Board of Education Work Session: May 25, 2021

001good evening it is 6 17 on may 25th 2021 and i will call this pooter school district board of education meeting to order the meeting tonight is being conducted both in person and electronically board members and some staff for meeting in person while members of the public and other staff are watching the meeting remotely community comment will take place in person for those who registered to make remarks this evening with that i will move us to item 2.0 which is approval of the agenda and i understand we will make some changes to the agenda so i'm going to turn this over to you rob go ahead yes sorry we'd like to take the four charter school contract renewals from the agenda and uh not only from the consent agenda which is where they are but

002remove them from the agenda altogether because there was some incorrect information in the packet on that and they will be brought back to us on june 8th so the motion is to remove them not only from consent but also from the entire meeting today second from dj any questions on that uh change to the agenda okay jill could you do a roll call vote for changing the agenda for the motion hi nate donovan aye kristin draper aye christophe hi naomi johnson aye rob pederson hi carolyn reed aye motion passes 7-0 okay very good thank you that brings us to item 3.0 that is community comments board members there are two possibly three people signed up for community comments this evening as such i'm giving everybody 15 minutes to speak giving three minutes to speak let

003me read my statement this opportunity for public comments is for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated deadline each registered speaker will be given three minutes for their remarks anyone who removes their masks exceeds the three-minute time limit or makes personal attacks uses profanity or identifies any student by name may be asked to for to immediately end their remarks and leave the building with that i will invite in our first person and that would be miss christina fabriotz fabrizio welcome hello how are you all doing well thank you good all right i'm christy fabrizio um half day of school left right all right so i came here today to simply uh take a moment to first of all say thank you for your time and thank you for listening to the

004community speak uh thank you for your decision to allow the sr program to remain in schools um i don't feel like there's enough gratitude these days but instead people being so quick to jump in on disagreements and hostility i'm a parent and an employee of pooter school district i am directly in the classrooms so when i say thank you it is on behalf of teachers students and parents alike these men and women in blue have been amazing positive influence in my life personally as an adult so i can imagine the positive influence they have had and will have on students this program humanizes the police and teaches kids to not only not only issues they'll face in high school but the fundamentals of adulthood and knowing how to handle stressful situations that the police are

005involved in with my experience of being directly in the classrooms of 11 to 14 year olds i also ask you to consider the removal of the mass mandate for the next school year to do attendance alone is a challenge but to also not have a clear understanding from across the room is another did you know that there are 45 minutes to over an hour taken out of learning each day for mass breaks if the colorado if colorado is massless and so should our schools to see smiling faces in the hallway for choir to be able to sing again or to even sing happy birthday again because we're not allowed to do that my daughter alone having to wear a mask and face shield in science gets a headache i'm not asking for them to not

006be allowed but instead to be a personal decision based on each individual circumstance so again i will say thank you for listening to the community for taking your time out to be on this board it has been a challenging year for everyone which helps us also to come together with understanding and empathy for each other's differences so thank you for your time and being here thank you for joining us yes okay and second this evening will be miss danny lawrence welcome good evening thank you for the opportunity my name is danny lawrence i'm the parent of a disabled student trying to navigate the psd system early on i asked just a simple opportunity to attend or speak at the special education advisory committee thinking that if i was in like company of parents and educators

007who cared about special education that maybe i'd be speaking to the right people after having to make an open records request to just simply get the meeting date i was able to attend the may thirteenth seac meeting where i couldn't participate but only observe the districts continued denial of keeping meeting minutes is addressed tonight in your email there will be further evidence there of the misrepresentation that has been portrayed and what i learned from that meeting is actually that staff feels exactly like i do as a parent that their words and recommendations don't feel heard or respected and so i'm no longer speaking for just parents but for educators being ignored by district administration as well the picture being painted and the action letters given by district staff lacks accuracy and transparency based on the

008meeting that i saw the committee is being painted a picture that parents just want to complain about individual student issues and that's just simply inaccurate and demeaning in the previous state where i came from i worked as a disability advocate helping families and children that professional personal experience has given me some insight into systemic problems the district is facing and i have no place to communicate that only those parents selected by integrated services director are deemed valuable enough to communicate their observations and experiences does that sound fair to you and does it sound transparent and do you think the district could be missing some valuable feedback that might help decrease litigation miss johnson you are my district representative and i am asking for some representation please the parents picked by integrated services are refusing to

009listen so there's absolutely no way they could be representing my family since committee members and staff continue to minimize my observations as iep issues let me communicate there are certainly very many individual concerns here my son is owed over a thousand minutes of compensatory education not completed in the final four months of the school year and at this hour the district fails to acknowledge it last week my husband and i were placed on a communications plan designed to limit our civil rights and deny my son fape advocating for a child is a protected activity under federal law there is no doubt that calling attention to the seat committee has contributed to our problems retaliation is a dangerous game to play when the district clearly continues to violate my son's iep and is in the wrong

010i'm sad to challenge that in a district where i attended this school as a child and what i call home in the future i hope this board of education would support the rights of parents to be heard and support the value of outside observation as a learning tool for the district thank you for getting us through a really difficult year have a good night thank you for your comments tess says that okay that's everybody okay thank you that brings us to the end of community comments and over to uh item 4.0 uh so that would be committee reports and uh we did have our first dinner session so we launched into some of the committee reports already there are there other committee reports this this evening go ahead dj i'll be short because brett's got

011most of the good stuff on his chart to talk about but we did have our last legislative meeting and i want to take a moment to thank todd and the staff for helping us get some feedback on some of the bills that were out there and being able to have a district thoughts and opinions about those was great to be able to have those conversations and we are casby's resolutions are due august 23rd so if we have something that we would like to bring up uh just keep that in mind and we will be working on that over the summer very good thank you dj other committee reports okay and i know i'll be meeting with the ura under the with new council members for the first time this week i believe in all i'll

012report on that next next time with what the changes may feel like so okay with nothing else i'll move us on to item 5.0 that is the consent agenda would any board members like to pull anything else from consent this evening okay seeing none i would take a motion for the consent agenda minus the items that have already been removed all right nate i moved excuse me i move that the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for the items remaining on the consent agenda thank you do i have a second for that i do from kristen draper angela take a roll call vote please dj anderson aye nate donovan aye kristin draper aye christoph vev aye naomi johnson aye rob pederson aye carolyn reid aye motion passes 7-0 okay thank you very much that

013gets us to item 6.0 which are the action items for this evening there are two of those the first one is item 6.1 the early childhood head start annual report for 2019-2020 and i would like to start by getting a motion on the floor for go ahead go ahead rob there's a note here about needing to call recess for a notary to sign so we all sign things i couldn't see that actually is that still in play tessa having to do the notary thing sure why don't we wait until i i actually didn't it was kind of faded i didn't see that thanks rob why don't we complete this then we'll we'll take a break for the notary so okay so uh nate you were going to read a motion for us yes i moved

014that the board of education approved the pooder school district early childhood 2019-2020 annual report okay thank you very much i have a second from kristen draper with that i'll open it up and uh welcome to rebecca benedict it's a pleasure meeting you your green light will turn on you can actually press it there we go okay perfect well thank you for the opportunity to come and speak with you tonight i recognize several faces but others are new to me so i just want to thank you for supporting early childhood and i have a copy of the report it was in your novus submission so i'm going to kind of walk through some of the features and then um offer you some time to ask questions if you'd like to the annual report is a requirement

015of the office of head start head start represents approximately 50 percent of our funding and a third of our slots for kids in preschool and then early head start is for our zero to 36 months kiddos this is for 1920 and um we do that because our head start year is actually from november 1st through october 31st so it doesn't match the school years exactly so this is the last year that was completed that's why it's a year behind so the first page is just kind of an overview we tried to call out some of the things that have changed this year and last year as a result of kobit so on the first page one of the things that we had was that was a change from the year before was the transportation so

016less students were able to ask access district transportation this year because with the virtual model so kind of excited about that too on the last page of the report it highlights how many children we served in 1920 and those numbers would be very similar for 2021 as well one thing i would like to highlight is where it talks about eligible children in the early head start slots those are our youngest learners we have 108 slots awarded from the office of head start and that is approximately nine percent of the eligible children in the county so if we were to see any early head start slots come available we would go after more of those because we really feel like nine percent really isn't reaching everybody and we'd really like to to see more kids benefit

017from the program um as far as head start slots we're we're closer there we are serving 52 percent of eligible children and those that we aren't serving through head start there are also served through colorado preschool program so feel pretty good about that at the bottom the highlight about medical and dental exams you will see a slight decrease from last year and part of that was that for a quarter of the year no clinics were available for children to have a medical and dental home and visits this year we've also seen a dip because families are reluctant to go back to what they consider non-essential visits and we're starting to see those pick up more we've been working with our health advisory board to try to promote kids getting their well child exams and their

018dental exams so we'll be watching that number pretty carefully so as i'm looking forward and i'm thinking about next year we've got some next steps coming up our first next step is our grant submission so you can expect to see some consent agenda items coming up with our grant documents in preparation for our august 1st submission summer session is about to start it starts june 1st we will be serving 128 head start kiddos in eight classrooms at irish this summer we're excited about that we are completely invested in recruitment at this moment tuition based is full with a waitlist we're super excited about that but we do still have slots available in head start early head start colorado preschool program and early childhood special education so if you know anyone with littles have them call

019me we'll try to get them in and then the last thing that's on our mind well not the last thing but the last big big item on our mind is proposition ee and we're preparing for that it is currently in the house it passed out of the house education committee voted seven to two and is now moved on to the appropriations committee and the big information in that bill is the formation of a new department similar to like the department of education it would be a early childhood department and it would streamline the departments that oversee early childhood now there's multiple departments and lots of rules and regulations and it would house them all in one location in the department of early childhood proposition ee is slated to start and be in effect in fall

020of 2023 so it's definitely something we're thinking about talking about and as this bill moves forward we'll be looking for new information and seeing what that will mean for us as a district so do you guys have any questions thank you rob go ahead yeah i have two questions sorry um one of them is how many tuition-based slots do we have and how long is the waiting list so right now we have 78 tuition-based slots out of approximately a thousand we have a little over a thousand slots um the waiting list on that i don't know how many are on the waiting list i do know that two weeks ago tuition based wasn't full yet and now it is so i don't know how long the waiting list is i would guess it's 10 maybe

021um so okay so what prevents us from particularly if we can't fill the other slots what presents prevents us from taking people off the tuition base i mean how does that work how does the balance of slots work right yes um so we have most of our most of our slots in our program are no cost slots uh for families that qualify and are eligible when the tuition-based slots were decided part of that was we did not want to take business away from local child cares and so we keep our percentage of tuition based lower in comparison to our no cost slots for that reason we really want to support our community partners as well we have 78 this year and we will be adding 11 per year until we get to 100 so that

022our percentages are are more balanced because we have added more slots in our no cost area since the beginning of the tuition base lots we started with 56 but it's been several years that we've had 56 like long time and so we're trying very hard not to be a competitor for our community partners sorry just following up on that okay that's good i think that's terrific and i know we've been doing a lot of partnering with our community folks on this and other issues so i don't want to i don't want to change that is there a shortage if you look across the whole community including all the community stuff and our stuff is there a shortage of slots for people who are willing or able to pay for them um i haven't found there

023to be a shortage of slots for tuition paying families it's generally families that require a sliding scale or low cost or no cost preschool there's a there is a huge shortage for those um but i i don't have numbers for you i could find out yeah i'm just curious about where the balance is and and definitely want to support our community partners and we want to make sure that everybody who wants a preschool opportunity gets one so that's partly about filling up these low and no cost slots that you're talking about and i'm all in favor of that and maybe beyond that so i don't know okay thank you carolyn yeah and so i know in in in the past i don't know if it was last year the year before um we didn't fill

024all of our slots either so can you tell me what kind of a communication plan or strategy you have developed to reach out to families in the community to um because i would guess a lot of the problem is is people just don't know what's available right so what kind of strategies are you guys developing communication wise to reach out to people in the community that's a very good question thank you we have a recruitment plan every year um what we have noticed in in the past we have done things like face-to-face in-person events at homeless fairs or community organized events like the be ready fair where we would go and and be available for families to ask questions we've also done radio ads on spanish-speaking radio stations as well as we've done some media

025like colorado and articles and things like that in the past the problem with that is that we then on those particular recruitment strategies are are getting lots of tuition-based families instead of our targeted demographic for our no cost slots another thing that has happened in the last two years is that in-person recruitment events now are rare people haven't been gathering for recruitment or fares or in-person contact has been limited so we have shifted to a social media strategy where we can target ads based on neighborhoods and locations like if we have if we say for example i pick a school if i pick olander and olander doesn't have all of their slots built i can target ads towards families that have young children in that area so we've focused a lot of our efforts this

026spring on social media recruitment in the absence of like the face-to-face opportunities for recruitment we have also gone to open houses with at schools back to school nights things like that we were at 14 different elementary sites last fall while they were doing laptop handouts and things like that so that we can capture the families that have older siblings in the elementary for early childhood as well and do you work with like health care professionals or doctors clinics we have a health advisory board that meets three times a year and we will always update them our on our recruitment and enrollment status and then as they have families that go through their clinics they can help us wic is a great partner as well salud the health district as far as the dental and the

027health have also been great partners in helping us recruit families so so tell me a little bit of what it looks like if i bring my child in for a vaccination and the doc does as part of the doctor's interview of me do they ask me about that i mean like how do they how does that work what's the script for that how do you know how that works it depends on the clinic some clinics would just have our information available in the lobby while families are waiting um there aren't very many waiting rooms that are open completely yet so i i'm not aware of what script the it's usually the front office folks that help us with materials and and sharing with families not the doctors themselves certainly something we could look into okay

028um i'm going to go with kristen and then naomi okay thanks you had mentioned um that you got a higher attendance with the virtual home visits than you did with the actual home visits so i'm just sort of wondering if even when we're allowed to go back into the home if there's an advantage to that even though you have a lower attendance rate or if there's maybe the advantage of doing continuing the virtual visits so the office of head start has released some guidance it actually just came out last week that by january of 2022 we're going to be back to our more normal business in terms of face-to-face contact and building relationships with families that way i'm unclear on whether or not they will allow us to do virtual visits in the event of

029a cancellation i will advocate for that i think that's been really helpful but i also see the wisdom in getting back into homes and and building those relationships face to face um so we will be transitioning over the next few months we still have our zero to 36 month home visits happening through the summer so as those start to transition back to face to face we're going to have to take a look at our numbers and and see what's allowed great thank you naomi so i was really fortunate in my own family to qualify for cpp when my kids turned four and i was really surprised by that because i didn't know that that was a possibility so i was wondering if you could just take a moment here to help our community understand the

030community-specific eligibility criteria for income or some of the other ways that they could qualify for those free spots yes that's actually a very common question of families can i qualify if i make too much money and the answer is yes sometimes so for colorado preschool program four-year-olds only need one factor to qualify and there are there's a list of factors that anywhere from income is one of them but also concerns developmental concerns and we saw our largest group this year was families who had concerns for their child social emotional development particularly with the context of the pandemic we had a lot of children qualify not income eligible but with the social emotional concern for their child can also be a language development concern so that could be a second language learner it could also be

031a student who has a speech language delay that would be a factor they could qualify under we have written a community specific factor and have been approved by the state for a different income eligibility beyond the federal poverty level because of the high cost of living in fort collins so i would encourage any family to try even if they think they won't qualify because it's possible that they will each family who turns in an application the application has questions that help us identify some of those factors to see if they'll qualify and they also have an interview with a staff member to just kind of understand more about what the concerns are that the family has and if we can find a factor they qualify for we will and so we've had quite a few

032families qualify for cpp um based on non-income factors thanks naomi dj um i just wanted to mention the um of course now as i push the button the name left your uh your evaluation that you do of the students there was usually three times and it's two times um i was just overwhelmed when i learned what is all in that and i would love for you to share that and then i i really thank you and your staff for getting to these little ones and heading them in the right direction and helping families understand education and heading in that direction so thanks you're welcome we use teaching strategies gold and that assessment has indicators for child development in in the area so if you look at the annual report there are domain areas social emotional

033physical language cognitive literacy and mathematics there are literally hundreds more than 100 indicators that teachers are collecting data on we prioritize about 10 of them to really look at targeted areas that seem to be more difficult for our families but our teachers are collecting data every day in every lesson about kids development and then when they master a skill they look at what's next and what's next to help children move into that it's called widely held expectations category that's our proficient so we're working very hard with families we share data with them at conferences in the fall as well as in the spring and they get their most recent ts gold data checkpoint and some strategies to help them get to the next level for their kiddo regardless of where they start so it really

034helps families understand what's coming and be able to predict some of the skills that their kids are going to need other questions comments okay uh jill at this point i'd take a roll call vote please dj anderson aye nate donovan aye kristin draper aye christoph fev hi naomi johnson aye rob pedersen aye carolyn reed aye motion passes 7-0 okay thank you very much thank you so much for joining us it's a pleasure meeting you yeah okay and why don't we go ahead and uh i know brendan's sitting there waiting for the notary uh for us to notarize things why don't we do our resolution then we'll take a recess and uh board members will be asked to sign a uh on a dotted line so uh item 6.2 is the asian pacific american heritage month

035resolution and i would look for a motion for this please kristin i recommend that the board of education pass the asian american pacific heritage month resolution i get a second i have a second from dj and with that uh kristen would you like to read the resolution out loud for us resolution and supported asian pacific heritage month in so sorry resolution in support of asian american pacific heritage month whereas in 1992 congress designated may as asian-american pacific islander heritage month in 1992 to commemorate the immigration of the first japanese to the united states on may 7th 1843 and to mark the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on may 10 1869 the majority of the workers who laid the tracks were chinese immigrants whereas misinformation about the coronavirus and associated false allegations of

036blame have impacted the well-being of asian americans pacific islanders and those perceived as such threatening the livelihoods and physical safety of members of these communities and imperiling the ability of students to learn in a safe and welcoming environment and whereas the pruder school district board administration and staff are committed to making pluter school district a welcoming community for all students and staff and we recognize there is more work ahead of us equity diversity and inclusion are fundamental values in puerto school district ensuring that all students and staff are valued for who they are now therefore the bruder school district board of education does hereby proclaim the month of may 2021 as asian american pacific islander heritage month in pooter school district and encourages student staff and the community to support honor and celebrate the excellence

037and enriching contributions made from our asian american and pacific islander communities of the past and present and announced discrimination xenophobia and harassment of these communities thank you very much board member comments on this one go ahead kristen and i just want to um on thursday may 27th at 10 30 in the morning there is going to be a program on asian america history representations and community and it's an event put on by the bypoc alliance it is free and you can go ahead and join if you look on facebook there is a link there as well but that should be a great online event for learning about the history and of asian americans in fort collins excellent anybody else okay thank you kristin i think it's excellent that we slow down and reflect and continue

038to remind ourselves and everybody in the community just how important it is to have an inclusive school district and community at every turn we just can't tolerate hate for anybody and we need to make it feel safe at every moment so with that jill i would ask for a roll call vote please dj anderson aye nate donovan aye kristen draper aye christophe aye naomi johnson aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye motion passes 7-0 okay thank you with that uh why don't we plan a quick recess we'll get some signatures done and then we'll reconvene and keep the meeting going so if people would stay fairly put that would be useful okay thanks for everyone's patience it is 702 pm and we'll jump right back into the meeting and we are into informational items 7.0

039on the agenda and item 7.1 is the annual district advisory board report and i'm going to turn it over to you dr lambert president fed thank you and we're really excited tonight to have jessica zamora who is our board chair district advisory board chair and brady martucci who is going to be the chair next year which makes her the chair elect those are all great things and we're really eager to hear what they have to say and i appreciate the coordination on the colors i think that's a good look that's a good match up before we start though and i know they'll be okay with this i would like to give scott nielsen just an opportunity he just has some information he'd like to share regarding this past week and we just thought this would

040be a nice time to bridge that if that's okay and then we'll move right into the dab report thanks dr lambert and and president phil for just giving me the floor for 30 seconds or a minute i just want to honor work that happened across the district this last week as you think about a school district graduation is the culminating event and this last week we celebrated with close to 2 000 seniors who graduated tonight i want to take a chance or take the opportunity to thank a plethora of individuals from across the district who made it happen from jerry garretson and team who set everything up at french field um uh norm bastian and the security team who were there in and out monitoring the weather paying attention to ins and outs of everybody

041they did a fantastic job as a gentleman by the name of derek kaufman who did all the cad drawings for all of our ceremonies multiple times as the amount of individuals we could have show up changed so he he did the maps and then redid the maps and then redid the maps again so that was fantastic behind the scenes we had 65 individuals at french field each day from custodial operations and security so each day we just had a an army of people who made it happen so i just want to honor that i also want to say thank you to matt and phil um what a difference i know many of you were there last year the the screens that was matt and phil's idea and what a difference it makes right it allowed

042us to add some things that we didn't have last year from live music we don't have but we essentially felt like we did have live music because they did such a nice job it also allowed for some student made videos that were fantastic so i thought that was a great addition madeleine alex and brad were at almost every ceremony i think alex was at every single one last week in fact i think she's at an ou one for four collins high school as we speak so i just want to say thank you it takes a it takes a village and last week we really got to see the pooter school district team come together to celebrate what we do which is um celebrate students and honor students so thank you all psd for the work

043and thanks for a little time tonight to celebrate you bet scott i know you're not going to touch your own horn but i think a lot of people don't realize how much worrying planning um stressing that scott did over the time to bring the principles together when we found out we could move from four guests to ten that was an interest interesting hour and a half that got all that done so i know he like i said i know scott won't brag on himself so i'll brag on him just for a second he put a lot together he and kristen besanskini who is his admin assistant uh they do great work together and uh dylan before you he was the catalyst for a lot of that success so scott thank you thank you big stuff

044hey you know what we have jessica and brady here and i imagine they're tired of waiting on that but thanks for tolerating that your kids will be there soon enough not ready well we're looking forward to this so jessica i'm going to turn it over to you now okay you bet i want to make sure you have your microphone turned on push the button and then the light will turn green all right there you go much better awesome all right thank you so much for providing time for the dab to present to you all um over the course of the 2020 2021 school year we touched on a lot of topics we started with school phases because that was fresh on everyone's mind and a big concern while our district well we hope that our

045district will never have to face that again we had a few takeaways as parents that we hope if we do have to meet something like that in the future our district will consider more transparency and more communication with parents on what's happening how the decisions are made earlier so we can prepare accordingly and then also just more normalizing of education early on obviously was a really tough year for our teachers and switching over to online in a rush was hard but it was also really hard on parents and just having the knowing what the resources were that were going to be available to them they really struggled with trying to find what they were supposed to be doing for their student or for their kids we also appreciated though that this district took into account

046our youngest and our highest needs students and we just want to really address that because those students needed to be in a school and you guys made a point to actively provide that opportunity for them even though the bulk of our students had to remain off site our meetings for the bulk of the year centered more around diversity equity and inclusion and we went as far as setting up our own committee ran by lonnie williams to provide an opportunity for dab members as well as members of our schools and our school communities such as parents to participate in those meetings and that committee will continue to reach out to parents and staff again in the fall and we hope that we can have an even bigger turnout next year the dav is also hopeful that

047psd will prioritize dei training not only for parents who want to participate both for the staff as well we understand that there are many requirements placed on staff many professional developments that they already have to do and while we don't want to impose additional work on them we also feel that the dei training would be paramount to moving forward moving our district forward and with that in mind we don't expect a perfect plan we don't expect a perfect rollout of professional development we do expect to see something required with respect to dei for professional development for staff the remainder of our learning connected our dea conversations to your discussions regarding sros this year we respect that the board created a council to provide input on how whether or not sro contracts should continue and we

048did not foresee or make any recommendations on that contract whether or not you should or should not our conversations related a lot more about if we continue those contracts or implement a different security option how would we want to see that that improve or change to better serve our students and that's what we primarily put in your pocket was a document that really consolidated our ideas and we focused on how to improve that sro program since that's ultimately you guys did decide to continue with it so the five topics that we really wanted to focus on was diversity and those who serve as our sorrows so instead of simply having predominantly white males do males maybe having people of color or women also considering that they could maybe not wear a uniform or whether or

049not they need to have a weapon on their person while they're serving um another thing when we were having a presentation from the sros we didn't get a good sense that their role was very well defined and so really moving forward defining what interactions we as a district want them to have with students what interactions they should be a part of with administrative personnel and which conversations should really be stuck with a student and administrators or students and teachers without an sro present um next we'd like to collect more data we also we were very disappointed in the amount of data that we were able to get from the sros we only really got data regarding when they had a citation or when a student made an exceptionally poor choice we were not given data

050on we specifically were not given any data on um sro's interactions with ieps or 504 plan students only with their with respect to their race where we given data we'd also just like to see data on our sros giving warnings before something happens are they going you know who are they giving those warnings to are they more likely to give warnings to a certain population versus another just generally collecting more data so we have a more robust understanding of what their role is we'd like to see a continuation of the focus groups such as the council that you guys did create also maybe including students and or parents or creating separate councils whatever is best but to continue to observe the sro program continue to question it continue to push it to be better than

051it is continue to push it to better serve the students of our district and lastly we would like to see their sro training because they have a plethora of trainings that are available to them we'd like to see that training align more closely or as closely as possible with the schools that they are specifically serving and with that if you have questions i'm happy to answer them but that's all i have for you thank you just for your report let me turn it over to board members for questions comments dj and then nate uh i assumed all year long then you guys were doing remotes yes and did you guys have a better turnout throughout with that or was it about the same i think it was about the same actually maybe a little bit

052lower depending at the beginning especially but i think we grew as the year went on awesome well i thank you for your time and your service in working on those issues and giving us this input and the written form is great so that we can continue to look at it so thank you thank you nate uh ditto just want to say thanks for all your work thanks kristen yeah i'll say thanks thanks for your work i know it's not easy to go ahead and have those meetings online and and do all that and you know i just want also um as far as the suggestions that the district advisory board is making on the sros i think those are um as far as i can see the the five top ones there are all ones

053that we had suggested as well so i think we are all on the same page here and from the discussion we have we've had i think it's going going well and we'll be looking to do all of these things and it's going to it's definitely going to improve the sro program for next year and and we'll continue to to do that so continuous improvement on that so thank you for your input on this this is great we look forward to seeing how it goes thanks else okay um jess uh thanks for your leadership this year through kind of a crazy uh zoom year as the liaison i got to see that and i really appreciated the way you ran things and how you set the intentions and got us all going i thought this was

054a tough year and you guys did an excellent job and brady i do get three more months so i will look forward to your leadership starting next year so yeah thank you very much for joining us this evening thank you for your time guys thank you all right good luck recruiting fill up those seats yep fill them all up dj is going to say you could have probably had chris come in here and he would have given us a full report on membership tell him i said that okay um that brings us to item 7.2 which is the proposed budget for the fy 2021 2022 dr lambert i'll turn this over to you once again very good this is a culminating event that we've been leading up to for several months bringing back a familiar

055face he wore the full suit tonight which tells you how serious this presentation is going to be brett parsons we're glad to have you back we're going to turn it over to you for proposed budget 2122. well good evening thank you for the introduction glad to be here this evening to share the culmination of the work that we've done over the last year so i'll just go ahead and hop into the first slide and get started from there probably the main difference in the main area that we're monitoring and watching from where we've been at the last couple of weeks is the actions that have transpired at the capitol really in the last 12 hours or so so as recently as yesterday everything that we had in place everything that we had discussed from start

056to finish in regard to school finance budget preparation etc were all all in play so looking at the first slide what we're really going to talk about are items that are known to items that are unknown so you know two weeks ago on the 11th school finance actually came out and was released that day and i had some information and we shared that evening it was a little bit before the first ppr run everything that we have planned on going back to november still a line plus or minus a few pennies to the governor's budget proposal so november to may 11th really to today from what is under consideration are all still in play and we're talking about state revenue so senate bill 268 school finance act it has passed the senate um it was

057introduced in the 11th past the senate on the 17th and is currently in house appropriations so from that point to go forward to law it would be i believe referred to the committee of the whole second and third reading and then once it goes through that process it would be to the governor's governor's desk for signature so the interesting thing about this year in comparison to a lot of years is we look at the typical calendar which ends approximately may 9th may 10th and even if they push school finance to the end there's really not a whole lot of dramatics about it because the reality is we've seen the pie chart of the state budget we know that k-12 makes up one of the top two pieces of the pie so that's really kind of

058where we're at but this year because of the extension to june the 12th is the deadline for adjournment in the official calendar for the legislature is the date may 26th which is tomorrow final passage deadline including any conference committee report for the school finance bill well today's the 25th and i just mentioned it has a couple of process processes to go through is that doable in a day absolutely i would say so but as we kind of swap from the first bullet point to the second bullet point they're correlated but they're also independent so if we think about house bill 1164 the total program mill levy tax credit there's been very little in the news on this subject for over two months early march is the last time that's really been in the news or

059discussed so this is the bill that would bring all districts that are not currently at 27 mills for the school finance portion of your property tax levy up to that 27 mills over a period of years not to exceed i believe it's one million one mill a year increase for psd taxpayers there's no negative to this bill as introduced because we're already levying 27 mills so us and 40 something other districts are in that boat 130 something districts would have property tax increases so they were waiting on the supreme court interrogatory to come out and see if that would be allowable under tabor or if that would require a vote of the people the kind of usual conversations that happen so after over over two months of kind of sitting there hanging out by late

060yesterday evening at some point the interrogatory was issued by the supreme court that said that they interpreted house bill 1164 to be allowable and allowed because those districts were previously debruced and they had those tax rates and tax rates in place prior to the the reduction of tax rate over time prior to that the bill would be okay i guess to pass to approve and to make statute or set in place in law so within that within the time period of that being released yesterday and yesterday afternoon that had been it'd been laid over for over two months it was immediately passed third reading in the senate and is headed to the governor's desk for signature as of last night so what does that mean for us the reality is we really don't know but

061a couple of key takeaways are this the fiscal note estimates that it would generate around 90 million dollars of new revenue in fiscal year 22 for k-12 up to a total of 288 million dollars once it was fully implemented by the year 2040 and that's how many years it would take it one mill per year to get everybody to get everybody there so on one hand that sounds like a lot of money then the other hand we think about the buy down of the bs factor that is in the school finance act that was around 500 million dollars so not near the magnitude when you think about our proportionate share or what it ultimately could mean but i mentioned they were independent we talked about the total program mill levy way back in february early

062march it hasn't been on anybody's radar no discussion and school finance is the direction i think the wind was blowing and most people even those you know really close with you know following politics kind of thought everything was going but i've read a number of articles about it today googling and seeing what's out there in chalkbeat colorado sun cpr some of those one of the key takeaways that i've gotten from the articles talking about house bill 1164 tie into the third bullet point in several articles they reference this is articles specifically talking about the middle levy tax credit but led certain legislators are referencing if this passes if we get an extra 90 million dollars how do we spend revenue differently how do we allocate resources differently and that ties into the third bullet point

063which nobody thought had any chance of being introduced but i believe there's pretty good rumors going on right now that a school finance reform bill could be introduced at the very tail end of the session so when we think about what does that mean for us and and you know what could that mean in the long term is that school finance reform around potentially 90 million dollars is that scrapping school finance act altogether and doing something different i mentioned the calendar and without a calendar change tomorrow's the deadline for school finance so i think the reality is we just have to wait and see you know if that has a material change to our plan the direction we're headed et cetera but that's where that's like i said this is rumor uh complete hearsay at

064this point so i guess time will tell the if you look at the total calendar and the last day to introduce legislation is fast approaching here in the next couple of days i believe from memory so we're almost there so we'll have to see in that window if anything happens and if anything is introduced and then even if it's introduced if it has any chance of passing becoming law and what that potentially could mean to psd and then i already mentioned adjournment on june 12th so going to the next slide i'll tie it back to the first slide here in a second when we think about the difference in the preliminary budget that was shared at the end of april and the proposed budget being shared this evening the only difference is the addition of

065negotiated items so in the proposed budget the district's compensation proposal is included in there and that's the difference between this and april so whenever we think about negotiations the various processes we went through we did straw design in one of the meetings we ultimately ended up with options 1a through 1d and we get to where we're at now as of yesterday we have a tentative agreement in place that is going out to the employee groups for discussion among their members and potential ratification and what it really calls for are the the bullet items on this sheet so thinking about this sheet and or the slide and what it means from top to bottom the top bullets are what were called ongoing salary so these are things that are recurring that tie in to continue general

066fund operations that we have to account for in a multi-year period going down to the bottom these are non-recurring or one-time items in nature so at the top we have some items that are pretty pretty normal that we see on a fairly regular basis step increases for the license staff and the equivalent for classified admin that's an average salary increase of 2.23 percent that's built into the proposed budget then corresponding to that is another item that we typically try to do in tandem with that process that would be lane changes for additional education for the license group as well as approved market adjustments for classified in the administrator group so those items pretty standard same process as we would do in a normal year when we were trying to give those things out then the

067third bullet point one-time pay for those at the top of the range and top of the step typically for classified staff only if they are at the top of a range and it is a year we only do step step for classified and admin represents movement through the range so if we do step equivalent for classified and they're at the top of the range that would mean they get no salary increase so what we typically do is give a one-time pay on august payroll equal to the amount they would get in a given year to that amount because we don't modify the min and max of the salary ranges because they're market based based on certain data so those are negotiated annually so they're included here as well so those would be pretty standard items

068as well then going to the fourth bullet point this is something that i think we've only done one time in my six years here and that would be a district-wide one-time pay so what this represents is two percent of salary for licensed classified and admin to be paid on september payroll and this is a non-recurring expense so i mean one time payment kind of signifies not recurring but that's how it's set up that's how it is in the draft memorandum of understanding would be paid for from one time money from our coveted response reserve excuse me i misspoke the licensed and the classified portion is paid for from the remaining balance of the 2019 mill levy override reserve with the admin portion paid for from the code response reserve just to clarify that part then

069going to the fourth bullet point we don't often do contingency language for negotiations because there's so much variability through the year and the reality is trying to measure and trying to make salary adjustments at any point in the year after even our hourly people they're on a they're all annualized for the most part on a basically 112 payment basis throughout the year so anything that we do after the fact is pretty difficult to do but this year with so much variation are so much not volatility but uncertainty in the revenue and the expenditure situation we do have contingency language in place and basically it just talks about the relationship between total program state revenue from the school finance act compared to the amount of additional expenditures that we may incur depending on what student enrollment

070growth is if revenue from that calculation were to exceed additional expenditures via budget allocations caused by student enrollment that amount could go out as additional as additional resources for potential one-time one-time payment in january if certain conditions are met as we think about the information i shared on the last bullet point on the previous slide even though this information as far as contingency language was written in absence of that we do believe that language as it is written would still be adequate in the event of revenue change of some sort were to come from either the mill levy credit middle levy tax credit bill passing or potential for school finance reform so that's where we're at on negotiations with with the employee groups like i said reaching out to members for approval at this point

071we'll have more to share with the board shortly on this so on the next slide just a quick recap of the proposed budget and and where we're at from top to bottom a lot of this stuff we've already included we talked about revenue assumptions state from school finance as our primary driver we talked about the inflation rate we talked about ppr aligning to the current school finance run all of our assumptions are good there we talked about ppr excuse me talked about funded people account a funded people count is one of the larger risks that we face this year we've talked a lot about the averaging and the reality is it's going to be a financial challenge when we come off the averaging and go back to the real number the question is do we

072come off all at one time and just rip the band-aid off and go back to normal does it take three years to get back there and it hurts a little bit each year the reality is we don't know and a lot of the stuff we won't know until august september october will be the first we even start to have an understanding of how some of these financial situations will play out on the local revenue side probably the biggest the biggest area that we'll be monitoring there is going to be assessed valuation it's a reassessment year it's the first year after the gallagher repeal so the residential assessment rate is going to stay the same our budget assumptions are including an assessed valuation increase of four percent um i talked to employees at the assessor's office

073read the newspaper articles and all that the reality is laramie county is having anywhere between three percent to close to double-digit uh increases in assessed valuation a lot of the higher numbers are on the south side estes park loveland area and then i think probably three to five percent is the number for fort collins area proper of course our boundaries much much larger than that so we have four percent as a placeholder and we'll see in august when the preliminary av comes out how that really looks then looking at the expenditure editions we have the items from the budget design team and we i know we've talked about this so much but i just can't i can't impress how important this whole process related to updating the student-based budget allocations and doing some of the

074work from the budget design team sbb like i said was the largest dollar amount increase as well as workload most people involved most hours spent most stakeholder input as we went through that process then we have you know the minor work that we did in the non-school areas minor adjustments there some some one-time items to get us over the hump as we get through 21-22 and then ultimately work toward what the future looks like when we're back on 100 general fund operations so these items through that area were all included in the preliminary budget and then i mentioned on the previous slide compensation and benefits those items as well as any one-time items that are non-recurring in nature from the the bullet points above are all included in the proposed budget so that's just a

075high level recap of where we're at for 21 2122 in the proposed on the next slide same thing here just a quick update on the sr funding and where we're at still listening to cde it you know it still feels like the rules are continuing to evolve around so3 primarily sr2 at this point in time it probably is pretty solid what we're going to be able to do with that as we think about sr3 that one's going to be a multi-year project as we as we plan to spend part of that in the current fiscal year and then the remaining balance over the next one to two fiscal years as i mentioned sr3 is evolving a lot of the work that the finance team is working on now is the consultation piece one of the

076new additions that is new to the sr3 funding source that was not a part of sr1 and sr2 and basically it's just engaging your various stakeholders getting feedback feedback input et cetera as you work on a spending plan for your organization with ester three dollars so working through those items as we speak then we talked about the creation of the covered response reserve in the general fund that is from the general fund resources freed up by the use of sr2 and sr3 in the current fiscal year so that aligns to our budget and our spending plan that we have as we go forward and then the fourth bullet point will sound probably a little bit familiar to the group last year at the end of june after sr1 and the crf money came out we

077did a supplemental budget for our designated designated special purpose grant fund so if we think about state law in colorado you can amend your budget for any reason up to january 1st and you can only amend your budget after january 1st in the face of new revenue so as we think about the we call the grant fund internally as we think about the grant fund in the current fiscal year and the revision we did in january we knew about federal resources up to sr2 at that point in time at this point we have sr3 resources that are new revenue that were not identified or known about in january so the supplemental budget is just our method to legally appropriate those funds for expenditure in the current fiscal year same as we did last june for

078sr1 and for crf so i just wanted to give the boards a heads up that'll be coming and that's the legal formality required for the expenditure of those funds this year then going to the next slide looking at next steps and what we're wanting to do as we go forward we talked about the budget design team reconvening in the fall so that's the plan at this point we're going to have that group together starting september or so probably the biggest change as we think about that group next year is going to be expanding stakeholders to include input from the employee groups as well as operations staff as we think about the bdt and what it did this past year a lot of it was instructional focused and a lot of the resource type resources time

079and effort were spent on the sbb portion and then i've mentioned that we didn't get all the way through the zero-based budgeting process in the non-school areas so we're going to have to reconvene that process bring additional staff as well as the employee groups with higher levels of expertise in those given areas into that process as we work through that in the coming year then same as we talked about a lot over the course of the last year budget mind monitoring throughout the year and then adjustment the reality is so many unknowns exist you know we've talked about some tonight some that we can't even fathom at this point in time et cetera so as we think about what what finance and budget does for the district now our goal is to get everybody back

080in school be 100 supportive in that and then monitor the situation report back and then adjust as according you know throughout the year as we work to ultimately get back to normal operations at some point in the future then ultimately what we're trying to get is fy 2223 planning it seems like a long way off but it won't be but a couple of months and we'll be going full swing as we start start to think about the new year and how we get there and just generally looking forward to working with mr kingsley staff and all that as we go through the process budget design team working with the board board priorities all those kind of items as we work toward the future in the budget arena so going to the last slide we have

081one agenda item or one bullet point left for the current fiscal year that would be budgeted adoption on june 8th that'll be both the adopted budget the traditional larger packet as well as the supplemental budget for the current fiscal year for the designated special purpose grant fund that i referenced a few minutes ago so we have that item lined up and this slide is kind of it's kind of funny to put together because it seems like just a couple weeks ago when it was completely full of bullet points from start to finish and then i've really been reflecting over the last couple of days over the last year and how as challenging as this april and may has been it is better than last april and may so as we think about totally totally challenges

082ahead for sure uh not at all naive to the struggles that lay before us as we ultimately work to get back to financial normal and what that means in the long term but i just wanted to take one second to thank the the board of education for the kind words and support over the last year as well as dr lambert and cabinet for uh for help and no support through the entire ride of 2020 2021 so i think that's uh that's about the last i have so the last slide is just asking for questions questions board members nate can we on pupil count can we choose whether it's the actual account or whether we average to get to uh people count nothing i'm aware of when you look at the school finance formula it's all

083in statute so the formula basically has it has a greater of so the formula says the greater of the average and then it has the actual detail calculation for the average or your actual account okay thanks kristen so the one thing that's confusing me is we have to adopt the budget on june 8th but the legislature doesn't close out until the 12th and is it possible that they could make changes that would affect our budget after the 8th yes so what happens if we approve the budget but then they change something and do we have to go back and reapprove that later so in general the the industry standard would be to adopt a budget in june revise the budget in january if they were to make a minor change we would most likely i

084would say discuss the change talk about the materiality of it and then catch up anything significant in the revision if there was to be a complete rewrite of school finance if total program was no longer a word that existed in school finance for example that would probably be something we would have to have a more robust conversation about do we need to amend our budget as early as july august the end of june etcetera whatever that looks like i thank you thank you very much dj um i had a question about the food services with what i saw with the change in our fees and stuff and how how is how are we keeping that afloat i guess would be the best so up to the 1920 year the national school lunch program you turn

085in the free introduce application at the beginning of the year and then we either we receive reimbursement at the free rate the reduced rate or the paid rate and those are all different numbers and as we think about the current fiscal year the summer feeding program which is typically only operated in the summer was in place or was extended throughout the current fiscal year and that enabled all children to be fed meals and paid at the reimbursed at the paid rate also of note the summer feeding program has a slightly higher reimbursement rate than the national school lunch program so you're typically better off to take advantage of that program instead of the national school lunch where possible so that is where we're at this year the primary cause of the deficit in the current

086year is purely in the number of mill sold we have certain fixed costs related to keeping staff employed throughout the year we talked about the continuation of services a lot of those items and in absence of 100 in-person learning it's hard to give away enough meals from the mobile distribution pickup site method we were utilizing to reach that break-even point as we think about uh 2122 that program has been extended again for another year we talked about the challenges of it like some downsides are in the absence of those forms at risk counts for the state are now off because most families are not turning those forms in but as far as food service operations what it means assuming we're in person five days a week for the duration of the year it should be

087very very advantageous to us to be for participating in that program and having that higher reimbursement rate with more children participating and that's referenced in the budget document so in the budget document the current estimate of the food service deficit for the current fiscal year is two million dollars the budget estimate for um we have an operating transfer in place to cover it the budget estimate for the operating transfer for potential deficit and 2122 was 1 million dollars so we've scaled it down half of what it was in the current year optimistic that it won't be near that high but also prudent to keep that line item in place and in the event something happens with the serving of mills and the reimbursement rate throughout the course of the year okay thanks my second question

088um when you were talking about you hadn't got a chance to really go through uh central office with the new budgeting uh zero-based budgeting plan stuff like that i i was wondering if if in that conversation there is con going to be a conversation about uh the maintenance and upkeep like you know we've got such you know over 500 million deferred maintenance stuff and what we can do with our bond money is there but are are we looking at different ways that we can make sure address those needs in those absolutely that's why we have taken to calling a lot of those areas non-school areas because the reality is we address schools head-on with sbb both traditional schools alternative schools um and the online school setting through that method as we think about non-school areas

089we're talking about everything from finance hr instructional support services here in the jssc up to i.t operations custodial ground maintenance all those items and i'm glad you brought it up because the conversation is actually going to be much more robust than doing business in our current footprint we're preparing to open up new schools and the conversation overlays and how do we use uh you know how do we use resources to open up those new schools uh ultimately three with opening of bamford this year and then the two new conference of high school settings and how do we get uh the right staff because it takes both people to clean mow do all those things as well as operating budget for you know supplies mower blades you know we need your trimmer all those all those

090different items to get there so that'll be a pretty robust conversation as we both work on that program in the current school footprint as well as the setting of opening new schools and just be clear when i was saying that i was also thinking about like some of our older schools and you know some they need their deferred maintenance might need more than some of our new ones are we making sure that we're trying to make sure we're taking care of all of those and i would probably defer to the experts in deferred maintenance in that field instead of trying to but budgeting wise yeah yeah i mean our goal is to ultimately get well 500 million is a big number the reality is we know realistically we're not going to get 500 million dollars

091from general fund budget to get there so really we're talking about the balanced approach of you know we have certain bond a dollar set aside for budgets to do some of these items we have a shoestring budget in the general fund to pay for some of these items and the reality is how do we start to target the close-out of the 2016 bond with the completion of the new schools what projects are feasible and doable within bond constraints then then ultimately go back to the general fund for the primary source of resources to to do those and then to your point i i can't speak to the group in the setting but i would like to envision and hope there's basically a needs based so everything we talked about in last year is a needs

092based approach i would you would think and and hope and that's something we'll bring up in the group that we're doing that same approach and target to how we allocate resources towards those projects thank you the questions rob no okay all right thank you very much thank you have a good evening thank you okay that brings us to item 7.3 and that is the student advisory council fall planning and it looks like i'm turning this over to you again dr lambert you are i just before brett walks out of the room i just want to thank him for his preparedness and his ability to answer questions on the fly brett we really appreciate it your budget game tonight matched your clothes game right on the money this is an exciting event i know we've been

093working on this one with a lot of enthusiasm i actually got to see the special drawing and uh selection process i felt an honor to be part of that this weekend the live broadcast of that on espn two or three that might be on the ocho we might not make those first three but it should be somewhere because it was pretty cool item 7.3 student advisory council fall planning board directors naomi johnson and dj anderson are going to present information on how they've been planning for that student advisory council naomi i think i'll just turn it to you or dj i'll just go ahead and get started and dj will interrupt me when i get things wrong so um if you remember a couple of years ago the last time we were at a caspi

094convention we saw a lot of students and we got really excited about the possibility of bringing peter school district students back to that event and that's kind of what started us thinking about this and then there was a pandemic and so we have spent this year trying to conduct the student advisory council with any students who were interested entirely remote and i think that we started in october it's been a long time that we've been doing this and we are ready to move into being in person in the fall next slide please so what are we going to be doing the council plans to meet monthly to share what is going on in each of their individual schools and offer insight on the student experience we're hoping that there will be an opportunity to share

095thoughts on anything that is at the district level at the board of education or that the board of education might be considering so these might be big picture items as they arise one of the things that i thought might fall into this category from previous years would be the change to the school start time because that is going to impact lots of the students across a variety of high schools we probably would not take up anything about a dress code at one school or a club experience at one school we're really hoping that this council could be a part of the board of education's work at that high level looking at the entire district we are hoping to get a total of 26 student members and we would have a subset of those council members

096attending one board meeting per month to present to the board this group would rotate so we would ultimately have an opportunity to meet all 26 students and that all of the students would have the opportunity to come and speak to the board as such the student advisory council would be a regular part of the board of education meeting agenda every month for the second meeting of the month dj am i missing anything i i would just uh clarify a little bit about that we are besides the big picture we're looking we want them to share what's happening in their world so that us as a as the big picture it can see uh what's happening down in in the high schools and kind of uh get an idea of what's priorities and what's happening there

097so that we can be hopefully be a little bit more a part of what's happening yeah thank you next slide please so here is a list of kind of our meeting details the group would meet monthly august through june 4 45 to 6 15 on the third monday of every month you might remember at our last meeting we talked about getting some funds we did very scientific pizza consumption mathematics to determine how much money we were going to need for that we're also hoping to have some linkage dinners i'm going to let dj talk about that here in just a second on the right side of the slide it might be too small for you to see here but this is in your packet the first date would be the date that the council would

098meet all together and then the bullet underneath that would be the board of education meeting that a subset of the group would attend you'll also see here that we are rotating attendance around the district so that the council will have the opportunity to visit all 11 high schools in the district and just see what it's like in another building tj the the linkage dinner which i think i've covered a few times here is is this is a something that i learned about when we were doing research about having the student advisory council and one of the opportunities is having this group come and have dinner with us all at one point and uh but it also would be an opportunity for principals uh at a different dinner at a different dinner it could be uh

099the political legislators that we have around here and stuff like that so it is an opportunity for us to also get interaction with other stakeholders that we have out there and have those conversations awesome next slide please so this is just a quick reminder of the district makeup and how we came to looking at 11 schools we've got four large comprehensive high schools two small alternative high schools to choice high schools and three charter schools with a high school program so we're looking at 11 total schools that we're hoping to draw participation from next slide please so for the membership we had a call for applicants that was broadly shared around the district beginning on april 22nd and you can see this beautiful graphic on the right-hand side was shared in a variety of social

100media campaigns we sent this to building principals we sent it to students who were involved in the student advisory council this year so that they would have the opportunity to share it on their personal social media pages and we really tried to get as much word out there as possible we are looking at up to 26 total student members for the council we agreed that we would have three student members per large high school because they would be representing more students and two student members from our charter special or smaller schools because they're there's not as broad of a student body that we would be looking to represent at those schools active members would roll over to subsequent years if they would be interested in doing so and vacancies for the council would be filled

101by a random lottery of applicants per school that is what dr lambert was referring to students filled out a brief google form for applications just indicating their interest and we were really hoping that we would draw a broad cross-section of the population from the schools with that application process for our schools that do not currently have representation we are hoping to contact building principals to ask for recommendations perhaps just appointments for one year as we get the in-person version of our council moving and if we have a meeting that is to be held at a school that doesn't have any representatives even after we've reached out to the building principal we are hoping that we would be able to hold that meeting here at the jssc instead anything i'm missing all right next slide please

102so these are a little bit small so i'm just going to go ahead and read them but here are some of the comments that were a part of the student application process i want to be part of the sac because i believe that i can be a positive influence in someone's life and i want to challenge myself to step out of my comfort zone i believe being a part of sac will provide me with many opportunities to make a positive impact in our community the school board makes very important decisions however many of those aren't made with student opinions in mind i have a passion for leadership and advocacy that runs deep enough to have a profound impact on the community around me i would like to work with others to make a difference highlighting

103teamwork and togetherness and we will recover and we as we recover uh from a pandemic that separated this type of unity i am interested in being a part of the sac because i would like to learn more about the other high school communities and how as a group we can better our community i think it is a great opportunity to practice using my voice and sharing my opinions kindly crazy and unpredictable times have allowed many students to sit back and realize many things they would like to change about our education system and school environments i would love to represent those students as well as myself when it comes to education the people that should be listened to the most are the ones receiving it so friends i think the kids are going to be all

104right these are great comments just some of the comments that we got in the application process and again this application process has been over the last month at the end of the school year this is what peter school district students want they want to be a part of what is happening they want to share their voice they want greatness for years to come next slide please we are pleased to share the following student representatives that have been selected for next year from centennial high school we have grace and renee rose fort collins high school christina kim alexis ashley rocca elora miller vivienne from fossil ridge high school alan mcfarland and raoul goosh and karam gurken both alan and karim were a part of this year's sac or sac and provided lots of great information in

105getting us ready and prepared for the fall from liberty common we have samantha templeton and austin wallach from polaris charlotte park and bran schneider from pca keenan o'connor thomas from pga and what is going to be pga virtual austin henson from rocky mountain high school robert dortch phoebe hadfield and ellie mead we did not receive any applicants from compass pooter high school or ridgeview so we are hoping to get students from those schools we are also hoping to get additional representation from centennial pca and pooter global academy so if you attend one of those schools and you are interested please reach out to the board we would love to get you connected next slide please what questions do you have for us rob so what do you see as the mechanics for getting the linkage

106dinners going it seems like there's a lot of planning and coordination that needs to happen around that and i guess i'm wondering what your vision of board involvement is that in that relative to staff involvement and how do we get that rolling uh that's a really good question i um because i i think it would be beneficial to uh have some um meet with todd basically and get some idea of what staff maybe would be able to help with us on that because planning it just because i think we can do some of the same things where we can go to different schools which would be awesome i think and uh what kind of dinners that we can bring in of course that also has to change a little bit with the pandemic policies but

107uh i think the next next step is really to try to figure out you know what manpower behind the scenes it needs to take to get that done i think ultimately we want to do none of the work and have the students do all of the work that is that is our ultimate goal for the linkage dinners for for the for the entire sac we want them to be involved in in talking about who do we want to include in the linkage dinners and then they would help be a part of that process i'm confused yeah because i i would say the linkage dinners is more our thing and that we're inviting them to be part of one of those on that i take it back yeah because i because i think that's more of

108our moving uh all of our stakeholders that we want to be a part of and and how we're going to bring those into it on that so it sounds like the linkage dinners are sac adjacent well yeah yeah so we clearly we need to do some more conversation about this so i'll i've taken a note to that in fact so thank you carolyn so i see that we the students were picked by random lottery and i think that's a fair way to do it my concern would be though is how do you make sure that you get some diversity on the board like did we look for diverse applicants or i mean if if the lottery if if by doing it by lottery we didn't get any diversity on the board what would we on

109the sac what would we do yeah that's a good question so we actually heard from um the administrators and some of the teachers at fossil ridge high school because that's how they go about selecting their student leaders as they go through this lottery process and statistically speaking we would draw a broader representation by doing a lottery than if we went through an application process because again statistically speaking more people would be willing to apply for something that they know they have an equal chance of getting as opposed to only the kids who are at the top of the class are always going to be selected for this so if we if we don't have any minority applicants i'm not sure what we would do about that okay any other questions do you um these every

110other so the work session meetings when you intend to bring them were you imagining doing that during the dinner session or doing the during the regular meeting during the regular meeting uh so have them kind of have a couple people join us at this kind of a situation yes for the meeting okay all right general uh consensus from the board that this feels like a a good plan yeah all right march on thank you excellent thanks for the work you guys put in and i definitely agree um we need to get that student engagement again that we had at one point on the board and get you guys helped really bring it to life and give it voice so thank you okay uh item 7.4 on the agenda is the revisions to the student rights

111of co and code of conduct policies and this would be a first reading and i'll turn it over to you dr lambert for introductions thank you president feb psd legal and policy council autumn aspen will provide information on proposed revisions to student rights and code of conduct policies autumn welcome thank you so as you know every year around this time the administration brings forward some policies that are within the student rights and code of conduct that have some proposed revisions either due to changes in legislation or just other changes to conform with practices or if we just think there's policies that need some updating so this year we have two policies um for the board for first reading the first one is jica which is student dress code and it looks like there's a lot

112of changes here but a lot of the the green is basically just reorganizing some of the paragraphs so if it's in green it's already been in the policy so it's really just the red changes that are actual changes to the policy in the first paragraph there's just a sentence that's been added there that states district standards on attire are intended to reduce discipline problems maintain school order and safety and then we've got in addition to number one number one says that dress code or dress that causes or is likely to cause disruption of the educational process is prohibited and then that next part in red has been added which provides some examples or illustrations as to certain type of dress that could be considered disruptive which includes apparel that displays symbols of hate or speech

113that expresses animus or violence toward a particular group or individual on the basis of race color creed national origin ancestry sex sexual orientation gender identity gender expression marital status age or disability number two on this policy has also been added and that discusses apparel that is not allowed and has some examples there such as anything that displays or depicts legal or lewd conduct weapons the use of alcohol tobacco marijuana or other controlled substances um pornography nudity or sexual acts and here also um since the policy has been in novus scott and i have had a chance to talk through some other changes as well so i think there's a few additional changes i'd like to bring up for the board that could be considered and one of them is instead of sexual acts just changing

114that to sexually suggestive language or messages which is just a little i think broader more encompassing and vulgar obscene language or images and then the next change we have is a removal of beach or swimwear as inappropriate which i think it's just covered in other areas of the policy it's not necessarily that that clothing is now allowed at school but i think there's also some ambiguity that was there because some beach attire that's considered beach tire could actually be allowed under the dress code and then the next change we have is in the new number five which discusses headgear and what's inappropriate in school based on some comment from board members there's also a potential change here as well to just clarify that along with permitted religious or medical reasons for wearing headgear it also

115could be based on school if the principal or administrator permits hats or caps or other types of headwear headgear as well and then i think that's the the main changes there's one other option scott and i discussed that we could include in this dress code and that's an option to discuss coverage of clothing so that could be a statement that says something like clothing must have shoulder straps or otherwise cover the shoulders and much and less cover areas from one armpit to the other armpit down to approximately three to four inches in length on the upper thighs and that there could be exceptions made for certain school sponsored activities or extracurriculars like some athletic uniforms may inherently violate that language uh that's uh new so that's not in there right now but that's a suggestion

116that we could also include in for the second reading and up for discussion and then the last change there's just some wording change to that last paragraph and also within there another potential change that's not included in here but could be made is stating the different options for if a student is in violation of this policy that before re-entering class they could be given the option to either change into their own alternative clothing or where school provided clothing or have their parent or guardian bring some alternative clothing to school right now it just says that they have to remove that clothing so it's just providing some more detail as to what the options are if they are in violation of the policy those are the proposed changes for the dress code and i'd welcome any

117questions comments suggestions to any of these proposed changes rob so my question is on the hats piece or headgear what is the value proposition of allowing that to be a school-based decision i don't understand why it would be okay for a student to wear a baseball cap that doesn't otherwise violate the rules in fossil ridge but not in fort collins i don't understand why that's i mean either it's either it's a problem or it isn't it seems to me so if somebody could help me understand that that would be great rob i think that's a fair question and but and is it a butt or an and maybe both that's current practice so i mean that's currently where we are in the majority of our middle schools hats are not allowed the majority of our

118high schools they are why is it that way i don't know that i can answer that rob that's that's been the way it's been we could certainly take a stance and say hats are not we're not gonna prohibit hats i'd be uncomfortable saying we're gonna not allow hats at all so so why maybe you can help me understand then to the extent that there are let's say high schools keeping at the same level that don't allow hats what is their reasoning for doing that right now i'm not aware of a high school that does okay so what's the what's the what's the value prop then or the reasoning of the middle schools that don't allow hats i think that i should be able to answer that easily because i was a middle school person um

119i believe they would say it uh it distracts from what's going on but i don't know that i could give you a better answer than that rom which is good reason for i mean you just asked a question and i can't answer it for us not to have it so i i guess i would ask that you and autumn think more about what we should do in that regard and come back to us maybe in the friday update in between or in some other way to let us know where your thinking has evolved on that let's be prepared i i also wonder you know it could be flipped to an opt-in rather than not an opt-out i i was i think a lot of board members were wondering about that if i'm not mistaken go

120ahead carolyn and then i've got dj and nate and then just to follow up but we do allow religious headwear right so that's not an issue so so yeah i guess i would wonder why that would not be disruptive and a baseball cap would be you know so i just don't know how to be disruptive dj um so my comments are really to all of these policies that we're looking at is that i feel like um i really feel like the principals should should be involved in this process a little bit more because they're the ones that are are working with this and what they've seen and what they hear and uh it's nice to hear that you were able to get some time with uh scott and kind of go over that i but

121the other one that we'll talk about with discipline too to me it sounds like i would feel a lot more comfortable having more input from state other stakeholders on that uh the discipline one which we'll talk about a little bit later is i think dab would have been a great example of something just so that they hear some of that and some of the reactions that we get from the principals and parents about what how this comes about i think is is would be beneficial for me at least when i'm voting on this and thinking about it i'll tell you um i'll tell you as a parent of a daughter uh some of the comments that you guys just made about some of the clothing is something that we hear about in our family quite

122often uh because of not feeling that it's it's fair of what some of the boys get to wear the shirts that are barely there or cut up versus what uh the girls can wear about a two inch strap instead of you know a spaghetti strap i might be saying these words wrong even though i'm a father of a daughter but uh those kind of things seems to you know get them get them very riled up and and i understand that so it's it's one of those things where i think it would be interested in in some of these to have some other stakeholder input on that so i want to share that dj i'd just love to i completely agree um and the the policy we'll talk about a little bit started with principles so

123secondary principles have all been involved in the discipline one um to get some feedback on some starters and how would they feel and they helped to guide where we landed the code or the the dress code is one that's on the agenda both of them are on the agenda when we meet with principals again on thursday two days from now following this reading given feedback we would get tonight and so we'll talk about that and i would also say that that the dress code the way it currently sits right was a almost a 30 000 foot view if you look back at our policy that was set before it had very little specifics and our schools went in and specified everything and so we've got 50 different dress codes in this district at the secondary

124level it makes way more difference than it does at the elementary level for the reasons you just talked about right we're hearing the same things you're hearing dj around how any ineffective are dress codes we're not following the codes we have we're not speaking to or they're unfair is more often what we hear and so what we're anticipating is getting to a place where our dress code that we have as a district particularly for the secondary schools can be their dress code for the next year and we can all have the same one and we can learn and we can pay attention to it and understand what iterations do we need to make as a system rather than each individual one and getting beat up here or there because they've created their own to try

125to drill down to some specific three inch strap or it's got to be the length of your fingertip length shorts for the girls but not the boys right i mean those are things we've had in policies around not just our district all kinds of districts for a long long time so how do we get away from that we've tried to do that in here and take a step forward i i can't say this dress code is perfect i don't know that there's a perfect dress code anywhere i can tell you dress code's miserable when you're in the building it just is so but this feels like a step forward at least a place we can launch from and there's no question the people the practitioners need to be a part of that i do appreciate

126the uh addressing the hate speech though so i will throw that in nate i think generally most of these changes make good sense and i have a conflict of interest because i'm a fan of hats and wearing hats but i think if we're going to prohibit hats we need to have a good rationale that's defensible so i just encourage us to think about that so disruptive may mean something different in different contexts so nate i appreciate that and i am a big fan of hats myself um oh go ahead kristen yeah i'm not i'm not a fan of number five um with the hats i'm not i just don't see um the reasoning behind that if you can convince me otherwise go for it um but at the moment i don't um i just don't

127see it and then does that include hair wraps does that include uh i mean there you you know you can just kind of yeah yeah you can just kind of go down um a road of of it's not considered a religious um or maybe not even a protective hairstyle but you know it's definitely something that is a cultural or a heritage or a um even just something that people like um and we're saying no you can't do that and it's there's no reason not to um and i think adam you had mentioned the possibility of doing the straps one but it's not in there correct i didn't see it in there correct it's not in there right now um i think to scott's point if we do want this to be a policy where schools

128then wouldn't have much to add at least maybe this first year we could consider adding something about um what would need to be covered for the dress code which isn't in here now it's normally in the school level ones so that's something that the board could consider adding into this one or leaving out and i appreciate that wanting to to be um the same across the board and i think we want to try and get there but i mean i've been hearing that for 15 years now about i mean i remember going to school and the boys could get away with wearing one thing and the girls couldn't and um it it's just that's not where we need to go um on that so i appreciate getting it to a level where it can be

129the same for all schools but i really don't want to get down to um again you can't wear spaghetti straps but you can wear a two inch you know and you know it that just gets that gets a little bit too drilled down for me thanks kristen all right thanks go ahead rob yeah i'm not sure i agree with that i think i think there's a high value in trying to standardize the dress code as much as we can across the system i think it's unacceptable to have different standards for boys and girls so in some ways in some way we would need to address that i don't know what that looks like i don't i'm not a fashion czar but i'm open to the idea of of what needs to be covered i guess

130is the way it's normally talked about but not only in the language of the policy but yeah this isn't the document not only in the language of the policy but also in its implementation it would need to be um uh equitably i don't know if that's the right word enforced in the same way for boys and girls regardless of the difference in fashions that that that boys and girls wear so i don't know whether that's possible but i but i do think there's some value in that and i don't think it's a good idea to have principals deciding about spaghetti straps or the length of hems or or shorts or anything else so i don't know that's where i'm thinking about that and i absolutely agree with you rob that it should not be up

131to the principles but i don't know that it should be up to us either i just don't know that it's a i i really think we need to rethink the distraction part of that um because that's that's thank you it is it is used as a weapon against girls and so and i don't want to start a whole different conversation on that i understand um but i just that is something that is i mean from the from the beginning of time it's the what were you wearing you were distracting them versus they're getting distracted by that's the the way that words are used is very fine so like i say let's have it be equitably and correctly and equally enforced and not be about girls and what they wear and whether they're distracting boys or

132vice versa because you know i mean there's a bunch of hormones running around in both boys and girls at this time of their lives right absolutely and i'm just i'm just saying i don't think we want to get i don't think we want to drill down to nor do we want to have the principles individually drill down to these these shoes can be worn but these straps can't be worn but those hems can be worn but i i think but the question is question well the question but as soon as you say appropriate dress somebody's making a decision somewhere right and so the question is what where where where's where's the line quote-unquote and who gets to decide where the line is no shirts no shoes no service it's a great discussion it may come

133down to describing how much covering we we require from students that was one of the recommendations as i recall so and it would be equal it probably says cover more not less another option would also be at the beginning of this policy in that first paragraph to also add in some sort of equity statement on enforcement to ensure that the dress code policy is applied equitably and equally without any sort of discrimination based on any of the protected classes so if that's something you'd like in there we could add something like that as well just to have that next reminder in there of it being applied equitably i would absolutely like that in there especially for gender non-conforming kiddos i think that's valuable independent of the discussion about hems and straps and of the shorts

134and whatever i'm going to jump in and change directions a little bit so the one that i've wondering them more about is number two which looks like something you added if i'm not mistaken right um i guess a simple way to ask this is just these these protections that kids have for freedom of speech and all this and i know when it comes to hate speech and other things in item one you define it by disruptive but when you don't define it as disruptive and you have things like just broadly speaking about nudity or sexual acts or tobacco you know like is a marijuana leaf where where do kids have a freedom and it kind of gets back into that ambiguity that i keep wondering about so i was thinking of these mud flaps that

135have two uh silhouetted i think they're women facing each other is that nudity there's so many forms of nudity that may or may not be included and or may jump towards freedom of speech now i don't know what the supreme court has said do school districts maybe that's the first question i have is do school districts have the right to limit uh this kind of expression yeah there have been a few supreme court cases regarding this type of speech and there is a difference between speech that's lewd obscene vulgar or promoting something that's illegal versus speech that gets into the other ones you're talking about where it is more of a question of is that disruptive is that their freedom of speech or is it hate speech so the the category is number two there

136have been some supreme court cases on those where they have said schools have more of an ability to regulate speech if it is promoting something illegal like drug use or if it is something that is vulgar lewd obscene language those types of speech could also be regulated more by school districts so let me ask the two that come to mind then i'll ask them is a marijuana leaf promoting an illegal drug and then the the second one as far as sexual acts go and i know you've proposed other ways of describing that but would uh two people kissing uh on a shirt or or a roman statue count in those categories to the first one i would probably say that the marijuana leaf um would be considered promoting illegal activity because at that age with

137students it in colorado even it is illegal unless you're a certain age um there's probably a little bit of discretion with the sexual acts or some sexually suggestive language it's probably hard to define that completely one way or the other because there are some that would be in between so that may be something where we would need some additional guidance or training on that i don't know scott if you have thoughts on those two examples well i think the marijuana leaf would be practically yes right that is for for uh under 21 year old it is illegal so it would be promoting that the the second one is more challenging because what is on the shirt actually when if it's a roman statue that may look different than other ways that could be portrayed and

138so there is going to have to be some room for interpretation and that's why dress code is is a challenge it just is and i mean if you talk to any principal they're going to tell you dress code is one of the hardest things you get to do to do what rob's asking for is to to uphold it in a an equity way it's hard to do because there's interpretive i mean it is interpretive there's no it's we can't come up with a policy that says yes no yes no it's not that simple um and so that second one you have kristoff could be interpreted one way or the other depending on actually what it is okay and i think that's why frankly i like things where you describe it as disruptive because that gives

139us something we can wrap our minds around when something's not disruptive and it's an example what i when i think of a kid in the school maybe wearing a marijuana leaf might be because his parent sells medical marijuana down the street and they consider that their their their family's t-shirt now maybe maybe it's simple it's illegal it's illegal and we just are done that's easier the the sexuality things i think did really ambiguous to me it helps me if i feel like it's something that's disruptive it becomes pretty obvious at that point but i i don't know i just my my line of questioning i see carolyn wants to jump in and rob yeah and i think there are a lot of things that we haven't covered you know like pajamas you know we see

140kids all over town we're in their pajamas around the kids coming into my store with the pajamas on when what about uh under exposed undergarments or even undergarments worn as outer garments you know like so we have a kid maybe um who's wearing his pants really low slung and and you know i can maybe i can even see his his his backside and all of his his underwear you know is that disruptive you know i mean how to i mean there's a lot of stuff to think about it's just yeah there's so much to think about i do appreciate how hard it must be you know because there's i mean we haven't even talked about some of the things i that i imagine a lot of the principles come across rob so yeah i think

141i think it's a good point carolyn i think i think at some level no matter what we write down here even if we write down that it's disruptive disruptive is in the eye of the beholder right unless there's like a riot and then it's clearly clearly disruptive but i mean otherwise it's going to be in the eye of the beholder and i think providing some guidance in the in the direction of what we would rather not have in in our in our schools i think is a good thing right uh the marijuana leaf is is to me the same thing as the tobacco question right because you know i could be i could be running a tobacco shop down the street too and that's my family's tobacco shop and why can't i put tobacco on

142there i think i think the answer is those are those are not legal for kids of that age and and to some degree certainly with tobacco and to some degree certainly for some people we don't want to be seen as promoting usage of that stuff anyway the sexual acts thing i don't know again i think it's i think it's really in context but i i think providing the direction of you know that this is not you know school is not about sex right it's about learning right and so to the extent that we can give some direction to our staff about the kind of areas that you know are not what school is about then that's a good thing and i i acknowledge that it's that there are gray areas and it's about context if

143i know that the first man or the supreme court allows limitations i it strikes me that it becomes easier to limit more rather than less um it just becomes simpler right no nudity shown it's just simple so that means no roman uh statues but i i think maybe the question is what's allowable for for the district so i don't know that we've given you much good guidance here well i've heard some i heard pretty clearly that you want to go where i'd like to go with hats amen other comments to help autumn get to a second reading or an action item okay good luck with that yeah i would i would just suggest that as you're developing this if you can share it with us as you're going along i mean i know that's sort

144of awkward and everything but you know otherwise we only have one more meeting this year right so if we're going to nail this if we're going to stick the landing as they like to say we're going to need to sort of perhaps individually because we can't meet or decide anything outside of meetings provide you with feedback i don't know you can figure out what the legalities are that yeah i can definitely look into doing that okay and i know you're taking us to the next one so any other feedback on that before moving on to next policy uh the second one is jich which is student conduct involving drugs and alcohol this policy i'll go through and highlight some of the the major changes to it as you can see um there's other ones in

145there that are a little bit more minor like on this first page a lot of the definitions is more just kind of wordsmithing or just formatting changes there but one thing i will know is you'll see that what has been struck is that drug paraphernalia includes vape pen so that would be removed from the definition in this policy and then where the major changes are is mainly in the different categories for consequences and this first one we've added in less than one gram of marijuana in its traditional or natural form and also well the possession of that and then also the youth or being under the influence of marijuana previously marijuana and in any amount or user possession would have been in that second category so some of it's been moved into this first category

146now and under this first category we've basically kept the first offense the same as before although we changed it from within any three-year period to the first offense within one calendar year so that's a change from the policy as it was before and aside from that the the first offense within one calendar year is basically the same as it was in previous years the the major change here is under the second offense before second offense in this category was a suspension for 10 days now our proposed language would be a suspension for five school days with a possibility of an additional five school days and a recommendation for expulsion with the student however within this category we've also provided an option for waiver of up to five of those days suspension and also waiver of

147the expulsion and that's if the student has elected to complete either an alternative placement or a district supported or non-district supported alcohol and or drug education intervention program and in number four the policy discusses some other requirements for having that expulsion waived which would include having the student and parent enter into a written agreement which would detail the the terms of what needs to be completed for that waiver to stick and that could include some of the details of what that program would look like maybe some other requirements possibly on student attendance or not any other violations of this policy or other policies during that term and if for whatever reason the student does not either complete the program or has any other violation under that agreement then the the waiver would be gone and

148it would turn into an expulsion at that point and then the third offense within this first category within any one calendar year would be a recommendation for expulsion and i don't know what this one if it makes more sense to just go through the whole policy or have questions in between but the the other main change is in the second category where now it's changed from having marijuana just included within that to marijuana that's one or more grams in its natural form or any amount of marijuana in its non-traditional form and the first offense here basically would mimic the second offense in that first category so it has changed where prior it would have been a 10-day suspension and now it's the same as what we just discussed with the the second offense in that

149first category where it would be a 10-day suspension with a recommendation for expo category is for purchasing and then i also proposed adding in here distributing dispensing exchanging giving and selling was already included in there but basically it's purchasing or selling all drugs except for those sold over the counter and here the the first and second offense did not change from the previous policy except that now it's changed to within a calendar year did you want to ask a question rob yeah go ahead yeah so i actually have three questions um the first one is uh the the vape paraphernalia right so do i understand correctly that simple possession of a vape device is not an offense at this point anymore under any category or did i miss something uh not under this policy that's

150correct it would just be treated as um tobacco possession under policy adc okay so that's and is do we need to change adc to say that somehow i think that one i'll double check it but i think that one could um exist how it is now okay that's fine i'm assuming however that if they're used if a student is using the vape device with a controlled substance that the controlled substance part of that then does fall under this policy is that correct that's correct so it could still be considered at that point drug paraphernalia or it could be just considered possession of whatever controlled substance is within them but it depends on the controlled substance piece okay that's fine so from a mechanic's point of view it appears to me i mean we certainly expressed

151a lot of value on this board and i know i have a lot of value on restorative practices and whatnot but it it feels to me that the mechanism by which we force if you want to say it that way students to engage in restorative practices or or self-help for folks who are struggling with with uh addiction or whatever is that if you don't do this we're gonna expel you is that is i mean that feels like all we that feels like the lever we have is that is that am i reading that right uh yeah so that's how the policy is drafted now were there um they're under the first category there is that first step where it doesn't go straight to expulsion sure i understand but um but yes that's i think a

152fair assessment of how it is it's providing maybe some more accountability to students but then in a way there's there's some less punitive aspects of it because there is that option to waive the expulsion there's also an opportunity to learn and i think that's the that's a big piece for this right and and i i think another big change and again this was something we put in front of principles when we were talking about it to start with is there's a clean slate after 365 days right now a student makes a bad decision maybe a year and a half later makes another bad decision they got another year and a half before their they get a clean slate so right now yes it's two options but it's the second option they have a couple of

153different pathways to to jump off and get out off the the opportunity for expulsion of the recommendation but they also have a clean slate after the 365 days which is that's a big shift for our principals to think about and they were on board with that so i think for us this was a there's some relatively big shifts for us to make over the next calendar year to take a look at how much does this change how much does the choices we've created and that's really what we've done right we've created three choices of which rob you are saying one would be expulsion and we likely will have some students who would say i don't i don't want to go through treatment right now i don't want to do a program and i'm not willing

154to to look at a change of placement so we've got to make some decisions are we ready as a school system to say okay we're good with those that happening in our buildings our our intent right now is to try to get some help for the students and we feel like this might work but we need to be accountable to you a year from now as to whether we feel like we have watched families take advantage of the opportunities we're going to create and we believe we'll have that we believe we'll have families that are dumbfounded that their kids are using that are going to be like absolutely my son or daughter is going to step into some support and um and so that's a mechanism we want to create and and learn and and

155we'll iterate on this process but we think this is a step in the right direction do when a student is expelled how does that i've never been entirely clear on this how does that interact with the ability to continue learning at for that year just so our students what do we do to support yeah and i that's a good distinction rob for us in psd because we do we do things different than many other districts do and that when our students are expelled they're given some choices as to how they want to learn we do a remote learning piece that troy runs he's done that for a while but we also have journey that allows for our expelled students to go on to pca's campus and the early approach when they're on pca's campus is

156they're with the other students that have been expelled to go through some learning they've got certified teachers driving their classes they're still taking classes if they're high school students toward graduation and many times during their expulsion they step right into pca and do some learning with the rest of the pca campus many students decide when they're there this is a better environment for me in general you heard that from one of our speakers last week one of them saying that it was pca that helped me once i was expelled i don't think all of our students recognize the influence that being in the whatever current system or group they're in has on the the decisions they're making and sometimes that change of placement is different and it helps them make decisions which is why we

157felt like that was an off-ramp for some students a change of placement might be all they need to make different decisions take away the influence of the group that they're making decisions so i think that gets at that rom kristen so i do have a clarifying question on the second offense of the um oh gosh what is that consequence is for possession of alcohol one less than one gram of marijuana um so it says that the student shall be suspended for five days with a request by the principal to to the superintendent to extend it for an additional five of her total of ten and then number two says the 10-day school period of suspension may be reduced to five days and the recommendation for expulsion may be waived the student the parents do one

158of the following and what i'm wondering is if they're only been five days suspension because they didn't recommend for a second five days to the superintendent or the superintendent didn't grant it would that still be waived would that five-day suspension still be waived so that they would have zero suspension if they were to complete one of those um you know go to an alternate or go to a district supported intervention program or something to that effect yeah i think there's the flexibility of getting it down to what you just talked about kristen the whole idea with both of those is to give the building the the ability to work with the family to try to get him in some support and as soon as we can do that and come up with a plan we

159want them back in class so that's the whole goal of of what we're trying to do and that that's that's great that's what i i was hoping to hear because um i think to you know to rob's question before um yeah that that does seem to be it's what the da does for diversion programs you walk in and you say you have two choices you can do the diversion program or you can take your chances in court what would you like to do and ninety percent of the time people are like oh give me that diversion program and we're good to go and you know they can go in and sort of the heels dug in if i'm not going to learn anything and yet most of the time they do and they come out

160on the other side and they're like oh that was a good thing that's a good thing i did that um but because it's it's then wiped um and you don't have that on your on your record it's a great thing and so that's what i'm seeing here is that we give we're giving them that opportunity to learn to wipe the slate clean and then the other thing that i'm loving about this is that one year is huge because if you have an offense at the end of your freshman year then it's a year and a half that means that somebody's got their eyes on you until your senior year and that's a long time and this way it's you know you have it next year you're good so thank you naomi what is the goal

161of suspending and expelling students is it punishment is it a deterrence is it to lower recidivism no naomi i think there's a couple um one is to give us a chance to do some work with the family and try to understand what's there but there's a certainly a deterrent factor to it right and there's a deterrent factor for the students around right there's an influence that a student who has marijuana and is smoking in the bathroom there's an influence that student has at a building and if the building would tell you i think if they don't if they're not able to step into that on some level they're maybe it's just a fear that we'll have others that are doing the same thing so how do we curb and encourage curb the behaviors we don't

162want to see and encourage the ones we do and we don't want to see students smoke and pot at school we don't want to see students sharing over-the-counter drugs at school those are things that we're charged with every day right i mean our families if we were to survey our families they would say we want a drug-free environment so how do we create one i don't believe we create the best drug-free environment by kicking the kids that bring drugs to school out that doesn't that those those students end up going somewhere else and they don't like school so and i think that's what you're getting at naomi is how do we help those kids belong and i think this is a step in the right direction to doing that because i think this allows us

163to step into the intervention with a caring voice instead of being stuck in a position where as a principal i have to send you home for x amount of time or i have to expel you the principal now has the ability to say look with the second offense i have to recommend you for expulsion and there are some opportunities for you to not get expelled and here's what they are and then for us as we put that into practice we will have troy who steps in and drives that practice so it's consistent across our buildings and he would be the one then to drive through how do we put into practice exactly the the options that the students work toward trying to get to your model naomi which is to allow students to make a

164bad decision which i would argue bringing something that is illegal to school is a bad decision and that they can learn from that and hopefully not repeat it over and over and over again and not influence others that might make the same type of decision at school that put my kids or any of our uh our students um in a risky situation so that and i think that's what we're charged to do by our family so yes i love all of that i love the idea of talking to the families and and giving student choices i'm not clear on why they need to be removed from school for five days on the first offense in order to make that happen i mean do you is there do we have data that demonstrates that removing students

165from their educational setting is advantageous or in any way deters offenses by other students i think naomi the five days if you read the way the five days reads it's up to five days and it allows for us to get the pieces in place it allows for us to meet with the family do the work we need to do with the first episode to make sure they're involved the idea with both of these is to get them in school as soon as possible but we've said we can suspend up to five days we can waive all five if we can get them back in school faster but if we if we simply say to the family we're going to do some counseling with your with your son or your daughter and they can come back

166to school tomorrow then there's not there's not necessarily an incentive to have this this back and forth and trying to get a plan in place and think about what the plan really looks like and and uh a deterrent for what's going on and a deterrent for the other students yeah so i guess that's my question is there any evidence that removing children from school actually deters offense by other students i i think there's probably evidence both sides of that naomi i think you've seen some and i you know we see we see some that would say um an out-of-school suspension may or may not influence students but i believe it does give us it gives us an opportunity to do the work we feel like is important and i think we can evaluate the effectiveness

167of this policy with our own data a year from now to find out did it have a different outcome than what we've currently been doing it gives us more flexibility at school and allows us to have more student contact time which i think is important um so i guess i i mean i'll just end by saying um there there have been a lot of studies about what it means to exclude a child from an educational setting and and i i mean i feel like they're pretty conclusive in what is best for children what we have here is not a restorative program it is a traditional suspension expulsion program with some other things added on to it that is at the discretion of a building principal who may not be able to dole out those discipline

168situations for children in a completely even-handed manner i would really like for the district to continue to look at what it would mean to keep students in their educational settings and provide truly restorative programs for them because i believe that that can be done without suspension and expulsion and there is a lot of research out there to support it so i would encourage us to use this year to delve into that work to see if we can really reimagine what discipline looks like for children who are going to make a ton of mistakes and get caught sometimes with it thank you i'm going to go to kristen and then rob and carolyn so what i'm wondering is under that first offense there is we have right now we've struck the word deferred and put in

169waived i'm wondering if we should have both deferred and waived or deferred or waived because i mean what you're talking about is you're saying to the to the kid um it's a five five day suspension um and what i can do is i can defer it until we get you into a program um and you know we talk to your parents so it's not gonna happen tomorrow you know we can defer that or we can waive it so if you complete the program we waive it if you get partially through the program we can you know waive a couple of days maybe but it's going to be deferred until we get everything lined up and and um sorry that's nice language so i'm thinking if we could go ahead and do that yeah okay rob

170oh sure go ahead dj i the the thing that really jumped out on me on number one though from what scott was just saying um is that the language doesn't really fit i mean because he you know you're making it clear that it could be up to five days which the bottom part of the of number one explains but that first sentence is very defiant you know it's the student shall be suspended from school for five days and and i just wonder if that really should be you know instead of shale it should be maybe suspended or something like that because that's kind of what works in there the whole so i just wanted to bring that up because of of how you were talking about it and then going back and rereading it you

171know i just kind of wonder if it it should be addressed to that first line a little bit more rob so i wanted to understand a little bit more what your you have in mind naomi because i'm i don't i just don't see it because um i'm not sure what keeping the kids in the educational setting means in the context of someone who is selling drugs or even using drugs on a regular basis what does that mean i mean if it if it means you know we have a separate area of the school for kids like that i don't know but if it means keeping them in a general population that does not seem to be a reasonable thing to do frankly because kids could simply say if there's no consequences they just say you

172know you know fine thanks very much i'm just going to keep doing what i'm doing and that's not okay for the rest of the kids in the community yeah i think that ending suspension and expulsion is not the same as saying there are no consequences um the consequences are just not going to look the way that they have looked in schools for the last hundred years so what does it look like and the other thing i think is important to recognize is that we're not the most of the students that we're talking about who are going to be a part of this discipline code are not students who are heavy drug users or heavy drug pushers we've got students who maybe are experimenting or you know like the question that i asked in the in

173the packet was if i have an ib student who's super stressed out and her friend says you know i'm on adderall and it's great you should try it and then that kid gives an adderall to the other student both of them are going to be up for expulsion for that one thing and and i don't think that that's right i don't think that that serves any of the students effectively i think that what we should be looking at is a counseling model i think that we can go to talking with the family and developing a plan could be after-school detention could be community service could be working with other organizations that are involved in um drug and alcohol abuse programs there there are a lot of actually restorative justice programs or restorative pedagogical programs positive

174behavior intervention and support has done some really really great things nationwide in removing suspension and expulsion so i i think that it's definitely worth actually looking into some of the alternatives i i think all that's all that's true and all of those things in the right circumstances ought to be considered the problem i think we have if i understood and that was sort of the gist of my initial question is if they just say no i'm not doing any of those things what do we do then you know and so maybe this policy doesn't go far enough in terms of saying you know the district shall try these other things before we get to the expulsion or suspension but i'm certainly open to hearing more and maybe this isn't the right forum and we need

175to do some research offline but but at some level i'm not sure what lever we have in the final analysis it ought not to be the first analysis or maybe even the second analysis you guys know what i'm saying sure yeah and i'm open to hearing more so let me go to carolyn and make sure we get people in the conversation so so i think what i hear you saying new i mean i think i kind of agree with you is i think what we're talking about here is commun compassionate assistance and restorative practices instead of exclusionary punishment right because what is what we exclude kids from school as punishment we really aren't getting at the problem i think that we have to talk about counseling do we talk about referring these kids for for

176drug treatment do we have some do we have some kind of counseling supports at school for them instead of this exclusionary practice of just kicking kids out i mean so so i get with what you're saying know me so if the kid makes a mistake so do we just drop kick them out for five days and and not provide any you know kind of restorative assistance i mean i think that's what we're looking for i think i think i just want to hear that's what we're going to get i'm going to okay respond and then i want to make sure to get around the room i just want to clarify something and i'm not i'm not trying to like trick anyone or put anyone on the spot there is a lot of research that has

177been done and many studies that have been done and there is no deter determined determinant in other students for removing peers in who've committed these types of offenses and the negative impacts on students who have been suspended and expelled are significant so if we know those things i think that we should look at all of the other possible alternatives as opposed to saying well we've always done it this way and we can't think of anything else that's perfect like i think that we really need to explore the options i'm not suggesting that that is going to be done in the next two weeks maybe that's going to take a year let me get kristen on the floor and i'm not disagreeing with you at all i'm just curious because to me that that's in the

178first paragraph it says right in the first paragraph this period suspension may be deferred or waved and whole apart if suitable arrangements are made for the student's participation in an appropriate drug and or alcohol program and if the student participates in good faith and completes the program as determined by the principal um so to me that you know and scott go ahead and jump in there but i know that we have a lot of wraparound services that do exactly this and they do it well and the kids come back and they have learned a lot from that but they haven't missed school so go ahead i think that's exactly what we were trying to do what we were trying to do was put into practice a policy that allows us to do the things i

179hear you asking for the things this board's been asking for all year but practically when you talk to the principals i think it was rob that said it what do we do what does the policy tell us to do with the students that say no i'm not stepping into any of those things i refuse to get help right now i refuse to do anything that's gonna that's gonna put me in a position to move through where i am and that's what the principles will ask how do i operationalize that right we've got to think about how do we shift our proportionalities of students that we're stepping into discipline with we also have to look at the outcomes we have to study where we are but what we've put in front of you tonight what we'll

180put again back in front of principles on thursday is flexibility to do the things you're asking for us to do get some counseling get some support build a program that allows for that to happen and watch students stay in class and work with families around that that's what we're trying to do and the principals will tell you they'll have some that will absolutely refuse to do and get help and and do the things to stay in the building and they're going to ask us they're going to ask you what do i do in that situation and that ought to be in the policy as well so that would be what i'd say and i think we need to come back and study this in a year um if i may i'm going to jump in

181um i actually generally agree with your premise naomi and it has something to do with uh also the fact that we know that people who get suspended once you know we can watch the statistics we don't know the correlation or the causation but we we know something about the statistics of what happens to kids who get removed that that is meaningful to me um i also think there's something about um the way it's written that allows and i heard you say this something about the variability principle to principles so the way it i read it different principles might handle the language differently some might just jump to suspension first and others might not but what i do wonder is if the language is awfully close it just may be that the intent of the policy

182is is reversed you know if we put item one to the end and it's you know it actually literally says when all else fails uh the consequences can be up to five days suspension now we're now we're getting what we want out of the school board which is saying don't suspend unless it's the last k the last possible thing you have to do instead you know you start with item one being a parent conference is held restorative practices are reviewed a school official will attempt to develop a pro all this should be at the top of the policy and at the bottom should be the final consequence and i mean i i do believe you that there are uh kids that will just refuse and we seem to have no and that's where we don't

183know cause and correlation maybe that kid was going to be you know going down the wrong road and failing in life anyway but we have to have limits as as a school district but we can also express in our policies what what the school board intends so that every principal knows what the school board intends they intend for diversion to take place restorative practices for education to continue for that kid so i for me i wonder if it's just as simple as taking number one put it to the end and say it's the the final outcome so i'll turn it over to you rob yeah i i i like that as a as an approach i'm like i maybe wasn't yeah i like that as an approach so i think that tries to address the

184range of things and the intent that we're trying to get at do you have any sense numbers would be good frankly but any sense about let me back up i think part of the reason that we're we're talking about changing the rules around drugs right particularly marijuana sorry you know one less than one gram one gram whatever is because we saw that there was significant that that that drug offenses and alcoholic fences were significant uh percentages of the discipline challenges that we've seen you know in terms of the data that we've been shown and whatnot right so do you have any sense about the number of kids who would no longer fall into the more punitive category but would be in the less punitive category uh or i call it the i don't know punitive

185is the wrong word because we're trying not to be punitive but you know what i mean in terms of the terms of the the one gram yeah limit let me take a stab at that rob what i what i could talk about is i'm looking at the last four years of expulsions and i've got a category that's labeled marijuana vape now what i don't i can't delineate based on this right now is how many of those students had more than a gram of marijuana keep in mind a gram of marijuana is two to three joints so we had to come up with some cut off i think the board challenged us last time or two times ago to think about what minor major was that's what we decided made sense to learn in 1718 we

186had 38 students that were expelled for marijuana vape that was the first year we made that change in 1819 we had 46 in 1920 we had 34 students this year we had five if you take cocaine amphetamines prescription thc wax or the other type of marijuana that's not in its traditional form acid mushrooms or in 1718 we had three kids total that were the harder drugs in 1819 we had six in 1920 we had two this year we had one so for us when you're talking about drugs and alcohol it is marijuana for us and vape has played some role in that that we have only a couple kids that were three vapes but we have more than that that we're at one of the three over three years were because of a vape pen

187as paraphernalia so that's a change that's a big change we think we'll learn um but we also think that giving ourselves more flexibility with marijuana allows us to get students more help allows us to be more restorative in nature and gives our schools more flexibility with oversight from both troy and myself in terms of what are we doing keep in mind all of the expulsions are recommended for expulsions are landing first with troy to which he'll be able to talk about what the other options are if they haven't already explored those so that's how we'll try to operationalize that and i think get at the spirit of what the board is asking for dj i um kristoff i really like your idea i think that was fabulous um i do want to i guess throw

188in my thought or value a little bit on on this discussion a little bit about uh the school the the kid being out of school for five days or up to five days i to me i i don't my bigger concern is kids that that we are expelling for a year or half a year and those getting them in a weird education thing i i honestly think that if they're out of school for one or two days it's almost like a time out you know from when we had our little kids and it's a time for them to think about it the parents and everyone else to to work on trying to help that kid i i i i don't want to see it on a continuing basis but i think it does have a

189place for the principal to have that opportunity to say you know go home you know deal with you think about it too you know so um overall i i do think the restorative justice is definitely the way to go and we want to try to get that especially for these long-term ones but um i i i'll tell you from my experience of having a daughter who missed a lot of school time for medical reasons um three or five days is really is no time at all in those kids weeks and they're they're making it up within a week and a half of getting that that works so i just wanted to add that i guess thank you other comments okay clear guidance from the board yeah i think so i think that was really helpful

190and just kind of like go and work on some changes and bring it back for a second reading okay now as rob said uh our next meeting is our last of this school year but you're thinking you'll bring this as a second reading on as informational and we'll vote on it in august most likely no i think we'll second reading will be an action item okay got it if i understand correctly it's got to be in place because it's got to go out to all the students before the school year starts right oh good stuff yeah exactly the code of conduct booklet which normally we have done sometime mid-july so students have that to read okay so the second reading will be an action item got it okay good enough for this evening on uh

191policy excellent uh that concludes the informational items brings us to item 8.0 8.0 is an executive session or 8.1 is an executive section for the board to consider legal and policy council performance feedback it will be done behind closed doors the only other thing that will be done in public will be the conclusion of the meeting or the adjournment as item 9.0 so with that i would take a motion from a board member please go ahead naomi i move that the board enter executive session to discuss personnel matters related to the legal and policy council's performance feedback as authorized under colorado revised statute 24-6-402 subsection 4-f individuals invited to join the board in executive session are board assistant secretary jill bruner thank you do i have a second i do i have one from kristen

192draper and i take a roll call hang on for a second i have a comment oh you've been sorry i should have been no that's fine normally we don't i just want to make sure that for anybody who's watching they understand that this is the beginning of an annual process for us we put in place a new process here that allows the board to give feedback on the performance of the legal and policy council so this is the first of an annual uh approach if you will to to ensure that uh the communication on those fronts with legal and policy counsel happens so that's great it's just a regular problem thanks for that explanation rob anything else okay jill roll call vote please dj anderson aye nate donovan aye kristen draper aye christoph fev aye

193naomi johnson aye rob pederson aye carolyn reed aye motion passes seven zero okay thank you we'll reconvene the next exception thanks to staff for showing up and we'll see you all very soon okay it is 9 56 p.m and we are back in the regular meeting and at 9 56 p.m we will adjourn the meeting you