Lawrence Public Schools Board of Education Meeting | February 28, 2022

001february 28th board of education meeting is called the order for the safety of all those in attendance display of signs or banners will not be permitted in addition masks are required to be worn during the meeting except when speaking at the presenter's podium tonight's meeting is a meeting of the board and held in public not a public hearing or discussion with the board patrons will be invited to share comments as part of the public comment portion of the meeting as outlined in board policy bc bi that time is set aside on the board's agenda for members of the public to share their thoughts it's not a time for dialogue with or question and answer session with the board if your comments require follow-up from the board or district staff that will occur after tonight's meeting

002the district assumes no responsibility and or liability for the information shared during public commentary the views expressed are solely those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the lawrence public schools please be respectful of the presenters and the board as we discuss and deliberate on the issues and topics on tonight's agenda comments are actions that are not that are disrespectful of presenters or disruptive of the board's discussion and deliberations use of foul language or threats to the board or others in attendance will result in immediate removal from the meeting in addition usd 497 provides public access to our board meetings through live streaming the platform used used for this live streaming has acceptable use rules for its content on its site while the district does not delete or hide board meeting

003videos the streaming platform may elect to do so if the content of the public comment or any other portion of the meeting is found to violate the platform's acceptable use roles thank you for your cooperation in these areas at this time a motion will be in order to approve the agenda do you have a motion this is kay i approve well i approve the minutes uh motion for the minutes okay do you have a second this is carol i second yes kimble yes could do blackwood yes emerson yes jones yes moosebomb yes smith yes motion passes 7-0 next is special recognition we will hear from dr lewis and then shannon kimball will provide some comments for the retirements thank you board president hill good evening everyone in attendance and those that are watching at this

004time of year we normally have numerous recognitions and awards for both students and staff honors and additional awards and so tonight we have representatives from three schools three of our schools with us that will recognize some very impressive honors awards and even some national recognitions and so first i would like to invite free state theater director brian percival to introduce his students and share the information about the honors that were earned by our firebird thespians can y'all hear america uh back in january the we took 15 free state thespians to the kansas thespian festival at the hyatt in century 2 down in wichita we competed in numerous events and we have some honors that we would like to recognize for those we received four superior ratings for our thespis or thespian excellence awards we have

005mary green solo musical julia ruddy solo musical beckett hutchinson solo monologue and mary kade schultz playwriting and then mary kate schultz received the kansas thespians uh playwriting award for larry shu larry shu was a playwright that was born in kansas uh and ken thespians has an award that is recognized for him and then our improv team which a few of our team representatives are here for tonight made it to the final rounds amongst nine teams in the state of kansas and placed in that top nine the students that qualified are over here at the chairs if you would like to stand up these are our four superior ratings and three of these four uh students also participated in improv and all four of them qualified to compete at the international thespian festival this summer in

006bloomington indiana congratulations any of the scholars like to make any remarks i can say this hi i'm mary kay i'm the president of the thespian club and the improv team um thank you guys so much for this recognition it means a lot i know um it means a lot to be recognized like the community and theater and arts have such an importance in our schools and it's really cool to see that recognized and it uh yeah we're really happy for all that we've accomplished [Music] [Applause] thank you so much and i'll if you haven't seen a play at free state or any of our high schools middle schools you're missing out on a treat top-notch everything um from you know the the the set the design the performances just broadway um ready so congratulations to

007our free state thespians next sunseal sunset hill principal jeremy phillip will honor our award-winning staff member i told you a little bit about at our last meeting mr phillip and i am not broadway ready [Laughter] good evening board members uh dr lewis my name is jeremy phillip and i'm the principal at sunset hill elementary and it is my honor and privilege to be able to introduce in the flesh this year's kansas school counselor of the year amanda atkins or as she's known at sunset hill miss ladybug we are just really really excited to uh celebrate um and recognize basically what we get to see every day with miss ladybug she is an incredible part of our family and uh just one of the things that she does is make sure that every student knows that

008there's an adult that truly cares for them she supports our students their families and the staff and so the state finally saw what we knew which is that she is the the number one counselor out there part of her honors she will get to attend a national conference representing kansas and then also she'll be heading to washington d.c next february also to represent kansas as our kansas state counselor of the year so miss ladybug would you like to say anything yes um so excited to be here really excited to get this recognition as well looking forward to representing kansas and lawrence public schools and talking about the good stuff happening here i really appreciate my principal jeremy phillippi is such a supportive principal and jose cornejo who really helps support all the school counselors and

009it is a team effort and i love where i'm at and i love the school i'm at and i love doing what i'm doing and i'm side note miss ladybug because i'm the lady you can talk to if something is bugging you so that's that's why i miss ladybug so thank you everybody i'm happy to be here what a huge honor to have the kansas school counselor of the year right here in lawrence and i think this is the first ever do we verify this is the first ever for lawrence public schools i think so so that is truly remarkable and i'm glad that the state has taken note and now the entire country will take note next february in washington d.c so congratulations miss miss ladybug and finally lawrence high school principal jessica bassett

010joins us to recognize students and staff journalism honors ms bassett good evening board members and dr lewis in the community it is with a great pleasure that i have the opportunity to introduce or present really barbara tholen our journalism and graphic design teacher here at lawrence high school barb as she is affectionately called was chosen as one of the seven member class of 2022 kansas master teachers barbara spent 10 years working as a reporter for the kansas city star and topeka capitol journal before she made the switch to the classroom and began her career at lawrence high school in when we asked barb to describe what would she describe as her mission as a journalism teacher she says i want my students to ask touch questions think critically and vigorously protect their first amendment rights

011she describes her proudest moments not just when her students are recognized but also when they take on the challenging work lawrence high is grateful to have such a passionate teacher who is student focused and who is working to develop the next generation of journalists so it's a great pleasure that i ask you to help me celebrate barbara barb dolan kansas master teacher thank you um i have a few things to go through because we have a couple of awards that we thought we would celebrate all together but um so a couple of short speeches um so i guess first of all i just want to say my students make me look good and we'll talk a little bit more about that why in just a second but i love what i do because of them

012um i remember their drive and their determination and i try to learn the lessons that they teach me um really every teacher should be so lucky to have students who students who inspire encourage them like mine have done mostly i want to say that i work in a school full of masterful teachers my colleagues at lawrence higher dedicated to their craft they're dedicated to our students and i'm a kansas but and if i became a semester teacher i surely work on a full building full of master teachers finally i've been lucky to be inspired by wonderful teachers throughout my life i have just a long list of excellent educators that i've encountered um but it begins with my parents my mom and my dad my mom's here tonight um my children been in edi beauty's

013here tonight they teach me new things every day um and i always appreciate the support of my husband phil who's also here um i finally and she's not here tonight but my dear friend lori folsom who teaches at free state high school um you know proving that you know rivalries can include friendships too but um i can certainly say that lori makes me better every day so thank you now let's talk about other things are we good i'll just just jump right into it so we had we've had kind of a string of good things happening for us um so first off kenneth and kate if you could come up um these we wanted to celebrate our students winning the yearbook are being pacemaker finalists for the yearbook um the journalism staff last year produced

014such an exceptional yearbook that was one of just 58 high schools in the country to be named a pacemaker finalist the pacemaker is the prim preeminent award of the national scholastic press association and students will be recognized for the honor in april in la in the past five years lawrence has been a pacemaker finalist or winner three times for the yearbook and three times for the newspaper it's an honor to reach that bar in the best of times and our students persevered last year to create a book that told a broad story of our students experiences whether they were regularly at school for classes in sports or they were solely logging in from their bedrooms this was largely due the exceptional work of our 2021 editors and chief kennedy mcnally and sophia kaufman this is

015kenneth sophia couldn't be here today um both of those students finished the 2020 yearbook as well before taking on that even more challenging yearbook in 2021 and they really knocked it out of the park during constantly shifting plans game schedules all the struggles we faced last year they were my rocks and i can't thank them enough ken is here tonight with kate o'keefe who also helped make that 2021 yearbook a reality and i'm really really lucky that these two lovely students are both editors of our 2020 2022 yearbook and i know that they're continuing to set that bar exceptionally high so i thank them for that and kenneth i think might say something oh okay if you want i don't really have anything to say okay kenneth's gonna say it in the yearbook okay we're

016good bye you're back okay kyler come on up okay number three last but not least um kyla this is kyle dunn kylie dumb received the state's top individual honor for scholastic journalism in the as a kansas student journalist of the year in his portfolio for this application kyler had to explore and reflect upon all aspects of his work in journalism um from his writing to his leadership abilities it's a massive undertaking that portfolio will be moving on to the national competition he's our state's nominee for the national student journalist of the year here's a little bit of what i read about kyler and my letter of recommendation i said how can i begin to explain just how unique and extraordinary kyler dunn is how can i fully let you know how it's not just this

017amazingly talented journalist that his leadership skills blow me away on a daily basis that the newspaper published this year because of kyle's sheer determination to put everyone on his back and carry them across the finish line and then he pulled this exhausted advisor out of my pandemic malaise and reignited my enthusiasm for student journalism tyler's burke is co-editor-in-chief again this summer when without my asking he took the initiative to cover a school board meeting he attended camp he taught students in-person reporting skills and he encouraged new students to step into more challenging roles maybe we can see our lovely jack over there who by the way i have never like this is the type of job i have i never asked jack to like live tweet a school board meeting he just does it like

018what other teacher has that happen okay so um kyler encourages you students to step into those challenging roles his reporting never shies away from tough topics he is deserving truly of the kansas um student journalist of the year recognition thank you tyler i have a little thing i wrote um there are lots of people that in some way have helped this happen obviously my parents and a ton of other people who are influential in my life but um specifically i'll start with mrs stolen or barb as we refer more often barbara shaped me into the student journalist and the person that i am today none of this portfolio would have been possible without her four years of leadership and support and perseverance i mean there were times where i couldn't fit a journalism class into

019my schedule or i had to fulfill my staff duties in a different class in bar's classroom but throughout it all she was making sure i was in that room and and doing that journalism work and without that perseverance i probably would not be where i am today at all um and all of that talent and passion is clearly demonstrated by her own award also um of course i need to thank my staff and co-editors a few of them are here today um everything i put into that submission of that portfolio was a group effort every single story every single graphic and every editorial decision would have been impossible without the dedication of my staff and the creativity leadership and hard work shown by my fellow creditors i mean this is a great example jack's been

020at basically every school board meeting so anything i put out about school board meeting i'm talking to jack about information that he's gathered i couldn't have done it by all myself final thought i'll leave with everybody journalism is really important at all levels especially during difficult times both locally and nationally and internationally right now we're facing a lot of difficult issues my challenge to everybody read listen and discuss it's more important now than ever thank you [Applause] thank you so much mrs stolen and your amazing scholars if you haven't read the budget i think a lot of times other news outlets local land throughout the state depend on the budget and you're right about jack he's been at every school board meeting every subcommittee meeting and he's on my superintendent advisory council and we just

021met and he told me that he's like the point of contacting the school for anything related to um budget conversation so that's a true testament to the work that you do as an educator mr and so we really appreciate you thank you and that's all i have okay um i have three retirements to recognize this evening first congratulations to rita byer on your retirement please accept the board's heartfelt thanks for your 21 years of service and devotion to the this community in its schools in addition congratulations to brenda waite on your retirement please accept the board's heartfelt thanks for your 11 years of service and devotion to this community and its schools and finally i want to recognize myron graber on your retirement please accept the board's heartfelt thanks for your seven years of service

022and devotion to usd 497 in its schools and your 47 years of service to public education thank you shannon next is a superintendent's report dr lewis awesome um really excited to hear about the work from our district administrators to guide and support our building principles in the report that you were here momentarily as we continue to work our strategic plan and so the data informed decisions report i'm really excited about that and i think you will be as well with some of the data that's shared there i don't have my clicker oh yes i do okay so uh this is the timeline that our executive leadership team thanks to patrick kelly crafted that will allow us an opportunity to kind of look at some of those proposals and requests to have a recommended list of

023cuts from building and district administrators so we've involved our building principles we'll continue to involve those building and district administrators at the direction of the board as we look at those prioritized cuts again to cause the least harm to students we'll try to get this if it's not already posted post it to our website ksb research report released on friday shows a statewide enrollment decline of about 3.4 percent between 2019 and the 2020 school years it also suggests that kansas public schools can expect enrollments statewide to continue to decline from about four a point four percent to one point four percent each year for the next five years uh with a cumulative decrease over the next five years about 5.2 percent the report looked at decreases in the number of students i'm sorry the number

024of children born in kansas each year as well as historical public school enrollment and retention of students from one grade uh to the next i am pleased to acknowledge the exceptional leadership that has been shown by these two individuals kathy branson over at west middle school rebecca weaver at corley elementary school they have been serving as interim principals on the personnel report we are looking to make the recommendation to remove the interim title due to their exceptional leadership in those two buildings it's a reminder it's tuesday is the deadline for a staff retiring under the post employment contributions this is our early retirement plan this is the deadline to submit retirement notifications to hr the district is currently engaging the free state high school community in a survey about the principal search we also have

025invited interested students staff and parents to apply to serve on the interview advisory committees to all of our student musicians and singers who participated last week in the kansas music educators association convention i know that based on our talent lawrence was very well represented free state wrestling team has added two more 6a state titles to their records last year congratulations to free state high school wrestlers including state champion madison gray nolan bradley and matthew markham as many of you have seen in the community our numbers are continuing continuing to decline with the current average daily count of about 27 it's our 14-day moving average and that's down about 11. also our number of current cases is at down from 181. so again i would encourage folks typically when we see these declines we kind of

026let up on our mitigation strategy so i would encourage you to continue to decline practice those mitigation strategies as you know douglas county's health order requiring masks be worn indoors in public places is scheduled to expire this wednesday march 2nd unless the douglas county commission chooses to extend this additionally the cdc released on friday a new tool to help communities decide what prevention steps to take based on the latest transmission data the cdc's covet 19 community levels can be designated as low medium or high and are determined by the number of hospital beds being used also they look at hospital admission and the total number of covet 19 cases in the area on the cdc website the douglas county douglas county is listed at a medium level as is on our county dashboard for a

027covet 19 transmission at that level cdc recommends that you talk to your health care provider about wearing a mask if you are at high risk for severe illness locally here in lawrence public schools our executive leadership team will review these local and national public health updates and communicate with our staff and school families if changes are made to our district covet measures the communities safe routes to school work group will be reviewing requests for school crossing guards this spring march 4 is the deadline to let city staff know if you would like to see a crossing guard in a certain location and the request can be found on the website shown on the screen at usd497.org forward slash crossing guards you've seen this screen before but i really want you to take it in and

028i will tell you i was saddened by the kansas commissioner of education's comments during a meeting last week the comment that he made in my opinion perpetuated a harmful racial stereotype about native americans dr watson called me on tuesday and acknowledged the number of native americans that we have in lawrence acknowledge the work that we've been doing around equity and i do believe that he understands the pain that he caused i believe that his apology and his commitment to learn and to do better is sincere you know one of the things that makes makes lawrence public schools special special is this diversity of students diversity of staff and diversity of families and all of us benefit from a different perspective than our than our own all of us benefit from listening and being in spaces

029with others that come from different backgrounds and cultures and those different backgrounds and cultures are certainly represented in our schools here in lawrence we are so fortunate to have haskell's indian nations university in our community we're fortunate to have them to learn from um to learn with about indigenous peoples and um the different tribes all across the country but not only that the different tribes that are represented right here in lawrence and so i would like to invite dr watson to join lawrence public schools in showing respect showing appreciation for the many contributions of our native americans we as you know we have two school board members uh that are native we have many staff students and families in our school and community not only that we have a large number of native americans here

030in this state and so we honor our native american individuals here in the city in the school system um and as i stated to him when you know better you do better um i reflected on my time first coming to lawrence after working in two large urban areas i assumed that i understood diversity you know but as i began to learn and list listen and then learn there were some things that um i learned that i did better and made some different uh choices in terms of of of words and so um this is a commitment that we all have to make and i know a lot of times we talk about this equity journey that we on and i would encourage to encourage us to kind of refrain from the term journey journey signifies

031a destination and i don't think this is something we ever arrive at and so with that i want to say that um to all of our native indigenous peoples here in lawrence we see you we honor you and we will continue to lift you up and then finally i hope that the negotiations that began today between ukraine and and russia will continue to bring a swift into the conflict that we're seeing in europe that's all i have thank you dr lewis next is the president of the board of education report and i will keep my comments brief so on february 15th i had the opportunity to be on a panel with vice president shannon kimball and dr lewis at the lawrence schools foundation board retreat and we primarily spoke about unanswered questions about the current

032budget situation and we also had an opportunity to learn about the lawrence schools foundation's vision for supporting our students and our educators and last week on february 23rd i had the opportunity to provide welcoming remarks at the bob's dinner and i had never been to a bob's recognition before so it was a great honor to be there and to meet the current and past recipients educators and also thank the bobs for their generosity i believe it's for 25 years they've been providing support to our educators and so it was a wonderful evening and so i appreciate the opportunity for the invitation and that concludes my report next is the public comment portion of our agenda to have a volunteer to read the policy this is carol i can read it the usd 497 board of

033education welcomes public comments and thanks you for taking time to talk to us about our policies and procedures we set aside this time during our regular meetings to hear from the public this is your time to share your opinions however complaints about specific staff or students will be heard by the exec the bar the board and executive section in order to protect the privacy of the individuals to be discussed while you are not required to share your contact information we ask for that information the district staff or the board can follow up with any specific concerns you may have the board president will invite comment on topics not included on the agenda at the beginning of each meeting comments relating to agenda items are welcome after the board has had the opportunity just to discuss

034the topic please limit comments to three minutes thank you carol first is lisa greenwood good evening i'm lisa greenwood library media specialist at west middle school and i'm speaking on behalf of the library media specialists and our library media assistants that serve every student and every staff member in our district as a board you've asked our administrators to provide you with a list of proposed cuts and their impact on students as we address the budget issues we librarians can provide you 30 years of research from 34 states that clearly demonstrates the detriment to students if our district chooses excuse me to further reduce library staff and programs i say further because over the past decade or so we've been asked to continue to provide top-notch instructional resource and technology support that our students and staff

035expect in our schools while balancing an increasing number of responsibilities with reduced budgets and staffing hours we can share specific information with you and district administration showing how since around 2010 library staff fte both certified and classified was reduced while our responsibilities have increased these cuts were always touted as temporary budget fixes and we were told the staff hours and budget allocations could be restored to previous levels if the economic picture was rosier but that's never happened in the six years i've been at west as the librarian i've seen increased responsibilities with no increase in staff hours the adoption of one-to-one devices meant that library staff became on-site go-to for instruction troubleshooting maintenance and everything else that comes with putting a device in the hands of every student and every staff member in our buildings

036librarians have sometimes been assigned to teach classes outside of our regular library duties or assigned advisory classes at the middle school level in addition to teaching and collaborating that we already regularly do at the secondary level the recently remodeled library spaces provide even more teachers and students space for a wider variety of learning activities which means we're now managing more learning spaces and supervising more students in those spaces maker spaces in our remodel libraries also require more materials to budget for lessons and activities to plan and more students to supervise other cuts in the district have shifted even more responsibilities onto librarians and library assistants over the past decade such as staff cuts at the instructional resource center shifting some book processing and textbook duties to school librarians at the same time those responsibilities increased

037middle school lma hours were cut to half time and high schools went from two to one full-time librarian as these responsibilities have increased we've not seen the hours for our lmas increase lmas do so much more than check out and shelve books than i have time to enumerate here we rely on our lmas as collaborative partners in doing the work that keeps our libraries open accessible relevant engaging equitable and safe thank you so much for your comments i really appreciate that lisa thank you thank you next we have alicia erickson hello i am alicia erickson and here officially representing the save our schools 497 organization we understand that this is a long and complicate complicated process and we come before the board tonight to reiterate our desire to work together with the board and with

038the district to amplify all voices as we seek long-term financial health for the district to that end we call on the board to seek more options for cost savings and revenue generation seek more equally distributed cuts this cuts include cuts to the district administration level and also to ensure that individual programs are not crushed while bearing the burden of the financial needs of the entire district and we ask that to foster a transparent and equitable process that allows for creative solutions and broad community participation that equally represents those directly affected we recognize there are various ways that our save our schools 497 organization can help the district and the board as you create and evaluate processes we call on you to include a process for in community engagement we have identified four ways we feel

039our organization can serve as a bridge between the district board and community in the first way we feel we can help with educating and clarifying information within the community we would like to help address rumors and also help with basic clarification of funding sources we can work to rebuild the trust required for success and from you we need transparency and your time number two we can help be a repository for cost savings and revenue generating ideas from teachers staff and community we have had over 300 participants in a community survey that launched just over a week ago and have a more direct survey launching this week that we are specifically asking to amplify the voices of teachers and staff we will publish these results and i'll send this in an email with more details to

040you following up this week we'll share them with you and categorize and vet them as much as possible we see a c establishing an open process for collecting ideas as a critical step in involving teacher staff and community voices in this process from you we need respect earnest engagement and open minds number three we can help organize community volunteers to better support teachers and staff creating a more positive experience and helping with teacher retention we are working on creating volunteer programs at each school to help give teachers and staff more time and support whether that is helping in a lunch room or recess duties or other ways to help for all ages or creating a structure for a repository for substitute plans across the district we will use the save our schools 497 organization to

041amplify voices of teachers and staff from you we need support and ideas and the last one we can help with gathering information when families or staff leave usd 497 and forming a strategy to address this loss in ways to bring people back there needs to be an exit survey when families leave 497 for accurate data and to address bringing families back to the district there needs to be an exit survey for when teachers and staff leave so that we can adequately address problems and increase teacher retention from you we ask for collaboration and a willingness to listen and how else can we all work together thank you thank you alicia next we have injury shimari and kasirian ingera my apologies if i butchered your name good evening and thank you for allowing me to speak

042i am and jerry shimari an elder in my community and i want you to know that we see you this is my offering for the lawrence community to consider the first is credited to author mr james baldwin which i have taken the liberty to paraphrase for this audience children have never been good at listening to their adults they have never never failed to imitate them the second is an observation i know that i'm being recorded i want us to remember that this is always the case when young people are present and the last is credited to no one that i could find in my google search listen to your elders advice not because we are always right but because we have more experiences being wrong thank you so much for your words we will now

043move to virtual it's justin ready to go okay justin can you hear us okay go ahead all right uh my name is uh dr justin i have a phd in lifespan human development from kansas state university and i have a master's degree in marriage and family therapy also from kansas state university one of the top programs in the nation as a marine family therapist most of my work was with children who had been sexually abused i want to talk to you about two words that i worked with each of these children on in their therapy empower and consent they go hand in hand and you are destroying both in our youth by masking them all day every day recently a student had enough of the mass mandate and stood up and said no more i

044refuse to wear a mask she was met with a staff member who said she couldn't possibly have trouble breathing because studies after studies after studies have shown that masks don't interfere with breathing or asthma essentially telling her to sit down mask up and shut up teachers should be cultivating her courage her individuality her voice her fight her spirit instead they do the opposite told to shut up and take it your voice doesn't matter no kid can march out of step and swim against the current where are the parents what values are you teaching your children by keeping them silent and thus compliant extrapolate that into their future and see how that plays out silent and compliant leads to being taken advantage of victimhood and recipients of continued abuse while on the other hand am i

045still on well on the other hand being outspoken assertive and even aggressive helps keep us safe from danger by being confident in setting boundaries limits knowing it's okay to say no and if necessary to defend ourselves against danger and that's good silent and compliant tells children to just take it don't fight it and thus they have no fight in them and are easily taken advantage of is that what you want for your kids or do you want them to be americans do you want to be americans to stand up and fight and proudly say nobody tells me what to do and those that try can go straight to hell because their opinions mean nothing the youth are getting restless i sense it when i stand out on my protest outside your guys building every day

046and they should be getting restless look at the poor examples they have all around them in our community men wearing masks at every turn afraid of their own shadow emasculated to the point that they can't even say no one tells me what to put over my face men allowing other grown men to tell them and their kids and their wives what to do and for how long there are no examples in the community of people standing up for freedom there's no one defending the kids as they continue to fall behind in their classes everyone showing that being an unquestioning follower is better than being their own unique individual these are pathetic values that are we are showing them so yes the youth are getting restless and they need to get even more restless the youth

047today tend to look back on history and see how real oppressed groups fought for their freedoms and the youth today get a sense of identity with that pass oppressed group but they're also disappointed they don't have a real oppression situation that they are in today as well look all around you this is it this is your chance to rise up against these fools and say hello justin compare your generation what is your time thank you is sue available and ready to go okay sue can you hear us sue yourself sue sue can you hear us let's come back to sue and go to amy baumann amy amy are you there hi i so i thought my daughter was going to talk she didn't get to talk but i'll just go ahead and say what i

048was going to say and if it's okay if she can just read what she wanted to read a couple weeks ago then that would be great um new york has just recently made the mask optional in schools and i would hope that we could do that here as soon as the county commissioners dropped the mandate kids have great immune systems if they even get the virus considering so many people have already had it it's ran through everybody i know we do things in our house to prevent sickness that doesn't involve other people having to be inconvenienced like vitamins and a healthy lifestyle and i think everyone should be able to decide for themselves if the masks are good or good a good choice for them because people need to make good choices for themselves that's

049important also so and here's my daughter okay so i wanted to say this a few weeks ago but i couldn't it got cut off yeah i got cut off okay so my name is laina i am a student in the usd 497 school district specifically lawrence it is a bit ridiculous compared to surrounding schools they seem to work their mask mandate around the numbers whereas lawrence has just continuously had masks there are several problems with forcing us to wear masks some of us have a hard time breathing it interrupts class because the teacher has to tell us to pull up our mask even if we are just chewing gum and it goes under our nose it causes anxiety it causes rashes and makes it hard to read facial expression the younger kids are really going

050to be affected by this as they need to see the mouth move to learn how to talk furthermore we have spectacular immune systems designed by nature the majority of us have already had kobit so we have natural immunity built up it is no big secret that there is very helpful and important information being censored while the tv and radio will have you believing everyone is so much more soft it's called fear mongering the lies need to stop and we need to live free wear masks if you want don't if you don't kids should come first because without it without us none of you would be there all right thank you for letting us speak you guys all right thank you was sue still gonna speak can you hear us there we go hi my name

051is sue herring and i wanted to talk to you tonight about the suffering that you're causing our children you've cited cdc statistics to back up your cowardly decisions i wanted to remind you that in 1850s this county was a home base the seat of courage for liberty and freedom i can't help but wonder i wish i could sit down and talk to you guys across the table i can't help but wonder where your courage would have been in the civil war era would any of you had the courage to help with the underground railroad or in world war ii would you have had the courage to help anyone who needed it and back to the civil rights era would you have had the courage to stand for other people's rights based on the what i

052see here and your activities in this county and the harm you've done to kids the answers across the board is no you are ruled by the fear that you're fed from the cdc i guess that's about all i had to say tonight i wish that you would unmask our children and stand for liberty thank you thank you sue next the board will recess into executive session related to public comment shannon would you mind reading the motion please i moved the board of education recess to executive session to discuss student matters in order to protect the privacy interests of the students to be discussed with dr anthony lewis shawna and shauna downing invited to be present and with the board to return to open session in this room at should i give us 10 minutes to

053get there hear the comment and get back okay to resume an open session in this room at 6 58 pm with no action to follow i'll second hill yes kimbu yes kadu blackwood yes yes jones yes nussbaum yes smith yes motion passes seven zero okay the board is back from executive session with no action to follow next on the agenda is board commentary yes couple things thank you erica i just wanted to say thank you to the schools foundation board members and staff for allowing me to participate in the panel at their retreat that erica mentioned during her president's commentary it was great to learn more about how the foundation is working with the district to support our students and our staff and our schools february 19th which is saturday i had the um uh

054i was thrilled to go attend the ribbon cutting for the new mural on the side of u.s bank building it's called sustenance it was a project of van gogh and their apprentice artists this year students from usd 497 high schools were among the apprentice artists who worked on the mural my own student was one of those students so it was doubly exciting to see the work that those students had done and have it presented to the community i also attended the sunflower elementary school site council meeting on february 22nd continue to appreciate the staff and parents that are engaged in that school community and i just wanted to say thank you to the community for your engagement and sharing your perspectives with me i've met with zoomed with and emailed many parents and community members

055over the last many weeks i know a lot of you are still waiting on an email reply from me um please know that i'm working my way through them it's just been um it's been a lot so i continue to respond as i can and i just want you to know i appreciate your engagement that's all thank you shannon anyone else okay uh good evening i kind of want to start off saying that it's always a pleasure to see outstanding educators who are staff families and students support and leadership so i would like to give my congratulations to kathy branson and becky river and their permanent status as head administrators and leaders in their respective buildings it's really awesome to see additionally i want to give a congratulations to russ middle school teacher brian williams

056for putting on a successful production of rock the ages with talented students and crew just like sports our district theater and arts play a significant role in the lives of many students with most years of self-sustaining budgets paid directly by families to support so it's really remarkable what they have been able to do with minimal budget since this last week i have had several experience inside the classroom which i have enjoyed my first was visiting lawrence high school as a guest speaker to speak with our ninth graders about how vast the action of civic engagement civic engagement is and the importance of getting involved now and doing what you can to help your own community based upon your own interest my second opportunity was substituting in your door public schools and learning that having community

057as educators is important to plan and discuss with one another and then the long-lasting stamina educators have to go an entire day with a little to no time for self-care i hope to see that improve over over my time on the board so um so it was a lot of perspective there and lastly i spent time uh with some doing some original playwriting on the history of lawrence kind of celebrating uh specifically uh with our public schools uh writing a scene that depicted samuel wilson the first black male to graduate from central high in 1879 in other scenes of life with board colleague carol in the weekend production coming up of threads of lawrence arts center finally i just kind of want to give a brief ward about last board meeting and general perspectives from

058my perspective extending trust to our administration during this time as a new border board member it's not easy thing to do it really isn't especially when you're learning about the idea of governance versus management um so i i understand and i hear you guys when you're saying you know what's going on you know how how come we're not involved as much as we were during this last phase and at a certain point you have to you have to let our administrators you know do do the work and work with our building leadership and coming up with plans and so i'm as just as anxious and eager as most of you are right now but i'm putting my faith and my trust in our building in our administration in this next step and i hope that

059you can extend some of that trust as well thank you thank you kay hi uh this is carol i just wanted to thank dr lewis and the district for making a statement about dr watson's comments and um i wrote a rather lengthy letter opinion and and i submitted to the lawrence times i did submit that very letter to the kansas department of education members and yeah i'm sure they are buried in emails just like i am i'm doing the best that i can to respond but um and and just like um i'm i'm sad to report i've not heard a response from any of the members and i'm still waiting on that apology from uh randy watson because it's the restorative justice just just doesn't feel it's not something that's just in a vacuum we

060have two native american elected officials right here we're highly educated women and i don't know i just i mean just i don't i'm just speaking out of angers fresh i'm frustrated i'm hurt i'm saddened and and you know my colleague here erica hill she signed in 2020 the douglas county health board that racism is a public crisis and in my letter it does cost the systemic racism costs the united states 16 trillion dollars a year for missed opportunities let me repeat that again 16 million a year 16 trillion dollars a year in miss opportunities and again i'm like i'm just so angry and thank you thank you carol anyone else okay moving on to the approval of the consent agenda do you have a motion shannon i move the board of education adopt the items

061listed on the consent agenda this is k.i second kimball could do blackwood yes emerson yes jones yes nussbaum yes smith yes heel yes motion passes 7-0 thank you next we'll turn it over to dr lewis introduce ann ma from the kansas state board of education yes thank you good evening again typically around this year particularly as it relates to what's going on in the legislative legislature as well as some things that are happening at the kansas state department of education we typically invite one of our state board members to just share any updates uh with us and to address the board and the public at this time so at this time i would call to the sound like i'm calling a witness for a call to the stand and my one of our state board

062members thank you dr lewis and thank you board for having me here this evening it's always good to be here you guys um you have such a great board and i can't imagine what it's been like to be in your shoes the last two years i deal with the high level issues and sometimes that can be daunting got thousands of emails when we were trying to decide you know whether or not just to start school two weeks later or not but that is not nearly as daunting as what you guys have to deal with you and other districts are struggling to come out of covid and figure out what that new normal looks like and hopefully we learned through this process that there are some things we can and should do differently going forward that

063we won't be going back where we were and you guys are doing some really cool uh things with redesign i had a chance to go to lawrence free state and visit some take a tour of the school and visit some classes with dr lewis and you know very exciting stuff so i know there are always bumps in the road the first year you try some new things like that flex mod schedule is like oh but you know you'll get through it and the kids love it i was out at rossville high the other day and they're also doing flex mod but you know it looks a little different when you're doing it with 200 kids than or 100 kids than a thousand kids so anyway i just want you to know that everything you do

064is appreciated by the state board dr lewis sent me a list of topics you guys wanted to hear about and there's a lot to get to so let's do that one of the things you guys want to know about was the virtual education bills because there are several those on the table and you have quite a large virtual school population first before i get into what's going on at the legislature let me tell you something about the general rules over there first nothing ever dies at the legislature and nothing becomes law until you get 63 21-1 that means 63 votes in the house 21 in the senate and one signature or concurrence from the governor so everything's still up in the air and nothing's written in stone at this point also this is the time

065of year where we really have to be vigilant bills are combined where you can't find them they're amended to the point where you don't even recognize them and when they get into conference committee that's where the real sausage is made so stay vigilant kasb does a great job keeping track of all the bills and where they are hopefully you guys get those updates every day and you can follow along in regard to the virtual bills the house k-12 budget committee put three of them together into one 25 12 25 53 and 25 50 are all now part of 2512 and here's what they do as i understand it first it recalculates how graduation rates are calculated for virtual schools if a student is behind schedule for graduation when they enter a virtual school they will

066not be counted for kesa accreditation purposes because you know we want improvement we're looking at those rates they will still count for federal tracking purposes however the bill prohibits virtual schools from offering financial incentives to students to enroll i doubt that that's a problem it increases funding for dropouts entering virtual schools right now if students are 20 or over in a dropout the school gets 709 dollars per credit hour under this bill that 709 dollar rate would also apply to dropouts who are 19 or younger so overall it increases the funding and funds dropouts all the same no matter what their age 2512 was not voted on last week it came out of committee went to the house floor but it was blessed if you will so it did not die on the floor it

067is well alive and well so it can be pursued and i think it will be voted on and probably sent to the senate because the senate had a hearing last week i believe on senate bill 499 that also impacts virtual schools but they did not vote it out of committee so it's still sitting in committee but i think you'll be interested it provides a second count date for virtual school students so that if you have new virtual school students in the spring semester you get a half the amount of money for that student now you don't lose money for students that you had in virtual school in september twentieth and they may have dropped out or whatever so you you can only gain money you can't lose money the way it's written right now it

068also increases state aid from five thousand to fifty six hundred dollars per student now this is the maybe interesting part it says that if a student transfers from a traditional school in one district to a virtual school in another district and they are behind schedule on how many credits that need they need to graduate or below grade level the sending district has to transfer 45.6 of the funding they got for that student to the receiving district now as i said this bill is still in committee but what i'm thinking is senator baumgartner who's the chair of senate education is very likes this bill a lot so i would imagine when the other bill from the house gets over there they'll just work them all in together i want to mention a few other bills house

069bill 2511 contains that cashier bill that allows homeschoolers to participate in acacia events and it also contains 2514 which changed the compulsory attendance rules so that if you went to a home school part-time and public school part-time that would cover compulsory attendance but that bill now has been marked dead the rule is generally unless you had a tax bill or a money bill of some kind and it didn't get passed last week it's supposed to be off the table but what they do is they take all these bills that they kind of want to keep around they send them to an exempt committee to be blessed or touched and then they come back to the floor and away they go now includes 25 53 and 25 50 also that bill now has a provision to

070allow school districts to give credit for learning in non-traditional ways like you know if you did 4-h speech and you know you can pass the speech standards you could get a credit the truth is you guys can already do that it also has that open borders provision in it where students can you know go wherever they want as long as the capacity allows but they don't really define capacity um that one is still alive in the house now house bill 2690 takes away nearly 50 million dollars from schools statewide that now get the high density at risk funding that's for our most you know high density students living in poverty i think maybe that's just free lunch not reduced lunch that bill did not come out at committee but we expect the chair to try

071to work it into the budget somewhere else so we need to be on guard for that one basically that we thought well you know we were all on guard and la had a lot of people writing letters last week to our house members and they basically didn't pass anything out on education last week but they got them all blessed so they're they're sticking around and that just means we're going to have to be even more on our toes about where they go from here another issue i want to talk about was how we were dealing with so many teachers leaving the profession that was one thing you guys wanted to know about of course covet magnified that problem by several powers not only are teach teachers leaving the profession we already know that at the

072end of this year more than 25 percent of superintendents are leaving their posts we're going to have a lot of holes to fill so here's some of the things we're doing about three years ago the state board led a blue ribbon commission study about teacher retention and recruitment there were recommendations for the state board the legislature and for local boards the state board took action on nearly every one of the assignments we had including a new licensure level to increase the number of algebra teachers and pilot programs to increase the number of elementary and special ed teachers the legislature was asked to fund schools at a higher level so we could increase teacher salaries and benefits and even though that had to be court ordered it did happen what i don't know about is how

073much local boards are aware of the recommendations we made for you to look at so i'd encourage you to get that blue ribbon task force report out and see if there's still some things you could do to help us keep and retain teachers i would note that the elementary pilot that we did did not produce many new recruits but the special ed pilot was quite successful what they did was they targeted special ed paras to let them work and go to school at the same time wsu really took the lead on this and they had more than 200 graduates this year so these are working with people you know are quality people and have experience in special ed we're very excited about that we're also trying to develop a new restricted license pathway for elementary

074that looks somewhat like the restricted one in secondary you know where you can pass the practice get into a graduate level program and get your educational pedagogy while you're teaching we'd like to see if we can't develop something like that for elementary we're also encouraging schools to grow your own teachers if you don't already have an education pathway in your high schools please get one and consider starting an educators rising student group if you don't have one of those i think this frankly is about going to be the only way that western kansas is going to save its schools but it also works in metro and and suburban areas too i know that topeka schools have a great teacher ed program that they have at tcalc and as those students come out as seniors in

075high school if they plan to go into education in college they offer them a job when they graduate from high school you go get the certificate we'll have a job for you here when you come back and some districts like kansas city are partnering with organizations to bring people with bachelor's degrees into teaching they have a really amazing mentoring program where they mentor and they do the pedagogy in the evenings it's a two-year program very intensive and they think that's going to work quite well we're going to look at some modifica some modifications next week when we meet but it looks like a very interesting model but frankly retention is the new recruitment you know teachers don't just leave because of money they want to feel valued and that is something that can really be

076dressed here at the local level i mean if we could just stop the bleeding you know we we wouldn't have a teacher um shortage but um there's so much going on i mean teachers are heroes our champions you know everything they've been through the last two years i i know because my daughter-in-law is a teacher but it's just crazy um we i was asked also to talk a little bit about what are the state board priorities right now well the state board is still focused on the success of each child our plans got up ended by kova just like everybody else's did so our staff is now spending a huge amount of time managing those esr payments hundreds of millions of dollars that we're trying to get out to you as quickly as possible but

077we are also trying to make sure that the proposals are worthy and meet federal guidelines because the last thing we want to have happen is that a couple years down the road the feds call and you have to send that money back because that's been known to happen we also put a pause on kisa during covid and let you the schools take a year off if they wanted to but right now we're also starting a new pilot on melding redesign and kisa together some of the schools that just finished their five-year cycle volunteered to do this new model and they're in training this year and we're very excited about what that might look like hopefully a much more streamlined process but our priorities are really the same strong academics supported by kindergarten readiness social emotional

078learning a good individual plan of study a high graduation rate and success after graduation along with that we continue to work on mental health teacher recruitment and retention moving our reading programs to structured literacy which i think you guys are way ahead on if i understand it and work based learning i chair the student voice committee so i've spent more time than most at student conferences and in classrooms talking to students every time i do i ask one question in particular what is one thing students are dealing with that adults should be paying more attention to you know what the number one answer is across the board yes mental health mental health across the board didn't matter if i was at k camp or student council or educators rising or in a class at free

079state where they said stress you know they're stressed and and i think we got some really good ideas from your students about what they're dealing with and how we can help so we need to talk to students and teachers and listen to them and i was just really glad i got to visit with kids that day you have great kids they're amazing i was asked before the meeting to address dr watson's comments and i be glad to do that as i'm sure you know dr watson told a story from his childhood at a recent conference that involved recounting of a hurtful stereotype of native americans in kansas it was wrong of him to do that and in telling that he hurt the very children he's been trying to help for the last 40 years so

080the question came to the state board what to do about it when considering disciplinary action which we do nearly every month for educators whose actions come before the board we look at several things one is the history of work another is the pattern of behavior and a third is whether the person has shown remorse and made amends in this case we found a history of decades of stellar work we also found no pattern of the same behavior in fact we have never had a complaint about dr watson about anything the seven years he has served also as soon as dr watson realized what he had done he immediately started making contacts and apologizing to people across the state the board decided that in this case one mistake was not going to end his career and

081the decision was unanimous we also believe that firing doc dr watson solved little as he needed to be here to rebuild those bridges what we agreed on was to suspend dr watson for a month without pay and ask him to work to restore the relationships he had damaged when he returns we discussed using restorative practices which the state board and i in particular have promoted for years in fact dr lewis and i did a video last year promoting the use of restorative practices here in lawrence and the folks at schlegel high in kansas city are working on another one i really believe in it and strongly believe that healing is more important than punishment and when dr watson returns we will figure out what that looks like for him we have had a number of

082offers to help us through that process from folks in the native american community the process of bringing together the offender the victims and the community will be extensive i promise you that but there isn't also probably an opportunity now for the board to perhaps make some policy and practice changes of a larger nature and we will start that discussion at our march meeting as you know there are folks at the capitol who would like schools to stop discussing race equity diversity anything that has to do with history that makes folks uncomfortable if anything i can say we honestly have much more work to do here in fact the governor's commission for racial equity and justice has just finished their final report and we will get their recommendations at our march meeting the members of the

083tribal council the chairs met last week with dr watson and members of the state board and expressed some things to us that were very important for us to hear about how damaging dr watson's remarks were we invited them to speak to the state board i don't know if that will happen this month but it certainly will happen and we are working together with the governor's office to rebuild those bridges again dr watson has to play a very important part of that because he's the one that has to rebuild those bridges he is the fender we will bring him together with the folks who are hurt and make sure that things happen as we decide a path forward i will let you know what that looks like but we always welcome any input now i've talked

084a very very long time and i'd be glad to answer any questions or concerns that you have hey ann i appreciate you um coming and providing all those updates especially around the bills i've been watching as much as i can to see how it impact our district but um to what you said about meeting with tribal councils they don't need to just come and speak to the state board they need to be at the table yes you come and talk about i'm sorry is there something when you talk about proposing a comprehensive plan for oh i'm leaning on the keyboard there you go what'd you say [Music] i can't hear you of course yeah i think you're absolutely right and they will be at the table i guarantee you that'll be part of the process

085and a couple of other things as dr watson was did come down and apologize to me when i immediately addressed that to some directors a couple of directors at ksde but my response to him was i could not accept his apology because it was hurtful and it impacted students and other tribal leaders that had communicated his statement to me some of the things that i shared with dr watson is publicly acknowledging the comment which he has done i think it's just more than apology because tribes have been apologized for decades so i think there needs to be some concrete actions behind dr watson's comment the other there's a couple of other points i'd asked him to consider was create an action plan for self-learning and one of the things that i pointed out to him

086was the governor's commission on racial equity and justice report to review that and i would even ask the board of education to review that and have the discussions among yourselves about racial equity in our state when it comes to students and also commit to removing the use of native american mascots and related imagery and public education settings that is also in the crej report i'd also asked dr watson to hire a cultural competency consultant to address the passive aggressive behavior in ksde towards native people and people of color lgbtq and women and i also shared with him some of the experiences that i've heard about and have seen myself using the arrowhead chop when the chiefs were when the football team is playing the kansas city chiefs which is highly inappropriate for ksd staff to

087do again those were the four points that i had asked dr watson and i'd also asked the board of education to release a comprehensive plan for improvement not just for dr watson but for ksde yeah i guess i wasn't very clear but that is our plan we're hearing the report from the the crej this month so that can be part of part of our thinking and and most of our day on wednesday will be spent just talking about where do we go from here and what does the bigger plan look like and we've invited the uh tribal council to be involved i appreciate that but there are also an amazing staff on their within ksde that has cultural competency training that would be able to help lead those discussions those internal discussions yes thank you

088appreciate that this is carol i was a part i'm a part of an active member of the kansas association for native american education and we crafted a letter a statement if you will of a list of in suggestions for the ksde and dr watson and that can be found on lawrence times as well and um i do believe it was emailed to you all but um to that end i i for years i protested at the chiefs games because i know how damaging i'm a licensed social worker so i can tell you about the and i'm so glad you brought about mental health because that's um i'm a therapist and i can tell you about the damaging effects and i can i could probably teach a class on it but i can tell you about

089the damaging effects that mascots have on our students and i it's it's hurtful it's harmful and again i point back to the public the racism is a public health crisis and erica will tell you because she signed that the boy the she signed that back in 2020 the the declaration from the douglas county health board but um no i'm just i'm just so i'm grateful you're here and you know i do i i feel for dr watson i do because he has been disenfranchised of a good quality public education because i've lobbied for several native american bills and i can tell you that every time i go there it's i have to start from the beginning of scratch and people are often amazed that i'm a sixth generation kansan because i've been here before kansas

090was a state and people are often amazed when i talk about treaties in the gym you go back to our treat of 1854 washington and we would then we have social welfare agreements and clauses in our treaties and if you go to the the constitution article 6 section 2 states clearly that treaties are the supreme law of the land so i have to do that every time so i would like to see that embedded in our curriculum at the state so this doesn't happen to have happened to dr watson it's exhausting going to the lobby every time yeah well you know a couple years ago maybe about three years ago representatives alkaline nguyen had a bill on requiring culturally relevant pedagogy in all the schools we said you know if you really want to get

091something done you don't pass a bill you come to the state board so they came to us and we supported their efforts and for two summers they provided some amazing training it was more like a teach the teacher kind of thing but it wasn't very well attended and so that's kind of on my list to do more culturally relevant pedagogy in the schools and find out what could we do differently than what they tried those two summers to expand that but my list is kind of long i mean uh dr lewis will probably tell you i've been interested in racial justice now for a while restorative practices equity we did a video on equity as well and i'm just not going to stop doing that because the folks at the capitol don't get it or

092it makes them uncomfortable they're going to be a lot more uncomfortable before we're done um [Music] so i want to note that in addition paula also has is a social worker and has mental health training i was i was very disappointed by the outcome of the state board's actions related to randy watson and i was most surprised that there was a unanimous decision that fell in the face of the request of the governor that he resigned so it's hard to understand a commitment to racial equity when that's the vote and i wanted to point out the um kansas association of native american educators that carol mentioned in their statement they asked for curriculum reform that respects and affirms indian indigenous peoples and nations and i think this is an opportunity for action in the face

093of a state legislature that is clearly opposed to supporting schools in their equity work it was deeply troubling to me that that was the outcome of that vote well your second point there i think was what i was trying to address with the culturally relevant pedagogy i think will address what you were talking about um i think i just have to reiterate what chairman porter said the governor had no business weighing in but we would have no business voting the way you did i just i'll disagree like i said we considered a number of factors and to us one bad mistake would not end a 40-year stellar career and we were unanimous in that we felt like firing him solved nothing in fact if he's gone how does he come back and build bridges it

094doesn't happen we need him here facing up to what he did and and i think that's going to be the best resolution and i'm sorry you disagree but as uh you know a fellow board member when you have those tough decisions you take all the information and in this case it was unanimous but we just think the governor was wrong thank you any other comments or feedback thank you so much ann thank you guys appreciate it next on the agenda is the new ela resource um and patrick kelly is coming up okay good evening i'm patrick kelly chief academic officer and if you're looking at the slot but you're not looking at the slide let's see i know the suspense is killing you yeah i did it on here let's go ahead and switch that

095over because that's going to be okay all right so we'll try that again i'm patrick kelly chief academic officer and you'll see on the slide it says chris hayes i'm not chris hayes chris hayes is our elementary curriculum specialist she's done an excellent job of working with a large group of stakeholders when it was to consider a new elementary ela curriculum resource we're bringing that recommendation to you this evening and chris is going to walk you through the process and how we came to the recommendation that you have before you tonight chris thank you i do have notes today because i want to make sure i didn't leave anything or anybody out as we're going through things so the first thing i want to do is thank you for the chance to be able to

096tell you about all the work that was done by so many teachers and administrators to really put forth the effort to find something that's really going to work for us and our kids i also want to [Music] let you know that the money to pay for a curriculum resource does not come out of general funds it is special fund that come that is used that is funded through textbook fees that parents pay and that's where the money is coming from i know in the budget time that we have right now i wanted to make sure that it wasn't something else we have to add to that the district curriculum instruction assessment team is recommending the purchase of a six-year contract with benchmark advanced 2021 to be used beginning next fall i can't say enough about

097all of the teachers and administrators that did all this work to make this happen it was expertise dedication commitment and they really put forth the effort and and shine at what was going on very quick timeline in 2019 the kansas state department of education approved recommendation of dyslexia which also includes using structured literacy that's a shift for us in lawrence we've been a balanced literacy district for many many years and the instructional strategies of components of structured literacy is something new for us our current res research resource is reading street and in 2021 that was discontinued so they don't publish it anymore we no longer have online access to anything that was part of that then in may of last year we started creating the process to be able to look at new resources i'm

098going to talk a little bit more about the adoption committee the pilot committee and the teachers that did the work with that information about the adoption committee up there again most of the members on that team were teachers that came together we started coming together in may after school worked in the summer the resources we looked at the 14 resources we were really focusing in on those components for structured literacy we were using some guideline from ksde about checklist and what to look for they narrowed the resources down to three for us to pilot that is benchmark advance ckla which is core knowledge language arts and open court and within those um those three that committee did take those through the csrc the culturally sustainable resource criteria we had sample materials so we couldn't look

099through everything but we did go through what we had to be able to make to take information from there the pilot committee then was formed most of the people on the committee were from the adoption committee as long as some additional people involved with that as well they created a timeline we want to make sure that we get resources to our teachers by the time school starts next year there's a lot involved with that in getting them to our irc and getting them processed so they're in teachers hands and so they have manuals in their hands before may when they walk out some teachers want to look at those and start digging into that over the summer we appreciate all of the work from those two committees that did a lot of work to make

100all of this happen the pilot teachers there's 18 pilot teachers each one of them piloted one resource starting on october and then they officially finished in the end of february just a couple weeks ago however most of them are continuing to use those resources so that they don't have to change and kids don't have to change into into another resource as well we were limited in the grade levels we piloted kindergarten first and fourth grade we had a limited number of subs we could use to get the teachers trained in the new resource there was also a limited number of teachers who were willing to do this work during a challenging time in education in their buildings as well the let's see when they were using the resources they were able to take some notes

101about anything within the resource that didn't align with the csrc taking some notes on those and making adjustments um to like use this photograph or we're not going to read this story kind of a thing but there weren't very many that i've heard of but it's some they've only taught a couple of units so they haven't had a chance we haven't had a chance to look through everything the admiration i have for those 18 teachers is immense the extra time that they took out they had to prepare subs when they did the training the time to meet after school to evaluate the resources the time that they spent learning a new resource and how that's going to work with their kids and they really taught it with fidelity to be able to see what was

102going to happen and that was a huge piece on their part they were assisted by learning coaches and a lot of that work too and it was incredible the dedication that they showed the pilot committee then looked at the data after they filled out the evaluations and we saw that open court scored significantly lower than the other two so those that information is not on a couple of slides coming up both benchmark and ckla are very rigorous and that was one of the first things especially with fourth grade that i heard a lot is that it's very rigorous the level of reading the text complexity is challenging for our kids and realizing that fourth graders have not had this moving up through the ranks and the teachers realize that if they've had this along the

103way it wouldn't be as much so they did a lot of scaffolding support to make that work for their students kindergarten and first especially with the foundational skills that both of these programs were able to provide they were very pleased with what was happening with their kids and the progress that they saw the pilot committee the majority of the committee chose ckla as our to be recommended benchmark came in as a second choice but the people on the committee said that they could support either one of those the budget like i said earlier the the funding for curriculum materials comes out of the curriculum instruction budget and cindy's going to talk a little bit about what that looks like and where those money and where that money comes from good evening cindy frick executive director

104of finance the district curriculum budget is paid for out of the student materials revolving fund and that the revenues in that fund come from student materials and the student fees primarily the books materials and technology fee which brings in about 800 000 a year the expenditures cover all district curriculum all ages all subjects textbook workbooks online resources as well as the new adoptions when they come up and so our cash balance has been declining the last couple years it's been declining a couple hundred thousand dollars a year this year um when we proceed with this adoption if that's what you choose we'll be spending about 1.5 million approximately in this fund and so we will be having um watching this fund very closely for future purchases that are needed compared to cash flow on hand

105thank you this is a summary of the quotes that we receive from benchmark and ckla for three years five years six years and seven years one of the things i do want to say is that the open court quote for six years was 1.3 million approximately because that's not on the table we looked at what would work best for our kids we looked at a six-year commitment we get a discount when we do more than uh one year at a time also that works within our curriculum review cycle to do six years when you're looking at the numbers the one piece that might be a little confusing if you look at the seven years on the very bottom and under ckla the number 953 000 that only includes three years of consumables and the others

106the others represent the consumables for all six years or all five years or all three years or whatever there was a significant difference if you look at the six-year quote between ckla and benchmark it comes comes to in a message i'd put out last week i put the number 520 000 because that was a projected discount that we might have gotten if we were going to do that the the quote from benchmark and ckla for six years also for benchmarking include 11 professional development days from the trainers and ckla it was eight days there was some feedback from different people in the community different teachers and things about ed reports and how benchmark if you look at the yellow column there the benchmark is partially meets the expectations for building knowledge both of them both

107ckla and benchmark met the expectations for text quality ckla met the expectations for building knowledge as well on the last column where it says usability rating there's an n a there for benchmark because that that's a program that was totally revised over the past few years they did a pilot for two years and piloted across the nation different places and then they launched their new program officially last fall 2021 so it hasn't had enough time yet to get a usability rating on there but wanted to make sure you understood what that was also the benchmark under building knowledge the yellow column there there's a scale at the bottom and they are at the upper end of that scale for um partially meet expectations we've received feedback from teachers that that are excited to have benchmark

108they've used it or heard about it from other people from the teachers that piloted it we've received feedback of people that are disappointed that we're not using ckla and people that are disappointed that we're not following with the pilot committee recommended does benchmark have everything we want it to no but it's it has it's not as strong in phonological awareness we can supplement that with hegerty resources that we already have in place that are paper copies that we don't need to buy more of it doesn't have as many as decodable readers we can supplement that if needed with raz kids which has some decodable readers with it it has leveled readers and i've seen fourth grade teachers using those as skill based and not as a leveled reading type of small group and been very

109successful with that the district curriculum instruction assessment team would like to recommend ckla for our new ela resource it is our first ckla was our first choice however with the cost we feel like benchmark advance is a good second choice i had a couple of teachers lined up to come and talk tonight however one of them is working i couldn't get off work and the other one is out of town but a couple of things that i wanted to share from from some of the notes was they thought that it was a comprehensive curriculum they've seen a lot of growth in how students listen converse ask questions about the text the anchor charts used to help us guide and they are able to refer to them more frequently for comprehension strategies the routines unit is

110something that helps them learn of what how to talk with peers how to listen what routine should look like and sound like models the jobs of scholars and teachers are different during time difficult during different times a lot of opportunities you respond through throughout the ela block we found it easy to implement kagan strategies and focus note-taking strategies through avid part of the piece that they had trouble with was the teachers manuals do not have the standards written right in the teacher's manual there's a separate document that does that and that was that was hard for our teachers because they are so standards focused so that's something that we would have to make sure that we have very clearly lined out for them this teacher also said they were a big fan of the wide

111array of texts that were featured in each unit there's a lot of leveled readers for each unit that align with topics the kids were engaged with the program there were opportunities to dive into fiction and non-fiction with purpose and focus they loved the nonfiction texts and started asking really great inquiry-based questions the fiction stories were fun to them fun for them to read and we're easy for them to recall there's also video examples available through the online resources which is like a professional development piece it explains and models different approaches encouraged with the curriculum the other thing that i wanted to say is that ckla was one program that we almost didn't pilot because we thought it was too different and the adoption committee had really looked at it and thought this is too different

112it's too hard they had some other concerns with it others really wanted to pilot it which is why we did three instead of two one of the teachers who didn't want who had a lot of concerns about it ended up piloting it and after four days she thought it was the best so i think that speaks a lot to having a pilot program you don't see everything when you just get samples thank you all right are there any questions thank you kristen appreciate your your report any questions we saw the recommendation is to adopt the pilot committee's second choice benchmark advance 2021. so any questions for kristin possibly patrick and cindy um so whoever it applies to yes great um well matt is it okay if i go sure um so at one other point

113in my um career on the board i've disclosed this um so i'm a person with dyslexia and my kids also have dyslexia one of them does and as probably i would guess as one of my parents um i'm trying to understand how so this really matters to me but it's trying to unpack your language so that i understand what i'm voting for because i'm really uncomfortable voting for the second choice and trying to understand budgetarily what that second choice means and translations for individuals learning to read and our students learning to read so can you talk a little bit about on the first slide there's a component about dyslexia and then you talk a little bit about supplementing with coding using another product i think i understood or maybe i misunder can you just talk

114a little bit from your expertise about how that will be impacted if we don't select the more expensive option so with with structured literacy it is very explicit systematic program which both programs have also when we took both of those through the checklist from ksde about structured literacy they were both they both met those marks ckla was stronger in some areas one of them was they were they they had a more they had a more robust program for phonological awareness and our hegerty program that we have now that teachers have been using for a couple of years that would be something we could supplement to address that issue does that answer your question it does um yeah i'll i'll defer to shannon now i know there's additional questions and i think i know the directions

115hers will go if not i'll ask them later thank you erica um patrick or cindy d can you tell me when was the last time that we increased our fees for the revolving materials fund i can't tell you the exact year that we increased them but we haven't increased them in quite some time we have had some discussions about increasing those fees as we've discussed that you know that there's a tipping point there with families currently we don't have families who pay those fees some are waivered out others just choose not to pay them and we can only assume that that's a difficult financial situation so just raising the fees doesn't necessarily mean we'll actually raise the money we could actually make an argument that we might lower the amount of money that we get

116from raising those fees so that's something we usually approve those fees in july and that's something we could have a conversation with the board about at that time um because it you know it gets into a lot of our equity work and what our how how we support our families um in need so it's a really it's a it's a tricky situation to try to to use um fee based um you know doing curriculum resources through fee base okay and i guess that's that's why i mean i'm definitely aware of all the things that you just said but that's why i asked the question because i tried to think back through my board experience and i'm not sure i recall ever raising that particular fee so that would be 11 years and this particular board

117item has caused me to think about that because like kelly i'm pretty uncomfortable with going with our teacher's second choice in this instance particularly given the amount of emphasis that the state department is putting on structure literacy and the amount of emphasis and scrutiny that we are under from both the state department and frankly the legislature around reading achievement mastery by third grade and improving scores for our at-risk students and so i'm glad that we're going to be talking about that i think it's if we are going to rely solely on revolving materials fund to fund our curriculum purchases i think we have to talk about that especially if it's true especially if my memory is true that we have not raised that fee in 11 years i guess uh i'm curious uh did we

118did we give dca's to any of these classrooms that were piloting these programs during the time that they were doing the to that pilot one i see zach raising his his finger one uh what did the what did the um assessment data look like that was between the different products do did we pull did we pull out that data it's too small of a sample size and that i mean it's just one data point so we we looked at it but the information there we're not able to really glean on what outpour outperformed another one okay that's fair thank you um [Music] and i also had the same question that kelly had noted when you were describing the differences between the two programs and you mentioned that we would have to supplement benchmark with hagerty

119and razz kids would we have to provide would we have to continue using or purchasing those supplementary programs if we went with the other um with the committee's first choice so i'll check with chris i don't i think we decided we wouldn't need to do razz which is something we do now and the dollar amount on that is 20 is it 62 or 26 i get them backwards i think it's 26 000. so your 67. 67 000. okay so you spread that out over the six-year contract and and still i mean the big challenge because we were first we were all in with ckel ckla but when we started to look at all the other requests for resources and you've seen that curriculum review timeline spending 1.5 million to have those resources would set back

120so many of our other areas i'm going to check with chris but i'm i'm pretty sure the concerns or the differences wasn't necessarily that it wasn't going to be able to teach kids those basic skills for reading that are so crucial it may have been just the amount of resources or the types of resources that were there was really what divided it between one and two we're just trying to balance some different values there that are coming up about being thoughtful about all the different areas that need those dollars so we're thinking ahead to high school social studies which hasn't been renewed in a number of years in high school science which hasn't been renewed in a couple years certainly if we had if money was not a concern if finances were not a concern

121we would go with first choice but in this class it is a concern and so that was something we thought we had to consider that probably doesn't make you feel any better and i get that but i think we have a responsibility you give us that responsibility to look at those overall budgets and the dollars that are there and make the best recommendation to you um i think my my last question is maybe more of an evaluative one for you patrick so one of my concerns about going against the recommendation of the teachers that piloted these programs is that there will be a great deal of lost opportunity cost when we try to roll out a curriculum that our staff is not as excited about using and i just you know i wonder if we

122will struggle with effectiveness of of the choice when we say to our staff thank you for your input but we're not going to give you the resources you've asked us to give you now please do this instead um i guess what would you would you say in response to that so i i think i think for one all of our staff need to be involved in the conversations when it comes to budget you know and what we can what we are able to do with the dollars that we have um and i i guess i would i would push back a little bit on we told you what we wanted and you didn't get it for us you had 14 different options that you looked at and many of those we dismissed thanks to the

123great work that happened with teachers we paid teachers for piloting that you know those teachers that did choose to pilot they were paid to do that work and and i certainly understand that no matter what we chose tonight there were some that maybe chose benchmark as their first choice and that they could possibly say this wasn't the thing i wanted and we may hear a different story if we didn't if we didn't recommend see um benchmark tonight if we recommended something different i think what what my responsibility is as the chief academic officer is to look at the big picture not just at one resource and seeing like how does this play into it if i asked our elementary teachers and said look here are the two differences and costs you know how would we

124want to spend that i don't know how they would answer and quite honestly i think if we had had a little more time we might have done that but we have to hit this march first deadline or we won't have materials in the fall we've heard that before and i think you have heard some of that from teachers before of we're trying to roll out a new resource we're not getting the professional development at the beginning of the year we don't have all the resources we've worked very closely with publishers to make sure that they would have those resources here for august to do that we had to get to march 1st so we made a choice there whether to take this back to the the pilot committee back to the adoption committee and sort

125of walk through the two financials or do that as a curriculum instruction and assessment team we chose the latter due to the timeline so i do recognize that and i appreciate that um and and certainly with all the money in the world and all the time in the world we could we could do a better job for everybody but we do have those constraints there were people that um chose ckla as their first choice were there votes for benchmark as the first choice so it wasn't a unanimous decision necessarily it was the majority but they said that they could support either one okay all right thank you that was my point that i was gonna talk about so he said there was 14 options and these are the top two yeah i think yeah i

126think that's right we started with 14 and the adoption okay so the top two options out of 14. and then um in the notes here it did say that the committee agreed that either program was acceptable and so when we talk about a percentage of staff that is not excited about benchmark what percentage of staff is that like is it the majority is it yeah that would be a great number to know wouldn't it that would make decisions a little easier and unfortunately not every teacher piloted the the uh resource not every teacher you know we just don't have we would then have to buy all three resources right and have enough time to do that that's why we have committees that represent those teachers and take that responsibility very seriously but i'm sure you

127have all served on a committee before and and sometimes there's differences of opinion at the end but and we tell them this is their recommendation and then curriculum instruction assessment makes the final recommendation to the board because we do have to include budget as as a factor in that decision okay thank you any other comments or feedback before we get consensus yeah so i'm gonna i guess my i'm trying to look through my notes of questions i got about this so can you tell me about matching the phonic sequences i and i feel like i'm asking something outside of my i'm nervous about this this particular vote in a way that i haven't normally been and i'm trying to ask informed questions um based on research i was able to do so if this question

128does not come out well please forgive me but we did get comments around decodables again from kids a to z to teach benchmarks advance that they'll not match phoenix or phonic sequence can you talk about that does that make sense it does so the resource will have has a both resources have a scope and sequence right an explicit systematic is the scope and sequence piece raz is set up so if you go in and and you want some more decodables for whatever phonics skill that you're working on you can choose them okay so you can choose which one that would match what the resource has for the systematic for the scope and sequence piece okay all right so if i could just add just as a reminder this is a resource for our talented teachers

129one of the questions i used to ask as principal in a district that was heavily focused on structured literacy was talk to me about how you would teach reading using a cereal box and so the good teachers that really understand how to teach reading were able to answer that question now as they indicated that this is not our first choice i kind of look at it as a cadillac and a ford right both vehicles will get us to the destination there are some features on the cadillac that we would love but the ford will get us to the designation and right now we have a forward budget you know and i think this is a part of the overall big picture of some of those conversations around you know acknowledging that there will be some

130loss as it relates to some of these budget decisions this is one of them while i would love to go with the first choice of our teachers i had a conversation with a teacher friday about this um but when we look at our budget we just can't you know you're looking at other areas as it relates to curriculum that we need to use these dollars on as well it's probably indicated looking at the big picture um it's something that's really impactful for us that's helpful thank you it's a reminder that um we've asked the district to recommend budget cuts um but while keeping the integrity of our curriculum that's something that we're very passionate about and so the board has directed district leadership to find seven million dollars from the budget and from what i

131understand this what they presented and what the final recommendation was from the committee was choice number two out of 14. that's how i understand the situation so are we yes but from my understanding this particular item is not um it doesn't come out of general funds it comes out a separate fund so it's kind of almost separate issues is that correct yes this is using the textbook materials fund which is its own fund exactly for this purpose okay okay thank you for that clarification so are we ready to make a motion before we do that i want to add a little clarity to what i the point i was making it's if we're asking the district to bring recommendations it's not always going to be the top tier cadillac if you will because that's not

132where we are right now so even though these funds won't affect that we will have decisions in the coming weeks that it will and so using this as an exercise to get us in that mindset if you will of yes we'd love the cadillac but we can work with the ford going off of dr lewis's analogy so just keeping that in mind as we're making decisions going forward so with that do we have a motion anyone would like to make as outlined in board docs if not we can [Music] what's the timeline for a decision remind me please yeah we really wish we could wait if we choose to wait if you want to think about it some more if you want to come us to come back with a different recommendation we could do

133that we can not we would not expect that materials and professional development would be available in preparation for the 2223 school year we are currently making it work as you saw in chris's presentation in july of 2021 did i get that right chris yeah the current resource we have reading street was no longer available so we added hegerty last year we really had hoped to bring this to you last year but just our teachers told us no we can't spend time working on this and so we've been making it work so far um and if we were to delay tonight we just couldn't we couldn't assure that we'd have that in time for august okay so lots of silence on the board so what's the recommendation from the board just talking about what would you

134be comfortable with given the timeline that patrick just spoke about can i i'm gonna ask a budget question um so shannon asked to raise the question related to next year which is not a vote we can take tonight about fees we don't have time to do that so i'm asking are there other funds that we could use in the interim if we wanted to get the curriculum that we felt most confident about and the answer might be no but i want to double check that the other option is to transfer from general fund okay into textbook fund and since we have a lot of cuts there it would just be an additional amount that we would have to add to our cut list thank you sorry i'm looking for the motion personally uh so just

135kidding i'm looking for the motion so you're looking for it yeah that's exactly right okay the language on it okay so just give me a second it may be a really long second carol to you yes this is carol i moved the board of education approved the purchase of benchmark advance 2.5 grades kindergarten through fifth grade classroom thirty copy package and digital six year contract in the amount of eight hundred eighty two thousand dollar eight hundred eighty two hundred and ninety nine hundred dollars to be paid from the student materials or volume fund elementary curriculum and instruction budget this is ki second cadoo blackwood yes emerson yes jones no newspam yes smith no hill yes kimble no all right oh i started with kaduba motion fails what's four i count wrong i'm sorry i think

136it passed i'm sorry motion passes 4-3 hey um president hill could i explain my vote thank you um first of all thank you patrick and chris and all of the staff who worked on this i want you to know that my no vote is not um not a reflection on what i think of the value of the work that you've put into this i this one really has been hard for me i do not reject a recommendation from our staff in this area lightly however it is my belief that given the the emphasis that ksde and the legislature and our district have put on third grade reading achievement as the pro one of the most important things that we could do for our students to improve outcomes to increase graduation rates ultimately i felt compelled

137to cast my no vote because i wanted to emphasize how how i feel that we should be prioritizing this particular curriculum decision probably above all others in terms of the resources that we're choosing to do this work because it is so foundational to everything else that we're doing so i thank everyone for the work that they have done and i just wanted to share my thinking behind why i ultimately chose to vote no on the motion thank you hey thank you next on the agenda is data informed decisions dr zachary conrad good evening board i'm dr zachary conrad we're going to be reviewing our process that we've put in place if you'll remember in the november board meeting we had discussed some of the things that the district was doing around data informed decisions and

138tonight we'll be pleased to hear from building administrators and some staff on the work that they're doing in the building around data informed decisions we will hear from early childhood schwager elementary and southwest middle school after that we'll also review some graduation data so data informed decisions are are based around these two points we use data to inform all instructional decisions we develop systems that support student-focused database making you remember at the november board meeting i had this quote up there action without vision is only passing time vision without action is merely daydreaming but vision with action can change the world we are attempting to put our vision and action together with this plan so we established some goals during the summer time where buildings were able to select from these goals we are working

139with the buildings to make sure that they are smart goals we do this in three different ways first we have these one-on-one touch bases i meet with building administrators and their teams monthly to make sure that they have the data and support in place we have check-ins three times a year where they are able to come and we're going to hear about three of those buildings in in the check-ins that we recently had with them and then they also have the opportunity to get ongoing feedback reviewing that data with their staff and blts i shared this timeline before and so we had the building goal check-ins in january and actually it bled into february a bit um and one of the things that we focus on is making sure that that data is available it's

140accurate it's accessible and most importantly it's actionable and so this is what we're going to hear tonight from our building administrators on how this process is working within their buildings so first i'd like to invite esther up and her team to review a few of the things they're doing and then following esther will have dr comfort and his team and then dr miles and her team my name is esther kotwitz i'm the early childhood coordinator and building administrator for kennedy early childhood center and the people who have come with me tonight are trish wills who is an early childhood special education teacher and jill anderson who is a general education early childhood teacher in our pre-k readiness classrooms so thank you for having us come tonight to talk to you a little bit about data

141informed decisions that we're making we're emerging in this process we've not mastered it yet and so what i do want to do as i go through this is give you a little bit review of where we're at availability of data i will say that i've been here this is my third year and when i came on board with lawrence public schools i was impressed by the amount of data the early childhood teachers in both general education and special education were collecting it was a lot of data about individual children and groups of children so i think that the department is strong in that but what we're working on is taking that data and making it usable for everyone to not have teachers working individually around children or even with teams but giving us the opportunity

142to compare data and make decisions for the whole department the accuracy of our data is important i believe that the accuracy of data was important for all teachers anyway but what we're doing is we're allowing some consistency and fidelity on how we collect that data and how we use it and then as we go into the spring we'll be looking at accessibility of data across teachers and across departments so that we can make decisions about what we're doing with state standards the priority standards that we've identified are those still the priority standards going into 22-23 and then how do we communicate with each other using that data when we want to make changes to curriculum curriculum use focus i believe that our focus right now is viable and will continue and those are focused on

143social emotional skills and development and then also working toward that third grade goal for reading for children and then are we actionable i hope that we can address this and be very strong with actionable around our data by fall again we're emerging in this and continuing with professional development and also collaboration among teachers and related service providers to get to being actionable in a way that anyone could step in and pick up on that data use so i would like to have the two teachers talk to you a little bit about how they use the data jill is a gen ed teacher i get to go first jill anderson good evening as a gen ed we have really worked hard this year especially in the fall to bring our program to look at those priority

144standards kansas has riggers early childhood standards and we've prioritized those and so that we can look at those throughout the whole program because we are the year before kindergarten and we want our students to be kindergarten ready then we look at those standards that we have and and looked at them compared to the kindergarten standards because because where we are is the end of may where we want them to be in august so that's where we started and we worked really hard on that general ed we kind of work as the whole class we look at those standards we look at where we are with our data amongst the classrooms but even then in the personal classrooms more of those small groups and where they are and how we can move our students to get

145ready for kindergarten hi trish wills early childhood sped in the sped world especially in the early childhood level we use our data to drive literally every decision we make in the classroom and the data that we take on our students is important in several ways it's important because it gives us a look at each individual student and helps us determine [Music] if their iep goals currently are what they should be if they're appropriate if we need to change them how are they doing on those goals what kind of progress are they making we also take that data and look at it because our kids are at such a range of skills three to five years with exceptionalities we're talking about a huge range of of skill levels so we use that data to determine how

146are we running our classroom and how how are we meeting the needs of each student not only individually but also as a group so as jill was saying we look a lot at those ready to learn skills to prepare them moving into kindergarten so we use that data to really determine how are we laying that groundwork as their first stop as most of these families first stop in the public school system how are we using that data to lay that groundwork so that um they're meeting their their need they're making progress on their goals while they're with us but they're also um becoming ready to enter the the kindergarten stage and and move on from there so data is pretty huge and we're pretty proud of the work that we've put in and i think

147um yeah so we've talked a little about you know where we are in our process for gathering data using data and making informed decisions i hope that we'll be invited back next fall to actually bring some data give you some specific information about what we've learned around child growth this year year in preparation for kindergarten and for students who are three and will continue with us next year as they're four years old and then we'll be able to share that data and then also reflect on what we'll be doing different for 2002 to based on that thank you good evening i'm jared comfort principal at schweigler elementary school uh we are privileged and appreciative of the opportunity to talk with you tonight also have with me chris kassen our instructional coach and also sheri murray

148our first great one of our first grade teachers at schweigler who also is a pilot teacher this year for the ela resource that you already talked about we just kind of wanted to talk to you about our processes as we built them in our school the first one being just our goals and we were able to with the guidance of the district meld our two goals the cohesive and guaranteed curriculum goal with our data informed decision making goal and so really by putting those together the process is pretty seamless and so kind of with our work with our plcs our professional learning communities to build our common formative assessments utilizing our standards work and then coupling that with the expectation of student achievement and proficiency that's kind of how that system works to help support

149our students and support our teams chris is going to talk to you mrs caston is going to talk to you about our plcs and how our teams work and then also uh how she and i help support those teams so hello good evening like you said i'm chris kassan the instructional coach at schweigler and a quick overview of what our plc looks like our teachers use that wednesday collaboration time to meet his teams and they plan their instruction based off of the data that they're collecting we model we use the model called the 15 day cycle just to replicate our where we're going our structure and so we give a common formative assessment of cfa at the beginning to see where we are with those standards and then we base our instruction we that drives

150our instruction moving forward and then along the way we give other cfas to to have checkpoints to make sure that we're on track to meet that standard and meet that benchmark and during that wednesday collaboration time dr comfort and i make rounds and we are on a abc rotation so like the first wednesday he's in three different classrooms meeting with those grade level teams while i'm with the other three that way we can make sure that somebody's there to support them answer questions or or help them in any way they need it we also look at their plc notes that they turn in every week just to make sure that we're up to date each week and on where they are in that plc process and so mrs murray is going to share about what

151that looks like in first grade good evening i'm a first grade teacher at schweigler and i'm here tonight to enlighten you on our usage of cfas or the common formative assessments within our instructional planning process in particular how my team works through this process as a staff we implemented the use of cfas approximately a year ago it is still a work in process and but i can definitely see the benefits of using cfas within our instructional planning process my team begins this process by determining which learning standard we need to address we then break that standard down into a particular concept or skill and put it into student-friendly terms our next step is then to create the assessments that we feel would prove mastery of this concept or the skill that we want to cover

152within that standard so we're basically working backwards when we're doing this process these assessments that we do typically consist of the pre-test and we do a midpoint and then the post test at this point then we will sift through all the resources we have available to determine what will truly support our instruction to help our students with their learning we also have discussions with our support staff to gather their input and suggestions of any additional resources that they have for the instruction especially for our tier 2 and tier 3 students after the cfas are given we collaborate over the data to examine which instructional instructional practices were the most effective for either all the students or even for particular groups of students upon review of this data there has been time where we've chosen as

153a team to speed up our instruction because we feel the students have mastered the particular concept recovering however i can say there has been more times that we have chosen to slow down our instruction and provide more hands-on practice bring in other resources and enlist additional help from our support staff to help those students that are really struggling with the concepts that we are trying to cover cfas are a powerful tool that i feel provide immediate feedback of our students understanding of the chosen standard which then enables us to monitor and truly tailor our instructional practices when we know with such specificity the impact of our instruction and what students have or have not learned we can be much more precise and therefore much more effective in helping our students and their learning as a

154teacher i feel i'm truly able to provide the learning environment that's much better fit for each and every student within my classroom thank you swagger good evening i am dr carissa miles i'm the principal at southwest and i am here with rosemary bloom who's our academic interventionist i'm so excited to share the absolute incredible work that our teachers and staff have been doing this year so this summer our building leadership team got together and we came up with a couple different school improvement goals and one of them was what we like to call the guaranteed three so early on this year all of our teachers decided three skills standards or concepts that they wanted all students to know or be able to do before they end the school year and the way that we were

155going to measure that was through our common formative assessment work that we're doing and so we had to get our tool box right we knew what our goal was we ran to get our tools and so we started looking at what information do we have available to us to make sure that we had a complete picture of our students so we started looking at fast bridge data we looked at dcas we looked at last year's state assessment scores we looked at walkthrough data we looked at attendance and behaviors and social and emotional screenings so we started to put it all together so that way we could get a full and complete look at our students to really understand where they are and how to start planning to move them and so um once we had

156the tools in the toolbox we had to figure out how to make it accessible for teachers so early on i quickly realized that perform performance matters was a bit of a hurdle for our teachers the technology itself so we wanted to remove that right because that wasn't the objective our objective is to move students and so we started to create google sheets and we made a lot of really beautiful really colorful google sheets and we taught people how to manipulate that data but then besides making sheets and starting to provide that data to teachers we had to create space so space and time became huge so we cleared out our weekly team meeting schedule so that way once a week every team or plc could meet together to talk about what's happening in classrooms and

157the data to go along with it to make sure that what we were doing the tools on our plate were the correct tools and um we also cleared our wednesday's collaboration schedule so on most wednesdays you'll find us doing some deep plc work and then our academic interventionists and our learning coach push in on a regular basis to all of our staff to make sure that they have all the support they needed so that was kind of the first part of just really making sure that it was accessible the second part was to make sure it's accurate so when we started looking at dcas or cfas we wanted to do a question analysis so we looked at the questions in depth to make sure that we were asking the right things and to make sure

158that they were aligned to the standards that were teaching and then we also looked at the distractors and kind of started to analyze the questions and we worked through this deep work now was it all accurate no this is a continuous learning improvement process we're not expecting everything to be perfect the first time but we are expecting that we are going in and we are working hard to make sure that we are making data informed decisions and so we are really thankful to have dr conrad and dr rambler to partner with us to help our missteps and to kind of keep improving on our own practice and our partnerships with the district office to make sure that the test and assessments that we're giving kids is accurate um and um we like to say at

159southwest that we want to succeed wonderfully and fail forwards and so there have been a few opportunities for us to learn and that's okay we're okay with that and the last step is we really wanted to take action and we didn't want to wait our kids don't have time for us to wait to figure out how to read a spreadsheet or how to analyze where they are so we had to work really hard and really fast and so we started doing things like intervention groups where we started using our data to help figure out which kids need specialized instruction whether it's through a sped referral or if it's through um esl supports or if we needed to do different flexible groupings during the school day or if we need to differentiate within the classroom we

160really kind of look to target where and when and how to best meet individual student needs and so we've taken action that's kind of that next step piece that we wanted to talk to you about tonight was students and how do we get students involved in this process because we really believe that that ownership needs to also fall into students and not just teachers and i'm going to let rosemary speak about that okay yes um again my name is rosemary bloom and i'm the academic intervention interventionist and what we did uh as you can see here is first of all we got the teachers really involved in taking a good look at the dca tests and we put above each section the standard and then looked at the questions that were asked underneath that standard

161and then we provided the information with regards to how this the student answered that particular problem or question and so that gave us some insight as to possible ways of where the re-teaching may need to occur as well as do we need to move these students in individual groups and address those standards that way one piece though that seemed to be missing was we had a lot of students telling us well why are we taking these dcas what are they good for you know how does that count for anything and so what i thought about was developing a piece that would allow them to do some own their own self-reflection on the process and so what the piece is is at the top there it identifies the correct answer as well as what the student

162answered and then it provides the opportunity for the teacher to go through the test with the student and have the student identify whether or not this was a careless mistake or was it a conceptual mistake and it gives them a little bit more ownership in the learning process and on the back it would identify the standard and they were grouped according to standard so they could see you know if they needed particular work in those areas and so that gave them more insight into their own student learning and we're hoping that this can be a piece that can work with the teachers students and parents because we don't want the dca to be a mystery to anybody thank you guys um for sharing that with us i want to identify that this is a big

163process we had one goal and we we took this and you guys have now seen what we've done at the district level in that process and what takes place in the buildings this is a tremendous lift on just this one item we have here to move third grade reading or eighth grade math on that academic piece and the data portion of that and they do a phenomenal job and we get to hear about it and i really felt like you guys should hear about it as well from them and what terrific work that they do and the building goal check-ins um it's it's a big group of us where you have the principals uh you have the learning coaches uh teachers uh all the staff are involved but then also at the district office uh

164kristin ryan and rick henry uh are supporting it's uh it's a big lift and it's amazing to watch really amazing so any questions up to this point before we get to some graduation data i don't have any questions but you're right this is a really big process and so i really appreciate you and the team taking the time to show us everything that you've done and a lot of work obviously went into this so i appreciate that okay i have a quick question um in reading the material beforehand one question that came to mind and i'm not sure that it now is the time to ask it or maybe more toward the end so i'll throw it out there and if you want to hold it i understand i was wondering how you apply these

165same approaches to the college and career center and the jdc okay we will uh we got bill here with us okay i don't know if you'd prefer to hear from me or bill uh the same thing applies so dr dewitt is able to come and i meet with him on a regular basis and he comes in for data consults as well or building goal check-ins on that name and so the same process applies okay thank you i was just gonna say that it was it was really great to see our early child care uh center here tonight so it's really great to see you guys so thanks for coming you don't get to hear about them enough okay so we do want to share some graduation data with you and this is uh starting with

1662015 you'll see at the top of the chart the year 2015 16 17 all the way to last year and then we have down at the bottom you see that it's district and state so the district is in the blue the state is in the orange and the percentage is at the top of the bar so you can see in 2015 the district was at 84.2 percent and the state was at 85.7 percent fast forward all the way to last year the district is at 84 percent 84.2 and the state is at 88.1 percent the state did see a decline albeit slight and we did see an increase over the prior year of 2020. we also broke this down by building and so the first building we'll see is free state and you'll see the

167same the years at the top going all the way across starting from and then at the bottom you see free state the district in the state free state is in the green free state did see a slight decrease over last year but overall free state is above the district and the state the next slide is lhs it is laid out the exact same way so we'll see lhs in red and in 2015 they're at 91.4 percent and 2021 they're at 80.6 percent then we have lvs lvs in 2015 at 59.1 percent and currently this year is 77.6 you can see that lvs has had some steep increases in graduation rates over the previous five or six years zack which year was can you remind me which year was it that the district took over managing

168the high school at lvs from we used to use a um we used to have a company that did that work for us and we took it over and if you don't know the answer to that maybe i wouldn't know that patrick do you know the answer to that have i been on the board long enough now that i'm asking questions that nobody knows the answers to that's a sad thing i want to think that was like two or three years ago it wasn't that long ago but don't quote me on that but it was fairly recently we we did contract with another company that that did high school lvs i was just trying to remember because i know that one of the reasons we talked about doing that was the grave concerns that we

169had about the graduation rates and it appears that that decision has produced benefits okay thank you and i believe uh what was shared today by anne maw and the changes that they're thinking about making there will also see some improvement in those graduation rates and then we also broke down graduation rates by race and ethnicity and we did this in two ways this first slide you're going to see this is within race and ethnicity it's easier to to view it in this manner within race and ethnicity so this first column is african-american in blue and at the bottom you can see the years so this is an easier way to to view african-american over african-american students over those years of 2018 to 2021. the next column in red are students that have identified as asian

170and then hispanic and so forth the orange to the far right is the total the district totals so you can kind of see in comparison where they're falling the next slide is actually between it's easier to compare between when they're all grouped together by year and so we we made two charts here one compares within and the other is easier to compare between so at the top we have 2018. and then we have all the race ethnicities at the bottom with the total next to it going all the way across to 2021. are there questions over or these slides i do have a question so if i'm reading this correctly it shows that african-americans students have seen the largest decline of all the races at least there's a small one like 0.2 but why is

171that so uh yeah in 2020 they had the highest graduation rate and then 2021 it dropped this is mainly due to the small n size percentages function off of your numerator and denominator and because those numbers are smaller it affects your percentage more and so there's been years where the state doesn't report for accountability purposes african-american graduation for our district because it's under that 30 count and so just to give you an idea that the numerator and denominator are what are kind of exacerbating that percentage drop are there any other questions over the slides yeah i do want to acknowledge um yes we definitely have some work to do with some of our subgroups but i do want to highlight uh for one our hispanic students from 73 to 80 and um our native american

172students from 75 to 85 and then obviously a tremendous amount of work that's been done at lvs but overall as a district for the past four years we've been sitting at 82 uh and this year we are up to 84 um and so i think that's something definitely to to celebrate while we're not there i think we're headed in the right direction as it relates to our graduation rate and speaking of additional things that we're doing because we're not there we're still moving forward i'm going to go ahead and let dr johnson address some of the things that we're doing at each of the high schools to continue the progress we're making thank you good evening to the board thank you for this opportunity to share the current reality of the work that we're doing

173in our high schools dr conrad is giving you a historical glance of the work and we're going to take a moment right now to look at where we are at this present time we're going to begin with free state high school the numbers on the screen state that the number of seniors at free state current reality is 451 number of seniors on track to graduate are number of seniors who are not on track to graduate are 14. so of those students that are not on track to graduate the other question that i ask um the principles are what types of things are you doing to reach out to those students that are not on track we're not just saying you're not on track we're going to give up that is that is never the story

174so you will see the list of different strategies that are being implemented in the buildings the one that i want to speak to right now is the fourth one is the highlighted one that says structured learning time now this time according to mr graber and mr graber is here tonight as well as all the other administrators high school administrators because if you had additional questions they would be the ones that would be able to articulate the final details the structured learning time is assigned time one of the things that really intrigued me about destruction learning time is that it focuses on student outcomes as well as teacher outcomes for the students it focuses on learning gaps it's a time where teachers can really focus in on those learning gaps and they can complete the work

175and have access to their teachers as well as their peers the teacher portion is that focuses on very specific skill development and students have or teachers have access to students in real time if you will right right then there during the school day so you don't have to do something before school or do something after school to make different arrangements there's time within that day that is built in to to support those students so it is not just for um the 14 students in the flex mod um schedule there are multiple opportunities or students are getting a chance to um really get additional assistance if you will the next school that i want to look at and i purposely put these slides um in the middle because i believe that right in the core of

176free state and lawrence high school are two of the most important programs in this entire district and that's why i didn't want to leave them as an aside i want to put them right there in the middle first of all is the college and career academy and i appreciate dr dewitt who is behind me being here today total number of seniors number of seniors on track to graduate the 22 remaining and why are we saying 22 remaining because um there have been 12 early graduates in december and that is absolutely phenomenal number of seniors who are not on track to graduate are four and of those four students one of the areas that i want to speak to tonight is the focus of the collaboration when students are not on track it doesn't just come

177down to the individual student it involves the families and these are conversations these are meetings where they are meeting individually with the students but the bottom line is the student and the family member have a voice in what is going on and that is very very important to help that student become and remain successful the next area is the college and career total number of seniors 90 seniors um that includes three juniors who will graduate early number of seniors on track to graduate you see that number right there one hundred percent number of students who are not on track to graduate zero so when it comes time for graduation day and we're saying you know you have met all the requirements we're looking forward to seeing that number of 90. the area that i want

178to speak to as it relates to louis virtual school is the homeroom content teacher counselor family student and collaboration once again we're not doing this in isolation just with the student we're involving all the stakeholders to be able to have a seat at the table but most importantly to be able to offer input to help the students become and remain successful and i am so excited i know susan's out here somewhere she's out here somewhere she's walking baby right now but that's right she's here she's present and things with us so like i said those two programs schools that meet the needs of our students are at the core of everything that we do the last school that i want to speak to tonight is um lawrence high school total number of singers is 370.

179this includes ctran as well as project search number of seniors on track to graduate number of seniors who are not on track to graduate total number is 22 and 15 of those 22 are seriously um credit deficient so i know that probably there are some conversations and things going on right now is what types of things can we support you with here at to school but also what types of things can you engage in at the academy as well seven of the 22 are at risk but will likely make it meaning it's going to come down to the wire to to have them become and remain successful the area that i want to speak to on this slide is the school-wide avid professional development looking at those wicker strategies and how that is incorporated throughout

180the entire school not just in those avid classes not in the five or six avid classes but how it is incorporated and ingrained in everything that takes place at the school that is so absolutely important so i applaud um the administrators for for except for being here but i also applaud the work that is continuing we've had a couple tough years and in those tough years we have been resilient to completely continue to rise to the top so i'd like to have dr conrad if you'll come back just for a second because i want you to look at or hear these numbers because you're you may be seeing you're thinking oh my goodness if we've got a hundred percent here and we've got you know maybe 90 percent here what does that equate to in

181our overall graduation um data so talked about that just for a moment so yeah these these numbers right here the total number of seniors right here and then the total number of seniors on track to graduate do not factor in the students that we have lost along the way and so the graduation number will be lower than this number this is just that 12th grade class and so we've lost students in ninth grade in 10th grade and 11th grade so we're not we're not capturing this in here and i i just want to make sure that if you're anticipating hey 100 percent we're going to be a little less than that because there are students we've lost along the way any questions thank go you i have a good question for zach um zach so

182one of the questions i get asked all the time right now is what happened to all the students that disappeared during the pandemic are you finding that we are catching up on answering that question as we have to try to track down where students have gone when they've left us for purposes of calculating the graduation rate data i know we have some obligation to kind of try to find those students and then report them so they don't count against us in our graduation rate data yeah so we every year we have students that don't come back to us and we attempt to track them down and actually if if a building administrator would like to speak to this more feel free but i think i'm just i'm curious if you're finding it more challenging right

183now or if you're finding that um you're actually getting more answers to some of those questions about where did our students go and is there anything surprising in that data as you're putting it together so we we rely on the buildings to do a lot of that tracking down and so we follow up with we get reports to say hey here's how many students that have this exit code of unknown and they are attempting to track that down that's why i was asking if an administrator wanted to speak to that specifically because we rely heavily on them to be able to track them down and enter that code correctly and we have one i can tell you what we've been working on at lhs we have our sst teams meet they go through our list

184of students and then our social workers go through that process of looking for those students if we if they have not been to school they make sure that they report them to child services to see if we can get home visits they check all addresses that are available to see if we can find those students some of the things that we found in the process is that students have moved to other areas but they haven't enrolled in school in those areas so there is no exchange of records for us to say where they are because they're they're not enrolling where they are where they're at and so that's one of the major issues that we found especially with those juniors and seniors right now so we've had several cases where we found them in other

185places but they're not still enrolled so that's why we still have their records and so that's how they end up still being drop out so those are a few cases that we found as well okay that's helpful thank you any other questions or feedback all right thank you so much for your time thank you guys next is the budget proposal update administrative study dr lewis and i guess patrick kelly's on the agenda what so patrick is setting and setting this up um there's a tremendous amount of information that we've shared uh previously during superintendent's report previous board meetings with the board so patrick is going to walk walk us through some of the information that that was shared and then end by sharing the ksb study good evening patrick kelly chief academic officer so i

186thought i'd start with where all the data a lot of the data that you're getting is coming from and that's the superintendent's organizational report or what you'll hear in education world in kansas we call the so66 this is a district level report that aggregates on audited data what that means is build districts enter in the data to the report ksd doesn't come in and check any of this data salary information is reported for the superintendent principals and teachers and does not include any other administrators i included links to the so66 user guide if you want to sort of dig in and read more about this and where this data comes from the certified licensed personnel has us enter in reports of district certified personnel by building type so it has district office high school middle

187school and elementary school i gave you a quick snapshot here because i know some of you are just dying to know how we enter in this stuff for state reports and over on the left is that report there sarah hamlin does a great job you'll see directors coordinated supervisors and specialists can be assigned to central office elementary middle or high schools some job titles like principals and assistant principals can't be at the district office they can only be entered in at elementary middle or high school patrick in our district do we report facilities and operations staff as part of central office in this data we we typically do not and that's a perfect segue there shannon to if a person with has a certification for a position that does not require it we don't count

188it so for example on this report cindy frick our executive director of budget that doesn't require a certification for her and she won't show up in that district office number um it would be reported on a non-certified which is a separate report when you look at it one category i'm gonna go back one little bit is director you'll see there i'm sorry that's so small it's a big chart but you'll see the fourth line down which says directors uh no fifth line down director supervisor trying to do it from a distance all other directors you see that the second to last line all other directors right our number there included all of these job titles in 2020 21 and 21 22. it becomes difficult and you all have had access to some organization charts to

189know where to put these different people based on their job titles so we just wanted to give you a little bit of an idea of all the people that we would put in a specific category you had asked for some information and this has been provided for you before so i was just making sure that you still had it on salaries and you can see superintendent salaries and i gave you the link there to the ksde report on average superintendent salary you can see the past five years what the average salary is you can also see low median and high salary for across the state and then we also pulled down some information and again this has been shared with you before to see how superintendents across the state compare all of this is provided

190for the public on our budget and program evaluation committee website and we've linked it there as well remember i said that um we the state requires us to report average principal salary and superintendent salary and so that same information is here for principals and then how they compare across the state is over on your right again this is on our bpec website also on kansas data central you can see the percentage of budget that is spent on administration and support so this is a summary of general supplemental general fund expenditures by function i think this was shared with you two weeks ago during the board of education meeting we thought it might be helpful to get you links for the three districts that are larger than us and the three districts the next three districts

191smaller than us what their budgets were spent on administration in 2019 20 2021 and what is their 2022 budget and then what percentage of total budget that is if you do click on any of those links it will take you directly to those budgeted glance reports in data central for that specific district go to page six to find that chart there so if you want to do a little more research and look at different districts i think you've already said this patrick but i just for my own understanding and because it comes up quite a bit the percentage of total budget that you seek for taking for example kansas city um as that 21 but when you look at the previous or one of the previous slides you'll see that maybe some of their administrators

192are making less than say blue valley which is using 15 percent of their budget and there's a number of reasons for that but does that also factor in to the fact that we are not capturing we can't really compare apples to apples that's a theme through the entire correct yeah that would be one interpretation yes yes okay thank you i'm gonna glance over my shoulder at cindy everyone so i get a little nervous here when i start going into budget territory so she has looked at these and said go forth patrick we also gave you last week the kansas open gov data bank and and sort of did some cultivating of information for you there um this is just a little snapshot of there it is available on our bpec website and i gave you

193the link you can also look at state county and city databases for comparison if that's helpful to you just wanted to make sure you had that resource we gave you the organizational charts for a number of different districts and those districts that didn't have organizational charts which provided provide you a lot of links to some of their different departments so you could sort of make your own organizational chart in your head based on that information we hope that was helpful and part of the reason we did these last two is because not everything that's represented on the s06 report we thought you might have more questions and wanted to give you some more resources to to do that so that moves us to our kasb report dr britton hart was unable to be here with

194us this evening he's the one who put the report together so we asked him if he would be kind enough to do a video report he's in omaha this evening and so it's a little under 10 minutes here and he'll walk you through the report and just some reactions as he went through that report good evening i'm britton hart i'm from the kansas association school boards i appreciate the opportunity to join you this evening online via video so i apologize i was not able to be there in person but i appreciate the opportunity to speak with you tonight so this evening i've been asked by lawrence public schools to update the 2000. what's that zach it's kind of soft yeah he adjusted the volume it's a 19 administrative staffing comparison and so want to briefly

195walk through that staffing comparison for you tonight and just really expose the board and expose the the data to you as a board so you as you guys continue to have those conversations and lawrence about the future the future excuse me and what needs to take place to best serve your students you'll have this data in front of you to be able to do that so as we start i want to kind of kind of lay out three outcomes and three overviews of the staff in comparison so the first one is you we took lawrence and 17 other comparable school districts as we put this information together this information comes from the so66 which is the superintendent report uh it's done annually primary purpose for the so66 is really to to review enrollment and look

196at staffing compared to that enrollment across all 286 districts the second outcome is as you think about this exo 66 report this is a statewide report that's supported by ksde this is accessible to public anybody that is viewing this tonight you can go to ksd data central i will tell you this is a self-reported report by all districts in the state at some capacity outside of enrollment it can be unaudited this is a an opportunity where people put in this information and sometimes uh when you look at two comparable districts those numbers don't always have the highest level of accuracy based on when and how the information was put in third thing is i hope this data provides the board an opportunity to kind of look through the lens of what what does need to

197take place what does need to happen moving forward to best serve the students in the school district and then the how part allows the administration and the schools and the teachers the people that are on the ground doing the work figure out how to accomplish what the board would like to set out and so as the board thinks through this data tonight i would encourage them to look at your goals look at the values of your school district and start to really kind of formulate and think about some of those past conversations about what needs to happen moving forward to best serve you your community and your students and then thus allowing the administration and school and employees an opportunity to figure out how to accomplish this goal within your expectation so let's unpack this

198first data table first data table as i didn't mention but this study is going to kind of really look at and examine three different areas of staffing first area is central office certified administration so anybody that would be a certified administrator in the central office setting first thing i want to kind of note is that this was based on overall k-12 enrollment lawrence public schools is the seventh largest school district in the state as you can see there's a lot of there's a lot of range between the seventh all the way down the 17th and all the way up to the top and so use that as an opportunity to compare yourself with districts that are similar size so in particular today topeka andover etc those people that maybe share some of that same enrollment

199data also through the same lens look at that free and reduced enrollment and so as you can see as you start to think about topeka 501 maybe we don't are closely related to them as we are derby for example and so same way with special education enrollment as we move farther right on the table i want you to look at how this is organized so on the far right side it says total number of central office admin and so you can see highlighted there in the middle lawrence is at 20. state average is at 18.1 and then as you go right it takes the total number of admin divided by the enrollment for k-12 for introduced and special education this next table shows that the number of central office admin in comparison to your overall

200enrollment and so lawrence is third out of those 18 schools having the fewest number or the largest number of admin serving the fewest number of kids and so i want you to take that as one piece of data but i wanted to relate to this next piece when we think about central office and building and so it's important as you look at this data that this is an opportunity for you to really kind of reflect on current practice you can reflect on how the is reported but let me give you one example let's hone in on central office at the top building at the bottom so so topeka has 15.6 central office admin lawrence has 20. jump down right below there though when you think about building admin to peak of 501 63 and lauren's

201at 33 so you can see a wide difference there so something to think about and process in your conversations is that possibly in lawrence public schools a lot of those reports a lot of that work that's being done at the building level in topeka is being done at the central office lawrence and vice versa some of that work that is being done in topeka at the building level is maybe passed down to the billing of principals and thus having less staff at the central office in 501 and so as you can see that comparison with similar size school districts similar size enrollment how each district is drastically different of how they drop job descriptions identify titles and really hand out the work to ensure that the kids are getting their needs met and so think

202about that be cognizant about how that looks as you move forward comparing building level and district level admin as well this next table let's drill down a little bit deeper just on the certified building admin so what i showed earlier a couple things that are interesting here is look at the number of school buildings that serve students in your school district you're right at 21. and then we took the total number of administration 33 just as like it was shown on the slide before and then we did something a little bit differently here we did a ratio between not just enrollment but also building so number of administrators per billing so you're one of the fewest uh number of admin per building uh in this data set so 1.57 and then we also again took

203the ratio to enrollment ratio free and reduce and also ratio to special education so this first table in that upper right hand corner would show you that you were seventh overall in the fewest number of admin per building ratio and so that is a good number there's a number that says hey we are doing great work with the people we have in each building to serve kids it also may kind of resonate with that table prior that some of the work that we're having our building levels had been doing some of those things take place at the central office in other districts just like your district in particular and so that's a good piece of data to kind of reflect on this next one is also comparison like we said before of the number of

204admin based on the number of students and so as you can see you're right there in the middle right where that appropriate average should be and so i think that really speaks volumes to what you guys have committed to and the responsibilities and job descriptions that your building level admin have in each build building which is primarily focus on students good quality instruction and support for staff so this last piece this last data we covered central office admin cover building admin and this last one is non-certified district-wide so i always describe these folks these are the people that keep the doors open these are people keep all your kids safe they keep your kids fed these are the people that really if you have a technology problem these are the ones that make sure that

205the functioning of the buildings and the district is at a high level and so this really is kind of a unique comparison across the state as you think about other districts similar size the average number of non-certified district-wide that is reported by the so-66 is right around that 300 range 300 employees so you can see lawrence is well below that but also those people across not just your district but across the state play such a vital role to ensure the success of your buildings and your students in your district so as we close tonight i just want to remind you that i hope this is just one form and one piece of data that will help you as a board have that discussion on what we want to do moving forward and really start to

206kind of empower and instill into the district and building and teachers admin to start to figure out how we're going to accomplish this task you guys have a hard task ahead of you and i hope this is one area that and a piece of data can help you make some of those decisions as board members i would encourage you if you want to reach out you have further questions or or other pieces of data that you would like to see be happy to partner with you in your conversation moving forward thank you very much and best wishes so i believe that ends our report to you if you have any questions i'm sure you can either direct them at mr hart by email or dr hart by email or dr lewis or myself you know

207dr hart's not listening but i thank him for all the work he's done on this i know he had a very quick turnaround so i appreciate his work putting this together any questions and or feedback for patrick i have one thing i just wanted to get your reflection on patrick um and dr lewis so um i thought that the perspective that dr hart provided was very interesting in thinking about how a district is structured and what your philosophy and approach is to doing to doing the work that has to be done to operate in terms of what what duties you have people do in a bit at the building level administratively and what duties you have people do in the central office administratively and i guess i i just would like to hear if you

208have any reflections on that as it relates to our district knowing knowing from my experience over the years is that our district has tried to become uh less site-based than it used to be 15 or 20 years ago in terms of standardizing a lot of things across buildings so that our students have [Music] access to similar experience educational experiences no matter where they are in our district do you think that that philosophy is reflected in the data in terms of the administrative data in our district the philosophy of moving being more being less um being less site-based management um versus um uh it's kind of that conversation around tight and loose there are things that you that you control more tightly from the central office versus things that you decisions that you let buildings make

209on their own and um you know i've heard people say about our district over the years that we we have become less site-based than we used to be so i guess i'm just trying to put this data into context in terms of the management philosophy that that has been prevalent in our district um over the last many years at least i've been on the board and i would just reflect on just my time here in the district if you recall when we were doing the strategic planning process that was a graphic that i showed that had in one box arrows were going different ways and then the next box all arrows were going in the same direction that was that alignment that we were looking for as a result of the listing learning tour and

210understanding that we had some independent contractors in some classrooms and more was was more site based we're trying to align that and so when we look at the development of the strategic plan and the implementation of that now we begin to put together the team to make sure that that that could happen and so with with that team that's that's the support of our buildings you know again this building used to be called the es dc i believe we removed that d but maybe we wanted to focus on that as that support and making sure that district staff provide that support to continue those arrows going all in the same direction all right thank you any other questions or feedback for dr lewis or patrick none okay thank you excuse me next is the recess

211to executive session so we'll make the motion please erica can i request that we try to do it in 20 minutes i can't hear you may i request that we amend the motion to 20 minutes to see if we can get it done or do you want to continue with the 30 20 okay thank you i'll make motion okay i moved to recess to executive session for the purpose of discussing personnel matters on non-elected personnel in order to protect the privacy interests of the individuals to be discussed with dr anthony lewis invited to be present and with the board to return to open session in this room at 9 38 right with no action to follow let's shannon a second emerson uh i jones yes newspaper yes smith hill yes kimbu yes kadu blackwood yes

212motion passes seven zero we are returning to open session with no action to follow dr lewis any closing announcements this is a reminder that i didn't include in my report earlier but we don't have another meeting prior to spring break so this is a reminder of spring break is march 14th through 18th our next scheduled board meeting is march 28th however as i indicated on the timeline um there may be a need for a special board meeting on either march 21st or 23rd as we begin to talk about the budget reduction okay thank you you have a motion to adjourn this is okay i mentioned to be adjourned for a second this is carol ii hello's in favor say aye hi let's suppose say no motion carried thanks