belief we know from experience in the boardroom and in our individual lives that we do not always agree and that's okay sometimes disagreement can be frustrating and uncomfortable and that's okay too it's part of who we are as a community that's committed to working and growing together if there's one thing that i think we can all agree on it's supporting our children or our kids in school it's finding common ground in our passion for making their time here in psd educational and fulfilling as they prepare for their lives beyond
003psd part of that work centers upon teaching students how to listen how to interact respectfully even with those with whom they disagree and generally how to show up each day we as engaged participants in our community must model and coach these learned behaviors with those shared commitments in mind i would ask that each of us model the following during our time together in board meetings and specifically later on in community comment we may not all agree but we should strive to be respectful of one another and our individual views please don't degrade others for what they share in this space community comment is by definition where one individual may speak while board directors staff and meeting attendees listen to what they have to say we ask that attendees not interject or interrupt community comments or
004board discussions psd requires all people adults and students to appropriately wear masks in any psd facility this includes wearing a mask that covers their nose and mouth and as we've discussed before community comment and board discussions are not a space for back and forth conversation with board directors or the superintendent if you have questions you may follow up with the staff or the board individually either at the end of the board meeting or via phone or email the board and staff strive to respond to questions in a timely manner thank you for respecting these protocols it is my deep desire and that of my colleagues on the board your elected officials to have the time and space to listen to what you have to say when it is time for our community comment thank you
005for listening to that and i look forward to working with you on it we need to start our meeting beyond that with the approval of the agenda would any board members like to make changes to the agenda apparently she does go ahead i forgot i moved that the agenda be modified to add an executive session on the school district negotiations related to the 2022-2023 collective bargaining agreement or employment contracts after the informational reports discussion items category do i have a second jim jim is seconded if there's no discussion we'll have a a vote lexi dj anderson hi jim brokish hi kristin draper aye rob pederson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora jess did you did you say something aye okay good thank you yes and i'll take that this moment to uh allow uh to
006let people in the room know and those online and then watching the video later uh director zamora is joining us remotely today and director donovan is actually on his way back from a national association of school boards uh conference that he was attending so he will not be in attendance this evening having uh settled sorry go ahead motion past 7-0 oh i'm sorry yeah okay good excellent uh superintendent kingsley will now make remarks to the board of education and to the community it's all yours thank you members of the board members of the community good evening it's great to be with you uh again uh to ground us in tonight's conversation i want us to bring our i want to bring all of us back as a community as a school system to our three
007priorities one is to graduate with options to ensure all students not some students but all students graduate with options two is to double down to ensure that all of our students graduate literate that's not just our ability to read and write but it's our ability to critique and comprehend our ability to value independence to value evidence to recognize and draw upon other perspectives to not just tolerate them but to honor them we also believe that another priority is improving wellness and students and staff's mental health with covid and the various factors that we continue to deal with as a community it can be hard to stay steadfast and stay focused but our team and myself and this board this governance team in this community remains committed to doing this work and i'm really really excited
008that tonight we have an opportunity to speak around a really important work that impacts students specifically about our approach and thinking about how we're thinking about and acknowledging what our current support system looks like in terms of supporting children with their mental health needs that are across our community i continue to see firsthand the work that happens across the system both in and out and i continue to be grateful and blessed i want our community to be able to see that as well though and so i'm really proud that our communications team and myself are beginning to launch a new video series so stay tuned we'll be launching it on youtube it will be called doing the work where i'll actually be having an opportunity to work alongside various psd staffers to get a sense
009of not just empathizing but providing compassion to what their day in the life of being a psd employee looks like in our districts i've already had the opportunity to launch this and learn from one of our bus drivers and i'm super excited to make that visible to the community so we cannot just learn about these various roles but we can learn to empathize to to to empower them and to lift them up on a pedestal to create i would like a community campaign to propel enthusiasm and morale for all of our staff members so i want you to stay tuned to that and i'm just incredibly excited to partner with our extraordinary communications team who just make us better make our thinking visible to the community and the work that you do madeleine and the
010respective team in partnership with various staff members to help tell our story i can't just say enough about you in fact i would like to have a camera with me all the time to be honest with you and i know we all have one in our pockets and sometimes we use the med every other tuesday night but even just in the last 24 hours i've had the opportunity for the first time to spend some really quality time with our integrated services team more specifically i had a chance to go over to columbine health and visit project search as well as the swap program the school to work alliance program and what's incredible is thinking about these students with extraordinary abilities we had an opportunity to double down on them and i want to make sure
011i sp send a special shout out not just to director sarah ballou and our assistant director aaron voight by making sure that our coordinators at both of those programs sean rizzotti and his respective staff and emily ring who's over at project search the work that they're doing to create upward mobility for some of our most vulnerable children by doubling down on individual services whether it's job coaching apprenticeships helping with resume building giving them real life opportunities to be in the workforce as a result of this community surrounding itself with students who we see their light we see their brightness and we see the opportunity that they have with their intellect and their abilities to serve is nothing short of extraordinary that swap program started off with 30 students it now serves it's a year-round program
012it's not on a school calendar it serves over 200 students i'm really proud of that i learned that our project search program that started with columbine health it's now expanding to banner health systems had an opportunity yesterday to learn that that was the first project search program in the state of colorado we are trend setters in that space i now believe that there are three i met sammy one of the students over there i could tell you right now she knew everything about columbine health that you would ever want to know and she was excited to tell me all of it i had an opportunity to meet maya who came back from her day of work at banner health systems and was just so excited to talk about how to help a health organization that's
013newer to our community off of harmony road to help keep it organized so he was in charge of making sure that a lot of their systems and structures not just you know odds and ends but some of the things that they need to make sure that when they need something they know where it is maya was the person that they can count on and she's a psd student i had an opportunity to meet sebastian and anayas who were sitting and learning yesterday about interview prep who are getting really excited about interviews they have in the week ahead this program is not just significant in terms of its service but what was significant is the relationships the trust the opportunity to think about job creation i had an opportunity to spend time this morning uh over
014at gosh where was i this morning i was at god where was i i was at the lincoln center just forgive me for a second i'm still calibrating with the geography here but i had an opportunity to spend about almost two and a half hours with our professional development team in partnership with our classified staff who were having their seminars at their end of their program to show what leadership and psd looks like through the lens of a classified staff this was not just an induction program this is a program that's investing in psd staff who want to grow and become better and be leaders in our organization to pay that forward and some of the creative ideas that we heard as a staff today didn't live in a vacuum they're now something that's being
015drawn upon my cabinet meeting on monday morning how do we take these ideas and move them to scale these priorities are not just words that we speak we have to live them out through our actions and i'm continuing to see that in new and unique ways every single day in spite of the challenges and so if you're one of our staff members that's listening to me speak tonight i just want you to know i know i've said it many times and i can't say it enough thank you for not just showing up showing up is the hard hardest part especially in spite of what we're all dealing with whether it's morale issues staffing shortages omicron surges not one of our buildings not one of our schools are closed today it's not a result of its
016superintendent it's a result of our staff being committed to making sure that our children have an in-person experience and doing whatever it takes to make that happen and getting the job done and the staff of this district do it every single day and they deserve to be celebrated and i couldn't be prouder to represent them i know you're exhausted but hang in there you're doing great things i also want to say thank you to our community partners i talked about a couple of today pro you know the swap program and project project search project search they don't happen by accident that happens as a result of business partners surrounding themselves with this community and valuing inclusive experiences inclusive leadership for all students not just some students but as we begin to talk about mental health
017in deep and meaningful ways tonight we have supports in various partners who are in this room tonight whether you represent that aspect of our community or another we want you to know we see you we hear you we value you and our doors are open to partner with you in new and meaningful ways and i can't tell you how excited it is to not have to do this work alone i'm not talking about me i'm talking about the people who are not here but we represent to know that we're doing this in partnership with people and not two people is significant and you deserve to be celebrated as well i know i spend a lot of time in my community comment or public comment celebrating and centering on gratitude people need that now i will
018continue to stay on point and stay on message because it's really how i feel and how i show up as a result of how you have embraced and shown me love and compassion since i've been here and i just want to say thank you and i appreciate the time to be able to speak and address the community tonight thank you so much for those uh for those remarks uh we all need to celebrate the work that our that our employees our staff are doing in support of our students and we all we thank you all very much i know in that in that regard i speak for the entire board so thank you um so next on our agenda unless i miss something nope is a community comment uh this is an opportunity for public
019comment 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 because of the number of people who signed up to speak this evening each speaker will be allotted 90 seconds to address the board recalling the protocols we discussed at the beginning of the meeting i would like to invite john robinson to the lectern he is the first person who signed up for community comment i will call each person's name in turn and i will say that if you are still speaking when your time is up i will respectfully ask that you to finish to allow each person the their allotted time to share their thoughts with that if you would like to go ahead uh john
020i appreciate it thank you good evening school board members superintendent kingsley our cabinet and all our educators and parents watching at home as the president of our uh our association representing the voice of our licensed staff i spend a lot of time in meetings with brian kingsley our county health director tom gonzalez and our district coveted response coordinator cory henry we analyze kovid as it affects our primary objective of in-person education in a safe and healthy environment for our staff and students since winter break our county has seen 28 to 30 percent positivity rates icu usage hovering around 100 percent and huge numbers of seven day average per 100 000 people i predicted that we would have at least half if not the majority of our schools in remote status by friday the 21st i
021was wrong looking at our psd covet dashboard today we have a few classrooms in quarantine but 53 sites are still providing quality in-person instruction in a safe and healthy manner day in and day out despite the surge i want to take a moment to all our educators support staff and administrators and everybody working so hard on our primary objective i've been in 29 buildings this year i see you and how hard you are working to educate our students how do we do this successfully in the pandemic we have strongly encouraged vaccinations and booster shots we are serious about a strong mask mandate and we mitigate our buildings keeping everybody safe and healthy brian kingsley board of education thank you for your steadfast leadership your community your parents we very much appreciate it thank thank you
022our next speaker is amber carhoff i apologize if i got the pronunciation wrong welcome good evening tonight i'm just here to share some great things happening at my school which is putnam elementary where i'm a third grade teacher first of all our wonderful fifth grade leadership team full of students creates a weekly news broadcast for all of the student body to watch which includes news announcements weather forecasts and of course the favorite joke of the week also at our school we have fantastic community support for many of our students providing food bags going home every week to those families that need it the most that comes from our lumber county food bank and the first presbyterian church as well as other volunteers that put those together and a large portion of our teachers are receiving
023glad training which stands for guided language acquisition design and this is a fantastic way for our staff to be able to reach the students in a better manner when teaching language and vocabulary and reading and literacy skills and especially those students that are learning english as a second or even a third language so all of this would not be happening if we were not in school in person and i want to thank the board and the pooter school district for allowing that to happen by keeping our health and the most important thing for our students and our staff thank you [Applause] thank you our next uh commenter is amanda hoffer welcome thank you my name is amanda hofer my son is a psd junior he was born with bilateral hearing loss and hasn't has had
024an iep since he was three years old he's received special services from amazing teachers over the years the most recent teacher and undoubtedly the one who has had the most profound impact on his life and even came to be something of a father figure is adam adam passed away unexpectedly in his sleep on november 3rd adam's passing has made me more appreciative of all the educators and i want to express my gratitude to members of this community who dedicate their lives to the education of our youth i commend the way the school delivered this hard news to the students on that sad day and the swift response of the district to have grief counselors available at the school i believe we're all doing the best we can with the information that we are given the
025coveted protections of mask wearing has posed a great difficulty for my teenage son who relies heavily on reading lips and it is a protection that we practice out of a deep reverence and love for community members who are more more vulnerable than we are you see our beloved friend and teacher adam was also considered very high risk for severe covid because at the beginning of the pandemic he was diagnosed with cancer and upon his death had only just celebrated a few months of being in remission adam was 38 years old i support the board's decision to follow empirical evidence and data and the protective measures there to taking to protect everyone especially the most vulnerable thank you [Applause] thank you our next speaker is holly quinones no okay after that we have tara mccormick welcome
026hi i too am a pooder school district parent and have children in several schools throughout the community i would like to talk a little bit about influenza in the winter months of 2019 2020 130 000 american children suffered from influenza and more than 1 1300 of them died in the winter months of 2020 2021 one child in america died from influenza 38 million americans suffer annually from the flu the biggest difference between these two flu seasons was mask use we have seen and will continue to see dramatic decreases in influenza death and suffering in the states that mandate mass use in public schools covenanting and influenza are transferred through air droplets projected while talking singing sneezing and coughing all things that children do although we haven't seen covet copit19 result in as many child deaths
027as we see with the flu this virus is rapidly changing and adapting physicians across the country support mass use because they save lives institutes like harvard school of public medicine journal of american medicine johns hopkins medical school and the cdc are all doing research to substantiate mass use for flu protection i as a parent and community member am extremely grateful that our school district is enforcing a mass mandate and i applaud that protective measure for our children that are that are um your your time has expired please end your remarks thank you our next speaker is candace moser no okay our next speaker is mackenzie einstein or anstein again welcome and again i apologize if i got the name wrong hi my daughter is a second grader at psd when covet hit we kept her
028home and did a pod and it is the choice that i regret the most in this pandemic we saw her mental health decrease we saw her energy and enthusiasm disappear we saw her lose herself to fear we chose last february to send her back to school she's had a mantra since she was two i'm big i'm brave i'm strong i'm smart i'm confident i'm kind when we sent her back to school she was very afraid that she would bring this home to her younger brother who has some health issues that she would bring covet to her friends who have health issues the one thing that gave her that confidence was adding to her mantra i am safe and the thing that gave her the confidence to know she was safe was that she was masked
029her teachers were masked her friends were masked she understood that this gave her a platform to go back to school and keep her community safe and well her family safe and well she is thriving she's back in school she loves her teachers she loves her friends she understands the restrictions she understands what needs to happen to continue to be in school and she's seven she respects the policies and i want to say thank you for giving her the confidence for giving her back her little life she she needs to be in school and the mask gives her not only the confidence to be there but really the safety she's had countless exposures and come home thankfully for vacation please thank you our next speaker is jenny marco no okay our next speaker then is livy
030christensen welcome good evening my name is libby christiansen i'm a senior in the ib program at pooter high school just down the street first i know that every single person here cares deeply about our community you wouldn't be here if you didn't have a strong sense of empathy for the people around you passionate empathetic citizens with the energy to care is what builds a democracy so thank you but the intense juxtaposition between your empathy and passion for our community and the careless and reckless policies you advocate for every two weeks manifests itself in the behavior of the human beings you are raising let me tell you what your students have said to me when i ask them to wear their masks correctly for example and i quote i want to give you coronavirus i'm going
031to punch you in the face if you say that one more time i'm going to kill you kill yourself unquote students have coughed in my face and tried to run me over while shouting slurs at me this behavior is not developed in a vacuum i hope you feel the responsibility of the pain your students have brought to me and our community you know that if you are a parent you have a duty to for example raise kind humans who care about their communities if you are using your passion for community well-being to advocate for policies like anti-masking and not getting vaccinated you are actively teaching your students that it is okay to be careless and reckless when it comes to our community a juxtaposition that i know you don't want because you care about this
032community i invite you to take responsibility as a parent and be a part of our healing and empathy thank you our next speaker is rachel olsen welcome hello board superintendent king's lane cabinet my name is rachel olson i use she her pronouns i'm the director at the imagine zero coalition at the alliance for suicide prevention yet many many of you know me as an involved parent through dab and dac i'm here tonight to thank you for taking the time to discuss and prioritize mental health and social emotional learning over the years this topic has been identified as a significant need through psd's unified improvement plans and hopefully the one thing this pandemic has shown us is that mental physical and emotional health all work in tandem and all deserve our care and attention as pressure
033mounts to us to accelerate learning post pandemic it's critical that we do so with the whole child in mind you may receive pushback that these non-traditional academic skills are unnecessary yet extensive research shows that soft skills are the bedrock for hard tools employers consistently share that they want to hire excellent communicators critical thinkers and innovators so how do we prepare our youth we prepare them with skills such as the ability to regulate emotions employ flexible and critical thinking enhance interpersonal relationships and use kind and clear communication when implementing mental health and social-emotional curriculum i encourage psd to use consistent research-based programs so that there is a common language and level of excellence across the district i also encourage you to lean on your community partners such as the alliance to help we are here for
034you and ready to support you i fully believe that if our goal is to educate every child every day mental health and social emotional learning is the foundation upon which all this work should be rooted thank you very much okay thank you [Applause] our next speaker is mariah bannon nope looks like not then our next speaker is jeff after heidi welcome my name is jeff after heidi from wellington colorado it seems newly elected members of the board may be concealing from the public that the president of the pooter education association acted in the capacity of a campaign manager for their election i say this because the pa website contains a photograph of two elaborate printouts entitled peter psd boe election 2021 plan the tactics on this document include meetings virtual phone banking neighborhood walks if
035true major ethical boundaries were crossed your campaign gratuities of over fifty thousand dollars from this organization paid for flyers using specific language from the department of justice leveling parents questioning your policies as extremists the implication is parents attending tonight are worthy of local state and federal surveillance but parents only need to look at the front of the colorado one on november 2nd to see several of you not wearing masks at your own election party paid for by the pea the irony is that weeks earlier tom gonzalez implemented a mandatory indoor mask policy you don't even believe or take your own policies seriously and you do this at the expense of the well-being of our own children for your own political motives maybe you're unwilling to apologize for these flyers because the concept i'm speaking of
036has a name it's called purchase and sale of public office in the pooter education association are your air boys and bag men and i'm going to say that you know that this is true mr kingsley because mr robinson reports to your executive cabinet he maybe should have a seat up at that table what do you think [Applause] if you wish members of the public i don't make a point to interject myself after an individual public comment but just for the record uh john robinson is our pa pea association president is not on our executive cabinet and is not a direct report to no me you're wrong i uh thank you for your remarks mr after heidi our next speaker is jessica krauss we are here yet again pouring out our hearts sharing our personal concerns
037and the concerns of others who are too afraid to speak up we would much rather be at home with our kids but we are here negotiating their freedoms instead we would love to trust that our kids are in good hands and confident that this board won't overstep their boundaries or push critical race theory on our kids we want to believe in you just as we did years ago when these meetings did not included over a dozen unhappy parents what happened board profit over people we have presented scientific data proven studies personal damages the web of corruption that you are all connected to your financial ties and obligations expose your hidden agendas and have upset you to the point of exposing your true character anyone with an ounce of humility would not be able to sit
038on this board and say they are proud of what they have done you simply don't care so today i've come with solutions pushing mental health support when you're feeding the problem isn't a solution in-person learning isn't a priority it is mandatory stop spreading fear and turning these kids away from what they really are and that's full of love and joy unmask our children starting now they don't work they've never worked you can can't prove they work or that they're even safe this isn't about anti-mass or anti-vax this is about personal freedom for all return the esser funds our kids aren't for sale mr patterson clearly you are afraid of getting sick and i'm so sorry it must be hard to live in such fear you've mentioned accommodations are available for those who cannot wear a
039mask maybe you would feel safer utilizing that oftentimes finally the lord will forgive you thank you our next speaker is silent wellington again i hope i got the name right welcome good evening psd board my name is silan wellington and my pronouns are they them theirs i serve as the lgbtq plus youth outreach coordinator for the alliance for suicide prevention of larimer county and i'm here tonight to thank you all for prioritizing youth mental health and social emotional education as you may all be aware colorado children's hospital and a number of other state partners have declared a state of emergency for youth mental health last december the u.s surgeon general released an advisory on youth mental health with recommendations including bullying prevention programming creating safe and affirming school environments inclusive language and behaviors and protecting
040and prioritizing those students at higher risk for mental health challenges it is likely not a surprise to any of you that lgbtq plus youth are at higher risk for suicide with almost 40 percent of lgbtq plus you seriously contemplating suicide in 2019 these students need a supportive school environment which i know you all are dedicated to and creating the support of states space starts with the language we use starts with ensuring the existence of lgbtq plus people are not erased in curriculum starts with supporting psd staff so that they are well equipped to have conversations about pronouns and well-equipped to elucidate the importance of pronouns in these conversations to their classrooms and our communities we need to ensure we are cultivating school environments and communities that will foster robust feelings of belongingness for every child
041every day keep up the good work and on behalf of the alliance for suicide prevention thank you the work you are doing will save lives thank you our next speaker is mark fuchs welcome hello so i'm here tonight to speak on behalf of another parent who could not be here and would like to have their voice heard so in their words i am the parent of a middle school schooler and psd during this recent school year i've received a call two days in a row for my daughter's school principal regarding masks i was informed that my daughter was sent to the office the first day because her mask fell below her nose three times for more than 30 seconds in one of her classes i was asked to have a chat with my daughter about
042wearing her mask sure not a problem i was called again the very next day for the same thing but this time i was told that if she was sent to the office again the same issue i would have to come and pick her up from school and she would not be allowed to return until the next day i asked that my daughter was experiencing illness symptoms i was told no but she needs to learn how to wear her mask when i respond to that until my daughter is ill or experiencing a symptom that is outlined in the policy i would not be picking her up from school the principal responded by saying that if this was the case my daughter would be pulled from her classes and put into a room where a mask are
043not an issue she would be away from her friends and not have access to her teachers and would be released at the end of the day when i talk with my daughter i was told that there were 12 other students in the office for the same reason not social distancing let masking be a family decision deprive our children of their right to an education because they are 12 and are trying to navigate mandates but are threatened with unreasonable consequences at the same time whereas the logic tell a bunch of preteens that can't do something and then complain to parents when they don't comply those were her words for me i would say thank you psd thank you for bringing back segregation great job [Applause] thank you our next speaker is olufun milayo garner and i
044and i'm almost certain i got that wrong so if you can help me out that'd be terrific welcome good evening everyone and i apologize i might be reading off this a little bit um my name is milayo garner and i'm a senior at pooter high school as many of you might have guessed i'd like to share my piece on this masturbate that's been happening i don't like masks any more than the next person when i don't have to wear them i don't but when i need to i will request that others put on a mask at school i'd like to see schools remain open but there is no deny that the cova cases are rising many of us would like to finish out this year in person because we value an in-person education one can't
045deny that the amount of learning decreased when we were on computers all day however the only way that schools remain open is if our community health gets better in terms of coping one of the easiest ways to ensure this is to wear masks not everyone is as healthy as those of us here today and while uncomfortable masks do help to to keep everyone safe from the spread of many respiratory illnesses we are a community and communities take care of each other and right now that looks like wearing a thin piece of paper i know everyone has their opinions but whichever whatever side they are on they need to be kind kind to others who might be affected by covid and kind to others who don't share the same beliefs as them i will continue to
046request that others continue to be wearing their masks while in school in the classroom or the hallways but i will also continue to be kind to any and all people regardless of their opinions i ask that others be kind and to the board i thank you for keeping us in person as a priority thank you thank you our next speaker is lisa mclean and she has uh is going to be speaking for us uh to us remotely as a result of an accommodation i'm not sure there we go go ahead lisa mclean speaking to you tonight from the quarantine area within this building provided for those who have medical exemptions to wearing a mask community comment is only allowed in person so this is the accommodation that is provided for those with medical exemptions if
047they wish to speak to the board of education after being given my speaking order number i was shown the separate entrance i was to use to access the accommodation location at the designated time i was provided the link to watch the meeting live from my phone outside before and after i speak i'm not required to wear a mask and i will leave the building again when i finish from the separate entrance reuben and the facilities team were very professional helpful with this accommodation that you have established but really a separate entrance escort different location is this an example of how our students are being treated who have mask exemptions ostracized even though they don't have symptoms and are healthy are they required to sit at a table in the corner by themselves are their classmates
048being conditioned to fear them and treat them like they have the plague do the students in the hallway part before them in case they might become contaminated what are you doing to our students this is unacceptable and the mask mandate thank you our next speaker is heather luddenpera welcome good evening board superintendent kingsley my name is heather lauden pera i have a bachelor's degree from pepperdine university and two master's degrees one in physical therapy and one in oriental medicine i've worked in the healthcare field for over 25 years my life's work has been dedicated to helping people achieve robust health we can all agree that these are very difficult times and the answers to our issues are extremely complex as are we i hope to be able to help people move out of this period
049of trauma and fear i highly value self-sufficiency and bravery i believe that if we can cultivate courage in ourselves and our children we can do great things i also believe that cultivating these traits makes our bodies physically stronger nothing weakens a person more than the emotion of fear and i have watched with much sadness and concern fear overtakes so many people these past two years i think we need to find a way to help people overcome their fear and reconnect to their innate power we are quite remarkable beings i hope we can work together to create a new narrative of both kindness and empowerment thank you [Applause] thank you our next speaker is nikki galbraith no okay then our next speaker will be diana majors welcome i asked my son who will be starting high
050school next year what high school he wanted to consider going to he replied i just want to have a normal high school experience it broke my heart because i want to be able to provide that for him and for other kids in our community a normal school experience you are robbing my son and the kids of our community of a normal school experience by your coven measures mental health problems are much higher in school age populations and getting worse academic scores are reflecting that schools are failing at their main job to educate our kids i have heard of many teachers who are leaving teaching your decisions that have harmed our kids i hold you responsible the parents of psd are generally well-educated and well-informed people we do not need you to make the decisions for
051us the parents on how to keep our kids safe from covid we've got this we can make our own decisions on whether or not to mask or vax our kids we as parents have sent you countless studies showing the harm that masking kids does and how mass don't do a damn thing yet you insist in this unscientific decision to mask our kids by accepting federal or state funding for specifically coveted mitigation measures you've signed away your power as a school board to make independent sensible evidence-based decisions and you signed away our rights as parents to make these medical decisions on behalf of our kids how can we as parents trust you in your decisions point blank we don't trust that you have at heart the best interest of our kids and of us as parents
052stop these harmful policies and start earning back our trust [Applause] thank you our next speaker is gina forcato welcome i'm here once again to ask you to stop the insanity i'm asking our children is insanity i'm not sure what studies you continue to reference regarding the effectiveness of masks but i've spent several days reading through study after study worldwide showing that mass do not prevent nor protect against covet in total there are 157 studies showing that mass scoring is not effective in stopping the spread among the population nor amongst health care workers i did find and read through many of the over 30 studies published on the harm especially to children wearing masks headaches impaired learning and cognition brain deoxygenation difficulty concentrating facial acne and skin conditions increased anxiety and irritability candida thrush infections in
053the mouth dental gum disease cavities weakening of the immune system during mask use speech delay sense of helplessness public humiliation and a sense of feeling that i'm bad or evil and i need to be masked and there it goes on and on i have a list if you'd like to see all the studies i've referenced them i can send them via email to all of you so my question is how much more money are you willing to accept from the cares act at the expense of our kids let parents make choices like douglas county for their children's health needs stick to reading writing arithmetic historically correct history and sound science leave the rest up of uh leave the rest up to the parents [Applause] thank you our next speaker is tasha carr last week during
054his comments superintendents kingsley contaminated his poorly fitting cloth mat mask by touching it 50 times after shaking hands with a dozen or so people if the superintendent can't wear a mask properly for 10 minutes how can you expect small children to do so all day long but now with omicron ripping through our community and schools the fallacy of masking to stop transmission should finally be evident even to all of you on the board who ignored over a hundred studies that show masking is not effective here's an excerpt from a recent article by leading scientific experts from yale and stanford who have been ignored and censored and even denigrated by our government quote the time has come to terminate the pandemic state of emergency it's time to end the controls the closures the restrictions the panic
055mongering the force masking the vaccine mandates omicron is spreading widely but the illness is no more severe than the seasonal flu and generally less so the lockdowns and school disruptions have done as least as much damage to health and welfare as the virus the state of emergency cannot be justified by fear the emergency is over it is time once and all to end the mass mandates and senseless quarantine policy and lets parents make health decisions that are best for their children thank you our next speaker is casey lindsey welcome thank you good evening board superintendent kingsley i have a parent statement she would be here but she has many activities on tuesday nights she states my son is a sophomore in psd he has struggled his freshman year with the online schooling and finally started
056improving once we went back to in-person learning he gets decent grades with a push from his parents and the want to stay eligible to play sports his attendance is pretty good because he also wants to stay eligible last week he had a substitute teacher in one of his classes and his mask slipped down his nose a bit a couple of times so this substitute kicked him out of class this kid is working hard to do a good job in school even though it is not his thing and now he gets kicked out of a class for his nose showing a recent article said that psd had a dip in graduation rates to 82.6 that's quite a dip it seems that schools would be taking steps to keep kids in class and not find reasons to
057kick them out who are showing up and wanting to learn i don't think i need to get into the difference each day in class or out of class can make i don't understand how substitutes or any teachers have the right to kick a child out of class for something so ridiculous as his or her nose showing for a moment it seems to me that it is far more important to keep these kids in class i can imagine the way it would emotionally affect a child dealing with the embarrassment and shame to be kicked out for something so trivial and how it might affect their motivation to go back to class please consider setting some guidelines for teachers especially substitutes as to what is something bad enough to remove them from an important time has expired
058and i'll personally add if you're a teacher doing this shame on you thank you thank you our next speaker is aaron ramler welcome hi i'm a mother of three pooter high school graduates one and one fourth grader who we chose to pull from psd this year i'm here once again asking you to get the masks off the faces of the children and the teachers stay in your lane get back to your mission educate every child every day graduate kids with options because frankly you're failing it's 2022 and you can't even get students across the high school finish line my daughter tells me she knows three poudre high school kids that chose to drop out instead of make it to the graduation date because the mass harassment from other children and teachers was too much for
059them to take the student that spoke again tonight and last meeting was a frightening product of psd's victim culture a culture that treats fear as a virtue and virtue as a weapon this same culture that president peterson displayed last week while flexing his power over a child struggling to breathe during this meeting caused such a disruption and embarrassment that the cameras to the public had to be turned off is this how the new psd board engages with the public finger shaking and power struggles please take a note from our commissioner's meetings they engage with us they listen to us and they respond to our comments please get out of healthcare and get back to education please [Applause] thank you our next speaker is carly rayburg welcome good evening psja school board my name's carly rayberg
060she her and i'm the youth programs fit facilitator for the alliance for suicide prevention of larimer county it's my job to go to your middle schools and high schools and talk to your students about mental health warning signs of suicide and how to ask for help i'm here to applaud you for your prioritization of mental health and social emotional learning in your district this year i've been providing a curriculum called reply resiliency education protecting the lives of youth working closely with kelly glick and her team to offer open conversation surrounding teen mental health and what they may need for support rather than hearing it from me though i'd love to share with you a few direct quotes from your students on the topic quote it's important to hear how to access resources and having those
061resources available i've been in a lot of situations where friends have come to me in need of help but sometimes i feel like i can't help as well as i would like to because i don't know who to turn to warning signs and risk factors were what i thought were the most effective to me because i needed to know the signs in case it happens to anyone else around me please stop putting grades above happiness it can't be fixed by one uneducated conversation and sometimes we just want to talk to you and don't need a solution right away but our parents don't know how to listen i know it wasn't a conversation when you were in school but just talk to your child because honestly when your parent doesn't check on you and make it
062a top priority i feel alone the resounding theme that we've seen in the emphasis of students is finding effective ways to talk to adults about their mental health and adults finding more effective ways to listen your time has expired thank you thank you [Applause] thank you our final sorry our final speaker tonight is malachi malachi gillespie is that right okay i apologize for getting the name wrong and welcome dear members of the board superintendent kingsley and the psd community staff faculty teachers and students i when i heard about the opportunity to talk about emotional wellness i was thinking to myself malachi what do i want to bring and i want to bring awareness to mental health because it's only then that we can begin to improve the situation and it's a crazy time an ever-changing
063time and i've been with friends who have struggled you know emotionally and you know not being themselves maybe not going to sports practice because they're feeling super lowly and i would also be remiss to say that you know um i haven't hurt myself i've hurt myself before and so i really want to stress the importance of it um now more than ever and there are things we can do like um you know asking questions um giving teens you know space um and sometimes it looks you know like being irritable even um when someone's just you know feeling really you know depressed or you know anxiety within and i want to emphasize that you know we could promote the i matter program more or bring mental health matters workshops again there was one last year that
064i think was really great and there's absolutely more you can do and i implore your time has expired thank you [Applause] all right this uh concludes community uh community comment thank you for sharing your thoughts appreciate it um next we'll be going on to uh board reports we'll wait a minute for those of you who wish to wish to leave if you want you're certainly welcome to stay all right we will now have board committee reports item 5.0 on the agenda would anybody from the board like to share any reports or thoughts dj go right ahead um i'll just uh share with our legislative meeting we had our first kind of kickoff looking at what is happening down at the capitol and uh there's not a whole lot at this point that we're diving into
065but we are keeping track of those bills and making sure that we are looking out for our students here in psd thanks thanks for sharing that anybody else up here at the diocese nope jessica i'll just check in with you do you have anything that you like to share no i'm good okay thank you in which case that will conclude uh item 5.0 board committee reports we will go on now to the consent agenda would any board members like to remove anything from the consent agenda all right seeing no such requests i'll ask for a motion to approve the consent agenda go ahead kristin i move that we approve the uh sorry the consent agenda as seen in 6.0 can i have a second for that dj has got a second over there lexi would
066you like to call our world vote dj anderson aye jim brokish hi kristen draper aye rob pederson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora hi motionpath60 excellent thank you very much okay we'll be moving on now to item 7.0 action items and our sole action item i think tonight if i'm remembering correctly yes is uh our internal monitoring report and policy review for executive limitation 2.0 these are the general executive limitations and may i get a motion on that monitoring report and then we can have discussion as needed go ahead i knew that the board determined that the superintendent has reasonably interpreted board of education policy el 2.0 in his internal m internal monitoring report dated january 25th 2022 and that the evidence presented supports the superintendent's conclusions stated in the internal monitoring report do we
067have a second for that carolyn would give us a second would anybody like to discuss your thoughts or the report in general looks like not in which case lexi would you please call the roll call dj anderson aye jim brokish hi christian draper aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passed six zero excellent thanks again so now we'll be going on to our informational reports and discussion items our first one is uh something we've been looking forward to for a while and that's our vision on enhanced mental health and social emotional wellness and with that i'll turn it over to superintendent kingsley thank you president pedersen here this evening to speak to the district's vision for mental health and social emotional wellness our director of student services reuben chacon and mental
068health and prevention coordinator tyrell hirschert they are also joined by psd students akoshita bendy and megan jones welcome thank you for being here for those of you who are online we're just getting things set up thank you i think we're now ready good evening president pedersen distinguished members of the board superintendent kingsley my name is reuben chukon i'm the director of student services and psd i'm honored to be here tonight to present to you and share with you a vision for enhanced mental health and well-being and social emotional wellness and psd mental health has always been a priority in psd but is now more important than ever given the disruptions of feelings of safety over the past two years our students are expressing a greater need for support and we must respond we know that
069a student's mental health and well-being is just as important as a student's academic experience oops it helps if i would click this one excuse me again we know that a student's mental health and well-being is just as important as a student's academic experience our vision is to create a comprehensive system of care which includes enhanced connections with parents and guardians community partners trained mental health professionals and staff to provide higher levels of support and services to promote positive school climate social emotional learning and mental health and well-being for all students as we began this process we prioritized the importance of gathering a number of stakeholder voices to ensure we're we're best able to identify our needs and areas of growth as a system as we work to build a comprehensive care system to better serve
070and support our students stakeholder voice was gathered in a variety of forms which included a series of community partner meetings staff and student feedback sessions with psd student groups mental health specialists school counselors school psychologists social workers and the principal advisory group we also completed a comprehensive mental health needs assessment which consisted of a survey containing 53 questions and 5 free response items this was sent to all psd mental health providers which are the mental health specialists school counselors school psychologists and social workers additionally we conducted a review of psd student connections data healthy kids colorado survey reports and mental health specialist data psd is blessed to have several caring and engaged partner community partners mental health partners and providers who are eager to collaborate to strengthen the supports and services we provide our students
071in a system of care represented on this slide is a sample of mental health providers and partners in our community who have expressed a desire to collaborate with psd as well as work to address the increased student needs in our community again this is just a sample of those partners um as we try to build that entire network it's hard to put everyone on there and it's not representative of all of our partners in the community as part of the understanding of the needs of of our community we also wanted to make sure we shared our student voice and their perspective we are grateful to have akshitha and megan here to share those student voices whatever number of students you think are struggling that number should be doubled or even tripled is a quote set
072by one of our students at putin school district this just goes to show that there are many students facing mental health struggles and there are often no sure signs to know who is facing mental health struggles and who is not one might say that students should simply seek mental health should simply seek help if they're facing mental health struggles however this is not as simple as trust and confidentiality often become a barrier to seeking mental health support in school and community and there's often a stigma that comes along with seeking help from mental health issues additionally gaps in school and community service services and after hours crisis resources makes it harder for students to know who to approach if needed to seek help to address these issues one of the solution is to increase access
073to and availability of highly trained mental health professionals in schools and provide more easily accessible resource guides to mental health services for students i'm going to skip around a little bit so as akshata was saying there is an obvious need to strengthen and grow school wellness teams throughout our district this can include enhancing social and emotional learning opportunities and skill building so one of the emotional learning opportunities that has been offered is three to five minutes of mindfulness to start a 90-minute class and this student said that it resulted in the most focused class they've had so this shows that even just five minutes of a class period can really affect the quality of the work the effort put into the work and the outcome of a student's time in class another quote that a
074student said was that there have been times when they've spoken to a counselor about their mental health and there is no follow-up because they are already stretched thin so this also contributes to the growing school wellness teams and there's just simply not enough trained professionals to help the students so one of the solutions is peer-to-peer counseling that has been found as one of the most effective programs offered to psd students where students are able to talk directly with another student which is often more comfortable reaching out to somebody your own age as a first resort instead of reaching out to somebody you may not know at all this is also more accessible as there are more peers than there are trained professionals the last point on this slide is the need for more non-disciplinary drug
075and alcohol services many students across the pooter school district took the psd connection survey through this survey it has shown that secondary students who indicated not sure if i'll graduate show the most need for additional support in 22 out of 23 social emotional learning items additionally students receiving free and reduced lunch indicate a need for additional social emotional learning support in every subscale compared to the overall student population as we continue to gather the voice of the of the community we mention um and as we mentioned earlier we completed a comprehensive mental health needs assessment what you see on this slide are the free response components of that mental health comprehensive mental health needs assessment what we indicated and what we identified through that process was a trend and common trend that we're hearing from
076students as we both looked at that data and heard from our students one of the top three concerns or excuse me the top three concerns that were non-academic concerns identified by our student by mental health providers where the inability to self-regulate of students anxiety and depression and increased increase in suicidal ideation with that we also asked how many self curriculums are you currently using as we identified those curriculums in the system we were listed there were listed 29 different curriculums and then some with that we heard a variety that it occurs in a variety of locations meaning advisory homeroom lessons that were provided by staff members and created by staff members and the most commonly listed were zones of regulation stanford harmony second step staff created brain wise and expect respect reuben can i just
077ask clarification the um when you say the top three non-academic concerns regarding students are you talking k-12 or um mostly high school at that point or secondary so it is k-12 the the survey went to all mental health providers regardless of level and so this is what indicated from all levels all mental health providers meaning school psych counselors social workers mental health specialist as we continued with the free response component of the comprehensive mental health needs assessment we did hear again those common themes that were expressed by our students one of them was that we have very caring and concerned teachers and staff members they just need more training there's a need for more of those wraparound services in our community and schools that need improvement that really focused around that handoff and that communication
078from our schools to our mental health providers outside what we were experiencing again were that in the past it was more peer-to-peer difficulties and troubles this year in the past year has been more around the anxiety experienced by students in the school day and again with the number of staff to respond what we're seeing is an increase in responding to crisis situations and the inability to work on some of those tier one level supports that are needed in the building again from the elementary perspective we are seeing kids that need so much more support from school staff providers feel it would be beneficial to have a full-time sel teacher at the elementary level and a full-time counselor at the elementary level and again we see the pattern of that non-counseling duty component which is taking
079up some of those other pieces and as the students spoke to it that ability to follow up in a timely manner because of the number of duties and increased demands on staff time and again teachers want to be proactive they want to work on tier one and counselors and mental providers work on tier one interventions and really build that system of support for students in the building but with that there they have limited time and access and so how do we increase the ability and access to staff members in the school day from the comprehensive mental health needs assessment and those 53 structured questions that all mental health providers received here are examples that stood out as areas of need for instance more tier one training for staff to assist how we systematically provide culturally
080responsive and trauma-sensitive supports in our classrooms and it also led us to ask how and where does tier one's supports and interventions occur in the system our school focused on that continuum of sel care are we following sel best practices to ensure that students are experiencing the same curriculum and and learnings as they matriculate from one grade to level or from one school to the next or from one grade to the next data also indicated a need for a more cohesive system of care with universal divine design features that is focused on supporting students in a continuum of care that ensure a warm handoff between district and community partners and strengthen and then strengthens communications with families and so you see on this it's it's does speak to that variety of stakeholders in our community
081as well as how do we involve those different aspects and components with youth serving mental health providers in our school district so as part of that work that we did as a team and the team that i directly support is the mental health specialist team and looking at different data points here's some data that we collect as a team so you can see kind of historically some some data around suicide risk assessments in our district conducted by this team and we also just did a little bit of a data dig on fall semester 2021 and you can see that we did 254 suicide risk assessments across multiple levels elementary middle and high in our school district 50 percent of those suicide risk assessments are conducted at the high school level additionally 25 percent of those
082assessments result in a referral to either a crisis center emergency room or some other higher level of care based on the level of concern that that student is facing at the time as a team we also really track what type of direct service we're providing and that's either face-to-face or online for students who are online and you can see uh these are you know in the graph you can see we do a bunch of different types of services but these are the top five uh from the fall semester group a check in with the student working through trauma with the student concerns around anxiety and then teaching them direct skills around emotional regulation part of what you don't see in here is this is the direct service that we do there's also a lot of
083indirect service that we do as a team that supports that system of care that we've been talking about with community partners and really promoting that wrap around support and service from school throughout the community to build and strengthen current supports it was vital that we also listened to the voice of our partners in the community our partners had many great things to say about psd and their work in partnership with the district however they also expressed the desire to strengthen our community system of care in collaboration with the district and we heard several of our conversations some common themes such as the need to redefine partnerships in pooter school district again to a partner and you heard it tonight from the alliance and rachel and the other speakers silent there is that willingness that ability
084that eagerness to partner with our district i think where we can benefit and where partners have asked is really how do we simplify the system for them how do we create those conversations and connections to the school how do we create those uniform approaches to if we have a provider coming in what does it look like in our school day in our setting eliminate some of that negotiation from building the building and really clarify that process with that comes those mouss and those systematic needs to clarify that role and function of those care team members in our community when do we invite them in how do we invite them in what does it look like if we're responding to a crisis where do we plug in so that we're not overwhelming our system and our
085principles and our building leadership and district leadership but really building that team that is cohesive and supportive of our entire system with that comes that ability to be more fully integrated into our schools and part of that is increasing funding to support and strengthen partnerships we're again blessed to have a number of community partners in our community who are always willing to step up how do we as a system also have some of that skin in the game to support those different roles and partnerships how do we commun strengthen communication loop and information sharing and how do we enhance youth driven and family guided services again these are all in conversations with a variety of partners in a variety of settings some individually some larger settings whether it's the mental health substance use alliance or
086in other formats so we have a summary of needs based on stakeholder voices and data here are the four key areas that we identified as immediate needs however there are some additional system-wide pieces that we have identified as gaps to address as we can continue to develop a comprehensive system of care by focusing on these identified areas of needs we will be better able to provide proactive and preventative care that addresses the increased number of crisis situations and greater need for comprehensive student supports so again as we look at our system and our partnerships that increase mental health staffing and role clarity in our system would go a long way strengthening those community partnerships increasing professional development and opportunities and time for those and that pk 12 social emotional learning through the curriculum where does
087it occur how does it occur when does it occur who provides it as we discuss a desired future state and look at our current system it's important to understand the roles of our providers in social emotional health and wellness and psd and what our staffing looks like in our system mental health providers and psd which include school counselors psychologists social workers and mental health specialists have specific training related to promotion of social healthy social emotional and behavioral development all mental professionals are required to have completed a minimum of a master's degree and to pass a test developed to assess professional knowledge we consider nurses as a part of this mental health providers of mental health providers in psd as they are critical delivering health care and services for all students and providing other services to
088allow students to remain in school as we looked at those different mental health providers in our system in what is considered national model guidelines this is what it would look like in the system currently and again these are psd ratios compared with national recommended ratios on the left of the slide you will see school counselors currently at one to two ninety five mental health specialists and school social workers at one to ninety six there's an asterisk there because it is a higher acuity of care and it is a more intensive need around those mental health providers school psychologists of one to 958 and school nurses of one to 253 if we compare that to national model record national model ratios you'll see that school counselors would be one to 250 mental health specialists be one
089to fifty school psychologists be one to five hundred and school nurses would be one to 750. what would that mean to us as we look at staffing throughout our system in order to achieve national models staffing ratios we would need to invest 11.3 million dollars towards these positions on an annual basis that is a very heavy lift for a system to do in one year as we look at our psd staffing ratios currently our current staffing and positions what we have done here is created a side by side for you to see how those different positions break out currently and what it would mean in numbers in the system we currently have 81.6 school counselors you also see that we have grant counselors broken up because that is one of those components where we always
090try to continue on the grant and bring those staff members on board it's sometimes a difficult task and asked to do but we do want to always keep staff that we have trained and developed in our system we have 16.6 mental health specialists 9 social workers 29 school psychologists and 12 nurses again with that large investment we would be able to we would need to move to 120 counselors 45 mental health specialists fifteen school social workers sixty school psychologists and forty school nurses as we looked at staff when we also understand that the number of school counselors there is a disparate percentage in terms of how we look at the different levels at the elementary school when we look at counseling ratios it actually comes to a ratio of about one counselor to every 346
091students high school secondary level does a much better job and i think that goes to the economy of scale and the ability to have more creativity in that budget which is a secondary level of the approximate number is about 1 to 213. so you do see different levels and how that might be part of that conversation as we address the levels and staffing so after looking at psd staffing models and national staffing models across the nation we thought it was really important for us to look at a local school district in colorado that has been nationally recognized by people like dr bruce perry for the work that they do around mental health and then as a state their you know aurora public schools is always recognized as being on the cutting edge of mental health
092in the school so they started implementing their comprehensive mental health system in 2013. um and they found that in six years so in 2019 they increased graduation rates from 56 to 79 during that same six year time period they also had a 55 percent decrease in police referrals which is a significant amount to continue the work going into this decade in 2018 they passed the tax increase that equals about 35 million dollars annually and of that 35 million 40 percent of it around 40 14 million is earmarked to just mental health staff programs training materials stigma reduction campaigns etc their staffing model in aurora public schools is at the elementary level they have a minimum so you know above the line of 2.0 mental health providers whether that's a school psychologist a school counselor or
093a school social worker some of their bigger elementary schools have three or four fte devoted to to their students in middle schools that minimum is a 4.0 fte some of their bigger middle schools might have five six or more aurora public schools have spent a lot of time around different pd opportunities for teachers mental health staff administrators and the broader stakeholders in their community they work on training their teachers to be culturally responsive trauma responsive and then be that kind of first line to address tier 1 sel mental health concerns and trauma they invest a lot of time around sustainable wellness social emotional wellness and developing and promoting school wellness teams they span across adams and arapahoe counties so two counties is is aurora public schools and they have an online referral system for staff
094and other stakeholders to refer their families and students to outside providers their 11 most frequently used that same system allows them to self-refer as a family and select the services that i want to be a part of they also have done a great job at vetting sel curricula and creating that economy of scale for their 38 40 000 plus students that they have in their school district ty do you mind if i ask a quick follow-up question to this this great information that you're sharing and please that ruben i invite you as well as ty to help illuminate one of the pieces they know your second to last bullet talks about the online referral system that extends to community partners i know our board has had some shared interest in trying to create a similar
095uh concept in our community i was curious do you have any ideas around how they navigated data privacy and data protections for our students to be able to engage their community partners in that way to keep that work moving forward and have a warm handoff between the services that are happening within the schools that extend to the community partners okay i think going back a few slides when you look at some of the feedback that we've got from our community partners thus far is that those systematic mous and interagency mous that address the scope of work that we would do as a community and as a county potentially but also you know addressing data privacy and things like that so that we are um providing the best services and wraparound supports but also maintaining individuals
096rights to privacy thank you did you want to add to that ruben i'm going to add to it around the local community conversation in that aspect again as we discussed with community partners that systematic mlu is in that clarity we'll go a long way towards that because i think right now it's an operation out of fear of am i exposing too much am i sharing too much am i going to be sued for this we want to make sure our health care providers have that open chain of communication are able to do that and so that is part of the mou so we can better support them in that conversation additionally i know that summit stone and it's it's at the very infancy i believe of the conversation has been working on a community compact
097um that's not ready for prime time yet and we haven't put our eyes on it yet but that community compact is also striving towards in that community support model and that comprehensive system of care to really be able to share with all the different partners we see that more and more currently with our behavioral health authority and that monies that are coming through them for the different phases that are occurring with the mental health facility where the money path is flowing through them providing partnership with university hospital or uc health excuse me summit stone flowing through to us and so it's how do we leverage all those different access points and really make sure that the communication is happening to better support our students thank you for the extra level of clarity members of the
098board knowing that this is a shared uh passion of this governance team i you know staff will reach out to our friends in aurora to pull copies of these interagency agreements for us to review with our legal and policy council and i will report back to you on those findings knowing that this is something as we begin to build bridges to our various partners in the community and strengthen what those partnerships look like i think this to me seems like a natural first step to be able to accelerate that so i just want to say thanks again tai and ruben for going deep i didn't mean to delay your presentation but i just thought that was an important point to to make with all of us i this is something that i've brought a few
099times that i've heard from different agencies about uh the warm handoff being a problem being able to share data and information and so i just want to let you know that uh i think as a board and especially me personally as an individual if there is help that we can do to try to change either rules or laws that would make this easier make sure you communicate those to us that we can talk to our legislators and see if there's a way to make this something so that we can take care of the kids the best that we can because i don't want to see the this a silly thing stopping us from being able to communicate about a kid's needs because they are fearful about getting sued when you know if we have the
100proper channels and everything set up data privacy is very important but there there's got to be certain ways that we can set it up for the best for the kids so i want to throw that out there and please bring that to us let us let us be voices out where we can too to help for you guys on that thank you i appreciate that one of the suggestions we may have is michael allen from summit stone has been a part of that legislative team working around some of these obstacles and that how do we better improve our systems of care in the community he's a wealth of knowledge around that he typically shares that their mental health substance use alliance and so that might be an opportunity as well because i know that he's
101probably the closest to that conversation caroline and i think in addition to that we've had conversations with multiple people in the community in multiple agencies and they many of them have stressed the same thing that you just mentioned you know how can we work together there is a lot of red tape so to speak to go through but i think a lot of our community providers are willing to to have that conversation and go through that right now so with that said um you know i'm sorry go ahead i just made myself a note but it's relevant to here so i might as well mention it uh obviously you mentioned well you mentioned and you said you'd follow up on uh aurora's uh approach to this we heard earlier in the dinner session that on
102uh physical health which i assume has the same kind of issues thompson has somehow solved this problem as well so there are multiple models i think throughout the state maybe they're all similar i don't know i haven't researched them but let's try to learn from what those people have in place and accelerate the the process i guess is how i would feel about it fair okay thank you thank you um so uh one thing that we have control over is build those building blocks in our school community in our 53 schools and psd and social emotional learning is the term that they use for that um this type of learning really is the glue that kind of holds everything together from bell to bell that time they get on the bus go in the lunch
103line get on the bus and go home at the end of the day these skills these building blocks you know they carry with us um you know throughout our lifetime throughout all of our lifetimes so they're imperative that we treat it just as important as our academic skills so part of the work that we need to do as a school community is develop essential standards based on nationally recognized models so building that self-awareness in ourselves and our students the ability to manage these tough times that we're going through especially during a time where it's a global pandemic social awareness maintaining relationships and those skills and then all throughout that responsible decision making skills so part of what we need to do is develop these essential standards and the work will be done through an advisory
104team so recruiting an ongoing advisory team teachers parents community members mental health staff content area experts students a team that can really dig deep into those 29 30 plus curricula the tools that we need to develop to measure accountability and success of school buildings and as a school district and then also develop and and vet some of that sel curriculum that we need to narrow in on so that we can support an economy of scale and decide really what are the best practices from whole group to small group to one-to-one individual services for our students so the district is currently in the process of developing a mental health and suicide prevention policy which will prioritize youth suicide prevention and the programs that go along with it so this will include procedures for suicide prevention intervention
105and postvention this policy will also require training for staff on suicide prevention including education about mental health and the warning signs and risks of suicide it will consider populations at high risk for suicide including lgbtq youth this policy will also describe all of the suicide prevention team member roles and responsibilities and it will it will describe the communication between each of these roles and how they will interact with one another and what they will be doing so as we again we're looking at the data provided to us the question for the system as we continue is what are we going to stop doing and what are our recommendations to support schools with that there are a number of conversations that are ongoing that need to continue and so with that it's how do we examine
106those funding resources that are going to support this continuum services budget design team will be a critical component of that what is the how do we currently evaluate our current resources that are dedicated to mental health staffing and staff training what is considered to be above the line and below the line of requirements in our staffing will we have a modified mental health staffing structure in our schools that provide role clarity and then how do we examine the braided grant funds for email levy override title one two and four funding to better direct towards services that are gonna support our students we know that there is that ongoing conversation around school health services and what does that look like if we do pursue that medicaid program and then how do we identify district funding priorities
107do we implement programs that are not achieving desired outcomes do we reallocate resources to evidence-based and effective programs and how do we budget to support even a menu of vetted options programming to better better support our economy of scale so with everything we just presented we thought it was really important that we identify a few action steps that we can take that we are taking currently and that we will be taking over the next 6 to 18 months with that said though you know this work cannot be done in 18 months this is an ongoing process that we will need to continue to fund and support you know as a school district going forward so as megan mentioned we are currently in the development of a mental health and suicide policy which can be a
108great foundation and building block for some of this work we are currently working on coordinating community partnerships and and identifying some of those gaps and services that our students talked about we will begin working on recruiting that sel advisory team so that we can speed up that process and narrow in on those few curricula and curriculum that we need to promote success for our students we currently have multiple train the trainer models such as sources of strength youth mental health first aid where this year we're focused on getting those trainers trained so that next year they can really implement that training to different schools whether it's a secondary level or professional development opportunities to better understand youth mental health another thing that's not mentioned on here is the neurosequential model for education that's a great
109tool that aurora public schools has invested heavily in where it is focused on trauma sensitivity and developing that tier 1 support for students in a classroom another thing that we need to to really develop and work on is data-driven systems and identifying universal screening tools so that we can intervene earlier and work and focus some of our efforts on prevention before it becomes crisis additionally next year to start the year we have a lot of work cut out for us where we'll need to establish those student wellness teams we want to add a student wellness coordinator and different coaches to support some of this work around promoting sel and those essential standards continuing on that work with the train the trainer model around restorative practices sources of strength neurosequential model for education really take a
110good look at the budget and address some of those schools like school counselor school social worker school nurse and mental health specialist staffing ratios and then as we've said you know ongoing professional development is an area that we need to invest heavily in and take steps towards so working with our pd department and learning services team specialists around providing that menu of options for training as we move forward and then again just continuing on a lot of that work um for the next six to eighteen months so additional pd opportunities as we learn more about our students over the next you know year of school and adopting and implementing systemwide data tools to track our interventions and are they having the desired impact for our students that we that we sought out to have and
111then that sel advisory team continuing their work on narrowing in on what our best practices for social emotional learning and social emotional wellness in our school community so we want to thank you for writing us an opportunity to share our enhanced our vision for enhanced mental health and social emotional wellness and psd we know that a student's mental health and well-being is just as important as a student's academic experience our vision is to create a comprehensive system of care which includes enhanced connections with parents guardians community partners trained mental health professionals and staff to provide high levels of support and services that promote positive school climate social and emotional learning and mental health and well-being for all students and with that any questions yeah i do i uh thank you reuben and tai and abu
112shita say it correctly and megan thank you very much for being here and thank you for the community partners who stayed for our presentation uh i'm going to ask probably an unfair question of megan and abukshita if i can invite you back into the conversation both of you as and feel free to come to the microphone if you feel comfortable i don't want you to have to speak on behalf of all of our students but you've heard a lot tonight around what the district has to do as next steps you being students today in our hallways in our classrooms can you help advise us in terms of what you think is most important what is most pressing what is most urgent that we simply cannot wait to react to that we must listen to you
113and your in your fellow students voices as you continue to engage in these thoughtful conversations i'd i would really love to hear back from you thank you for your courage yeah my insight for this would be more accessibility more advertising of what resources are available because frankly i don't think that it's as known across the school district as it should be that we do have a variety of resources i think students think it's very limited to the school nurse or school counselors and there aren't that many of them so if they're busy i can't get help but we do have those other we have other outlets we have other resources that we can use they're just not known so either advertising those or like freeing up space in the day for students to be able
114to get mental health help where counselors are free for a certain amount of time and students can go in and get help because scheduling an appointment for a week away when you need immediate help isn't super helpful in my opinion so having that immediate resource would be of use thank you megan that was very helpful i just wanted to add on to that to say that i think another important thing is for counselors to check back in i think that's a huge thing with students about how they go in for to talk with their counselor but they don't receive anything back from the counselor so i think a check-in would be really helpful and it would also make us students feel like we are valued and we are being heard and we are checked back
115in sorry thank you yeah great i i also want to add my thanks especially for the student voice that we've heard tonight i really appreciate that i think it's very helpful to get your perspective on what's going on in the schools thank you so much with that i'm sure that folks have questions or comments i know i do uh but i will i will defer my thoughts and actually i'll start with jessica if we can jessica do you have any thoughts or questions that you want to uh put into the room yes sorry my screen like did something weird um i have a few questions so i don't have to do all of them at the moment i can kind of pair it out if necessary yep one question i have is if we're kind
116of comparing that aurora had you know has implemented this and done a better job was there any particular position that they prioritized that maybe we should focus on as a first step hey jessica um they didn't really prioritize necessarily one position over another they really treat their school counselors school social workers and school psychologists and mental health team is uh all equally important and all imperative in providing that wraparound support for students so there are schools where they might have you know one school counselor and three school social workers or two or three school psychologists depending on the school and what they identify as needs in their community but one thing i think you can see that they do is they really train up everybody who is a mental health provider to provide a really
117great floor of excellence for all their students okay and i guess my kind of a sort of a follow-up to that would be you know we have a lot of areas in our district where we've struggled to fill positions do we think we would have a sufficient pool of applicants to be able to fulfill the needs that we're talking about you know these positions are considered hard to fill um locally statewide and nationwide um i think though that one area that we can really leverage and i have some experience around this is creating really good pipelines from our universities so university of northern colorado they have school counseling programs they have a school psych program so developing a relationship with them and getting interns and paid interns potentially in our district to help support that
118um school social workers they have a great program right here in fort collins and we've had conversations with them and we're you know as a district we do take some of their interns and practica experience and i think just further developing those relationships and providing more uh training opportunities for those students and a pipeline to become you know a school social worker counselor a psychologist or a mental health specialist in our district is a great first step that we can take but i can say that some of our positions that we've posted even mid-year we've had more applicants than we've expected it hasn't been one or two it's been you know six or seven highly trained and qualified people so you know i think there's you know opportunities to develop pipelines but also promoting ourselves
119and becoming one of those models where people want to work at around mental health we can do that thank you i really appreciate um encouraging that connection with csu and i'm assuming unc as well potentially um and that you know maybe we have maybe it's looking better than i i'm expecting thank you so much for your answers other board questions or comments dj first off i want to start off with a big thank you because um this is something that i have been really wanting to see us as a district to be able to pull together and uh the the data and the information that you guys put out is uh is great uh and it's it's i know it was a lot of work to try to get all this stuff and information together
120um but i think it is the first step of being able to make a sensible and and good plan and and um and as we talked actually two years ago at a retreat for the board um this is something that needs to be rolled out district wide and and not just dropping here and there type of thing so i really appreciate the the time and effort you guys put into this i think the numbers the data that we we can see gives us something to work off of and track in saying that one of the things that you mention in your report you talk about tools for measuring sel sel skills and i was wondering if that is measuring it for our teachers and our providers counselors and all those we're also measuring how much
121of it is being absorbed by the students too is it is it both is it is there a way to actually see for getting the message out i guess is kind of where i'm going with that um yeah there is a way to to do both i think um there's you know packaged curricula through companies out there already where they have internally developed tools that are reliable and fairly valid to assess student knowledge of skill as well as teachers perception of the student's skill there's also districts who develop their own internal you know reliable and valid measurement to both of those things one school district that's local that comes to mind to me is brighton 27j schools so they've developed sel curricular frames and then they're developing an sel common assessment for the students to
122take where they can demonstrate knowledge so there's internally and externally developed tools that can measure both things depending on you know what curriculum we go with or what we decide to do as a as a district if you want to develop our own internal thing you know that's something that we could look into too thank you because that's yeah i was really i i saw the value of it being not just our our providers that we're doing it with and and being able to see if we're really reaching our students so it's great to hear that that can be done and i assume since there's a screening that we can do for students also that there would be something that we could maybe measure it also and so i you know a couple of those
123things seem very important to be able to um i guess the best way to put it just you know to make sure that we are using money wisely and you know and and we'll get questions about that uh often and so you know we want to make sure that we we have data to back it up but you know to me the most important thing is getting to the kids that need the help and so i i don't want to make that a center point but i do think it is valuable and i'm happy to see that it's on your blueprint of your plan so and again i just want to say i'm so excited to see this moving forward after a while and i hope that we can continue to build on this because
124i think this is is great a way to be able to start and so let us know again what things we can do as a board to help you along on this journey because this is something that we have talked about since i before i was on the board even and uh you know i personally was really excited with the 4a money being able to use it for counselors the question that you brought up about you know not how low our ratio is i think is a very valid point and and i think it's very important that we we come up with a good structure so thank you very much jim go ahead i think it was a great presentation thank you very much um i want it all now right that's how we all
125feel i think and when i worked for a living my my boss would say that to me he'd say i want it all now and i'd say well wait a second boss we've got scope schedule and resources right and we're trading off the three of those so i guess it looks to me from this presentation like you're going to do the best you can with stuff and you're kind of looking for money trying to find things i just wonder if there's a way to look at gee if we had 5 million here's what we could do 5 million here if we had 10 million a year here's what we could do are there have you done that and are there ways to sort of uh look at that and then look at the schedule and
126what you can do on in terms of scope with that level of funding so that is a yes to all of those questions we have looked at that we have considered what it would take to roll out and so you know even that number of what would be desired future state if we went off national model you know there's that number to start from that 11.3 million knowing that we also have a large mental health provider pool in our district what is that system of care so we say system of care is what does it look like in our district is it you know is it mental health social workers uh mental specialists is it school psychologists counselors and so it's where do we make those exchanges in terms of that and where do we
127design it schedule you know we want this all to happen in the next six months knowing that there's a that's a huge ask of the system to implement with the schedule also comes that ability to to provide the training and that access and so the conversation around calendar and where do we find those opportunities is also one of those kind of logistical pieces that it does take some of that structures and leadership support and then budget is you know part of that budget design team and how do we really look at those resources and how do we provide those tools to those teams to actually make those decisions more soundly and based off the data and so when we talk about you know universal screener or data driven systems system-wide it's what are we seeing
128across the system and not the little pockets of data but how do we really get that data for the entire system to provide decision makers to better make those decisions and be a part of that planning process thanks for the answer i'd just sure like to see some scenarios sometime yeah i would as well well and as we talk about dollars i'll just quickly interject something there um maybe i'm being naive but i'm hopeful that through the partnering that we've been talking about extensively this evening that there's an opportunity to provide more services potentially in the schools themselves at let's call it a lower cost to the school district per se i mean i don't know what all the financial transfers are to make that kind of thing work but but if there's an opportunity
129to take advantage of uh in a positive way of the partners that we have to get more services to our kids i'm curious whether you think that's a possibility or not i think it's a possibility one of the sharings that we have planned is to meet with nick peterson and the business development group as another access point to see if there are those partners that may be willing to fund some of this work currently we don't have monies that sustain our community partners in our buildings which has i think also systematically kind of resulted in our not having mousse and those components because there's not that skin in the game from the psd perspective we are currently working with behavior health authority and lori stolen as well as summit stone to bring in a community
130care navigator and coordinator that we can use to better access and really create that first step in creating those better partnerships but again that is from an outside resource coming in and having that money to say hey we can free up this and let's bring it into the district it's it's that piece of how do we balance what we commit to those partnerships [Music] to help sustain that and not necessarily always rely on the generosity of our partners to to find that money to do that sure i understand that and and i guess sort of piggybacking on what jim said i'd be interested to understand maybe not this evening but at some point when you talk about money to sustain the partnerships what what's all involved in that i mean where does that money go
131how does it how does it work to make that happen so like i said you're welcome to share that with me offline or whatever or with the board as a whole offline but uh that would be one thought that comes to mind kristen did you want to say something go ahead carolyn so i really liked also that you talked about assessing the programs we had what's working what's not working and trying to understand you know what monies we might be able to free up from programs that aren't working i don't think we've done that in a long time brian so i think that's a good first step and i think in this this next year we need to really and from my opinion we need to really lean into our partners and the community and
132ladies when i heard you talk about advertising and letting students know about what's available i couldn't agree with you more summit stone has a crisis health helpline that our helpline that you guys can call they also have a help a text line too that you can text when you need help but how many spaces in our school are dedicated to letting our kids know that there's a 24-hour crisis line available to them or a place where they can text if they're more comfortable and that they need help so i think your point is well taken we need to we need to advertise to you guys and let you know about what's available today because we can't wait till tomorrow for you guys to have help so thank you for those comments excellent i think kristen
133has something she'd like to share yeah and i think just following up on that too i unless i'm naive i would imagine that if we partner up that we're going to be able to search for a lot more grants in that manner as well that would benefit everyone uh together so i think that's that's an opportunity that we don't currently have as well you know speaking to the advertising um yeah i mean i you know at the library we have a homelessness resource guide and it lists everything that you could possibly need whether it's local or national and i think that's something that would you know if not if it's not there already we could put together pretty quickly um everything from summit stone to the trevor foundation so um you know there's so much
134out there that they can you know you could access and um i mean honestly i'm just thinking put it on the back of the bathroom stalls you know in the bathrooms so that you can see it every time um but going back and it's still you know a little bit um digging into some of the particulars i did ask and i asked this in writing too and you did a a pretty good job of answering it but i did want to follow up that the phrase consideration of populations at high risk for suicide such as lbtq lbtq youth and i said asked what considerations are we looking at because this population does tend to have a 40 to 50 suicide ideation rate and what i would like to hear on that is that not only
135are we talking about the suicidal ideation throughout that but to have both staff and students have an understanding of what lgbtqia is and so that there is this level of being able to talk to somebody who is right now we just don't have a lot of people who are even lgbtqia knowledgeable or friendly i should say let alone lgbtqia knowledgeable and so if we can have that broaden and that that could that's going to benefit not just the population that is suicidal ideation population but all populations i mean you know there it's been shown um that a school with a gsa it actually has everybody performed better um not just the per the participants of the gsa so if that could be a part of what's going to be happening in the very be very
136beginning through these next three to four months is that something that you're looking at doing very quickly um yes and we're actually excited because i had the pleasure of sitting in on interviews for our lgbtq lgbtq plus ia coordinator yesterday excited to be a member of that team and sit in on those interviews and excited to partner with that individual who really brings an expertise is focused around building in gsas really supporting sponsors education for staff and students as well as being that touch point and we did have students who were able to join that interview panel and it was an amazing experience to see that interaction and that really having that sense of belonging there just as even part of the interviews and so we're excited for that we're excited to partner with that
137individual and really bring that new level of expertise into the into the district all right fantastic and is that going to be spread to both mental health professionals and teachers and um you know is that how how much will that be disseminated because the last time it was probably two or three years ago now at this point um but it was an optional pd for um teachers and it didn't include paraprofessionals it didn't include um you know a lot of the people who would have daily interactions so um what's the or it's probably too early sorry i'm just getting a little excited [Laughter] yeah i feel like um in addition in that suicide prevention and mental health policy you know we we called out lgbtqia in the presentation but we're also talking about indigenous backgrounds
138transient students students in foster care students who have been through significant trauma they're all at a pretty uh you know disproportionate higher risk of suicide and suicidal ideation so that goes back to that pd conversation you know that this is something that we all need to be focused in on as a community and and especially as a school community too so part of that policy is addressing those populations in addition to lgbtq and the pd that that that we need to do to to wrap all those people in support and christine if you want me one last time we also have been partnering with with silent all year to help support that training with staff and so it's been a great partnership with alliance and with silent as well and then i know that there's
139an another pd that is just about to roll out um but again it's how do we really ensure that our system of training does hit every professional that is touching students or in contact with students excuse me touching sounds weird yeah go ahead kristen all right and then that kind of rolls into one other question that i had which was um how can we get the parents involved i know you had answered that we're going to have parents on the sel committee to see if that's working well and that sort of thing um you know i know last year we had the mental health classes for parents and staff as well is that coming up again are we going to be doing that in i think typically we did it in march if i'm not
140mistaken so i'm not sure which training you're referring to um and so i'll have to look into that unless you it's i think believers at pruder high school um oh gosh oh okay it was the mental health matters program yes mental health matters yeah that'll be coming up later on this spring um so yeah i apologize for that oh no my mistake i didn't know with that as we talk around those community partnerships and that connection to parents and guardians it's really also around how do we partner with providing more access to our to our parents in many of our conversations with with our partners it was what can we as a district do to support you if we co-advertise a training if we are offering a qpr training for parents why not use our
141facilities for that why not say hey how can we facilitate some of that conversation so they're hosted in school and not finding a location that isn't part of their home network and so with that building of those collaborations and partnerships it is how can we co-support you know one of the pieces we talked with the center for family outreach and that was a big conversation around with lori around hey laura you're doing this intervention training and prevention with students what can we do to support families and how can we grow that where do we offer some of those drug trainings in our locations whether it's on a weekend or with parents and just finding those ways to grow and really make it a part of we we are the center of the community and so
142how do we really support a lot of those partnerships in those conversations and as we move forward with really structuring some of that conversation that's fantastic that's what i love to hear because that you know the parents are you know essential part of what's happening with the students so to have them be involved in this is really really wonderful to hear thank you right well i'll touch on one area of my questions and then we'll see whether we'll see about another round if people have other things to ask i'm curious about some of the data that you presented in in the slide that talks about the number of contacts and you identified the type five ones i noticed that bullying was way way way way way down the list i mean it was like if
143i'm remembering craig it was very it was almost at the bottom of the list well actually it was the top but you know what i mean it's the smallest number right so that's very curious to me because we hear about bullying more frequently than a lot of those other things from parents and whatnot so what is your thought about why that might be is it yeah what is your thought about why that might be or what the prevalence of bullying is in the schools actually or how we deal with it so that data that displayed the bullying category around the contacts comes from our mental health specialists and our mental health specialists tend to work with a higher acuity of student then typically our counselors may our counselors are going to see that every student
144in the building primarily and so it's part of that building those systems of data is how do we also track counseling data how do we also track school psychologist data how do we also track school social work data so that when we are looking at and helping inform the system do we actually track everything across the board or is it just by a group and so we'd rather not be just by the group you know we love and appreciate the work our mental specialists do but we also know that it doesn't tell us the whole picture in terms of what is occurring and so part of that ongoing work is really saying as a system where are we going to land on what tool we use and how we use it and when and where
145is it required to track that information we get some of that information from our connection survey as well and so as you look at connection survey quite a few of our students indicate that they will intercede around bullying and they will intervene excuse me and try to stop that bullying if it occurs and so that is a really nice trend to see that we have students who are proactive or supportive of other students but we also then need to track it aside from just a connection survey and also find out what we're seeing on that day-to-day and how do we capture that information great thank you for that clarification one other question about the data and that is you showed us a bunch of pie charts and some other data that uh represent sort of
146a holistic view have you have you done any kind of a breakdown by a subgroup or by school for that matter on that data and does that lead to any insights on hot spots or hot issues or or actions that we need to take so unfortunately that data is around that comprehensive mental health and needs assessment which is was developed based off of the colorado behavior model um university of maryland as well as um i think wisconsin state of wisconsin it really is around identifying that larger scale district components of do we need more training to support students in this area do we have systems of care with our community where we also have spoken to and it might be more in some of that underlying packet information is when we talk around those data
147wide systems it is looking at both risk factors and protective factors right now our connection survey is a great survey for protective factors do i you know do i have that safe person i talk to we don't identify as much of the risk factors with that we rely on possibly more the healthy kid survey and unfortunately we're not going to have that data until the late march but how do we build a tool that we are using annually that does measure both risk and protective factors so we can better identify those hot spots or those areas or the schools that our students are are experiencing and so that comes with as well some of those data systems and that implementation of those data systems as a as a district all right thank you jess i
148know you said you had multiple questions do you have another one you want to throw into the room i think you guys have covered my most pressing questions at the moment okay thank you very much is there anybody else here up on the dias who has another question go ahead dj i i just wanted to uh your the document that you a planning document um you know it talks a little bit about uh some of the subsets to kind of look for or keep an eye on for that have more of an average higher average of of having some issues sometimes and one of my concerns that i that i just want to mention and make sure it's out there i guess is that is is the students that are the perfectionist ones the ones
149that really drive for those a's and and their attendance is is really up so they don't fall into some of those charts where you you know it's a red flag and there's a lot of uh data to show that some of those students are also ones that can really need some help and some support so i just want to make sure that that's floated out there and that's in the room to that we are something that we look for uh because i think that is something that we uh sometimes think everything's going well and it's not behind behind closed doors it's not so yeah i just wanted to bring that up all right i wasn't on i wasn't live anybody else have a question or comment kristen go ahead i just want to say thank
150you um this is this is great this is i'm so glad that we're putting this to the forefront and um you know i we often say that kids can't learn when they're hungry well we also know that kids can't learn when they're stress driven or anxiety ridden or all of those things so thank you this is gonna help our students immensely and and thank you both students for for coming in and speaking to us today and um sharing what you've learned um it's so important for us to hear from you so thank you thank you great now i appreciate that very much and i believe uh superintendent kingsley has some remarks that he'd like to make yeah just in closing i want to again thank staff and students for being here tonight and i don't
151know who's still listening but i think a couple key takeaways from this is life is hard right now it's been hard for a lot of people for a long time it's been messy but it's really messy right now and there are people that we love that we care about that are hurting and what i love most about the responses from our students earlier is you both brought a strengths-based mindset to realizing our cupboard is not bare we have resources that are available that people are simply not taking advantage of and so i want to encourage us to be mindful across all of us this is not just a school district scenario this is a community scenario where we all collectively have to do our part and own this it's making me reflect even as a
152dad when i go home for dinner am i on my phone or am i checking in with my son and seeing how his day was and what he needs and am i listening to him or am i thinking about the next thing i need to do as an adult i think we all collectively including myself have to raise our accountability of checking in with our children listening to them when they tell us how they are and speaking to each other adult to adult to figure out how we can collectively partner to be better advocates to be better champions and better servants to the people who we love or our precious children in our community i also think from a community or school district perspective what i would say and i shared this with my team
153i think right now we're we have awareness of where we are at about a hundred thousand feet and we have to quickly get more closer to the ground because we do have staff and students who are engaging in this in a scenario every single day do we have all of the pieces that we need no but i think more than anything a takeaway from me as a superintendent is we have to get more clear on what our theory of action to strategically and aggressively address the needs of our students and we cannot do that 53 different ways we cannot do that without the help of our parents without the help of our students and their voice and ideas at the table and we can't do it without the help of our community partners we doing
154this alone in isolation will continue to only amplify the fractures that already exist and so i want us to share in the spirit of vulnerability because in this data there's pain points there and what i love about our ability to be courageous in sharing our most vulnerable truths is it's the first step towards disrupting them but we must have the collective courage as a school district to move forward and do this systematically and strategically and not in ways that doesn't allow us to be good fiscal stewards 29 plus sel curricula is not good fiscal stewardship i don't say that to indict any staff member because we're participating in a system that's been in place for a while but we have to cur we have to have the courage to name that not only does that
155not allow us to be strategic in financing one or two high quality curricula it introduces 29 plus different language to our teachers to our parents to our students when we go from one school to another school we lose people in that dissonance the charge not just for staff but for us together is to create community coherence around this work today was the first step under my tenure to have a sense of knowing where we are like all of you i want to fix today because there's children it's not widgets on the other side of this so there are things that i think we've identified that we can do now we know that we have to be aggressive and assertive in our budget development process knowing that our money needs to be aligned to our values
156but we also have to figure out the resource constraints that are collectively on top of all of our minds that are making this problem very complex very difficult but still incredibly urgent so i remain encouraged because we have the right people aggressively working and collaborating to talk to each other to make sure that we do things but we're going to need courage as a governance team when people experience a sense of loss of no longer being able to do things one way because we're really trying to do this a community way and i want to name that now to project and anticipate because that is the role of leadership in my opinion we must forecast the future to provide hope and optimism but there are things that we're going to need to stop doing in
157order to double down and do this well and our kids can't wait they simply can't wait and so again i appreciate your support you're charged to make sure that this is here when the healthy kids colorado survey data comes out in late march and or early april i would like to come back to this board not just with an update on that data but to let you know where we are continuing to make continued progress on the strategy development that is needed to begin to build those pieces together for next year and not in 23 24. so i just want to say thank you and the staff again i appreciate your leadership collectively uh this is one of our system priorities in the sense of urgency is there but also the leadership that's required for
158us to lean in and collaborate together we have no time to waste so thank you again thank you superintendent kingsley for your words of wisdom vision and courage really appreciate that and i have a request now for a brief recess and uh we will take that recess and reconvene at nine o'clock sharp thank you all right folks welcome back to the continuation of the uh january 25th uh board of education meeting for pooter school district uh we have one more infinite informational report that we're going to hear about this evening and that is our second quarter school resource officer data and presentation and superintendent kingsley would you care to introduce this for us sure members of the board members of the community tonight psd executive director of operations matt bryant and assistant superintendent of secondary
159school scott nielsen will give us an update on the school resource officer program this update will include data inform information on training and an overview of what is next for our program matt and scott good evening glad you're here thanks superintendent kingsley and uh president pfev board of directors really do i look like kristoff to you oh [Laughter] oh boy hey scott was the microphone on when i said yeah i think president pedersen oh there you go thank you oh boy that's a blast from the past i guess so we're here to do the second quarter sro update not the first quarter one we did that one back when he was still here we're looking forward to sharing tonight with some of the updates we have some of the work that's ahead of us as
160we get rolling tonight and as i gather myself we want to start with some definitions of some of the uh some of the slides that you may see later on tonight as you see throughout this we talk about the sops those are standard operating procedures that we wrote about 18 months ago 20 months ago sros are our school resource officers fcps refers to our fort collins police services lcso refers to our larimer county sheriff's office dhs if you see that in there refers to department of human services calls slash assists they are a request for our sro to intervene and dispositions are the response that the law enforcement agency has to one of the call slash assists so that sets the ground work we wanted to refer back to this timeline that we talked about
161late last year when i think we came back in in may and talked about what we would be doing going forward and as you see here we're we're in that second cycle steering committee winter training board of education update um i also wanted to just go back and and reiterate when we shared this with the board in may there were a couple things we talked about about this this oversight and training cycle and we talked about the responsibility that the steering committee would have and at the time we talked about the steering committee would focus on data that we would share experiences we would evaluate how things are going based on data and based on the experiences that we're seeing from the school side as well as from the police side and that would guide
162the trainings we decided to put in place we had a question i think from from the board that we thought made sense for us to address in person tonight and it has to do with how much have we shared the data that we're sharing with you tonight with other groups and the fact of the matter is we have not shared what you're seeing tonight with other groups but i do want to the data that we're sharing we will be putting in front of other uh groups as we have time with those individuals but i also want to reiterate that in addition to what you're going to see tonight focusing on our relationship with sros that the board will also be getting a lot of data over the next several months in our monitoring report that
163will include discipline data that we will be sharing with other groups as well so i we're we're working toward being transparent but you are the first group that's seeing what we're seeing tonight so i just wanted to be transparent about that as we move forward um as we we shared this with you with a little less detail the first time we were together at the end of first quarter so again i just want to just briefly walk through the timeline for us to this point we started with that july training where we had all the sros all of our principles all of our assistant principals and we closed the gap on what the standard operating procedures look like and what our expectations were you can see on the bottom line that matt and i have
164met with larimer county sheriff's office multiple times as we've gone through the fall and we did that because if you recall when we went through the process of landing the contract last year we had a little more conversation with larimer county sheriff to make sure we had some congruent practices we've had some meetings where we had to agree to disagree and there was some energy in the room and we've gotten to a really good place so i i just want to be transparent and say we as we've worked through the fall um we've gotten to a place where i think both sides are feeling more comfortable understanding what what's expected of each side and how we're going to work together in a collaborative way and they're seeing it out in the building so that's worked
165out well again that's the coupled uh meetings that you see on august 10 september 28th and the december 10th meeting as we also met once in in november the other one i want to call your attention to that is new and different um is when we met with our steering committee um in november the november 9th steering committee meeting we we invited all the normal individuals including timoth police larimer county sheriff's fort collins police services the district personnel dr geil matt myself norm but we also invited one of the district attorneys and we did that because we wanted to try to understand what the role of our shifts remember we made some shifts last year and how we were entering discipline into the system we're doing some of the the pass forward to get services
166directly from the school district and we wanted to try to understand with law enforcement in the room what impact is that having on the district attorney and the work they're doing and for us that guided the work that is our next step in our district and it has to do with ongoing communication it's not really about how we're operating uh with the police services and in the district it's how we continue to communicate the continuum of services and support and that came directly out of how do we continue to make sure individuals are in the loop and understand what needs students have and when those those needs can be addressed and by who so that was fascinating for us to align um the police services with the district attorney and our needs at the forefront
167it was a great conversation i think it illuminated some of the work that's ahead for us if you recall when we just uh just to be clear and maybe restate the obvious when you say district attorney you mean like the district attorney's office not yes not not autonomous district attorney's office that's what i thought okay thank you um if you recall we we talked about standard operating procedures we we wrote and implemented those uh about 18 months ago maybe 19 months ago now and we did that to deal with some of what you see in front of you we had some disproportionate discipline data some of our disproportionate discipline data was in reference to our sros being too involved for lots of reasons in some cases we were asking them to do things they didn't
168need to do in some cases they were overstepping so they were getting involved for non-criminal offenses and we had misperceptions about what we were trying to do in the system around restorative practices and diversion and that those had to go through the police in order to do both of those and and over that we saw some mission creep and you heard those and saw those each time we've been in front of it we just wanted to make sure that we came back and talked to you just reference those as we as we move forward we believe um some of the results that we're seeing as we've been back together now with law enforcement agencies multiple times this year that we are seeing better collaboration um that our meetings with the sros we are closer together
169and closer aligned in in some of the challenges they're seeing from the sros and we're hearing from from our our school side personnel um the the meeting with the the district attorney's office helped us discuss some of our internal processes and there was support for those but also a recognition of how do we make sure there's a continuity of communication the data collection that we're seeing from larimer county are from fort collins police services continues to be robust and is super helpful for us and you'll see tonight um laramie county sheriff's starting to share us some results as well and it shows and you'll see i think as we go through tonight that we see less law enforcement referrals and in fact um quite a bit quite a big drop more student support that we
170have internally we've also begun to see that the the internal support that we're turning on through the family outreach we're having families engaged themselves to stay in touch with the family uh with the center for family outreach and that's been a nice addition for our students and then we continue to have the trainings and our training for this round will happen next week it was scheduled for early in january but given the shifts we made in our administrative meetings we moved it to the first meeting in february so that will happen next tuesday as we as we talk about some of the communication between us and our sro partners with that matt's going to jump into some of the data good evening and thank you for having me as my colleague dr lambert pointed out
171it's our pleasure to be here tonight [Applause] president patterson that was for you uh so i get the pleasure of uh reporting on the data that our law enforcement agencies report back to us and collect and as scott you know referenced it's pretty robust i will try to do it justice as much as i can i was chasing snowflakes at 2 30 this morning so forgive me if i stumble a little bit i'm trying i don't drink coffee so there's a reason for that we'll talk about that later but anyway so fort collins police service they do they have a very robust system anytime that they make any kind of contact or student engagement whether it's just a simple conversation or if it's stopping somebody in the parking lot you know that may be using
172some bad judgment on driving behaviors that all gets recorded and and it becomes this data that you see in front of you now so what i'd like to point out some highlights here is the first quarter we had 559 calls and assists you can see on the second quarter you can see some of those lines have gone down some have gone up some have kind of stayed even but the second quarter we had 441 calls and assists so we did have a decline in the total calls to date our two school year we've had a total of a thousand calls and assists that our sros have responded to i believe the last quarter when i when i came here we had about 27 different categories on this chart this time we've got 31 so the
173categories have increased just based on what types of responses and calls and assists they were called to so they've added a couple there some of the ones that i would point out to you that are of areas that you may have heard in the previous presentation with mental health you can see that's we have some assaults that have gone up and i can go over some of those here in a few minutes and talk about that you can see our harassment has gone up just a little bit our marijuana leaf calls have gone up and i want to discuss the marijuana in a next chart here and then our suicidal calls so sadly those have been increased and we've heard multiple times tonight how important that is to our community to our students a lot
174some of those suicidal calls many of those ref uh if this if the sro was called to assist with those they made referrals back to the school and then entered the system with reuben and his teams or community partners those calls were made they varied from staff students reporting in parents calling for help with their students and then safe to tell reports as some of the ways that those are coming in some of the actions to those suicidal calls include mental health holds and then references to our community partners and later on at the end of this presentation we'll show you some of those community partners that our sros and our staff are working with to respond to this one of them i do want to talk about standard response protocol that one may kind
175of be wondering in your head okay what exactly is that those are our drills and our evacuations so the sros participate in those they and they and they offer guidance and evaluation on those so that's what that standard report our standard response protocol is about so our next slide here is our fort collins police services sro dispositions and as previously discussed the dispositions is the actions taken for our first quarter dispositions we had 561 for our second quarter uh there is 441 dispositions again totally in a thousand um the the blank uh that you see there is just a duplicate form or errors during submission it doesn't mean that we lost track or anything like that it just means that they had a duplicate there and uh getting out of that one of the questions
176that was asked in the first quarter report was what is the teaching and we talked about what our sros do with our in our schools and what they're asked to participate in outside of a law enforcement duty but it kind of falls within their training and their specialty that they bring to our our sites some of that would be like internet safety training threat assessment training and drug and alcohol health classes first or fourth amendment rights things like that so those are classes that they're brought in and we talked about the process there where there is an opt out when students or parents feel like they do not want to participate we're still using that process as well when we go through that the fort collins juvenile citation tickets i thought it was hard to
177read therefore but i think it's okay um for the first quarter you can see that it did go up by eight as far as tickets go uh one of the things we pointed out in the first quarter was that most of our tickets and our citations all of them actually in that first quarter related to victim crimes so we for victims rights those citations tickets were issued for the second quarter there was a change in the law for the amount of concentrate that a miner can have which is basically zero because of the effects that concentrate has and and the dangerous uh the danger of that so that becomes uh an automatic first offense uh mandatory substance abuse program if you're if you have concentrate for possession so you'll see there about midway down where
178it says marijuana concentrate there was three of those issued so not necessarily a victim crime but because of the law our sros are are required to respond to that in there another question that came up in the first quarter from from the board was were we tracking iep and 504 students the answer that is yes and i can tell you that out of the 28 citations total that you see for the school year there so far uh four of those were iep and 504 students and again working closely with the school staff on on the proper response there but you can unless there was the marijuana concentrate or leaf issue you can assume that it may have been because of a victim was was involved in that incident the race and ethnicity information on the
179on the right hand side kind of breaks that down the sros do not ask when they investigate or they react or respond to an incident they don't ask for race or ethnicity they don't assume anything that information is taken from our synergy system so they look on there and that's where we get our our data for that you can see there one of the lines i'll point out is the hispanic latinx there was 11 citations tickets issued there one of those incidents was multiple students i believe there was four students involved in the same incident so there was a big incident there there was a another couple incidents that involved two and three students at a time so there were there was a couple of major incidents that increased that number uh and then you
180can see that a total for the year is that 24 the information here 24 out of the 28 citation or tickets issued were victim-related crimes so the majority of these are still victim-related our felony filings uh happy to report we're down a little bit there so any any kind of any kind of downward trend in that in that area is great to see no matter how minor or major so we will look to hold that hopefully but you can see just the different kind of calls and assists that were responded to and for the second quarter there was one assault and one theft that resulted in a felony filing and then again on the right you can see it broken down by race and ethnicity by quarter all felony filings are based on victim-related crimes
181so the marijuana does not play into this report here you would see a victim related on these and then again the race and ethnicity is from our synergy system so how were they notified that was a question again that came up uh you know how are how are srs sros knowing that they need to be involved or or being called so you can see the different categories here the notification types we talked a little bit about this the last time you can see one of our bigger categories is still staff reported which makes sense when you think about how many students are in our buildings and the contact hours that they have with our staff and the vigilance there so i don't think that's uh too uh shocking uh one of the ones i wanted
182to talk about is dispatched it's like what is dispatched i asked the question when i saw it that was mean that somebody called it could have been 911 property but somebody called 9-1-1 and the fort collins police services dispatch called an sro because it did involve one of our students that's a good thing because our sros are trained for our students they are familiar with our students and that means they're going to get treated a little differently because that may ends up instead of getting a ticket for something that another officer may not may not know that they're a student at one of our schools the sro knows that okay we're going to go see the principal and we're going to work through this issue so that helps us in our discipline reporting or helps
183us in our reactions and our in our incident actions that we take so that is uh that good information there you can see that most categories are down in that area about how they're reported so i think you can relate that to just how many incidents that people are are seeing and calling 9-1-1 for or the safe to tell is down we'd like to see those other categories that we mentioned earlier go down as well larimer county sheriff's office uh the first quarter we didn't have any data and i mentioned that we would bring data back this this quarter and this is uh this is the data that they have available to us larimer county sheriff's office is working closely with fort collins police services to bring like data to us as soon as they
184can fort collins police service has made a significant investment in time and some money to get the reporting where they're at laramie county sheriff's office is trying to figure out how they can do that same especially knowing that we're fixing to add another high school out in wellington and then timoth will look at the same thing as we open that tennis site as well for next year we're hoping to see that all of our agencies are using some sort of similar or like program to record this data and report to it but you can see there on the on the left we talk about the summons that were issued is three we had one felony filing in our in our schools in the county and then two restorative justice actions there 21 sro contacts or
185incidents similar categories to the fort collins police services not much difference there and then our community engagement and events again those officers for the sheriff's office are highly involved in teaching when they're asked to or when they have that opportunity going to sporting events making their presence known learning and building those relationships with students at the same time and doing some mentoring if they can the sros for the larimer county services does use a google form which does not collect race or gender or age so as they develop that other program hopefully i can pull that out of synergy and we'll have that data for you as well this data here is is generally first semester data it's not broken out by quarterly so you're kind of almost seeing yearly data here and they have
186committed to bringing us more accurate and descriptive data for a third quarter report and we're going to help them as many as any way we can to help them do that as well so that you can see that when we come back to you and i think with that i'm going to turn it back to dr lambert i deserve that so as we as we get started on on this tonight we we shared with you last time we were together that the majority of our discipline data would be part of our monitoring report when it comes out over the two reports later in the spring but what we wanted to share tonight was data that is the pipeline right is the connector between our work and the sros and that's when we formally refer to
187law enforcement and what we decided to share with you tonight was we went back to our last full year what we would consider kind of a normal year and that's our 2018-2019 school year and what that circle represents is a little over 700 7 200 major incidents across our district for the entire year so i just want that in in perspective and for that year 4.28 percent of the total majors were referred to law enforcement in the current year it represents uh through january 7th so it's essentially half of a year and up until a half of a year we're a little under 1900 so our number of majors is way down but our our referrals at 39 is only two percent so our percentage of a lower number of majors is also down dramatically
188so that's a celebration um i i want to uh to thank teachers building leaders that's all happening in buildings and as we've worked to try to get back to what feels more normal in buildings where students are are building culture back in the buildings they're in that's work um and it's our it's our educators our teachers and our our leaders out in the buildings that are making that happen and our students that are stepping in the circle and you saw in some of the data from fort collins uh police services that that many of our data points are down but in general we're starting to see that just across the board as we're seeing much more restorative type practices enter into the circle and so as we think about some of the things that have
189helped us get here clarity in the sops has has made a huge difference we have now sros that we might ask a question who will say that's yours that's the schools to handle we also might have a sro that'll step in and say hey what can i do and the school will say that's ours so the clarity both ways is helping to identify whose role whose responsibility is it and both sides take an ownership for that so that's that's a big win for us and restorative practices no doubt are having an impact and particularly in the schools that are stepping into that with pretty robust practices you're starting to see students buy in but that takes some time and it will continue to take time to see that pay dividends but i would argue we're
190already seeing uh some of the dividends from that and then i some of the partners that have helped us as well and we'll talk about some of those to end the presentation have also been powerful in in trying to see what we can do to intervene with students who are having some at-risk behaviors without starting them down that that uh what some would say the the school-to-prison pipeline the second set of of pie charts we wanted to share is the same data for our hispanic students and so in 2018 2019 we had over 1900 major referrals 91 of them were referred to law enforcement it was 4.7 and if you remember the percentage on the other one was 4.28 so our hispanics were a little over represented in the major are in the yes category
191for referred to law enforcement not dramatically different but over represented if we take a look at the this first half a year's data we're looking at 660 total major referrals or major incidents with only 12 referrals to law enforcement and under 2 the percentage back uh of for everybody was one point uh was uh 2.07 so the hispanic is underrepresented in our current data where it was over represented slightly um in our last full year so just a way to to call out that for us to pay attention to how how we're doing on our side and we wanted to make sure that we did share this what we believe is the conduit um to the to the tickets if you will and it it it mimics pretty well we've asked for 39 we've referred
192to law enforcement 39 times and i think there's been 32 tickets so there's been a few of those cases where law enforcement has made a decision not to write a ticket but in the majority of those cases it's turned out to be victim-related as matt talked about or in the case of those four cases marijuana and law enforcement has made a decision to write a ticket in those events so our dad our data is talking the same story and that feels pretty good to us and we think it's headed in the right direction by no means are we there by no means do we not have work ahead of us but we feel pretty good about the progress we've made since we stepped into this this process um over the last 18 months the last
193slide before we turn it over to conversation is we just wanted to put in the room tonight something some some uh uh resources that we feel like have been supportive to the district um this is by no no [Music] this is definitely not all of the resources but some we've used to help with some of the work this year the center for family outreach has been fantastic and that is who we're using for our own diversion program for drug and alcohol support and we still we're continuing to see success um by many students who are stepping into that program and even some of the students that have stepped into the program and not made it through have gone through some of the council and and we may end up seeing a benefit from that down
194the road even if they weren't completers at this time they at least got some support along the way but many of them are experiencing success as they go through it and we've had great feedback from families students the feedback is mixed right because they've had to go to extra classes but we've got several families that have asked the center for family outreach how do we stay in contact and how do we continue to use your services and that's huge as we continue to move forward summit stone is continues to provide resources for our group the larimer county hub is a great support system for students that we feel like might be at risk for families where we might feel like the parents are abusive and it's also an entry point if in fact a law
195enforcement needs a place because they're they have taken uh individual into custody and we continue to promote safe to tell as a way to let us know what's going on if by any stretch students don't feel safe they don't feel safe about what's happening at their site they don't feel safe about what's happening in their home for whatever reason there's there's something happening and safe to tell is a a fantastic resource for them to utilize as well so those are a few we wanted to put in the room that we uh continue to think help us as we move forward and we'll continue to celebrate those as we uh come back in with the board uh again at the end of third quarter and with that um we would love to to hear as you
196saw had a chance to to peruse this presentation even before tonight what resonated with you as you see some of the progress that this presentation may demonstrate thank you very much for the presentation would anybody like on the board like to uh open the conversation kristen um no thanks so much i'm telling you what resonates with me is the fact that not only is the percentage down that gets referred but the numbers overall are down and that's fantastic um so i think it's really great to see that i mean the numbers down by at least a third it looks like so i'm i'm loving that um i do have a question what happens to those students when they do get a ticket so what at that point is is psd sort of hands off at
197that point and it's all through the juvenile justice system or can you just explain to me what happens when we've handed them off yeah so i'd like to say with our police services right now we we've worked out a warm hand-off as we talked about as you heard reuben talk about before but one of the things we put in the sops was an encouragement to think about restorative practices or diversion the majority of our of our students that they get a ticket for the first time they end up in some type of diversion and they're working real hard in that angle our restorative justice for collins is fantastic many of those students that end up with tickets end up going through the restorative justice for collins so they have that same uh lens we do
198if those students do that though with their first ticket so i mean that that ends up they they end up going through that process but in general that's the if we were to talk to if fort collins police services was here a huge percentage of them go through diversion um as a recommendation that's awesome to hear and is it possible then and it probably wouldn't be our stats then but is it possible to get the stats of those who were ticketed the first time and completed and um you know have finished and without having then a juvenile justice record is that is it possible to get that certainly yeah because i think that would be truly helpful to to see that that is even when they're being ticketed um that it is still restorative justice
199that's happening so let me just make sure i'm clear about the question um because i'm there's maybe two pieces of data you're asking for that i that i see in my head one would be the students who are ticketed if they get yeah go through diversion and i also heard in there a question for the students that we have gone through our own internal diversion and percentages that are success in that as well absolutely i'd love to see both awesome thank you so much other reactions or comments or questions dj um first of all i want to thank you for for taking on the challenge of being open and honest about this data and that we dive into it i i really do appreciate it i really think that's the way that we can fix
200problems and the pie charts it is a great start i'm excited to see those again in june and so that we can see a year year-to-year type of thing a little bit better but it is a great first step my wondering that i have for you is the assaults and if i guess first of all if you could clarify that so that i understand correctly what is classified as an assault maybe would be good on that but then my second question is is there were comments that you know there were some multiple people ticketed at a time is that also maybe why that number is up so high is because it was multiply involved i don't know how much we can let me start and then mac and correct me um when when we look
201at uh um yeah those we got some specific assault tickets but when you look at the number of assaults that are that are in the the report they're large right and if you look at the assaults versus disorderly conduct they switched and if you recall our training when we came to talk to you first quarter our training was to define those two and so in some sense the conversations or the information that law enforcement may have been handed was we feel like this may be an assault assault in terms of language is often used like bullying when when law enforcement is talked to so in some cases parents may have referred to and said my son was assaulted um in some cases we may have conferred with the law enforcement around what our perception was
202is this disorderly conduct or an assault and so as they write that down that may have been why that's on their their uh assist conversation because we asked for an assist or a collaboration but not necessarily a ticket for that unless it it approached that right um in terms of the the actual assaults that we have um they were all for fighting or fighting in the bathroom those kinds of things are what they were charged for um we had a let's see assaults that were students attacked and beat up another student multiple students attacked another student so those things constitute an assault disorderly conduct is when matt and i make a decision that we're going to go and we're going to fight and we're both engaging in that that's not me assaulting that or mad
203assaulting me that's considered disorderly conduct so there are conversations that we may have with the law enforcement around does it constitute that you can see what constitute that by what they've charged not necessarily by what they've been we've communicated or collaborated with them about as we're trying to make decisions how to respond in our in in conversation and that's what i what i think you see from the data that for collins police services puts out is they put out every conversation we're having is what goes on that that chart uh it doesn't necessarily constitute that it's actually an assault but that may be how the conversation starts does that does that answer the question dj or do i need math to fix my issue no no i i that does kind of explain the especially
204the the types of calls and assists i think that really brings that to to light and and i i think you got a roundabout that the assault really is uh especially for the ones that are uh ticketed it it really is physical contact for sure okay that's what i mean and it's toward one other you know it's toward another person that's not mutual consent okay thank you other questions here in the room go ahead kristen i just had one quick one the difference between teaching and mentoring what is that teaching is generally when we ask the sro to go into a classroom and do teaching for the whole class mentoring might be informal um so they might be they might step into a conversation with a student and then the student might say hey how
205do i how do i deal with x and more of that one-on-one kind of conversation okay perfect thank you jess do you have any questions or comments or reactions you'd like to share at the moment i'm excited by the numbers i'm seeing and i'll be really excited after another year of this and hopefully what will be a more normal year kind of see these trends continue but thank you very much for this update yeah i'll add my thanks and i do have one question and that is that we talked about putting in place a mechanism by which students staff and sros could comment on interactions between sros and students in particular but i suppose also with staff has that mechanism been put in place and what kind of data do we have from that so
206yes and that was asked at the first quarter meeting as well and we told you we were developing that uh that has since been developed and we're meeting uh with communications on friday to stand that up i like that buzzword um starting the first of february and we'll have that uh we'll have that available to student staff it'll be a qr code throughout the school where they can just click and we're trying to make it as accessible as possible to anybody that wants to use that okay thanks for getting that in place i really appreciate it thanks to madeline's team for doing the the legwork on getting that process developed thank you madeline uh soprano kingsley you have anything you want to add to this okay okay go ahead dj i had one other thing
207i just wanted to thank you guys on actually is is the incorporating the district attorney's office i think that was a great idea and such a a way to try to you know bring it as a community-based look at it and and looking at the student and helping them through their life a little bit so i really appreciate taking the time to do that and stuff and along with those lines is when the sros meet and they do their bi-weekly meetings that the district attorney's office is involved in those meetings on that regular basis so this was the first time the steering committee had had an opportunity to interact with them and get some feedback both ways but they are involved pretty on a consistent basis uh with uh sros and student interactions thank you
208for the information thanks and i'll just add my thanks again thank you very much for the presentation and for the data and for the progress we're making toward our values so thanks so much appreciate it uh that concludes our information reports now we're going to go to our executive session item which is the new 9.0 that got added if you'll recall when we amended the agenda at the beginning of the meeting um may i have a motion to go into executive session from somebody oh jim would you like to give us that i move that the board enter executive session for the purpose of developing the strategy of the school district for negotiations really relating to the 2022-2023 collective bargaining agreement or employee contracts as authorized by crs 24-6-402-483 those invited to join the board
209and superintendent and executive session are chief of staff lauren hooton executive directors brett larson and dave montoya attorney jan farrow and board secretary lexi donnelly may have a second yes great kristin has given us a second uh and so lexi would you please call a vote dj anderson aye jim brokish aye kristen draper aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora hi thank you motion pass 6-0 thanks so much we will reconvene in executive session at 10 minutes to 10 please in the superintendent's office for the purposes of the public this is the last agenda item before we adjourn this regular business meeting we will come out of executive session solely for the purposes of publicly adjourning the meeting there will be no more content beyond that thank you very much for your attention
210this evening you