Board of Education Meeting: October 26, 2021

001good evening thank you for joining the board of education this evening today is tuesday october 26 2021 and this board of education uh work session is now called order at 6 30 pm with that i will do approval of the agenda would any board members like to make changes to the agenda this evening okay seeing none we'll move on to item 3.0 which is the superintendent report superintendent kingsley i'll turn it over to you members of the board members of the community good evening it's great to be with you tonight uh over the course of the last few weeks i actually think just over the last week or so celebrated my first 100 days in psd as i've had an opportunity to articulate our collective vision for our district moving forward i'm trying to be

002as crystal clear as possible that the goal is for our children not to just graduate but to graduate with options and as i begin and continue to share this vision across the system and what that means for our staff for our families for our school and district leaders i'm really hopeful that we don't collectively see that as a moon shot something that's so far out into the distant future that we can't figure out a way to execute that and make progress in in real time and in real terms i do believe as we think about a bold collective vision for the system though that it's important for us as people as human beings not just colleagues and professionals for us to think about what are the small wins that are right in front of us

003that we can replicate over and over for people especially our students and each other for us to experience success i had an opportunity today to visit several of our schools building a bridge and a partnership to our charter schools is a priority of mine and making sure that we have an opportunity to collectively learn from each other had a chance to visit visit both the elementary and the secondary school of liberty common charter school as well as well as mountain sage being able to see another core knowledge school in our community as well as a school that's based upon has an academic model built on arts integration and how children were learning about literacy through the arts was nothing short of fantastic also having an opportunity with president feb to visit another school of our

004own blevins middle school to see principals and teachers collectively working so hard in service of making sure that we can continue to prioritize in-person instruction there's just a lot of hard-working people that are making this community go making this school system go and i just want to acknowledge that there we see you i also want to you know acknowledge today that last week we had an opportunity to have our first quarterly business and community partner forum uh the attendance was incredible we had almost 35 different entities i'm not going to name all 35 i don't want to leave anybody out but there's a lot of people in this community whether they're higher ed business small moderate or large that are willing to roll up their sleeves and engage with us to ensure that all of

005our children do have an opportunity to not just graduate but to graduate with options and we've talked about that it's going to create an environment where we double down on various workforce development opportunities we talked about that two weeks ago and learned about what that infrastructure looks like we talked about ensuring that we double down on literacy efforts across the system as well as making sure that we continue to prioritize mental health as we continue to think about our work i also think that our mindset values and beliefs around how we show up matters and i want to close my remarks tonight by highlighting a very specific school that is not just prioritized academic press and you've heard me highlight and illuminate some of the great work that's happening at lincoln middle school previously and

006i won't repeat that but what i can also share with you is beyond prioritizing learning and teaching our core business every single day something that really stands out to me about principal penny steyers and her entire staff and community is that they've prioritized kindness they've prioritized kindness they've actually called it a kindness revolution and our students at lincoln middle school are embodying something that a lot of us feel and want to see more than ever in our community i've shared many times with this entire community that while i do see and know that there is a hopeful optimism that exists across our system that it is probably at some level equally paired with a level of deep exhaustion and that includes our families and i think the only way that we get through that is

007by being there for each other being kind listening to one another and i know that's messy sometimes i'd love to be able to illuminate for all of you in real terms what that looks like at lincoln middle school kindness has become the culture at lincoln and i'm not going to be able to do it justice so i'd rather just show you so if i can have our communications team cue the video of what this is looking like right now i'd greatly appreciate it all right what's up mr barry well well i came here to tell you that you are amazing you always have a way to make math fun in your class there's there may be times where i don't want to do it and i struggle at it but all i wanted to say

008is i want to thank you for having patience with me and helping me get through it of course thank you so much [Music] all right thank you yeah thank you so much i really appreciate it um i just wanted to give you this and i think you are awesome because you always take time to help people in your class and you're the only teacher i know that would go through uh trouble to let your students throw pencils into them yeah and then i wanted to give you this little bracelet for appreciation awesome yeah thank you can you help me [Music] because you're such a good teacher and a friend i appreciate you a lot in many ways thank you so much for helping me and my mom you've made my life so much better and

009i know i'm not the best girl you can trust but i know i'm really really stressful and that i don't listen but i know and thank you for understanding me and everything you're the person that i can trust and i could because they're you as my best friend thank you so much oh my gosh i get to keep this thank you [Music] i'm so touched i really am well thank you so much virtual hug okay oh thank you so much wow you made my day miss runyon even though i don't see you in any of my classes i know that you are an awesome person because you're always really nice to me and my friends and you are funny and classy students thank you so much pascal this is awesome oh the same sign thank

010you [Music] gosh thank you that means so much [Music] like the students at lincoln middle school i believe too and i'm sure that we all believe that kindness is a revolution and in tough times i'm hopeful that we can learn a valuable lesson from our students who are modeling for us every day how to show up how to speak to each other i want to thank all of you for persevering with me and supporting with me since i started on july 1st at each of your respective chairs is a bracelet as a symbol of the kindness revolution that's taking place at lincoln middle school i also have here one for staff and we'll share here with the community that is in attendance this evening i'm not going to tie it on your wrist today for

011the sake of time uh but i'm just hopeful you know democracy is messy and we don't always agree but how we show up how we treat each other how we listen to each other matters and it matters in this community it matters with this board and i'm just really grateful to be a meeting this evening so um i also wanted to thank you for first hosting me today in the couple visits i i did with you i thought that was excellent to see you at work and your comments about the outreach you're doing whether it's to the business community in the chamber or our foundation or uh all our non-profits the community at large i think is super meaningful it matches very much with the type of thing the board was looking for i commend

012that and i i truly believe that not only is education foundational to our community and our economy but by doing that work we can create resonance and expand what we can do as a as a school district so i thank you for your comments tonight all around much appreciated uh with that uh i'm gonna bring us to 4.0 which is community comments and this is an opportunity for the public to comment and it's for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated deadline those who registered to speak will be allotted two minutes this evening and i believe our list is somewhere in the order of 24 to 27 people and so i will call up the first person and that would be miss casey lindsay welcome all right good evening board and

013thank you for allowing public comment at tonight's meeting at the board meeting on october 12 2021 there was robust public comment which i applaud but it was repeatedly claimed that all of this is normal it is not normal to not see faces expressions or the smiles of teachers and friends this has even been confirmed by the american academy of pediatrics one week ago when they released a statement tuesday october 2019 2021 i quote them directly as health professionals we have witnessed soaring rates of mental health challenges among children adolescents and their families over the course of the coven 19 pandemic they are also citing at this time right now as a critical tipping point during the uip meeting on september 28th also 2021 it was discussed how crucial clear desk space is for educational success

014and i feel like that has been lacking i've spoken to several parents in psd and i have their permission to share the sad state of affairs concerning education currently especially while being quarantined if psd's motto or mission is educate every child every day how is it possible that while quarantined students are given a packet of information to complete with zero instructional or access to online tools when quarantined students families that i spoke with returned to school basically they had a folder of work sent to the office when picked up as well as a few assignments on the learning page on the school's page she turned in all her work when she was allowed to go back to school her teacher then proceeded to email us stating she was very concerned how far behind she was

015that she had missed two math sections and two big writing assignments this was due to her being told she could not attend school there is no offering of zoom in or anything to be involved and learn the lessons that are being taught it is disheartening frustrating and embarrassing as a student and i'd argue it will further hurt students educate every child every day even when quarantined thank you thank you for your comments okay and next up we will have mr jeff alterheiden welcome thank you my name is jeff alderheide from wellington colorado it's come to my attention some school board members view parents questioning their policies as extremists two weeks ago 16 pooter school district employees signed up for public comment that same night the public health officer for lama county tom gonzalez presented a

016coven 19 update to this board days before the october 12 meeting the president of the pooter education association sent the following email to unknown recipients and it read hi folks the school board is very concerned with community comment on the october 12th meeting being overrun with a bunch of extremist views they're looking for 12 to 15 educators to sign up and let them know how the year is going how students are doing and how teachers are doing this is to the board members your bylaws state members must have loyalty to the citizens unconflicted by loyalties to staff other organizations and any self-interest you have failed to the president of the board and those of you in the room i sent a message to the board of education on october 18th to clarify which board members

017were referenced in this email i received no response i sent the follow-up communication on october 24th with no response and i'm here tonight to ask which board members conspired with the president of the pooter education association to silence our concerns and i would like a formal and written response to my question by the end of business tomorrow and i think whoever's involved should issue a public apology to all the parents of us in this room that's all thank you for your comments number three is miss nikki galbraith welcome thank you it's a little sobering um despite what the pooter education association and association recruited teachers said to you guys last week at the board meeting things are not normal in schools do you think it's normal to have fight clubs at schools on a regular

018basis is it normal that there are more fights in the high school this year than ever before is it normal that the police are being called to break up fights in the park is it normal that there is only one bathroom open at one of the high schools for some time because there was so much damage done to the bathrooms that they had to keep only one bathroom open while fixing the others flooding from sewer lines being broken toilets painted red soap dispensers ripped off the walls is this normal these kids have been asked to protect the adults for over a year and a half who is protecting them you guys are supposed to be doing that and we apparently extremist parents are not doing our job so all the mental health programs in the

019world can't fix what your policies are doing to these kids i am asking for you guys to consider thinking outside the box and we parents show up here it's the same group every other week can we have a meeting can we talk through this we are ignored can you guys think outside the box and bring us in to the community because this is our community and these are our children and we love them and we will never stop because they are our baby bears and we are the mama and papa bears thank you thank you falbright and number four is heather ladenpara welcome thank you hi thank you at the last board meeting brian kingsley asked what can this district do to better serve you i will tell you the district could start by not

020shaming parents who are sincerely concerned about their children and come before you to share their concerns sending campaign flyers to households throughout the district with pictures that portray parents as extremists is divisive and misleading the person portrayed in these flyers is not even apparent in this district how else can psd do better abide by your own code of conduct represent and listen to all of your constituents don't stereotype parents and attempt to shame them in their own community and don't contribute to political the political divide in this country your views are narrow and assumptive and you have made it clear that you don't care about understanding parents unless they agree with you for example i lost my brother last year to cancer after a over 25-year battle with hiv and aids i went to fort

021collins high school in the 80s then nicknamed by high because many of my friends who were very courageous were coming out at that time when it was unprecedented i grew up here my parents helped build this community i started my schooling at tavelli and i went all the way through psd until graduation i'm not a racist i'm not anti-lgbtq or any of the other things that you're trying to imply with your smear campaign i am however very concerned about the health of my children and i'm very concerned with the medicalization of children in schools yet thanks to you i've been stereotyped in this with this flyer in my own community did you think you would shame me into backing down you do not represent me or this community well you obviously have no real understanding

022of the people who come before you that question your policies you've made no attempt to understand instead of trying to instead of trying to do so you've created a black mark on our entire district with your politically motivated actions i think a formal a written apology is in order to be printed in the colorado on and i also think that if any one of you on this flyer are elected or re-elected that as a show of good faith you should hold a public forum with the parents who have been coming before you to voice their concerns and allow for a dialogue thank you i'd also like an in-person meeting alone with kristen drake your time has expired okay thank you for your comments number five is miss kelly holdridge welcome hey guys um sorry that

023i'm also here holding this i'm sure i won't be the last one i'm actually here on a different reason um this was my rally and um i spoke with one of you before and after and i was told that it was an impressive protest that was well handled it was loud and impassioned from what i was from what i saw it was controlled and as such meaningful later on it was said i know there was some concern about time and nervous nervousness about possible negative behavior but everyone walked away feeling the protest was well handled so i guess my question is were you lying then or are you lying now are we extremists now because it goes along with your political aspirations this is ridiculous you were there you know this did not happen this

024lady is not from here and she was obviously protesting vaccines nothing to do with what we had going on at that rally um thanks for ruining everything thank you miss holdridge number six is aaron rambler welcome two points and i think i'm not alone in them masks and the abuse of public comment i'm a mother of three pooter high school graduates and one elementary student who is fortunate enough to find refuge from your mask mandate at a local state charter non-psd mask simply i ask that you apply the recent science there are now over more than 65 studies negating the efficacy of math squaring please update and educate yourself and then maybe try some simple measures for cleaning and addressing covid like maybe wiping this podium in between everyone that speaks because hand washing is

025key when you're trying to keep everyone safe as lovely as your bracelet thing is maybe not passing them all through the public for every one of us to touch before we all hand them to each other but we pretend like these are going to save us and we do these ridiculous things that are not addressed misses like this make me question your actual commitment to reducing the spread of covid i wonder how many other measures you're missing and apparently many because the coveted numbers in your schools are on the average or 20 times higher than that of my child's nearly mask-free charter i think you should have to explain that one the other thing is public comment many parents are disappointed about that email that was sent out stating your concerns about the august 12

026meeting being overrun by extremist views followed by asking union teachers to take up public comment slots that expressed a myriad of useless statements statements like how long they work where they work go hawks even poetic statements about their coffee and the air temperature followed by an egregious use of the word normal to describe pooter high school i think the public would be appalled to know that the normal that normal school has roughly 1200 children and two student bathrooms and i think you were really poorly represented in the teachers that spoke thank you miss ramler your time has expired much appreciated okay and next up is miss katie cook welcome hi thank you um forgive me for speaking quickly i feel like i have a lot to cover i'd like to address a meeting last month

027when superintendent kingsley pointedly stated that the district does not teach critical race theory when superintendent kingsley stated that the district does not teach crt can he please explain how he defines crt so parents can have a clear understanding critical race theorists argue that all white people are racist and perpetuate systems of white supremacy so i'm concerned when i saw psd communication recommending the book white fragility by robyn d'angelo in this book miss deangelo states white identity is inherently racist white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy if psd does not teach crt why would the district recommend this book crt theorists also believe that america was founded on racism slavery and white supremacy so i'm concerned when i see miss amora promoting training through the district advisory board that states the foundation

028of this nation is rooted in these types of ideas and understandings by the white people who stepped on killed disenfranchise and oppress all people of color in order to maintain their supremacy and power critical race theorists believe the state should actively discriminate against groups that deemed are deemed privileged and support policies involving racial quotas so i'm concerned when i see a fossil-rich high school 9th grade english assignment asking students what is privilege who has the most privilege in our country in our town in our classroom how are you feeling right now about your privilege in this classroom again may i ask for mr kingsley's clear definition of crt will this board host public forums to listen to parents concerns regarding crt and its related theories will this school board hold a public vote to affirm

029that crt is in its related philosophies will not be taught in pueder school district i believe that representatives thank you very much for your comments okay number eight is mr brady beale welcome yeah good evening i am brady beal and i am running for the school board i would like to introduce myself i'm a parent of three psd children one of whom has already graduated from pueder high school my family has lived in fort collins for the past 22 years and we are proud to call it home we love traveling to national parks and hiking on natural trails especially here near fort collins i believe that we need to pay all attention teachers competitively in order to retain our current teachers and to recruit new teachers i believe that we need to get back to

030the basics of reading writing and arithmetic all students should be reading proficiently by the end of third grade so that from that point forward they can read to learn once basic reading writing and math skills have been mastered early on in elementary school then it will be far easier for the student to move on to other subjects that interest and inspire them we need to prepare all students to be able to think critically so they are ready for whatever career that they choose i believe in the dignity and respect of everyone and that all students should have an equal opportunity to be the best that they possibly can be in school and in life i think that is critical that everyone be heard students teachers and parents thank you for your time and support thanks

031for your comments mr veal and number nine would be miss tasha carr welcome here's the flyer again vermont's parents have been speaking out against boe policies that are harmful to their children what has been the response of the school board ms draper miss reed and mrs amora sent out this campaign material calling us anti-science extremists founding dangerous conspiracy theories this is laughable i have a phd in biology and a 30-year career as a research scientist but draper reed and zamora didn't stop there their campaign flyer also refers to the doj dispatching the fbi to ensure school staff can work without fear that these three members are now using the disgraced actions of the nsba and the doj as campaign fodder shows poor judgment indeed the flyer clearly violates the boe code of conduct which states

032members must have loyalty to the citizens unconflicted by loyalties to the staff other organizations and any self-interest as stated earlier tonight we have evidence that there's collusion between some members of the board and the pea this is not conspiracy theory if you stated in here we have the receipts does the board believe this is quote ethical business-like and shows appropriate decorum as defined in the boe code of conduct i call on president fev to investigate this matter and hold these board members accountable i am submitting an official written complaint under boa boe bylaws gp 3.12 this flyer will intimidate parents infringes on their first amendment rights is an egregious violation of the boe code of conduct and it demonstrates that draper reed zamora and their running mate brokish in this room are incapable of representing

033this community on the board of education thank you ms carr and number 10 would be miss danielle drew charts yeah thank you for the help welcome so i wanted to speak tonight to thank the board and superintendent kingsley for being proactive and making decisions around masking and covid that prioritize both keeping our kids in school and keeping them safe as a mom to twin first graders i can speak firsthand to all the challenges that came with virtual learning and the inconsistency that last year brought having kindergarteners learn virtually was not ideal but we made it work but what really highlighted to me how much all the craziness was affecting my kids was how upset they got last november when school had to return to full virtual learning from hybrid they were so clearly struggling at

034that point we had all the meltdowns and big emotions that at six were hard for them to process having this year start and remain in person has been amazing for them not only are they thriving academically but emotionally they are back to being happy seven-year-olds being back in school in person has been the very best thing for my children they love getting to be with their friends and teachers every day and as a mom it feels so good to know that they are doing it as safely as possible thank you for following the large body of science out there that tells us masking is one of the best ways to keep our kids both safe and in school in person i'm proud to have my kids in a district that took the lead on this

035rather than waiting till it became necessary thank you for making the tough calls so that our kids can have as normal of a year as possible my seven-year-olds love their school their teachers and honestly they don't even notice their mask keep making the tough calls and know there are so many of us parents out here who are grateful and support you thank you very much for your comments number 12 would be miss jessica krauss welcome thank you i hope you didn't start my time man here i too have these i was going to speak tonight about all the drugs in our high schools boys girls making out in the schools boys and girls smoking in the bathroom girls violating every dress code in the student student handbook and many other topics that our sweet innocent

036freshmen get to experience while under the care of your facilities we don't care about all of that anyway as long as they pull up their mask what i am going to talk about is this let me first say that i am politically non-binary since i was old enough to vote i have been disgusted and disheartened by the smear campaigns of both political parties because of that i have never once got into politics all my life i have stuck up for the helpless the hurting those who had no voice and now i'm considered a con extremist conspiracy theorist domestic terrorist for simply sticking up for human rights parental rights constitutional rights and the rights to question a narrative i'm not anti-science i get my information from world-renowned neurosurgeons cardiologists pediatricians ob gyns virologists immunologists and doctors

037who have won nobel peace prizes i'm also a mother and as every parent in this room and watching online can attest to our job as a parent is to protect our children we are not here to target the school or the school board we are addressing you with our fears concerns for our children in this community who are we supposed to address the cashier at walmart shame on you ms draper and the rest of this board the cea pea and the ace for attacking publicly bullying and targeting us as something more than concerned parents in 2000 safe school planning sb 11 133 and bowling prevention sb01080 were passed by the state legislature and now required of colorado schools this is now considered safe to tell colorado mr kingsley this is my verbal report that i

038fear for my safety and the safety of other parents who are speaking up to protect their children's rights i fear for our children that they will be treated differently by those who support the current board members ideas i have had family and friends thank you miss krauss your time has expired thank you for your comments i started my time before i was ready okay thank you very much okay number 13 is mr darius bell okay number 14 mr jim brokish welcome thank you my name is jim brokish i'm running for so i'm going to turn this a little my name's jim brokish i'm running for school board but i'm here tonight as a citizen and my comments tonight are more for the community than for the board and for the administration because i think each

039of you already knows of the things i'm going to talk about i think most of us felt that once our kids were physically back in school that things would snap to normal pretty quickly and it was a good hope and it's been a wonderful thing to get our kids back in school but things aren't yet normal staffing shortages across the system are impacting all district employees which in turn impacts our kids we're short paraprofessionals subs for teachers bus drivers custodians health techs mental health staff and integrated services for special ed and i'm sure there's other areas too my daughter teaches in the windsor's district and one day one of the language arch teachers at her school when faced with covering yet one more class that normally a sub would have covered he just decided to

040quit a sad story the shortages are causing stress across all school districts so i guess my message to the community is be extra kind to the teachers and the other workers in our district cut them some slack say thank you give them a gift card write them a note their jobs have gotten harder and we as a community need to help thanks thank you for your comments mr brokish number 15 is miss karen artel please correct my pronunciation welcome thank you my name is karen r artel i live in fort collins i have four grandchildren in the pooh school district i support pst's efforts to protect students from contracting the copied virus with public health measures and indoor mass requirement i've been wearing a mask when grocery shopping and i've taken other protective measures because

041i have grandchildren who up to this point are not yet eligible for the code vaccine i want to do my part to protect them from contracting the virus they've been so happy to be back in school wearing a mask is not a big deal for them so far this year they have not had to quarantine or miss in-person school because of the protective measures their school has taken i've been able to start volunteering in the youngest grandchildren's or twins classroom if they contracted kovid they would have to stay home from school for an extended time which would set them back academically and they would miss their friends um i'm hoping as more people are vaccinated including younger children that will soon be go back to not having wearing masks and businesses and eventually possibly in

042the schools too i appreciate your efforts to protect psd students thank you thank you for your comments ms artel number 16 is kristen stolte welcome thank you president fev superintendent kingsley and members of the board my name is kristen stolte i'm the principal at linton elementary and i'm the president of the pooter association for school executives first pea and pace would like to say a huge shout out to our classified employees while hr is trying to move mountains to find to fill open positions we have countless classified employees who show up every day they often take on extra work they make sure our students and our staff are getting exactly what they need so to our custodians our food service workers our facilities staff our bus drivers and our school-based support staff we want to

043say thank you our numbers of students in quarantine are down more than 96 percent our masking policies our protocols in place and our vaccination rates are all contributing to that we are keeping our kids in school which is everyone's priority our teachers and our staff are at their very best when they have students in front of them we've been able to bring back so many experiences and so many things for our students and for our staff we see them building strong relationships they're able to do clubs and activities this is a priority for our district in this district we also serve a lot of families who often work two or three jobs taking time off is not an option without getting pay cuts paydocs many of our families are paycheck to paycheck shifting to remote

044almost overnight for numerous days is so hard on our families reducing those work disruptions is also a celebration we need to celebrate reducing the quarantines by 96 percent we need to recognize the factors that have led to that and we need to reflect on reflect on why all of that is so important thank you for making choices to keep our kids in school thank you miss dolphy okay number 18 is mr mark fuchs welcome okay i'm taller um hypocrisy the definition being the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform to me this is the perfect example of psd right now last week my extremely shy quiet daughter who does everything not to get in trouble was sent to the principal's office for her mask falling

045down under her nose for less than 20 seconds she missed the end of one class in the beginning of another while waiting for the principal to address why her mask was down which she replied it fell the teacher set me here before i could put it back up we have also learned that for children that have experienced this more than once in a day or sent home meanwhile we have the mayor visit our school on three separate occasions to give a speech without wearing a mask when this was brought to the principal's attention by a fellow teacher the principal nodded and let the mayor continue without wearing his mask this folks is the height of hypocrisy we punish our children who are doing the best to follow the rules even the ones risking their health

046while those in power do whatever they please it just shows that these policies that you claim are based on morals are a sham you claim to believe in the science when it supports your agenda but even failed to follow this yourselves we now have children walking around schools with mouth sores face covered in acne afraid and silenced last meeting we had all these teachers speaking for all the children touting how normal it is how happy they are to be there and that's that's no big deal i can promise you they did not speak for the majority of the children most children go along to get along like my daughter most children are taught to be respectful listen to authority without talking back what these teachers are are touting is respectful children to afraid to voice

047their true feelings parents please open your eyes to the truth these are facts events that have happened in the last week the people sitting up here on their pedestals do not have the best interest for our children they sit here grandstanding about how great they are for wearing masks when in reality it's pretty obviously don't really care i guess it's nice to be the mayor thank you mr fuchs and number 19 is mr brian blakely welcome thank you very much my name is brian blakely my wife and i moved to fort collins in 1976. our three children went through the peter school district system and received what i believe to be a world-class education they have attended and graduated post-graduated as well from some of the finest community schools and colleges in our country so

048we are grateful for the efforts of pooter school district and i know for a fact that you are well intentioned and trying to continue this but the challenges facing the district parents and students today are so much more daunting than ever before we live in a deeply divided country and those divisions have reached into this very community just witness the vehemence and the vitriol and the division that is expressed by so many people during the public comment period and i believe this stems from the fact that we so many of us have lost sight of the basic principle on which our nation was founded we are all in this together we are we the people and we though and those words are encased in the opening words to our constitution how many of us can

049readily bring to mind the opening words of the constitution most of us can remember we the people of the united states in order to form a more perfect union and that's about it we are also here to establish justice ensure domestic tranquility provide for the common defense promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity but we routinely recite the pledge of allegiance which is not in the constitution it's not part of the supreme law of the land and so i would encourage every board member to lead by example and start to recite the preamble to the country mr blakely your time has expired and to try and incul that thank you as well thank you for your comments thank you very much yeah okay number 20 is mr

050tom griggs welcome good evening my name is tom griggs i'm a 21-year resident of district d in peter school district and a candidate for the district d seat in the current election i speak today about the importance of deep educational expertise on the board the psd board has a long history of outstanding public educators serving on it who have understood the importance of a truly public education at a deep level two of them who are recent former board members of the psd board tom balczek and ml johnson both heartily endorsed my candidacy for the board jessica zamora who was up for election right now has a k-12 teaching background and i support her for the district g seat but a single board member with teaching experience provides neither sufficient depth nor breadth of educational expertise

051and advocacy on the board my personal qualifications include a phd in education being a now retired professor at unc and teaching today's and tomorrow's teachers in fact many of my former students are working in the psd school system right now in psd schools i'm also currently in a ka public school teacher myself and have a long history of educational advocacy at the state national and international levels this background will critically enhance the depth and breadth of educational expertise on the board our strength is in our diversity and an effective board should be comprised of individuals with a range of different backgrounds and skill sets but right now the balance is off although a public school district should never be run like a business psd is in the business of education and its board leadership should

052fully reflect the different sectors of the community i encourage you to visit my website at tom griggs for psd.org and learn about my perspective on the pressing issues the district is facing thank you for your time i'm tom griggs and i hope i've earned the votes of the residents of puter school district so that i will have the chance to serve alongside you after the election is over on november 2nd thank you thank you mr griggs number 21 is miss amber karhoff welcome tonight i just wanted to share what teaching equity in the classroom looks like since there seem to be so many questions and some misunderstanding around that concept let me begin by stating that the teachers in psd teach to the colorado state standards which you can look up online at any time

053for those that don't understand what equity means here are some definitions for you equality and equity get confused a lot equality means that everyone is treated exactly the same way regardless of individual needs or differences an example of this in the classroom would be having consistent behavioral expectations for all students equity on the other hand means everyone is provided with what they need to succeed since we all come from different backgrounds different experiences and different cultures equity is very important in school equity is why we have ieps and 504s we're meeting the needs of those students equity is why we have food bank programs free coats and boots at title 1 schools free and reduced lunches it's taught through literature and history we include a variety of books that represent all students family types and

054experiences it's taught by having conversations your students may engage in very challenging conversations they may end up reading about different perspectives and they may end up learning about other cultures this is simply learning it's learning about equity and diversity thank you for your comments okay number 22 is miss catherine colino welcome thank you i've been a parent within putter school district since 2008 with one child who graduated last year one who attended for ten and a half years and two currently attending canard middle school i'm here to comment on the importance of returning to out of travel for student leadership classes the travel portion within these leadership classes provides the capstone to classroom learning engages the students in service activities and immerses them in a cultural experience like no other sorry it's hard to breathe

055the travel experience connects the students to learning within a dynamic hands-on environment and builds their sense of belonging which is even more important this year to ensure students are re-engaging with education in a meaningful way as an example of the effort and focus that canard's global leadership classes exhibiting in preparation of their trip the class led efforts to collect over 23 000 pounds of food for csu's annual hands around the oval fundraiser to benefit the larimer county food bank the students enthusiasm is impressive and that's why we support their travel i understand planning in today's environment is challenging and i'm here to represent parents who are willing to partner with teachers and administrators who support travel opportunities we made the choice during the height of the pandemic to enroll our children in these classes that

056include travel we understand there will always be risk and we are willing to support the program to proceed in a safe way please continue to encourage these amazing programs that we are so fortunate to have thanks to our teachers who go above and beyond thank you for your time tonight thank you for your comments number 23 is miss diane profit welcome thank you i'm here tonight to ask the psd board of education to provide specific scientific research and data as well as peer-reviewed studies to back up their statements about the effect of mask wearing six plus hours a day that doesn't include riding the bus with a mask or practicing and playing sports after school why does the board of education you know unilaterally say that mass do not impact our children's physical mental intellectual

057social and mental health it's been 18 months where is the research we would like to see it we can't see it because it's not there there is no study that says mass work the community knows this every day more and more people are waking up the parents in the community are tired of fear mongering oh look here the number of deaths oh look over here the number of new cases oh the hospital numbers are rising childhood deaths death rates from covid remain almost non-existent and yet the children are once again political pawns they are being played by the very people that are supposed to protect them who is there to look after the emotional physical health i find it deeply disturbing and unprofessional to hear psd teachers profess that mass have awarded the children the

058opportunity to attend school are these teachers clinical psychologists because i didn't hear these credentials not only were these teachers condescending in insensitive and judgmental but they were wrong fight clubs are popping up in high school vandalism deep depression and anxiety that's what's happening in our schools so without longitudinal peer-reviewed studies regarding the physical and mental health of prolonged math squaring it just makes their comments seem even more ridiculous i believe that the board members and the teachers that spoke are irresponsible masking the children is child abuse thank you miss prophet number 24 is miss gina furcado welcome thank you good evening i've testified several times i'm sure you know my name see my face you recognize me i've emailed you um i've kept things kind respectful and objective however due to the choices of a

059few of the candidates of this board that were have been made in the past few weeks you made it personal you publicly smeared our names and reputation within our community by your ads making us out to look like radical and potentially dangerous parents the woman that you showed in this photo is not part of our community and has no stake in what takes place here she is a parent from greeley the parents whom you who have testified over the past year and a half from all that i have seen in here have been respectful direct and have brought forth pertinent information have asked poignant questions of the board they have not attacked you verbally nor smeared your names publicly although there is a lot that could be used to do so your actions validate the

060reason that i left teaching years ago i was tired of the politics of the board and local teachers association i wanted to teach my subject matter help kids come to love learning a foreign language and different cultures i love being an advocate for my esl students and their parents as well i gave up my evenings to teach english to parents and my students so they could have greater opportunities to thrive in the work and social workplace socially however the extreme agenda of my local school board and teachers association forced me to rethink my involvement in public education i received anonymous letters in my school mailbox regarding that were abusive and demeaning i was chastised by the president of the local school board for not joining in with the stream agenda pushed by them and other

061extreme thinking teachers you see i learned quickly after becoming a teacher educating kids in my area of expertise supporting them emotionally and personally was not important to the board nor the teachers association so i left i never looked back your recent actions supporting your personal agendas and your desire to keep power to support your agenda is what is causing the sleeping giants to wake up and become involved your smear attack furcado your time has expired much appreciated okay number 25 on the list is misty uh miss cindy oddenwald oh welcome i'm sorry thank you um so i'm improvising because quite a few people have already addressed how inappropriate the flyer was that some of our board members put out i have not spoken yet at all this year i have in previous years we've been

062in fort collins since 94. my kids attended psd schools part of the time when that wasn't appropriate for them we did some homeschooling um but as i've been listening to the board meetings this year i've listened to all of them so far this year and i just feel so heavy-hearted and sad because i am hearing parents trying and trying to tell you that their children are not doing well that their children are hurting that they're suffering the parents are coming to you now you can i think it's okay that you can disagree with what to do for the district but the response that i've been hearing from the board and from the 16 staff members who came to the last meeting is basically gaslighting you basically said to those parents who said hey my kid's

063not doing very well we have to do something different and you said no it's fine nobody else feels that way all of my kids are fine with masks our kids are not hurting our kids don't mind okay maybe yours don't but that's not how as an educator that's not how i approach a parent who comes to me and says their child has a problem if they say my child is hurting i say okay let's talk tell me more about what's not working for your child what am i doing that maybe is contributing to that what do you think i could do different but i'm not hearing that dialogue and it makes me really sad for this district because there are lots and lots of very skilled excellent teachers in this district staff at all levels

064that really care so thank you very much for your comments yeah and finally this evening number 26 is miss danny lawrence welcome thank you for the opportunity my name is danny lawrence and i'm the mom of two children here in the district and i'm alumni myself my son is a visually impaired student at blevins middle school and that's what i'm here to talk about tonight is special education and integrated services in september our local media paper ran a front page story about the lack of paraprofessionals in the district that number was confirmed to be at least 30 by your by your director and since then i've been waiting for a human resources or integrated services update presented to this board and haven't seen it and make someone like me wonder if you all think about

065iep implementation in federal law and the consequences of that type of shortage as a board of education you have a fiduciary responsibility in addition to a moral obligation to make sure that children are getting a free and appropriate public education while also protecting the financial liabilities of the school district with 30 pairs short and no information being shared how is this being accomplished personally in the past 90 days my family has dealt with a lack of services unqualified staff a violation of the least restrictive environment and ferpa violations so i'm here tonight to please ask please please please put integrated services on the agenda as an agendaized item so that you can get an update about what it's like to be a parent like me trying to get iep services from this school district please

066we need your representation thank you so much great thank you all to those of you who showed up this evening with your public comments um that brings us to item 5.0 on the agenda which is board committee reports and board members i know we had a time at the dinner session but i'll open it up to committee reports if there are this evening okay let's hang on for just one second and let people clear out okay let me open that up again board members are there any committee reports this evening okay seeing none we'll move on to item 6.0 which is the consent agenda and uh would anybody like to pull anything from consent this evening okay seeing none uh could i get a motion on the floor nate go ahead i move move that

067the board approve and adopt the recommended items on the consent agenda thank you i have a second from dj anderson and lexie i'll take a roll call vote please dj anderson aye nate donovan aye christian draper aye christophe aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion pass seven to zero thank you very much that brings us to action items and this evening we have one action item that's 7.1 and it's a national homeless youth awareness month resolution could i get a motion to put that resolution on the floor kristin let's see uh i recommend the approval of a resolution in support of november as national homeless youth awareness month 2021. okay very good and a second from nate donovan and with that kristen would you like to read the resolution for us

068please a resolution in support of november as national homeless youth awareness month whereas national homeless youth awareness month was first declared in november of 2007. since then november has been a time to acknowledge those children and families experiencing hunger and homelessness do i'm sorry are we going to do an introduction first okay all right whereas in the 2019-2020 school year 1290 k-12 students in pooter school district were experiencing homelessness and then in the 2020-2021 school year there were 1 312 and there are 889 as of october 11th 2021 whereas the mckinney-vento act is designated to provide students sorry is designed to provide students experiencing homelessness with resources and protections that remove all educational barriers with emphasis on educational enrollment attendance and success and whereas the purpose of the proclamation is to educate the public about

069the many reasons students are hungry and homeless including the shortage of affordable housing within the pooter school district and to encourage support for homeless assistance service providers as well as community service opportunities for students and school service organizations and whereas there are many organizations committed to providing shelter support services meals and food supplies to students in the pooder school school district experiencing homelessness including mcbackpack food program the food bank of laramie county the united way of laramie county the family housing network catholic charities and housing partners such as housing catalyst neighbor to neighbor care housing and others and whereas the porter school district board of education staff and community recognize that hunger and homelessness continues to be a serious problem for many students and families in the pooter school district now therefore be it resolved

070that the pooter school district board of education hereby proclaims november 2021 as national homeless youth awareness month be it further resolved that the pruder school district board of education encourages our community to recognize that many students and families do not have housing and adequate food and need support from our community with assistance from both private and public nonprofit service entities please take time this month to find ways to help our homeless youth in our community thank you kristen and with that i'll turn it over to you doctor our superintendent kingsley members of the board this evening psd mckinney vento program specialist miss whitney reed will speak to this resolution i'm really grateful that she's here whitney does an incredible job amongst others in our community supporting students and families who are experiencing homelessness welcome whitney

071good evening superintendent kingsley and board of education my name is whitney reed and i'm the mckinney-vento program specialist in the department of language culture and equity i'd like to start by thanking the board for recognizing homeless youth awareness month throughout this simple act you are supporting our most vulnerable students and families by spreading awareness of youth youth homelessness throughout our community this awareness is a critical component of addressing needs within our community and our schools and ultimately providing the necessary resources that are essential to ensure the success of psd students who are experiencing homelessness and housing and security mckinney vento is a federal law that requires all school districts to identify and support students in our community who don't have fixed regular or adequate housing on average we identify over 1100 students a year in

072pluter school district our mckinney-vento students and their families live and survive in a variety of circumstances ranging from being doubled up with family or friends because they've lost or cannot afford housing to staying in emergency and long-term shelters and safe houses to living out of hotels rvs cars campgrounds and even on the street the cause of their homelessness is wide-ranging but it doesn't take much to tip the skills for many families the loss of a job a serious medical issue a youth experiencing family conflict or fleeing domestic violence can all be tipping points for families living paycheck to paycheck the kovid 19 pandemic has had a significant impact on our students and families as well more than a year and a half in the consequences of the pandemic are still being felt for most vulnerable

073families a week or two of work lost to a positive cova test or to a precautionary covet quarantine can be the difference between making rent or having enough to cover a hotel stay or coming short for the month and having nowhere else to turn as you can imagine students facing youth homelessness encounter a host of barriers to accessing education technological access a stable home environment in which to study and work and transportation to and from school are things that an average psd student takes for granted yet there are all things that present significant barriers to education for those experiencing homelessness and that's and that's to say and that's to say nothing of the mental and physical barriers posed by hunger stress and trauma that often go hand in hand with not having a home psd's

074programming focuses on removing barriers wherever and whenever possible via the free and reduced lunch programs immediate enrollment busing material assistance community partnerships and extra educational supports that lift up homeless youth and allow students who are experiencing homelessness and equitable opportunity to achieve success and pursue post-secondary options that work cannot be done without the incredible support and effort of so many amazing psd professionals from our mckinney-vento context that we have at every site nutrition service staff bus drivers and routers to teachers recognizing the needs of our students donate to our program and community non-profits that work towards sustainable futures we thank you for their for your partnership finally it's important to recognize and celebrate the families that we serve they continuously inspire us with their resiliency determination and love for their children by acknowledging homeless youth

075awareness month and supporting our mckinney-vento program psd's board of education helps makes all these efforts possible and make a huge difference in the lives of families we serve so for that we thank you very much okay with that i'm going to open it up to board comments questions anything else i would just echo the the thanks uh for the work that you're doing also and and all the staff that that i know the your peers and and john are doing to help our students in need so i think that's that's great work and and we appreciate it very much thank you any other comments dj i i want to just take a moment to to thank not only our staff but all the great partners that we have in our community it's it is such

076a huge problem uh to try to be able to find the right way to meet these needs of these families and i am overwhelmed at times by the generosity of some people to step up and help and i really thought your comment about the parents was was great too because those parents are stepping outside themselves a little bit and realizing they need some help to make sure their kids are getting their education and and that that's a huge step and so it is it is a problem that i wish was not there and that we could easily solve um but i'm so happy that our school district is plays a vital role and works hard to help those kids so i think you and you and your team for all the work that you guys

077do and thank you so much to our partners out there in the community that help us great comment thank you dj other board members kristen yeah i'd want to echo that sentiment dj i'm just thanking our our partners um and making this visible i think a lot of times it's easy to ignore it's easy to pretend not to see and i think that psd and their partners make sure that all of our students are seen and they're heard and they're you know treated equitably and and equally and that's something that's huge for us and huge for those students so thank you for that um thank you for for doing that and i truly appreciate that and thank you to the community partners that do that as well thank you kristin the board members go ahead

078carolyn so i had the opportunity this weekend to talk to a mother who had moved here about two months ago from arizona her boyfriend or had gotten a job up here and so they decided to move up here because when they were in arizona they couldn't find a good job that they could live on so they moved up here expecting to be able to get an apartment and maybe get their get their life going again but the mother had had an eviction during covid and so they could not get into any housing nobody would take them and so they found themselves unexpectedly homeless and they had two small children and they're attending one of our district schools and the mother shared with me her experience with the district and the services that she was able

079to access for her student who had an iep and and the different um service services that the council helped to get hooked up with and they were hoping to work well with a counselor to get into some kind of permanent home housing but what she shared with me was is that it was like so overwhelming when she got here when she realized that things were not going to work out like they expected they ended up homeless they had had brought up a camper they ended up having to sell it they're living in a hotel right now and these are the things that happen to people these are real real stories about when people get here and things that happen to them that they don't expect and you know she did not know when she was

080talking to me that i was on the school board when she was sharing with me her experiences but i was really touched about how many people had reached out to her to help her and so i really appreciate everything the district did for her as well thank you kristen go ahead rob yeah i just want to emphasize the last statement in the resolution which is about reaching you know what we can all do to help these folks right i mean it as i said earlier it's terrific and what carolyn emphasizes terrific what the district is able to do but each of us as individuals is able to help as well there are plenty of volunteer opportunities out there i volunteer every week with mcbackpack which is a program that helps to provide food for some

081of our kids who are who are hungry there you could join that group there are plenty of other groups that that help pardon me yeah matthew's house there are plenty of other other organizations and groups that are trying to help and they need bodies and they need money so i encourage you to think how you can help as well thank you other board comments okay um i think i'll say something slightly different i echo thank you mr reed for presenting uh kristen for graciously doing the work to bring these resolutions before us i think it's it's vital that we slow down every once in a while with these resolutions to remind ourselves what we're doing in the district but i truly appreciate once again the comments you opened up with today mr kingsley i view

082the work of the district to be an investment in our economy in our children and what it takes to serve every person in the in the community working against homelessness is all encompassing and it takes action and i think our board in uh supporting the work of you and your staff in reaching out into the community and doing what i hope is going to amplify the services we have is vital to the solution we will sit here uh years into the future doing this but i believe that this work that we're undertaking will make a big difference so uh i thank you for coming forward and speaking to the cause for the board to bring this resolution but most importantly for the district and the staff that are going to do the work to carry

083us forward and make a big difference uh if there are no more comments i would turn it over to a roll call the police dj anderson aye nate donovan hi christian draper aye christophe aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion pass 7-0 excellent that brings us to 8.0 on the agenda those are our work session topics for the evening first work section topic is 8.1 which is the first quarter school resource officer presentation and progress report i would call that i will turn that over to you mr kingston members of the board this evening executive director of operations matt bryant and assistant superintendent of secondary school scott nielsen will present information on the school resource officer program that will include first quarter data information about completed trainings and an overview on

084next steps i'd also like to take a point of privilege to welcome and thank lieutenant robert cook from larimer county sheriff's office sergeant robert wincoup from timothy police department sergeant laura lunsford from the fort collins police services and lieutenant kelly weaver for collins police services for being in attendance this evening for your partnership and thoughtfulness in this work good evening president fev board members superintendent kingsley thanks for the opportunity to talk with you tonight to give you an update to work through some of what we promised i think as we as we stood here last spring and set a new path for our partnership with with uh law enforcement agencies from from timnit our larimer county friends and from fort collins and so matt and i will try to to give you an update give

085you uh a showing of where we think we are and uh and then disconnect from that a little bit and share a little bit of our own data through first quarter to ground us tonight we want to talk about some of the things you'll see in the presentation so that you have some idea or some of our acronyms will make sense you're going to see us refer to the sops which are standard operating procedures that school resource officers are sros fcps our fort collins police services dhs is department of human services calls and assists are ways we refer to the calls that the police or the sros get to step into some incident and the page you see on dispositions is how we respond or in this case the dispositions will be how our fort

086collins police services have responded to to calls or asks to assist you may remember when we did our presentation at the culmination of the work we did last year which as we start sit here and think about all the work that was done over the last year it was a great deal i think the work that the community group did helped us to think about what is it we need to shift how do we need to change our practices what is some of the the opportunities we have for improvement and i think what you'll see tonight as we talk as i talk and as matt talks as we talk about the partnership i hope that you see some of what learning occurred last year how it's impacted some of the information we're able to produce

087tonight we couldn't have produced for this group a year ago much of that is a testimony to the work that that fort collins pd has done and larimer county and timnith are in the process of of doing the same work we really appreciate their partnership but last year as we talked about our plan going forward we laid out a rhythm for this year and what we said was we were going to land the standard operating procedures at a meeting with you in june we were going to do a training with our staff in july and then we would get into this rhythm of a steering committee that would meet we would follow the steering committee up with however that steering committee saw what we were looking at as information we would think about what training

088we needed to proceed with and then we would culminate that i'll call it a triad with an update to the board we sit there tonight in october with our first update to the board we'll repeat that cycle two more times before we uh step in front of you in may with what changes we may need to make with a contract and our standard operating procedures all of which we'll learn as we go through this year meeting and going through that rhythm where we analyze how we're doing we analyze our data the data from the partnership what things we think we need to tweak as we talk and confer with each other as we set forward with the initial standard operating procedures a little over a year ago we worked toward those standard operating procedures because

089of some of what you see in front of you we had disproportionate data we weren't representing our subgroups equally in terms of how they were seeing themselves experiencing either discipline with us or disciplined with our sro friends we were seeing that our sros may be being utilized in our buildings differently from school to school it was not consistent we didn't have systemic procedures for sros to follow or for our our principles to follow we were seeing our sros were being asked to step in for non-criminal behaviors things that we should be handling as school personnel as psd staff members we had some misperceptions in the system around what restorative justice was how we uh allow students to engage with rj rj4 collins which is a phenomenal program but the perception was having students get involved

090with that meant we were getting them in this school the prison pipeline some of the diversion programs were the same way so we wanted to clean up some of the pathways there and in some cases we've been able to build pathways directly from psd staff to some of those diversion programs but we've also had some help from our our police services that have helped us create some different pathways to diversion as well and for that we're thankful we also saw mission creep we saw um our our sro friends stepping into things they didn't need to step into many times because they were asked by by our staff members to step into things that were inappropriate that we were able to address in a systematic way with some standard procedures we talked about with when we

091were in front of you starting with a training for all of our administrators july 27th we did that training we did three hours of training in the morning with all of our second edu secondary education administrators principals aps and all of our sro friends we did some work that morning to clarify what the sop said to make sure there was common understanding and then we did scenario training where we actually had the teams work through two uh challenging scenarios led by our our sro friends but allowing our administrators to work in tandem with the sro they would be in partnership with in their school to process how would they put those procedures into place that's work we hadn't done before and that in that intensive away we followed that up that afternoon with the elementary

092administrators doing exactly the same thing with again with our sro friends and our ap and principals from each elementary school they were there for three hours as well on september 16th we invited fort collins police services to bring in an expert around what's happening in the community particularly as it revolves around marijuana and drug use and they spent an hour with our ap friends from the elementary and an hour with our ap at the secondary level to build awareness and understanding with some of the administrators that might first interact with those incidents in their building and then on october 1st following our first steering committee meeting where we looked at data tried to analyze what we were seeing most prevalent which turns out to be disorderly conduct and so as we looked at disorderly conduct

093we decided that training would focus on disorderly conduct versus assault one which is an incident we handle inside the district one which is a an incident that we would hand over or refer to law enforcement and we gave them a couple of scenarios they could work through to try to analyze do they believe disorderly conduct or assault and we work through that with teams at each of the secondary buildings and help them to paint the picture and understand some clarity and create some consistency across our district and how we might delineate the differences between disorderly conduct and assault we also reiterated some of the team approach in regards to the sro and how we might work with our sro our sros in significant risk events in our building we have a threat for instance and

094and we made we created some clarity around um working with our sro friends first you may remember some conversations about um how we would update that that in our contract and would we update that in our contract and matt will talk about that a little sooner but as we started thinking about that we needed as a district to talk to our administrators about shifting our practices that's ultimately our practice as we move into how we partner and so we reiterated that day that when we think about risk and threat in our building the experts the sro who's with us so bringing that person in bringing that person in the process to help us analyze what's our next steps was important so we reiterated it that day maybe we cemented it that day that that is

095the practice we need to move forward with and we'll continue to analyze incidents like that or opportunities like that and make those adjustments as we see fit and communicate those out as we move forward good evening board of education superintendent kinsley thank you for having me tonight i'm back and i will almost promise that maybe this one won't take four hours but we'll see right but thank you for having me tonight it's a pleasure to present this information tonight i too would like to acknowledge our rsro and our police services friends and partners uh we appreciate all you do and your officers do in our community not just in our schools so thank you and thank you for being here tonight so the first lady i'm sorry to interrupt you but i have written down

096since you you brought that up would you be so willing to introduce the folks that have joined us and ask them to stand up i think we should show some appreciation for the fact that they did absolutely thank you for that opportunity to do that so we have lieutenant kelly weaver from the fort collins police services [Applause] we have sergeant laura lunsford from the fort collins police sergeant lunsford oversees our sro program and is the direct supervisor of our sros and our schools we have robert cook from larimer county sheriff's office he too oversees the sro program for our larimer county partnership and then we have robert wincoup from the town of timnath and we're excited to have tim as one of our growing partners when we open our new middle school high school next

097year in timnath so thank you all again for being here i apologize for the interruption but i really appreciate you bringing thank you i truly appreciate you having coming to the board and joining us so now i have to start all over so i'm back three hours and 55 minutes just giving you a heads up so thank you for that though uh so what you see before you is uh fort collins police services calls and assist information so i want to give you a little bit of background where this information comes from and tell you why we're concentrating on the fort collins police services information tonight all of our police agencies are doing the same kind of data collection because of the size of the fort collins police services and the development of their information

098and their data collection we're using their information tonight for this presentation we expect in future presentations to have the data from the other agencies so if you'll bear with us tonight we're going to just use the fort collins police service information here this information is derived from a pretty extensive and robust daily log that our sro officers fill out any and every interaction they have is entered into this daily log and then categorized according to what it was how it was initiated and maybe what the outcome is of whether it's an investigation or what it might be so what you're seeing up here tonight is not all these types in these categories were offenses a lot of them were just reports maybe some of them initiated an investigation some of the incidences up here in

099the in the numbers may still be under investigation and what this represents is about 29 categories up there and uh 559 calls and assists this data was collected starting august 16th the first day of our of of classes until october 8th so you can see it's already a couple weeks old and i can tell you things are probably looking different today than what they look on this chart on some of these the action is taken after investigation some have referred back to the school scott referred to some incidences that are school related and our sro should not be involved in those some are an sro school combination of action together that could include a restorative practice or a ticket being issued depending on the outcome of the investigation a couple of the a few of

100these areas i'd like to concentrate on tonight just to talk to you about them if you look at the sex offense category there probably is some ongoing investigations in that number the investigations will include interviews with victims witnesses and suspects but again ongoing investigations they may not be reflected in our slides later on that talk about the tickets and citations that are being issued another one that i we wanted to concentrate on tonight and talk about is uh one that brings a lot of sadness to our district uh but we have been um adversely affected by some suicides this year in our school district and as much as that uh is a sad category to have it needs to be addressed and it has a lot to do with our mental health conversations within our

101district the responses to that could include referrals to community partners for counseling services it also could be probably refers to our references to uh school counselors and school mental health officials i can tell you in that category there are three protective custody referrals so there has been responses to some suicidal calls and reports some of those are made on safe to tell some of them are made by students if you see something say something we hear that over and over again i can't stress that enough the teaching category you can see that there's 31 attempts or 31 teaching uh um sorry 31 teaching opportunities there for our sros a little bit about that teaching this category comes from the cac work um when they asked about what our sros do every day what do they

102do in our schools what is their function for us and teaching came up that that was one of them in our teaching categories we have things like teaching sixth graders about what sros are when they were in elementary school they didn't really get a chance to see a police officer in their school and they may have wonders what is the what is the function of this how does this person relate to me and these sros have opportunities to go in classrooms and introduce themselves and introduce the sro program and what is available to these students through that they also take an opportunity to teach classes on teen choices teaching internet safety also discussing women in law enforcement so there's a variety of classes and teachings that these that these uh sros are involved in per

103the community advisory council we do have uh templates in the schools that allow parents and students to opt out of these trainings to receive that notification that are being used and then alternative learning for that day is or that time period is available for those students so this slide here is part of the new data along with that past slide but scott mentioned that we didn't have this data a year a year and a half ago when we started this evaluation of our program i think this is important data because this shows how our how our sros got involved we just saw how they're involved but how did they get involved who initiated that involvement in the sros you can see here that 45 percent our staff reported if you see something say something again

104with our students at almost 18 percent and then there's a self-initiated down there uh almost 11 and i want to touch on that here in the next slide about what the mentoring opportunities and learning opportunities are for our sros and our students working together you can see safe to tell is on there at five percent and then some of the other calls and some of the other ways that sros are initiated to help our students and our staff this next slide is a bar graph that disc that shows the relationship with our dispositions to our reports that that come in this this chart reflects the outcomes of our calls and our assists i want to draw your attention first to the far left where it says blank and it says three when we asked the

105sros fort collins police services to provide us with their data they were still refining that data and still looking at it and making sure all the categories were filled in and we had three that weren't since then i have learned that one of those is was a motor vehicle accident and a couple of the others were secure hold statuses that our schools went into for various reasons so those would probably be other categories that you would see in future reports there's some what i call the big three here you see the larger lines the first one is mentoring and i referred to that just a minute ago in that pie chart about the sro initiated contacts this is these are mentoring uh opportunities teaching opportunities that sros might encounter as they work throughout their day

106with students it could be that matt was doing donuts in the parking lot and the sro had a had a teaching moment there to talk to matt about his vehicle safety and how he should behave in school psd property that may or may not have happened in my past but we'll talk about that later so these are moments that these sros use in order to build those relationships with students some of those mentoring opportunities may have turned into an administrative referral where the sro would ask to tell the administration hey this is the third time i've caught matt doing donuts in the parking lot we need to address this it may be that there's no reason to to proceed with it and it becomes into those no charges category or it may roll into that

107referral category as i just previously stated the next section is that no charges that's where sro has been involved maybe a student told them them about something they followed up and there was just another learning or mentoring moment for these sros to build relationships with our students and maybe correct a pathway a little bit and no charges were very because there's no law enforcement action needed the next category would be the referral to schools that's our largest category in that category there's 21 of the previous 29 categories on that first slide that are involved in that that data so i can tell you about 50 of them were disorderly conduct that scott alluded to earlier about how those become administrative issues more than they do law enforcement issues some were welfare checks but most of

108those or all of those were deemed actions not necessary to be taken by law enforcement agencies there was no legal action to be taken there and then you can go down through there you can see some of the other categories and the statistics that are attached to those as far as the numbers of dispositions that were handled during that time so the types of juvenile citations and tickets that we have uh that our district has experienced and that our sros have had to address uh the important part of this slide um one of the important parts of this slide is at the bottom that footnote that all citations and tickets issued are based on victim related crimes it's important that our victims rights are taken into account during our investigations and all these uh calls

109and assists these these tickets that were written did have a victim related to them therefore that's why they were proceeded with the law enforcement action uh to enter into the legal system that way on the left you will see the types of categories of calls and assists and what happened there and then on the right you will note that that is broken down by race and ethnicity the next slide similar to this one talks about the felony charges that that have been pursued in our district on our students based on again victims rights and that the charges are based on a victim-related crime you can see that we had one increment criminal mischief one in drugs and one in menacing and again on the right there is a breakdown of race and ethnicity of who

110those tickets were listed or assigned to so to kind of wrap this up i want to go back to our timetable that you saw earlier in the presentation you can scott talked about our steering analysis group our committee that looks at that that committee has been hard at work he also talked about some changes that we have made in practices for our administrators we did find section 5b3 which probably doesn't mean a lot to you sitting here unless you have the sops in front of you that section had to do with the discretion about criminal investigations and school discipline we found a a word and words matter we found that as we continue to strengthen our partnerships with our law enforcement agencies and our community that we learn that our language matters in our sops

111and some of our changes will come about from language changes there we learned that bringing our contract changes or what we would like to do is bring our contract changes as needed our plan is to bring contract changes uh primarily in may when we bring a recommendation and contracts for review with with a recommendation for approval or not and these uh if there's anything before then that's identified that is of any substantial importance we would probably more than likely bring an amendment to the contract to the board and to our uh partnering municipalities to look at that but we plan on doing that in may with the contracts so in closing and in service really of our future presentation since this is our first presentation that we've made on this and you've seen some data

112that's never been available for we'd just like to ask you what resonated with you and if there's any questions that we can that we can help answer tonight or any comments that you would like to share with us thank you very much to both of you so let me open it up to board members for questions or comments kristin and then dj all right i'll start it off first of all thank you so much for the presentation and thank you all for being here i really appreciate it the question i have actually refers to the sro dispositions and so you're talking about 141 referral to school do you know like of those 141 how many of those are self-initiated how many of those were sort of like it was happened in the school it got

113referred back to referred to the srs and that got referred back to the um to the to the school so you mean like somebody reported to the asro hey i saw this happen you might want to and the sro investigated it or questioned it and then said you know i think this is an administrative issue that needs to be handled in school mike yeah versus like what you what you all saw and and um initiated on your own um what was han you know even sometimes maybe the school administration brings it to you and then the srsa you know that's not something that you need to be doing it's it's back on you i don't know that i have that number specifically what that is i can tell you the majority of those in that

114referral to school are probably that specific incidence that the sro was at some point involved and then it was turned over to the administration to uh to finish that's something we could do for the next one for the next that'd be great yeah if we can drill down to that and then because i think the um part of the reason i'm asking is because the idea would be to have those have that number come way down so that it's not sort of a tag of i've got it no you've got it no i've got it versus it becomes much more clear and well known of whose responsibility that is kristin i i appreciate that but i i also would say one of the learnings we've had and i think that the tweak we've made in

115wording this year i think was in almost fear of working as a collaborative team and so as we really begin to understand the roles and responsibilities i think coming together to collaborate as a collaborative partner not a referral to law enforcement necessarily but as an opportunity for us to come together with our expertise and to figure out and assign roles and responsibilities that is one way for us to get cleaner with how we move through different situations at all sites instead of being almost fearful which we had some last year we had as we walked marched through last year with our first year with the sops we had some of our administrators who almost had a fear of connecting with the sro and others that that were probably still connecting too much so trying to

116understand what's the balance and learn what that is i think is part of that role we're in and part of the thing we'll measure and try to understand as a steering committee each time we're together i appreciate that because that's what i'm looking for is is how do we and i think in doing so that'll that number will come way down okay dj and then rob uh first off i wanted to just thank you guys for putting the time and effort into getting some of this data this is the areas that we were heading that we were asking about and trying to get better understanding of one of the things that for uh you know for me i'll speak just for me i guess is is um is kind of defining some of these a

117little bit better so that i understand them or you know define what these are the one that jumped out to me was um the family where'd he go the family yeah problems yeah thank you family problems you know and like what does that mean uh type one in there and so it might be good at some point that we have a little bit of examples of what some of these are and how how they're taken care of just to get better understanding of what that is but i do like the idea too of drilling down on some of them to understand the more information we have to try to figure out where we are having those rubs running a little wrong i think is something that is going to be beneficial so i'm excited to

118see this and i hope that we can continue to grow with it and if i could just uh respond to that thank you for recognizing this data i do want to reiterate that this was some hard work done initially by the fort collins police services and some of the sros in that program in response to what they were hearing from the council about what they wanted and what how they wanted sros to show their involvement in our schools so the kudos goes to the to these police departments for sure great rob and then carolyn yeah pardon me i'll i'll second those thanks uh and for your presentation tonight as well i want i do have a couple questions one of them is that we had said and you did in the first training a joint

119training with the sros and the staff it wasn't clear to me that the that the assault versus this early conduct thing was done as a joint training was it and if not why not just from the point of view of making sure that everybody's on the same page so we we talked a bit about disorderly conduct and assault at the training in july yeah but when we noticed that at the time we met as a steering committee late september um we noticed that disorderly conduct was up was the the highest number that we were seeing in the buildings so we felt like doing scenario training on disorderly conduct versus assault made sense we talked about it in july we did scenario training on it where they actually got to think through okay so we have

120a situation do we move through it as disorderly conduct or do we move through it as it might be assault and it was fascinating to see where our administrators were and to begin to think about what is the differences between the two and how do we identify um the the maneuvers that they make in consultation with their team their administrative team and law enforcement but that was the difference for us is we were defining we didn't do scenario on that at the the bigger training we did that at the the october one one and the feeling was that the scenario training having the sros involved in the scenario training wasn't wasn't the best use of their time in this context we had some sros present in in the october 1st training they were not given

121what was going on that morning they were not all present um that was a school day so there was um july 27th we were able to say everybody's there yeah we'll continue to process how that goes going in in the future trainings okay i'll ask a second question and then i'll give it to carolyn and then we can circle back um one of the things we had talked about for mental health uh challenges in this case showing up on here as suicidal calls was a joint response with mental health professionals and not just the sro has that been happening so i can give you an example of how that would work if a report comes in from another student see something say something say through safe to tell or another form to the sros they

122are then engaged with the response team at the schools if the student is at home a home visit is made during that time referrals are made for the family working with the family for referrals can be made to our community partners for counseling but our mental health teams are also part of those response teams at the schools so they're involved with that investigation and with that help with that family as well in part so another response to that would be the mental health holds that i told you that we had three of those this year all that's done in conjunction as a team where the sros if they're the first ones to receive that information they then engage the school teams the school teams and the sro teams work together and bring in whatever mental

123health supports they need from community and school to address that so you're pretty confident then that those 14 suicidal calls assists not only was the sro present but some mental health professionals were there in conjunction with those folks yes thank you carolyn okay i think kristen was kind of alluding to this earlier and i was wondering how many total calls did we have not for last year because that was affected by virtual learning but for the year before so we can have some kind of year-over-year calls so we can kind of see where we've been where we are and maybe where we're hoping to be going so i was really kind of curious about how that goes was it 559 calls for so far this year compared against not last year but the year before

124yeah we have 559 calls right now and i think when i referred to earlier we wouldn't have been able to do this before i think fort collins police wouldn't have been able to do this before we didn't have this granular detail this came out of some of the work that was done uh in this room and by the cac last year in what we were asking for and quite honestly laura took that and tried to figure out how to make it happen with her team and built uh the ability for them to take a look at this and monitor from the the stu school resource officer side i think what's important about their side is is this we couldn't answer this a year ago either in fact one of the board members asked us this

125last year because what the cac was saying was that we that staff was asking for too many responses from the sros when this at least helps us understand how many of those 559 are coming from psd personnel and how many of them are coming from safe to tell or self-initiated or are coming from a student directly or our parent requesting we didn't have this information directly either about all of the incidents we were involved in last year the year before your year before that so this is new baseline for us we're going to work with it we're going to work going forward one of the things i really appreciate is not only did laura work with her team to help create this kind of data view but robert from lerner county is working with with

126laura to figure that out and as we think about all our partners they'll do the same kind of work to help uh illuminate what we're seeing okay thanks great jess uh sorry i have two more comments i think for future or maybe they're questions if you can answer them now but um one is i see that we're collecting data partially on race of students but can we also maybe break this data down by students with iep's 504 plans and or mental health because i know there's a number of parents who have had concerns that's also not being addressed um and i guess maybe my second question or comment is um can we also get data like so we have this pie chart on they were notified but i'd also like to know what were they

127notified about so if we're having a lot of staff reporting but it's about those suicidal students that's very appropriate staff reporting if it's staff reporting on maybe something i don't know what exactly would be i expect staff to be the primary person reporting i guess they're the ones that are the adults in the room they're the ones there but i'd like to a better breakdown of like where this reporting is going and what's it referring to director zamoro can i uh just make sure i'm hearing it well if i were to take this chart and cross-reference it with this one that's what you're kind of asking for is okay that helps me thank you okay great kristen one other thing to throw into there if it's possible is if you have multiple referrals about the

128same person from different teachers or different um you know maybe once a teacher and one's a parent so just cross areas you know so you can know that you had five references but it only refers to one incident that kind of thing i don't know if that's possible thanks kristen rob okay so questions three and four um you had um we had talked a lot about restorative justice practices uh and i'm i'm not entirely clear how that maps into the dispositions on the slide after this one and similarly we do get notified of expulsions and suspensions on a regular basis and so i'm wondering how any of that maps into this stuff so rob i think we're going to as we separate and slide out of this presentation i'll give you some overview and i'll

129talk a little bit about some suspension and expulsion data and some of the process changes that the board helped us make in the spring sorry and then the fourth question sorry is we had set in place i think a feedback system feedback is maybe the wrong word [Music] i'll just call it feedback because i can't think of what the word is right now but a system basically whereby students and staff and sros for that matter could anonymously uh report i think is the word that kristoff just reminded me of oh god anyway anonymously report um uh how their interactions with sros went or from the sros perspective how their interactions with students or or the staff went the administration went have we got is that in place what's the volume of reports that have come

130in and what are they telling us so we just finalized the development of that and so your feedback is appropriate to call it that we have just finalized that process through it on how to get that digitally available our plan moving forward is to have qr codes set up in schools to make it simple for a student to walk by hit a qr code it takes them to that form they can give that feedback and to your point about sros uh providing feedback as well part of the evaluation process moving forward and throughout this school year will be to allow not not just staff and students to evaluate the sro program but also to value have the sros do an evaluation about how they feel our interactions and our partnerships are going so we should

131see that feedback form up and running soon so we anticipate being able to say something about the content of it at the next quarterly report i believe uh by next quarter report we should have some data related to that thank you jess and i just wanted to make a comment this is like this it feels like a really huge lift for sros for you guys and i really appreciate that you guys are collecting this data that we are able to make more informed decisions this way so that we're utilizing the sros that are in our schools the best of our ability and not kind of abusing that relationship which maybe we were doing in the past um so just thank you thank you for putting the effort into making this happen thank you okay and

132i'll just uh kind of segue off that because i find that uh by going towards the end a lot of questions are really well handled by the board but i also want to kind of say thank you i i felt like last year was a really important year in the system however we got there we felt a sense of urgency to address this and i felt like our community asked us two things through the survey we found out that our community resoundingly appreciates having sros in the schools and that does not mean that everybody did there there were some people who who expressed some concerns with it the second item i felt like we had was uh just an urgent request for us to review and reflect and kind of hone in what we're doing

133and i think this evening what i appreciate is seeing that that work has begun and things are well underway again i think we really appreciate having the police departments show up be part of the conversation and work with us that was another thing i felt like i learned last year is that our departments really want to be part of the solution and serve our students and our families so much appreciated on on all those fronts board members are there other questions on this subject before we move over to the disciplined uh review okay because that really leads nicely towards the next part of it and i'll turn that over to you uh superintendent kingsley well prior as we as staff begins to transition and cue up the the next slide deck i want to just

134no it's okay i just want to comment again on the incident reporting system that director vice president pedersen brought up i believe so we're approaching the beginning of november our next quarterly update i believe isn't is kind of in queue to come back in january so i think at that point in time i don't want to over promise and under deliver to this board or to the community right so i want to be clear that i think we're in a place where we've worked out some of the technical kinks and we can begin to articulate what our scale like rollout plan is of communicating to our district stakeholders on how to access the incident reporting the purpose the functionality how it's different than safe to tell as you mentioned directors of moore that's a big

135lift in search of making sure that we have really really clean data so i believe we'll be positioned in january to articulate clearly where we are in that rollout process but to come here with specific data on where we are i think would be i'm fearful of over promising under delivering on that i just want to be clear and name that here okay as we close the presentation on the sros one of the things i i just want to acknowledge is we have our sro partners here tonight um but they're also part of our steering committee they're here with us when we meet as a steering committee um laura's been willing to meet with with me several times this fall as we prep for training but also as we just clarify how we're going to

136respond to things so that we're on the same page as we're given principles and sro advice that partnership has been cleaner this year too we've spent far more time understanding each other's roles this year and and i just want to honor that and say i appreciate that from from all four of you that you're willing to give up your time to partner with us as we plan and continue to move forward with the partnership as we shift to the discipline side i think one of the things that got a little bit convoluted last year was as we were talking about what was going on with sros and the sro partnership and some of our data um i think we ended up um looking at them as the same thing and so tonight we wanted to

137break break free of that and as we move forward the next time we come together to talk about the sro update it'll be what you just saw with some of the questions you just asked that were great i think that will enhance our presentation and and for the discipline you can expect as dwayne talked about last year in the monitoring report robust out report out on where we are with our discipline so tonight if you will is a tease and i want to talk a little bit about some of the things we put in place um but it's not a robust presentation on one quarter of data it is a snapshot of in time of where we are but i also think it's important to to remember a couple things we put in place last

138year as a district um to help with students and help with things like expulsion we shifted practice around how we respond to drugs and alcohol i'll talk about that in a little bit about some of the the outcomes that we have seen and where where uh where some of that change in practice has assisted us um and and possibly where the proof is still in front of us to know exactly how effective that's going to be but right now it looks pretty promising um and then we'll talk a little bit about where we are in terms of suspensions and as we break it out into a couple of different subgroups and then take some questions from you if you remember uh duane in the monitoring port in uh february when he did that he put

139in at the end of the monitoring report a slide it looked much like this disciplined by ethnicities dwayne would tell you if he was sitting here tonight that did a change this slide over last year's slide is or if you recall that slide was for 1819 i think it was the data carolyn asked about because we didn't have good solid data from last year so this pie chart that was in the monitoring port was for that year in the rears but as we look at this our hispanic uh count is up by one percent and so is our hispanic discipline count both of those numbers are up one percent dwayne asked me to pass that along just so if you looked at them year over year you would see that those are up by both

140up by one percent but i think as you take a look at this to orient ourselves as a district this pie chart is showing us that we have 71 percent of our overall population identify as white that's the red part of the pie chart and 57 percent of the discipline events are represented by students that identify as white it's also important as we look at each of these pie charts that each incident is one child so it's it's one child one incident it's not one child may be representing five different incidents so i think that's clarity it's a different kind of pie chart and i think it's important as we move through that to understand that's what this represents and that's why you're able to compare the overall population to what percentage of that population

141has had at least one discipline incident it could very well be that under there some of them had more than one but what we know is that percentage of the population has had at least one discipline incident so that's our overall quarter one data for our overall student body if we break it down and look at the elementary we have 70 percent identifying as white the incidents are 66 percent if we look at the blue we're 21 hispanic about 27 percent of our uh disciplinary events are hispanic just for context just to lay the foundation for what i'm going to talk about at all three levels if we take a look at the number of events for our hispanic students at the elementary level there are 92 minors and majors for our hispanic population and

142the overall circle is 404. four percent of that overall circle received out of school suspension so four percent of that received some out of school suspension and of the the hispanic students about six and a half percent received a day or more of out of school suspension so it's balanced pretty well in terms of what the outcomes were as we moved to the middle school at the middle school level in psd were just a little over 19 percent hispanic 72 percent identify as white and as discipline events 34 percent of our disciplinary events were students that identified as hispanic and about 55 students that identify as white similarly the overall pie chart represents 579 miners and majors 24 of those students received at least one day of out-of-school suspension so 24 of that pie chart

143on the left those students received at least one day of out-of-school suspension at the middle school level there are 197 um hispanic uh incidents that's that 34 and 27 of those students received at least one day of out of school suspension so roughly the same percentage in that category received an out-of-school suspension of one day or more as we move to the high school you can see the percentage stays relatively the same in terms of uh it's it's up by a little bit on the total population side to a little over 20 percent 34 percent 34.7 percent of our hispanic students had at least one incident discipline incident and again if i were to talk about the overall incidents majors and minors at the high school level there were 424 on that left circle there's

144424 incidents i'm sorry on the right side and 100 of the 424 52 of the students so a little over half received one day of out of school suspension of the hispanic there were 146 that blue 34.7 represents 146 students and 50 of those students received one out of school suspension so slightly lower than the overall population so as we think about the where does it represent with suspensions are our out-of-school suspensions is down dramatically over our 1819 our number of incidents is down a bit our number of major incidents is down quite a bit in terms of restorative practices we we have lots of restorative practices in place the monitoring of it is in process so we'll continue to build out the monitoring of it so that we're able at hopefully by monitoring have

145some ability to show you what the output is in terms of those practices what we've got in place that you so you can see what's happening instead of in school or out of school suspension but one of the changes we made was for the drug and alcohol i talked about at the beginning and we have had to this point this year 18 students who have had an incident involving drug or alcohol that could have required an expulsion but if you recall we put in place a pathway to get some support um working with the center uh lori at the center has been fantastic for us she's worked she's working super hard to build um a pathway and outcome for students right now of the 18 five students um have had that diversion revoked and and

146some of that because they either were using drugs again at school there was at least one that was an assault at a school of a staff member and others refused to continue with the program but 13 of the 18 right now continuing the pathway and as i say in lori's words it continues to be promising but we knew when we went into it having a program that was lasting somewhere between seven and ten weeks that was a commitment we're asking students to make to get that assistance and so when i talked at the beginning about the proof is still out in front of us the proof is still out in front of us in terms of how we monitor the changes we made and do we need to modify those changes as we look at

147things going forward coming out of year one and into year two of those changes in addition to those 18 that were in the diversion pipeline we have four other students that were expelled that you've seen paperwork on for things ranging from multiple drugs plus a assault on a staff member to a weapons incident so those are the the things where we're still in a position where that's that's how we're going to move through it right now and troy's working with those one of the things we've we've looked at is what duration are we are we um upholding for those expulsions and that's a conversation we'll continue to have i think the board asked us to process that as we thought about students to end up in that window so for me as we think about

148the changes we made it feels positive it feels hopeful which is what we talked about in this room was we wanted to have some kind of ability as we're holding students accountable to also foster hope which is a critical piece to modifying behaviors and i'm happy to say as we go through that that the partnership with the center has been fantastic a great resource for us to have it also is is uh accessible with when you go through law enforcement but in our case right now we've got a clean pipeline the other thing that uh has come on our radar as the year got started thanks to a partnership or a group of individuals that's coming together in the community to talk about gun safety is a direct referral that can be made by our

149sro partners to rj4 collins for students that make threats have weapons risky behavior like that we can make a direct referral working with with our law enforcement partners to get them into classes offered by rj for collins and that's new that didn't exist i don't that didn't exist a year ago so that's another avenue for us that feels positive again feels like it's it's an opportunity for learning and to allow for hope to continue as we as i close tonight i just want to talk about we'll continue the implementation of restorative practices they're critical um that's about how we talk how we set up how we structure classes how we allow voice to provide belonging for students most of the discipline incidents if we shaped the way we help students belong could be curbed or

150encouraged before they ever happen maybe i can't say most but many could so we'll continue with that work that's that's proactive not just reactive i think often we think about discipline as being reactive some of the best discipline work you do is proactive work to help students feel like they belong and that they're truly part of and they live and have a place an experience that they know is a fit for them and you're building we'll continue to analyze data at all three levels around attendance connections and grades that our connection survey will be done shortly we'll be able to look at that we have on the agenda for both elementary and secondary next week to do a little deep dive on quarter one behavior and we'll be looking at attendance and our grades monitoring

151of grades will continue as it has all through this year as we continue to analyze the impacts of those on how students are interacting with other students or adults in our buildings where we will as we dig into our behaviors be looking at our own dispositions you saw the dispositions for fort collins police services in an earlier slide we'll be analyzing our dispositions at the school level as part of our work next week with our principals as we get out of quarter number one to analyze how are we responding to different behaviors in our buildings as we do that we continue to work on a disciplined matrix that will give guidance to teachers about that proactive work i just talked about but also help our administrators understand what what might be possible uh avenues or

152moves they can make when it's not just proactive but when it's reactive and then we are committed to monitoring over time and that for us as you see it shifted in practice you're going to see outcomes change over time this is not the kind of data that's going to change overnight it's going to have to be a process in systemic and we're engaged in continuing to monitor at this level but down to the schools as well so as we continue to go forward that's the commitment we we are making to continue to keep this on the forefront and with that i would ask the same question are there things that resonated with the board nate yeah that last slide what do you mean by minimizing variability school to school with the same type of incident

153i think when you think about variability nate you get variability inside of school teacher to teacher you might have teachers that interact with a student that needs extra attention in the classroom a move like moving toward them and just having a quick conversation is different than a teacher that stands at the desks and challenges the kid to be sit up do whatever they need to do so there's variability teacher to teacher but there's al also variability school to school in terms of how we might interact but having the conversation and trying to look at our our own dispositions is pretty important in understanding what variability we have right now other questions rob so i have two this time one of them is about it's just a request and that is as we see this data

154over time and for that matter as we see it in the monitoring report if we can figure out some way to show trends that would be great because it's hard to see whether we're doing better with those pie charts or not yep you know so yeah dwayne is dwight is invested and looking forward to it great okay so that's that's one thing the other thing is and this sort of applies to the last presentation and this one and ties in some of what i think we heard in community comment tonight and that is my understanding is that some some non-trivial amount of damage has been done in our schools as a result of tick-tock challenges and whatnot and how does that reflect as it uh i mean is that showed as a spike in discipline

155or a spike in referral to law enforcement or what's the story there it does not show in a spike and refer to law enforcement it and as we work through that that's one of the conversations laura and i had was was how to respond in the moment because there were littler incidents and bigger incidents and you got to decide how you're going to move through that and what's the line and we worked with principals to try to understand how do we want to move through it and we worked through trying to understand how do we help kids repair and restore rather than moving for a ticket in hindsight was that the right decision if we had to do it over again we might have a different conversation but we made a decision in the moment

156collaboratively with principals in the room and uh so it does not represent a jump in tickets or refer to law enforcement and but it there were disciplinary actions taken and and several different practices there was some suspension for that there were some restorative practices for certain thank you dj first of all thank you for the data as we were going through the first presentation i have my notes were what about the other discipline data so that's fantastic that you guys worked that in i'm going to piggyback though on another question that came up in community common is concerning i guess is about fights have we seen an uptick in fights there has been an uptick in fights in our community and there has been more fights in school this year than we've seen in previous

157years so our buildings particularly at the four high schools are dealing with and having some consequences for more students that are struggling and engaging in but there is there has been a resurgence not just in fort collins but multiple places around what's called fight club and you may remember the movie fight club so that has found its way back through social media so we've had um reports from our our police friends that we've had several large gatherings across fort collins in the evening that that's what they're attempting to do is is that type of social gathering where it's a fight club mentality and we end up only finding out about it late and and our police respond to it we haven't had your second question i guess dj well i already answered the one about

158schools where we have had more fights between a couple of students in buildings that have happened in previous years as i think kids try to enculturate back in and work through and uh i think our buildings are working hard to to continue to build culture right now jess one of the things you're talking about was drug use and trying to divert some of the students and so can you clarify is that students using drugs on campus is that them distributing drugs are the suspensions because they're distributing to other students or because they're personally using on campus and almost all those 18 cases that i talked about there was more than one student involved um in one case there was eight students that were involved in sharing some um and all of those students worked with

159families or all the in that case all those students we worked with families in all eight took the the support treatment if you will or counseling took the classes as an option i'm not aware of any that we're a single student that by themself was using i have a question and this might apply to both data sets from the referrals and to the discipline and and this is as i think about how we partner not just with our police but with the county and all the various partners we have and what it takes to educate kids i'm wondering um about an overlay with social economics as compared to the ethnicity and i i realize as we work on our biases and whatnot that ethnicity piece is important but what is possibly at the root of

160how kids show up to school and how they behave i'm assuming it has a lot to do with social economics and if we're not studying that we it would be harder to report that our data correctly to those in the community that might be able to help us yeah so that's a question but a comment christopher i think it's it's a great point and i think when you think about the the slices dwayne gives you in all the other data sources he'll do the same thing in this case i think last year in our in our monitoring report he sort of teased that and part of that was to tease and to say to our schools look this is going to be in the monitoring report going forward and now that's the way we'll look

161at it in the monitoring report as well is to dig in and see what we have available and how we can how we can share out so that it can help us brian i i think the president the question that you asked i think is important i do want to say though both to the members of the board and the community is that i think as we talk about some of the things that we're prioritizing the system whether it's workforce development opportunities literacy rates mental health needs they're cross-cutting poverty definitely is an amplifier but i would say some of the things that we're experiencing across the system are cross-cutting around all demographics i think all people are experiencing current society and current reality in different ways and so i think it's important to interrogate that

162data and publish that but i would say that our you know conversations with school-based leaders and teachers and even hearing from here tonight listening to parents uh there is a real need for children to have additional types of supports i think across all sectors of our community i just i thought it was important to name that great i just want to make sure we're kind of combing out the effects that could be teasing out yeah what what those might be so okay other questions comments okay great thank you very much scott for presenting that date as well oh kristen oh and then i have a request for five minute break so why don't we uh do a recess and come back uh you know in five ish minutes nine o'clock it felt like it was

163gonna go fast and then all right let's uh get the meeting back underway it is 901 p.m and we're back in session thank you all and i'm gonna i'm gonna call the meeting back to order with the board members sitting okay so uh next up on the agenda is item 8.2 and that is a covid response summer learning evaluation report another very important academic update so i'll turn that over to you superintendent kingsley thank you yeah members of the board as you know coming out of last year's reliance on remote learning providing high quality extended learning opportunities to our students throughout the course of the summer was a community and district priority sharing information on the outcomes of our summer learning opportunities as a response to the covetera learning impacts of last school year our

164two rr2 assistant superintendents mr scott nielsen and dr tracy geil tracey thank you for being here tonight good evening president feb members of the board superintendent kingsley and members of the community thank you so much i'm very pleased to have the opportunity tonight to present our evaluation report of our coveted response to summer learning the complete evaluation report prepared by dr dwayne schmitz and also co-created by kate kanine director of professional development and john mckay director of language culture and equity all partnered to complete that evaluation report which you saw in your packet tonight tonight's presentation is to pull out the highlights of what we learned about our summer programming that we designed in response to coba era learning so thinking back to last school year our students spent the first part of their year

165in and out of a virtual classroom and had many of their learning experiences in this format and through that experience psd started working with several of our community partners in the fall of 2020 to create remote learning support centers for students who are just struggling to access learning at home through this particular model transitioning in january of 2021 we started to bring students back to in-person learning and we then turned our attention toward designing programs for our summer to really support our students who experience limited or no or negative progress between the fall of 2020 and the winter of 2021. in designing our program we really went after just starting with mitigating additional summer slide and we felt like our key lever for doing that was to lean into our connections and support for our

166students to really offer them opportunities to engage experientially with their learning and also to reconnect through personal relationships with adults and peers in their lives so in mitigating that summer slide we prioritized our students to not lose their relative academic position with their matched comparison peers and our core value was to design programs that were engaging and really emphasize their interests while accessing academic content we also wanted to go after those social emotional and experiential aspects of learning and finally we wanted to provide choice and flexibility for students and families to opt into a variety of different models that fit their schedule as well as their particular needs that led us to work with our community partners to design the following summer programs so you can see the summer programs that we designed at the

167top for each of the levels and then the community partners who helped us in the boxes below so we started by pulling data to identify a priority group a as the audience for our targeted programming priority group a was defined as students who fell below the 35th percentile on language arts or math on nationally normed assessments and fell further behind by at least five percentile between fall 2020 and winter 2021. for middle school students we also added in the factor of students who had a read plan and for high school students our priority group a students were off track to accrue graduation credits to support those learners we came up with several programs that were locally informed and uniquely designed through collaboration with psd staff and community partners in addition to the programs listed on

168this slide we also ran extended school year for our students with an iep as well as early childhood programs at the elementary level we leaned into our previous experience with camp seoul camp seoul had been an existing program in psd and we enhanced it by allowing more students to access camp seoul it was housed at four different sites this past summer and we buzzed students from all of our schools across the community to one of those four sites students participate in seven full weeks of a full day experience that was supported by staff hired by the language culture and equity department and staff from alphabet the connect and engage intervention sessions were a 20-hour session held over the course of the summer by paraprofessional or licensed district staff to work with small groups of students

169in literacy and math the early learner transition sessions were opportunities to bring in kindergarten and first grade students early in the month of august to begin assessments home visits and build structures for school to create a strong start for students who did not experience a traditional school year opening in 2020 for early learner book access we worked to put as many books as possible in the hands of children over the summer months by opening school libraries partnering with the fort collins public library and purchasing additional books we provide children with as many books as we possibly could for the middle school connect and engage intervention session that looks similar to the elementary connect and engage session the connect and engage camp plus stemx had students invited attending a one-week 20-hour camp designed to target literacy

170and math needs under personal financial literacy students attending were also invited to attend the stemx at a reduced or waived fee the boys and girls club summer of discovery provide a workforce exploring summer camp for middle school learners for eight weeks enrichment activities were focused on workforce development and experiential learning and for high school students summer school classes were designed for students currently in grades 8 through 12 with an opportunity to complete graduation requirements online or in person during three sessions the three sessions ran in the spring in june and a july session was a remote only session with mentoring support mentoring and tutoring was provided through the matthews house and fort collins museum of discovery and students had the opportunity to accrue additional experiential learning and that was supported through credit scott nielsen is

171going to talk about some of the experiences our kids had during their summer programming thanks dr guy so as part of the summer experience we asked staff to engage ask questions of students and families about their experiences in the different programs we then pulled together the feedback we got from the different questions and you will see more questions than we have highlighted tonight in the report but we pulled out a couple we thought were important for this the question here was what was the best part of the summer program what did you like about the program and the word all represents what we saw as responses the bigger the word the more times we saw it if you think about what dr giles said was our goal we wanted to re-engage kids and the biggest

172word right there is friends we got students back together with other friends and that was positive but you also see things like reading and learning trips games math teachers all those things are super positive as we bring kids back together and help them engage i'll pick out just a couple of those to read so that our community can hear some of what's on the slide the best part was seeing teachers and friends the playground math work the teachers and playing with my friends it was math math is fun now you don't need your math books second question will highlight tonight how do you think this summer program will help you next school year and again you look at the size of the word to see what they said and reading and writing math are all

173big words the students felt like that's how this summer program will help them as they moved into this school year this summer program has allowed my kids to get ready for school get in a routine and become comfortable with their surroundings yes second grade will be harder but not so much since my sister's going to middle school and i used to feel safe with her relaxing will help me not worry too much about missing or about what my sister is doing and if i'm concentrating and someone is talking i can calm down as we think about the work we did this summer we could not have done it in isolation i want to honor some of our friends many of who are watching tonight nicole armstrong at the matthews house played an instrumental role with

174high school students casey hedrick played an instrumental role with middle school students gary ozelo and nancy patton at canvas credit union played a big role in setting up financial literacy partnerships for boys and girls club but also helped facilitate much of the experiences they had as well as some of the work they did in conjunction with the stem stem acts or the stem institutes discovery museum laura valdez was instrumental in getting going what was the process as we met last spring from the city of fort collins um sarah gagne and mark rademacher participated in our planning processes alpha best was uh instrumental dave mcclure was involved all the way through the year and was a was a great partner sarah moranowitz from bohemian was instrumental in getting everyone together and being a catalyst for partnership

175to start last school year but all the way through the year stayed engaged at inside the district we had profound energy around making this a priority kate canine did an incredible job of leading the charge and pulling everything together and making it go jake bell in the entire transportation department did things that we had that we thought were going to be a struggle and actually in conjunction with hr did something we hadn't done before and that we looked at partnership and we said we've got people who work in this particular partnership who work for matthew's house and we didn't have drivers to to help support those students coming from matthew's house or coming to work with matthew's house so we hired the matthews house individuals before and after school to drive our vehicle and then

176there were matthews house employees during the day when they were doing the work with the students that was new for us different and a testament to our hr department our risk management department and our transportation department all three came together to think creatively think out of the box how do we make this about kids and not put roadblocks in the way of kids john mccay's team mariah ortiz and the entire department worked hard to make this happen our hr department was great and thinking out of the box um our finance department worked hard to say hey let's make it go craig schneider food services worked differently than he has any other summer there were stipulations that he had to overcome and we were asking to to create a much more robust program than we had

177in the past and his team stepped up scott elias and his team at the futures lab created field trips for many of our programs who when they couldn't travel we traveled to them with the futures lab and some opportunities curriculum instruction helped create energy so as a system we said students and the summer program was a priority and we thought differently than we had in the past and it was exciting to see as you can see on this slide we also had as we went through 855 elementary students a little over 200 middle school students and 597 high school students that engaged 961 of them were free lunch free and reduced lunch students 357 engaged in summer program that were on an iep 435 of them identify as english language learners our total budget was

178one point a little under 1.1 million dollars which came in under what we projected and what we presented to the board last spring the question did we mitigate additional summer slide if you think back to that diagram that dr giles shared where our goal really was to mitigate and not allow for summerslide to happen well in reality what we saw was the involvement in the summer program associated with pretty solid gains across the board in different programming students that this year have tested spring and then fall in the nwa averaged a 0.04 gain and in a cadence a 0.06 and we'll break that down a little bit in the next few slides and talk specifically about individual programs participants also realized above average summer learning gains relative to both national peers and their local peers

179and students who participate in the summer program more than mitigated the summer slide which was our goal they actually advanced their normative position which is pretty exciting and solid learning for us as adults around what might be out in front of us as we dig into the data you'll see there's several data slides that will go through over the next few minutes this particular one is identifying map growth for students that took map in the spring and then again in the fall recognizing that we had some students participating in the summer program that didn't take map in the spring so we may not have that data but the majority of the students that were participating they took it spring and fall and we're comparing it to that no summer program group of over 11 000

180students that we have spring and fall data on that's that group to the far right you can see to the far left you see the summer of discovery the boys and girls club in this case a .11 growth if you think back to the effect size when dwayne talks to us about effect size the dotted line would mean you stayed congruent with your peers so anything above the dotted line means you grew or you're in a better place than you would have been had you stayed in the same position with your typical peers so as we think about a 0.11 that's a lot of growth the reading growth effect size realized for those students in grades six through nine can convert or to a percent growth that .11 indicates that participants in boys and girls

181club reading summer of discovery grew approximately 43 percent of what we'd expect them to make over the course of a year so think about that for a second as the growth we saw that group on the left they made 43 percent of a typical typical year's growth in that summer program with boys and girls club that's astonishing and it's a testament to the way they set that up and the work they in enriched their students with from visiting businesses to academic work each and every day for eight weeks the matthew's house at 0.10 is strong so is the 0.09 camp seoul each one of those doesn't represent 43 percent because each one is dependent a little bit on the age of the student and the amount of growth they would be expected by nwea but

182as we took a look at and tried to put in perspective point 1-1 is very strong very strong summer growth we take a look at this again this is that summer of discovery and this one is comparing the summer of discovery students with students that did nothing with us over the summer that's an end count of a little over 6 000 students and you can see the students that participate in boys and girls club again had very strong results and that is compare them to their typical peers continuing to drill down into that realized growth by students with pre-identified academic needs so remember that priority group a this is solely that group that we were going after to influence those results for this year so that summer of discovery program jumps again with 0.20 being

183nearly 75 percent of a year's growth for those 11 students who are part of that priority group a similar growth for our connect and engage camp camp seoul students gained approximately a third of a year's growth related to match comparison peers and students participate in connect and engage sessions at elementary did not realize gains as a whole in reading as assessed by map this data set builds on the last data set with looking only at latinx priority a group students who are participating in summer programs the summer of discovery and connect and engage camp continue to demonstrate substantial gains with students who identify as latinx or hispanic connect and engage did demonstrate benefit for let neck students and camp seoul also elevates gains for latinx children this next slide switches gears to our results with

184math map the variety of programs that we had in place in the district are compared alongside students who had no summer program participation again connect and engage camp and summer of discovery show growth impacts over non-participants while camp sole participants held consistent with non-participants and our last two programs showed students lost some ground in mathematics over the summer when comparing math map results a wonderful celebration is that participants in the connect and engage camp experienced more than three times the growth of their peers who did not participate in the summer program again there's lots for us as a community partner team a staff based leadership team to dig into why did this have such an impact for our students and how can we replicate and reproduce these results to create such powerful gains for our

185students that they not only did we mitigate the summer slide but we also caught them up over there their normative peers again that math map group i'm going to turn it back over to scott to talk about what that looks like for summer of discovery again thanks dr geil and and if you take a look at this again you can see down at the bottom you can see the end count and the end count for boys and girls club is small but it's a mighty result so it had a large impact on our latinx students but you can see all four of those programs move the needle for our latinx students and again something for us to pay attention to and look at how do we enhance look at other other ways to leverage this

186type of experience for our students as we move forward this one talks about the students that were as tracy talked about the pre-identified students so they they had pre-identified characteristics if you go back when we talked about the boys and girls club students earlier in the slides there were over 30 students in this case there's 11 that were in that pre-identified group we wanted to measure and see how did those students do and again the results were strong and in in this case they were strong strong uh particularly strong in our summer discovery our connect and engage in our camp seoul and they were slightly effective when we think about our connect and engage sessions which were less structured and more open to interpretation at each site as we think about implications for future summer

187programming which we've been asked by uh our partners already what's the thinking for next year um we've got work to do to think about program models this was helpful for us this kind of robust report out for summer has not been the norm in this district we haven't had this kind of report out on what we've done i want to as we think about the implications also give a shout out to both kate and duane for taking the energy to put together this report we didn't give them any extra man hours or any extra people they took this on to to build a robust report as i was talking to dwayne he said as i was building this it's like building 10 because you're actually building a report for each of those subgroups each of

188the partnerships in reading and in math so in some sense he uh he went about building this in lots of different veins so we appreciate the work we appreciate the energy to get this report both to you to us and to our partners to uh potentially take advantage of what does it mean going forward so we have work to do in looking at models and looking at what curriculum might be most effective taking a look at the experiential gains boys and girls club was a program uh set up around experiences supplemented or supplementing the academic work they were doing they visited businesses each week they had themes around what they were doing they spent a great deal of time with personal financial literacy and in in many cases many of them walked away with with

189high school credit for personal financial literacy which again was a first for our district students and staff surveys named positive experience and connections that were made both between students and staff and then we have to talk about what's our infrastructure what do we have that we can position next year's assets thinking about our transportation and other systems that we can we can leverage to support this type of experience as we move into the summer of 22 and the programming we might leverage to enhance the outcomes for students and if you think about the goal to prepare students for graduating with options the summer program we just created this past summer put students on a different trajectory and we look forward to continuing to think that through as we move forward with that what were some

190highlights as you saw what we presented tonight and as you had a chance as a board to look through the presentation or the report over the past couple of days great thank you scott and tracy and duane and kate and others who were involved so uh board members questions nate and then dj i'd just like to thank everyone that was involved both staff and our partners this is really great i'm glad we did this and it's a good model to build on so appreciate it thank you nate dj i am so overjoyed to see this this is something that i think we can definitely build on i am um the one question that i'm gonna start off with is did did we not uh already uh plan with some of the esser money to continue

191this for next year with camp seoul and put some money into it already or is that something we are still going to have to discuss later uh dj we have money set aside but we wanted to evaluate what we saw as a way to take a look at what does that mean going forward and this this uh ache wasn't very dry when you got the copy of it so for us we'll process it it'll help drive decisions that the district makes going forward because uh i i will i will tell you i will one my value is that this is something that we have to get ingrained in something that we do every year and we got to grow you know the camp soul numbers are great but i would love to see that almost

192doubled easily especially into more sites so that we have it around and the effect that we got from the the summer discovery i think is is amazing and so we've really got to dive in and figure out how we can get things like that out there more the boys and girls club thing i've heard about even before the report positive thing so i'm excited to see these things also have the the numbers to back up some of the stories that are out there i'm pretty sure casey's up there with a smile on her face one of my comments and dwayne i know how much you put into this and how much you love working on it but i want to be able to sell this to our community and get this information out there really

193well and since we we get the z scores very often i think it's important that we turn those around into like the percentages that you mentioned so when you mentioned that it was 43 growth those are numbers that more people are going to understand and we got to get that out there and i've uh you know i've already been talking up some of this to the foundation as a way as an avenue for them to work on and i think it's something that's fantastic the partners that we already have but i hope that we can show the growth and what we've done here even more out there and we can get even a lot more partner so uh great job everyone let's now let's make it bigger and better rob and then jess and carolyn

194so yeah i have i have a bunch of questions but in in hope for everyone here i'm going to take some of them offline um i i uh just following up on what dj said there i think i think there is a way to summarize the data in a way that's more accessible to the public uh and i still i still want the data at this level right because i think it i think it i mean i don't i hope i'm not the only one frankly but uh you know because it helps to explain how you got to the higher level conclusion so i think we sort of need a little both is what i'm looking at so my questions uh one of them pardon me one of them is uh i know we haven't

195done these kind of effectiveness of summer programs in the past right analyses right it seems to me we probably could do some of it retrospectively i don't know we probably have we probably have fall and spraying scores for people and we know who was in the summer school programs and whatever i don't know whether you think that's worth it or not but it'd be interesting to understand how this whether this is more or less effective than what we've done previously and and in terms of over time kinds of questions which that is sort of a retrospective one i'd like us to make sure that we continue to follow these students that we do this longitudinally going forward right not only for next summer students but for these students as well to see whether their gains

196are sustained or whether you know there was this bump up and then they just stay which you know is better than nothing but you know it'd be good to to have uh have an understanding of what's going on there so i'll leave those two let more people talk and then i do have a couple more okay i think it was jess and then carolyn yeah i don't know that you have these numbers handy but i'm curious what how much we spent in previous summers on these programs compared to last year and how much we can kind of anticipate spending in future summers so that we prepare ourselves for that cost i think that's a really great question i think the only program that existed before this summer at this level was camp seoul so that's

197probably the only program that we have data for it in terms of budget in terms of the number of students that were served as well as their academic gains and results i believe dwayne did do a a monitoring version not quite as robust of an evaluation report for camp soul results in the past but there are there is a data set for camp soul so that's probably the one program that we could do a look back and see those exact questions go ahead carolyn all right thank you and so i'm just going to piggyback on what some people have set up here just so i can express my values and as that is is that i would also like to see these kids followed you know so we can see how long to tutely how

198um the summer program affects their uh future growth so like this knit at the end of this year when they when they do their testing you know are they going to score a lot higher you know as a percentage over last year so i would just like to see you know if this this gain if we can keep this gain right if it keeps um it keeps going and so it's a really important program not that it isn't already but if we see those gains if we keep those gains super important a game changer for us i think and then the the last thing is is i'm going to agree with rob and dj which is as this information needs to be accessible for our community z scores are great but i can remember when

199i got on the board i had to go sit with dwayne and have him explain it to me you know and i have to every once in a while get my head wrapped around it again but when we're talking to our community we have to think about making this information really accessible for them to understand it's really important because even for me i got a lot more excited when you started talking about the percentage of gain it just you know it really resonated with me and i just want to let you know that kristen there we go piggyback on that as well um just thank you for doing this um and i i think having it accessible not only to the community that might want to access it for the students or for you know

200for their students but to have it accessible for potential partners because when partners see what what you're doing with that i think you know again with the foundation and everything else but the partners are going to want in on this as well and i think we can grow that organically and and quickly as people see how well that's working rob so i have two more questions and then then i'm done if i stop coughing it'll be great um so to the extent that these gains in a relatively short period of time were i don't know whether unexpected is the right word very very uh very um they're exciting i mean they say this is great we this is maybe more than we even expected is there something to learn from what we did in these

201summer experiences that should go back into our with our teachers and our schools in the regular course of the year is there something that happened in those experiences that is transferable to our regular school year either of you have any thoughts about that i would say probably my best hypothesis is the connection to real world application having partners for example i'll use camsol and the futures lab come in and provide on-site field trips for camp seoul some of the the work that the kids are seeing is immediately applicable like when i go back into the classroom and i'm working on my computation i just saw a real world application of why computation is important so i think that relevancy is my hypothesis about why we saw some of those gains really pop i think another

202hypothesis that i have is that the programmatic design of our programs was not to to put children into skill and drill repeated practice types of exercises that we emphasized the relationships with their teacher with adults with other children for that co-construction of knowledge and learning over maybe a more traditional model of what people think of when they think of ketchup growth and how kids need to to catch up to grow that's my hypothesis about why we realized the gains that we did and i asked rob if i could piggyback because he was thinking along similar lines i'm going to have to think of how i want to ask this question could you back up a couple slides to one of the ones that right there so if i look at the bottom line and i

203apologize for not asking this ahead of the meeting when we had the pack material but it came to me now so i just want to make sure i understand if i go to the bottom row for camp seoul and i go to the spring 2021 average z score does that mean that those students in the spring of 2021 would have been averaging a minus 1.23 z-score is that correct okay and we we intervened with a summer program and we went in the other direction okay all right um yeah it is it's very interesting to me because it seems to indicate the impact we can have on students depending on how we do education is that okay i just wanted to be really clear in my mind what that what that was showing us okay uh

204i'll leave it there for now thank you go ahead all right so all right so my other question is uh i guess i'd like more clarity on what's hap what happened as a result of the high school activity right i mean there was some talk about in the report very small sort of footnote thing about how many kids got credits some graduated some uh yeah so some some got credit some didn't some seniors who were in the program didn't actually graduate as a result of this i guess is there some way to summarize either tonight or in the future what the net effect on our end goal was of this did we for the high school students relative to graduation i'm talking about relative to credit accumulation right did we do we have like did

205some high percentage hopefully but whatever percentage it was of those students who took advantage of this get back on track as a result of this as we define on track i don't know it's hard to understand how that translates into our how what was in the report translates into our end goals so if you could say anything about that scott that would be great and if not if you could think about it and get back to us yeah rob i can speak to a little tonight and think about how we might um push out some more information in the future i think when we looked at how we could present the information we didn't have map spring or fall to be able to show map on because we didn't take map at the high school

206level in the spring so we didn't have that we had more students engage in gathering credits at the high school level than we've had in recent years so that's a positive the i think there were 23 who didn't complete and and as we followed up on those students some walked away and didn't complete their classes some enrolled and didn't start um somewhere during that july time frame where it was a class maybe they registered for three classes and ended up doing two so there are multiple reasons that those walked away but as we looked at the completion of the summer school classes and actually some anecdotal response from bianca who runs much of the back work back-end work of the summer school was her accolades for matthew's house she felt like because matthew's house came

207alongside and partnered with many students many students resiliency as they move through a summer course was uh was more co more of them that were part of that com finished but in terms of how do we structure every student and what every student's outcome was it's it's uh it's hard it's hard to follow every thread for 570 students but we can take a look and see what what information we have that would tell us are they on track or off track those 597 students some were way off track and so they still would be but they gathered credits in the summer they wouldn't normally have gathered which was part of the goal was to to give them access to credits when they didn't normally have access to credits sure that's a good thing absolutely but

208from a systemic point of view it's helpful to understand what the net effect of this is and and my understanding is given what we're doing in terms of night uh nine-week checks on terms of whether or people are on track or off track we should be able to map these student ids into whatever is going on there and figure out what yeah we'll work on trying to help understand where they were pre and where they were posed thank you other board questions comments oh brian sorry no jess um i just mostly had a comment um i hope that this continues in the summer i would especially for elementary students i know there's a lot of parents that when we have days off or spring break that they are looking for something to do with their

209own children so if there's something that we could also partner with boys and girls club or have another opportunity where i don't know how you'd structure it since it's single days or a couple of days versus a summer but just where it's like hey you guys are gonna be or even the city of fort collins because they usually have those um camps as well where it's like hey could you focus on some task or some skill set also as part of making sure kids are keeping the games that they have worked so hard for okay brian members of the board i just want to just say i'm really proud of staff in the community for coming together i know i had nothing to do with this and that's okay but i certainly want to celebrate

210it because there's a lot of people that came together and i spend a lot of time benchmarking ourselves across the country i have yet to seen at the national level a district that shows summer programming that's having this level of an effects size it may be out there i haven't seen it but i promise you i'm looking you've heard myself as well as staff and leadership talk about not just developing a sense of belonging but accelerate learning this is what we're talking about people coming together to provide students opportunities and when i think about the values that this district that this board our community represents that are centered and outlined and articulated in our four district ends this is an assumption that i have is that when i heard staff's presentation tonight and in preparation

211for this evening all four district ends were present invisible in the planning the execution and the student experience and so this doesn't just inform in my opinion what we do for this coming summer in terms of taking proof of concept to scale this should challenge us to think about how we redefine our school day now right how do we as we engaged partners 35 partners last week around key ideas and vehicles that to mobilize us forward there are opportunities and collective groups of willing people that are wanting to engage whether it's through high-dose tutoring student experiences that we can be thinking about as extensions of our classrooms and our school days i get really jazzed about this because this is to me community progress it's not just about you know a group of students or

212several groups of students so i think we have to continue to pay attention to this but i think the challenge in front of us is to think about where is the low-hanging fruit the small victories that we can replicate from this learning and put it into our school days now or whether it's before school after school even during the school day as we invite partners in to engage and send students out to engage in our community in thoughtful ways but i just think that there's a lot here and i've asked staff that we're going to do a formal media release on this information we want to share this story tell this story but also celebrate the various people that are at the center of it so i just there's more information on this to come

213but i just wanted to say thank you to staff and to all of the community members who worked tirelessly to make this happen and during a very very challenging time thank you brian and uh to both of you as well i think i i would just say when you you search what you might not have seen is a district willing to also assess itself yeah uh that evaluation presentation of the board and the expression of values that would lead us to make good investments is perhaps what's missing in other districts and that we're going to be doing really well so i really appreciate this presentation thank you both for presenting it this evening and i think you saw a great deal of uh positive feedback from the board so thank you excellent thank you all

214okay um that brings us to item 9.0 on the agenda and like i've said i've got to take joy in holding the gavel for just a little bit longer it is 9 44 p.m and i will adjourn the meeting you