USD 453 Board of Education Meeting March 14, 2022

001good evening it's monday march 14th this is a regularly scheduled board of education meeting at this time please silence or stow your phones to minimize distractions during the war proceedings and if you must take a call please leave the boardroom now this time we'll take a look mr carney here mr goodman here miss murphy here mr powell here miss reed here miss wells here and jesus christ please stand for the pledge please of the united states of america and to the republic for religious chance one nation indivisible with liberty and justice yes it's to prepare every student for success every day in every classroom all right thank you our next time is 1.4 adoption of the agenda madam president uh i move to adopt the agenda as presented second okay we have a first by

002mr first minister segment is murphy all those in favor are there any uh exceptions to remove anything from the consent agenda madam president i move to accept the consent agenda as presented okay we have a motion by mr powell the second diamond as well as to accept the consent agenda all of those in favor say no thank you see item number four the building record ms marble good afternoon thank you for the time for us to talk about our avenue school and quest i'm rebecca barco i'm the principal at third avenue as well as our assistant director of special ed i have with me miss crawford hi my name is laura crocker and i'm an assistant professor okay all right so at nutty we have a lot of different programs today we are focusing on

003third avenue school and quest 1821 so the first program we'll talk about is third avenue school third avenue is a program that we developed started five years ago i mean the purpose of third avenue is to provide a setting for students to practice social emotional learning students that come to our program have to have gone have to have an iep they have to have needs in social emotional areas of concern that are documented on that iep and they've had they've had to go through rigorous assessments and a lot of processes in order to determine that a day school setting which is what nettie is is an appropriate setting because it is not the least restrictive environment in most cases so these students are students that have significant social emotional concerns that need this intensive environment

004so that we can work on behaviors um and get them to where they need to be um so some of the great things that we have going on there is currently we have 24 students i'm enrolled the highest we've ever had in that program is 31 it fluctuates throughout the year our ultimate goal of getting these kiddos um to where they need to be we need to get them back to their home buildings and give them the skills that they need to be successful in life so currently when we brought our this program um to leavenworth from lansing back in 2017 we were at 16 percent of our students transitioning back to their home buildings um pre-coded right before copenhagen we were at 45 of students transitioning back and as of this month march 2022

005we are at 55 of our students transitioning back um to the home buildings and we have a couple of those students that we're hopeful that they'll be 100 transition back by the end of the year and then we also have on that two or three students that are being ready to begin that transition so we're extremely excited about that of the students that we've had during this five-year period on the seniors they've all graduated none of them have dropped out during their senior year so we have 100 graduation rate for seniors in this building um one of the things that we've done a really good job with is practicing restorative justice all of our students and our staff are trained in restorative justice essentially what that is is we teach students that if you have

006harm in the building you have to remediate that so for example if i break something i either purchase it or i make that right i apologize to the teacher i apologize to the student if we have a student that maybe makes a mess and the janitor has to clean it up our students then give that time back maybe they help the janitor for an hour maybe they help clean the building um with the janitor so they give back time to give back and kind of right that wrong so if that's something that we're really proud of and the students have really bought into it the families have bought into it i mean has been really successful for our students um our students also participate in a lot of service hours within our district and within

007our city so a couple things that we have coming up um that allow that are we have city clean up so every april um for the past four years we have participated in city cleanup and we donate our time on a friday and we clean up our area around nettie and the surrounding blocks of time and our students always love that and then we also have something new this year uh mr seeger who is our high school teacher is going to do um what we kind of call a spring cleanup where we're going to um run donations from building staff and basically clean out your house of anything you don't need and then we're gonna donate that to local charities and use that to help fill up our food pantry our clothing closet those types

008of things and um we ran something similar to this about four years ago and mr senior had a huge success and had over a thousand items donated so we're really excited to see where the students can get with this and they love collecting the items and you know distributed delivering it they absolutely love giving back to the community so that's one thing i really love watching our kids grow with that um we do a lot of community audience once again we don't want students just to practice those social emotional skills in the building because they are part of our community so we practice those in all walks of life and so one thing that we did this year was um our students have went to the holocaust museum when they have that open in union

009station they've been to the world war one museum in kansas city um this spring we have planned the trips to city parks into local areas restaurants and things like that to get them out more and then we also in order to help fight chronic absenteeism in our building um we set up a standard um last semester where if students missed less than three days of school they got to go bowling at the end of the semester we had a lot of students that bought into that um and were actually watching their attendance and like i had parents calling saying he doesn't miss the bullying trip that they missed today because of a doctor's appointment are we going to be okay so we had a lot of success with that and students really being aware of

010their attendance and wanting to be at school so we'll continue to do that as well um we have a lot of family engagement opportunities one of the things that some of you guys participated in this fall was haunted hallway um that started five years ago was just a idea that we had we did it we thought maybe we'd get 30 people we actually that first year had around 400 my husband has to go out and get candy about five different times within a period of an hour because there's like reserve coming from um this year we have the highest attendance yet upon hallway we had 571 attendees students um young young students who aren't yet in school we had families we had grandparents it was amazing to see that event is something that is put

011on by our students our students decorate our students plan our students reach out to the community members so it's something that they buy into it's not just staff another thing that we did on this year is we have our family feast in december and so that's the time we invite families in we do some professional development with families around on social emotional learning resources in the community that can help them um and then we serve lunchtime and we did a christmas dinner for the families and we had in a total 69 people that attended that event right before christmas break so that was great to see and we have another family engagement opportunity similar to that this spring that we are planning to do just a couple other things that we have going on is

012um we are working on developing a peer modeling approach to where we can maybe bring in some peer models to help the students be able to model appropriate behaviors with them so we've kind of been dabbling in what that would look like and trialing that out and then we also have been piloting um our character strong program to see how our students at their avenue would respond we've had a really good outcome with our students and learning the different character traits and practicing some of those skills so with that i will let mrs crawford talk about quest okay so with our quest program it serves our adults that have disabilities who have graduated and they're between the age of 18 and 21 on years of age the goal is to improve their quality of life

013and to provide them with those skills this school year we have 16 students in our program next year we're looking to help these 17. um when the program started in 2017 we had only two students so we have roman that's amazing it's amazing to go down to the quest um classroom you see those kids with disabilities actually being able to do some things for themselves uh this year we also hire two um second on quest teachers a second quest teacher to help out in there we do islands within and within our community and we have job sites we go to the local shops we have field trips in town and out of town such as the apple orchard the parks in the zoo the kids have went to we um take your kids to the

014farmer's house we used to only have one time a week now we're doing two times a week and they also have apollo land that they can actually go out and plant things and actually get um harvest those things and actually utilize them um they also go to the jccc um they do local jobs um consume your work on culinary work here in our district um at the depot the catholic charities they go there as well they go to um a lot of the um churches and clean up there as well they do uh meal preparations um for our staff for clubs and also they do fundraisers um they do the dog biscuits i don't know whether some of you guys have called those or not but those really good honor my dog for fundraiser they

015have their own t-shirt um business that they do t-shirts for the district and for our building as well um they have a snack cart that they take around to the different schools into our building as well in dispersing soups and salads and sandwiches they deliver to all the buildings some of the buildings also they all have a craft fair with the mirror on tree lighting ceremony so they do that as well they have occasionally given you guys streets when you have your meetings so thank you tomorrow next month um we also um they do um vocational training um with task boxes such shelves shredding and sewing a lot of things that those kids can do and i was so amazed to see that you know just because they have a disability you know some people

016think oh they can't do that but they are so amazing even the non-verbal ones are so amazing and actually then you know what they need and what they can do so i'm very excited any questions um so i got a tour the other day on on the grounds and got to see all of the fun things that uh miss laura showed me around and all the things were here and i think it's doing a great job um i got a lot of good ideas from uh miss laura on things that you guys would like to try uh part of it is kind of being held back by the building itself um what sort of options do we have for nettie hartnett in in specifically the lockers so one of the things that could be done

017you could remove all those lockers and it looks like it would be like the cubby holes down at the right uh parents teachers where matt's crew did most of that work because he has some extremely talented individuals that work in the maintenance and facilities department so they did a lot of that one of the things that has been tabled for the 1821 program specifically is the house that's been brought up a few different times uh yeah throughout the years i heard all about that too so do i [Laughter] um the the other thing would be um really on the capital plan is if you would want to facilitate dollars to that building one of the things that um i think it's a 1922 building so it's approaching 100 years old that's that's kind of one

018of my concerns is at what point do we have to start looking at hey this is a historical building and now we can't touch anything well it is it's on the historical register because we did actually uh take through uh a business a gentleman that was into the loft business they actually walked through the building to see if there was any use for that they did not at the time think that they would want to take that on because they just finished the bin day side of it which it's a sister building basically and so there was no interest in it at that time we've um maintenance matt's done you know the maintenance we started some tuck pointing we're looking the next phase would be and doing some windows those types of things but realistically

019it comes down to the capital plan and where the money from a board standpoint do you want to put in a 100 year old building do you want to look for something else do you want you know those types of things and so really that nettie hartnett was going to be a part in my opinion i think maddie hartnett would have rose to some type of level within the strategic planning and so really it comes down to the dollars and and the the functionality um visiting i visit with dr redelberger and ms varvel weekly and matt is in a lot of those because we've discussed that in cabinet and have discussions around that so it really just depends on you know the direction the board would want to take on the amount of dollars they

020would want to spend now if the longevity of that building is something different and so that would be something that i think would come to come forward within the strategic plan okay but 100 mr goodwin you're correct we've had a lot of maintenance discussions um matt and i meet weekly just the two of us with us dave and tony through the custodial and grounds department um and that building's been discussed a lot but again until we get a direction from the board or kind of an idea from the community or what they want to see within that building of what that building come to be is the next step yeah the great thing about it is oftentimes when we have new students families that come in you know you walk in they can really see

021school but once they get in and they see the amazing things and their kids start growing immensely in ways that they've never been able to grow before sometimes overshadows all of those things that we know need improvement and we're working towards but just watching the successes of those students overshadows a lot of the other things that happen with them they come in they're successful we have kids and families that say we my kids never had a success before kids are like you guys are different like you've never been like i've never been able to be myself i've never been able to be successful if you guys give us a chance and so a lot of those types of things and those opportunities overshadow some of those things that maybe aren't the best things in that

022building it really overshadows a lot of fun and one of the things just to point out aesthetically is what you would be looking at safety wise the building is perfectly safe okay so you're looking at aesthetic you're looking at lowering ceilings and one of the suggestions that i got when i was taking the tour was he would really love it if the kids could make some of this space their own be able to paint the walls put stickers up that sort of thing i think if maybe we could be the middle ground um take out the the dingy and bent and rusted lockers we put up some white boards magnetic strips give them sticker you know magnets that they can put up uh magic markers they can they can make their own space that way

023and then at the same time have cubby holes that they can put in their stuff i think they they started doing that but then coke would hit now we can look into that and then report back to the board on some cost analysis on that yeah absolutely i i know when mr powell mrs reed and i went and toured about a month ago one of the words that i heard was it was kind of sad uh it's an older building it's a little it's institutional it's old school it's the best way to put it i think some bright paints more or less like we've had in some of our other buildings would actually bring it up several notches just in aesthetics but also in inspiration for the kids as well and it also may help

024in being able to more easily transition kids back and forth to their home schools when they're when they're ready for it it feels less like uh you know constitution i think that's important as we look at as i just mentioned the strategic plan because we still have uh things like uh where do we stand on expanding to an alternative school so that we can get recapture and other things with students in return so yeah but we got to find that balance right thank you for the tour when we went it was good obviously you love your school and your kids yes or in reverse order though we love our pioneers and all the historic pioneer things hidden in that other room too yes absolutely thank you guys that's where they have all the skeletons in

025the closet it's an archive truly archives yeah all right moving on to item number five scheduled patron input the board appreciates patrons taking time to talk to us about our policies and procedures we set aside time at each regularly scheduled board meeting to hear from the public your comments should be directed toward board policies or the procedures our administrators established to carry out those policies please understand that while board members will listen to and carefully consider all your comments board members will not respond to questions either verbally or through gestures for example raising hands in response to questions nor will they engage in a dialogue with you during the patron input time this is not an appropriate time or place for patrons to make comments of a personal nature about any district employee or in

026student persons making comments which violate the privacy racks excuse me privacy rights of district employees will be asked to terminate their remarks if a patron or parent has a concern with one or more employees the board will refer that person to the appropriate employee or the superintendent if the board refers your concern to an administrator for investigation or we'll hear about in a future meeting you can expect a superintendent or another district employee to make arrangements to meet with you at the appropriate time each patron is reminded they have three minutes to speak and will be getting noticed when 15 seconds remain thanks again for your time to discuss district business with the board and this time mr mr howard webster defines conflict of interest as a conflict between the private interests and the official

027responsibilities of a person in our position of trust there's a member of this school board who is guilty of a gross conflict of interest and it must be addressed this member was elected to support the board and pledge to support the mission and vision statements of the district he actually continues continues to disrupt the board school operations while actively promoting and supporting an ultra conservative christian school in its place even going so far invite prospective parents that are quote tired of the nonsense in the public schools to come and visit their school board she's using the disruption that she is causing here as evidence of why parents should leave usd 453 and join her conservative school instead her philosophy would ban orwell's 1984 for its negative depiction of a crt german society and bradberry's fahrenheit

028451 for making book banning and burning look like a bad thing and yet this conservative school promotes a book using every grade and age level within its curriculum which exposes the students of incest sibling murder slavery idolatry and more miracles in the entire harry potter series finally it repeatedly notes page after page how all the primary characters are having unprotected sex and having children encouraging students to emulate the lessons that are being taught this board member in question is vanessa reed i submit to you that vanessa reed sits on this board and is disrupting this board so as to promote her own private agenda which is in conflict with the interest of usd 453 and that she is guilty of a gross conflict of interest i request that she be required to resolve this this

029conflict of interest that until she does she should be restricted access to district facilities staff and students i further submit that is the best interest of the district the schools the teaching staff and the students that vanessa reed be required to resign her position on this board and apologize to all the citizens of leavenworth that voted for her believing that she would serve in the best interest of the community and not in pursuit of her own private agenda thank you mr claire good evening my name is jason clara i have two children enrolled in the district eighth grade with a 4.0 gpa and the senior who just earned the horizon scholar were given for maintaining a four point gpa all four years of his high school there are smart kids and have had some pretty

030good instructors to guide them unfortunately i've had to address and formally complain about several concerns i've had this year regarding their curriculum these concerns included new seating statement assignments after the mass main date it was abolished in one class students with masks were assigned to one side of the room those without were segregated to the other another instructor employed scare tactics telling students that if they didn't wear masks they could kill vulnerable teachers by spreading the virus additionally this instructor told their class that aside from a few dead people voting there is no proof of fraud in the 2020 presidential election and video records at least two class periods with a camera pointed towards the students and has used it as a tool of intimidation to straighten up unruly students with threats to review the

031recordings another instructor assigned their class a true or false question assignment questions included i have been vaccinated i have family members who cannot be vaccinated i worry about someone who i care about who refuses to be vaccinated i know someone who has died of covet on january 24th an instructor discussed with the class of school board meetings scheduled for that evening the meeting was rumored to include a proposal to reinstate mass mandates the instructor told the class that representative pat proctor was stirring the pot by making masks a political issue and that i quote the proctor crazies are going to show up in force to the meeting many of my concerns involve the written or spoken word words matter they can hurt influence and inspire people of all ages which is why book assignments matter

032last year my son was assigned the kite runner by khalid hassani the book is on the american library association's top 10 list of most challenged books for 2008 12 14 and 17 for containing offensive language sexually explicit material and depictions of homosexual rape had i known of the assignment and the controversy surrounding the book i would have strongly objected and voiced concerns as i did with the previously mentioned examples even though i am an observant and outspoken parent i failed my child in this instance by not having the proper resources to question this book assignment however the school system failed parents by not disclosing years of established concerns from other people surrounding this work until the process has changed the legislation is passed to make school assignments more transparent i encourage parents to sit down

033with their children every evening and ask them these questions how was your day and what did you learn in school review review their assignments if you don't like what you see stand up for them talk with other parents and challenge the system if you don't who will thank you [Applause] this hassle thank you i also want to thank vanessa reid for hearing the very large majority that has been silent for way too long and i want to thank the rest of the board for working together and trying to hear everybody's sign our daughter's in well we have several students that one of them is in ninth grade and she came home one day from school and she said home i am really uncomfortable with the book that we're reading uh she said the book was

034twisted and i looked at i read just a couple of pages the first few chapters described janitors looking at the bouncing jiggling butts of the girls high school tennis team and having sexual thoughts about them um the i didn't even get to the second chapter i'm not gonna lie to you i did not read this whole book um to me that's predatory grooming when you have adults looking at children in a sexual exploitative way um the other part was this girl with her breast is very one good thing about this book is it has very good sensory language and does not have any um compound complex sentences i'm a certified new york state english teacher so i was kind of looking for some literary value in it but i didn't find any um the guy

035the girl is sprawls over the hood of his car and she whispers seductively in her in his ear and then she opens her mouth and he says oh god i've been waiting so long for this i don't feel that this is educationally appropriate furthermore there are kids that are being sexually abused that are being um there's a lot of issues in these books besides the sexually explicit content and teachers as well educated as i was to be a teacher i am not educated to deal with the triggers that come up in students and neither is any teacher in the classroom psychologists and child behaviors they go to school for years to learn how to help these students i'm um whether you agree with these books and the content or not i'm sure everyone in this

036room could agree that there needs to be a safe way for a student to self-advocate i reached out to the teacher being a former teacher myself i know i'm really really busy so i asked the teacher what are you trying to teach and i can come up with a book for you i know you don't have time we never and to this day still have not received any email response from that teacher i do know they're human and i do know they're busy so i'm not throwing any teacher under the bus um my husband got upset and contacted the principal he tried to call back and left voicemail then we called him back and left voicemail and then it we just played phone tag meanwhile my daughter sat in the classroom three walk periods um

037i think the issues here are communication giving students a safe pressure free choice and then having a proactive course planned and designed to meet that need we need we need to understand how your time is up okay thank you very much moving on to item six consideration of character strong social curriculum yes um this is uh something that dr redelberger will lead um because it relates to the special education program and the disproportionality um that uh was revealed through an audit with that so with that tucker over thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight i'm gonna try to make it through my voice so please bear with me um so we're here to talk about character strong social emotional learning curriculum um i want to take this opportunity to talk about something that i

038know ms murphy's been very passionate about which is our student mental health she's voiced as several of you have concerns over the mental health of our students um and what we can do to address that so what is character strong it is a tier one proactive approach to teaching social emotional skills behavior skills social skills um it provides a pre-k through 12 social emotional learning curriculum for students in professional learning that would positively impact our students see sorry um yep thank you it addresses our pre-k through 12th grade students and up on the slide you can see the 10 traits for elementary and then the traits that go through secondary middle school and high school so the traits for middle school and high school are the same so in kansas we are um we have

039the social emotional learning outcomes that are defined by the state department of kansas um in a poll from ksd that was conducted through 20 communities with over 2 000 respondents in regards to questions of what do you think when you think of a successful 24 year old cancer and many of those uh skills that the business communities came back with were those soft skills how to communicate people are students self-aware are they aware of the people that they're they're communicating with are they able to communicate with those individuals appropriately seven additional communities that were told um included chambers of commerce business leaders and the same questions were answered or asked with the same types of answers given one of the things that we look at in measuring student success is this post-secondary goals for our

040students can they demonstrate character and actions by treating others with respect um are they able to communicate back and forth in a discussion are they able to disagree in a discussion in an appropriate manner i think those are skills that are really important especially in today's age really excuse me they strive we look for them to be able to be innovative creative responsible citizens we want them to be a part of our community we want them to be responsible citizens in our community the state board if listed on the left hand side are the character development traits that the state board has listed out as areas to address when it comes to social emotional learning many of you are familiar with the competency wheel through ksde through their presentations that they've given across the state

041in regards to what we're looking for for a successful kansan um looking for self-awareness self-management being able to interact with peers with people of authority one of the things that we get a lot of questions about and see a lot of confusion about is that term equity what does equity mean in education equity and education means that we're giving opportunities to students that maybe don't have the resources available to have those opportunities some examples that we already do today we have free and reduced programs for lunch and breakfast we have um we have before after school tutoring we have academic supports for students that aren't able to maybe meet the expectations of the curriculum but we put some extra things in place that is what we consider an education to be equitable is to write

042students what they need no matter their circumstances or no matter their experiences in order for them to gain success within their educational career and on the our on the financial side we experience some of this with the gannon keys are we being able to financially if every school were to get the same level of funding it might be equal that doesn't mean equitable equity needs to be based on the community that you serve in the population that you serve so why do we need to do this if you look at some of the statistics over there over half of our students are experiencing an adverse childhood experience and i'm not going to explain to you what those experiences are i'm sure you all are aware of some of the things that our children are experiencing

043being able to address students with a social emotional learning program right at the beginning helps those students through some of those traumatic events we also have some tiered support for when the first year doesn't work but supporting social emotional and behavior development early helps students along as they grow throughout their career so we talked about tier ones character strong is tier one it's what we would do with all students just like our tier one in english language arts tier one in mathematics tier two and tier three are are designed to be reactive tier one is proactive so the things that we do reactively are listed up here we have social emotional interventions we have board certified behavior analysts counselors clinical social workers um school psychologists tier three includes all of those things but then adds

044in special education services for those students that qualify if we continue just to provide reactive services this overloads tier 2 and tier 3 systems and it does not sustainable to be able to continue to refer students to tier two and tier three um without trying to do tier one first it would be like saying that my student has never gone to school for um uh let's say he's never gone to school until first grade that we're going to automatically put that student in an intervention without even seeing that the student can read sorry all right um in addition i wanted to include the mental health interventions um through this the grants that we've received um kim knight is our administrator that works very closely for these grants um our first grant we received was one

045um to receive funds for one clinical social worker or school-based therapist which occurred in addition after spring break um we will see two additional clinical social workers or school-based therapists that will come into the district and start working along with one more that will be added even later on so the county commission um had a grant and it has provided five additional social workers for the accounting three of which will come work in level school districts as a frame of reference currently the one social worker at the high school has 250 students on her case list that's not manageable that's not something that we continue to be able to continue to support through just reacting all the time so most of you are familiar with the triangle that we have listed up here tier one

046is that is in that green it's what we do in all classrooms every day we want eighty percent of our students to be able to to be able to meet the expectations or our expectation would be eighty percent of our students could do this tier two which is what we just talked about in tier three we talked about which would be special education are the next two layers if you look at usd 453 safer data which is what you all had approved earlier to purchase it's a screener that will the teachers uh provide information on each of the students and then the students take that screener as well to provide information on their own well-being and so if you look up here tier one our goal is like i said 80 of our students would

047fall into that tier one currently um or well back in 21 we had 73 in that category um and then in spring 75 percent students which is more concerning when you see students rate themselves as having more concerns 68 students 68 in the fall were in the green and 22 were in the green in the spring if you bump up to tier two um in the fall of 21 you see the 20 were at low risk um and in the spring 18 and then moving forward to my sabers in 2021 students said 26 of them had some risk and then 22 26 of students said they had some risk and then in tier three we don't want to see more than five percent of those students in that tier um we had students that had

048um that teachers had identified as five percent of them almost six percent of them in that risk category that we're really really concerned about um and then 22 in spring of 22 that was seven percent my saber shows that kids were at the five point six percent in fall and now in my summers in the spring they were at so our goal is to get students at 80 in that tier one so that our tier two with social workers school psychologist counselors can work more effectively with those students that need those supports so one of the things that we look at is the rose capacities which came out of the gannon case of how we should be addressing schools in school equity which i'm not going to read those out to you but um many

049of you are very familiar with them that flows right into the accreditation process for kisa that the district is required to go through in order to be accredited and be recognized as a school district in kansas so as you can see we've kind of outlined um and read those um those accreditation pieces that would fall under the social emotional learning with character straw the ksde um standards for social emotional learning are lined up very level character strong they talk about self-awareness self-management problem-solving skills being able to make decisions and you can see that through through the standards when you look at the standards as well as the accreditation requirements so another reason we're looking at this back in 2019 we had to start a process to address the disproportionality that the district was identified with

050suspending more students with disabilities at a higher rate than they were than we were suspending students without disabilities when that happens the district is required to perform a root cause analysis as to why this is taking place along with the root cause analysis comes what we call a comprehensive um let's see if i can put this up there a cceis plan um i'll come up with the acronym names here in a minute as well as 15 of the special education budget has to be allocated to intervening services for all students if it happens to benefit students in special education that's okay but it cannot only benefit students in special education and so the district worked to define what that what they believe the root cause analysis was lord that disproportionality and they came to the

051decision that it had to do with social emotional learning um in tier one for all students we have very good tier two and three but the system can't handle all of those student needs through that process and so in september of 2019 we reviewed the data answered clarifying questions um looked at the data and did some analysis and then we created plans of action which is that comprehensive coordinated early interviewing services um that plan was submitted to ksde for approval and they did approve it and from that the funds that we've allocated through that plan must be spent by december 2023. um some of the things some of the things that are are the things that we included in this plan was the sabres my sabers which we just talked about border proof that back

052in may 2020 um the hiring of an sel facilitator who would be in charge of analyzing the data researching available options as far as curriculum interventions that may be needed and then purchasing the tier one character strong uh curriculum as well as providing professional development to our staff so you can see how that monetary part lines up and through the selection process we had two social emotional learning curriculums that we took a look at and the mental health team was gathered to evaluate both of those programs um some of the most all the things that they were listed but some of the ones i'll point out they wanted something that was aligned pre-k through 12. so when i move from the middle school to the high school i am hearing the same things i'm hearing

053the same vocabulary being used i'm having the same characteristics being addressed and talked about and being able to practice those things throughout the different buildings um the other important piece was the ease of using plan that was really important our teachers are amazing but they cannot manage to do everything that we wish that we could do they all sit and wish that they could do more for children so we wanted to make sure that it was something that was easy for teachers to be able to plan and implement um planning is already created in the system teachers have the autonomy of using what's there or adjusting it if they wish to adjust it we wanted obviously to make sure that it was aligned with the ksde standards which we've already talked about opportunities for different

054learning modalities through multi-sensory strategies and then differentiation how do we differentiate that instruction for our different learners and our different groups of students making sure that it was sensitive to all different kinds of cultural needs gender race ethnicity social socioeconomic style styles all very important to that team when the team is made up of building district administrators counselors school psychologists um clinical social workers and i think i got all of the groups that we we had identified for that um individuals who are very educated and very versed in looking at what would be appropriate in the avenue of social emotional learning um we also had the opportunity to pilot the program and so nettie wanted to take that on and listed up there are some of the pieces of feedback that we uh received from

055uh the implementation that we've got going on with that pilot program so you can see it there that the teachers agreed it was easy to use and access um para educators and teachers both are able to to utilize that and then students were observed and reported to be engaged in these lessons obviously we want to make sure that our students are going to have that engagement so that they can get those skills and practice those as we we need them to continue to learn those things so implementation here is our kind of implementation timeline curriculum strong um offers uh or sorry um is relevant engaging um they have the plug and play lessons coverings of slides english and spanish translations there's minimal supplies needed and there are pre-recorded video options to show so if for

056some reason um there is a lesson that a teacher is having difficulty trying to get some ideas on how to implement that lesson for the day they can always go to the pre-recorded video options and look for those or maybe it's one that they think does a better job than what they could do and then you use that video option if they so choose timeline spring 22 teachers would receive training through character strong summer 2022 our new teachers would go through that training and then fall 22 we would be looking at student implementation through all grades in a list of expected outcomes we would expect to see increased instructional time and less time spent on student discipline if we can teach kids how to manage themselves what the procedures in their classrooms are if we

057could practice those same things and reinforce them we could spend more time teaching kids instead of reacting all the time increase student engagement if we're not dealing with student discipline students are more engaged in the class work that is going on when they're more engaged in the classroom you see student success increased attitude about self and others positive classroom behavior decreased instances of bullying it's a catchphrase that we hear a lot about and we have students that report those things some students don't report those because they don't they don't know how or they don't have the skill to be able to do that um decrease numbers and students who receive special education services the piece that's missing through our tiered support is tier 1 reduction in conduct and emotional problems and then increase post-secondary success

058so those would be our expected outcomes for the implementation the cost you have listed here um 14 395 and 20 cents includes 20 discount from the company um those are all the components that are included for elementary which is pre-k through um five then middle is sixth grade high school uh ninety three twelve there's free access for uh at nettie park right now so if we had individuals that wanted to come check it out um that's what we would be doing and then our renewal fee is 6.99 per building so after we make this initial purchase a yearly renewal fee is and i know there's been some stuff out there on social media about an individual named aaron jones um and some concerns and objections about the information that this individual shares through character strong

059we want to make it very clear that she doesn't work for character strong character strong partnered with her to um develop an equity training program which talked about equity but this is not part of what the district is planning on purchasing right now we are focused on the social emotional learning curriculum the self-awareness being able to have those interpersonal communication skills good decision making skills those are the pieces that we're focused on you can see the bid up there or the quote up there that was given to us that does not include the equity training piece so that's what i have for you all what questions can i answer dr redelberger for the instructor training how many hours are involved the training itself is truly about an hour and you're good to go yeah they

060really wanted the the company really wanted to make it user friendly they know teachers have a lot to do so they wanted to do as much for teachers as possible by planning those lessons um and having someone to be able to implement them yeah are there parent resources provided with this so that we can at home reinforce what they're learning at school um i'm not sure if they provide parent resources but what we would do is um just like the teaching and learning um uh department does is we would make the stuff available online and then communications would come home from the buildings about what trait you're working on and is this similar to what we've already been doing for several years like when my kids were lost and we would go down the hallway

061and there was a place on the wall where it said you know we're working on honesty this month then lesson plans were based around honesty and we would focus on that and it would change every month yeah and currently we have bits and pieces of social emotional learning going on in buildings but nothing that's systemic in across district that means the pre-k through 12 expectations that we have um as well as ksce it's just really important that all that stuff aligns especially when kids move from like a model when you're in class all day long moving from class to class class because now i need to know your expectations and so being able to have the skills to differentiate between the fact that i have different teachers that may have different expectations but the ability

062is to have an overall character trait or skill that they're working on so in this program it said that it was the mental health team that chose this i heard on social media that it was dr rope that shows this no in fact he wasn't even in that he wasn't even a meeting i don't even know that he knew the names of the programs and so you had said that there was just two programs what was the other program other than character strong that you were looking at and then we'll get up again we'll get that to you um one of the i can tell you one of the big reasons that the um mental health committee did not know what that is because if we would have to purchase two separate programs one that

063addressed elementary and one that addressed um secondary they did not have an alliance program so but we'll get you that name all right thank you i'm curious about i mean it's easy to wrap my head around how this works with um kindergarten through even middle school um high school level this is where they're definitely going from class to class to class to class when i send a child to math class i expect they're going to be taught math how are they are they planning on it being incorporated in this time or is this going to be something that's incorporated in um whatever they're like study hall advisory time visiting with the high school we've talked a lot about advisory time um that that would be you know those teachers have those students for four years

064in a row and what a great opportunity to be able to continue the high school person people over here shaking events what great opportunities to have the same kids for four years and be talking about these kinds of skills um during that advisory time with that being said it doesn't stop at advisory so when i go to math class and we're talking about self-awareness and i maybe am having trouble regulating myself but i don't realize it maybe i have my math teacher visit with me and remind me about those things obviously not publicly but if there's an overall um chance for for the whole building to be addressing a specific skill based on their data the data that they receive they will define what skills they're working on and then everybody across the whole building

065can be working on those things for students that are struggling but in a more indirectly classes okay and so this is definitely just going to be the s e l portion it's not going to be jumping into the cast what i call i pronounce it castle for the acronym it's not going to be jumping in and incorporating that because that is where you get more into mrs jones [Music] um yes for lack of a better word i just want to make sure that's not the path that we're going on this yeah castle is a um it identifies um it helps identify evidence-based um strategies that help in the area of social emotion or evidence-based topic areas to address some of the topics self-awareness does identify self-awareness as an area that should be taught in social

066emotional but we are following the ksce standards when it comes to that we saw that competency meal in the ksc those will be what we follow well and i just wanted to make sure because i did go ahead and go to the national department of education and they refer to some specific documents that went through sel and castle and uh granted i've read over a thousand pages just with those two documents that they had in there and some of it was kind of intense and i after reading some of i can understand and i've not shared with any of our constituents or anything what i've read this weekend but that was a little distressing when some of that verbiage was just like flashing right out there and i know that is not what they want

067if you go to the ksde website or even if you google social emotional learning standards in kansas you will what will come up are the standards that kansas has identified and you can read through those okay and and i did hear that you know we've already been using this over here at third avenue um because i paid attention to the building brief um my thing is is this where you have to spend spend the money i know you're using this program already in one of our schools um but also in doing research and looking through things and through the national board of education and all there are several wonderful programs to do the same thing for nothing and so part of if you remember we talked about the disproportionality in the plan when we submitted

068the plan um we had listed out the things that we would be looking at and where that cost allocation would go and so ksd ksde had approved that plan and has the expectation for implementing that plan as he wrote it so because the plan said you would spend x amount of dollars that's why they expect you to spend that because you maybe didn't know that there were some free notes or they didn't know that they weren't free or versus you know how they weighed out with each other whether they were equitable or equal to what they would produce for the the children yeah the team felt that the character strong was the one that aligned directly to the kansas state standards and then met all the requirements that they had for what we would deem

069as appropriate social emotional learning curriculum okay thank you very much can you share this presentation with us absolutely and lion's quest was the name of that other request and so when this gets rolled out to students um how would how would that be done is it a one day training is it continuous daily training um right how many hours a day or week or month [Music] right there so if you look up here um there are 30 uh two traits that three kingdoms you work on um it would be a daily lesson um i can't imagine more than ten minutes a lot of times in elementary they do social skills in their morning meeting group um and so that would be a perfect time for that to take place middle school there's 35 lessons per

070grade level on those topics um again through some type of hour like a seminar or whatever i know that the middle school is working on a similar exact schedule and then the high school like we said during advisory and there's 25 lessons on those same topics so it's not necessarily we're spending time on this it is designed to be something that's short but is carried out through the whole day for a student so if you're struggling because maybe something happened at home you have a hard time communicating that and you talked about this advisory but maybe you have some situation that happens in math your math teacher can come along and help and talk about the things that you discussed in self-regulation um and that was just a really basic example but okay and this

071is going to be taught by by the advisory teacher during the advisory classes the determination of how they want to roll it out but that is one of the suggestions that we have given to the high school but that would be the best time to be able to provide that it's a block of time where students are working on various things from they might need help and math they might need some extra support from some other teacher and something they may need to go visit the counselor or the social worker and so that time would be it would be a good time to start that class with a lesson like this and then move into specific individualized instruction in the areas that each student needs and that's one of the pieces of having an equitable

072equitable community is that we are providing students what they need dependent upon their experiences and circumstances so it's very similar to you know a very similar thought to ibea if i don't do well and i am identified for special education and math then i need sports now that is kind of the basis of is providing students with things they need tutoring maybe it's maybe their food their food they lack um meals at home we're providing those things so that they can be successful we know about maslow's hierarchy and basic needs so we're finding all different kinds of ways to address each individual student based on their unique circumstances um this is like i said this is met their requirements for what they felt like our students needed based on the savior's data and my savior's

073data well and i think part of the answer to that is this is on the approved list of evidence-based materials that we were expected to draw from so this isn't something we just went out and got because i mean it actually is substantiated in the state standards correct and to make the point between research based in evidence space there is a distinction and evidence base is what we want and it space means it means it was reviewed by somebody outside the company outside of the publishing of the outside of the developer um those are what we want evidence as i look through these traits i see these things already being taught by your teachers every single day so we're just being more intentional with it making sure that we're touching base on all of the

074things the teachers the resources that come along with it a lot of times um teachers are doing that on their own without any kind of resource this could be a resource and one of the best and one of the things that you will see those of you that have been in elementary buildings the middle school they already do that when pre-covered they would meet in the gym and they would talk about a specific task for the week you know be kind to your neighbor how can you be kind to your neighbor here's some ideas for that it really feeds into that if you ask if you have a high school student go home and say make it a great day and they'll tell you or not the choice is yours right because those are the

075types of things so it feeds it feeds from one level to the next as opposed to david brewer doing something and anthony doing something and then the intermediate school in the middle school it kind of flows together k through 12. and that was one of the things is dr redelberger was presenting at the cabinet on this was that it was a k-12 it's stair-stepped up just like your state standards do just like your curriculum does those types of things and then the other thing that we were looking at or that they were looking at from a group was how is it going to be an ease of instruction for the staff right so this is this is programmed out they can they can adapt it they can they can utilize it they can get the

076concept of it but everybody would stair step it together and so you would have a flow all the way up through k through 12. so a lot of social emotional is already going on to your point miss murphy and mr goodman and the rest of the board but what this does is it brings it together for ease of instruction but also stair-stepping it from k-12 re-emphasizing the things that our staff already is doing um and really what they're doing across the state as well okay let's let's talk about funding then um so this is coming from disproportionate fund so is that money set aside for specifically this sort of thing and we can't spend that money on uh or i mean we could do alternatives to this with the disproportionate one no this is the

077plan was submitted and approved by ksde and so the expectation is that we are implementing the plan as we wrote okay so one of the things if we don't uh take that disproportionality and and have a plan to address and fix then there's ramifications on the back side the issue that we had back in 2019 yes but even more so is aligning what we're doing in the district around social emotional giving teachers their resource instead of having the expectation that they're coming up with the things on their own um you know doing it building wide versus classroom classroom classroom and then to address the the mental health need that we have in our district for us so i also noticed that we have a renewal fund so is this going to be a yearly renewal

078for seven hundred dollars per per building how many how many buildings is it going to buy all of them well nettie's free they're going to do renewed nutty free every year seven yeah you can allocate 15 of the special education budget to address proactive solutions for all students right when you're found is proportionate you're required to do that right so and so the how long are we going to carry that are we going to carry this in perpetuity from this point until it is over we will continue doing this i will continue to assess the money out of the special education and the reason you want to do that mr gilman is that you don't want to give teachers an initiative that they have to prepare for for a few years and they'll be like

079oh once we get off this door because then you're right back into the disproportionate i'm concerned about you know the funding aspect so this is going to resolve the issue with 2019 are we going to then go into maybe another set of students get suspended all right will this work why does that exactly okay discipline will be a part of districts right forever and what we're hoping to do is is to refocus reteach re-emphasize some of the soft skills the emotional skills giving them avenues to report um and those types of things and so what this what the idea behind this is to create to try to help continue to create that well-rounded student by exposure to many things including including positive reinforcement ways to seek that positive reinforcement and to also find avenues to

080have open that communication with your staff or your teachers so that teacher student relationship also is enhanced okay so it's a it's a one-time fee for for fifteen thousand dollars and then it's seven times eight so that's about five thousand dollars a year in perpetuity we have that that's part of our special education budget we can cover that right okay without impacting anything else okay now just to back step just a little bit this is more to give the continuity versus when i came on the board pre-covered um you know four years of the board's been great but two years really been sucky with covet um each building was pretty much doing their own thing i mean i knew that so and i saw really great successful things at one building where there were really

081great things and another win but those children were not getting the same benefits this is going to bring that continuity in there to where they're all on a level playing field and then seeing what the needs are right that's the structure correct that's the structure of the program um so and i i hate to say it like this but i've seen it a lot but the fads come and go and and research gets better and better and down the road if we come across something else what sort of exit strategy do we have for this sort of thing so if the district's needs change if the data change we determined that this was not addressing our student needs we would absolutely look at something different and if i could offer for the board if you're

082interested in excuse me continuing to develop an understanding of what we're talking about here they have a great website and of course we can always go to neti if you need to but i think that it demonstrates a lot of what they're trying to accomplish um so if we just set the equity piece aside let's just set that aside because that's i think where the argument's coming in if you go and look at what they have tried to do with this product is instead of a teacher floundering around trying to teach basic academics and also figure out how to create their own products and make this work and then prove that it works it's already there and so when you they have a very um detailed support package that goes along with this professional development

083you know what would the building want to talk to their teachers about how to integrate it into your system so i just recommend without going through all that that and i hope that everybody's kind of understood we start talking about social emotional learning here we're not talking about indoctrination we're not talking about see our critical race theory we're talking about giving these kids that and i gotta tell you if you go into our classrooms right now you see kids in every classroom that are unregulated in high school and why do i mean unregulated they don't know how to manage their emotions they don't know how to interact in a socially responsible way with other students in the classroom and so you that's now become the school's responsibility whether we like it or not and by

084state standards it's a directed responsibility so that's what we're after here is and i hope everybody understands that this isn't any indoctrination and i would recommend you go to the site and look at it and you'll see they've got some really great programs and they're threaded you know like that was the question you know a teacher to this i know but but a teacher the agenda logged in and they already sent me tons of stuff teacher in third grade could go you know this class isn't quite ready can reach down into the second grade and pull it up and implement some of those things because kids come at different levels so i would just you know one thing that we haven't talked about here is is we are struggling um and i think we've made

085some great strides with trying to keep our kids from killing themselves um and so part of this uh program at the upper levels try to teach the problem-solving skills and try to treat teach kind of the term that we see here commonly uses resiliency and that resiliency means you know the world doesn't end when you're you lose your girlfriend so how do you address that and and proactively so that's what makes this as important as we're we're working to give these kids those skills so we run into those things they've got a toolbox and a lot of these kids are not coming with toolboxes and i'm not talking about the group here because i know a number of you and i think that you're great parents we have other parents that just don't know how

086to do this you know they weren't taught through generations and so how do we deal with that we've got to find a solution at least a start solution and that's what this is about so um i for one i know i was told to completely get rid of this but i i gotta tell you i think it can be a very powerful tool we don't need to be teaching crt i mean you i'm telling you i'm against that uh adamantly but this isn't crt so and this is something that we've as a board asked for i know i've talked to you dr roth uh a number of times about having something whereby we can teach kids the the social skills personal interactions you know being able to have civil discourse as an adult uh be

087taught to them and and that kind of sounds like what this is yes and and that's part of what the lessons are going to be correct yes so how do i regulate myself when you and i are having a conversation and i adamantly disagree with you how can i still have that conversation with you and still hear what you have to say and and regulating emotional uh because because i know there's a lot of there's a lot of kids that are uh very high functioning that still have emotional problems that may or may not be diagnosed that could benefit from this well and we we talk about post-secondary that's one thing that was kind of mentioned just glossed over but what do we what are our businesses telling us that we are not producing kids

088we're not producing kids capable of soft skills you know i can go out and i can add two plus two and run a calculator or work on the computer but they don't know how to establish relationships with customers coming in the door really the core of this is ultimately establishing functioning respectful relationships and drives to that post-secondary soft skills that to the best of our ability to introduce it and inculcate it in the students before they walk out the door are we going to be successful you know god only knows but we are mandated to try not dr erbil right i hate to keep you talking but um what what sort of accountability mechanisms do we have for this do we have some sort of uh behavioral metrics that we have now that we can

089compare them to one year two year three years from now so that we can and can we have maybe a uh an annual accounting at these meetings to tell us hey this is this is working this is this is not working or it's just remaining flat it's not really any good so that we can we can have that sort of accountability yeah the sabers data will be the data that we use to determine if what we've implemented is having an effect now training starting this summer should this get passed yes okay so and i appreciate you saying annually i i hate to be um i think i'd like to see a little report a little sooner than that midterm of the year like asking how any adjustments we may have noticed i mean we know

090whatever we've been going through right now and i understand an annual report but i think a really brief review just even midterm on the school year to say hey by the way you wouldn't believe this or oh gee i'm really sorry to report whatever it may be we administer the sabres and lifesavers um in the fall and the spring and so we certainly could give you those early spring um results because fall we will just start it and we're going to don't see much um but that spring data of next year um we certainly would be able to provide them for you we could have like a minor report even like december if you just did a survey with the educators and whatever just a little quick survey the data that i showed you where

091we are currently yeah and kind of yeah yeah i mean a year is great and that's going to give us a lot more data and everything but i just think to even start watching some of the flow would be really beneficial to us if i could make a suggestion not that i'm an expert but if you do need some help with the team building and and motivation and resilience i would encourage you all to have first sergeant mrs shorts pay a visit to each class in the district and spend 10 minutes even no i i actually would say that some of the modules are even useful in the jrtc department oh yeah absolutely so i mean it's because we've been doing this for years same kind of stuff may i speak um dr rettelberger in

092your presentation i admit that you tried to smear me may i just state to all the district staff that the board is what runs the district not the staff and i have asked dr roth to make sure that the board gets to see the presentations because i don't own a rubber stamp i know some of these other board members do but i didn't bring one to this job so if i'm going to vote on curriculum i need to have had the opportunity to look over it fully and when you log on you have to get you can just get samples you can't see the whole website it's meant to be purchased also i don't appreciate your attempt to pretend like aaron jones doesn't currently contribute okay she's a current contributor which is the same as

093an employee she does you're correct do you have control over what she contributes to do you have control over what she contributes to no but no you don't thank you so aaron jones who works for character strong is absolutely a supporter of the 1619 project i took an oath to protect the constitution when i became a board member anybody that has looked into the 1619 project would understand that it is against the constitution its goal is to try to tear the country apart so i will not ever sit here and tolerate someone promoting a curriculum that is influenced at all in any way by someone that supports the 1619 project and i'm perfectly happy standing alone on that i will respect my oath even if i'm the only one doing it [Applause] are you going

094to deny that john norland has anything to do with character strong curriculum i am not familiar you're not familiar with him okay well he's one of the two founders of character strong there are two men that put the program together when when did the program become into existence oh you don't know how long it's been in existence okay well it's been in existence since roughly 2017. so if we're also going to look at a curriculum i would appreciate looking at a curriculum that has a better history most schools basically shut down for two years so we have what we're gonna hire a company that has roughly three years in experience for curriculum for our entire school did you get the email that i sent you a couple days ago that hasn't been replied to you

095i received all the emails that you had sent to me and did not reply to the last one as i believe i received it on saturday afternoon and knew that i would be addressing it here at this meeting so did you address that whether or not the state law requires sel uh the state expectations no is it law do we have to have sel in our district is it a law there's no law to teach math or a reading you're right there is no law for seo are there specifics mandated by the state board or only guidance for sel yes are there specifics mandated by the state board or only guidance for sel what are they they were listed in the powerpoint brand if you want to go back so are they guidance they're standards

096so they're not lost that was part of my email so we are not mandated to teach seo we are not we're under no law no obligation in fact excuse me danielle you already had your opportunity this is my turn to speak i would appreciate you represent us as the board please don't speak so disrespectfully to one of our staff members we can have conversations to be nice to each other i am not trying to be disrespectful i am supposed to tell the truth i apologize if you feel like i'm being disrespectful your social media is the only thing i'm aware of that's disrespectful you've blocked me on social media so so we are so i was going to say we are required john norland who's one of the founders of character strong tweeted may 31st

097of 2020 after he founded his company i will bring up i will not remain silent and will do what i can to dismantle systematic racism and that's exactly what this program would do so that is one of the founders of this program and i don't know that that view is held by everyone in the community we serve everyone in the community and what i'm asking for is objectivity i'm asking for it for our staff i'm asking for it from this board i'm asking for it for dr rolfe i don't think we should be siding with any political side any extreme i think we should shoot straight down the middle a tweet from aaron jones who is the creator of the equity training but we don't get to decide what she contributes to in the character

098strong curriculum white privilege i apologize i couldn't get the wi-fi working so i'm working from my phone white privilege is not thinking twice about filming yourself or taking selfies doing things you know are illegal because you are pretty sure there won't be consequences i also don't know that that represents our entire community i don't know that our entire community signs on and agrees with those ideals ann jones recommends the 1619 project here are her reading suggestions which would be first staff she must she mentions a bunch of authors are not going to take the time to go through that but included in that is a 1619 project the 1619 project broadcast along with teaching while white revolu sorry revisionist history code switch this american life words matter nice white people calling justice seeing white facing

099ourselves speaking of racism um let's see some of the books that currently are in question for myself for having like 80 f words or something as the hate u give also which is currently in our library dear white people is another um tv show movie so the other founder who you also may not be familiar with is houston craft he's one of the other two gentlemen this is his post the year that he founded the company i am not a liberal snowflake he goes on to say some other things and he says winter is coming john norland also had a post which is a part of what you're bringing on social emotional learning through the lens of social justice i don't know that everyone in our community agrees with those ideologies i think if we

100move forward with this curriculum we're ignoring the parts the families the taxpayers and the students who don't all sign on to the far left agenda and that's that's my understanding that's the emails that i'm getting from parents i have some emails that i've been asked to read from parents and i believe that's all i have to say i appreciate you standing through what i have to say um i will not be misunderstood i respect and i appreciate and i highly value every single staff member of this district and everyone sitting on the board next to me i also am not going to sit quiet on things that i am very passionate about so i apologize if i sounded disrespectful i am extremely passionate please do not misunderstand me [Applause] question for you dr edelberger is

101there any sort of crt in any of these lessons what sort of things because i've been to the website there is a module on critical race theory and equity and racial diversity and all that kind of stuff we're not buying that module that is correct so we do have a certain degree of control over whether or not mr or miss whoever it is i don't remember her name has any sort of impact on the program that we're trying to buy for them we just we just want the emotional learning all that sort of thing so we're not going to have any of that crt stuff right in there okay um and and we don't want any of that i i am aware that we have on occasion had rogue teachers try and teach the 1619

102project in our schools i hope that we would shut that down because it is rife with errors and inappropriate for good learning i would i would want there to be repercussions for a teacher that tries to teach flat earth theory personally so to my knowledge that's not what we're purchasing here um we really do need to have some sort of curriculum for getting emotional learning for our students so that they don't as the example was given try and do some sort of health self-harm we lost a student i think a year and a half ago in october and that's the sort of thing that affects me very deeply this is the sort of thing that we can do to address this we are obligated to do this by law because of the highest of suspensions

103in november 19th if we don't do this we would be in violation of state law and we would lose funds and we would lose funding standards not law standards but yeah and i am a big supporter of mental health and i will not for one second have anyone say that i'm not i'm probably more passionate than you are i don't think we have i don't i don't know i hear all the time that we don't have enough staff supporting our students they ask for a counseling appointment they're put off but then when i talk to our staff they say no they get in right away i get mixed messages a lot i am a huge proponent for there to be good relationships between the kids in the classroom and i i think we struggled there

104i think we are struggling there i'm a huge proponent for there to be amazing relationships between teachers and students and we absolutely struggle there and i think there's a huge like can't even put the right word on it a vast amount of things that we are not doing in this district to better support our teachers and give them a better culture of appreciation that we need to be focusing on all i am asking and i'm not ignoring a single fact of what this offers what i'm asking is that we look at a different curriculum that has founders that better represent the goals of this community at large that is all i am asking [Applause] we are mandated by law to follow the accreditation process and the accreditation process does include social emotional learning so standards

105standards so in order to be accredited we do have to address social emotional learning and i just want to come back to again we're not pulling these programs out of some internet search these are programs that we have used in the developmental process to determine what best would serve this district not be crt not be the other things we're talking about and it is evidence-based which means they had to demonstrate that if you employ the teaching and learning rules that they've applied that you'll get after the social emotional learning i would also like to say that this is a community effort i mean it's great to have everybody here because it is a community effort and we need parents that are teachers or maybe parents that aren't teachers come and say well i don't really

106understand this because we all have to take a look at our curriculum over time no curriculum is going to be perfect we can look for another product we already have but which which one is going to be perfect for everyone in this community that's not um so i have a little bit of faith and confidence a little more than faith and confidence in our teachers and our building administrators it doesn't mean they're perfect and there's and like we said out there there are some that come with an agenda but those are the ones that we need to identify and we need to correct that's what our teaching and learning you know department does so we all have to work together in this nothing of this is going to be perfect so yeah okay maybe there

107is a lesson let's take a look at that lesson just like we're doing the books right now we're going to talk to that later and some of the effort that was done by board member here to look at books that may not need to be in the library and they left the library was taken through our process so i just we need to have a little grace here for everybody and we need to have some faith in everybody in the community not just the one on the right and our left and talk respectfully and present issues in a way that we deal with it we can't keep fighting each other folks we've kind of stopped this thank you dr rettelberger [Music] [Applause] seeing since that this this first tier in character strong has been at

108nettie have you reviewed every module that's in that first year i personally have not but our staff have and there's no way that anything that is objectionable would have leached into there that you're aware of we would not because my thing is the minute that it is voted on in six months down the road suddenly there is some grand revelation of oh yeah look at this i would hate to feel the repercussions of the community of that and that that gives me pause of not knowing absolutely for sure if you can understand that i think the difficult piece and dr ruth you can say you know well the one thing one thing that you've got to define is objectional what do you find is different than what ms reed finds or what mr goodman finds

109or what i find objectively so everything that we do as a public school across the nation somebody can find an objection to every every literature every lesson everything out there so to sit here and tell you nothing's going to be objectible that would be that would be a false pre okay so pretense find crt in it we've had three board members vocally declare they do not want any crt i will go the district doesn't want it right and i know i mean the district business and i'm just asking if it were to have a revelation that suddenly in one module that pops up it's there the repercussions that would be falling from the community should that happen the one thing that we entrust is that our teachers also use good judgment and i think that

110our teachers do a great job of using good judgment now is every lesson exactly how that student's going to learn it maybe not but that's the thing of teaching is that they come back and try to reteach what what's been missed you see our scores we're far from perfect but the staff that we have and you'll hear less you'll hear some presentations later about how the process goes to try to figure out the areas of weakness to be able to make them an opportunity for strength that's a process that's public education but to sit here put this dr roberger on the spot that nothing's ever going to be objectible that's not a fair question for anybody because everybody defines objection i know but as a whole the feeling of the community right and we feel

111it too we're all going to get it wouldn't be just me it wouldn't be all of us 100 percent asking this we feel the emails from miss reed we feel the emails from ms price we feel them from mr carney we feel them from a board we do try to accommodate every time and sometimes sometimes it's not an area where it's a reminder hey mike you need to get this going better and we try it we talk you'll see processes you'll see policies you'll see it the thing about where we're at right now is the same thing is going on nationally and we're trying to rebound from a pandemic none of us planned for we're trying to continue to move forward with the best recommendations that we can do that meet the requirements of the

112state board of education which is mandated curriculum that's all we're trying to do we're not trying to go rogue on anything we're not trying to act rogue we're not trying not to be transparent we're trying to do the things that we believe that keeps kids first i have the utmost faith in our teachers our custodians across the board bus drivers we're all trying to do what's best for kids are there going to be opportunities for improvement 100 without a doubt but you could say that at any place anywhere whether it's a public school a university a college the households anywhere people can continually improve our goal and it's always been a goal for the last eight years is to try to improve every day we try to change one student a day if we can

113change one student to jay that may change a family forever and that's our goal and are we going to have some things absolutely but we're willing because your staff believes in each other to try to tackle the things that are the most adverse and to make them the most positive that we can and and i get that and again i was not trying to put you on the spot so i don't know where that came from here because i haven't i've been really even tone in here today you have you've been awesome or miss murphy that was a great question but my point of that is is the question was if you fail we're going to have this room full again no it wasn't if you fail but it's just some you know modules change

114if one can buy a package and you might have 22 modules and they say years bonus 4 24 5 and 6 and all of a sudden it's the exact thing we said we didn't want well i think we got to have the confidence and the people you've hired to take care of that i don't have any lack of faith in any of our staff i just want to make sure that the curriculum that we're giving them to teach is fair to them also if i was a teacher in this district and i was given training by someone who's a supporter of 1619 i would leave the district so i that's not a point that i'm making and i want to make that clear i sent an email to laura batson also this morning at 904

115i did not receive a response why has there been an issue since 2016 in the sped department that has remained unaddressed how does doing a blanket be kind is the basic moral of the story of this education founded by a guy that is a professional hugger going to fix the fact that we have kids being kicked out disproportionately from this bed department i i don't understand the answer to that question still special education department doesn't get kids out that comes through kids get disciplined through building administration well your email to me said it was just proportionality from the sped students with disabilities were suspended at a higher rate than students without disabilities so how is this curriculum hopefully it won't be voted on but it sounds like it will be so how is this curriculum

116going to fix that problem so that's where we start with the tier one initiative i'm sorry that doesn't make sense to me but that's fine i'm not understanding the logic of the board that you're going to purchase a curriculum that's founded by far-left agendas they are not quiet about how they're activists how are you going to purchase their curriculum and sit here and say to the public and to myself that you're going to assume there's no no undertones no training for crt in there it just doesn't make sense to me but that's just me and i won't say another word thank you all right anything i'm good any other questions do we have a motion to accept the character strong social curriculum as presented by my well five second second i have a motion by

117mrs wells second by mr powell to accept the character strong social curriculum as presented all of those in favor 5-2 thank you sure you can recess for a file break for five minutes return at 7 45. dr rick will move on item seven district facilities and projects right part of uh um esser two dollars was set aside for like building improvement controls heating air air flow those types of things and so matt has been working with beth on how the sr2 application comes together what could be used within that and then what would best benefit the district with those funds set aside for those types of um opportunities for district improvement and so mr dedeke is one of the very best in the business and so uh matt it's all yours thank you uh so

118i was approached early december to look at some expenditure dollars for sr2 to improve air quality we've been to the board approved some other air purification items and have discussed some additional changes we could do at that time all of you have seen my capital outlay forecast i had some items that would improve air quality that were on that list so they were easy move up in line and take care of several projects that otherwise would have taken probably three to five years to complete so we identified four major projects uh that will improve controls as dr roth said uh to improve air intake from the outdoors to verify the co2 levels in our classroom spaces at these locations and fit in line with other systems that we already have in place so it was

119an easy move to suggest these four projects totaling up to about 199 000 that would be paid for through esther 2 grants and i'll answer any questions [Music] so what is there anything specific to covid that's going to be going into any of this any filtering or so the biggest piece with covid that we learned early on was movement of air introducing outside air and the rate of return uh recycling there so uh with this we have the existing units and three of these locations uh we're just going to control them so we can verify uh when co2 levels get to a certain point that we can bring in outside air mix that and and have fresh air into our classrooms that's not to be mistaken that that's not happening now this allows our automated

120system which we have across the district to integrate with some units that are not quite as smart as some of the other units and that includes this building so as we're sitting here it would also help control the main boiler chiller and main air system of this this plant so that we can make sure that we're changing air over uh adequately so to your question it does help with the coved in uh in that manner filtration will remain the same as i reported before but this will just improve outside air intake and verification of co2 levels any other questions madam president i moved to accept the recommendation that guy over there i ran out of fingers folks sorry by mr goodman to accept the consideration of hvac equipment controls for the four buildings and uranium

121all those in favor so no thank you and then item 72 sidewalk replacement well annually mr stoka blesses us at the board meeting to talk sidewalks and so mr stoke is here to talk about concrete purchases or projects and request permission to move forward with those so every year we go out and around the district to identify bad areas of concrete sidewalks falling apart entries that are getting holes and stuff like that mr connie pointed out one for us um handicap ramps that are failing back 10 years ago they started replacing them with fiberglass ones we're going to a cast iron that will last longer take the tractor abuse that um snowplowing takes tolls on and i've got any questions it says pioneer sports complex is that the ball fields yes we've already got deteriorating

122sidewalk and we just built it not at the complex itself but when we got that area leading up to it from the parking lot we also got the area that the city had taken and there's a big section right on the north end of the football field that's raised up and it's a trip hazard and it's falling apart no and and i was just making sure something wasn't already breaking on the other stuff that would be taken care of okay thank you i'd like to say why mr carney is concerned about things like that because i sit on the board of trustees for 139 school districts and things like that cost us money so i'm just going to make sure in my real life my involvement what's the uh what's the worst spot my biggest

123weight room by the way my biggest concern is uh the handicapped ramps that are falling apart creating more trip hazards um all the concrete out at the warren school area except for ias which is all new we've been replacing over the last well i've been here 20 years over the last 20 years because it's just it's a bad mix and so the ones i've worn are probably the worst okay any questions i'd like to make a motion to approve the bid from baker for one hundred fourteen thousand five hundred thirteen dollars and fifty cents for the sidewalk replacement we have a motion by ms wells and second lenders murphy to accept the bid from the reconstruction all those in favor seven zero the answer i died item number eight in district technology purchases brian's our

124e-rate guru so he's going to talk about e-rate e-rates uh where we get uh we can have the government pay for you know a large percentage in our cases of uh services that we we would need like one of them's internet so this first one i'm bringing is for the internet renewal and uh we want to renew that for three years so um you know we had a couple of vendors that bid on it and charter which is actually spectrum is one we already have and we've had good service through them and uh the difference in price is really a small amount over three years and it would take much more than that to go ahead and change it because there's a lot of configuration you have to do on the back end and change

125ips and get ips approved it's a it's a entailed process to switch that over i agreed i started on the on the rebates and this week we're doing it over three years is the payback over three years is it lump sum or is it you know over time and then are these the only companies that do this sort of thing yeah you put out you do you file a form 470 which any vendor across the nation can uh bid on it and so they all have that information and they have very into the system to where it alerts them hey you know so-and-so's got a bid out for internet service so that's that's what we had okay any further questions just uh the bid as stated at the bottom the recommended nation from you is

126actually the charter bid okay yes all right i'd like to make a motion to approve the charter bid for 126 thousand dollars for our internet services second we have a motion to accept the um through three-year program that's presented all those in favor of thank you and then the next one is also an e-rate item it's for managed internal broadband services so what this is is they have these sensors that will go in deep into your your network and proactively let you know about uh anomalies on your wireless network which that's a common thing with wireless networks is you'll get some kind of interference and it's not always easy to track it down so what these sensors do is they they look at it all the time and so they proactively report out to you

127that hey you know here's here's a interference and this is the area it's coming from and here's the possibilities it could be so it really reduces our time of troubleshooting um because you know a lot of times when we get uh interference we don't know about it right away so then we have to go back and try and find out okay what time of day what day was it that that interference happened and so then you gotta search through logs to try and find it which is again time consuming and this is like i said proactive it will alert us let us know hey there's a there's a problem you know over here so we can jump on it right away so this will give you real-time monitoring of your yes the wideband okay and

128that's not something charter automatically offers to us with our no no this is a piece of uh hardware along with the service but no they don't do that because this would be internal to the to the wi-fi yes system yeah um do we have any plans for maybe setting up something in-house for that uh with your staff i know there's software out there that we could basically do this ourselves with just the software not to this degree not to this degree okay is it because of how many devices we have or no it's the intelligence that they use behind it so it's hardware and software and a company actually monitoring it too other than software trying to do it and is this something new that we're implementing or this is this is something well we've

129had a sensor you know we tried it out and it's worked really well for us well but that only does one site and so we're again we're reactive right we find a problem we're having trouble finding it we put the sensor out of the site to nail down what it is this will help us have sensors in each site so we're not having to be reactive we can be proactive on it so if i'm understanding the action the board is to take is to accept the bid as recommended from y bot for that amount with e-rate paying is part of that and then the responsible amount that we are authorizing is the 10 000 amount is that correct yes and that's our three years of service okay so it's ten thousand over the three years

130not two thousand a year ten thousand over three years and and this includes the equipment yes the sensors and the service now are we are we buying the equipment or are we essentially renting the equipment essentially the three years because it doesn't work without the service right okay so but again if i could understand what we're going to be authorizing when you say the 10 223 83 over three years you're saying each year it's going to be 10 000. or that is what then it is okay because that can be two red two different ways okay so we're authorizing ten thousand two twenty three eighty three and president i moved i'm sorry i just still have other questions so um after three years so i'm trying to think 10 years down the road uh considering

131technology and it's changing all the time um what's our what's our exit strategy are we gonna look for something different after the three years yeah during the three years we'll be okay seeing how well it does for us but as you just mentioned you know technology is changing all the time so there might be something that that we like better than another product could do maybe it's a learning is quicker you know with artificial intelligence coming right sky is the limit right um my other concern is so we're getting we're getting e-rate funds uh three years from now are those e-rate funds going to be available then or are we going to be on the hook if we decide to do this for three years paying the full 50 grand well we're not on the

132hook i mean we don't well i mean if we don't do that but as long as it keeps the e-rate going yes we can apply again and that's something we have to apply for for okay it does have um the option of renewing so we could renew it for another three years if we wanted to without having to go out for bid right but again you know all that's subject to you know evaluating what we've had and what's out there because we might find in three years again that there's uh a much better uh proven product out there over 20 years it great yes yes yeah yeah yeah okay yeah uh in well over 20 years okay and we've been consistently been able to to get those okay but even if i understand this we

133are buying a three-year contract period and the e-rate is for all three years because they are that's that portion of the contract so it's when we look at replacement then we'd have to reapply so the e-rates already paid contracts done is three years right what one was approved now just it is contingent on e-rate approval so we're not on the hook even if the e-rate didn't you know yousek didn't approve it okay any other questions sorry uh madam president i move uh to accept the recommended bid from ybot as presented for 36 months at fifty one thousand one hundred nineteen dollars and seventeen cents with eighty percent of that cost or forty thousand eight hundred and ninety five dollars and thirty three cents being paid by e-rate with the obligation to the district of ten

134thousand two hundred and twenty three dollars and eighty three cents over the three years second motion and this is working to accept the right contracting figures all of those in flavor 7-0 absolutely avid expansion into our middle school for five years we've had the avid elective and school-wide avid going in our high school and it's been a huge success and we have two of our avid teachers here with us tonight and you can see that absolutely they support this program in fact just found out very excited to announce this hope it's okay if i share um right now we're sitting in about 200 000 in scholarships for our avid seniors right now [Music] and that is a win so such a big win so our avid uh program that's going on in our high school

135has been such a success we began researching last year moving it as an elective option for our seventh and eighth graders i sent you a kind of a breakdown of funds it would be for five years so we're using our dodea grant to pre-pay with avid to continue the work in our high school for five years but then also using esser funds to implement avid in our seven eight building for five years so um sent that to you and any questions do you have someone in mind are these two coaches going to be going from the high school and the middle school or are we going to have middle school specific i would love that however um as you see their blood pressure going through the room um it would be a different staff member

136and no we have not uh dr johnson and i have talked about qualities we'd like to see and attributes of that educator but not any one particular person okay i just wanted to make sure we weren't stretching well i tried i'll tell you absolutely cloning is still illegal okay please fall under estrogen good questions and was there just not enough of the dodea grant to do it and so we're making up for it with the esser no dodea has to be spent at our high school and so in that there's some perks to combining it under one contract and so with that that's why it's split that way thirty okay but this still sets us up for the next five years are we gonna be applying for the grant or uh grants are very specific

137each year so i'd like to make a motion to approve the contract cost of 60 what is it 63 205 dollars well it's up to 85 000 the 185 not to exceed not to exceed eighty-five thousand dollars and per course change and for the course change listed in the documents thank you thank you we have a motion by ms murphy especially mr carney to accept the avid expansion as presented not to receive 8500 yes there's a couple board policies this evening that i believe the board would need to be just to discuss most of it's come from questions from you as board members as well as community members that have reached out questioning um different things about our policies and so with that one of the things that jake has taken some questions on and

138tried to revamp and revise his policy bcbi which is the public participation which you've had this evening with people addressing the board not only before as scheduled but also some that are going to address the board as unscheduled so jake you want to talk them through the changes in the policy and this is a first read so as a board you wouldn't be making a decision tonight if you see further questions that you may have you can direct them to myself for jake we've already had some feedback this was provided to the board on friday um it doesn't change anything in terms of how we've been practicing the last few weeks basically policy was either out today out of date or unclear biggest change we've had in the last school year is we used to

139require you to register with us a week in advance of this meeting which should allow patrons the opportunity to see an agenda come out to decide if they wanted to speak or not that's been backed up to basically 72 hours so the friday end of business before a monday meeting that helps to prevent us from if everybody wanted to speak tonight as scheduled input as they walk in the door would be an uncontrollable and sustainable meeting so that does also allow us to be able to sometimes provide information to those wishing to address the board knowing that it's not a two-way dialogue sometimes at that point in time patrons decide they don't need to speak um so again this doesn't change practice it helps to provide clarification and it's actually been a response to some

140of the patrons that have been showing up month after month and giving us suggestions into how that make this policy better also we do not you're required to come and get a hard copy um you can either visit me at the back or you can provide that either phone email over the course we can try to make that as easy as possible so to get people signed up at any given time um before unscheduled input begins at the beginning of this meeting individuals could decide on site that they want to speak maybe came didn't have knowing that they were going to have concerns or suggestions to share again that doesn't change any of that just helps to establish best practice that aligns with board policy and the last thing i would point your attention to

141again doesn't change current practice the re-title of what was scheduled patron input to request for agenda item i think that's always been mistitled so as we review this policy with the finer detail again doesn't change how we practice that um it does just helps to redefine that policy so not suggesting any changes thanks to everybody that comes through the door they if you watch a few meetings you kind of know how the flow of the meeting goes and that that's what we would be doing so first three tonight looking for suggestions for the next few weeks and then we bring it back to the board in april for action you any other questions for mr potter how i'm sorry for clarification how do we give you the suggestions that we would like to see change

142emails email or from to you specifically so this is the policy that uh probably has the most interest um this is a policy that's been in place since 2012. however a lot of the question around this policy is what the procedures are to be able to get to materials in the classroom and to materials in the library and those types of things and so as a request from the board and board members this is something that um that i feel that as a board you would want to discuss and be openly discussed and have open discussions about this um again um a lot of what you talked about earlier with character strong some of that leads over into this and so what we're trying to do is provide clarity um to the processes that go

143into effectively trying to keep the policy in place and make the policy work for you as a board and us as a district um so ms batson is going to lead us through that process uh we have a special guest that's going to show the ease of some of the things that are in that um and then we're also going to uh wrap up at the end with the actual policy i have so with that um thank you so reasons resources change in our classroom because they really don't change as often as you might think um there are three main reasons one is when there's a formal standards update it comes to ksc it's on a schedule on cycle created by ksde um another one is when you do a new course for example when

144the admin elective was just approved there was a portion page document that went to all board members so they can see what resources were going to be used in that class and then the third one which is probably the one that causes the most resources to be updated at one time is through just a normal cycle of a refresh or a curriculum update in that timeline we sat within our district so when we're looking at a standards change ksde sets those out it's public it's published you can find it on the ksc website this is a screenshot so you can see it um in there teacher representatives from across the state in that content indoor grade level band are parts of that cadre that give initial feedback it comes as a draft form it goes

145into all districts you get feedback from content specialists and expertise in the field and from there and then it requires a state board approval so the ksce state board approves that now what happens here at the local sometimes has components of it that are local board approved sometimes not because if the shifts are minor if it's more of a renaming that might not require local board approval we fall under of course the state board mandates with that however if it does require fiscal purchases of course that comes to you in that manner so another way as i just mentioned is through our new course documents this is not a new form and as we have new courses aligned and this form has been in place long before i came into this seat and in there

146it mainly where we see it as our secondary schools because elementary don't necessarily have the electives or the separate courses you have fourth grade whereas in our high school in our middle school or seven eight you have band you have math and you have media so we will see those come through those are border proof you get all of those it lists documents curriculum that we'll be uh using resources or curriculum that we'll be using in those but the third one that's probably like i said the most popular the most often is through a normal cycle of resource adoption it's a year-long process we're already starting on next year's adoption cycle in that it rotates between secondary and elementary right now we're finishing up elementary we've got a little bit of middle school going on

147and we've switched to secondary next year and it also rotates between contents so you have your ela refresh you have your math refresh your social studies your electives your world languages all that it's divided into four phases which i'll go over here in a minute and it does require board approval it usually happens in april i'll give you a spoiler we're coming to you in april with some curriculum um updates for that as well so phase one it's research and that's something that's done within the teaching and learning department ryan bonesteiner wants to point on this he does an amazing job so in this he looks at when are our digital license expiring for our access textbooks when i come to school the big thing was we had the textbook pack i remember we all

148wanted the paper bags from the grocery store to cover them in that's not how textbooks are done today textbooks now are a digital access code that they pull up through their chromebook you have some you have some available within the class but it's not in the same settings that i remember and then maybe some of you remember um carrying around that geometry textbook and then we do a needs assessment in there what is it that was missing our previous resource that we see a hole that we need to better fill for this upcoming cycle and we explore potential options and what's called the marketplace what's available for purchase what's available for open source records it is something that we do look at as well and one of the big ones that ryan attends every year

149is this green bush resource review it is like a shopping mall of products that every publisher wants you to stop and see their table then in the spring and summer there is tons of research so right now i told you we're already starting up for next fall and with that one of the things that it's always looked at as are those external reviews and those come from ed reports what works clearinghouse the national cleaning house for intervention and then also looking at some of those states uh white adoptions and he lists some up there and some of the some of the ones he currently looks at and then finally we reach out to local districts and that we know we're using that product that's one of the questions that's asked the publishers like who in

150our area uses this product so we can call and ask what do you like about what are the struggles what part of your teachers you sing the most part are they not using at all those type of questions so here's an example we did an elementary math adoption a couple of years ago and we went from envision to reveal and this is teacher feedback and you will notice the orange part of the circle can't read it one of the things was like where do you spend a lot of your time like where are you seeing i need the most bang for my buck i have a resource don't see and it was in numbers and operations in base 10. so with that we knew looking in we needed to look for a resource that was

151strong in that because it's great if it has the other things but if i have two thirds saying my most important concept that i have got to get through is this numbers and operations i need to provide a resource that helps with that and that's just an example of one of the opinion gatherings of google form that goes out to teachers and administrators to gather kind of that input from there i said we do research pull some external reviews these are some copies of ones that have been done in previous products and so it's not a laura batson you know kind of likes the cover or right button sign or like some of the bells and whistles that are off so while we're researching uh meet with potential vendors so a lot of time is

152spent meeting with vendors and tell us a little more about your product we see on ebb reports this tell me a little bit you know why do you figure this is scored lower or this is scored higher what pieces of it and a huge thing that we have to figure out at this point is it even compatible with our technology so does it work well with chrome and that is where we pull in brian we pull in things here we say okay let's get this next layer of research going and i consider this our shopping phase it really is like window shopping because we're not purchasing or anywhere near purchasing but we then take all that research and narrow it down and say okay of the viable options these two to three meet our needs

153the best and in that we go into phase two and that will tell you currently i told you on process so we are um coming to the board with a request for refresh using a k3 phonics was one of the things we looked at spoiler alert the one in the middle is the one we're going to recommend next month so it is on our website in just a minute i'll show you where you can get that uh information it is something that if you um are interested in looking at what we are looking at for phonics instruction please absolutely and kind of dig deep into that reach out to me we talked to ryan bones we'll be happy to kind of share with you our thoughts on that then for our seven eight we're not

154quite to the point of the big reveal with this one yet we're still tabulating some of the reflection sheets from our teachers but in that those were the two products that they highlighted so from this we go into phase two and that is exactly like dr robert said one of our non-negotiables are lessons are taught in our classrooms with our kids not the salesperson showing what they think the classroom will look at but our teachers our kids and if the product won't let us pilot them we say no thank you and i will tell you sometimes vendors have a hard time with that and we just made a commitment uh mr bonesteiner and i to each other that we will not look at products that they won't let so teacher representatives instructional facilitators other staff

155come together and we have the vendor come in they do their pitch it's very much a sales pitch please understand that teachers take the products use them for a period of time and keep reflective logs what they liked about the product what they didn't like about the product uh from there and already i can tell you by the time they've talked about the third or four lessons they know what they like they know what they don't like and they're able to articulate that so from there kind of i was generalizing it november is usually i told you we're doing research now november because we let them get their classes started november is when we kind of pull in the cadre and say hey and here's what we're piloting your grade level your content area whatever

156it is is that for the refresh then november and february they pilot those products and in february we get the group back together which enters us into and there's some examples of the reflection logs that they keep on there we go to phase three and teachers recommend products now please know um we're very upfront like if we know this is not physically like we're not gonna buy with phonics there was one company that had all these puppets and uh i tell you absolutely kindergarteners love puppets those are part so in that but we said we will buy puppets from another resource you know if this puppet is makes it so cost and effective in there so we're very upfront about the pieces of the program we're looking at the pieces that we're not looking at

157so from there teachers complete two responses and in there they do the quality of the materials as well as if the decision was yours and money was no option which one would you select then we gather all their feedback analyze it look for things and then we do kind of a fact check then we go back to the padres this is what we think we heard is this correct is this what you're recommending and then from there you can see where we kind of gathered some opinions that's another example then we come to the board and we say here's what we're recommending here are our products here's the cost here's the professional development here's the timeline uh mr bonesteiner does this every april in fact you'll see a review of what the process is this

158always includes that in the um of a resource adoption and a huge component is not only just the resources but what is the follow-up implementation support so a few years ago we had an issue in a math adoption that didn't work well with our computers and so we had to absolutely get some additional support in there and that's why we always purchase that and always come up with a support plan for the implementation because it does this no good to buy these products if we can't support their implementation so that is kind of and i'm going the wrong way or one of this is all right that is kind of or that is how those main core resources enter into our classrooms now supplementals which may be additional novels that come in additional text could

159be a secondary book that comes with it follows a very similar process in there so same piece of research in it there's a needs assessment that's conducted similar like what are we missing in our curriculum what are the kids really struggling with what are they absolutely refusing to read what are they reading like crazy in there and then a little asterisk his ap and college bound classes are really particular in what they want to see in literature in their classrooms we look for award-winning books we look for ones that have been identified as strong reads for young adults diversity and relevance and current and future trends it does need zero good to spend taxpayer money on books that kids will never open that's huge then from there research discussions conversations on which text should be

160eliminated and which texts are chosen and then final recommendation approval process we're buying whole grade level sets it's something that's come financially it's going to come so it can be approved if it's small circle or supplementary text depending on it'll go through building approval and or district approval as it's added to there so this form has been in our school district since 2016. okay so it's not something that was created um because of this and it's called a book approval form and it identifies what state standards which union of study what objectives they're going to teach and it asks teachers to give two external academic reviews above and beyond what they want to use this book for in then it is included in the curriculum so this is just a screenshot of our 11th grade

161ela and you will see that the pearson text which is their core resource that was through that normal adoption is partnered with a trade book or an authentic test a text is especially in high school at that point we reading does not hurt the textbook i mean it absolutely can be taught from but that lifelong reading and that reading to learn and that reading for pleasure and reading for information you want to see them access those trade books and that information and then from there if we're looking at the library media center very similar process in there um needs assessments conducted and opinions gathered that's one thing i love about secondary students in the library they'll tell you exactly what authors they want to see exactly what genre of books they want too and i

162love watching our secondary students and our secondary librarians go back and forth on authors and which one is the better one of this book or this one's the better uh genre of that so the research is conducted i've listed some of the things that are used in there the american library association what's referred to what's referred to as er what's uh or what's a future in adult lit very unlit fall at destiny award-winning book list author talks showcases all of that so then recommended purchases are through our normal um process so in it it goes to the administration for approval it's ordered has a line item to fund it gets inventory through fall at destiny which you all have access to see everything in our libraries and i'll show you that here in a minute

163from so with that one of the things that definitely want to talk about is what are your options as families and kind of you know i have a child in the school and i'm not sure what they're reading i'm not sure what's in their yali class i'm not sure what's in their library so i want to talk about it and then i'll talk about what you have absolutely as rights as family members to communicate for your school so i will always say please reach out to your child's teacher please reach out to your child's administrator 99 of the time that is where it works effectively sometimes it doesn't if for some reason it doesn't please continue to reach out reach out to your child's administrator if that's done reach out to me if that doesn't

164work reach out to the doctor reach out to your board members so many times we can absolutely communicate and find a solution that works best for your family then you as a high school family will receive a syllabus one of the things that i encourage you and that happens in august and i have to tell you up front i wasn't always the best with my own personal children and reading those for details so in that ask for a an electronic copy of it keep it on your computer ask for uh to be posted in the group classroom find a way to kind of keep that so when it comes to everywhere and you're like what what are you saying you're reading please refer to that but even if you lose it i have another solution

165for that your child's google classroom has this information as well that your power school that you can log into as parents if you're like i remember seeing that but i don't know how to do that please reach out i want to help you i want to help you figure out that uh login and so do your child's teachers and so your child's building administrators this is new so i want to be really transparent on that this step is new and it was not necessarily because of our february board meeting this happened because of a conversation with a parent that occurred in november so in that one of the things that came out was whoa i'm not okay with my child reading this book it's not a good fit for our family what are my options

166so you as a family have the right have absolutely the opportunity to choose a different text an alternative assignment and that works best for your family but one of the things that became clear is we didn't really have a way to navigate that easily so these are novel letters this is an example of one so if a book is going to be read aloud to your child in class whole novel as a parent you will receive a novel letter so this is one um that kind of goes through this book in whole blood and for that it will have a sentence and all these letters that say that gives some things that you know that your family might find objectionable so in this the text contains references to violence murder language and adult content from

167there if you see lower on the letter it kind of has a yes i would like you to contact me concerning this novel uh used in class you can also email as a reply when you get this letter to say i would like some more information about this book not saying it is a good fit i'm not saying it's not a good fit i would like to have a conversation about it and then from there alternate assignment alternate text not in a punitive way but in uh we actually this book is not the best fit for your family so that's one thing that has been added um since november so as far as library options in there please if you're interested in what your child is reading please reach out to your child's librarian and

168say hey can you provide me information on what books my child has checked out from the library and then in there if you see something that you're like i'm not okay with my child checking this out please visit with your child librarian and so that you know can be noted in there and then this let's say you don't necessarily have a student or um that's in our schools but you're like hey i care about what's being taught in our community i care what's in our classrooms and i want to know what those things are so this is directly on our website if you go to and here in a minute we have a live demonstration if you will go to the www.usd453.org scroll down to the bottom you're going to find something called find it

169fast there are these big blue boxes and the one that says instructional resources and technology is one that's been up for the past three four months in it and in an effort to be very open in an effort to be very transparent with our community so absolutely you have access to almost everything we've got in here so please it's like a wormhole you're going to get in and dive in when you are like okay i've got questions my name is laura batson please contact me i would love to talk to you about some of the things on this website so it gives overview of resources it gives assessments and it also talks about our parent support materials so so when you go to the main landing page instructional resources and technology a couple of things

170to note on this website it gives an overview of every resource we use in this district it also gives a form that you can request to review those so if you're like i want to see the social studies textbook i want to see this book all you have to do is ask will be happy to set up a time and when you fill that out it goes that request goes to three people james perry ryan bodensteiner and myself ryan bowden's son or i had one will contact you and then set up a time for that it also gives you access to look through your child's or any one of our buildings library media centers you want to know if a book is in our inventory all you have to do is type in the title

171or the author and it will come right up if we have it it'll tell you if it's checked out it will tell you if it's available it also gives an overview of our learning platforms and some kind of health documents to help navigate that so one of the things i really want to point out because so much conversation has been about the novels that are used in classrooms in our website under high school if you will go to english language arts you will see a document that's up there in that upper left that is every book that is approved to be taught by grade level now when your child sees it they may freak out and say i've read 75 of those books on that list and i only have a quarter of school left

172i gotta read all those books no no not every book is taught every year and not every book is taught in entirety so tell them take a rep and in that just know that those are the supplemental resources that have gone through that process to be on this list okay my favorite button is down at the very bottom called help page because if you're like me you get to a point i hit that wall and i'm like i can't even navigate out of this website i'm just going to x out but in there it'll take you to this video that helps you navigate and know how to use the site it's on the bottom of every one of our pages in that website so we tried to make it extremely user friendly we tried to

173make it as open and transparent as possible because i want you involved in our school district i want you involved in your child's education i want you knowing what's going on in your classroom so i've asked mr powell to kind of show us here navigating from the kind of beginning so you can kind of see it live action we've never tried this not really sure how this is going to work i get to be your training dummy i'll try to do this pretty quickly because i know it's getting late but i think it's really important for you to see that the teaching and learning department and then all the others that they've tapped have worked really really hard to do something i don't know of any other school districts doing this we challenged them about

174a year and a half ago to say look you know the world has changed i can't hand a parent a textbook and have that parent look at the textbook and take it home you know part of what we've um lost in this transition to electronic uh capabilities is um every time you touch an electronic textbook it's controlled we only get so many uh licenses so many kids assigned to those licenses when it reaches the point that we if you wanted to get a book we have to give you a license well that's coming from somewhere and we pay for every license we've got not only that every time it's accessed it goes back to the database in the database they know that it's been touched by this person with this code this many times etc

175so the ability to control our access into our teaching our learning materials is uh has changed fundamentally from when most of us went to school so the challenge was to the teaching learning department hey look um we've got to find a fix to this so is this perfect no but i would tell you find another school district the teaching learning department is trying to make this it's evolving you saw in january instituted another step because learning from what parents need and even the community needs to figure out how to make this match our community mores and standards so with that um i'm live on the internet i hope right brian there we go okay and you just go to the you know you could just type in usd 453 and bam you're at our site

176so this is live right in our database now aurora's talking to us right here instructional resources and technology now keep in mind as we go through this i am your training dummy so just bear with me but i i think i can demonstrate that most anybody can do this she talked about instructional resources and technology now this is where it gets powerful because you see on this page right here at the top you can read all the stuff down there and they've tried to kind of help you work your way through what's on the technology and resource but up here every one of these pull downs you can go to if you have access to power school library media center i'm going to come back to that but she just talked about english language arts

177so we go over to high school and bam you pull that down and now it shows you what software we're using and some of these i don't know whether all of them are hyperlinked to where you can go see the sampling of what that looks like now is that perfect no but then if you see something you go well i'm kind of interested in this in our social studies then you can get back to laura and to ryan and go i want to see this and are there any textbooks that i can get for this and i would tell you that i was just in ryan's office about a week and a half ago and he had a box of guess what textbooks and other items waiting because someone in the community asked to be

178able to look at it so this is accessible but now let's talk about see this is the chart that we're talking about and you have access to that and not only here but if you go to the teaching and learning web page it's right at the bottom you click it and a hyperlinks up and you can get every one of them but you can go down and like she said hyperlinks right into it it gives you all of the kansas standards where are we drawing the standards that we're having to build curriculum too i know this looks complex it can be but it gives you a place to start um i talked about the uh other point that i wanted to show you just a couple quick things is library media center because i think

179this is really powerful you know if if we're wondering what what's in our uh elementary classroom or excuse me uh library what's there what are we looking for this is live we decided charlotte's web that's probably the only one i can remember i read it enough times to my daughter is that right oh my gosh i told you you had a training dummy here so i'm trying i just i just want to point out that i do technology for a living so you just for a small fee you handle christmas but i mean bam there it is it tells you how many uh we have where they're located and even some of the things that are related to charlotte's web this is for every library in our school district and you have direct access to

180this this isn't something that's hidden it's as transparent as we can get our libraries to you guys so um that's a double-edged sword people go well we don't want them to know well i think we do and i think that our district does and we'll deal with you know the reviews and things we've already already dealt with some of them like the manga books this is a good way for us to look at what we wanted in our community libraries and our kids have access to and i just want to before i get off this just want to highlight one thing that laura said that i think you need to take to heart you can control what your child is going to access in their local school library you can find out what they're reading

181or you can say i i don't want this genre of books i would prefer they not get checked out and that can be put in with their ability to take that out now can you stop somebody taking off the shelf no but you you can kind of semi do what you think you need to do to help control what your kids have access to so is it perfect no but we're going to work on it thanks brian so in here this is a copy if you would like to see um there's two ways you can just email me once again laura batson at lbfinders.org so that's one way you can also go through the slides there's something specific so please fill out this resource form ryan or myself we'll reach back out to you for

182that so in this there are a lot of ways for you to be involved in child education and i just want to review because you know this last uh two years we haven't had the normal events that we normally have so in this um you have to log into powerschool that is something that you're like i know i need to set that up i haven't quite yet call us it's all it's on our website look through it we want to help get that connected um in there you have access regardless of when parent-teacher conference days are you have access to your teachers to the school administration um to myself to kind of talk through this you can phone email we've gotten good at zoom i've gotten a whole lot better at zoom in the last

183two years and we absolutely scheduled face-to-face meetings in fact had one this afternoon um with four uh other adults uh two parents and two community members they just wanted to talk and share some concerns that they had and i think it was a very pleasant meeting i think that both sides didn't listen it felt hurt it felt respected in that so we are getting back into as far we'll talk about getting back into family engagement events let's be involved in there um school newsletters school media posts all of those follow your child's school follow our district on social media and those school newsletters are just chunks full of great information there are opportunities to volunteer and be involved um with your school through formal channels like pto or site council but then also through informal

184channels and one of the things i kind of want to show you this is an average kindergarten family we asked them to send us what do you see because i you know my is 22. so in that i don't get these as much anymore but this is an average kindergartner since as you can see they have a newsletter down by the dojo they have some examples of their work now does every school do it the same way no but every school does have communication in place where they reach out this one um here is i think an ab a high school that you can see you have access to grades in there this is all at your fingertips as family members this is our intermediate school our fifth sixth grade through social medias the parent

185updates and google classroom updates this is seven eight i believe yep so in here you see another set and all those that are blue underlying down the bottom are hyper links that give you even more information so as a district we are committed to being transparent with our community with our stakeholders with you as families so when there for those of you that don't have students in our schools i want to invite people get involved and there are a couple of ways actually there's multiple ways and probably some i didn't even put on here that we can come up with together one is consider joining district site council so i meet monthly with community members parents representatives from across the district we'd love to have you come join us um in the volunteer in our

186schools whether volunteering working with students volunteering in the library shelving books volunteering in a wide variety of ways substitute teach and currently our state has passed where the normal sub requirements under an axel so with that you of course go to the desert destroyer will be happy to give you some information about that but come see what we do each day and then when we hit a barrier when we hit a pothole um please call me if you are not sure who to call call me i can get you in touch with the right person or i can help and if you're not hearing back from your child's teacher or your child's administrator more than likely they're like me they saw it come up on their phone they meant to apply and something happened and

187they were up it's still wrong i'm not making excuses for it but it's very very human so in that i've done it in fact uh did it apparently to miss read today from 904 this morning so i apologize i was uh in meetings all day but still did not respond and what she felt was a timely manner and so in that i caused her stress wasn't intentional so when that happens reach out because one thing i know is that all of us in this room are here because we value the youth and students and that's where i want us to keep our focus from there so one of the things that um you've seen through the character strong program through what miss bassin proposed all of those types of things there's many many many many

188steps that go into place there's conversation that happens around that there's expertise in the room from endorsement like college endorsed individuals that went to college for those particular needs wants and what to do and where to go as far as curriculum curriculum is designed statewide so all of those things um with the policy that you have at place um to me this is where the discussion um kind of the rubber meets the road because is the policy broken if it's broken what do we do to fix it um right now this policy if has been in place since 2012 up until this last go-around um is the first time that i've had to be involved from um discussion with the groups getting to uh my level which then it was taken care of based on

189not on my decision but based on the discussion happening at the building with the building principal with a recommendation to me that i could support we pull that series of books off the shelf if it's not if it's something i'm like no i still think that that's important i've visited with the people that's in in in those processes then it comes to you as a board so that's your policy and to me the policy has been followed now if the policy is broken that's the that's the discussion and the decision that you as a board um need to to take on redesign um and then give it back to us to continue to follow you're right there are things um that are controversial um but there's also things within that if you take the whole

190picture i think that could be discussed as well um and as i said before i think that you're you see the processes that take place it's not trying to decide one way or the other because multiple people have voices and the people that have those voice have a passion for kids have a passion for learning and ultimately they do they do want to take consideration of the community as a greater whole and so to me for me as a recommendation to the board um i've seen some media out there i've seen some angst with with community members um is our policy broken and that would do that would that would determine what's in the media the media centers not the media at large the media centers and i think that the our librarians have done

191a great job trying to encompass for all students that's what public education is all students from every walk of life from every background from every learning modality that they can find interesting within those processes so i know we have teachers in the room i know we have former teachers in the room i know we have concerned patrons in the room um and that's what democracy is is that you have the opportunity to express both sides what we wanted to do is take you through the entire process of how things are developed how things are implemented and how things are purchased [Music] is this open for questions or not right now what's up um i don't think it's on a slide no so is it is honestly i'll burn go the next slide okay right there

192okay so so that everyone knows what we have here this is an objective statement for a curriculum policy procedures review this is a subcommittee of the board so to broaden school community understanding and appreciation for the district's curriculum review and selection process elevate the discourse specific to student achievement and well-being and ensure that a representative voice of families community members educators administration and board of education are engaged in identifying opportunities for system enhancement and ongoing improvement so the intent is we'll have the subcommittee they'll be composed of two board members and a family member from the elementary intermediate and middle and high school levels there will be staff administration will serve in an advisory capacity to that subcommittee and the subcommittee will brief the board at the june meeting for those interested family members the

193applications will be accepted until monday the 4th of april they'll be on our website you can call there's an email address there but the intent is to have one family with students currently enrolled to be a member of that so with the intent of forming this subcommittee to review our curriculum policies and procedures and present findings to the board at our junior meeting june 13th i would like to appoint mr powell to serve as the subcommittee chair are you willing to accept them i will thank you at this time i will accept a volunteer nomination or a nomination from other members of the board for a second board member to serve on the subcommittee i volunteer to be tribute your volunteer to be true okay so you nominate yourself are there any other volunteers okay

194all right mrs murphy will be working with mr powell outside of the board so from there uh mr powell please work with mr potter to receive the names of the three family representatives that we'll select from that during the application period the students who are currently enrolled in usd 453 and will also ensure that they are randomly selected from all that apply as part of that dr ruth i also ask that you work with mr powell to identify and share names of individuals from our staff administration they'll be willing and available to serve in an advisory class to we have a few guardians in our district yeah i think the issue that we're trying to achieve here is make sure that someone who's right now vested in the materials that are right now in the

195school that we've got a process that they can contribute to either you know agreeing with or improving or changing so yeah i would think a guardian a specific guardian for a specific child in one of those three areas should you know should be included paralegal guardian yeah a foster parent any of that right means they are the legal guardian acceptable so that it's understood you know we want to try to make this as as fair to as many people as we can is that please uh go to the website that uh jake's gonna have a uh an application set up for and at the april meeting we will look at who has volunteered wants to participate in this process and we'll randomly select them within those groups so if there's more than if there's one

196we solve that problem and if but if it's more than one we'll randomly select it so there's no bias or or any other you know thing that could be uh drawn from it because we really would this is an opportunity just to simplify the objective statement is really to take a look at those processes that that laura's just mentioned any organization that isn't willing to look hard at itself will never grow and that's really what this is it's you know we think that they put some great things in place but maybe they are maybe they're not but for this group they evaluate how can we do it better how can be more transparent and what is reasonable and sustainable because that's the other part of it is what you don't see is all the work

197that ryan and laura and other supporting staff are doing every day so this is an extra duty and we all many of us know what that means so um just you know if you have somebody in mind you think they'd be a great member or you want a volunteer just go to our website it should be available tomorrow jake okay by the end of the day tomorrow so let's say wednesday and then we'll uh will we visit this at the next board meeting so for the rest of the board and all interested and affected stakeholders i ask you give this group the time and space they need to effectively review our policies and practice and procedures and then they will provide a background to us of any recommendations just so we're clear of this isn't

198to go down and review all the book lists we've got a pro just to look at that process that we do reviews of the book list and we select books to make sure we're we're giving our students the best resources we can so once again it's purely a subcommittee to review the policies and procedures that are outlined so any questions thanks alisa thank you it's okay to address miss batson now is that yourself yes no questions and i apologize normally i am not a public speaker but i usually don't read from my phone but my grandma died yesterday and i'm having a terrible time just being present in the room so i apologize so i'm going to read to you so i want to thank you for providing transparency with the presentation that you did

199on the upcoming items i can't tell you how much i appreciate that um just speaking to laura batson i generally find her work to be thorough and have had high general respect for her for several years and so i was not trying to imply that i don't since i didn't get an email response from you today um i am ecstatic regarding the new parental letter super excited about that i think that's going to be awesome for our parents my only concern and i apologize if you address this is how a student's educational environment is negatively affected in the current situation so in the case of a book that was talked about earlier my understanding i think it was twisted if i'm not mistaken was that it was read for like six or eight weeks in

200the classroom um so if a a student is opting out of that where are they you know is this still negatively affecting their educational experience their experience with their peers or even their teachers so where are they what does that look like during that that time period for them and i'll be quite transparent that's a growth in progress right now um 100 this year it was reactive uh what we're trying to accommodate and absolutely make available and i'll tell you our english language teachers have already kind of started these conversations um in this kind of like okay more proactive piece of it so it's one of the pieces that um the more we work together in partnership to like when we get that syllabus in august to you know communicate these are some novels that

201you know i'd like more information on so that way we know going into second quarter we go in going into third quarter we're gonna have five students who we're going to do an alternative assignment for so then that way it's planned uh better it's prepared better it's communicated from both sides better a piece of it and then if we don't capture it in august by sending out that family novel letter um you know two weeks in advance having time for families and teachers to you know to reach out and say like okay let's have that soon let's have that conversation about that book and let's make a decision so to have a definitive answer for you right now in the moment i do not have sure i'm just saying it no and i did not

202address that yeah so you didn't miss it okay on it i just focused just on the that's where in my parent hat also and that than that but i know i've gotten emails from other families talking about they wish they could opt into something you know so they weren't it wasn't their kid being excluded because they don't like something but i think my other thing is probably with the review committee as far as library books go i just struggle a little bit feeling like the responsibility shouldn't be on the parent to know what the library books are you talked about having control and excluding whole genres but how would i as a parent know like from the book that danny zuck read what genre to exclude and then we're excluding a whole genre from our

203students over one book that's that's a struggle um i would say for me thank you so much yeah i would say in that that's the power of that conversation yeah so that is a critical piece of having that conversation um with your child's teacher with your child's librarian in there because they can absolutely kind of share that information with you thank you yes absolutely i just have a couple of things to mention in the superintendent's report just as a informational piece for board members the academic awards banquet on the 25th of april is a refreshment only it's not a meal the process will still be the same it just won't be a meal that evening so just it's a small change that i wanted to make you aware of on the academic banquet april of

20425th um and the last thing that i want to reiterate to you as a board discussion is powerful and your discussion tonight whether we agree or disagree is powerful for us as educators to continually try to look for ways to move forward so i thank you for that to my instructors to my staff to the teachers of this district thank you for all that you've done this school year i say since covet is hit usd 453 has done as much or more than a lot of districts in our state and definitely as much or more than any district our size that doesn't happen because of me it doesn't happen because of you it happens because of them and them willing to take the risk with us uh to pro to progress and to tr truly

205try to change a child's life each and every day so i know they're on spring break some of them are and i wish them the absolute safest to re-energize themselves because we do have a stretch run that's extremely important to a graduating class and a kindergarten class and every class between uh you raise a point and it was brought up by other members of the board about uh next year's schedule is uh maybe we should do what other school districts do sorry guys you wouldn't have a place to go but um look at not scheduling the board during spring break because when i look around the room i see people who are engaged here that could be somewhere else you know we had somebody who's recording here that came right out of south dakota just

206to be here in time to do this and so just a consideration as we go and we may want to re-look that part of next year's schedule item 12 executive session for consultation president i move we go into executive session for consultation with our attorney pursuant to the exception for matters which would be deemed privileged to the attorney-client relationship under the kansas open meetings act and that we will return to open session in this room or i had a five-minute break so it would be 9 55. i'd like to invite uh robert hingola to uh the executive session section so we have a motion by mr fowle second by mr goodman to go into executive session all those in favor say no so that five minute bio break is at the beginning so be in

207the small competition by nine or nine ten minutes madam president i move we go into executive session to discuss negotiations pursuant to the exception for employee employee negotiations under kansas open meeting act and that we return to open session in this room at um 17. the board will invite dr roth amy sloan beth maddox and robert hindela into the meeting mr powell and the second minister here on the executive session of the negotiations so thank you [Music] i guess it is but it is 14 or 15. why did we separate them i guess i just never noticed madam president i move we go into executive session to discuss non-elected personnel pursuant to the exception under the kansas open meetings act in order to protect the privacy interests of the individuals to be discussed and then

208we'll return an open session in this room at 22. board will invite dr roth amy sloan attorney robert hengela into the meeting and beth by mr policing by mr murphy mrs murphy to go into executive session for november [Music] and a president um i move that we accept the staffing report as presented second we have a motion by mr powell as well as to accept the staffing this happening all of those in favor 7-0 thank you okay it's upcoming meeting dates we're all in spring break right now some key ones to look at our next board meeting is the 11th of april uh jrotc balls on the ninth april and non-working holiday for those and no school on the 15th i will not go through the whole diagram but it's remind everyone that you do

209have three minutes to speak you may not um make any comments of a personal nature about district employees or students and you can do so i'll just terminate your comments okay i'll be calling each patron based on the order that it's in the stack here the first one is ms riggins [Music] hello it's been a long meeting so i'm going to quit if you guys are troopers okay so my name is camila wiggins and i'm a parent of three kids here in leavenworth my kids are not in high school yet but they're up and coming they're on the way i have a bachelor's degree and i'm passionate about education and continue learning and study i believe that life and learning are one and that education is meant to challenge us help us become better people

210as many of us here i believe curriculum and books should bring us face to face with greatness and that is our students should have the right and opportunity to look greatness in the face and dare to grow this happens through books all of human history is full of stories stories heal us help us teach us challenge us that said i'm very involved in my children's education have strong opinions like we all do about education um after thinking about this and everything has already been said in the meeting tonight i just want to push the idea of choice and agency in the classroom i loved mrs batson's presentation um a lot of what i had to say today she has already addressed i'm gonna skip it i love what that is doing for prevention of issues

211coming up in the classroom with parents and students regarding the curriculum i also want to say that i think we need something to address student concerns in real time as with mrs hassell's experience in the classroom with her daughter um i think it's important to consider it at least start talking about ways that students can reach out for help in real time and to understand what kind of the process is for example if something inappropriate or if there's a lapse in teacher judgment or if something hasn't been caught to where they can safely and rather anonymously because we all know nobody likes to stand up to make a scene um to address that concern in the classroom as members here have said no curriculum or content is flawless and that is why i think that

212should be something that is addressed in high school i love what miss batson said about what they do for middle schoolers whether it's kind of a green light red light yellow light system with the school counselors i think that should be considered going forward just as a recommendation there's no reason why that should be removed in the high school i don't know if that's currently uh you know in the high school but i just thought i'd mention it since we had talked about it so things mentioned including the detailed class syllabi and reading materials um posting things properly on the website and having a two-week review period for the literature for parents to just know what's coming down the pike and students um i would just love to see in future meetings kind of how

213that implement implementation is going i think those i think that's all i need to say thank you so much mr rico first off i would like to thank the board and its constituents for allowing me to take this time to talk because as anyone else in here who has gone through that process i'm a graduate of lhs and i am a former employee of usd 453 and hopefully in the future a educator within this district um last week i know we touched on faces wonderfulness more about ms batson on addressing the issues uh a member of the community came before this board and talked about the topic of the absolute true diary of the part-time indian by alexei sherman being taught in sophomore classes at the high school uh now let us be clear on

214the record or if anything record this strike whatever um that it is of course the topics and parts of the book that he had brought up is provocative and vulgar in some cases that we believe our children should not hear um but this story has a lot more complex things and we've discussed this today about how there's an overarching themes and stuff that your students learn that we must uh that we don't have experience to so talking about this the story is much more complex and deeper meaning on what it's like to be as a person from the first nations of that of native american people i shows that the uh people of the first nations live on these native lands and on reservations that struggle in poverty and that they have no represent representation

215at all or at least little representation in these existing uh organizations now there are a lot of thought-provoking books here at the district that is provided such as fahrenheit 451 by radberry uh bradbury uh knight by eliza um kite runner by uh khalid and many more these are materials that teach prepare to expose students to the complex thoughts and complex topics and for them to talk to the students not lecture their students which is very important in education um and those who might think that there is an agenda you are right there is an agenda uh it is not to limit the horizons of children be it six or twelve ten or twenty but to fight the animal ammunition to enable students to expand their horizon as said by judith crowe co-founder of the banned

216book means uh don't put education on trial don't put educators on trial and don't put uh the constituents of the district on trial educators have enough on their plates with covert 19 short staffing planning curriculum training grading family matters and struggling with funding it goes on and on and on we should support them to continually grow and not tell them how to do the profession thank you for your time [Applause] this good evening to the usd 453 board of education dr vote superintendent of schools thank you for this opportunity my name is sandy smith i'm a resident of the city of leavenworth and was a paraprofessional for ten and a half years at leavenworth high school i've been hearing and reading a lot of misinformation and disinformation about some of the books being taught in

217the high school english classes i in fact helped teach both the absolutely true diary of a part-time union and twisted because i could not recall anything untoward and twisted this last week i reread it i still can't find anything to cause concern both of these books were about young teenage boys trying to find themselves in a not so friendly world in one case the book was based on the author's experiences as a native american boy living on a reservation and making the decision to try to get a more complete education at the nearby town school which happened to be primarily white students and staff the other book is about a boy who lives in a somewhat abusive and chaotic home and is bullied at school having decisions made for him that don't take him into

218consideration in both books the boys find their footing and they're able to go forward with their lives the books teach about perseverance humility self-confidence and victories being the mother of a son sister of three brothers an aunt to ten nephews compared to many male students i know that the few sexual references in the story are just normal thoughts of teenage boys they are nothing to be ashamed of nothing to be alarmed at and certainly nothing to warrant banning a book and these were mere mentions in the books they were not what the book was about i'm an avid reader from early childhood literature throughout time has been filled with sexual innuendos and some not so subtle when you go home get out your bible read genesis 19 30-38 after you read that are you going

219to ban the bible or are you going to find a way to discuss such passages with the youth in your life are you going to ban shakespeare and ernest hemingway and other famous authors and along with the disinformation has come attacks on specifically our english teachers and librarians this is totally uncalled for these are teachers who are professionals highly trained in their field they are the ones who spend time with your children grandchildren nieces and nephews day in and day out through the last two years they have worked hard to maintain an excellent education through the pandemic they do not deserve these attacks they do not deserve to have their names and pictures put on social media someone needs to be looking out for their safety their mental health their sense of belonging in the

220education field please remember that this is a new day and age i am a 69 year old christian caucasian woman through my many years years of raising my son and working with youth i've learned to listen to them their world is different than what ours was however this through this whole uproar about some of the books i have not seen where their students were involved have you asked them their thoughts or are you only calling out your own agenda thank you for listening and i hope you will take your time to think about what i've said is thank you so much for listening um my name is anna emerick i have a bachelor's degree in elementary education and a master's in education i am certified to teach in kansas missouri and virginia um i'm also

221a parent of a sophomore student here at leavenworth high school i come to you tonight to express my concern and disappointment in several literature selections that have been utilized at lhs as an educator i know that parents place a trust that we will have their students college and career ready by the time that they graduate high school i also know that parents put an immeasurable trust that we will preserve and protect their students values character and individualism the absolute true story of a part-time indian reading the lhs sophomore english class incites controversy due to the novel's depiction of alcohol poverty bullying violence profanity slurred slurs related to homosexuality and mental disability and references to masturbation and promotion of pornography materials of this nature not only violate the trust parents place but also jeopardizes the validity

222of state standards and objectives what state standard does the content align with why would any school want openly invite controversy and insult students values and promote sexuality and who decides or approves the appropriateness of these books educators are not certified or trained to facilitate discussion or aid in the residual effects that such topics can trigger in victims of addiction physical or sexual and emotional abuse it's not only dangerous but irresponsible it is my belief that public classrooms acknowledge the various backgrounds of all students and err on the side of caution present material that is of high literary quality i'm not asking that we put on rose-colored glasses as we select literature for our students whether i'm asking that be vigilant in the selection as to protect and preserve each student's value experiences and just and

223inspire character development thank you [Music] good evening my name is katie mcallister scandal and as you guys know excuse me i work at david brewer elementary as a building aide um i'm really glad that you guys passed the uh socio-emotional learning curriculum it's super important um my concerns that i wanted to talk about this evening um was misread the disrespectful address that he gave to one of our hard-working district employees over an email that she didn't answer from three days ago it kind of got me thinking about the email that i actually sent you three months ago today um and then you responded at 7 44 am and you said that you were gonna come visit and you still haven't um you speak of a far left agenda as if you're not packed rockers bronze

224upon sitting here as a publicly or nonpartisan publicly elected official promoting privatized education and banning if you took the time to actually show up in your schools like you told me you would do you would notice the importance and benefits of social emotional learning being embedded in every lesson in every class every single day that's all i got this time mrs [Music] first of all i wanted to address you and say i'm so sorry as a teacher that you feel attacked or anything like that um nobody is trying to ban books i wanted to bring up the point that um i have taught in several states and i am an e um english teacher this book was read for eight weeks long i have never and it's the only book that was read this year

225any the only novel that was read this year i have never spent i spent four weeks on shakespeare with a sophomore class um and i'm also concerned that you there was nothing in there that bothered you about that it talks about a boy i'm sure there's lots of issues but there are thousands of books that can address the same thing without compromising a student's moral values or their comfort level um it talked about a guy looking at pornographic magazines and that he's the master of masturbation and that it should be normalized and it's not normal for some families and if they want to do that in their family that's fine but you need to allow choice again um like i said there needs to be a choice and an outlet and i i think teachers

226are doing an amazing job i think there is too much on teachers already but there are thousands of books out there and my sister-in-law is native american and she she does not even agree with that book um she also gave me several books that would be so much better at addressing what it's really like um thank you for giving us the time and thank you for listening to all sides we appreciate it and thank your batson and what the district is already doing it's amazing that you guys are already taking steps thank you good evening i've been here throughout this very beginning this meeting all the way to the end and i've heard arguments on both sides and in 2017 this school board maybe different members i don't know voted on a approved curriculum and

227just this last year we've identified um curriculum that promotes uh sexual fantasies sexual content and so most of that's inappropriate and some don't i got it um but tonight we voted the board voted on another curriculum the sel that's already been identified to have controversial content in a module that's been agreed to be taken out the crt and i don't understand why it was voted on and approved knowing that this sel already had crt content in it that had to be removed and i don't know what other modules are in it but i have to assume that it's in line with the already currently approved curriculum and every single one of us and i may have missed somebody stood up and pledge allegiance to the flag that stood for the republic for which we stand

228one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all and i'll testify to you tonight there's two people in jail right now who took the liberty from young women and were put in jail by our justice system for what they deemed to be socially normal socially acceptable because they acted on their perverted fantasies that are being taught in our school system right now and i disagree with it i don't i don't think it has any place in our learning sexual content in my opinion and i think i have several supporters here should be a private thing it should not be something that's publicly spoke about or spoke publicly taught as acceptable when you have people that promote sexual fantasies as something that's normal i was in law enforcement for four years i'll tell you

229what i put a lot of people in jail who violated sexual rights of juveniles they're in both the juvenile detention facility and the state penitentiary and i have no regret for what i did and i stand here to testify to you that having sexual effect sexual fantasies in our school curriculum is wrong this should be something that's private and discussed between parents and children [Music] thank you for your time hi um i'm karen overby and um i stayed to the end and mixed all my comments because i want to thank you very much for addressing almost everything that i that i had to talk about but i wanted to stay to publicly thank miss reed and miss murphy for not voting for this seo curriculum i like miss reed did some research on it and

230was uncomfortable and i just felt i feel like we didn't need to do this so quickly um take a look at what's in it take a look at who's behind it and something that's very concerning to me as a parent and seeing what's going on with what's being pushed nationwide in our schools through sel sel is that vehicle where a lot of these ideologies that are very objectionable to a lot of us are coming in because it's all about feelings and emotions and that's a perfect vehicle for some of some of the racial identity sexual ideologies that are getting into our schools and i think we need to be very very careful with sel education and you all said that the equity training package was not part of this purchase and i'd like to hold

231you to that because if something pops up later on down the line because you didn't take the time to look at it or something else is added on to this um well we're going to be back here again so i wish you would have taken a little more time done a little more research but here we are but i wanted to stay and publicly thank those board members who voted to um you know slow your rule a little and i appreciate that thank you hope this makes sense i am uncomfortable hearing that this is a transparent district getting a notice of new curriculum on a thursday leading into spring break week and then being told when i emailed dr rose that the presentation will be given on monday or apparently staff members waiting to comment

232on responses to emails because they want to talk during the presentation is insufficient there are some things we should have more than a couple days paired with the weekend to review i feel like it was proven in the case of respectfully mr zak that when rash decisions are made mistakes remain letting parents and taxpayers look over curriculum for several weeks with an online login would have been much more transparent in my opinion i hope to see something like that more in the future to reply to him as well she's not blocked has never been blocked to my knowledge we just aren't facebook friends i did not want to disappoint the 1609 people that voted for me i believe the only member that surpasses me and votes is lisa murphy i did quickly share a message

233without reading its details from a friend who is finally opening their new private school i acknowledge how this was confusing to some in the community i believe any individual with a concern could have spoken to me for quick resolve do you want an expelled student to have no other school options i have been in buildings and meetings with departments and individuals working for this district and i've been working non-stop and i don't plan on stopping i will contact mr ida kavitch this next week in response to katie mcallister's comment i did not set a date i just have not shown up there i did not forget about her and i did out of respect not visit her when masks were still being worn because i did not want to offend her if i did not

234wear a mask i have been called a racist what i find racist is for a student to be assumed that by the color of their skin they may not be able to raise their hand in class or be on time which are some of the things i came across from the employees of this curriculum that was voted in tonight thank you to the staff at third avenue i love your presentation um from that presentation and the tour that i took it appears you guys are doing a phenomenal job especially with the resources and facility that you have to work with and i think jack for bringing that up because exactly what you said was exactly the thoughts that i had so thank you it's been a long and emotional day um i've got a lot

235of strongly held positional beliefs one of them is that as a board member i try and find the middle ground on everything because that's basically where we're going to find our footing as americans and at least come together on some things um i know that there's been a lot of national rhetoric uh i indulge in reading lots of national news so i'm very well versed in what's going on and the things that i see are that concern me most in our country is the polarization that's existing in our country where by everybody retreats to their respective corners based on their political beliefs and it happens on both sides and i just i guess trying to find peace in the middle is a lot harder than i anticipated but what we've decided on for this emotional

236learning thing is not crt in fact the the big complaint when i studied it was that there wasn't enough crt in it by a lot of left-wing pundits uh the piece that we're not purchasing and don't intend to purchase has all of that in it if there comes up anything like that i'll be the first one pounding on dr oath's desk you can attest to that i've come in and pounded on this desk before um i truly do am interested in the kids of our school district i have three of them in our school district i don't want to see any of this sexual content either um i know that there are literally hundreds of thousands of good books that we can utilize i've expressed this to laura batson um in our curriculum that can

237satisfy all of the needs of reaching and expanding the minds of our youth without also exposing them to the dangers of pornography and pornographic material these are all middle grounds that all of us can reach and agree upon if we let go of the extremist positions of other people and come up with our own views these are the views that i preached studying both sides looking at where the most positive aspect of all of it is and trying to forge what's best for everybody uh to bring everybody together as a family um i dislike crt because it pits all of us against each other it seeks to put us all in groups put us all in boxes and pit those boxes against each other which weakens all of us i don't want any black kids

238in our schools i don't want any white kids in our schools only has hispanic kids or asian kids i want pioneers and the only way to do that is to bring equality into our schools uh equity tends to be a loaded word quality never has been it's always been the dream of martin luther king that we all get judged based on the content of our character and so the thing that we voted on tonight i just want to be clear is for the benefit of all of our kids to bring the social emotional some of these kids need it i promise you i've talked to the teachers um other kids don't and they can benefit from the other programs that we have so just understand that every single one of our board members i know

239this i haven't known vanessa very long i know she does i know every one of these board members for years and i know they do um we have different methods of going about that but i promise you that's a single year focus for us so um i want to thank the board members well thanks staff i've worked with you guys for years so i i know how hard you work um so i guess all i'm asking for is is is grace an understanding that we are doing the best we can and we are actually doing a really great job i you know not to to our own horn but we have done votes and board decisions that have been to the benefit uh despite disagreements so uh with that i'll yield back is murphy okay

240it's almost 11 o'clock i know and i have so much i would love to say but i'm gonna give you guys the respect that i know you have lives outside of here um we have phenomenal kids in our district each and every one of them and they are phenomenal because of the teachers and the staff and our academic leadership um and we have some tremendous dates right there on our calendar that are going to show the amazing things these kids have been doing and the amazing things these kids are going to be doing in the future when they move forward after graduation and the next class stepping up to be seniors so i would like to ask you all to come and support them in any of the events that you can and see them

241doing between now and the end of the year i believe their first softball game i'm not sure about baseball softball game is coming up after spring break ends it is away a game but you know no there will be home games lots of home games um baseball uh raiders will start practicing again the drills teams have still got their competition in florida i want everybody to have the rest of their spring break to be enjoyable safe peaceful and loving and um no pioneers we're all don't always have to agree on everything or the reasons why we may not agree on everything but we are in the boat together and there's no reason to tip it over and drown us all thank you mr party well my first grade grandson and i had a project today

242i don't know how many of you take a lot more times but this was on the back page last thursday i just haven't seen it before i threw it in trash but this this is all of our honor roll people at the high school and i tried to get him to count it's almost 400 he he got up to about 116 he quit so i said well just match the column though but anyway i just think this should have been on the front page of our lemon times but if you've lived in lebron as long as i have you you know that doesn't happen the second thing is i appreciate the people here and stayed here all this time but what i've said many times when i run for office in the past is that

243why aren't there more people here the only meeting we had in an auditorium with my first term on the board is because we had a dumb principal that told a young black man that he'd never mount anything because he was black and that's not god's truth and we filled up the auditorium we had to have police there and the whole nine yards so i appreciate the comments of people coming out but i just just slayed me why there's not more is it apathy if you look at the voting record 18 the last election before that was 12 so your your chosen few as far as showing up but we need more people involved as well i'd like to start off by apologizing to everyone for raising my voice earlier that was uncalled for i'd also

244like to acknowledge some of the accomplishments of our students i was able to attend a few of the basketball games this season the teams played well um and it was great to see them back on the court again being able to be there um as a spectator was incredible the energy and the gymnasium can't be beat um i'd also like to give huge props to dr pro for the pep band i am biased but they are fantastic um they really know how to to pick up the pace whenever we need it um judy price and i were able to attend the glass menagerie small cast plays are hard they did great absolutely fantastic so good job to everybody that was involved in that [Music] getting to recognize our students accomplishments is the highlight of being

245a board member events like today are not fun but necessary we are here to set policy and make sure that those policies are going and that that's the real work but it's fun to recognize our students um i had a lot to say about books but i'm going to keep that short it is very late books are amazing you can live a million lives through books you can go anywhere you want to places that haven't even been discovered yet will never be discovered because i love fantasy um i could read you a dozen different quotes by people who are way smarter than i am about why books are so incredible and why everybody should read i do not think um i had not read the absolutely true diary until after the last board meeting my

246student had read it it was never discussion he didn't think that it was important um to talk about so i asked for a copy i've read it i took away a few things from that yes there was some components of sexuality there was also generational poverty there's food insecurity there's bullying but the biggest thing that i took away from it is grief how many funerals that student had gone through how death had affected him and how he was able to overcome that and vanessa i'm really sorry to hear about your grandma because when his grandma died in the book that broke me grandparents are so special and so i all i'm going to say about books i'm here to help i'm here to advocate for our students our teachers our staff and our parents um

247please continue to email me i try to email everybody back as long as it's an actual genuine email that you've written if it's a forum email i do not respond to those so please just know i've read it i'm not going to respond and i appreciate everybody's time i'm glad that you are here thank you so much for taking an interest in all of our students yeah i find it amazing that you all are still here thank you i'm amazed we're still here but uh but i think uh what was echoed before is really important um and i just want to offer for both those that are here those might watch it later that just because the board made a decision about curriculum that we have sought to adopt and oh by the way i

248did not vote casually about it and i mean it when i say i spent most of my sunday trying to figure out what was right for social emotionally learning and we have to start somewhere and none of them are going to be right i'm just telling you so the reason why i want to go down this path now is to make sure everybody understands the decision was made we bought the curriculum but you know there's people sitting here on the front row that i really have a lot of faith and confidence in why because i know their passion for our kids and i think the message is out there and that's what i think all of us as a board have to help reinforce is that you know we've said there are certain things and

249standards for our kids that we want to do better i think the comments were very valid is what is it we need to do better and i think that we work and we work closer together and not so much against each other that we're going to find out what it's right for our kids it's messy it's ugly uh because we're human and so i hope and i'll say it again because i hope that i'm respectful i hope that i honor your points that you raised with me but at some point we have to make a decision and that decision has got to be based on just one thing and that is the children that are the other end of the decision we're making so um is it going to be right for everybody no but

250we're going to try to make it right for our kids um what that looks like i don't know but that's also why i think this board and this district are trying to take different approaches to honor what our parents are bringing to us what our educators are bringing to us and you know it's funny i i recognize something up here that i've got to figure out how to bring into this equation and that is what our kids think and so i'm not sure what that looks like but um i think this is really powerful i am so grateful that everybody's here and i mean that not as not in a bad way we can disagree as long as we're moving in the same direction and there's a kid at the end of that direction that's

251all i ask so i appreciate everybody being here tonight and i'm just you know i'm really kind of proud that we engaged in this process and i hope that you are too this isn't a bad thing that's that's where we get in troubles when we look at each other in a bad way because it's not i mean if it's if it's about the kids it's always going to be a good way so thank you all right most of the things i would like to talk about spring break thank you for being here i know it's been a long night go out and enjoy the rest of it please come back safely because we need you your teacher and educator um and of course when we come back to spring break we'll be spring sports and

252yes to baseball and softball and all the other supreme courts track but the bigger thing is schools are a reflection of their communities schools are only strong as a community they're in our community is split our schools are suffering so i ask all of you reach out to your neighbors talk to them don't play that i'm republican i'm a democrat or whatever i don't care this is nonpartisan it's the future of our students it's the future of our community we can't come together as a community our kids suffer okay our future suffers so please drop the left right libertarians whatever you want to call them care but i do care about our kids i do care about our teachers so with that in mind be a good human be a good pioneer ah i'm reminded

253prom is april free all that's all right that's a good thing too mark it on the calendars folks but once again i really ask you to be a good people okay think about what's right for our kids what's right for our community that's right for our teachers and with that go pioneers