001good evening tonight is today is october 12th 2021 it is 6 31 pm and i will call this board meeting to order with that i'll ask our new board secretary to call roll call if you do that lexi please dj anderson aye kristen draper aye christophe i rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye and for cabinet brian kingsley aye autumn aspen matt bryant tracy geil lauren hooton brett larson dave montoya scott nielsen madeline noblett and dustin rensma thank you okay thank you very much moving along that brings us to item 2.0 which is the pledge of allegiance if you would please stand up and join me indivisible with liberty and justice thank you for joining us okay item 3.0 is the approval of agenda would any board members like to make any changes
002to the agenda this evening okay seeing none we will proceed and that brings us straight up to 4.0 the superintendent report and i'll turn that over to you superintendent kingsley right thank you very much members of the board members of the community good evening i am approaching my first 100 days as the proud superintendent of the pooter school district and i can't tell you how excited i am to to be here with all of you this evening um as i've had an opportunity over the last three and a half months to learn about our community i think a term that kind of comes to mind that i'll start talking and using more often is you know what is our district's brand promise and what i mean by that is who who are we what do
003we stand for uh what are we willing to not negotiate and i know those are complex questions uh but i feel really confident that as we've had an opportunity to visit almost i think 45 of our schools and meet with many members of our community i find some areas where i think we're finding some agreement there's a lot of pride in this community and one of these key areas that i believe as we think about what our psd priorities are as a leadership team in partnership with the people that we serve in our classrooms in partnership with families like many of you who are here tonight who send your most prized possessions to us is that you don't expect just your children to go through our system after 13 years of their precious lives you
004expect them to graduate and you expect them to graduate with various options and we hope we're hopeful that in working together that hope's not our strategy but that those options are meaningful to both the child our student the young adult and our family the baseline can't be anymore that they walk across the stage they shake the superintendent or their principal's hands and we say good luck navigating this world the complexity of our society today is going to require our students to feel connected to themselves to other people to their interests to higher ed opportunities whether that's a four-year school a two-year school maybe entering the workforce directly and maybe even a proud member of serving our military but ultimately the goal that i have in working in partnership with people is to ensure that all
005of our children not just some of them can walk across that stage after 13 years of being with us in this system or if not longer and have an opportunity to articulate to themselves as well as to us those options that doesn't happen by accident it happens by design and the work that is in front of us that is going to need to be a multi-year effort is to me going to be to double down on two key areas of improvement in the system one that you've heard me talk about prior which is literacy uh in literacy it belongs everywhere it's not just in our pre-k through our grade three uh it exists in our high school classrooms it exists in our middle school classrooms it exists in our health classrooms our science and social
006studies and yes as a former math teacher our math classrooms too in order for our children to graduate with options they need to be literate not just functioning and illiterate and then figuring out and stumbling upon those options they need to be connected and that's beginning to bubble up as a system my priority across this district i would also share that literacy isn't enough either that children feeling whole and feeling well and loving who they are feeling that they are enough matters it matters a great deal and those of you who are here and who are listening at home or on this dais know that deeply we have to double down on wellness we have to double down on mental health supports and realize that those two conditions together do provide our children with the
007greatest opportunity to graduate with options i'm really proud of this board's commitment to continuing to go deeper on our core business which is learning and teaching later on this evening we'll hear a presentation specifically through the lens of our career and innovations department because we must have strong workforce development options available to all our children and that means partnering with our with our families partnering with the business community ensuring that our children have options in our backyard not just somewhere else as i get a chance to live here and with my family i'm learning to love this community deeply and i'm understanding why there's so much power in this community it's a result of the options that are in our own backyard and that's not just with jobs and businesses that's with the colleges and
008higher ed opportunities too you'll have an opportunity to hear a report and an update that's not just about our futures lab that i'm incredibly proud of and visited last week if you had a chance to drive by i was flying drones in the backyard of the school and having really deep conversations with people it seems on the surface level children in the back of a school flying drones well what is what is that all about and he spoke to one child he was immediately plugged into the real estate industry using his drone knowledge to be able to actually make money today yet other families and children that were engaged in the military opportunities and pathways of what that was looking like and the entire classroom was headed to denver international airport on friday to partner
009with united airlines to fly their 787 simulator so looking at all of these pathways what stood out to me is that the students felt seen they felt visible and they felt connected to knowing what was next it was a result of the opportunities that this this district provides that's going to require us to engage the business community thoughtfully as i shared with you in our dinner session i have the intent beginning next week to begin hosting quarterly meetings with our business community to make sure that we're playing offense with articulating what our needs our vision is in beginning to organize ourselves as partners deeply to make sure that those who are interested and have the capacity and the will that we're finding a way to make sure that we're bringing down the walls in our
010system to connect them with our students and that may not just be with their money that maybe with their time their ideas their energy and their resources and their feedback and their thoughts over the last two weeks i've had the opportunity to visit with many members of this community and all the things that i just shared with you they don't start in high school they start the moment you know somebody you know one of our families decides to trust their three or four year old to come into one of our pre-k classrooms i talk a lot about acceleration of learning and belonging and how much that matters in this system i went to shepherdson elementary school met with principal wayne thorns and his team last week and i could tell you if you want to
011know what accelerate learning looks like in this community go knock on shepherdson elementary's front door whether you were the dance teacher in the school who was providing dance teachers and music teachers provide some of the best specific feedback to students in this district we have so much to learn from them they know how to make children grow in real time based upon what they're hearing what they're seeing and what they're telling people i had an opportunity to walk into a kindergarten classroom that was teaching standards that were on a first grade and second grade level and doing it in a way that was seamless and flawless because she was connecting her math lesson to her literacy lesson she was connecting it to what the children read she was connecting it to these various themes that
012have very deep academic vocabulary i walked into a third grade math classroom same school in the level that third graders were talking about the communicative property of math think about can we remember when we talked about the communicative property in math and were we in third grade it was happening at shepherds in elementary school but it wasn't just the language it was her little nuanced things that she was doing in her classroom that if you weren't paying attention you may have missed it where she'd give children two to three minutes to think to themselves and write down their thoughts and their ideas seems so simple and then spend the next two to three minutes turn and talk to your partners at your table getting people to express how they feel talking and modeling civil discourse
013engaging in deep conversation and then beginning to share that out it existed and i could go on to talk about five more teachers in that school i had an opportunity later in that week with ms zamora to go to centennial high school i'm gonna tell you my first 100 days one of the most profound experiences of my career not just my time here because what i learned there is that sometimes our traditional pathways to accelerate learning and ensure students have options we don't always get that right the first time and sometimes not even the second time and having a chance to partner with principal mike roberts and his crew we did about empathy interviews didn't we miss amara for with about 40 students to just talk about their stories how they ended up there what
014they were getting out of the school what made them think psd was valuable i could have had a lot of tissues that day there are people in this community maybe people in this room that are hurting a lot that don't feel seen they don't feel visible they don't feel understood and we're struggling with that's a real problem not just in our classrooms it's a real problem sometimes in this boardroom that school is saving lives without that school and the children it was their voice it was them stepping into themselves to be able to articulate in their power what went wrong but what took what got it right and how they found it at that school it was significantly profound engaging them with the community is the next step and how we make sure that they
015have job opportunities post graduation i had an opportunity as well to meet with miss joni baker and her ace leadership team last week i could have had a lot of tissues around that table too whether it was talking about our bus drivers the current state of our paraprofessionals in our system our nutrition services workers or our custodians we're short staffed in many ways across the system we're fragile i want to be honest and sincere about that we got people working double time triple time doing two three four jobs and you know what you would expect is they were coming in and saying well you know we need a raise they didn't show up asking for a raise they showed up you know what i just want to be seen do you see me do you
016understand what the challenges are and are you committed to my excellence because i care about the system what i heard from them is they're deeply and i hear that from all the associations i hear that from everybody the takeaway here is whether i'm talking to children in this community or i'm talking to employees i think ultimately whether it's even the people in this room who are going to speak a little bit later today we all want the same thing we want to be seen we want to be visible and we want to be understood and that's really messy when we don't always agree i want to close tonight because one of the questions that i ask employees many times not all the time but a lot of times when i'm engaging with them is what
017can this district do to better serve you you'd be surprised the reaction that i get a lot of time sometimes like well wait the superintendent just asked me that question i went to o'day elementary school another impressive school in our portfolio and i had a chance to walk into one of the autism classrooms that are serving children with autism and there was a group of teachers and i asked in that question they're like that question requires me to think a little bit about this and to be thoughtful and what i want to share is that our integrated services staff members across the school it's hard when as a superintendent you don't want to single out one group over another which is why i try to spread my words and wealth as much as i possibly
018can around all the various people who are pitching in and leaning in but we know that our integrated services staff are serving in most instances the most vulnerable children and some of the most vulnerable families in our community and in some instances the lack of paraprofessionals the lack of supports is compounding the types of supports when we know they need more supports and so if you're an integrated service uh worker in this district and you're listening in right now i want you to know that we see you i want you to know that you're valuable like every other employee in this system and i want you to know on behalf of not just the families of the people that you serve but the people who are in this district and working in partnership with you
019we simply couldn't do what we do without you and i know that doesn't go far enough for people to experience joy tomorrow morning when they show up at work but i'm hopeful the more that we can start to talk and acknowledge and see people with light and positivity the greater likelihood we can stick together to these really difficult challenging times there's probably never been a more complex situation in our lives to be educators and leaders in this system and i'm just grateful that i'm here being able to partner with these people with all of you to serve these people well and i'm just really really grateful for the opportunity to speak with all of you tonight so thank you thank you superintendent kingsley i think i can speak on behalf of the board that we're
020appreciating your comments the deep dive into the community and into the schools and your your uh kind of perceptions you're you're articulating or are well received so thank you thank you okay uh that brings us to item 5.0 on the agenda that would be community comments um i'll start with a little bit of good news bad news the good news is i'm thrilled that we're getting 40 people plus showing up and wanting to comment i think that's what we're here for i think we all appreciate the engagement with us as a board and with this district so thanks for that the bad news is because we have so many people showing up and we want to kind of keep our our meetings contained and keep ourselves fresh we are going to limit comments tonight to
02190 seconds so i'll read this and then i'll launch this right into the uh 35 to 40 members who are signed up to speak so this is this opportunity for public comment is for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated deadline due to the large number of people signed up to speak and in the spirit of allowing as many people as reasonably possible to address the board i have decided to reduce the amount of time that will be allowed for each speaker to make remarks all speakers will be allotted 90 seconds this decision was already shared with those who signed up to speak in a confirmation email so you know i read these things out so people know what to expect when you do sign up we kind of make these
022decisions at the at the end as we see how many people show up okay uh with that i'm going to launch this straight in there are 40 people on the sheet but i think we don't quite have that many that are actually going to get to speak tonight some withdrew so first up would be corey carroll welcome uh yeah please join us at this podium watch the green yellow and red light as it gets to yellow i think you'll have 30 seconds left thank you mr president uh board members and superintendent um just a quick personal note i have two sons who were very um functional they were proud graduates from shepherdson about 31 and 29 years ago they also spent a little time on o'day so i love this district my name is dr
023corey carroll i am a board-certified family physician who's been practicing in fort collins for over 30 years tonight i want to thank you for your 3w policy in school wear a mask watch your distance wash your hands my academy of family physicians as well as the american academy of pediatrics support this logic logical effort to limit the spread of cover 19. there are no major medical organizations that are in opposition according to american academy pediatrics as of october 7th over 6 million children have tested positive for cova since the onset of the pandemic the number of new covet cases remains exceptionally high from the state's reporting hospitalized children range from 1.6 to 4.2 percent of the census it is estimated that 0.1 to 2 of all child coveted 19 cases resulted in hospitalization this virus
024affects children as a family physician how i take care of families this means parents siblings grandparents etc they are the most vulnerable i do not have time to talk about the patients that i've signed death certificates that are permanently damaged but i'll tell you it's effective thank you for your support of science and making sure that we are protecting our children and our families thank you for your comments okay uh next up we have mr jim brokish welcome thank you i'm jim brokish i'm here running for school board district d but tonight i'm here as a citizen i was looking at the agenda tonight and actually i got really excited i've always felt that the more students can envision their future and the more they can take a few steps down that path the better
025off those students are going to be and if there's a certain area that they're interested in let's connect them with someone in the industry that they can ask questions with figure out what's a normal day in the job like what do you love about the job what do you maybe not love so much about the job how about if we have them shadow someone as students start to see that path to their future i just think it's incredibly motivating and pooter school district is way ahead of me the thing i'm excited about at the end of this meeting the last agenda item is an update from the career and innovation team and when i look at their website i see so many programs program options available to students design and multimedia to engineering business and
026marketing to healthcare architecture and construction to culinary and hospitality the more i learn about the great options available from the puter school district for our students the more impressed i am with this district so stick around with me to the end to hear the update from the career and innovation team thank you for your comments [Applause] number three on the list is miss kelly holdridge welcome hi guys um i would just like to touch briefly on the educational outcomes of the district from the 2019 cmaf scores over 40 percent of the district's third through eighth graders are below level are below grade level in reading and 50 are below grade level and math this is not an unprecedented year the results are similar in the past years how has this been allowed to continue the
027question is do you think this is acceptable i would have to think any logical person would say no but then that begs the question as to why there are nearly zero agenda items during public meetings over the past few years that have focused on this or on academics in general over the past five to eight years psd has placed an ever increasing emphasis on diversity and equity but the graduation rates for minority and economically disadvantaged students remains well below district goals and are virtually unchanged the goal is 85 graduation rates and these students have consistently been in the 60th percentile how is this fair so many of us worry about our own children but seeing these numbers we really worry about all children the district has said they want all kids to graduate with options
028what options are these kids that don't graduate going to have i have a personal question for the board members if your kids were in school now would these results be acceptable to you if your kids are one of these statistics would that be acceptable to you would you be happy with what the board is doing to help the district and the students i really don't think there is a good answer here though i think if the results are acceptable that is a problem on the other hand if you think these results are not acceptable that is a problem as well is the current focus of the board working is it helping our students is it helping our teachers thank you thank you for your comments okay number four on the list is mr mark fuchs
029welcome thank you okay at the last meeting mr kingsley stated emphatically that crt is not taught in our schools then they showed us the new curriculum of diversity equity and inclusion which is one of the many forms of crt according to meeting two meeting minutes the district advisory board's focus last year was on equity the november agenda focused on professional development with the district with regard to diversity equity and inclusion this board was led last year by current board of education canada jessica zamora my question is what role does dei training serve for psd staff through the district advisory board ms amora promoted training do the work 30 day course some excerpts from this training include day 8 systemic racism the foundation of the nation is rooted in these types of ideas and understanding by
030the white people who stepped on killed disenfranchise and oppress all people of color in order to maintain their supremacy and power the systems of america including academic medical judicial housing judicial housing and more all continue to reflect these racist beliefs to this day day 15 decolonizing academia so much of what we understand about the world and subsequently so much of the lens through which we view the world is clouded with a whitewashing that we must intentionally scrub away we must hold ourselves in each other accountable for bringing an intersectional and inclusive education to the table sounds to me like you want to teach our children that being white is bad and then if you're a person of color then you are oppressed what a horribly racist thing to teach our children this is crt so
031given the training and courage by ms samara does that does she disagree with the district's publicity stated publicly stated stance of not teaching crt what role does she believe mr future your time psd teacher training and thank you for your comments okay next up number five is casey lindsey welcome [Music] hello board thank you for having us according to the uip that the board approved september 28th 2021 the last meeting the first major improvement strategy is accelerated learning the district states that it will devote the bulk of classroom time to challenging instruction at grade level or higher and provide all students access to rich high quality curriculum aligned with colorado academic standards two questions given that a significant portion of the district's students test well below grade level in ela and particularly in math does
032it seem the best educational strategy to devote the bulk of classroom time to challenging instruction at grade level or higher when they are struggling to even be at grade level how does this strategy help specifically the students who are already significantly behind additionally while the district stated that it will provide all students access to high quality curriculum as an improvement strategy can the current board candidates explain why access to high quality curriculum was not previously available or not previously an agenda item additionally superintendent kingsley stated also in that meeting on september 28th it is necessary to work with people and companies that align with psd on dei initiatives as the ninth largest district in the state and we should leverage that does that indicate the difference in diversity of thought is not welcome i thought
033that diversity was our strength thank you thank you for your comments number six is miss allison copeland welcome good evening everyone my name is alison copeman and i am here tonight as a teacher a mom and a community member this is my 21st year teaching at cruz where i teach first grade and one of my former students will be speaking tonight i'm so excited for him um my husband is in his 20th year at pooter high school and our two daughters have been in psd since kindergarten and now attend weber we literally are psd like my family is psd we are so invested i come here tonight to say thank you thank you to our current board members for supporting and believing in public schools and in public teachers thank you to dr kingsley for
034joining us and being part of our team and for all the work on restructuring literacy to close achievement gaps i'm fortunate that cruz's k2 is and intervention staff were all certified in og in orton gillingham and the structured literacy approach is the right way to go we are seeing amazing things with kids so thank you for bringing that if you aren't familiar with orton gillingham i welcome you all to come to my classroom and not all of you but them um to see how it really plays out and what it is so you can see it in action um and at the same time i'm also honest i'm exhausted the last two years have been hard on us all but my first graders are really resilient and they are making amazing progress and right where
035i would expect them to be so that is a success for all of us who are involved some of my students have never been in a classroom this is their first experience in the classroom this year and just the growth they've made already so far is just so heartwarming and amazing to see mrs copeman your time has expired i know i'm sorry so no thank you to all i really appreciate i could talk forever i love teaching i love this district thank you for your comments okay number seven on the list is mr mark bartlett welcome good evening my name is mark bartlett i'm the physical education teacher at irish irish elementary escuela bilingue dr kingsley you mentioned the district coming up with a strategy to double down on the whole child mental health and
036uh you know everything so it reminded me of exactly why i switched from being a classroom teacher to physical education so i can push physical fitness physical education social emotional learning learning and um uh as ms copeman mentioned these last uh couple years have been challenging but we're still here we are back in the classroom and i like many of my cl uh colleagues are uh thankful for that as exhausting as it can be being the mass police i love being back in person interacting with my students in a safe manner teaching pe through remote learning was a challenge to say the least vaccinations and the mass mandate help ensure that we can stay safe and stay in our schools for in-person learning the health and safety of our students and staff is the top
037priority so thank you for making the smart decision despite any misguided information or disrespect it has and may head your way so uh again i'm grateful for all of you on the board and uh thanks for keeping our district moving forward and uh i just wanna i know you're from penn state so i just want to say go hawks all right and your comments your time has expired so thank you miss bartlett uh number eight is uh miss clarissa hernandez welcome thank you hi my name is clarice hernandez i teach kindergarten at irish escuela bilingue i wanted to talk a little about my experience as a teacher this year i know that not all of our experiences are the same and i want to honor that and encourage you to keep talking to educators across
038the district it's important for you guys to have an accurate representation of how things are going in our schools my students are learning a lot this year they're learning literacy math science social studies and all of this in two languages i might add they're learning how to regulate their emotions and problem solve they're developing their voice and practicing empathy they're learning how to listen share and be part of a community they're doing all of this while wearing masks and practicing social distancing and it's true some days they're tired someday they miss their parents but every day i hear comments like i love my school and i like learning making all this happen has not been easy we had to make a lot of changes in our practices to keep our community safe and meet the
039needs of the students and their families during a pandemic many of us are working many hours outside of the workday and like my students sometimes i feel tired and overwhelmed i pour a lot of myself into this work but my students are worth it and i'm thankful to be able to do it safely thanks and in person thanks to a mask mandate i just want you to continue keeping us in mind as we make decisions we have a lot of ideas to offer i want to extend an invitation to each board member to visit my classroom and witness all the learning first hand i also want to take a moment to express my appreciation for parents and guardians that might be listening from irish elementary who trust and support us every day and it's an
040honor to work with them and their children thank you so much thank you for your comments okay number nine is ms jean's son and sanford i i could say it in french more easily please please you can say it in french yes sanfasan yes my name is jean samthason i'm happy to be here tonight um i am also a teacher i work at bowder elementary i work as what's called an interventionist and an eld teacher so i work with students who struggle in math and literacy i work with our students who are becoming bilingual and it is a privilege to work with them superintendent kingsley you visited my school recently and you asked me what i needed wow i kind of was dumbfounded for a second i felt seen so thank you i'm really here
041tonight i could make a list of many things we need but i'm here to thank you the board and lots of the psd staff i'm grateful for the commitment to in-person learning there it is the best to be with the children i'm grateful for the commitment to keep our brick and mortar schools open in a safe and healthy manner i'm grateful for the commitment to masks and schools i'm grateful for the commitment to students academic needs we are meeting students where they are and working on growth i'm grateful to the district's commitment to social emotional needs of both our students and our staff we were caught off guard by how difficult this year has been i we never we couldn't have imagined how hard it was going to be we were also hopeful that it
042would be easier than last year but we are addressing social emotional needs to assure that teaching and learning can flourish i'm grateful to this board is dedicated to making a difference for all children thank you so much [Applause] thank you for your comments [Applause] okay i'm going to skip over 10. um skater did not show up but we have number 11 miss samantha loundes welcome samantha lowndes my me and my husband and children are part of the district too we're both teachers in the district i've been at bennett elementary second grade for 18 years and i've also been a parent for 18 years i'd like to thank the board and the administration for finding a way to bring our students back to school my opinion the biggest takeaway from this covid crisis is that people
043need people and the ability to connect in person is a huge part of the educational experience right now classroom management is our biggest struggle in the last two years children have missed the opportunities to develop the essential student skills first for learning and frankly for life self management communication and social skills are a prerequisite to all academic standards here's what i think we need to we need we need to keep our schools open everything else is open for business general education teachers need space and time right now we need to eliminate any unnecessary mandates our time is better spent connecting with students and their families elementary school teachers are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to planning we are tasked to teach seven subjects a day many teachers use their evenings their weekends and
044the early morning hours in order to complete the work that we are not given time for in our world there's no such thing as extra duty pay or overtime pay we accept this as part of our profession our duties may not be visible but they're your time is expired yeah anyway we need to feel competent okay thank you for your comments okay number 12 is mr jeff alda welcome thank you hello hello my name is jeff after heidi from wellington colorado my public comment consists of five facts fact one in 2013 larry walk began a tenure as executive director and chief medical officer for colorado sandra smizer also began her tenure at super as pooter's superintendent and bernie bernbaum the current president of lambert county's board of health was appointed to pooter wellness buddhist wellness
045advisory council fact number two that same year cd phe passed a grant that allocated to putin 24 thousand dollars uh from 24 000 to 161 thousand dollars an increase about 550 percent from the previous year's funding to fund the clinic at centennial grants from cdphe totaled well over 1 million dollars since 2013. larry walks business every child pediatrics runs the clinic fact number three city phe provides a grant provided a grant this year to centennial centennial and lincoln for two hundred and ten thousand dollars the colorado health foundation bohemian foundation every child pediatrics contribute an additional three hundred thousand or almost half a million dollars to permanently embed health clinics in our schools fact number four bernie bernbaum is currently on the local advisory committee for every child pediatrics and co-medical director for this specific
046clinic at centennial fact five this board agreed to pay sandra smizer half a million dollars for the next two years for early retirement at the same time her son is actively working with cdc cd phe members of laramie county public health to actively track and silence voices for any parent dissenting from the rockefeller chief for change back to school program finally i'd like to say your time has expired i'm speaking to the board an objective board he's taking off mask your time has expired okay [Applause] thank you for your comments number 13 will be mr griffin cole welcome thank you mr kingsley you're on record on september 28th as saying psd does not teach critical race theory you were addressing how many of us discerning parents dislike the word equity which you may not know
047is our reason it's not just that it's another term for crt as is inclusion and diversity and these new terms that psd is now adopting via the colorado's unified improvement plan terms like restoration justice and restorative practices yes we're paying attention the real reason is that the kind of equity you're talking about doesn't exist in the real world our children all have an equal opportunity to achieve but some will perform better than others for lots of reasons better study habits more determination better skills that's just the way it is thank god for that we don't need you educators teach our kids that all of them will or should achieve the same outcomes no matter what that's not possible you should also know that at least four psd teachers have signed a pledge which states that
048they will teach crt despite what they're told or what law is enacted it's the zen education project stop teaching our kids equity inclusion and all that other indoctrination nonsense and get back to academics psd has a horrible reading and math proficiency rate and all of you on this board have failed this district every single student in third grade should be able to read and do math at at least a third grade level every one here you seem to be okay with 50 being proficient so until you get all of our kids reading and writing at a grade level or higher you need to stop allocating any time to health clinics and equity absurdity and focus on academics thank you for your comments mr cole number 14 will be miss kathy doomler welcome dumbler and thanks
049for correcting me welcome for over 30 years i've felt so fortunate to be employed by psd i've loved serving at moore elementary linton elementary leicester middle school and as a long-term sub for office managers and registrars throughout our district i served on the dab where parents had a voice for timnath bolts preston and fort collins high while my daughters were students between the years of linton and lesher i spent two years upstairs in this building as the office manager for the curriculum department where i learned how educate every child every day works district-wide psd has done a great job of providing families with choices for their students core knowledge ib stem dual language the list is long but perhaps my love for psd blinded me sadly my eyes have been opened to serious issues curriculum
050and policy changes with no parent input the drop in student test scores the disregard for parents and educators voices it's more than a coveted matter instead of educate every child every day sometimes it now feels like control every child every day in every way like districts throughout america psg is now influenced by unions and higher powers at the state and national level and now across america parents are stepping up to speak for their students many of our schools are named for outstanding educators our newest school is named for an amazing man who i believe would stand here with me to ask you to listen to the parents and educators i care about psd and the legacy of former educators ms dumler your time thank you for your comments [Applause] number 15 is miss jessica krause
051welcome so i just i have bullet points since we have 90 seconds so masks they're not working it's about compliance not science and we all know that you promote inclusion while segregating and discriminating against the unvaccinated children segregation has never worked either the experimental gene therapy shot has caused more damage in eight months than it had been all vaccines put together because they're not working either look at the viirs database naughty kids have always got suspended or expelled as a consequence to their bad choices and now healthy straight a students are being sent home for 10 days for doing absolutely nothing they don't like that funny how we used to teach dare in schools to teach kids about the dangers of drugs and hopefully keep them off of them now we can they can go
052get shot up and experiment experimental drugs in the school parking lot from the local health authorities get vaccinated or a vaccinated person might get sick from the vaccine they got vaccinated against because you're not vaccinated come on people it makes no sense our children are now being raised in fear fear of the world fear of illness virus and even the air they breathe they're being taught to fear everything prolonged fear is terror and terror becomes trauma the psychological damage you are pushing is irreversible we are con conditioning our kids to believe non-vaccinated kids spread illnesses they don't have and a person not wearing a mask can spread an illness they don't have none of it makes sense my favorite quote from george martin states when you tear out a man's tongue you aren't proving him
053a liar you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say board members we parents will not be silenced until there is justice for our children thank you for your comments number 16 is miss amber carhoff welcome good evening um and thank you for allowing me a chance to speak tonight my name is amber karhoff and i'm a third grade teacher in the pooter school district where i've been teaching for the past eight years in addition to teaching in pooter school district i have two children in the district one sophomore in high school and a fifth grader in elementary today i wanted a chance to share my personal experiences as well as those of my third grade students while i understand the desire not to have our children wearing masks in school i
054also see the safety and sense in the decision i'm not here to change anyone's mind about vaccinations or whether they should personally wear a mask as i know that will fall upon deaf ears what i can speak to directly are the students in my classroom and my school and they are happy they're happy to be in person learning they're happy to be at school they're happy to see their friends and their teachers they're happy with what we're doing and they don't complain about masks they don't feel trapped abused muzzled any of that and i know this because i talk to them i listen to them i see them every single day the students that had to deal with online learning were so excited to be back in school despite the masks your teachers are working
055very hard to help students feel comfortable grow academically and grow socially what i also want you to know is that many of my coworkers want to see more support the negative comments from our community are yelled by the loudest mouths and we would love to see more of those positive comments coming forward support your teachers and support the families with the students as well thank you for your comments okay number 17 is miss gina fulcado welcome mr kingsley i just want to comment real quickly you i applaud you for saying that you want a student to feel seen invisible when they are not visible wearing a mask i have seen students who were not even recognized by their teachers because of wearing a mask and so i just think that there is so much that
056we are missing out on a child wants to be seen and recognized individually with all their facial facial features their smile their crooked teeth their missing teeth the you know whatever it is but they're not really seen they're only seeing this part of them which then brings me to the point did you know that 2 300 years ago long before islam arabs discovered that forcing people to cover their nose and mouths broke their will and individuality and depersonalize them it made them submissive that's why they imposed on every woman the mandatory use of a fabric over her face then islam turned into the woman's symbol of submission to allah the man to allah the man owner of the harem and the king modern psychology explains it without face we do not exist as independent beings
057the child looks in the mirror between the ages of 2 and 3 and is discovered as an independent being the mask is the beginning of deleting individuality how does not knowing the history we are condemned to repeat it so i want to ask you who is your allah for our children the cdc cdphe are your intentions to force our children to ultimately submit to the vaccine as your allah thank you for your comments mr cotto okay i'm going to just remind the public one time please be respectful of all speakers keep the applauding during or the comments during the the commentaries to yourself if you would all right number 18 will be miss jessica wernemont if she doesn't show up she can't correct my pronunciation okay number okay no number 19 number 20 miss jessie
058andrine well i'm a lot shorter welcome to everyone hi i'm jessie andreen i'm from wellington and just a couple things so i feel very convicted about everything going on in our country right now but i i urge everyone here and everyone involved in our school system to really think why you're doing what you're doing um who who do you trust and why do you trust them you know i think so much of what's going on in our schools is mandated by people that we we don't know what their their agendas are their incentives are and so i would just urge you if you believe in whatever you believe in just know why um i also am really upset just i know this is a common theme but critical race theory i think is really dangerous
059um and so just for those that don't understand what it is i would like to share a little bit of my view of it um you know i just think critical race theory holds that our laws and our culture are irredeemably racist so that our skin color determines what what our bias is what our racial biases and you know our founding principles our laws are governing institutions they were established for the purpose of racial suppression and that the only way to undo this wrong is to disassemble our institutions and cultural norms this theory escaped from the strictly academic environment in our universities and it's become thoroughly entangled in the exponential growth of diversity equity and inclusion so the dei efforts and government corporations and now our schools and many miss andrea your time has expired
060thank you thank you very much for your comments okay uh that brings us to miss brandy aspinall welcome thank you hello my name is brandi aspinall candidate for district g first thank you for having me and thank you for serving our community i hope to be elected and serve with some of you sitting on this very board tonight who am i i am a mother a wife celebrating 13 years of marriage yesterday i'm a cancer survivor an author a realtor i am proud to be a fifth generation fort collinsborn native i live my life by my top five values my faith family integrity authenticity and hope as a mother of a current psd second grader and preschooler i was shocked to learn about 40 percent of psd 3rd through 8th graders are below grade level
061in english and language arts while around 48 are below grade level in math this issue has only been amplified due to the pandemic as this world is ever changing and the complexities in it increase it is vital we are committed to giving our children educational excellence so they can navigate it i believe providing a detailed curriculum map demonstrating what is being taught allowing parents and teachers to work together in transparency and authenticity and providing teachers with the resources needed to support this educational excellence will build trust and collaboration in spite of current test scores i have an unwavering hope that this downward trend can be changed when we begin to collaborate uplift each other and rally around our children's educational opportunities i believe we can implement solutions to succeed thank you thank you for your
062comments okay number 23 is miss tasha carr miss uh 23 tasha carr welcome so at the request of the national school boards association the nsba ms carr please wear your mask above your nose thank you the doj has issued a memo to federal law enforcement agencies to crack down on so-called threats posed by parents speaking out at school board meetings this unconstitutional action is counter to the rights of people to petition the government for redress of grievances this is a blatant attempt to intimidate and silence moms and dads and is disturbing evidence of the power of teachers unions and the nsba over federal policy and agencies such as the cdc as i mentioned last meeting and the doj and their disdain for the rights of parents at least 11 states have publicly disavowed the actions
063of the msba i commend christopher for his public support of parents speaking out and peacefully protesting and i call on you as members of the school board to disavow in the clearest terms the nsba in this matter the nsba letter is chilling and incites his justification propaganda purporting the false inclusion of crt within classroom instructions and curricula last week we heard the same talking points for the superintendent that psd doesn't teach crt but this is completely disingenuous since it's clearly the direction of focus psd is fully immersed in the fundamentals and guiding principles of crt for example the unified improvement plan states there is institutional systemic and cultural biases within psd which is the primary premise of crt thank you thank you for your comments [Applause] leave them with the board secretary thank you okay
064number 24 is miss michelle duncan welcome my name is michelle duncan and i am the parent of a fifth grader and a third grader who are black minorities in this district i am here today to voice my concern regarding the quality of educational opportunities available in this district i recently read a startling statistic which stated that 42 of white students are not at grade level and incredibly 74 of hispanic students and 75 of black students are not at grade level i will be honest when i say how shockingly unacceptable i find this to be my children as minorities in this district could have been included in that disturbing 75 statistic however they are not my third is reading at a fifth grade level and my fifth grader is excelling in math the two of them
065are surpassing the expectations of their grade levels i do not point this out as a bragging mother although i am very proud of their accomplishments i am pointing this out because their accomplishments are directly related to their hard work and the exceptional education they receive at the charter school they attend they are excelling because of the freedom i have in directing the path of their education it is my right and responsibility to advocate for my children and is the responsibility i take seriously however this board can unilaterally make decisions that have the potential to affect them for the rest of their lives a school board should represent the whole community not just the select portion too many viewpoints are one-sided many parents voices are not being heard or considered i know that my voice is
066silenced and my freedom to choose what is best for my kids is endangered when i have no representation from the members of the board the time has come for preserving promises duncan your time has expired thank you yes thank you very much for your comments okay number 25 is miss alyssa bennett okay moving on i have miss uh our number 27 is miss heidi mikkelsen okay uh number 28 is mr alan braslaw welcome thank you so dear president and members of the school board administrators and staff of pluto school district and members of the public my name is alan braslaw a resident for collins and a math and science teacher at fort collins high school it's so very important that our students attend school in person and it's so important to them that they can
067also pursue sports and other activities with their peers i'm reminded of this every day being in person is possible because we wear mass and because of the availability of very effective vaccines of course it's an inconvenience to spend the entire day wearing a mask but no one most importantly no students ever complain for they get it they want our schools to remain open in person i have students in almost every one of my classes who has had kovid or has been exposed to covid one student came back just yesterday after fighting and defeating kovid she had been very sick for one week and then got better and she told us that never ever had she felt so that sick in her life i was thrilled to welcome her back in the classroom i would like
068to remind you i'd like to remind everyone that the freedom of one ends where it starts to encroach on the freedom of others i encourage all of us to continue to do what needs to be done in order to keep our schools open and in person and not to yield to those who shout the loudest thank you for your comments number 29 is mr damon henry welcome thank you superintendent kingsley and the board for welcoming me this evening i teach at pooter high school just across the parking lot and i've been at pooter for six years prior to that i was at lincoln for 10 years and i've been completely in the teaching game for almost 20 oh boy almost 27 years and i want to bring a bit of good news principal principal mckay
069and all of the teachers and support personnel of pooter high school have worked mightily to provide a school that is normal my students come to my class each day ready and excited to learn they have their backpacks filled with papers folders books and computers it is normal my students laugh cry worry smile dance talk run hold hands argue fight and make up it is normal my students depend on their family friends and teachers for support they realize that we are all in this together it is normal my students often do the right thing but sometimes do the wrong thing it is normal today i came to work in the cold morning air put my lunch in the refrigerator and made myself a hot drink i got to teach my wonderful students about adams a student
070that i haven't seen in four years stopped by to say hello i ate lunch made some parent phone calls graded papers planned a lesson with my student teacher met with two students about a potential job got connected with four of my students that are quarantined and at the end of the day said goodbye to the students as they left pooter high school it was normal mr henry your time has expired thank you very much for your comments okay number 30 is miss amy hughes welcome hello hi i'm amy hughes a proud teacher at lincoln middle school first thank you to the board members for serving our community during challenging times your work is appreciated in order for learning to occur school needs to be a safe place for all most of my students and my
071fellow teachers have expressed that they feel much safer with masks especially those with unvaccinated family members at home and it's wonderful to hear how they're caring about others in their families besides themselves the masks have not been a hindrance or really even made much of a difference we're all happier so much happier to be at school interacting with one another than instead of at home alone on a screen something that is making students feel unsafe and uncertain about their future is the behavior of many adults they see in public and in the media they're concerned about fighting and yelling and violence over things that do not seem to be the big issues to them luckily children are resilient and they've been working hard to make the world better we have students creating tick tocks to
072spread kindness to counteract destructive tick-tock actions you may have heard about students in class have been practicing discussing opposing ideas with respect calm voices and empathy even willing to consider other points of view and occasionally change their minds thinking and learning in a safe respectful environment it is a shame the time and resources that could be used for their education are being spent dealing with politics rather than their learning and honestly wearing a mask all day even when it was 86 degrees is less of a concern than wondering if the copier will have enough paper or if i'll have time to provide individual feedback on all their essays before the next class starts thank you for your comments all right number 31 is miss heather ladenpara welcome thank you since 2009 psd has received over
0731.2 million dollars in grants from this colorado department of health and environment alone for its student-based health centers cdpsc cdphe justifies this type of action by school surveys like the healthy kids colorado survey which asks middle and high schoolers about everything from sexual identity to drug use the president of the lambert county department of health and environment bernie bernbaum has been the co-director for the clinic in centennial high school he's also served on the board that oversees the clinic he was also on the wellness advisory council at psd during his tenure at laramie county department of health and environment is psd captured by local and state health departments if not why is psd in the business of medicine why are you allowing eua vaccine clinics in schools and advertising them why are you allowing health
074clinics inside school property why are you forcing medical interventions on children as a condition of receiving a public education masks are a eua medical device i'm dismayed by the people who are thanking you for listening to the experts in regards to your mask policies what experts do you know how many experts there are in the world who understand the long-term health consequences from daily long-term mass use by children with developing lungs zero there are zero health experts because there has never been a large-scale long-term study on the long-term mass use of children you're forcing our children into this experiment without our consent and by doing so you're violating several international codes and agreements give parents the choice thank you thank you for your comments number 32 is mr mark morehouse welcome hi i'm mark i'm
075a teacher at fossil ridge high school uh i have a student who's a fifth grader at o'day i coached swimming for a long time at fossil ridge high school and recently retired from coaching to kind of focus more on raising my son so i'm really here to actually talk about pools but i will say i spend every day in a school a building with 2 000 kids who are all wearing masks and like this gentleman said everybody's doing just fine they're way happier to be at school than to be at home so what i really wanted to talk about was the space for our swimming teams we have two new schools opening next year who are both planning to offer teams we have not invested at all ever in aquatics in pooter's school district so
076we have no place to put those teams and i've been working with our athletic directors about how to make that happen we don't really have a plan and if we offer those teams it's just going to take space away from the the kids we already have who are swimmers we've been really successful over the last couple decades and we would like to keep that and that's going to be hard to achieve without supporting them with the facility so um i have two specific requests and i've been to a couple city council meetings recently talking about pools uh one is that we hold off on offering new swim teams until we have a plan for where to put them we can achieve that by offering co-op teams instead of new teams and then the second thing
077is for psd to try to partner with the city uh they're currently planning a new southeast rec center and would like to put a pool in it they need a partner that's it thank you thank you for your comments number 33 is miss kristen dice or diaz welcome my name is christa diaz and i'm here as a werner elementary mom and also as a clergy representative here i'm an episcopal priest at st luke's episcopal church and i'm one of about 20 religious leaders who penned a letter to all of you at the beginning of the school year thanking you we all come from religious traditions that have as our grounding love for one another in community which means that it's not about us as individuals it's about taking care of everybody particularly the vulnerable and
078i'm here to do that again to thank you for following science and keeping our vulnerable children as safe as you possibly can as a clergy person in the community i have a different kind of view into people's lives i know of a child who is a parishioner who would likely die if she caught covid i know of another child who has permanent lung damage i know of another family where the child took over home and the father died so while those are not the normal story it is happening so i thank you for doing your best to put love and science and equity at the center of what you're doing i'm very very grateful as a mom and as a clergy person thank you thank you for your comments okay i'm going to number 35
079miss aaron lee welcome hello i'm the parent of a sixth grader who was lured into what she thought was art club in her psd school last may where an unqualified stranger extremist and social disrupter was brought in to discuss my child's sexuality gender identity suicide give her inappropriate toys plus extra to give her friends give her the gender-bred person activity which explains that gender is never binary and heterosexuality is not normal and tell her that her family isn't safe and that she should lie to parents in order to attend in secrecy you all should know that my child's assailant cites the healthy kids colorado survey which just went out to all of our children as her primary resource for operating in secret in our schools she cites the survey as the reason for meeting with
080younger and younger children she claims that according to healthy kids colorado nearly half of school-aged children in larimer county are lgbtq half and you all support her some of you have even defended her 50 statistic which signals to me that your beliefs and decisions you make for our children align with that delusional statistic please for the sake of our children can you review the healthy kids colorado survey objectively some of you admittedly never even read this survey before it was put in front of our kids please take notice of how it doesn't ask about our children's biological sex yet it asks three times if they're transgender and what their sexuality is then give six confusing and misconstruable answers to those questions please research how the results are tabulated and data is utilized please look into
081and report back on its accuracy because those of you running for reelection had either never even looked at the survey prior to it being sent out to all of our children as young as 10 or you have cited the survey to push initiatives in our schools and you've also said that the questions are confusing and the data is not accurate i'll say that again some of you have cited healthy kids colorado to push your agenda while also admitting that its questions are confusing and its results are inaccurate please explain to me how you believe your time has expired i thank you for your comments okay number 36 will be miss diana majors welcome thank you members of the psd school board i respectfully ask you to consider the october 8 2021 decision of the douglas
082county health department here in colorado allowing exemptions from facial coverings and preventing quarantining of asymptomatic individuals following are some quoted statements from that recent order whereas while close contact with large groups of non-household members for extended periods of time indoors may lead to some level transmission of coping 19 in these settings it is observed that number one risk to the health of children is low number two your risk of transmission from infected children staff or teachers to family and others outside of the child care and and school settings is low and number three and this is very important attempting to use children as a shield against spread in the community by masking or ineffectually quarantining asymptomatic children will pose greater mental health risks to a much larger number of children resulting in a far more
083negative overall impact to the community and whereas some studies have shown that the masking students provide statistically and significant additional protection from cover 19 infection and others have indicated that it may cause unnecessary negative impacts for otherwise healthy children such as hypoxia fatigue and various symptoms related to mass induced exhaustion syndrome such as the universal mass requirement for all school-aged children is contrary to their overall health and well-being whereas this board respects the unique circumstances of each family that parents are almost always best suited to make health decisions for their children individuals for themselves and that current circumstances do not warrant compelled masking or quarantines both of which may be more detrimental to a larger number of people i'll send a copy of this order to each board member for you to consider i implore
084you to please follow their example and do the right thing thank you for your comments uh miss majors number 37 is mr rodney hussman welcome um my name is rodney hussman i have two kids that are in the pooter school district i just want to be a contrasting voice to all these voices saying how happy the kids are to be back in school and things like that my daughter was to graduate last last year as a junior early and then spend this previous year taking community college classes in at school well none of that happened um she was an a student and because she was forced to go online like everyone she basically gave up and then you know last a year ago she tried she tried to go to school she really did um
085it's very hard with the masks the teachers she couldn't hear the voice the pressure to keep it on the plastic around her the anxiety made it very hard she she barely could barely get her out of bed to go to school most the time this was an a student she gave up in january we just pulled her out her teachers understood who she was and she only needed two more credits or you know two more classes so they graduated her it's a bunch of baloney but she's graduated i have a 14 year old son he's um he had coveted last month and he was very scared and we he had some sniffles we it didn't seem like much we we tested him and he had covet so he was very scared he thought he was
086going to die he thought that he should be very worried about everything two days later he didn't feel a thing um he tested not negative um he said you know we're supposed to quarantine for 10 days what happened to all of that mr husband your time has expired thank you thank you for your comments all right and then we have next miss jenny willis marco welcome hi everybody um my name is jenny willis marco um i'm a csu professor and so i teach like many of you in this room all day in a mask which i'm very grateful for i spent a year much like my children with variable in person and not in person time and i can say that my students and my children are much more grateful to be in person so
087i was very grateful that i was able to send them back to school this year i can say that they have to be reminded when i pick them up from school to take off their mask because just like me i walk in between buildings and i don't even take it off it's just become how we do business much like putting on clothing every day it's just what we wear to go to work and school what they've gotten back has been immeasurable getting to be with their friends getting to talk at lunch about nothing in particular getting to ask their teachers questions relevant to the moment about the question or the topic at hand getting to work with their peers and get help on assignments and do their homework before they come home so they can
088spend time with us when they come home all of that has been priceless and so i'm grateful for all the work you're doing and listening tonight i can only say i'm even more grateful than when i came into the building so thank you for everything you're doing and please please keep doing it thank you thank you for your comments miss marco okay number 39 is mr ryan brittingham welcome leadership teamwork work ethic and community these are the values of a junior reserve officer training corps girotc is a military-based extracurricular that gives great opportunities for students in psd to learn about themselves perseverance self-motivation and dedication through opportunities in and outside of classrooms jrotcs exist to help high school students find something bigger than themselves i came here today to ask you if you could look
089into the application process to help the careers of every student inside of psd there much there is much more to jrotc than just the military preparation and all that stuff the army jrotc states leadership civics geography global awareness health wellness language arts life skills and u.s history as part of their curriculum jrtc's have also been proven to help increase graduation rates and academic performance within students and it only costs about seventy five thousand dollars a year which provides trips instructors and pretty much everything that a student would need in order to help better their learning experience and make themselves better people so i ask you to consider looking into the application process to bring jrotc's into psd schools thank you for taking the time to join us tonight mr burningham okay and then uh i
090believe last on the list is miss carrie p and we need a few moments to set her up if i'm not mistaken okay i think that means she's about ready to join us we see the pharmaceutical companies urging the authorization and approval of experimental kevin 19 vaccines for children my first question is why is this eua vaccine already listed and viewable in synergy it is not authorized nor approved is cdphe planning to add this biologic to colorado's required for school entry schedule i asked because in summer of 2020 sb 163 school entry immunization bill was pushed through and passed as urgent legislation this bill bypasses the legislative process for adding vaccinations to the required for school entry vaccine schedule and gives all of the power to the appointed officials of cdphe to add whatever vaccine
091they see fit to this schedule california has already mandated mandated the experimental cova 19 vaccine for children to go to school are we headed in this direction is this mask mandate just a placeholder for the experimental vaccine when it is available for children in july psd announced mass would be optional for students a week later mr kingsley swooped in changing the policy to masks required is mr kingsley using the chiefs for change rockefeller foundation playbook to try psd's coveted policies first require masks then implement optional serial testing is available require testing of unvaccinated students in order to keep them in person reduce quarantine time and to push the vaccine on them it really makes me wonder if psd has our children's best interests at heart or if there is some other overarching capacity influencing the
092decision making driving these policies thank you for your comments okay so that can oh i think i need to give it a few seconds good to go okay so that concludes the community comments tonight uh again i think everybody who did show up this evening your commentary is appreciated each of your point of views is being listened to so thank you uh that brings us to item 6.0 on the agenda and that is board committee reports about i give a minute or two for some folks to leave yeah okay uh thanks again to all of you who showed up and uh that brings us to item 6.0 on the agenda which is board committee reports um board members does anybody have a committee report or anything they'd like to report out to the board in
093public go ahead dj so i got a couple here first off october is family school and community partnership and as a member of the state advisory council of parent involvement and education i wanted to share one of their their statement sakpai believes that every child deserves an opportunity to shoot for the stars just as just as a space launch requires engineers mathematicians and other experts working together on a shared mission education needs many different people doing their part to ensure that every student achieves their educational goals we know that families educators and community members all have a critical role to play in helping our children and youth to achieve their dreams so sacpai invite or encourages early all grade levels from early childhood to higher education to please take a moment to check out their
094website and and read the promising practices 2021 promising practices and explore the family school and community partnership toolkit to increase their capacity to provide high-impact partnering strategies that will lead to positive student outcomes when we have a unified vision all students can overcome the opportunity gap and we provide any support they need to succeed everyone can reach for the stars all right um second up uh the psd foundation uh we had our a little meet and greet last week which was a great kickoff to remind people that were out there and to introduce mr kingsley to a lot of our partners out there after that we did have our foundation meeting today we are breaking into three about three committees to set up to try to continue on this momentum uh one of them is
095reaching out to our our business community uh community and strengthening that uh one is uh the uh outreach and fundraising aspect of it we're looking at the possibility of maybe doing one small thing in the winter and another one in the spring that's to be determined a little bit yet um and yeah right at the moment i'm freaking the third one yep forgot it um but it was very exciting that uh the turnout we did have they were extremely happy to see uh not only mr kingsley but uh the cabinet that really helped inspire a lot of board members on the foundation they really appreciate you guys coming out and listening and uh i gotta tell you at the meeting today there was a lot of smiles and a lot of energy which uh hasn't
096necessarily been the case in the last year and a half so uh i greatly appreciate that so thank you for taking your time and the found and the cabinet to come out and uh join us all right um yep those were all i had great thank you dj other board members have any reports uh carolyn yeah go ahead i just uh briefly wanted to say that i had the opportunity this last week to go to a get-together with fort collins police services called coffee with cops and it was i had such a delightful like afternoon visiting with chief sobota and his staff and they had a great turnout a lot of people showed up but i was also really impressed with the chiefs of openness to interacting with the community and and the positive message
097that he he had for the for the community not only by showing up himself but having all of his assistant police chiefs showing up and um and that he has women in his organization as having a woman that business myself and have come from fields where women don't traditionally serve um having been a ups driver myself i i thought it was really good that he had women on his staff and and uh different people from the community and on his commitment to making sure that our children see themselves in our police services i mean i think was really important and i i thought uh just seeing everybody there in the community having such a good time even parents with their children was was really a good reflection on them so it was really fun and
098i encourage anybody who wants to go out and visit with them they answer all kinds of questions they're going to be having those i think once a month so just check their website or their facebook post and it's a it was a really nice time great thanks for that report definitely heard a lot of positive things about the leadership of the police department so dj yes i remembered uh the third one is the executive director uh and uh moving forward with uh getting it committed together to work with trying to get the application out and hopefully by early part of next year we will have an executive director for that good good comment all right rob yeah so several of us attended the colorado association of school boards regional meeting uh in the last couple
099weeks i don't remember exactly when it was but we went and we learned some important things about what's going on at the state level and shared some some insights and some experiences with our fellow board members from across our region of the state that's all good and i want to uh share with you that at that meeting uh our fearless president christophe uh was awarded the mcguffey award for outstanding service uh extending service to the board outstanding board work and i want to take a moment to read the citation here that's on this certificate that i will present to him here in public uh mcguffy award christoph favre for dedicated service to public education christoph evra has been an outstanding board member and president of the pooter school district board of education throughout his time
100on the board and particularly as president he has worked hard to achieve great teamwork on the board and excellent partnership between the board and the administration his successful work has been to the great benefit of our students and staff his calm demeanor critical thinking and insightful questions have been instrumental in leading us successfully through many key decisions including most recently the hiring of a new superintendent he can take great pride in all he has done for pooter school district and that the positive effects will be felt for years to come thank you and i can only add my personal uh thoughts to this that i learned so much from christoph about leadership during the time that i've worked with him it's been a great a great period of time thank you for all the work
101you've done for all the things we've been able to do together because of your leadership and we wish you a successful retirement from from this activity when when your term is up in november so thank you again all right your time has expired [Applause] thank you your time did expire a long time ago okay thank you i i thank you guys all for the nomination and for thinking of me that that's great and i am going to miss working with all of you so and i'm definitely going to miss the opportunity to keep going with you i'm disappointed about that part so the long meetings on tuesday nights we'll see how much i missed that i'm not entirely sure okay any other committee report or board reports okay moving right along um item 7.0 is
102the consent agenda board members would anybody like to pull anything from consent this evening okay seeing none and without nate's presence i would need a motion from the board for the consent agenda i guess we're just letting nate know how important he is go ahead kristen all right i'm going to try and make nate proud i recommend approval of the consent agenda as is presented in 7.0 that works thank you i have a second we have a second from dj we'll count that as a ditto um lexi could i get a roll call vote please dj anderson aye christian draper aye christophe i rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passes okay very good thank you that brings us to action items this evening and uh we have let me make sure
103that i've got it right three action items so 8.1 is the compass collaborative school priority improvement plan and to put this on the floor i'd like to ask a board member to make a motion for this one take your time kristen all right i recommend that the board approve the compass community collaborative school unified improvement plan as presented thank you and second from dj uh and with this uh this evening we have here to present her school's priority improvement plan and that would be the principal uh jan harrison and uh thank you for joining us evening this evening and yeah you've already approached the podium we look forward to your report good evening everyone i'm very happy to be here i'm happy to have the opportunity to share with you the great work that compass
104has been doing for the last three years while i'm at it i'd like to also thank the superintendent sorry he ran out he ran out he'll be right i'll thank him anyway um he came to visit compass today and we had such a lovely visit and it was um [Music] it was great because i felt like i could share the really strong culture of belonging and inclusion that we have at our school and see so clearly that he just really mirrored that back you know that that he was also really welcoming and inclusive to us and made us as he was said tonight to um his value of seeing people and have seen all of us here together so that was that was a really wonderful experience he was really curious and kind and full
105of gratitude and i really appreciated that i would absolutely welcome any board members to join us at any time come visit see what's going on at our school good stuff what i'm less happy about is that i'm here because we have been stuck on a priority improvement plan for you know two years now when i was here [Music] two years ago to present about being put on the plan in the first place it was after our first year of operations and our high school earned a priority improvement no our middle school earned priority improvement our high school earned performance but overall we were priority improvement so we made a plan to improve and we have successfully improved and i feel very strongly that we are going to continue to improve of course that's our job
106is continuous improvement for ourselves and our community so i shared with you both our unified improvement plan for this year as well as our slide deck that gives you a little kind of background on all of this and i will see if that works it does how great um so we're required to give you a timeline showing that we're meeting all the deadlines that the state lays out for a school that's on priority improvement i i have to tell you i i'm happy to be here to present to you because i want you to know what's going on at compass i'm not happy that we had to do this to jump through these bureaucratic hoops because we did not in fact earn this this year so i you know i just have to say that
107because i'm like that so i laid out for you a little bit in this packet that at this point if we were to be judged based on the 2019 cut scores and the different school metrics that were in 2019 you can see we would have earned performance for both middle school and high school this year but that doesn't mean that we're perfect and that we don't have room for improvement obviously especially in mathematics you know we have not yet met in math our achievement for middle school nor our growth for middle school and although we have improved in many areas i still think there's obviously a lot more that needs to be done there another thing that's a little bit tricky about the performance ratings for our school is that our our end size is
108so small and so so one kid can make a big difference in both our achievement and our growth in a way that's kind of awesome because it really holds our feet to the fire that every kid really matters and we are responsible for helping every kid grow and every kid really achieve at grade level but it does make it a little tricky in this world of performance ratings that being said i feel confident we're we're on track so that feels good i anticipated that perhaps one might ask if we are so sure that we are doing so well why not apply for status reconsideration and we did consider it but then when we found out the requirements we didn't meet those requirements and that would have been to have 75 percent of our students having
109taken the cmass and the psat sct or 85 percent of our students having taken the map from fall to spring and as you can see we did not make those numbers so now that we know uh and i've heard from cde that there's some possibility that this is going to be kind of still stuck again next year that we will make sure that we work as hard as possible to make those cut scores so that we have enough participation to be able to apply for a reconsideration next year the other question i anticipated might come up in your thinking is you know from the ones that did test how representative are those students of all the students and so we did a little data analysis on that and i think you can see here that
110it's a very good representation you know our cmas our psat really represented both our free and reduced lunch our minority and our students with learning disabilities pretty fairly so it wasn't just kind of the cherry picking of the most academically minded students that did take our tests so i do feel like it's a good a good representation even though the numbers weren't as high as we wished on this chart you can see i've color coded a little bit to help us suss it apart a little bit we i put green for areas in which our students outperformed the district and the state yellow where they outperformed the the states but not the district and read where they underperformed both and you can see clearly here our grade 8 which is also our greatest number of
111test takers by the way underperformed in both math mean scale score and percent matter exceeded so when we saw that we had to do some considering about what happened there and i think that um the simplest kind of biggest things that that came to mind were first of all that last year i mean a lot of kids struggled with math online and we found in our maps testing that boys in particular struggled with math online uh remote learning of math just somehow the boys really did not do well with that also it's true that we did not last year have six seventh and eighth grade math courses as discrete math courses we kind of combined middle school groups so we weren't really targeting on each of those grade level standards and so we have fixed
112that and realized that we really need to build a stronger foundation it needs to just be more specialized and more particular to each of those grade levels and get more dialed in so we have done that now and additionally we didn't have a paid curriculum so now we have purchased a curriculum for that middle school program we're feeling really happy about that it's a great curriculum it's called desmos it's an online curriculum the kids really like it the teachers really like it there's lots of good engagement that we're seeing and we're feeling really strong about how that is going to improve and then the other thing i think is that our eighth grade you know as this really small school and because i think a lot of the pandemic but regardless i know that one
113of the challenges of being a middle high school in a small school is that we're always going to lose a fair number of our eighth graders to the big high schools and this past spring we really felt like we we you know was the first last quarter was the quarter that everybody came back full time and it took a while for the kids to really feel connected again right it was all it was it was just um i don't know what it was i don't know how to describe it really but but the eighth graders in particular that class it was some kind of a cultural thing in that class that we observed that the eighth graders who were leaving just had a bigger kind of negative impact on on the on the vibe and
114the connection between the eighth graders and so i don't know you know i mean it wasn't like i looked through each kid's scores and said oh if that kid was leaving they did worse or they did better it was just more i think just a cultural thing around the eighth grade so we're you know our ninth grade now it feels good and kids are on board and solid it's a smaller group and that's fine but um i think that impacted the testing as well so i don't think we can go back and fix that but we certainly have done everything we can to fix the other more kind of academic problems that caused those scores to be so low for our eighth grade um and then when we look at the psat and sat scores
115again you can see that as far as kind of the mean scale scores we were meeting expectations for all of them although we didn't necessarily outperform the district acceptor in 10th grade and a little bit in our percent ma met or exceeded for math for ninth and tenth grade and then in our 11th grade our math was below both the state and the district although it's still met by 19 2019 standards so again another indication that we needed to do some more shoring up of our math program but i also wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that those scores are just one little snapshot of what's going on at our school and i hope that you've had time to read through this a little bit and note that we have been winning
116awards and getting a lot of recognition for a very small and new school and we're very proud of what our students and our teachers and our school as a whole have been doing and the ways that we have been serving students and and helping them see themselves as winners and uh outstanding students i also think it's worth pointing out that we really are feeling strong about our post-secondary preparation we did have an excellent graduation rate we had excellent college acceptances and offers scholarships we provide six hours a week of post-secondary readiness and a capstone course for our seniors which as you know i mean that you listen to the stress that school counselors feel in all of the schools where they have case loads of 400 students and they are you know doing everything for
117them we have really dedicated one person to specifically really help our seniors on an ongoing basis throughout the year get ready for their transition out of high school and i i don't know if superintendent kingsley thought that i had planted the student today i felt like it felt like a plant but we had one of our graduates from last year so we've only had one graduating class and one of them was home for fall break from new york city where he is a film student at the new school so he came to compass to visit and ended up coming out to talk to the superintendent about you know how that's been for him and how well property he has felt and how successful he is being in his new adventure and it just felt like
118really i couldn't have planned that if i had tried and maybe he thought like this must be some kind of contrived situation but uh but that was really great so great to hear from him directly and to share that with you uh yeah and and then also just as far as concurrent enrollment we've expanded that program a great deal in the last two years the thing i didn't put on here is we're also the only school in colorado that's participating in a program called the five network which is a professional mentoring program that is offered for students for four years and it starts in 10th grade so they get professional mentoring from 10th 11th 12th and then their first post-secondary year so really special offering that we got connected to through one of our board
119members who actually lives and works in louisiana and this program is generally offered in louisiana and texas right now but they're branching out to colorado with us and hopefully with other schools soon so we're really excited about that uh and then the other thing i wanted to leave you with was just a kind of an insight into where we are right now as far as achievement our map data for math is looking really solid 79 of our students testing average or above in math achievement this fall and that was when 88 of the tests were complete and 87 of the students testing average or above in reading with 92 of this test complete so it's a strong base from which to launch feeling good about that so as you saw in our uip we are
120interested in really working on math achievement and growth we are interested in getting our math curriculum up to date and really solidly tuned in to each grade level and then creating that culture of data-driven instruction and math we're also interested in working on getting our science program also better aligned to state standards our math our science teachers have been focusing a lot on scientific skills but have been missing some of the points of standards in middle school and high school and so we want to dial those in a little better to be able to have that show up on the test and then also we are interested in continuing to develop and refine our competency-based education program so that's what we're working on we're working hard like everybody else in education and we're excited and
121honored to be able to do it and i'm happy to take any questions great miss harrison i'll just start by saying thank you having been involved as many of us were in watching your school get off the ground knowing the budget constraints and all that's involved in launching a charter it's not unexpected to see you here and in some ways i think most of us don't care how we get you here just hearing about your school in front of the board is a is always a positive thing so thanks for joining us thank you um we always welcome you here and uh i know i haven't visited this year but i sure would love to so i'll do that welcome any time all right uh board members are there questions regarding this uh go ahead
122kristen plan yeah i thank you for coming and sharing all of this um i did have one question though about the um the math curriculum that you were um investing in you had said that it's an online curriculum can you kind of dive into that just a little bit because if the if if kids weren't doing so well with online math classes then how is that different from online math curriculum yeah um sure uh really they weren't doing well online when they were behind their dark screens they're doing great in person so it is an online curriculum rather than paper and pencil although they also print out a lot and do a lot of paper and pencil as well but it's a curriculum so basically it's a textbook that updates all the time right so
123and nobody has to carry it around they have it on their chromebooks so that's what i mean by being online yeah i just wanted to be able to clarify that so that people i appreciate that yeah thank you dj i had a question about the your reconsideration part did on those tests do you just need to get one of those three or do you have to get all three of them to be reconsidered uh to you mean to what percentage of students taking the test yeah we would have to have 75 percent of our students take the c mass 75 percent take the psat s.a.t and then they will consider that data for a reconsideration of our status okay so just the two of them yeah two those two or then the other option is
124another there's another pathway that involves maps so you have 85 of your students take the maps in the fall and spring and then they you then they come to a site visit and there's it's kind of like their alternative pathway if you don't do it in the in the state testing realm thanks i just want to clarify on that yes thank you oh i'm sorry go ahead brian yeah absolutely jan and uh gina who's also the board chair from compass i just wanted to say thank you for opening your doors to me today i really really enjoyed the visit it's nice to see you twice in one day it's our habit now it's our new habit which is hopefully we don't break that right yeah i think having an opportunity to walk the halls of
125compass today it was a creative use of a facility um it was also great to be able to walk the halls engage with educators and committed students to talk about similar opportunities and similar challenges i think we have a lot to learn from each other in this particular space and what i saw today were engaged students and engaged educators working hard and i just appreciate your presentation here today and i really enjoyed the visit and look forward to continue to ensuring we have opportunities to learn from each other as systems and or schools moving forward so i just want to say thank you thank you i appreciate that and i look forward to that as well great comment rob yeah i i also had my thanks for uh your presentation and for what you're doing
126to to uh to continue to grow your school and your students and your staff one question i did want to follow up on with respect to and it touches on something that kristoff alluded to and that's the budget situation right i know that was a sort of a challenging piece getting the school off the ground and some of the uh steps that you've described here tonight require additional money right hiring additional people require higher you know purchasing additional curriculum and whatnot how do you how do you feel your budget situation is in terms of being able to sustain the growth path that you're on well i'm sure that uh the budget team here at psd could fill you in in more detail but uh bottom line is we're in strong and strong in a strong
127position um you know our the biggest hit that our school took to our budget was the fact that in 2000 you know in the beginning of the pandemic well in the 2021 school year we only had 14 students in our sixth grade class we had that were enrolled to come and over the course of the summer more than half of them disappeared and so with that very small sixth grade class that is you know creating this dip in our enrollment that's hard to recover from at any other age level the esser funds really saved us and this year we have 39 students in our sixth grade class so i feel like we you know and we still but even still as i was saying to my finance team the other day that you know we
128still have nine families that would have been enrolled well the nine students that were enrolled to come that again left because of the pandemic and the variant and even though we're fully masked and my staff is 100 vaccinated and many of my students are also vaccinated because we're 12 and up they still felt that the variant was too threatening and chose to stay home and do online school so it's definitely hurt our enrollment however that being said we have been good stewards of our money and i confident that psd's finance team would agree that we're on solid solid standing thank you very much for your transparency and your answer i appreciate it other questions i think i'll toss out i just want to uh verify jan but i think i'll ask it of you superintendent
129kingsley that your staff has reviewed this plan and is on board with it yes that that is correct and i'd like to if i can't just build off of board member patterson's comments i appreciate your transparency you know you've been vulnerable in saying you know the impact of remote learning is very real we've heard that from a lot of our constituents tonight and you've articulated what that impact is in your school building i also appreciate in my own personal review your root cause analysis to identify that high quality curriculum matters and not all schools across our community across the state have high quality curriculum it's not because they don't want it it's because there's a lot of stuff out there and it's hard to sort through it and for you to not just invest in
130the resources but to invest in your people alongside of that i think was really significant so again staff has reviewed that but i just i appreciate the vulnerability and the transparency that you brought forth in the process thank you that's important for me to know so go ahead jessica how is your staff um what is the like teacher development that's happening around desmos how is i'm sorry are they getting acclimated to this new math curriculum oh really well um they love it they love it and they were using the free version of it before so it's not unfamiliar to them and so now we're just using the paid version which gives them more access and more resources so they're very happy yeah and um and the other thing that's nice i mean the the silver
131lining to be putting to be put on a priority improvement plan is that you can apply for grants from the state for help to improve so we did win one of those grants awards back in 2019 and it's called an easy grant and we i can't remember exactly how much we got do you remember gina maybe is something like 50 000 over the course of two and a half years and so one of the things that we have done with that money is to hire a coach for our math teachers this year to start helping them really integrate you know how are they using that curriculum how are they working in the classroom we also have one math teacher right now who's a new math teacher he's a new teacher and new to compass as
132well so it's really great to have her there coming in as a math professional to help all of them but to help him in particular i think it's been a good use other board questions before i ask for a roll call vote okay see none lexie i'll ask for a roll call vote on this please dj anderson aye christian draper aye christophe aye rob pederson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passes thank you very much yeah we'll uh root for you not to show up here again unfortunately so always welcome you okay um the next two items are some resolutions presented by uh board members sorry oh okay i'm sorry i'm getting a request for a five minute break so i guess we'll go ahead and take a recess and reconvene in five
133to ten minutes that seems fine okay no let's that's fine let's do that okay uh it is 8 32 p.m and i'm going to get the meeting moving again we do have a quorum in the room i'm just going to proceed right on in so board members jessica kristen okay i i'm beginning the meeting at 8 32 p.m the next item on the action items list is 8.2 and that is a resolution in opposition to proposition 119. i'm going to ask for a motion from a board member to put it on the floor rob go right ahead yes i move that the board approve the uh resolution in opposition to proposition 119. okay do i have a second i do from dj anderson i have no motion uh with that okay i'll turn it over
134to you rob go ahead with another motion yes i have a uh a motion to remove the last full paragraph of the of the uh resolution as presented in our board packet the the uh the second now therefore in the in the resolution so if we could uh remove that okay to be clear that's uh it says now therefore be it further resolved the board authorizes the expenditure of district funds to distribute a factual summary regarding proposition 119 in accordance with the fair campaign act that will be uh removed from the proposed resolution is there a second from that for that okay that would be from kristin draper any discussion on the amendment do we need any discussion on it dj yeah i'll give some discussion just the the reasoning because when you first read
135it it does sound like a great plan but when you dive into the details there are some things that are concerning uh one of them is um the use of our public land trust monies uh to help fund this what you see advertised and out there all over is about the marijuana money raising the taxes on that that is a part of it but there is another part of it dj i'm just going to slow you down for one second because i want to make sure we close out the amendment before we have discussion on this sorry i i apologize to you um so i just want to make sure whether we have anything with regards to the the amendment that's on the floor okay so seeing none i'm going to go ahead and ask
136for a roll call vote on the amendment dj anderson aye christian draper aye christopher feb aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passed okay can i suggest that i read the thing first and then dj can do this that sounds fine let's let's back up and have you read it okay as i'm gonna read the thing as amended now whereas proposition 119 is a citizen referred measure on colorado's 2021 election ballot that seeks to create a new program that would provide out-of-school educational services and whereas proposition 119 would create a new state agency the colorado learning authority with no oversight from the student state board of education and the colorado department of education to administer program funds sourced from new taxes on the sale of retail marijuana and appropriations from the
137state land trust and general fund and whereas since 2009 the colorado general assembly has tracked the debt owed to colorado students resulting from the non-payment of funds approved by colorado voters under amendment 23 to the colorado constitution and whereas the resulting budget stabilization factor now stands at a cumulative 9.8 billion dollars and for the 2022 school year alone colorado students will not benefit from more than 572 million dollars for their education that voters intended them to have and whereas the board believes that public money should be invested directly in public schools to keep the funds under local control and allow school districts to provide additional learning and enrichment opportunities for students instead of directed to private out of school service providers now therefore be it resolved that the pooter school district r1 board of education
138officially declares its opposition to proposition 119 for the above stated reasons if it's approved it'll be approved and adopted this day october 12 2021. okay thank you for reading that dj i'm going to turn it back over to you for the beginning of your explanation um yeah uh so yeah the the use of the public land trust monies uh is i think terrible that they were going to try to use some of that that is intended for public education public schools the other aspect of it that i do have concerns about personally is that i think it's this is more geared towards the i-25 corridor where you will be able to get these private services [Music] that by all means uh can be good but the fact that we are not being able to make
139it available to the western slopes or the eastern plains i think is also a problem that is not really fair to be able to pull this out of our state funding so i will definitely be voting uh approval of this okay thank you other board comments kristin yeah i just um wanted to um some of the things with 119 that i have a problem with as well and i think we heard it best as another superintendent from a different school district had said right problem wrong solution and one of the many things that the reason it's the wrong solution but it is the right problem we need to be looking at how we can get extra help for our kids but this one it requires a reimbursement and therefore all of our low-income families are
140going to need to out put out all of this money first and wait for a reimbursement that's not possible for many of our families it's you know when you're living paycheck to paycheck you cannot go ahead and put have an output of money waiting for something to come back to you um the other problem is that it's not just for low-income students um it's all students and so there's there's this accessibility um it it's um it becomes an issue for who gets to use this money and if you know people who have the ability to pay out the money first and then wait for the reimbursement take up all the slots um that it's just gonna perpetuate the inequities that we have already so that's some of the main reasons that i am opposing this
141thank you kristen any other board comments or thoughts okay um i'll say generally i am in favor of taxing things we do not like so marijuana would you know as far as a behavior and as a school board trying to alter the the patterns of our students by taxing a bad behavior makes sense to me uh i am going to support this resolution because of some of the reasons you've outlined i do prefer uh these types of tax dollars to enter the public sphere the true you know the education system as we have uh set it up rather than going out into private uh systems as it's as it's outlined so um that'll be my stance i'll vote for the the resolution any other comments before i ask for a roll call vote okay seeing
142none lexi i'll take a roll call vote please dj anderson aye christian draper aye christophe aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passed okay uh 8.3 the board is also uh considering a resolution in this case in opposition to proposition 120. so take a motion from a board member and it looks like that will be you rob yes i move that the board approve the resolution in opposition to proposition okay a second from a board member from i got one from kristin draper okay and rob go ahead yes i move that we amend the resolution as presented in the packet in exactly the same way that we uh amended the previous resolution that is to remove the last full paragraph which talks about the bo the board authorizing the expenditure of
143district funds to distribute a factual summary regarding proposition 120. thank you uh do i have a second for that motion to amend and i got one from kristen draper and i won't re-read that one more time yeah do i need any discussion on this or can we vote on the amendment okay vote on the amendment to roll call vote please lexi dj anderson aye christian draper aye christophe aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamara aye motion passed okay i'll open it up for discussion you want to read the resolution first right deal okay so resolution in opposition to proposition 120 whereas proposition 120 is ascended sorry a citizen referred measure on colorado's 2021 election ballot that seeks to permanently reduce the residential property tax assessment rate of multi-family housing properties from seven point
144one five percent to six point five percent and the non-residential assessment rate of lodging properties from twenty nine percent to twenty six point four percent starting in 2022 and whereas proposition 120 would reduce property tax revenue to school districts thereby increasing the amount that the state must pay to backfill the difference or requiring districts to ask voters to raise future mill levies to offset the reduction in assessment rates and whereas since 2009 the colorado general assembly has tracked the debt owed to colorado students resulting from the non-payment of funds approved by colorado voters under amendment 23 to the colorado constitution and whereas the resulting budget stabilization factor now stands at a cumulative 9.8 billion dollars and for the 2021-2022 school year alone colorado students will not benefit from more than 572 million dollars for their
145education that voters intended them to have and whereas the board believes that permanently reducing property tax revenue will further hamper the ability of the colorado general assembly to carry out their legally required duty to provide a thorough and uniform system of free public schools throughout the state now therefore be it resolved that the buddha school district r1 board of education officially declares its opposition to proposition 120 for the above stated reasons again if it's approved it will be approved and adopted this date october 12 2021. okay thank you for reading that out rob are there board questions comments thoughts on this one dj um yeah so we got rid of gallagher and one of the biggest reasons that we got rid of that gallagher amendment last year was because it was going to pull down
146our assessments rates we realized what problems that would cause for budgets not only for education but also for school dis or library districts fire districts and such um this is um this is a poor decision i think to uh be out there when we have so many needs we have for students uh across colorado to be able to take care of them and so i i'm disappointed that we continue to have this conversation but with the way that colorado's financial system is set up unfortunately we will be having these every ballot measure probably and we need to make sure that we spread the word about that if you're saving a hundred bucks is how much more that hundred dollars could be used throughout that the state and school district to help our kids so i
147hope that we can get the word out there that this is a bad situation and we need to vote no and i will be voting yes for this resolution uh opposing it thank you dj kristen go ahead rob yeah that's fine so i just want to make sure that everybody's clear about this about this business about uh reducing property tax revenue uh and then the state has to backfill so the way the thing works just so you're all clear right is that is that uh the state sets a uh uh an amount of money that they send to school districts uh on a per student basis along with some additional factors uh like free and reduced and whatnot um and that total money on that total per student money multiplied times number of student districts
148has to come from somewhere right if it comes from local property taxes or the part that comes from local property taxes does not have to be sent from the state from their general fund revenues right so if we as a citizenry in colorado vote to reduce our the the assessment rates we will be getting less money from property taxes that amount per student will stay the same because there's a there's a there's a sort of formula for how that's figured right and therefore the amount between the property taxes and the uh total amount that's due if you will for all the students in the district has to come from somewhere where is it going to come from it's going to come from the general fund of the state right and what that means is more
149money will have to come out of the general fund to cover education there's only a limited amount of more money right that's available on an annualized basis because of tabor and just because of the economy and whatnot right and so basically more money has to come out of a of a limited pie right and so then that is going to be that either more money is allocated to education and therefore less the transportation less to the justice system and and and prisons and health care and all of the other priorities that the district has to uh sorry that the state has to attend to or there will be less money that comes to the to the to the school districts and the budget stabilization factor that we refer to in both of these resolutions will
150grow which means we're not getting the amount of money that the that the state uh believes that we need on a per per student basis and and that the voters effectively approved through amendment 23. so you know we're just not we just can't really be in a position i mean i don't think it's wise for us to be in a position to be reducing the property tax assessment rate and having this kind of negative effect on schools at the education system and potentially other services that the state provides through the mechanism i've talked about think of your comments rob yeah so basically this is pie um we always talk about things that you know love is not pie and you you don't have to worry about everybody gets a big enough slice and this is
151pie and so somebody's gonna get a smaller slice regardless of how we cut it up because it's a single pie and so if the taxes go down somebody gets a smaller slice of pie it's either education who gets a smaller slice of pie or transportation who gets a smaller slice of pie or your fire department that gets a small slice of pie or your police department or whatever it might be somebody's getting a smaller slice of pie and so i think the what we're encouraging people to think about is you know for the amount of money that you have to pay in your property taxes for the what your house is worth is that you know it's a considerably smaller amount um and is that worth not having the fire truck is it worth not
152having um you know money to the school system so that's what we're considering here because it's a pie thank you carolyn i would just like everybody to think about the human cost here for when there's less money we're talking about less money for teachers i've heard people in here talk about how teachers need better pay well better pay for teachers has to come from some place and so we have to have to think about that but not only will we potentially be taking money away from teachers we we're going to be taking money away from children and i think about my personal case so before tabor came around my daughter got four one hour sessions a week of speech and language development help and that's expensive that's expensive services that's one-on-one services but those early
153interventions make huge differences in child children's lives it takes what can be a weakness for a child and a lifetime disability and can turn it into a strength for them and can make and can change their lives you know my daughter graduated from high school and went on to get a linguist or a degree in linguistics she speaks two languages now early interventions work there they cost money when we take money away from schools we're taking money away from children i mean we really need to think about our kids and our teachers and so that's why i oppose 120 and i'll be voting for the resolution great comments jessica okay you don't need toots to you i mean i feel like it's been covered very well it's been very thoroughly described why um and how
154to think about it i i will also be voting the same because the money's got to come from somewhere so if i reduce my property taxes it's going to increase something else okay i'll state it my way before we vote um i agreed to run for election to this seat eight and a half years ago and volunteer in this position because i find education to be foundational and fundamental i believe passionately in what we're doing for all of our children everywhere in the state today i find every year that infrastructure and education just to name two of the major items that we work through in the legislature are in a disruptive and contentious discussion for every dollar that's out there those are just two there are many items that we're working on to keep this
155stake functioning every year the legislature has to nitpick over every single dollar that gets used but i do fear that this kind of ballot measure if it were to pass is going to eat away at the schools it's it happens all the time i also while i honor the discussion and the question on the ballot in general i find that doing it on an off your ballot with very little time to have the discussion as a as a community is almost disingenuous this will be a year where not a lot of people are out voting the discussion will not be broad and yet we will have very meaningful and impactful decisions made here these are just a few of the reasons that i will vigorously support this resolution in opposition to 120. so put that
156out there any final comments okay lexi i'll take a roll call vote please dj anderson i kristen draper aye christophe aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passes okay thank you that brings us to information reports and discussion items which is number 9.0 on the agenda and 9.1 is a psd covid response update and i'm going to turn this over to you superintendent kingsley thank you members of the board members of the community tonight we're going to give you and the community another coven 19 update and we will have multiple presenters here this evening including the larimer county department of health and environment as well as a few psd staff we're going to start with an update around current county health conditions and then we will transition to current conditions in
157psd prior to introducing our two uh guest speakers i just want to level set around where we started this year around our decision making process i just think it's really important we've outlined as a leadership team three key drivers that we would use to help make our decisions one we are going to prioritize in-person instruction two we are going to keep students and staff safe and three we're going to use data to drive these decisions and so i really believe that our presentation helps kind of set the stage for that after the laramie county health department presents i will come back and talk to you a little bit about some of our local decisions around this space and we'll go in a little bit deeper with staff to explain the why behind those particular decisions
158we're honored this evening that larimer county department of health and environment director tom gonzalez and dr jared olson larimer county's population epidemiologist are joining us to provide current information on the covet 19 pandemic gentlemen thank you so much for being here we're grateful for you thank you for having us and thank you members of the board tom gonzalez public health director larimer county department of health and environment i'm joined by our senior pop population epidemiologist dr jared olson we do have three key messages tonight right now unfortunately our current metrics are more challenging now than they were when we were here just two months ago that was august 10th when we gave an update right prior to the school starting so we're going to talk a little bit about some of those challenges and how
159we're all working through those vaccines are highly effective they are the single most important step you can take to beat the virus to get out of this pandemic we're going to talk about right here in larimer county we have an off-ramp group that they're showing us how this is working jared's going to talk a little bit about how successful it is at colorado state university and how they are showing us the off-ramp and if we follow their lead we can get out of this a lot quicker than than what's projected big one is uh superintendent kingsley said that in-person learning is our number one p priority here in larimer county uh fewer quarantines at schools with universal masking and vaccinations have not fewer missed learning opportunities we're going to get in depth on that we
160do have quite a bit of a data to demonstrate a lot less quarantines compared to last semester before i dive into the changing conditions i do want to give a sobering statistic since september 1st of this year we've lost 29 of our fellow residents to covet 19. and i look at you all when i back in april may when the vaccines were readily available for everyone i said at that time we're close we're going to get out of this tunnel i never suspected we would have this many deaths in september in early october and i toured the hospital pooter valley hospital first of september what i saw was similar situations back in november and december people doubled up in ventilated rooms or negative pressure rooms i should say nurses skilled respiratory therapists doctors exhausted beyond
161all belief 93 percent of the people in the icu that day were unvaccinated i come to you saying we got to as a community get out of this pandemic our hospitals are bulging and stretch thin and we'll talk a little bit more about that but my hearts go out to the families of the last 29 here since september and we're right now at 299 deaths to cover 19 which is now a preventable disease in larimer county so i talk about the changing conditions and over just two months our case rate was at 127 per 100 000 for seven day uh it's now well today was almost over 260. so we're case rate is continuing to rise our covet patients in the hospital at that time was 41 put us in the yellow area as of
162yesterday we were at 86 patients in our four hospitals what's more concerning here is our icu census utilization it's been in the red area since august 30th definitely over capacity when we say over capacity what does that mean that means if you have one room negative pressure you have let's say 15 rooms on a on a wing but you have 17 people there with kova 19 we have to double up the rooms and these rooms are fairly small big beds with the ventilator machine you have your your skilled professionals are heroic healthcare workers that are saving lives every day trying to maneuver in this room with two beds that weren't meant for that and most of these patients are prone we've learned to put them on their prone position that helps their breathing and they're
163trying to maneuver them and and flip them over and etc so it makes it a real real difficult situation so as you can see on october 11th that's where the situations that were going on in our hospital and when we say 105 of icu utilization on october 11th it was 41 percent of everybody in the icu was with covet 19. so you talk about one disease occupying 40 percent of our hospital beds in the icu that's unprecedented and what's coming right around the corner influenza even on a mild year we will have 100 to 200 hospitalizations a year in larimer county last year we only had three because we were staying at home and wearing masks and and doing all the other protective measures but i'm worried that if we even have a mild situation
164those numbers are going to get higher we're already seeing rsv in children and we're having hospitalizations with young children with rsv jared will get into more of that but that's the concern and my plea to the community if you're eligible to get vaccine get vaccinated please it only it doesn't just protect you and protects others and we can prevent you from going to the hospital prevent others for going to the hospital freeing up beds for those that may be emergency from a trauma or from a stroke or whatever it may be just the cdc also has their risk factors as you say back in august 10th we did have a few counties in the state that were not at that high level but now we're pretty much full all red so it's not just a
165larimer county situation and as we all know with respiratory diseases as we go indoors the spread is a lot higher in and the risk is a much higher situation so moving forward there are concerns as we move indoors in the weather outside gets a little bit colder but we do have some good news uh the emergency authors authorization use authorization for pfizer has been submitted to the food and drug administration they are looking at all of the trial over 2200 uh five to 11 year olds were part of the trial they're finding good safety and efficacy doing one-third the dose so when you talk to 30 micrograms that 12 and older use so that's a bigger syringe bigger device they'll be a lot smaller for our younger children which makes my nurses a lot happier
166because it's a lot easier to administer that vaccine to kids so that's good news that it's one-third of the dose the fda is meeting october 26 to review the data we're hopeful that the data is safe and proves to be effective if so then the cdc will bring their their panel together to review that potentially giving us approval to start administering the vaccine to our elementary kiddos starting november third as you all can see it's been very challenging for them definitely challenging for environment or our elementary kids because of no vaccine opportunities right there i'll turn it over to jared great thank you so much members of the board superintendent kingsley um my name is jared olson i'm a population epidemiologist at the for larimer county so taking for tom's kind of overview of conditions
167here i want to zoom in a little bit and look at our conditions the spring of last year so this would be march 22nd through april 30th about a six week period and the six weeks beginning school this year so what was happening on the ground so within the the zip codes that psd serves we had about 407 cases over that six-week time period in the spring of 2021 and 733 during this fall time period that's school-age children 5-17. similarly within larimer county we had eight and a half percent positivity that spring and 7.8 this fall so just a brief overview conditions are as challenging now more transmissible variant as they were then probably a little bit more challenging so what's happening with our quarantines by high schools so of the psg high schools we're
168looking at a substantial reduction in quarantines that have been issued for those high schools so in that spring there were 277 at fort collins almost 400 at fossil ridge and over 200 at footer in rocky mountain the high schools today have a total of 120 quarantines so reduction of quarantines for students of 89 percent in a similar six week period next slide okay so here we are with the middle schools some of the middle schools within the district again we see a similar pattern here so there's over a thousand quarantines in the spring while we have a comparable time period now only 176 this fall that's through september 24th that's an 83 reduction there so what's going on here so there's some new exemptions right so some of the conditions have changed routine classroom exposures
169with universal masking have not been included within quarantines as well as vaccination has also allowed students to return to learning without having a quarantine period even because of a close exposure we are seeing some challenges here with quarantines and with index cases those primary cases that are exposing other kids in the school environment but they're mostly focused in unmasked locations or unmasked situations especially things like lunch which continues to be a challenge the other challenge we have is not specific to the school day itself but within sports so this is data from cdphe on sports outbreaks from the beginning of october so these would be all sports outbreaks from the beginning of those sports seasons across the state you can see the top purple line is volleyball and the second largest line is football so
170not surprising information but indicative of the challenge of having sports inside especially if you're not using universal masking in those particular contexts football obviously an outside sport but close contact weight rooms locker rooms lots of inside time as well okay so we've talked about last time we were here risk three categories of risk i want to touch on two of them today and just kind of give you an update about what we what we know now and and what some of those risks are are kind of manifesting themselves and and mitigation as well so for our hospitalizations if we look back at the fall of 2020 we had three pediatric hospitalizations one of which was school-aged and none of our school-aged children were admitted to the icu this year we have six pediatric hospitalizations three
171of whom are school-aged and two of those school-aged children were admitted to the icu so still small numbers right especially compared to some of the risks for our older adults and the age gradient of this particular disease but at the same time an increase nonetheless one of the other factors that we should touch on here is the risk of families there is a interesting pre-print study in the journal pediatrics coming out estimating from april 30th 2020 to june of 20 june 30th of 2021 the loss of primary caregivers so specifically parents or grandparents that children live with in the united states and it's an estimated 120 000 children who have lost that primary caregiver that parent or grandparent that they live with that provides that loving home and environment we certainly know of cases within
172larimer county where this has also happened sadly though we think that because of our relatively low number of deaths compared to other locations that we are probably somewhat somewhat lower in this than we should be for our total population we have some good good data that's come out of school masking not just within colorado but from other places within the u.s including cdc partnered study with arizona from maricopa county so controlling for some factors both uncontrolled study and and controlled model controlling for factors like the urban rural density of population education things like that there was a three and a half times greater risk of an outbreak within a school that was unmasked compared to a school that was masked additionally if we look specifically within colorado cdphe's did some analyses looking at district at
173the district level and school age children and the rates of covid for those school-aged children within those districts the orange line being districts that did not require masking and the blue line districts that required masking there's about a 40 percent difference in the case rate at its peak there the peak difference they ran into the analysis a different way so instead of looking at school-aged children within a district because of course there are private and charter schools other variations within that data they looked at the individual students and matched that to the cdp excuse me cde records of where those students attended and whether those institutions were using masking and here you can see a much larger difference there are challenges with both approaches to the study but somewhere in between is probably the reality
174of the situation here you have the unmasked students with twice the rate of case rate of covid compared to math students and we certainly have our our local children's hospital continuing to promote the safety and efficacy of masking within our schools not only for the reduction of kovid but as they cite in this particular news release from august also for the the consistency and the certainty and the safety of those kids and their understanding of adults looking out for them and looking out for their teachers and their families as well so we we don't have any indication that masking behavior is a is a long-term risk to kids or that it increases the risks of of other illnesses or any other features that we would be concerned about so tom mentioned influenza season and here
175we just have a quick graph looking at some of our previous years of influenza and you can see we really do have an influence excuse me an influenza season that typically runs from about the 40th week of the year through may the 20th week of the subsequent year we did not have a significant number of hospitalizations last year and hopefully some of the covid prevention protocols will also help keep our influenza rates down flu vaccines are widely available and folks should consider flu vaccination alongside cova vaccination i believe they can be administered at the same time so that's that's an option for folks too to just get it all done at one time but right now we are concerned about the possibility of additional hospitalizations associated with flu this year really everything did kind of
176grind to a halt last year as we were in that severe wave of covid and then we also look at a colorado children's report on the bug watch so they report on childhood diseases this is their particular respiratory pathogens you can see a few of these on here influenza has not popped yet it's a little bit difficult to interpret from your perspective but we have rsv here in the red and that has been an earlier than normal season we don't really know what that portends is that a continued plateau of rsv will there be a larger spike that we don't anticipate we are bitten uncharted territory there so we will continue to monitor that as well we have continued challenges with vaccination rates but we also are are struggling with a hospitalization rate that's a
177bit higher than we would typically anticipate given our large metro counties so these are counties over 300 000 individuals you can see boulder down there at the far right nearly well let's say approaching 80 percent of their eligible population fully immunized and the other large metro counties down south below that we have an elevated and it's actually a little higher this week rate of hospitalizations given our vaccination rate of course we share a lot of commonalities with weld county which is less vaccinated than we are as well as as our neighbors to the north wyoming okay so taking a quick look at what we're seeing among our childhood rates in the county we have seen some declines after a spike right after school opening which is to be expected right so that mixing those new
178social networks opportunities for the virus to transmit especially i want to point out this yellow line here which is our high school aged individuals in larimer county coming down and now somewhat underneath the total population excuse me the adult population for their case rate as well as our middle school which peaked a little bit later but has also come down nicely there is a little recent upturn here that we'll continue to monitor but all in all i'm quite pleased with the the progress that we've made in protecting kids and i do attribute a good bit of that to masking if we look at case rates across districts and different types of schools we do see psd being very successful we are almost 60 of our eligible teens so that's 12 to 17 that have at
179least one dose it's now 58 percent so if we were going to push that to 70 percent that's another 3 000 little over 3 000 doses and nearly 6 000 doses would put us at 80 percent that's of all the kids who are eligible currently in the county which would be a great accomplishment okay why would that be a great accomplishment well let's look at csu so csu of course they have students coming from all over and we do not have great insight into the vaccination rate of those of those individuals of those undergraduate and graduate students because they are being vaccinated in other locations with different addresses that are not in larimer county what we can see however is through the partnership with them they've been continuing to require vaccination as a condition of
180being on campus with the possibility of exemptions and they're nearly 90 percent of their students fully or partially vaccinated so this has led to this particular trend here so this is our 18 to 24 year olds in green and our total population case rates over the whole pandemic and you can see in the summer in the fall and in the winter and then post-vaccination not quite eligible for that age group yet all the way through the alpha wave which was march and april of last year this 18 to 24 year old group had a much higher rate case rate than our total population one exception being when they were at home or or online what we see with this group is is other behaviors that make it more likely for the virus to transmit including
181congregate living and socialization but what's happening now we have them dipping below our population rate and staying there pretty consistently and i'm rather confident that they'll continue to be one of our lower case rates within the county they are extremely well vaccinated they're as well vaccinated as our 70 year olds and older and so we want to be able to come to this same level for our kids and have them reap the same benefits that csu and other organizations with this high vaccination rate have been able to enjoy they've had very little disruption to their athletics there's a volleyball game canceled at the beginning of the year but that was because the opposing team was unable to play not because of of any uh covet protocols for for the csu team their athletics teams are
182actually better vaccinated than their general population of students and then last lastly i'll just do a quick introduction and and boost for the pfizer booster which was approved recently so those who are 65 or older or living in a long-term care facility and those are 50 or older and have a set of high risk conditions it's it's recommended they should have a third dose of that booster as well as individuals who may have certain health conditions who are under and individuals who may be exposed so that is specifically factory workers retail restaurants healthcare workers but also teachers and teaching staff right so any of those staff are eligible to and may receive a pfizer booster and we are seeing some waning in the uh in the pfizer particularly but i think we're also going to
183see that in the johnson and johnson in moderna and that third dose really does seem to elevate the antibodies very significantly it may be possible that as the fda continues to review this data and they're meeting again this week on modern and johnson johnson and i anticipate they'll continue meeting in the future they may um they may elect to and suggest that this is a three dose vaccine effectively for for the majority of the population and with that i'll hand it back to uh director gonzalez all right thanks jared for that uh just kind of bringing us all back to where we're here in august 10th we all agreed in person learning is our number one priority as a father of two in this school district it is so exciting to have them come home
184talk about football practice what went on uh how the day was and just their friends and this and that it's wonderful and you guys are doing a fantastic job thank you to corey your whole team working with our team it's exhausting they're reviewing cases they're we're doing contact tracing but as you can see uh almost a 90 percent reduction in quarantines and we have less cases so it's working and we wanted this to continue to work we expect to have more cases unfortunately but if we continue these protocols and we stay strong i believe we'll keep in person learning as our number one priority and the more eligible people vaccinated with our five and 11 coming on board november 2nd i think we will even have less disruptions especially for our elementary and pre-k settings
185so i think that will continue to improve and again all parents out there if you have any questions about the vaccine certainly contact us your your our medical officer your own family physician have a conversation and hopefully the choices to get vaccinated so we can get the off ramp going like you're seeing at colorado state university from there i just if you anybody has any questions there's our contact information thank you thank you tom and before i open it up to questions i just want to make sure every board every member of the public wears their masks over their nose please and that would be every member in the room please put the mask over your nose if you don't okay thank you all right it's a it's a it's just a respect we're asking
186you to join us and we appreciate your respect in return thank you okay um so thank you for for that i'm going to open it up to board questions are there board members who'd like to ask questions at this time rob yeah i don't have a particular question i i just want to say thank you frankly both for the work the tremendous work you and your department are doing and have been doing throughout this pandemic and for taking time out to come and share with us very relevant information to the kind of decision making that that our administration has to make and that we need to partner with them on in making with respect to keeping our schools safe so thank you very much appreciate it you're welcome thank you jessica do you anticipate there
187being any kind of hierarchy for children to get the vaccine once it does become available like there was last spring for different age groups or different um health conditions or do you anticipate just being open no if i heard your question right when five and 11 become eligible will there be kind of a phasing in there will not be and we're already ramping up our teams they're getting excited we're in con with our three school districts our privates charters providing that vaccine clinic to the people so we want to be there available if that's the choice they like to get kristen yeah and i just want to say thank you as well to all the work that you've done for the county for the school districts and i just also want to give a shout
188out to the healthcare workers um and i want people to to understand that when you say that we're at 105 percent capacity at the icu um that that we're doubling up in rooms but that does not mean we're doubling up in staff and the staff then have to take care of twice the number of people that they were already taken care of and i know people who are doing this and it is exhausting and it is hard hard work mentally physically it is difficult work and so if we can prevent that for our health care workers that would be amazing rob so i i i'm positive i know the answer to this but given some of the concerns we've heard expressed in public comments uh mostly in previous sessions but to some degree tonight i
189just wanted you to be clear when you say you're ramping up to be able to give five to 11 year olds vaccines that requires parental consent correct yes it does require parental consent with a signature thank you okay i have one question i wanted to get out on the floor do you publish some of the articles and some of the research that goes behind the decisions you make on on your website yes actually an idea came out a couple board of health meetings to put together an faq on our website and when you go to larimer.org it's up on the very top you can get you know zakova 19 the data the vaccines just click covet 19 and you go into faqs but many of the questions regarding you know vaccine masking we've put that
190question in there and then the links to the studies and and we're adding to that as we get more information and more questions so i encourage folks to visit that that's i'm really proud of my communications team they've done a really good job putting that together in the last couple months okay great i appreciate that any other questions before i turn it back over to superintendent kingsley okay we just greatly thank you both for showing up i think it's very important that you come to our board meetings and present to our community as well as all the other events you do so much appreciated our pleasure thank you all right brian tom and jared thank you again for being here uh i think you know the information that you shared as well as the partnership
191of thousands of staff members across this district as well as the tens of thousands of parents who are setting their children up for success before they ever leave their homes every day it's proving that the protocols that we have in place are effective in their working and that's not happening by accident what i can share with you this is a little spoiler alert to the couple slides that you're going to see here is that a re as a result of us staying true to our drivers and having these protocols in place 99.6 of our students have been able to stay in person for instruction for the entire year so far our entire staff is incredibly proud of that we are approaching this week the end of the first quarter and as we promised the community
192that we would revisit masking in our protocols given the current reality that we are in we do not intend to change our masking policy or response protocols at this time masks are helping our students to stay in school and again we just seen a tremendous amount of data to support that what i will share with you though is that in a little bit you're going to hear information from our staff that as a district at this time we have decided not to participate i want to repeat this psd has decided at this time not to participate in the colorado department of public health and environments covid program for testing serial testing at this time we've made this important decision for several reasons that i want to articulate because i think it's important that the community
193hears this directly from me uh one first and foremost is the recent announcement that pfizer is seeking of fda approval and authorization for the coven 19 vaccine for children at the ages 5 to 11 we believe potentially can serve as a game changer as another mitigation factor in protocol in our district and in our community as something i shared in my opening remarks and i want to reiterate this again while cdphe provides a lot of resources to stand up these programs in public schools across the state of colorado it's not enough to do it without having a significant impact on schooling on staffing students don't walk themselves to a testing center students need to be pulled out of instruction at times to be tested there's a lot of value in serial testing and i do
194believe in my role as a superintendent serial testing aligns to the three drivers that i referenced earlier but right now we have limited number of personnel resources in our system to pull this off successfully i would also say that the now reduced impact of student quarantine exemptions based upon changes to public health guidelines associated with participation in the testing program has since changed from when the program around testing was initially rolled out in the late summer we will not see relief in quarantines as a result of that and we needed to think differently about that and we had frank dialogue with our school leaders around needs as i shared with you in our remarks uh questions that my our staff and myself are asking is you know what can we do better to support you
195you know the job that we have right now is to prioritize our core business which is learning and teaching we as public educators and as a system are holding the line i believe within our community on really putting our best foot forward to mitigate the spread of covet 19. while we are interested in exploring additional mitigation factors we cannot do that at the expense of our core business we can't do that at the expense of pulling children out of our buildings pulling our principles our assistant principals and instructional coaches out of their classroom walkthroughs and the ability to coach and mentor their teachers we're just not positioned to be able to do this well and so we're going to hit pause on implementing any serial testing in psd right now we will reevaluate this decision
196no earlier than january there are a couple large systems across the state of colorado who have already opted in we'll study how that went over the next few months to see what the impact was on instruction on the community on staffing as well as their spread and be able to make a more informed decision moving forward i'm hopeful that the community respects the fact that you're hearing that from me directly but i also think it's important that the community hears more details in the why behind these decisions and for those reasons i'd like to welcome our psd coven 19 coordinator ms cory henry and our executive director of communications ms madeleine knoblet here to provide more specific information on behalf of our school district and i want to thank you both as well as all
197the various staff members that are supporting the implementation of these mitigation factors it's a tremendous amount of work and effort around the clock it does not go unnoticed so thank you thank you superintendent kingsley members of the board cabinet and everyone gathered here tonight we appreciate the opportunity to be able to inform you about how the district's response continues in the kovit 19 pandemic and are thankful to tom and dr olsen for proceeding our presentation and laying some great foundational information for us to be able to present all right so in tonight's presentation we'll give you a brief update around the status of covid in psd as you heard in the previous presentation we got some insight into where we stand as a county we'll drill down a little bit more in terms of where
198we're at as a district as superintendent kingsley shared with you we'll we'll speak just briefly then on our decision to continue masking and then again briefly touch on the decision around testing and just to present some psd data to go along with the data presented from the county our 14-day cumulative case is count 678. 93 of those are student cases 7 are staff cases the percentage of staff and students as superintendent kingsley mentioned that are not in remote is 99.6 percent it's working our kids are in school our teachers are with them um as far as a breakdown of cases again you can see prior we've got 49 elementary 24 high school 23 middle and 4 percent in various departments and again just a reminder about our dashboard so we do want our community to
199be able to see this information for themselves on the psd home page up in the left corner where the red circle is that's our covid tab if you click on that it takes you to the psd data dashboard you can see information about cases per school within that school and our totals all right building upon that a little bit more also on the data dashboard you can access information about any of the classes or cohorts within psd that are currently meeting the state's designation for pre-outbreak which is two to four cases in a classroom or cohort or outbreak status which would be five or more cases in a classroom or cohort as of yesterday we had seven schools with classes or cohorts in pre-outbreak it is important to note that the majority of those are
200related to cases and exposure during lunch time so as you'll remember from previous presentations and you just think about your day-to-day life that's a time when we're taking off masks and so without having that piece in place with the current state guidelines and just the exposure risk associated with lunches we are seeing more cases there and that's what we attribute our pre-outbreaks to and then we also have five schools in outbreak as of yesterday the other thing we'd like to remind our community about is that we continue to communicate our teams communicate whenever there is a case or exposure in a psd school we want to make sure we remain transparent about that and that people are aware of these exposures one so that they can just watch their students watch themselves for signs of
201symptoms and then choose to get tested if they start to exhibit symptoms we have had close contacts identified as some of the cases again attributed in many cases to our lunchtime exposures we do not communicate each time that a class or cohort goes into pre-outbreak or outbreak status and instead opted to be able to keep that information public and updated in timely fashion on our website all right so as you heard super uh superintendent kingsley share psd is continuing universal masking we'll keep it brief again it ties back to our drivers to keep kids in school in many of the cases that we're experiencing because both parties or in the cases of classes all parties are masked because of current state guidelines for who is a close contact we are having exposures because there are
202positive cases in our buildings but there are not close contacts being identified in many of the cases because those individuals are wearing masks and so that's often a question we hear from our community how is it that we're able to keep kids in school when we were wearing masks last year and we had quarantines it's because of that change in protocol specifically around both parties being masked being an exemption to quarantine except for in situations of outbreak i wanted to touch on vaccination clinics so we are continuing to offer opportunities for vaccination clinics most recently we have partnered with cdphe they have a mobile vaccine clinic bus that parks in the parking lot of a school outside the building this has been great we're not in the building having space access to facilities they're able
203to come and provide that for families again for our vaccine clinics it is 100 voluntary parents must be present with their children who are 17 or younger to consent and those 18 and older in our schools would be able to come without a parent it's because they're adults and able to consent for themselves sorry i got ahead of myself so um just to touch base also here that psd staff are not administering vaccines again it is cdphe or if we're partnered in a clinic with larimer county that their staff are administering getting consent and running that process our communication for the vaccine clinics is that we are emailing all parents of students who are 12 and older within the district we're also posting it on our website and social media the dates of those clinics
204all right and i don't think we'll take much time here again because superintendent kingsley walked us through the rationale behind the decision but just to reiterate at this time psd will not be participating in the colorado department of public health and environments voluntary covid schools testing screening program again part because of space constraints in some of our schools not having enough psd personnel to be able to support some of those program needs including being able to take kids who have opted in take them down to the testing sites and back given some of the staffing challenges we have across the district and because of the authorization news around the pfizer vaccine for children ages 5 and 11 as well as stakeholder feedback in our communities with that any questions that board directors may have for
205us we're happy to answer them board members questions comments go ahead kristen yeah i just want to thank you all for taking a look at this and in depth and seeing you know what some of the opportunities and what some of the stressors on our system would be so thank you for that and and we can reevaluate in january and hopefully it won't be necessary at all um hopefully by then we'll be yeah but thank you rob yeah i like those thanks and i appreciate the fact that this along with many other decisions we have to make across a whole range of uh disciplines if you will represent balances between competing interests you know competing goods if you will and i think in this case i agree with the decision you've made and i appreciate
206your sharing your rationale for this thank you okay and i would include thanks for involving people and how you're approaching your decisions i think board members are appreciating being kept in the loop and whatnot so but the presentation is great we appreciate you guys coming forward and uh being very as transparent as you possibly can with both the decisions and the information and how we're handling things in the district if there are no further questions we will thank you and look forward to your next update so thank you okay the final informational item this evening is uh 9.2 which is an update on the career and innovation uh work and i'll turn this over to you superintendent kingsley thank you i i know it's late but this is going to be great so we got
207we got to bring our a-game to this presentation because we talked about our primary focus uh as a system is to ensure that all of our students graduate with options that doesn't happen without really being in tune around labor market trends understanding how we're aligning our academic programming offerings to those trends and making sure that we're centering our work our future our budget development process on innovation and so giving us an update this evening on career and innovation in our psd school district as well as through our lens of career and technology education is our cte coordinator ms tanya alcarez and our director of career and innovation mr scott elias thank you so much for being here we're excited to hear your presentation great thank you so much for having us i know it's been
208a long night and we hope to bring some some interesting updates from the last time that we spoke to it was a couple of years ago when when i last had the opportunity to provide an update some stuff has happened uh in the meantime uh we've worked through some some changes and we're really excited to uh uh to bring this update to you i first want to start by uh giving a shout out to the two young men in our aviation pathway who took the picture that you see here just a week ago they were teaching superintendent kingsley to fly a drone over the parking lot i'm pleased to report that no vehicles or individuals or trees were harmed during the flight and he did a great job so i don't want to go without
209mentioning how proud we are of the work that our students do and of every opportunity that we can give our students to get their work out into the world and into the community since we last spoke we have made some shifts organizationally and really the goal of those shifts is to leverage the resources that we have available in the pooter school district in the way to deliver the maximum number of opportunities to students in our system when we started this work we were conceiving of an innovation center which has become what we now call the futures lab but critical partners in that work were our career and technical education team which includes tanya to my right as well as our business and community development team so with some work within the system we were able
210to bring those resources together under an umbrella that we're calling the career and innovation team and you can see the the mission of that team is really to bring these resources together in a way that aligns innovative content from core areas stem steam cte and really gets kids in a position in psd where they have options when they graduate and to be clear this team supports not only students who take advantage of course offerings at futures lab the intent of this team is to better support the work being done out in the system in all of our schools when we approach this work this is a kind of a working diagram that we're using to sort of represent all of the components that go into building high quality programs that prepare students to graduate with
211options tanya is going to dig into this in a little bit more detail later but each piece of the career and innovation team is specifically designed to address a portion of this visual and that's how we're able to bring this work together for students most of the components of this visual visual come from the american cte acti is the association for career and tech ed it's the national organization however they don't just apply within career and tech ed programs and programming these things apply to all high quality academic content geared toward getting students ready to be successful when they leave the pooter school district regardless of what it is that they choose to do when they leave us i've included this kind of a wireframe of the structure of the team again two years ago
212when i stood in front of you we were talking primarily about futures lab and what those opportunities for students would look like the futures lab team currently consists of nine instructional staff one counselor and two classified team members so for all intents and purposes i'm the campus administrator who supervises that program so it's a really unique role and that i get to serve a central office position but i get to have that regular opportunity to interact with young learners and see the impacts in their day-to-day life and how these opportunities are really helping them create a better future for themselves in the middle is tanya she's our assistant director of current innovation she also continues to serve as our cte coordinator and she has a team who reports to her you heard earlier this evening
213from nick peterson who is our community and business development coordinator he is new to his role this year we're excited to have nick on board and then off to the side stemx is is a program that was formerly called the stem stem institute stemex is a summer and weekend program that began at preston middle school uh gosh over a decade ago and the more that program grew and as we brought the career and innovation team and futures lab together it became apparent that that this was a good fit to bring alongside our team because it allows us an opportunity through stemx to expose students from the elementary and middle school levels to the kinds of opportunities that we want to help them see at their home sites as well as at futures lab so on
214this slide you can really see how the functional aspects of each component of the career and innovation team work together and one thing you'll see reflected in all of these columns is the idea that by bringing these resources together under one roof and under one team we're able to be more nimble as a team and more nimble as a school district in responding to needs in our community workforce trends and the needs that are that our businesses in the community have with respect to bringing employees employees on board we'll circle back to a futures lab update in a bit but i'm really proud of the work that tanya and her team have been doing to to really continue to build and support our school sites in building career and tech ed programs at our sites
215so i'm going to turn it over to tonya to give a little bit of a career in tech ed update all right well thank you scott and thank you to the board for having me tonight i'm really excited to be here to talk about some of the work that our team has been engaged in over the last three years during covid career and technical education went through a complete redesign at the federal state and local levels and it's really exciting because we have been able to expand options for students and think about career and technical education for all instead of just a few i think previously when um a lot of people think of career and technical education they think of just the skilled traits or vocational education and we're looking at how can we
216provide career exploration and opportunities for our students to go deeper and learn about themselves their skills their values and their interests and accelerate their learning that's aligned with their career passions and interests for our students so we're doing this sixth through community college we are starting this in the middle school and we're working with front range and aims to align the last three years we've really focused on our high school programs and this is the framework that's driven our work so on the outside of the circle we're looking at some information to drive our decisions and our programmings how do we decide which of the 16 pathways we offer to the students how do we decide where we're going and what those jobs of the future are how are we preparing our students so one
217of the keys we have in career and technical education is we have advisory committees we have advisory committees by each pathway that meet twice a year they comprise of our post-secondary partners our middle school educators our high school educators our counselors and most importantly our community members we also have larimer county workforce at the bor at the table they're at the at the sea so i'm going to use an example of computer science because i think we've come a really long way with our computer science options for students sixth through community college level even with partnerships with csu so the four-year college degree on the outside we're looking at workforce data and trends so larimer county in larimer county in 2020 there were 2046 openings for software developers that's a lot of openings a lot
218of growth and the median wage was dollars an hour that's huge that career requires a four years bachelor's degree we also though have computer user support specialists and we have over 500 openings for that which requires an associate's degree and a certificate and the median wage for that is higher than a starting teacher's salary it's dollars an hour so we're looking at that data but we're also looking at our students what are our students passionate about sixth through twelfth grade our students are completing their icap or their career in academic plans and we can pull data just at the district level to see how many students are interested in which careers and we have in peter school district 495 students 6 through 12th grade that are interested in becoming video game developers we also have
219students that want to be computer programmers and get into software development how are we supporting those students that want to go deeper these students know in middle school often times they're exploring in our middle school computer programming courses and then when they get to high school this framework we want to align the courses that they are engaging in at the end of the pathway we want work based learning for every student so that's been really important to focus on work-based learning opportunities and how we're connecting and aligning what students are learning in the classroom to experiences in the workforce so they can make that decision am i headed to a two-year am i headed to a four-year or will my certificate that i earned at the futures lab in networking take me straight to the
220workforce we're also looking at accelerating those students through concurrent enrollment and and partnering with front range and aims so right now in our high schools students are earning college credit at the same time they're earning their math credit to meet their graduation guidelines because we've aligned that those standards in that work and and students are earning credit in web design and computer applications through front range they're also earning credit at ames community college through the futures lab for networking and cyber security industry certifications we're hearing from our community members are key to entering the workforce and then the last component on the inside is student leadership we have organizations aligned to every pathway and in computer science it's called the technology student association this is where stu our students are finding belonging they're finding those
221like-minded people in their school who geek out on computer programming and computer science and they get to connect they get to lead they engage in you know community service and i left access off on the outside because i think that's foundational to all and everything that we're doing in career and technical education and and career pathways for students and the access for computer science this pathway looks really good it's offered at all four of our high schools it's offered at pga and if it's not offered at your home high school you can access it at the futures lab in our other 16 pathways we don't have the same level of access for our students so if you're a student interested in agriculture for your future right now the only option for you is at pooter
222high school so that's part of where we're headed and what we need to work on is continuing to support and provide more access for our students to get connected to their career interests and their passions the why cte works the graduation nationally is 95 percent for career and technical education students 91 of these students feel like they're future ready they can see themselves when they're asked that question uh senior year there's one question seniors are getting asked right now what are you doing next year students that participate in our programs and our pathways feel more confident to answer that question post-secondary this is not for students just entering the workforce yes and it's also for those students who want to continue that education at the community college or four-year college level and then increased access
223to work-based learning because of the way we're organized and set up students have more opportunities to go on a career tour experience a job shadow which then in turn we hope leads to an internship or an apprenticeship for our students currently these are the 16 pathways that we're offering within peter school district i'm going to highlight just two of them health science is brand new rocky mountain high school is offering the first health science program in peter school district it is so exciting if i were to read you the data i think you guys already know it there's a lot of jobs in health care and there's a lot of jobs that aren't nurse doctor right there's a lot of jobs that our students can access and continue after high school and their education if
224they want to so we've been working with with the science teachers to think about offering this program at all of our high schools and then talking with futures lab about the future of the health science program in pewter school district the second one i want to highlight that's really exciting is manufacturing pooder high school this year launched a p-tech program that's an early college program for students in manufacturing and those students will earn their associate's degree and the second level of that learning will be combined with futures lab so that all students can be skilled and trained for careers in manufacturing in those high paying jobs so where are we at currently this was last year during covid we had over half of our students in high school participate in career and technical education programs
225in these 16 pathways and 786 of them completed 20 credits or more that's the definition we're looking at for our students to complete a pathway or a program 443 high school students earned credit for work based learning experience during covid uc health they still hosted interns because they think this is so important to get kids exposed to health care careers it was done virtually but the ceo of uc health was at our health care advisory meeting this past week and they're ready to bring it back in person even though they're going through crisis mode they're here to support 168 students obtained industry certifications we had the opportunity with some funds last year to train 19 middle school and high school counselors about all of these options for kids because it's overwhelming it's a lot to
226navigate um so the counselor plays a key role in that and it's really exciting that we have some champions out there who have who have been you know trained and up to date on how they can support students better and then again over half of our middle school students participated in in eight different middle school cte programs and that grew last year from three programs to eight so i'm going to end with this photo here these students are currently at columbine health care and an apprenticeship and when we talk about an apprenticeship that's really helping us blur the lines between high school workforce and college during a student's 11th and 12th grade year so these seven students well actually i should say they were they were chosen at a pool of 46 applicants so we
227had 46 students apply for this these students work a half a day they put in about 20 hours a week they go to to their job or their apprenticeship for half the day and then they go back to their home school for the other half the day they are earning their cna certification they're earning college credit and they're getting paid and they're earning high school credit for the work they're doing in this apprenticeship program so this is something that's really important to us and the restructure of our team and why we're doing it i get to office right next to the coordinator of community and business development and we get to connect and talk about how do we develop more of these opportunities for our students so that's where we're headed we need we still
228have a lot of work to do we have a lot of work to do to create awareness for our community our parents our families and our students so that they understand all of the options and we have a lot of work to do to make sure all of these options are accessible to to every student so so that's the work ahead of us so i'm going to turn it back over to scott thanks i know it was it's a lot but it's super exciting thank you tanya and i want to further share a a huge win that we had just in our first year with this model we've always had incredibly strong career and tech ed programming in psd this is our second year right now working under this career and innovation model in the
229first year which would have been last school year most of us remember a lot of really big concerns about the budget and where was money going to come from during that time through the collaboration across teams we were able to build some structures collaborate with cabinet and build some systems in psd that increased the amount of reimbursement we received from the state of colorado by over 40 percent so that's with some little tweaks here and a little nip tuck here and there some work at the school sites allowed us to increase our reimbursable funds from the state of colorado from just over 1 million dollars to we don't want to give a final amount yet because that hasn't been settled but we expect that's going to be about a 30 to 40 percent increase in
230a covered year just by tweaking some things within the system because cte a lot of that work that tonya digs into is around compliance when we talk about approved pathways you can't just say we're offering an approved pathway it has to meet certain criteria you have to be offering classes at very specific levels there has to be a qualified instructor in that classroom and the state and the federal government knows that running these kinds of programs is not inexpensive so by design by optimizing these programs we create additional opportunities to offset those costs to the district by recovering some of those funds from the state and the federal government tanya is a master at doing that and bringing this team together we were really able to help scale that up at all of our high
231school sites to launch new programs and to refine existing programs and create more opportunities for reimbursement so really excited about that incredibly proud of the work that tanya and her team do to bring these opportunities to kids in psd because all of that money that comes back gets reinvested at the high schools and it becomes becomes funds that are available to create more programs for more kids so i'm excited to be back and share a little bit of an update about what's going on at futures lab i think last time we talked we had about 40 kids and we've grown a little bit since then we matured during a year when it was really difficult to do much of anything in public education and a lot of the stories that we heard about public ed
232were not awesome and my goal from the beginning in having the opportunity to lead this team is to truly build a program that psd can be really proud of and we can be proud of the work that our young people are doing every single day and i have on the slide next year i'll be really excited to add two more logos we might have to widen the circle a little bit but we truly partner with all eight of our secondary schools not just our four large comprehensives our four smaller and alternative schools as well all of those schools are represented at futures lab we do a lot of work at the lab around intentional culture building with our kids because we know all of our learners are making a really difficult decision to leave their
233home campus and spend half of their day with us and i have two high school kids of my own it's not easy to get them to step off their home campus and try something new so a lot of our work is certainly not just around pathways although those are important but really around building culture and supporting students in the development of what we call human skills which is you've got these opportunities in front of you you have these options when you graduate how do you make a good choice are you even aware of what all of your options are so this is just a little walk down memory lane for you many of you remember that first year when we were here we were operating the lab out of one classroom at fort collins high
234school and somehow we managed to squeeze four classes into that on a really crazy schedule the buses brought kids to us by about 7 30 in the morning and at nine o'clock we rushed them out the door to get them back to their home campus before regular school started that was not a sustainable model bringing kids in before the school day started for one class really limited our pool of students who had access to the program by mid-year we realized that our program was getting pretty popular so we collaborated with troy across the street here at pca we opened up a second section of coding which has been our most popular pathway from launch and we were able to launch that right here across the street so that students at pca had options for coding
235and in psd coding is a math credit so we're looking at increasing opportunities for kids to earn core credit while they're earning credentials and certifications that can get them jobs in the future this was a crazy year because we transitioned in march into virtual instruction and we weren't sure what that was going to look like but our kids stuck with it we actually one of the things we do every semester is we have an exhibition of learning we believe it's important to get our students work out into the world and have an opportunity for them to interact with the community when they're seeing their work displayed and we did a virtual exhibition and we had our business partners linking into our students work products and having an opportunity to leave feedback for our students that
236was really powerful to see them to see them step into that in a year when really nothing was normal at that point in 2020 the other challenge that we ran into in 2020 is that we really didn't have much time to go out and tell kids the story of futures lab and bring kids in we had one public information session and that was about two weeks before the nba quit and tom hanks got kovid so we kind of knew we were done at that point and so we're really proud that even in a year that started with a whole lot of uncertainty we increased the number of students in our pathways to 178 students we started with just over 200 but as things panned out we had a lot of students who were younger and
237who said you know i want to wait because i don't want to take aviation remotely but we had a lot who stuck with it and we had so many positive stories come out of that that said this was really something that kept our kids connected to school because they were doing something that they were good at they were doing something that they enjoyed doing and success at the lab and their pathway translates to success at their home site as well we hear that story over and over again our all of our schools are doing incredible work but if we're able to connect with a kid in a different way that just raises the opportunities for that kid at all of their sites in our second year we turned our courses into pathways and one of
238the ways we did that was by bringing online a course that we call futures lab seminar that class is attached to every single pathway so every student who comes to the lab takes futures lab seminar in that class we we talk we call them human skills we kind of affectionately call it how to human in that class we learn things like how do you make small talk with someone um you know not just the sort of typical resume development things those are in there too but how do we make small talk how do you know who you are as a human what are your values how do those values inform the choices that you make in school the choices of careers that you have ahead of you why is learning values even something we care
239about so every student at the lab has an opportunity not just an opportunity but every student in the lab takes their pathway class and their seminar class where we really help bring together the different aspects of of their actual work into how do i translate that into a job and an opportunity when i leave psd the other nice thing about the seminar class is that that seminar class combined with their pathway class gives each student a capstone credit so as we look at graduation options to get more kids across the finish line one of our 240 plus options for students in psd is to complete a capstone so we offer every student at the lab an opportunity to get a capstone whether that's what they're going to use to walk across the stage or not
240all students get that opportunity since we weren't able to be around humans in 2021 it became a challenge for us to build enrollment rolling into 2122 but i'm excited to say that right now we're on track to to end the year with between 250 and 300 students right now we have 128 students sitting in pathway seats and you'll see in a little bit why that's pretty close to what we can handle we've got four learning studios we took over the partnership center that some of you remember you won't recognize it if you come in again we took over the partnership center and we launched some new pathways this year one that's starting in the spring which is a design build pathway that was put on hold at the beginning of covid an education pathway which
241is a first of its kind partnership with the university of northern colorado our focus this year is early childhood education students in that pathway are earning 12 credits at the university of northern colorado if they come back for year two they earn 12 more so the university of colorado the one of their deans is coming out next week to meet with our learners we are incredibly proud of this program and the opportunity that this represents to build a teacher workforce in the pooter school district that is reflective of our local community and the last one that we launched this year is multimedia and graphic design students in there are earning 15 front range credits and they are earning an entire front range credit certificate in multimedia and graphic design and i want to i want
242to shout out that we did all of that work bringing all of these learners to the lab without a single opportunity to meet any of them face to face so the students are there because they've heard great things they responded to my really awesome email that it's always powerful to send an email to 10 000 addresses and i would be remiss if i didn't if i didn't give a huge thank you to the counselors at our high schools without our counselors we would not have had the success that we had this year bringing students in our counselors that our at our comprehensive and our small schools have done an incredible job of identifying a kid who has an interest that will be a great fit at the lab and getting that kid plugged in so
243our counselors have been a huge huge part of that success and looking forward to 22 23 we'll talk a little more about this in a minute we're excited to to have a chance to move one of the jokes we have at the lab is we keep a bag packed so we've gone from fort collins taking over the partnership center and next year we're going to be partnering with jesse and emily and we're going to be taking some space over at the new timoth middle high school campus out east on prospect uh with that we are finally going to get to launch our advanced manufacturing pathway which is another one that was tabled when covid came along and we weren't able to get the facility that we had hoped for in 2020 that isn't that's a
244huge partnership with woodward i think many of you saw and read that press release they're donating a significant equipment donation they're also partnering with us uh in terms of personnel to help provide a machinist who can work side by side with educators at the lab and give students those skills that they need to be ready to go to work in an advanced manufacturing career and the other one we're bringing on is actually a return pathway part of front range career pathways one of the ones that was really hard to sunset when we made that decision was a pathway around ecology forestry and wildlife management huge in fort collins and colorado and we are partnering again with front range to we've we've kind of peterized that pathway and we've semesterized it and we're going to bring
245it over and start it next year at the lab so we're excited to partner with front range on that pathway as well these are four of our learning studios so if you've been over to partnership ever in the past you will right you will not recognize the space if you come over again other than maybe the big room the room in the top left we call the garden because we are growing young minds in that space you could fit 16 is probably a stretch and we are in covid but that's around 16 kids can fit in there the office that used to be the foundation's office is now our audio alley we teach audio production in that space we've done kind of a nice job of renovating that the big room we call the big
246ideas room and because every startup needs a garage the back room is called the garage and that's where we teach aviation and networking and cyber security we're also very appreciative to fossil ridge high school who has been sharing their culinary kitchen with us so our students who are committed to culinary many of them ride a bus to the partnership center get off that bus get on another bus and ride over to fossil ridge high school so the opportunity for all of us to be together starting next year at timothy middle high school is going to be significant culinary is one of our most popular pathways along with aviation coding design and multimedia and graphic design so we are pretty much at capacity we have between 65 and 70 students at any one time and to
247go much more than that would be a little a little sardine-ish this is one i get asked a lot because i think when you look first at the kinds of class offerings we have at the lab you could think to yourself well you know you might just you might just have this one particular kind of student it's been really important to our team from the beginning that we create opportunities for all students in psd so in many areas female we're really working hard to build up our numbers in that area but in many of our other areas you'll see that the futures lab is actually more diverse than psd as a whole and we are incredibly proud of that that is the result of very intentional work and a collaboration with john mccain our language
248culture and equity team it's certainly great to say all are welcome the message we wanted to send is we built this with you in mind and that is a really positive message to bring into some of our communities we have a a 50 person from the language culture and equity team that we share and brooks helps us identify kids who might be a good fit for some of our pathways but who maybe haven't seen traditional academic success sometimes for some of those kids what they need is a light switch to go off and some kind of a connection to school and then once they start seeing success at the lab in a pathway that translates back to their home campus and we see success because remember we don't graduate students from the lab so every
249student who increases who increases academically or improves academically when they're with us that translates to a graduate from one of our high schools so that's an exciting opportunity to be able to bring we are doing some really intentional work around bringing more more females in specifically in stem careers it's very important that we that females have an opportunity to see themselves in these classes our networking and cyber security class is taught by an incredible female instructor our design build instructor is a female instructor as well so we're trying to make sure that young women have an opportunity to see themselves in this work our graduation advocate helps us with with some of our latinx student population so that they can see themselves at the lab and this year we've brought along a family liaison as
250well so not only are students hearing the message about what's possible at the lab we have a family liaison who can help bring that message to families and help that whole family see that these are opportunities that their their students have the other thing that we are really proud of at the lab before we dig into this is that we just we really try to remove as many barriers as possible so our programs have no student fees we build them into our budget there's no barrier to entry for any of our college classes and this summer in what was probably a very dangerous day to be on the road in the city of fort collins all of our teachers got white bus trained so if kids don't have access we figure out a way to
251get them access we send a white bus we pick them up we get them there so our goal is to remove as many barriers from kids as possible and having our entire staff able to drive a white bus is both exciting and dangerous so if you see a white bus you're taking your chances we just took kids uh last week i think brian said that at the beginning we just took kids last week down to the united airlines training center in denver and it was just an incredible experience and an opportunity that many of our kids wouldn't have had otherwise and because we had a teacher that could drive the white bus we weren't restricted to the nine to two window and we could really make it a full day field trip for those kids
252and a great experience so just some numbers that we're proud of 31 percent of our students at futures lab become program completers in cte language that's a good thing the more program completers you have the higher your eligibility for reimbursement and if you remember from tonya's slide earlier across psd that number is 17 and i want to be clear that it's 31 at the lab not because we're doing anything better than anyone else or anyone's not doing what they should be doing but this is additional support that we can provide by being able to offer some higher end classes that scale well in a central location but don't scale well at a high school so if you take eight students that are interested at one of our big schools but you bring them all together
253now we have a viable program so this is not a competition when we have a student become a program completer our reimbursement goes up ultimately that money flows back to the schools to be reinvested in students and student programming we have 64 students right now currently signed up for concurrent enrollment of some kind uh we have three concurrent enrollment higher education partners front range ames and unc i'm not aware of any other districts that are partnering with all three of those entities so we're really proud of that of those 64 students they are signed up to earn 543 college credits this school year which translates to 83 000 in savings for psd families so this is a future maker for a lot of our kids who had not seen themselves attending college until they had
254an opportunity to sign up for concurrent enrollment we're also proud that already this year we're just finishing up the first quarter we have already issued 40 industry recognized credentials to kids most of those in it we've had some in our pro start culinary program and again there isn't those are incentivized by the state of colorado through the colorado oh i'm going to get it messed up i blanked on it colorado career development incentive plan c-dip is what we call it but it's c-dip it's like a shrimp dip so through the c-dip program each one of those is eligible for reimbursement when they take when they take the test with us we are paying for that test so we use that reimbursement to fund the next round of tests for kids because again we don't want
255that to be a barrier when a kid goes to sit for their drone license we pick up the tab for that test when we get that reimbursement back it goes back into our fund that pays for the next year's kids to take the test so one year we invested and that those have paid off those have paid dividends for us i just want to highlight some of the pathway work i've already talked a little bit about our early childhood education work one of our other partners we couldn't do that work without our partners over at putnam elementary that picture on the top left is our early childhood education class on their first day every single wednesday they go over to putnam elementary every teacher is assigned to a mentor teacher and all of our students
256get that student teaching in experience one day a week they get that opportunity for a field experience um in the bottom is our networking and cyber security class they're either always tearing something down or building something so just don't leave any electronics in their vicinity and you'll be okay and the one on the right is our culinary and hospitality pathway again it's an incredibly popular pathway they are you should stop by anytime they're always feeding us we're going to need to bring on an exercise pathway probably in another year because it's either cookies or sandwiches and we're getting close to the holidays and it's an extraordinarily dangerous time to have a culinary pathway as we get close to the holidays uh something that's been important to our team from the beginning is the idea of
257connection and it's always been the vision of our team that we are not just serving high school kids who choose to enroll with us certainly those are who we design our pathways for but our goal has always been to serve the district and serve the community in a variety of different ways these are three projects that are we're excited about over the last six months the one on the left is this year's design thinking students partnering with boys and girls club of larimer county they brought us a problem we provided them with a solution the students had the opportunity to present that solution to larimer boys and girls club leadership and they're going to see that solution implemented we redesigned the kids redesigned their their tech room they had to do client interviews they had
258to do a human center design process and really understand what larimer county wanted in that space and then they proposed it got a q a and submitted a final proposal back to the client the top right is our summer program we had futures lab and non-futures lab students who had an opportunity to get a summer job bringing innovation stations to all of our camp seoul students over the summer so camp seoul students take field trips every thursday this year that was not an option so we brought the field trip to them we had two teachers step up to lead this work and as you can tell some really happy awesome drone and hot drone flying students because it was pretty toasty out there that day i mean the bottom right is a group we're extremely
259proud of this is our young women and leadership group this group started right before covid it brings together young women from all eight psd high schools to to meet with each other start building their network and really have some time to explore their identities and really think about what it is that they want to do when they leave school and building that support network that is so critical and so important for our young women again it started at the lab but it serves students from all eight of our high schools some of them take classes with us some of them don't they're just in it so they have that camaraderie and that partnership um this is just more a bigger list of some of the projects that we are working on that we have worked
260on out in the psd community and beyond everything from flying drones to record fossil ridge high school's marching band so they can mark it up in coach's eye and give students feedback to working with a deca team at fossil ridge high school to design an app for their cup of joe store so that people can order remotely and then go in and pick up their coffee so we're just really excited about the different ways the different opportunities that we can partner in our community beyond just enrolling learners in our pathways so as i mentioned we're moving again we're really excited about it a lot of our energy right now is going into the learners that we have and getting ready to move in to what we hope will be a little more of a semi-permanent
261home for futures lab on the west wing i just like saying i'm in the west wing the west wing of the timoth middle high school campus we're working really closely and jesse and his team have just made us feel incredibly welcome and this is going to bring just some incredible opportunities when we have those spaces to really build out some of the programs that have been really space limited right now so we're really looking forward to a smooth transition over to that campus looking a little further ahead as we consider what a permanent facility for futures lab and the greater career team might look like we're really looking ahead to opportunities to create specialized spaces so that we can bring on board some pathways that we know are in demand you already heard tanya talk
262about healthcare we want to be able to scale that up and provide access for more students to careers in health sciences right now those needs are served at front range community college but i think with some collaboration we can do more if we have the dedicated space another one that we all know is electric vehicle maintenance and repair we have a fantastic program at front range right now where our students can go do a traditional auto shop but the next i think the future especially in this part of colorado is going to be electric vehicle maintenance and repair and we just don't have the space to launch a program like that right now we really want a central location the partnership center as small as it is has really served us well in that capacity
263it's a it's a great location for us right in the middle of fort collins and as as we move forward our big questions are around funding sources and exploring partnerships with businesses in the community and this is where we really see opportunities to expand into high need areas in the skilled trades including things like hvac electrical all of those things that right now we just don't have the space to do being able to move into a space where we can really work with our community partners and bring some other pathway opportunities to life so that was a lot but i'm excited to hear your questions and i'm excited to provide any other information that you might want great thank you scott board members questions comments rob okay so first of all i want to say
264thank you this is that this is this is tremendous really appreciate the work you're doing to give kids opportunities to connect with their passions and to help understand how they're learning elsewhere connects to those passions as well and so i think this is i think this is really great work and and helping students basically get a head start on their careers is a good deal or get a head start in finding out that they don't want to do the career that they thought they wanted to do you know so those kind of explorations are important and and and some of those courses are really exciting uh and i wish i had the opportunity to take some of them personally frankly uh and uh even the small talk seminar because i suck at small talk so
265you know if you can if you can work with me on that i really appreciate it uh separately though um i think i think uh you talked about trade i mean what are traditionally called the trades right hvac you know electrical uh you could think about pipe fitting you can think about welding some of those kind of things some of those other kind of things and you put that on the slide with you know what about our future location right i i don't know when that is i don't know how we would pay for it at this point i'm sure we'll that'll be part of the strategic planning process that happens so that that's good and we'll look forward to that in figuring out how we can pay for such a thing the question though
266is are all of those trade uh specific trade opportunities dependent on a new site are we going to have to wait for that or can some of them at least be worked either on site into the tinmath middle high school or at some other local facility because i know some of the trades have local facilities as well some of them are down in denver i visited some of them so what are your thoughts on that yeah thank you for the question so we are doing those things now we're just doing them a little bit differently than we would through a dedicated facility primarily right now we have students who are exploring the trades partnered with our industry partners we bring together advisory panels and what we're hearing from our advisory panels is they want employees
267in the trades and we need to cultivate the right training partner for those students who want to go into the trades maybe that's psd maybe it's not psd maybe it's some hybrid and what we're doing now is when we have a student or group of students who are interested in a specific trade this is where tonya's team and her work-based learning team really kick in and start working their magic we have five students right now doing internships apprenticeships out at newark's mechanical exploring careers in plumbing we have students who are interested in exploring careers in hvac we have a partnership with a very very big company right here in fort collins they take our students on as apprentices so the students get work-based learning which translates to high school credit so when students are doing
268work-based learning they get high school credit and they get an experience to actually out there in the field actually doing doing the work with our industry partners so we're not waiting we just are we're doing it where we can we're just being strategic with placements with our industry partners jessica i i also just wanted to say thank you because i've been i've had questions like most of the presentation and you answered a number of them throughout so that was very thorough and i appreciate that um one of the things that you guys mentioned was having a counselor with that specialist credential and i was wondering at how many of the middle school high schools is there a counselor with that credential to help students to kind of navigate this system yeah right now we're going
269through a process where tanya's actually onboarding them would you say we have one finished at each or in process uh we have at every middle school we have would you mind just stepping so the record tv audience can hear it yeah yeah thanks yeah so at our middle school level we have one credentialed counselor at each middle school and at our high schools at the comprehensive high schools we at some sites we have multiple but our non-traditionals we we're still there's a few gaps there that we can work towards um and just because they don't have the credential doesn't mean we're we're not going to share this work um with those counselors and they're they're huge advocates and and partners in this work especially as we talk about the trades and youth apprenticeships and understanding
270that apprenticeship model and understanding how we connect students to concurrent enrollment programs they're becoming even more essential to this work and i would add our human resources department has been fantastic at helping us actually create a counselor job that has that cte specialist title attached to it which makes it easier for for reporting um and also the apprenticeships that that we're describing those aren't just for external groups tanya is working incredibly hard inside pst because i looked at our website today we need hvac we need a plumber we need electrical so having apprentices from within psd working within psd is a really powerful opportunity awesome dj so i have multiple but i want to follow up on that real quick is because i think it's great that we're getting out there and doing this apprentice
271work but there's there is work that needs to be done to really get to that level of a understanding that's what they want to do and uh you know i'm just thinking about being electrician just learning about the wires the load and some of that stuff that needs to happen beforehand and um yeah i i don't i really don't want to be a debbie downer but you know since 2015 i've been attending different uh presentations about how we're going to get these pathways different pathways through our district going and we've really been turning our wheels long before your time too and and what i really want to see is the excitement scott that you have that you just shared with the futures lab i want to see that to be in all four all six
272of our high schools and i don't see that growing yet still very much i see with pooter we just got something new going which is great with the p-tech but my big question to you then is how do we get this going enough in these other schools to at least get a foothold just get those sparks get that switch flipped for these students to stay in school and start to learn some of that stuff so they can get to an apprentice or so that they understand their opportunities that are in front of them with a an education so i'll take the first part and then you can follow up yeah so in construction specifically as part of this redesign we now have offered for the first time this year an introduction to construction course and
273that course scope and sequence includes exploring all of the trades that is offered in all of our comprehensive high schools right now as well as at centennial high school and so the goal is to look at differently how we are aligning our school-based work with our work-based learning so the students in that course are the students we're connecting to a career tour and the career tour is happening october 21st and 28th we're taking kids out to the prospect timoth middle high school to learn about careers in construction that's aligned to this intro to construction course and pathway and their encore electric is bringing their escape room and the kids have to wire their way out of the escape room it's really cool so we've got work to do there i'm not denying it we've got
274a lot of work to do with expanding that but the work that scott nielsen has done and scott elias and dave montoya and rethinking how we're giving money back to our sites to incentivize this work has made a tremendous difference in the last two years so that will continue to be a focus for us within our our home high schools and our teachers will tell you there's still hurdles right there's still facilities what you see for facilities at pooter high school looks very different than what you see at rocky mountain high school we still have access issues so we're going to continue to partner with our community the futures lab and and and think through that i was going to mention the ace mentorship program which is a program that is initiated and run by
275our community partners in construction and i think last year we had 40 students attend virtually granted they're not getting their hands on but they still have an opportunity for that exposure and the response has been really positive and that's what ultimately is going to translate into our design build class so even a student who doesn't touch that pathway at their home campus has an opportunity through design build to go through that at a different angle they get to start with some drafting technologies look at cad how do we turn a 2d model into a 3d model how do we prototype and we're doing that as a collaboration with centennial this spring so we'll be on site there a couple days a week for build days and students will get to explore as tanya said all
276of the different aspects of trades to really say which one really clicked with me or none of them i want to do architectural drafting and design you have another question okay yeah and uh when we were talking about icap do you have data to say how many of the kids are actually getting through it or actually touching it um i you know just at the student advisory council you know that was it was kind of a hit and miss on how much were people were taking and i'm i'm here to again this is something that we've been talking about for years are we getting into the schools enough to really drive that to be a participation yeah um icap is an is another area where we've been through a lot of change we've had a
277platform that was naviance that was career cruising and now we've transitioned career cruising has been rebranded to zello that all happened during covid so we have a lot of work to do in that area but i can tell you that over ten thousand of our six through twelfth high school students have saved a career and they've we can look at what their career plan and what their career focus is so that's some numbers i can give you and then the training that we did with our cte specialists and our counselors at the middle and high school level a big component of that training was connecting the icap and those student interests to these course pathways and career pathways so i think you're going to see a lot of movement this year we've already seen a
278ton and we have a lot of excitement and energy from our counseling teams who are stepping up to lead that work and at the middle school is where it's really important to get those kids learning about themselves so that they can connect to that that next level and that next pathway so we have a district level training on october 25th where all the schools can bring teams of teachers gt coordinators integrated services staff counselors to talk about how can we use the icap as a system in our schools in our feeder systems what does that look like how are we getting these students connected yeah it seems like it's getting that buy-in from those counselors and teachers that is the step that we've been missing a little bit in the last few years so i
279i commend you for diving in again and trying to get this going uh but yeah let's i hope we can because i think it does give us a good direction and help guide the children before you go on i think brian wants to step in with the comment here yeah two quick things like one uh you know this board has been committed to doing deep dives on its core business and because of the interest around icap and the zello and the various changes that these two gracious people alluded to i would like to forecast that out as a we do a deep dive on that particular area to kind of see what all those changes were and see where we're headed as a result of it and i think board member anderson i think also
280you know you're talking a lot about things that are built on trust and our system has been competitive with itself for quite a while and i think what's been incredibly impressive for me to observe and see is how the leaders who are presenting and scott and other people have been navigating a culture and kind of you know breaking down those barriers by incentivizing it resourcing it bringing people along it's probably not where we want it to be but where they've gotten as a result of dealing with some of those complexities that were built around you know when a child leaves our school and goes to another one even within our system that school loses that funding at times right so that mindset those values and those beliefs we're really working through that in a deep
281and meaningful way that i think we'll see continued growth in these particular areas across all of our schools as we build our system strategic plan cool dj you have another question okay and then as a board i think i'm going to kind of draw us towards the end i'll get i'll get questions i just want to make sure because we still have more business to do so i appreciate that and i and i uh i really do appreciate what what has been done and we're moving forward on um but it is a little frustrating that we have spun our wheels uh but the the stuff that has been happening at the futures lab is is fantastic and um one of the other questions that i did have um have you given any thought uh to
282esports as one of yours because i have a friend who actually got money to go to college for that his kid yeah so we are we have an active esports team we are the lab rats i think we're like in like seventh or eighth place in colorado we're really excited to be able to offer that opportunity to futures lab students not every high school or middle school in psd has a team rocky's knocking it out of the park they have like eight different teams fielded but we want to pre along the theme of access we want to make sure that we're providing opportunities for all kids who may not have a team at their home campus and we are kind of helping to collaborate with i.t as well as our athletics department to sort of
283get our arms around esports in the district and make it scalable because there's just a lot of behind the scenes stuff but yes we have esports we love esports our kids geek out on it i'm getting a jersey like we're all in carolyn i i i do want to go one more time to brian's point though too i um that we're doing a deep dive i think it's beneficial for us as a school board but also our community to do a deeper dive into the other offerings that our high schools are having you know i think there are there are great things that are happening there that we just we don't get to see enough and the community so i think more that we can talk about and share that would be great thanks no
284problem great question honestly dj so go ahead carolyn yeah thanks for the presentation and there was a lot of stuff in there that i didn't know so i really appreciate because my concern has been all along with the futures lab is that it's come kind of come off as college light and there hasn't been from my perspective much focus on the skilled trades and when i first got on the board and we started talking about this that's what i really wanted to see because that's what i was hearing from the community that they want to see is some emphasis on the skilled trades so we can build a community of workers that we need here the kids can work here and stay here they're good paying jobs and so i didn't i just didn't see
285that when i first came on the board in fact one electrician was working at my store and he had a kid with him and he was showing him what to do and i asked the kid where he graduated from and he said he graduated from psd and and i asked him like how did he get involved interested in electrical work and how did a school counselor help them and what he told me is that when he asked his school counselor hey how do i become an electrician i want to be an electrician his counselor didn't know how to help him okay because we were so focused on sending kids to college that we don't even give our counselors a toolbox that has the trades in it and that's on us for not doing that and
286so tell me what'll be different now if a kid comes to you in his high school year and says i want to be an electrician what would happen now i think as a system we are continuing to get better at being able to respond to that question we're building capacity on our counseling team we're also building capacity at our schools to be able to offer if not the class a resource to say hey there's a work based learning coordinator down there in the office we staff the work based learning coordinator at each of our comprehensive high schools and we staff one that supports all of our small schools so i think we will continue to get better at that i'd like to be able to say design build is a great entry option um but
287remember that was that was a pathway we had to pause on two years ago which we're finally gonna gonna launch um but i think to your question i think we we definitely have work to do but i would not want any student in psd to hear we don't have an option to support you in reaching your goals and then so what i'm hoping is is with the hiring of nick what i would have heard is that we're going to have a partnership with a lot of businesses here in town that provide that training that they pay for that training for that kid to go and get trained for free and they'll mentor him through his apprenticeship until he becomes the master electrician that that levi is today you know and he didn't have to pay
288for anything but his him and his father had to go find that for themselves and i don't ever want to hear that again i i want to hear that our staff knew what to do knew who to contact knew where the schools were where the resources are for those kids who want to go into the trades can go into the trades with our support if i can respond yeah so i board member reid i can't agree with you more i i think some of the things the conversations we had in the dinner session with engaging our community and our influencers that includes the trades all right around trying to figure out how we can play connection with what they're looking for and what we have and build some space between that our counselors we do
289have work to do in that space i think the work that we talked about with the credentialing around this sets us up for success but there was a time in this system where we asked counselors to push children to four-year degree i want to name that right we're actually undoing things people are doing exactly what at one point we taught them to do and we're having to retrain and think differently because the workforce and the demands of our community and it has all changed right so it's uh i share your uh assertiveness uh and your desire i think we have a shared vision collectively of a as a governance team now which is great and i think as we think about as staff moving forward the idea is to figure out how do we get
290our eight schools collectively working together where we have community access to all of these opportunities not just some but your message resonates with staff at a great deal great i'll just um start by saying i thought i saw on the first slide um taken by the student with the drone it looked like the superintendent's car was parked over the white line i just thought you might check that um great photo so no honestly um dj great questions and carolyn your your thoughts aligned with what i was writing here which is uh this particular area of student learning and curriculum has been of great interest to the board for a number of years and i think you all know that i actually think i'm hearing the board kind of set that level of expectation and excellence
291that you've talked about in some of your comments so i appreciate hearing that out of the board and i also think the presentation showed us a real bump up in what's going on i'm i'm really happy maybe the only thing i don't see yet is that central location that i think the whole board has been dreaming of for years and i know how much work has gone into trying to find that spot and truly appreciate that we're going out to the new high school and still dream for this board that it'll it'll move back to the middle of the the community so i just thank you for the time and energy you've put into this you both expressed a lot of passion for the work that gives me a lot of confidence for what's going
292on so great job thanks for that and uh we'll see you soon okay so that concludes the informational subjects and brings us to item 10.0 which is an executive session and is actually the last item the board will work on and it will be uh behind closed doors once we get there the only other thing we'll do after this is adjournment of the meeting when we conclude the executive session i do want to before i uh ask for the motion i do want to thank uh i just feel like we have more members of the community that are joining us these days and i really appreciate that i hope everybody's having a chance to watch our work learn some things about the district hopefully some things people like maybe some questions you'd like to continue
293to ask i really really appreciate how many of you are staying and watching this work today so with that i'll ask for a motion for the executive session rob please go ahead i move that the board of education enter executive session for the purpose of discussing specialized details of the district's cyber security arrangements or investigations as authorized under crs 246-402-4-d individuals invited to join the board and superintendent and executive session our chief of staff lauren hooton executive directors dustin rentzma and dave montoya enterprise architect dougie wand systems administrator casey johnson clifton la sorry clifton larson allen associates allison sleef or slife sorry if i got that wrong and kevin huber legal and policy council autumn aspen and board assistant secretaries jill bruner and lexi donnelly thank you rob that seemed like that was unusually challenging
294so wow do i have a second for that move also i'll do a second from kristen draper and i'll take a roll call vote please lexi dj anderson aye christian draper aye christophe i rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye jessica zamora aye motion passed okay thank you so we will convene in closed session uh in the next few minutes and uh thanks again for the public attendance and we'll see you all very soon again i'll come back out here and adjourn the meeting at the end of this so good night you