Hopkins School Board Meeting April 7th, 2026

001Everyone it is five o'clock on April 7th and I will let's get started on our workshop agenda for the Hopkins School Board. Thank you for being here this evening. As Director Zhao said we are excited to hear some what we hope is relatively good news this evening. Thank you. I'll turn it over to Dr. Mary Perry-Reed. Thank you. So yes we're going to kick off the workshop with a budget update our interim CFO Jessica Olson and also our assistant superintendent Lightfoot will provide revisions to the FY26 budget and these revisions are result of having more accurate FY25 fund balances via the audit prep work. I do want us all to just keep in mind the statewide context of rising operational costs, flat enrollment, and very little state revenue growth so those are important factors to

002keep in consideration when we're looking whether it's FY26 or FY27 and and then later in this particular update from Ms. Olson and Dr. Lightfoot you'll also hear more about the bond sale that happened actually later in the board meeting you will hear about the bond sale that happened this morning so that we can fund our referendum projects however districts need investment services to manage their bond proceeds so in this particular report right now you'll get an update on the process that we followed to secure a qualified firm. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Ms. Olson and Dr. Lightfoot and thanks for being here and providing this report. Thank you. Thank you and good evening. So we'll start out with the FY26 revised budget and where we're seeing preliminary numbers come in

003currently they are still being worked through so we know there will be some changes but this is what we're seeing so far. So with the mid-year considerations we look at any enrollment updates, state and federal funding, contract settlements, staff placements, employee benefit changes, detailed look at the account activity so what's already happened this year and what we believe to project for the mid-year and then also prior year results so as the FY25 budget has been continuing to progress we've been able to help project some of that 26 information. With the enrollment just wanted to show here where trends are at right now so within FY26 that third column we're looking at an estimate of 6,978 students and you can kind of see where the projection is for the following years. All right so as we're

004looking at the FY25-26 adapted versus revised budget so looking at the 25 I'm sorry the 26 budget the one that was adopted revenue and expenditures netted to zero at 130 million 575 thousand 130 as we've been working through the revised budget process revenues we're projecting to be at 145 million 431 thousand 407 dollars and then expenditures right now are at 142 million 765 so that is increased which will go through those in the next couple slides of what really makes up that huge difference between the adapted and then also the revised. So looking at the revenues the first line that was one of the more significant changes with the state aid general revenue of 4.9 million so this has to do with enrollment projections from what the original budget was to what our revised is

005there has been an increase with the projected enrollment doesn't mean that necessarily there was a huge swing from the beginning of the preliminary to now it's just where the budget was done it was a more conservative underestimate at this point. The other state revenue that includes special ed funding so there's about three million dollars there an additional funding for special ed and then the other 1.5 million is coming from other state aid categories as your enrollment goes up so does your funding in every area within for state aid for the most part. Then we'll look at the federal program so title and special education this is for the federal side of it from the original budget to the revised is just truing that up to what actuals are coming in at there hasn't necessarily been

006more funding available just the budget is being accurate reflect what the revenue is. Next one is athletic fees gifts donations and then the Royal Athletic Center this is a larger one and this has to do to that there was no revenue budgeted for FY 26 so there is a big jump there so if you're wondering why there's a huge increase here it's just from where the original budget was to now. Next one is the third-party medical assistance that's an increase of nine hundred and seventy five thousand and then again that's just truing up where actuals are coming in at. Next one is interest so this is kind of one that is estimated every year and is trued up in the revised of what actual interest is coming in at and what the remainder of the

007year is being projected at. The stronger together grant was included in the revised and then a rental income. Rental income is higher than what it normally is and this has to do with some of the oracle work and being able to get invoices out in a timely manner so we are truing up what rent is for 25 and 26 so the revenue came in and 26. So next we're gonna look at expenditures and the first line you're gonna see is transportation and there is a significant change here not necessarily because there's been a huge swing in the expense but because the original adopted budget was inaccurate so this is just truing it up to what the actual year-to-date expenditure will be. The next one is operating capital this is again truing up to what we're

008seeing for expenditures and the projection for the remainder of the year and you're gonna kind of see that for the rest of them the American Indian Aid, the federal programs there was some reductions there just on expenditures matching up with where those grants are budgeted to come in at. School and department budgets was reduced a little bit a lot of this has to do with supplies and etc that has not been fully expensed out for the year. The read act teacher training stronger together grant the big one for learning and development so this one has not been typically budgeted in the past as a expense line it's always been reconciled at the end of the year during the audit process. Best practice is to have that in there so that is where you'll see that

009so we also reduce the other expenses that would typically true that up at the end of the year but I just wanted to call out that that is one change for that. Pago LTFM expenses so this is revenue that has come in for LTFM that we're moving over to help with some of the construction fund LTFM expenses again this is again a typical thing that we true up at the end of the year we just want to reconcile recognize it in the revised budget. There was a contingency fund of 1.5 million we reduced that by a million so just save on some expenditures there that we will not have to use so wanted to make that more accurate. State aid education special education expenses did go up by 2.2 million from the adopted to the

010revised and then we had the library aid expenses student support counselor safe schools levy and then the royal athletic and rec center. The one thing I do want to call on the last one again it's where the budget was originally adopted that was extremely low so we just true that up to where the actuals are coming in for those areas. Before I move on to another fund any questions on those that we went over? I'm sorry if I missed it but can you just explain that four million increase in the transportation one more time? Yep so with the FY 26 budget it was originally in Oracle so we had to rebuild that budget in Skyward during that rebuild process the transportation budget was budgeted around 5 million which is not accurate so to true it

011up we had to increase that so I just wanted to call out that that was one of the lines that we did increase. Chair Andreessen? Yes. Also transportation question maybe we don't know but we I mean we know we made some cuts to do savings do we know how much we realized out of that? I think do I have an estimate of like are we actually realizing the the cost savings there? So I have not deep-dived it from a preliminary review I saw about a $300,000 savings but again that is just a quick overview it's not actually going through line by line and making sure where things are coming in at. Okay I think we did. We did a preliminary work with if you remember Naisha and Tom presented to you and they did some

012preliminary work on that with a number of buses and they were able to reduce the number of buses so we know that through some of that we were able to realize close to that million dollar mark based on the original work that we were doing when we went through that original kind of budget discussion with you around this time last year. Okay thank you. Okay I'll move on to the next one. So next we're gonna look at the food service so this is a little bit more high level so with revenue we have an increase of $839,000 the majority of that is coming from state aid and federal increases then from the original budget and some interest income and then the expenditures increased by $426,000 and this is related to salary and benefits so they

013are currently projected to have a deficit of $253,000. Next one we'll look at is community ed so revenue increased by $503,000 expenditures increased by $1.1 million for the expenditures and revenue is a big piece of that is non-public was not originally budgeted in the adopted budget so we added that in and then we just had some other adjustments within for expenditures. Debt service is the next one that we'll look at the revenue is coming from interest revenue and then the expenditures is an adjustment from the original adopted budget and then the last one that I just wanted to go through was the trust and internal service funds so this is going to include the health insurance dental severance and OPEB there was not a budget in the original adopted budget so that is why you

014see the significant increases so the 16 million is in revenue most of that is going to be coming from the health insurance and dental premiums that are there and then also interest on the accounts and then the expenditures the majority of that is coming from the health insurance and then we also have some expenditures with the OPEB trust management investment fees so that is everything that I have for the FY 26 budget update we are still working through this so every day we're going through and just making sure we're refining it and making as accurate as possible I do plan on bringing the final revised budget foot to the board for approval at the next board meeting. Thank you do we want to pause here for questions? We can have. Chair Andreessen? Yes, Treasurer Heartland.

015Thank you very much for coming to give us this relatively good news I think one piece that I am seeing is that we in the past have been missing some key components of our of our budget and so I really appreciate your work and certainly yours too Dr. Lightfoot and the work of the business services to bring us this additional this more complete set of information that can help us better understand the actual state of funds and finances in our district and so thank you for even though it's maybe not fun for you to be like you didn't have this piece in front of you before I appreciate you doing that transparently with us and then you said that this information comes as we work on our fiscal year 25 audit and that work isn't

016done but you you did mention I can't remember if you said this in CFAC or if maybe you alluded it to at the table now but even though that work continues largely the work of truing the accounts is done it's almost done so basically what are the chances of other large swings to this information at this point so from a revenue standpoint I feel very confident where things are coming in that the expenditures in the general fund we're still reconciling so there will be some changes in the expenditures from the general fund now does that change any of the projections that we had for FY 27 that'll be gone over with CFAC later on no I don't see any change in that from what I'm seeing so far but I do see the expenses changing

017for the general fund I don't have those exact numbers yet as we're working through it every day our team is like okay did you look at this and like going through it and so just to be transparent where's where that is at and I would add but in addition to that we feel like we have the systems in place that are allowing us to do that with a greater level of accuracy and that feels good to be able to know that we will have those details and a lot more of that set of information especially as we're trying to plan for FY 27 yeah and as I have been in a lot of meetings with you too I have seen you guys each taking the learning and describing it to the various you know the

018board audit committee and to CFAC and so I really appreciate that and I think that it is good for all of us would you say that these missing budget pieces and these better projections now those have fully made it into these Ehlers models and so our current projections were fairly unlikely to be like oh we didn't have a line item there and end up with kind of this drastically undershot budget again yeah so we are accounting for all the things that have been under budgeted and just making that fault like move forward in 227 and also in the projections for farther out as well okay thank you for that confirmation thank you I did just have a question I mean I think that this if just let me know if I'm reading this correctly it

019looks like we are have more revenue than anticipated and while we do have more expenses than anticipated they're they're not canceled out so we have perhaps more money than anticipated is that accurate right now it's projecting that there's a positive net for the general fund once we have it trued up we'll know for sure where that's gonna come in at I don't see a huge deficit or like a huge swing where you're gonna go the opposite direction it may make that smaller but yeah it's definitely a positive budget great thank you and I also then had a question I'm hearing clearly that there have been light items that have not been accounted for in the past is that going to impact our our fund balance in any way or because it's my understanding that's kind

020of where dollars go if they're not used are we gonna see that that is dipping lower no so the budget is really an estimate of what you believe your revenue and expenditures are gonna be for the year ultimately that's not gonna be a driver of your fund balance it's what your actual revenue and expenditures are that are coming in that's gonna drive your fund balance so you want your budget to be as close to what your actuals are gonna be so that you can drive the school district where it needs to be and make sure that you're meeting the needs of the students in the community but yet also still making sure that you're not overspending at the same time so that's where that budgets more that guide for the school district but your fund

021balance are driven by your actuals thank you yeah appreciate it any other questions I think we can go on I think it's fun the bond yes so the district went out for an RFP for the bond proceeds and for management of those proceeds so we want to make sure that the district is getting the best return on investment and then also from a fee perspective that it's most cost-effective for the district and also get those refund or the returns so we did receive two proposals it was from Ellers and then also PTMA the evaluated criteria that we looked at is experience with public funds making sure that they have school district experience of managing bond funds the investment strategy and risk controls reporting and transparency of the bond investments and then the fees and overall

022value so this is just a high-level overview of the two vendors so first was split off with Ellers so they have a high experience within managing bond proceeds and have worked with multiple districts within the area and provided some of their school districts that they've worked with recently and their feedback with them they have competitive fees a solid investment structure and then strong reporting their considerations that we had to look at of kind of on the con side is they have slightly lower yields and then we also looked at PTMA for their proposal and they came in high experience as well they have a slightly higher yield have experience with Minnesota school districts and also have strong reporting the deciding factor for administration was really on the fees and with Ellers they're significantly lower and

023what does that look like so Ellers offers a flat fee of four basis points on all of the investments looking at PTMA it's a sliding scale so they go from anywhere from zero basis points for basically your money markets up to a 15 basis points so from a fee structure the estimate is a hundred and twenty three thousand compared to thirty two thousand so that is kind of one of the main deciding factors administration was looking at is for the fee structure and that will come to you guys later on during the board meeting for approval of Ellers yeah and I can speak to that as well we did put the placeholder on the consent agenda what we need to do in order to get the bond proceed accounts ready is to make sure that

024we move that off of the consent because what we will now need is a resolution so it is slated on the consent but we need the resolution to be in a live meeting so that resolution document is attached to that item what I would ask is if a member can move that off of consent on to then the regular agenda we can then get that taken care of tonight get the accounts ready and then that will tie in with the bond proceeds and the bond sale information that will follow after so as far as procedural actions all of the documents are there to move forward with as well as the resolution so we just need the resolution approved and that will happen this evening if you move that off of consent into the next practice

025so just to put that out there for you as well any questions yes yes just one question about the so I understand it Ellers is less expensive but does that out outweigh the yield right so I'm sure you did the analysis but the the difference in the yield doesn't make up that fee difference is that correct so it's still a little bit higher with PTMA okay for the yield yeah so and net net yeah so the one thing I do want to call it is those are projections so the market can change it can go higher it can go lower but from a fee structure it's gonna remain the same and the other I mean investment policy piece and something for the board to consider is that your investment policy really does ask that the

026administration look more toward lower risk options for the stability of the funds I mean certainly that's something that can be explored by the board as we think long term around what that might look like but in the application of that work as well as the consideration of those fees that really was the deciding factor in looking at how we could best position what we knew to be certain as well as the connection that really is done in managing and Ellers can speak to this a little bit too in the new business section about managing the debt over time so that we can also position ourselves well with the management of that when we go out for phase two what we should also note is that this is for phase one of the bonds and that

027this is part of the sale it is not the full sale the 88 million is not the complete hundred and forty just rough numbers but when we think about that we're also trying to prepare well for phase two I capture that and the district can also go out for another RFP for the phase two proceeds could I ask a clarifying question about that assistant superintendent but I'm wondering about I get the the idea of us being good stewards of tax money which would mean that we would go for low-risk investments and wondering if because of the volatility right now that we're I think all seen in our investments are we thinking that because I see here as one of the key strengths with Ellers that they have a solid investment strategy that we're feeling like

028even though both of them have comparable risk profiles Ellers might tend a little bit more to that or was it simply just a matter of the lower fees as a known expense I would probably say was a combination of both really and in our analysis because what we also know is that as we work with individuals the return or the yield can be variable no matter what and so part of what we were looking at is what is the likelihood of outcome of achieving and what do we know and feel more certain about was also part of that consideration thank you appreciate that context any other questions about the bond okay so we will take our direction and someone will pull this off consent and it will go into new business so that we can

029have a resolution wonderful thank you so much appreciate your time thank you thank you thank you and that takes us to our next order of business which is the superintendent search update this is a big one I think that we were all excited as board members we got to see the applications the deadline was March 31st so the open accepting of applications closed on that date and we got to see the number of people that applied and then our superintendent search firm got to work doing all their due diligence around assessing all the research that they did on the applicants as they came in and then sharing that coalescing that information and giving us as a board recommendations so that's where we sit right now for the update you will see on our agenda for

030this evening is a line item where we will be deciding who we want to move forward with as semi-finalists we have decided as a board that both of our interview interviews will be public we believe in that level of transparency and while it does maybe limit slightly our candidate pool we decided to err on the side of being transparent with our community about who we're talking to and and who is on board for consideration as the next superintendent so any board members were invited to speak with Barb Dorn if they had questions about specific reasoning the process candidates and and I believe some board members did that which I think is great and we also were able to do our own research if we felt that that was appropriate on on the candidates and have

031been empowered to be as engaged in this process or not as we would like to be so thank you for that I think we are are feeling like we're in a good place and are going to have some really good discussions this evening anyone have anything they want to add about how the process went for them these couple of weeks chair and reason yes just a word of thanks and gratitude to MSBA and to all of our applicants yes I agree I think it was an excellent pool I felt really good when I saw all the people that want to call Hopkins their next professional home and I too am really grateful I feel like the process that MSBA went through was really supportive of the board but I also feel really supportive of the

032candidates which I appreciate a lot because they are putting themselves out there chair and reason yes yeah I guess echoing what clerk WG said I you know I don't even know if every search firm would have given us the access to the candidate profiles and materials that were submitted and so I just thought that was like a really nice step for us to be able to see all of that so yeah good process so far I can tell you that not all search firms do yeah yeah so I I also feel really good about that I know that in my last superintendent search that was an area where some board members were not happy that they didn't have access to that information so I was really thrilled to see that that was part of MSBA's

033process and that Barb made herself available to all of us to talk through that if if needed we're talking about the superintendent search update I sure hope for if you have anything you'd like to add I would just echo I believe I came into the conversation just giving credit to MSBA just for their transparency and diligence throughout the process and I would also like to share those same sentiments thank you to Barb for making yourself available and just being very detailed with us about the entirety of the process it makes it extremely it makes it easy to not easier to navigate especially someone just the first time you going through it so so thank you for all that I would just remind the board that given what we've just talked about that I feel actually

034very grateful that MSBA did a lot of work for us to whittle down the field and so I feel like that positions us really well to have the conversation that we're going to have later on tonight because I know that we all are eager to make sure that our agendas are short and that our meetings don't go too long so I think that their process and being so transparent about what their process is enables us to have a really concise and productive conversation around that agenda item so with that I we will then go to the really big topic for this evening which is the spring achievement data review and I will turn it over to dr. Mary period okay wonderful so as our presenters are approaching the board table a reminder to our board

035and community that on a quarterly basis we do provide our board and community with updates that help everyone understand how well our students are learning as measured by academic and social-emotional indicators and assessments so tonight we're going to be talking about math we're going to be talking about literacy and also social-emotional well-being looking at Minnesota student survey results and other early SEL indicators I was thinking about you know I've been thinking about sort of Hopkins next chapter and I think one thing that the board and our IDL department can think about is how to better align our quarterly board updates with public facing dashboards that help our that tell stories about how well our students are learning and our public facing and updated in real time if our data team can support that so I

036think that's one way we can increase our alignment and our transparency to the public but there's a lot of work that goes into looking at the data and putting together these reports so I really appreciate this team and is Miss Whitlock joining us tonight? She's not okay and also Ea Vang our district assessment coordinator and data specialist has prepared the slides regarding the Minnesota student survey but she had a family emergency this week so she's not here as well so you get me and Kim and Elsa and board members is to piggyback on what Dr. Mary Perry Reid stated regarding these quarterly reports by the way good evening it's nice to be here with you after I think after tonight but I will be working on a feedback survey for you so because this is

037kind of the first year that we've done these on a regular quarterly basis I wanted to just get feedback on sort of the contents and the cadence and anything else that you would like to see differently our plan so Natalia if you go to the next slide please we laid out what we thought the data presentations would be for each quarter and in some cases the data didn't always line up with the administration of different assessments and things like that so I think this is probably going to need to get tweaked a little bit and so I'll be asking for your feedback just on maybe what you might like to see as we kind of tweak this and think about next school year so with that a hot topic something that we've all been talking

038a lot about and thinking a lot about is our K-5 math implementation and so Elsa Gall is here she's been leading that work at the strategy level but also at the sort of on the ground in the schools level with our implementation leads as well so I will let her start us off good evening again my name is Elsa Gall math specialist for K-12 I'm speaking on behalf of myself and then also the two implementation leads for the K-5 math rollout which are Tracy Beverson and Maggie O'Malley and Tracy may be popping in here in a bit but we're just really excited to share with you how this year is gone this was a massive lift in in adopting new math curriculum and then launching it in this first year so getting it off the

039ground all right so our goal for this first year of instruction was to not just look at student outcomes right away because that first year is really about shifting teachers beliefs practices in the classroom in as a means to changing student outcomes so not only do we have the new Minnesota math standards that have been adopted and will be expected to be fully implemented for MCA testing starting in the spring of 2028 we had new resources to align to those new standards rolling out this year we purchased materials for all K-5 classrooms including every special educator as well so this was a big success right off the bat I think having that alignment between special education spaces and gen ed spaces and we also asked teachers to really lean into some more updated instructional practices

040in alignment with what we see is best practice in the math classroom today in 2026 so our first year was focused on the adults and the big features of this first year of implementation was learning the story of math in our new program so our program tells the story of math through the year of kindergarten first grade second grade so if you think about there's a there's a year of math but then there is the sequence of all six years of the K-5 math story and our students will experience each of these points in that trajectory of learning so we wanted really to focus on teachers really developing a deep understanding of what that looks like at their grade level what comes before and what comes after and then second building student centered practices and

041I'll talk a little bit more later about student center practices but really focusing on our learners in the classroom is is a big lever for success and then we as an IDL team decided to make a really strong investment in professional learning for our teaching staff with coaching and implementation support again with Tracy and Maggie helping along the way so a thing a little bit about strong implementation we really want to ensure that this massive investment that we made in purchasing this curriculum is leading to a lasting higher student outcomes that are also equitable so we're focusing our implementation moves with the adults on establishing consistent high quality instruction across all classrooms all schools and then all years of learning we want to build a shared understanding of what effective practice looks like and reduce

042the variability so when I'm sitting before the board and I say this is what math at Hopkins looks like that's actually lived in our spaces and finally ensuring that all educators are aligned to those common expectations for teaching and learning which is helpful for our school leaders as we get together and work on strategizing and supporting teachers and students so the big goal is really shifting from individual classroom success to that system wide instructional coherence and when implementation is strong the system not just the individual classrooms will become the driver of that student success we've been doing a lot of work with TNTP research which is all about trajectory changing schools and three features of that research are belonging consistency and coherence and so I just thought it might be nice to lay those over

043again our first year of implementation so the belonging is students are feeling invited to do the math they're seeing themselves as capable mathematicians where strategies and ideas are welcomed and really valued in the space and that community in the classroom which is such a strong feature I think of Hopkins that students really do feel like they belong is also mirrored in the math classroom as well so it drives engagement perseverance and ultimately student growth consistency is all about that predictable high quality math experience in any space where students are experiencing common materials and there's pacing that's consistent across spaces that helps not only for the students but also the teachers if we have common materials and common pacing we can collaborate a lot more we can lighten the lift and it adds sustainability for our

044teacher experience as well and again we're focusing on equity that no matter the student no matter the classroom everyone is getting access to the same grade level mathematics and we are building practices that are sustainable in our system and then finally coherence that's that story of math that feels like it makes sense for students it's not just a bunch of disjointed checklists of skills but I'm understanding all the tools I have and strategies to do problem-solving which is a big transferable skill in life so again we have all those same resources so if a student is getting support in a win session or in a special education classroom we're getting an MTSS tier two support we're using the same resources the same vocabulary and everything feels aligned and we are already seeing that show up

045in our spaces where the students are making connections in the special education classroom saying that's just like what I'm doing that's how my teacher explained it and that feels like a new celebration we've been really intentional about that and again that coherence is really streamlining that student experience all right so one of our biggest moves we've been working on is professional learning so we have again these two implementation leads Tracy and Maggie have been outstanding at planning professional learning this was yesterday we had four different math professional learning activities on our professional learning day and this was an activity about specifically the story of math so you can see each of those posters represents a grade level team who was consolidating the learning of their grade level into a few key points and then sharing

046that among the whole school so then there would be all teachers would benefit from hearing the whole k-5 math story in their building so seeing kind of what my math connects to the next grade level or the one that came before so helping teachers to see the interconnectedness of what they do and just how we all really depend on each other in in really building this coherent story for students and in total we've had 10 hours of big district-wide professional learning sessions for all k-5 classroom teachers and that's just been since workshop week and forward and we've had 31 hours of very specialized professional learning for specific leaders support staff sites or programs that have requested something very particular and then over 300 hours of teacher level and grade level team coaching so again we

047have just been immersing ourselves with our teachers and teams and supporting them in co-planning co-teaching even modeling some teaching and just in general helping them problem-solve we did walkthroughs throughout the year starting in the fall we set three goals for teachers to focus on because it's a big lift and you want to make sure you give a bit of a streamlined set of goals for teachers so first was just establishing that community that we talked about about belonging where students really feel comfortable sharing their ideas and learning to have more discourse in the classroom second would be building that consistency where we're doing one lesson a day using the new math program and trying to align to a pacing guide and then finally content internalization we use that term in regard to knowing the math

048really deeply before you start to present to students we're really shifting away from the teacher modeling and students mimicking to the teacher really deeply understanding the math presenting it to students and then helping to kind of extract their thinking and helping them to communicate their ideas amongst each other so so it's a bigger lift on the teacher for really deeply understanding the math when we went into the winter walkthroughs we were able to graduate from two of our goals we saw excellent classroom communities which wasn't a surprise we already know belonging is a big feature of Hopkins classrooms and then again that consistency we were coming into classrooms seeing the math in action we would go to three fourth grade classrooms in a building and see the same lesson happening in all three classrooms which

049you know then that team is collaborating and they're planning together it's a pretty big celebration in the winter we decided to keep that content internalization goal going forward into the spring because until we get through an entire year of math that's kind of an ongoing goal till we we finish that so then in the spring now we've added two additional goals to that content internalization we've so far observed 31 classrooms I'm back in observations tomorrow at Gatewood and our second goal we've added is about student-centered learning which I'm going to share a little bit more about because I think that's that's a new feature and I want to give it some definition so in a student-centered space students are actively engaging in mathematical discourse meaning they're speaking to each other they might be modeling they

050might be using verbal communication they might be writing their ideas and just like in any other content area you make a statement and then you back it up with evidence and math is no different we just don't say show your work anymore now it's like you know explain your thinking just you know describe what your ideas are second is instruction or sorry problem-solving which again it's a very transferable skill to all areas and then that productive struggle and what productive struggle means is not that a student is struggling but they have to do some grappling and just like you've experienced any kind of learning if you have to think about it it's a more rewarding experience and you understand more deeply than if it's just handed to you so when we talk it's not an

051extended period of time but just allowing students to think before we just tell them and so that's it that's a bit of a shift and we want teachers to be empowered in facilitating those learning experiences that are promoting students developing their own sense making also developing reasoning again that collaboration and their ownership of their own thinking so it's it's a student centered is a is a big lift and then finally teacher sense making is helping teachers again not only to know the math but then to put that into action as they're going through the lesson analyzing the students thinking and sharing in the classroom making those instructional moves on the fly because they are guiding the students through that learning experience of that lesson so those are some bigger deeper pedagogical shifts for teachers and

052I assume will be in those spaces for some time with our goals but that's what we're focusing on going into spring so in conclusion I am I am NOT sharing student data with you today because again this first year was all about shifting adult practices deepening our adult learning and but rest assured I will be back next year to talk more deeply about the students experience but I am in classroom all the time and I see students thinking communicating they're so engaged their hands are on materials they're working in partners and small groups they're sharing ideas to the class and students are respectfully challenging others thinking and or building on I see how you got that I took it one step further and it's there's this it gives me goosebumps it's the most delightful math

053learning experience and then we do also see like the first image shows you know students are also getting that independent time to just think and process and communicate using paper and pencil and really just honing in on their own individual strategies and skills development so so there are very like traditional familiar elements that you would all you know recognize but then there are also similar components that might feel a little more you know exciting and fun to watch so hopefully we'll get to share more about that soon but I I'm really excited about where we're headed and I think that we have a lot of room to grow we talked about implementation is a three to five year process of really getting to where we want to be so we've just done year one and

054we had the national implementation lead for the program we adopted who did walk-throughs with us and said you should be very proud of where you are in this first year so that was helpful to hear because we only know our space but to get that validation that where we are specific specifically with consistency is pretty pretty significant so thank you okay just to piggyback on what also was saying I can say from a parent experience that my daughter is writing and speaking like a mathematician but in Spanish and so it's pretty neat to see that as well now Kim is going to share some literacy implementation information as well as a little bit of a sneak peek ahead to what we're looking at with our phase two read act planning which is really literacy training

055in our secondary spaces thank you director Erdl would it be okay to pause if people like questions section by section would that be okay sure thank you yeah any questions I just want to acknowledge that I've had the pleasure of doing ten days of third grade math homework with my third grader who wanted to write you know when the question says you know well why is that your answer and you know he's nine he'd kill me if he knew I was saying this but his answer was because that's what the answer is and so I just have to say that I really am impressed by the the strategic thinking that this math curriculum has kids doing at such a young age and real-life application of math we all know that everyone has a calculator in

056their back pocket now and so while I agree with the idea that being able to you know do back of the napkin quick math is important real world application and understanding is is really quite beneficial I did have one question about differentiation in classes I know there's a big emphasis on coherence and pacing what what is the situation or or how is it being handled because I've heard some feedback from some classrooms that someone's behind right so a student falls behind or isn't grasping the materials and the feedback I've heard is that teachers feel like they can't utilize different tools to help someone catch up because they want to you know implement the curriculum with fidelity right as we all hope they would but they also want to or try to help someone that may

057learn in a different way or yeah in that situation and how is that being handled with respect yeah with the pacing and the coherence across across classrooms good question thank you for asking differentiation is a challenge in every classroom every day that is probably the biggest lift for teachers is meeting the needs of the children in front of them so yes when we take on a program it will be designed to in an attempt to meet all the needs but then the human in front is obviously the decision-maker in those moments one thing I would say that has been really powerful about this specific curriculum that again as teachers are in their first year of implementation haven't fully realized how differentiation exists in how it's already designed so in strategically grouping students together or having

058students share specific ideas to help others come along and they're thinking there's a lot of teacher nuance in that in that design I think that again as a first time through you are going through a bit more scripted and feeling like I'm not the expert teacher I was last year because I knew what I was doing every day I'd been doing for 15 years so I think that they're relying more on like a script and feeling like the differentiation isn't as strong however in we are seeing spaces where confidences may be a bit higher they leave it a bit earlier in in doing the program as designed and we are seeing more differentiation show up in those spaces but it is absolutely a place of development one other thing we are featuring in a lot

059of our schools are things like wind sessions where if I have a handful of students let's say there we do a cool down at the end this is a new thing too so in the program they do a formative assessment so every day I know this was the learning goal here's how everyone attended to that learning goal these five students had a similar misconception I can now group them together and capture that in real time if I have the time so there's the there's kind of the hook points and cool downs there you know yeah so new name same concept so the so then when there's a wind session or there is a little even ten minute window of time that teachers discover they can you know capture in a snack break or whatever the

060thing may be it's kind of different classroom to classroom right now that they're like that additional ten minutes just to do that retouch is all they need I would say Tanglin fifth grade would be a great example they've been really exploring with their scheduling to build that into their daily routines and they have found that where they felt frustrated like I'm limited with the six because the lesson takes a full 60 minutes and that's all I have time for if I can carve out some other additional time so sites are building up with when and and those additional things to help with differentiation and also teachers are getting coaching on how to more strategically group or lift answers into the space or you know sometimes teachers are doing direct instruction like the good old days

061because sometimes a student just really needs some explicit directions and that's also okay so fidelity is a tough word because people feel like it's very rigid and I have no room to move and to shift a system we want to lean into that to the degree that we could get enough traction on our program and recognizing we're going to refine and loosen there you know what I'm saying like loosen loosen those more rigid directions as time goes on so you obviously know what you're talking about this is a very loaded question I could go on for hours and I think Tracy might be here she could come up and talk even more about it but yeah and the pacing guy just to be clear this first year was a guide to get teachers to see

062how to complete the year of math within our school year recognizing for equity purposes we want every student to get their grade level learning covered in a year and we're gonna flex that a little bit differently going into next year just because reality is what it is great thank you so much for that absolutely Chair Andreessen yes yes hello that's math data time very excited so you know you know when I saw that on the agenda I clicked on it immediately I was on the beach and I was like this is a good use of my time I did notice and maybe you edited the the presentation but there were some pie charts about pacing and I thought there was one pie chart that I was a little concerned about with some I think 75%

063of something not on pace and I was gonna ask you about that but it looks like maybe you got rid I just want to you know get a sense of like well hey you know how's you know maybe it's a draft item or there's some context I was just curious about that yeah and what I thank you for bringing that up I originally had the same data slides that I was doing with principals in their data meetings and recognized as I was running through the the slide deck with with dr. Erdl earlier in the week that it was a bit too specific and I was needing to provide a lot of context so I shifted the presentation to be a little more high-level instructional of what our implementation year was looking like I'm happy to

064share that's not exclusive data I just just shifted gears a little bit but to speak to that data when we were doing pacing guides we had mapped out the entire year and one of our measurable points was when we walked into the classroom were they within a week of that now if you have been a classroom educator particularly in elementary school you might not get really deep into curriculum for the first couple of weeks as you're building your routines and building your community and so we had a lot of teachers that continued that practice and some that started day one with the curriculum and so right off the bat in our walkthroughs we had teachers who were off pace from the first day they started and so we stopped measuring that because if where you

065started is probably where you would stay then going the rest of the year so I we don't see it as a big concern we're helping teachers with adjusting to compensate for that and again where they were was not something we felt like we need to just continually measure that same pacing yeah and we can definitely make those slides available for sure and the only other thing I would add to what Ilsa just described was we also are you know a system of schools that matriculate to two middle schools and so the other thing that I think the pacing conversation lends itself to is each grade level really is reliant on the previous grade level and so while pacing feels rigid punitive maybe sometimes we also have to sort of in in literacy we call it

066peppy pace like we also have to keep it moving because there is a whole grade levels worth of standards and so I think it's always a balance of making sure that we're not leaving kids behind with that rigidity but we are responsible at each grade level to ensure that all of the standards are are taught change recent thank you for the presentation I just had a quick question you had mentioned some of the staff training going on around it is there an opportunity or a formalized mechanism for staff to kind of give feedback and say here's how it's gone for me this year and what's the plan for collecting that yeah we have the question thank you we have had I believe two district wide teacher surveys on our professional learning the the learning we

067did yesterday we actually asked principles to facilitate the learning because we couldn't be in all the spaces at the same time so we had an interactive sort of video format that was live facilitated by principles and then we asked principles to provide feedback for us and then the image with all the posters was our cooldown of how did the teachers synthesize their learning for the day and so there's informal just conversational or email feedback and then again formal and we will be closing out the year as teachers are reflecting on how the year went to get a better sense of what their professional learning needs are again the coaches having these one-on-one conversations with teachers as well as working with teams and planning has been highly informative of just kind of keeping that ear to

068the ground of what the needs are so we're developing professional learning kind of on-demand in real-time as it's needed but to your question we'll be doing again a big formal closing to help us map out strategically for next year and anticipate what needs will be thank you go ahead chair Andreessen so two things one is thank you for the work and to all of the teachers and everyone who's been implementing this and I just wanted to comment as a person who was raised as a girl and in a community where girls didn't do math by the time I got to high school a teacher tried to encourage me I could do math and I left them it off because I girls didn't do math and this makes me so thrilled and what a beautiful story

069for us to get to tell to recruit young humans to the district to say hey every kid who comes into our district grounded in our values is that this is maths for everybody and to build that that sort of like I'm thrilled and so excited to get to see my kid be excited as she enters school in Hopkins thank you I would also say that marketing communications has had our videographer Thomas out in classrooms for the last month or so so be on the lookout we're gonna have some really fun video storytelling really to see it in action mm-hmm one of the jokes that we've had is a lot of times when Elsa talks to like other adult people about math because she's so excited about it it often becomes kind of a therapy session

070because like I also I think at some point decided I wasn't good at math and I just think it's such like such a common experience that a lot of adults have had and so we're really working to ensure that every child in Hopkins feels really good and excited about math that's great and literacy yes great segue I want to make sure we have time to get to there's two more topics in this slide deck I believe and the third one can be pretty brief but yes all right I'm gonna be sharing with you just a little bit about where we are with our redact training and so you'll see on this next slide here we had about a hundred teachers who finished their letters in-person session yesterday so that's the end of their two years

071of very intensive training I want to give a huge shout out to you all as a school board dr. Mary Perry Reid and dr. Erdl for supporting we are one of the very few districts who actually started cohorts of letters long before the read act long before it was required and and it's showing I mean it's it is already paying off so those hundred teachers yesterday kind of finished up they have their online modules and their final test that they'll take in the coming weeks we also have the most amazing letters facilitators we are a unique district in that we have internal facilitators that IDL has been funding and they are also like in positions in their buildings and so to have people who lead the training and then are able to go back to

072their buildings and be there to answer questions to provide support to connect it to instructional practices has been huge as we've moved forward with with you fly as a foundational skills curriculum they've been right there to say here's how it connects here's what that looks like here's how it looks for students and so as you just kind of the two graphs on here one is where are we with people who are required to do phase one training that graph on the left you can see we are right there we have a very small handful of people who just need a little bit of extra time and on the right are the people who overall within our system we have a group of about 45 people who will need to start volume one next year their

073phase one required most of them have been new teachers over the last three years we made a very intentional decision not to put our brand-new baby teachers when I say baby teachers I mean ones just coming out of college into this intensive PD on top of their first couple years of teaching so we have that group that will go through we've also had lots of requests from various people in different leadership roles that are supporting classrooms across the district who are wanting to go through so that they can be more supportive so those are those graphs the next graph is actually incomplete data but I decided I wanted to throw in and share so as part of the last letter session we are asking them to fill out a pretty intensive survey about the training

074where they are with their instructional practices this will help to guide both our local literacy plan development as well as any professional development going forward so I just grabbed three or four quick graphs this is incomplete because it's only the teachers who were there yesterday the secondary people who are have their last session is not until April 16th but you can see you can kind of zoom in and see how many people have been impacted both in their own understanding and where they feel more confident in their instruction and it's pretty unusual for me to get results data that looks that far skewed to the right and so it feels like a huge success overall we've just had really really positive feedback about how the training has gone and how it's impacting classroom practices when

075we look at slide the next slide this is some of our early literacy graphs from winter fast bridge and I'm going to explain how to look at these so that you can kind of see what I'm seeing in the data so that graph on the left is our kindergarten fast bridge data early literacy pulls from six different subtests so it's looking at letter names letter sounds beginning sounds nonsense words and our kinder data you can see came in last year in the fall at about 70 percent proficiency it drops significantly mid year and there's a variety of reasons for this it's not unique to Hopkins but we do see a pretty significant drop there what that tells us is the benchmark in the fall is different than the benchmark in the winter in the spring

076so in the fall they only need to recognize three letters and they are considered proficient on some of those subtests by mid-year they have to be I think it's 24 and then by the end it's about 32 in one minute so that it's a big jump and it's not always perfectly aligned with our curriculum so we are looking into why that that decrease is so significant but when you look at this year's data when you're looking at the incoming kindergartners you'll see that we had 64 percent who are proficient coming in so we actually had a lower proficiency rate coming in to school and that's before instruction has happened and at the mid-year we are higher than we left off last year so we came started with students who were lower to begin with and

077we have not dropped as much and we are higher than even where we ended last year so while it doesn't look like a huge success from an implementation standpoint we're on the right track we've got to figure out some things in kindergarten but it's looking better first grade when you see you look at last year I'm going to zoom in on my slide just a little bit here when you look at last year's data you can see we had 44 percent coming in proficient in the fall we dropped a little bit got kind of back up to 42 percent entering in this year we entered with 44 percent proficient so same entering proficiency rate and mid-year we're at 48 percent proficiency so anything that's over a 3 percent increase is statistically significant and so that's

078really exciting to look for at this point in the year and then second grade is where we've got kids who've had a couple years of pretty solid foundational instruction last year coming in at 50 percent proficient this year coming in at 53 percent proficient they ended last year with a continued trajectory of improvement over each administration and we're already above that in second grade so there are some really good signs of positive trajectory that we're excited about and we'll continue to watch those but that's just a little bit of our early literacy data I will have the spring data for you in June the next slide is looking at our CAPTI data CAPTI is a new assessment this year it is the fourth through twelfth grade screener that's required by MDE it's looking for characteristics

079of dyslexia we gave it universally to all ninth graders this year and we will give it in sort of what's called a gated approach to some other students in fourth through eighth grade that can help to identify characteristics of dyslexia it's not it's not a dyslexia diagnosing tool right all it does is just raise a flag that there may be more that you need to look at through diagnostic assessments and so when we looked at our ninth grade data what you'll see is that we still have a fair number of kids that are struggling with some basic foundational literacy skills so the categories are word recognition and decoding vocabulary morphology sentence processing which is comprehension at the individual sentence level that one is a little unique it's sort of it gives a single sentence and

080it will have kind of the same sentence with a connector word like because or so instead not so that it's really about the language and our kids processing that entire sentence correctly reading efficiency is basically a fluency check and then reading comprehension and so when we look at our secondary students we do have students who are struggling still with reading and as we look at what's required for the read act for phase two it's what training do we opt into and whom do we provide that training to to better be able to provide literacy instruction and so that's one of the decisions we'll be making now we've selected on the next slide to use strive which is one of the four approved training programs by MDE for phase two and on the left hand side

081of this slide you can see who's required to participate in that training it's a little loose on MDE's website as to who provides foundational reading instruction and when you look at the actual categories by different grade bands it's things that are not specific to just a reading teacher right they're requiring ELA teachers but many of the same things that happen happen in every discipline where you're reading and writing about that content and so we are making some decisions around who is going to be best best served by that training on the right hand side we've selected strive is the one I that we've selected and the reason we've selected it is a couple of reasons one it fits well into our professional development can calendar and it starts off with disciplinary literacy which I think

082is a system we recognize that you don't just read an ELA class right you read in all of your different classes and it's critical to your success through secondary and beyond and so knowing how to read in those different disciplines how to write is is really important and this of the four options provided the most development there and the most focus there and then it breaks down into those other components of Scarborough's reading rope that you've seen me present before the other piece I like about it is that it does have a free bonus module around understanding dyslexia and an additional one on active participation which applies to any content area so we're kind of finalizing who will do that so far having met with all the middle school administrators they are very supportive of

083almost their entire staff participating in this training next year so I'm really excited about that and we'll have some places where it's not relevant and we have some middle school teachers and high school teachers who've already done letters and so they are exempt from this training it's less intense than letters and so we'll share those with you as we as we get to them questions for me now before and as SEL. Chair Andreessen. Yes Treasurer Heartland. Thank you very much for not only this information that you're providing us but also for pointing out that the district did believe in that's work this previous board has done and certainly the administration has done before is to talk about kind of the payoffs of that early investment in the science of reading because we didn't wait for

084a statutory requirement but because we didn't wait for that statutory requirement we actually have made like really significant investments it was a very expensive proposition in order to train our own internal facilitators and then to send those initial teachers to training and to pay those fees do you have any idea at all like kind of what it what kinds of costs we fronted for it ahead of this requirement because now the state is contributing of course and and we are seeing benefit from that but I know it was a big investment for us. Yeah and would be able to speak more to the specifics of the financial parks it was before my time when they initially started and actually director Contreras was a key individual in really getting some of our literacy staff onboarded through

085the it was the through the transformation zones and so what we sort of provided the teacher time and MDE supported with providing the training and so I would I mean I don't know I can't off the top of my head quantify but what I think is has been true is that having our own internal people first of all it's always good to have your own internal experts because then they are also building the capacity of the teachers around them like Kim alluded to so I don't I don't even know if we could put a number on that but second of all having our own folks just created a lot more flexibility so that we could train how and when sort of we wanted to on schedule so there probably are some sub costs and things

086like that I mean from a FTE perspective I would say the investment over the last two years from the ideal budget has been about a 1.1 FTE so just a little over a full-time teacher it's been divided among our our letters facilitators but it has been a pretty significant investment. Thank you. Chair Andreessen. Yes. Hi thank you all for coming to share and present tonight on this on this data is really important I have two questions one for the for I know that you have mentioned fast bridge sorry my computer's kind of doing some crazy things I can't pull up the the slide but for as in terms of fast bridge you talk about the benchmark and I think I may have mentioned this in a previous meeting and as I'm preparing to administer and

087proctor the MCA tomorrow at my school do it's a it's the benchmark on fast bridge I know not for kindergartners but for sure for like the third to 12th graders it's a benchmark on fast bridge compared to the is it for is it the MCA benchmark that they are actually being compared to rather than actually being come tested on the benchmark for fast bridge because I think that's where when parents see like their kids are high risk or struggling with reading or math that is the very confusing point like okay well we're saying that they're seeing growth but then based on a fast bridge data it shows different so just kind of want to understand how we are addressing that in conversation I think there's a couple pieces there yeah jump in I think so

088no it's not specific to MCA's although they have done some connected studies to say if you are reading or your benchmarks are at this for fast bridge you are predicted to score whatever on the MCA the MCA is new this year so all of that is kind of moot because it's based on previous standards in a previous assessment and so what fast bridge does is they take large national norms and say if you are performing at this level you are likely to be aligned with grade level proficiency it's actually backwards mapped from the ACT is where it initially is kind of mapped from and so it's looking at what do we expect from kids at each grade to be on predicted target for college readiness with the foundational reading skills when you look at the

089early reading it is much more about those beginning foundational skills in reading whereas by second grade and above when they start taking a reading it's much more of a comprehension assessment that's more aligned with what you would see on an MCA or another kind of reading assessment where you read something and then apply standards level kinds of application around theme or comprehension okay okay yeah no thank you so much for that clarification just because as I'm doing all this coordination around district and state testing I'm starting to see how the integrity of data is interfered with through these ever-changing benchmarks and expectations and it's not clear to families you know what changes are being made and so I guess the second question is and maybe you just answered this in the question but how can

090we communicate this better to families to maybe just let them know like first and foremost what's the difference between a formative and assumative test and then secondly kind of giving them some basic understanding of the scores so because like for example for me I put my son in tutoring and he's done he has increased in reading and math tremendously thank thank shout out to the Gatewood Academy but I would have liked to know that that was an you know a factor prior to not meaning I was gonna put him in tutoring anyway but I would have like to at least have some type of foundational information about the how it scored my district so it's such a good segue so we as a as an IDL team and through our Hopkins instructional leadership team which

091is a group that meets monthly are working on a defined balanced assessment system as part of that sort of student success metrics component of our Hopkins learning framework and what we've noticed is that even within our system there's some variability around beliefs of what fast bridge is telling us or isn't telling us or MCA is is telling us or isn't telling us you talked about data validity and even we know that even the conditions in which a student is taking an assessment can impact their performance or impact how the data come out and so we're doing a lot of internal calibration and helping our system really have a common and shared definition of formative assessments diagnostic assessments screeners like all of the different things that we use to inform our instruction both at the classroom

092level but also more of that satellite level what we use to diagnose how the system is doing rather than the individual child and we've talked a lot about that you know like the right and wrong way to use MCA data for example and so I think all of that to say we have also been working with marketing and communications on putting more information on our assessment plans what all of those different things mean in a in a community facing way on our website so that you don't have to you know just wait till conferences to ask the teacher like you could get information at your fingertips on sort of what what the assessments are that you're you can expect your students to take and how that data are used I think we have made some

093some decent moves forward like there are now letters that go home saying your scores are now an infinite campus and here's where you can find those and here are the links you can go to to find more information about your grade level what subtests they take what the expectations are what that score means I think we're always trying to walk that fine line around how much information is too much information and if they go to a website then it's just all you know it's really hard to find that right line I would say as you hear from from caregivers if you have suggestions on the best way to do that I think doing it is finding that right that right level and being able to provide it in multiple languages so that we're not excluding

094people from accessing their students information in a meaningful way is is something we're definitely open to hearing about how to best do that and I would actually just add to that as well as we're looking at MCA data is really about systems use district level use site level use fast bridge gets maybe down more to the classroom level potentially the student level but it's a screener so you still have to go a level deeper to understand what it is that that student is needing and that's where honestly the best thing you can do is talk to your classroom teacher and they are the ones doing those formative daily assessments and the summative assessments which would be the end of a unit how how did that learning go for you those are the true tells of

095when we're doing grade level learning today in this classroom how is it going that will give you honestly the most accurate read of how your student is doing today so sometimes waiting for conferences can be really helpful too so the screener is like something to pay attention to maybe draw your attention to dig a little deeper but that deeper level again comes with the classroom level but thank you no I'll say thank you yes one quick question or comment I guess for the regarding the fast bridge scores and the you know validity of the data has I've heard some concerns around utilizing the iPads for testing and I just wanted to raise it as something that maybe we could look into I know I've talked to teachers I've talked that's just how it's done but

096I know from my you know we got a call from my son's teacher that he did click click click click click click click which if a lot of kids are doing that you're gonna have problems with the data and so I was I also learned that I guess there was a glitch in some of the iPads at one point for the fast bridge tests this fall and so I just wanted to flag as something to look into different options as to how to give the assessments and perhaps and you know giving an option to a teacher to provide it in paper and pencil form if that's an option it's not yeah I know I think it's not at least because of the read act we're required to either use that or dibbles and they are

097both online platforms but we are being very strategic around how do we help kids go into the assessment show what they know use the tools correctly I went out to all of our elementary schools before MCA is just like to set the right expectation this is your chance to show what you can do and it's our job then to take that information and then find ways to support you yeah I there's lots of studies out that are coming out right now around the difference in how you read when you're online versus on paper and unfortunately there's cost benefits right we get scores back quickly and can respond more quickly to them versus having to send it off and and look at it that way it's why if the score seems out of out of place

098for your child then talking to your teacher and them saying like nope everything I see is fine they probably just clicked through it's it's where the flag gets raised but then it's that actual real relationship with a student where there's either diagnostics or the student is known well to be able to say like no well don't worry about that or yeah I'm going to dig in further there's some things here that are coming up that I need to look into and there are mechanisms built into these assessments also to flag if a student has either sat on a problem too long or has completed 20 problems in you know two minutes so so it will like if you're giving the MCA it'll flag that a student is clicking through really fast for example like my

099head a third grader who won the MCA in third grade first I also have it on good authority that there's a certain student who did that on the MCA it's not a little kid either I think it does yes I would just say really quick director Hyman like I say we're stating when kids do do that we well at least I do I make them take it over in a room isolated from their friends so then that way when they take it over then they have to take their time I don't know if every school does that but that's what I do when I'm can you come to the high school yes I can they know not to play with Miss Brooke with testing like so we are getting we are getting a now we

100know that particular students should be in a smaller classroom with some more guidance and oversight to not click through the first 40 questions in the first 15 minutes it's also a reminder to us I mean the but the data is what the data the data is what the data is and there are there are always gonna be nuances and like untold stories within the data so it's also like a reminder for us that we have to pay attention to it at the system level and at the school level and it's it cannot be always the full story yeah I will say like part of the reason I this data that I shared with you is early child or early literacy password you can't fake that right it's all given one-on-one with those actual reading behaviors

101and so those early literacy early math assessments that's where the most value is because if our kids are reading it like they do the CBM which that one minute timing and a fluency passage that's a grade level passage if they are reading on grade level at the end of second grade I am not worried about them right like we don't have issues with kids who can decode well at the end of second grade that are continuing to struggle on the comprehension will come if fluency is there and so for the average learner so it's a flag but those early literacy ones tell us what we really need to know about how kids are doing thank you thank you any other questions on this topic before we shift to the next one chair and reason yes

102yes hi just actually a comment so I think it's fair to say that I am often on the board asking you to do more and asking you why aren't things getting better in certain ways and so I spent a lot of time doing that but also I do see this sustained improvement and there's certainly a lot of work to be done certainly you know we're like Sisyphus right like it's the boulders going back down the hill but I'm I'm you know very happy about these results and you know my wife will when when it when it when a grade comes back for my kids and it's like 19 out of 20 I'm like why'd you miss that one and my wife like yeah yeah that's my house and that's what I'm used to and that's

103you know kind of my expectations for outcomes but I do see that and I hope that next year we're going to see another four or five I mean not if you get me nine you know we'll maybe push Missouri aside and we'll do have the Hopkins miracle but I appreciate it so I see you I think you all asked me last time I was here like what what would be a good number and for me it's a hundred percent right like I want all of our kids reading well I also think we like having finished two years of really intensive training we are now hoping to shift some more implementation support and you heard from Elsa about how important and powerful that is and we've been so wrapped up in just having to provide the

104training and that using every minute of PD to now be able to shift and support teachers more in the classrooms I do expect that we will see greater gains so we'll keep our foot on the pedal thank you my favorite update of the year the Minnesota student survey yes so board members just for some context and community the Minnesota student survey is given every three years to students across our state to learn more about their experiences and well-beings so many districts in our state use this as their climate and well-being data source now in Hopkins we also have panorama and we give that in some spaces twice a year in some spaces three times per year in grades 3 through 12 to also gauge climate and well-being regularly but I didn't want to just ignore

105the Minnesota student survey because our staff and our students who took this survey did invest the survey can take 30 to 50 minutes of their day and so I think I wanted to just bring some highlights from that survey so on the next slide you'll kind of see the total number of surveys by grade with of course fifth grade participating very highly and again this is sort of what you see with test fatigue as our students get older the participation wanes a little bit so students answer questions about their school experiences activities that they're involved in family school relationships risk factors health and safety just demographics wise about 51 percent of our students who took this took the survey identified as white and about 49 percent identified as a race other than white so most

106of the data is broken down when we receive these reports from the state by gender and we did see slightly more students who identify as female taking the survey than students who identify as male we are if we sort of make a special request to the state we are able to get the data to disaggregate on our own we typically we haven't done that yet just because we do have panorama data that offers some very similar kinds of questions and that allows us to disaggregate by more subgroups so on the next slide you will see a question about school engagement and motivation and just some key takeaways from these numbers most students say that they care about doing well in school they with a strong majority saying that they care all of the time or

107at least most of the time across every grade most students say that they are paying attention in class and many students say that they try to learn more they are able to learn more when something is interesting to them so we know that as educators if a student is engaged with the topic or has a personal connection their curiosity and motivation is going to be improved the next slide is about experiences and relationships and specifically this the grass show quite a question about students who agree that teachers in general care about students so what you'll see here is that again most students agree that adults at school treat students fairly a strong majority say adults listen to students especially in middle school and high school so we're happy to see that most students believe that

108school rules are fair even though they don't always strongly agree and then students generally feel that teachers care about students so the agreement rates for that are over 90% in most of the grades and we have our panorama data indicates similar trends so the next questions that were asked were about discipline and in particular this the graphs you'll see on the left are male students report who sell and it's self-reporting being sent out of the classroom for discipline in the last 30 days and on the right side female students in the last 30 days so this data says that discipline removals are rare especially in 9th and 11th grade where over 90% of students were not sent out of class in the last month most students reports to come make report coming to class prepared

109at least some of the time and very few students report frequent discipline incidents so again it's important to as we sort of our monitoring discipline from our internal perspective and how we are coding things in infant campus and some of those pieces the students perception of discipline incidences is also important for us to take into account as we're reviewing our system the next slide is an attendance slide and so this is again self-reported number of full days missed in the last 30 days so the key takeaways here most absences are low usually between 0 and 2 for per month for many students common reasons for absence our illness appointment but we do have some students reporting mental health and stress as a reason for being absent and most students on the Minnesota Student Survey reported

110feeling safe at school and at home the next slide is about safety so the top graphs are students who feel that they are safe at school and let's see oh I'm sorry this one is by grade level so you can see that top left graph is fifth grade across is eighth grade below ninth grade and then 11th grade so the key takeaways from this data were that most students report feeling safe at school at home and in their neighborhoods and that the feelings of safety are especially strong at home with over 90% of agreement across the grades the reports of not feeling safe at school are low and then finally the Minnesota Student Survey does ask about post-secondary planning and again this is one way that we measure post secondary planning that we do that

111in several ways the takeaways here are that a strong majority of students plan to attend college or pursue additional training after high school most students say that an adult at school has helped them think about life beyond high school many students report feeling supported in their career exploration and students generally self-report strong academic performance with most earning A's and B's so again although the Minnesota Student Survey is not the only way that we measure this we do it is because it's students reporting on themselves it is an important factor as we look at some of these pieces so the last thing and I'll mention I mentioned this at the beginning before I take any questions on the Minnesota Student Survey data I did mention at the onset that I will be sending feedback or a

112feedback mechanism to each of you so that you can provide us with some guidance around these data quarterly reports and as we think about sort of recalibrating which sets of data we do at each quarter we are looking forward to hearing what has been meaningful what you'd like to see more of maybe what you'd like to see less of and some of those pieces so please when you see that feedback opportunity I would really appreciate hearing from you and and what you would like to see more of in the future thank you thank you any questions I just have a quick question for the safety aspect do you see and maybe this is not surveyed as often but do you in the in the light height of like school shootings right like do you see

113safety concern go up like kind of during the height of when like it's talked about a lot like in the media and then kind of like when it's kind of not on the quieter side of the conversations do you see the egg goes lower so do you see a fluctuate in feeling secure in schools based on like a national event and then when national events are not occurring at like a high rate you see it lower I would imagine so I so for the purposes of the Minnesota student survey it was given last spring and so and it's only every three years so that's not gonna be a sort of keen enough tool to tell us that but we could because we are in our district have placed a lot of importance on you know

114well-being of our students that's why we do panorama so frequently I think we could analyze our panorama data maybe around some specific sort of benchmark times that we would identify as times of stress either in our state or in our system or in our country to see if we can see any of those indicators I do know that one one reason that we like panorama is that we can look at our data against data from other states and other districts across the country so that can sometimes tell us if if we are experiencing something unique or different either in Hopkins or in Minnesota in general but I think so I think that would actually be the tool that we would use to do a kind of more of a deep analysis now interestingly tragically during

115some of the winter screening window in which we would have been doing a panorama probably some fast bridge is when some of our students were not feeling safe enough to come to school so we will see you know as we kind of look over the trend of the year how that shows up in either participation or in in you know how the how the trend data looks and if we think about street data anecdotally if you're if we're in our schools in the hallways in classrooms listening to students and what they're talking about right after there's been in a tragic incident at a school in this country you will distinctly notice that element in our students conversations in a way where the conversations are very different if there hasn't been an incident in a while

116thank you any other questions well thank you for providing this I also really appreciate the key takeaways because I think that helps put context around this I was also really happy to see the level of students feeling safe at school that I mean that's the foundation right if you don't feel safe when you're at school it's impossible for you to learn so I deeply appreciate this this data and also realize we have room for growth there as well you know I it's not oh it's over 80% and we're done I think all kids should feel safe at school so thank you for for providing this and for giving us some nice context around it absolutely thank you so much sure Andreessen yes can we just take a moment to ask our students Hafsah and Adina

117did you have any from a student perspective reflections or questions or wonderings when you heard this data I will say as a student it is hard especially with all the social media to not talk about what's going on in the world like you'd scroll like three times that would take like a minute minimum maybe and you'd see something like newsworthy and like our parents also like they'd be watching the news and it's hard not to listen because like you know you're doing something so I feel like it when I totally agree with director Mary Perry read that no secretary I'm so sorry that when something happens even if it's not like newsworthy or something like even if it's like drama about something like say a celebrity gets like married or something like they're gonna talk

118about it it's everywhere it's like a connection and as humans I feel like people steep connection so anything that happens is gonna be talked about I don't have any comments but thank you guys for coming and sharing thank you thank you so much and thank you to my board colleagues we got ourselves a little break so we have 15 minutes before we need to be back here in the room yay thank you hi everybody welcome thanks for being here you're ready to have dinner all right it is 7 p.m. I'm gonna go ahead and welcome all of you here tonight we're gonna do our favorite part of our school board meetings which is recognize our amazing scholars and yeah so we'll get started with that we come down to you sorry this is making a

119lot of noise so welcome again everybody thank you for being here with us this evening tonight we are proud to recognize two outstanding groups of student-athletes who represented Hopkins with excellence dedication and pride this season first we celebrate the 2025-2026 Hopkins High School girls varsity basketball team and I'm just gonna say I think that was one of the most exciting basketball games I have ever watched so thank you for that this team finished the season 27 to 3 earned first place in the lake conference and advanced to the state tournament frequently ranked among the top teams in Minnesota class for a known for their relentless defensive pressure and high-powered offense these athletes demonstrated teamwork resilience and commitment every step of the way come on in welcome we're talking about you and how amazing you are

120no no you're good feel free have a seat as Paige Becker's reminds us championships aren't won in the game they're earned in the gym that dedication was evident all season long on behalf of the Hopkins school board and district we proudly recognize the coaches and staff who support this exceptional program head coach Tara Starks assistant coaches Alexis Garcia and Mike Winston behind the bench coaches Martin Smith and Devin Buckley student managers Aliyah Berscht and Reese Watson and athletic trainer Lexi Dutton let's have some applause for those now we're going to invite the members of the Hopkins girls varsity basketball team to be recognized that means you get to go to the end of the blue runner I think some of you have done this before and then as I call your name please make your

121way down at the royal blue runner Amari Johnson Ava Capito Talaya Rienick Linnea Durant Mariana Davis Brin Steinberg Ava Smith Jaina Lyons Avery Weber Amia Hudson Hicks Portia Greer Harper Peterson Jaleah Diggs Cadence Reif Edwards Dahlia Thornton Fay Irma Walker and Anira Nesbitt and do we want to take a photo? okay so we're also proud to recognize our Hopkins Royals dance team following a historic 25-26 season marked by exceptional achievement and continued excellence at the state level this year the Royals qualified for the state dance team tournament in the high kick for the third consecutive season earning a bronze medal finish at the Minnesota State dance team tournament in February the program celebrated a record-breaking year continuing a strong tradition of competitive success we want to extend our sincere thanks to the Royals coaches led

122by head coach Marit Green whose leadership yes yes coach Green's leadership dedication and commitment to student growth makes each incredible season possible assistant coaches for the kick team include Jess Anderson Kelly Dempsey Allison Dill and is it Jezira? Jezara Hall okay thank you with the support of all coaches as well as parents and family members and of course our fearless parent leader Amanda this village of adults work together to guide and shape a program to be exceptional team oriented and always exuding royal blue pride so at this time we're going to invite the members of the Hopkins Royals kick team to receive your award so please go to the end of the royal blue runner and we're gonna call your names and they match okay June Anderson, Lily Anderson, Olivia Arth, Kylie Bloomberg, Alexis Brown,

123Piper Dotseth, Madison Gilson, Clara Hallberg, is it Clara or Clara? Clara Hallberg thank you Iris Kaplan, Adalyn Kazus, did I say your last name correctly Adalyn? Oh goodness I did not, Kazaj okay that's pretty, Ellen Larson, Marissa Lee, Hadley Mangan, Lily McIntyre, Skylar Okerlund, Elise Palmersheim, Evelyn Palmersheim, Brooklyn Patterson, Maddie Reed, Raina Simmons, Lillian Stremel, and Moxie Thorson okay so Royals you want to come up in front of the school board members and we'll take a photo and Maddie Reed you can come stand in front of me so everyone thanks for being here tonight ladies and parents and coaches and we invite you to stay for the rest of the meeting but we understand if you have other things to do I just hurt myself I just hurt myself sitting down well thank you all

124for being here I am having trouble with my computer but that so then I will call this meeting of the Hopkins school board to order it is a 7 11 p.m. for a Tuesday April 7th 2026 and thank you all for being here our first order of business is open agenda this is where we get have an opportunity for public comment and if you would like to address the board we have two ways to do that you can either come here this evening and fill out a comment card before we this meeting starts and I don't believe that there were any cards submitted beforehand or you can leave a voicemail the number to do so is on our school board website were there any voicemails left this evening there were not so we don't have

125any public comment for this evening we do believe that hearing from our community members is crucial for implementing vision 2031 so please do contact the school board if you don't want to make public comment we also receive emails and we we do read through those and bring those thoughts that are shared with the board to our deliberative process here at the board table so thank you all I know that our community has always been incredibly supportive and also very eager to engage with the board so I appreciate that that takes us then to our first reports which are the student board representatives reports thank you there are two of you here this evening yes hi my name is Hafsa I'm a freshman today I wanted to start by discussing the ACT test on April 14th

12611th graders who are not taking the test should have emailed should have their adult email dr. cool 9th 10th and 12th graders will have visual virtual learning that day the second thing I wanted to talk about was the community at summer volunteer opportunity they're taking applications for teens 14 through 16 helping cap royal camp royal staff with camp projects sports games and transitions helping prepare and clean after camp projects as well interested in interested applicants can fill out an application and provide two references applications will be accepted up until April 17th qualified students will be invited to a brief interview at the high school with two to four students being chosen for the program the camp will run from June 16th to August 14th Mondays through Thursdays the third thing I wanted to talk about

127today was the Hawkins school high school choir solo ensemble contest that's happening on Tuesday April 14th from 4 to 8 p.m. where a cappella ensemble solos duets trios and octets will perform when you when the group you or your group is up you play your piece or pieces while the judge watches then when you're done they go up and conduct you giving you revisions on how to play the music and specific measures to focus on at the end when you're done the judge gives you a score out of 40 that correlates to a rank of superior great or good etc the highest score scores will get the opportunity to go to all state and finally I would like to spotlight miss Henshaw my second block photography and web design teacher I have had the opportunity

128to already have experienced her as a teacher in my first term art class I find that she always has a way of creating a creative atmosphere in her class not only with the room itself but how you but how when you ask for help she invites mixing different things like colored pencil and watercolor marker or crayon etc and I'm excited to have her as my teacher again thank you hi I'm Adina and I'm a freshman I'm gonna start off with my teacher spotlight I'm actually gonna be spotlighting my counselor miss Nelson she's a very kind and caring counselor she is very good at responding to all of my questions and emails on time I've been in and out of her office all year asking many questions of many sorts and she is very nice and

129always answers all of my questions and leaves me with more information than like what I came for which is always super helpful next I have a student council update the student council has come up with new with three updates on some upcoming events first there is a pep fest on May 5th where everyone all the grades get together in the gymnasium and we do contests play games and we watch performances from the dance team there will also be a spirit week from May 11th to 15th the theme is unknown yet but very excited for it I love the spirit weeks next they have the prom update the location will be at Fillmore on May 16th and they also don't know the theme for that yet lastly there will be a student council presidential election hall

130where you can go and meet the candidates for Q&A it will be on Wednesday April 22nd during Royals Connect and it will be in the auditorium next I'm gonna be talking about fourth term starting so today was the very first day of term four which is the last term of the school year so sad and exciting at the same time many class kids will be starting new classes while continuing their semester classes the last thing I want to talk about is the Hopkins hoop alumni camp this is for boys going into third through 12th grade it's from August 3rd through 6 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the rack this is where boys can practice their skills and become more advanced along with gaining mental and physical strengths and playing 5v5s and 3v3s it's

131also a great way to make new friends make sure you get your tickets before May 1st and if you use the code hoops in all caps you can get a $25 discount the link or QR code can be found in the Hopkins High School newsletter thank you thank you both those were very comprehensive reports I feel like and I always love hearing about your teachers anyone have any questions or comments chair Andreessen yes vice chair Roper thank you thank you all for your for your board reports just two quick date verifications you said prom was May 16 yes May 16th May 16th okay and then the Student Council presidential election that is on April 22nd during Royals Connect so from 10 to 11 okay thank you PetFest is May 5th thank you for keeping all

132our calendars up today of course do they always start at the same time like around 9 57 or something yeah it's 9 57 well thank you so much I know it takes work to prepare these so thank you for doing that I also appreciate that you put your own personal touch on all these reports I think it's really important for us as board members to hear what what your experience is because this is why we're all here so thank you and that takes us to our superintendent report Dr. Mary Peary Reed okay thank you well for starters I just want to welcome everybody back from spring break and we're gearing up for the final quarter here of the school year for those of you who are able to travel hopefully you went somewhere warm or

133intriguing and for those of you who stayed here hopefully you found a way to create a meaningful staycation so as was mentioned in the quarterly achievement report during the workshop yesterday it was a professional learning day for our educators so educators attended training to help them improve their literacy and math instruction and also many educators experienced a session designed for program and curriculum review some important research about what makes professional development meaningful for teachers professional development is effective if number one it is sustained over time so that's why you hear about the continual focus on evidence-based reading practices and pedagogy around that and also on our math curriculum implementation what's less effective are professional developments that are just single sessions or one-offs also teachers find professional development that is highly collaborative as adding value to

134how they're spending their time and then third if PD is directly applicable to classroom practice so we always think about those three things as we're designing professional learning for our educators so next I just want to spotlight two amazing educators from Hopkins maybe you have heard that two of the 11 finalists for the 2026 Minnesota teacher of the year are from Hopkins which is really really incredible so we have Amy Fung who teaches kindergarten at Meadowbrook and Cher Anrufrizen who is a special education educator at Glen Lake and she teaches kindergarten through grade five and we just think this is so extraordinary and if you'd like to celebrate with these finalists and also with the semi-finalists then there is a teacher of the year banquet on May 3 which is a Sunday at the River

135Center in St. Paul so we are rooting for our two Hopkins educators following a really successful bash I want to thank HEF for recently awarding more than $25,000 in spring spark grants to support innovative and student-centered learning across our classrooms if you look at the details of these grants you'll find that these funds will enhance literacy the arts STEM focused education social emotional learning as well as create greater access for students with diverse learning needs through things like flexible spaces and adaptive tools so thank you Hopkins Education Foundation or HEF for boosting our educators commitment and also for helping us expand meaningful and joyful learning I did want to provide just a brief transportation update and then our assistant director in transportation is providing a more detailed written report for our school board members but

136of course we have a goal of improving the quality of transportation services to families and ideally at more efficient cost levels so we have made really solid progress recently with some recommendations that have come from the board earlier in the year so with catalyst as our partner we really we released an RFP for a new bus contract as we did reach five years on our with our current provider and we received a strong response rate that included six comprehensive school bus providers that responded to our RFP and four providers that do type three transportation so we evaluated all of these responses against a set of specific criteria we invited two bus companies in just yesterday for in-person interviews and these conversations went really well and we are now conducting very thorough reference checks and just

137you know doing some extra digging so we can make a solid choice so that there's really wonderful news and as you see on the slide we are also oh it's not on the slide I also wanted to let our board and community members know that we are making progress toward finalizing the parent notification app so that'll be huge for our community we are ensuring that all GPS systems will be fully functioning moving into the fall and then building the pay-to-ride mechanism which is requiring a collaborative effort between transportation business services and IT so thanks to all of the staff that are involved in those efforts on behalf of Hopkins public schools we want to welcome dr. Emily Palmer to Hopkins High School she is the fabulous school leader that we have selected as the next

138principal for Hopkins High School she comes with more than 30 years of experience teaching and leading in middle schools and high schools and is currently serving as the principal of Washburn High School in Minneapolis so we're really excited about dr. Palmer and she is going to be doing a little bit of learning here and there through quarter four and then we'll be fully on board on July 1st and then along the lines of great news for our high school so last August you may remember that dr. Erdl and Ea Vang shared 24 graduation data in a quarterly update and we were not as impressed with the results so we did explicitly name some discrepancies as well as actions that would help us focus on improved results and so these these 2025 results show encouraging signs

139that our efforts are making a difference overall our graduation rate rose to 86% which does exceed the state average currently and we also saw notable gains for our black or african-american scholars and also for our students eligible for educational benefits so this is really great news and just as a reminder the graduation rate represents the percent of students in an adjusted cohort so those who started ninth grade together plus transfers in and minus verified transfers out and then all of those students who earn a diploma within four years so that is really great news and with that I'm gonna invite our assistant director of buildings and grounds we were just in a podcast together today talking about the referendum projects we did that podcast with principal aroma Sally from North and also with John wetter

140from IT and so mr. Mazzoli has been with us since July 1st close August 18th August 18 how you remember that date so specifically yes big move it was a big move okay well we're really happy to have you here and Gino really did hit the ground running coming to Hopkins with experience and facilities from a pre from a neighboring district bye students good night and so for our department department spotlight Gino will just talk about buildings and grounds staffing and some efficiencies that were focused on and and goals that you might have for for that important department in our district awesome thank you for introduction and the opportunity to look at our department so if you look here at the first slide and we're going to roles and responsibilities focusing on the leadership team

141you have myself as the assistant director of building and grounds and we have the facility managers position that's currently posted but we are in the hiring process we have done interviews and we are hopefully moving along with a candidate we also have a new admin assistant Renee you may that name may be familiar she comes from Alice Smith as an admin assistant there at the building so she came over to us that was a huge win for our department we have Dre Jefferson Dre is the facilities use coordinator Dre it's an interesting position where he serves community you know Ed and then he also serves the building grounds department and that's a great way for us to stay in contact and communication that is a important piece to the puzzle there we have Jeff Goldie

142he's our health and safety and risk coordinator so that's kind of an overlook and how our roles and responsibilities are from the leadership standpoint as a district we are responsible for over 1.7 million square feet of schools and support facilities we have 12 separate facilities and they're located over 170 acres of land and we do have three pools within those facilities as well and here this is just a kind of industry standard of where you see custodial square footage per person so as you can see here that 18 to 22,000 mark you know those are some very you should see some very awesome clean clean spaces and then when you get down to that level five you're going to be looking at that 33,000 to 37,000 where you really want to avoid obviously being you

143know in a dream world I think we'd be in level two and then we have some buildings you'll see in level three and level four coming up and again this is kind of looking at this slide you know we have 60 to 70 custodians typically in our district that help us out and then there's some grounds position and some maintenance position and those numbers as well so if you look here this is currently how Hopkins staffing ends up from a building standpoint as far as where we land using those standards from a square foot per custodian basis so if you look there you know a high level it's our bigger buildings that are in that red that level that's you know a little understaffed and then on the elementary standpoint you kind of see that

144we're in a stronger area and then Alice Smith is a yellow so that's kind of how we currently sit and again looking at this you know this is with everybody who is you know without vacation without sick time personally you know there there are a lot of that stuff that we run into too so this is fully staffed which on an every night basis sometimes can be tough to be fully staffed and then also just from a standpoint your typical classroom is 750 square feet so using that as a baseline as to you know how many classrooms you know people may have on their shift and then bathrooms typically take more time as well as a kindergarten room versus like you know fifth grade some of those spaces can have different cleaning demands so you

145know myself and leadership and our other group we do try to split these spaces up even so that one person is not getting all bathrooms one person is not getting all kindergarten we do try to do our best to split those up evenly so that so it's even for the staff what you'll see from me coming up here soon is we'll be discussing our 10-year plan for long-term facility maintenance which is our LTFM so we'll be discussing that soon and then we will have some referendum contracts coming up or you know proposals that we need to decide on as far as a bid process so those are some of the things that you'll see me discuss soon here with the group we are starting to see some of our utility numbers come in and I

146do have to say I'm proud to say that our usage is lower I know folks under from my previous presentations know that that's important to our to myself as goals in the department so we are seeing those numbers come in from a user standpoint much lower than the history has shown any questions thank you for being here I don't have a question but I do have two comments one I agree Renee was a big get she was our front office person when my family was at Al Smith so she's amazing and I'm thrilled for her and also you often come up at Gatewood as a topic of conversation with some of our kiddos because when they want to do certain things I will say well mr. Gino would not want to come repair that so

147just so you know you are a topic of conversation throughout the district at least in one building for more than just temperature exactly yeah typically that typically that's my my point of conversation is when my name spread up so that thank you I appreciate this presentation yes quick question I really appreciate looking for cost savings like every dollar that we don't spend on utilities can help us keep programming intact I know that some of our buildings are older and so that there are some cold spots I know that there's at least a couple of staff members that were like we're very cold now do you have any way to like take that feedback and see is there if there's anything that can be done to even that out I know it's not cheap but like

148especially as we're doing projects inside buildings anyway to improve them sure no I'm glad you brought it up you know staff feedback is is very important sometimes just for this morning actually for example I had somebody from Meadowbrook reach out and say hey our rooms are really cold it seems like the air conditions on already seems a little early for that and it's cold out why you know could you look into it and from an automation standpoint there's all sorts of controls and numbers you can put into the system and we due to some like wrong numbers there is a high level discharge temperature of 65 degrees so that was the highest it was able to put out we changed all those settings and just people not enduring that in their space is important because

149other I can't check you know how many classrooms we have in the district one by one by their VAV it's called kind of their their temperature set points but once they reach back out to me we can take a look into it and just like we did we were able to fix that problem another example over at North if you're familiar with that 401 kind of the sped space is a kitchen in that corner they reached out and you know hey it's really cold our windows are super old we are actually replacing all those windows this summer through LTFM so it's very important for staff not to endure and to let us know bring up the concerns and then have us troubleshoot them thank you yeah thank you so much for being here with thank

150you thanks for having me any quit I just wanted to make one comment on your report dr. Mary Perry read I'm glad to see what and then I have a question I'm glad to see that our graduation rate is up but I also wanted to let everyone know that the state average is up as well so we're usually above the state average as a school district but I think that we're not as far above it as usual because the state average itself went up which I think is great for everyone and then I did have a question I know that you said that on the transportation update that the parent notification app and the GPS stuff and the pay-to-ride is coming along really well in particular I'm wondering about the pay-to-ride do we have an

151ETA on that when that's gonna be live and ready to go good question I'm looking to mr. wetter in the back do we have okay but to clarify we are shooting for the fall correct mr. wetter for fall meaning before people are putting their kids on buses to come to school okay thank you any other comments or questions and if there's more detail around that we can include it in the written update as well yeah that'd be great thank you okay thank you that then takes us to approval of tonight's agenda I would look for a motion chair and reason yes before we do I'd like to make a motion to add another item to tonight point of order director Thompson I believe an item cannot be added to the agenda without first requesting it

152of the chair or the superintendent has that been done no I was looking at our policy 203.5 regarding school board meeting agenda and under item F it says items may only be added to the agenda by a motion adopted at the meeting as a matter of procedure the motion to add an item requires a second so I was making the motion here under procedures section 3 part D persons wishing to place an item on the agenda must make a request to the school board chair or superintendent in a timely manner and that has not been done I don't believe I haven't gotten any requests superintendent Mary Perry Reid have you no I didn't make it until now it yeah so I was just reading F and thought something could be added if if adapted by

153emotion so I guess we're kind of stuck between D and F so assistant superintendent Lightfoot would you like to come in way in I believe there's also the part B which indicates that any changes to the individual meeting agenda that requires school board vote must be made five days prior any changes to the meeting agenda require board discussion will be made at least two days prior to the individual meeting yes so 203.5 under individual meeting agendas does state any changes to the individual meeting agenda that require board discussion will be made at least two business days prior to the individual meeting any changes to the individual meeting agenda that require a school board vote will be made at least five days prior. In addition, any changes to the individual agenda will require that all school

154board members be notified. In part, that really is due to the open meeting law that if there is any posting of material or documents that may be there, that there's also a specific time for the public to review that as well. That all makes sense. I appreciate it. I just thought something could be added if by emotion. But I guess I am wrong. So I appreciate the learning. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that, too. I think it's important for our community as well as board members to know how to add something to the agenda. So please, if you would like to add something, reach out to either the chair or the superintendent. So I would look for a motion to approve tonight's agenda. So moved. Is there a second? Second. I have a motion and

155a second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Chair votes aye. And tonight's agenda is approved. That takes us to the consent calendar. These items provide the board with information considered to be more routine in nature. If the board deems an item to be necessary for additional discussion, a motion will be made to move the item to new business. There is a recommendation that we move an item. Director Zhao, would you like to move that item? Chair Ingris? Yes. Yes, I'd like to make the motion to move the bond proceeds RFP approval to new business. Second. I have a motion. I don't think we need a motion or a second, right? So the item G in the consent calendar, the bond proceeds RFP approval has been moved to new business.

156And we will then go through a resolution process for that. And I would assume that it will be our first order of new business, if we could let the agenda reflect that. Any other, so I would then look for a motion to approve the consent calendar without item G. So moved. I have a motion. Is there a second? Second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. The chair votes aye. And the board has approved the consent calendar. And that takes us to the treasurer's report. Treasurer Heartland. Thank you. Thank you everybody. For my treasurer's report today, I would like to recap that the board audit committee met on March 26th with Jessica Olson, Emily Westrom and Dr. Nick Lightfoot to review the status

157of the district's audits. And overall things are on track. The district and KDB expect to complete the audit by early June ahead of our final board meetings. As we heard in the recent budget workshop, fiscal year 25 revenues have largely been reconciled and work on reconciling those expenses is ongoing. And after that, audit field work will begin that focuses on our internal controls and compliance. And we also talked about progress on making adjustments given the fiscal year 24 audit findings. And remember that because of that tight turnaround between audit cycles, we just finished in February the fiscal year 24, you know, not everything could be addressed right away in these couple of months, but we are making solid progress. I think reconciliations are already happening more quickly. That improves the accuracy and timeliness of our

158financial information. We've updated our practices around the reporting of donations and purchasing and strengthened our segregation of duties. And so all of this reflects strong work that's done by our business services team and district admin and along with, you know, some pretty steady oversight from both the board and the audit committee that takes that work very seriously. And I'm grateful for everyone's attention and participation in that process. The systems and our processes in place are improving and that is showing up everywhere. And looking ahead, here's what to expect. We, tonight we'll hear from CFAC, the Citizens Financial Advisory Committee about a smaller set of recommended budget adjustments. And then on April 21st, we'll review some final budget projections and get some more detail on those recommended reductions. And then in late May and early June,

159we'll both be reviewing and approving the fiscal year 27 budget and reviewing and approving the fiscal year 25 audit results. If you look at our check register, you can see some of that evidence of the work being done by the business services department. The period covered by this check register is shorter. It's February 16th to 28th, but it has quite a bit fewer than the normal amount of expenses. And another reason for this, besides the shorter period, is that during that time business services was doing retraining with all of our departments, mainly department leads and admin assistants and retraining them on more streamlined processes of submitting invoices. So there's now a more central repository for them instead of being routed to an individual, which helps ensure transparency and clarity and continuity. Like in the event

160that a business service person, say, leaves the district or is out ill, then other people in the department can seamlessly take over the reviewing and approving of invoice payment requests. Some expenses of note, we paid the Minnesota Department of Public Safety $25 for each site. That's our required fee under the Minnesota Hazardous Materials Act. Any school facilities that store and use certain classes of materials, like for science or for cleaning, has to report those materials and pay this nominal fee. From our Athletics Fund, Fund 61, we paid $4,162.50 to the Minnesota State High School League as our annual dues for, I believe, 47 different activities that the district is providing for our kids this year. You will note fees totaling $54,775 to Bergen KDV for fiscal year 24 audit. We paid $3,499 to ECM publishers

161to post our various meeting minutes and announcements in accordance with state statute. That is our official newspaper, The Sunsailor. We paid JAMF software $73,345.80. This is annual subscription for software that we use to kind of centrally manage and secure our Apple devices at scale across our organization. So that's how we kind of control settings and what apps are deployed and we keep them updated. We paid Safe Engineering $375,000 for preliminary work associated with referendum projects at all various sites. And you can see some details about which of those sites and projects were covered on the check register. And some further info was provided to me by Assistant Director of Building and Grounds, Gina Mazzoli, to say that that work was required to do submit topographical surveys, some initial engineering design, and required to submit that

162information for all city permits, watershed district permits and state permits, et cetera. With that, I move that we approve total disbursements in the amount of $966,472.17 for the period of February 16th to February 28th, 2026. Thank you. I have a motion. Is there a second? Second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? The chair votes aye and the treasurer's report is accepted. Thank you, Treasurer Heartland. I always appreciate your detail on these reports. And that takes us to our first order of new business, which is the bond proceeds RFP approval pulled off of consent. And I believe that we got a preview of the reasoning behind the resolution. But if board members want to ask some questions here at the

163table, we have our local experts here joining us. Thank you so much. So I would, I think first, do we need to read the resolution or do you want to have a brief discussion beforehand? I think we can do a brief discussion just to give context. And then after that, it will help if the resolution can be read into the record. It's a short one, so we should be good. But the general context is as we look to open the account to receive the bond proceed funds, this resolution is required so that we can get the account set up so that we are ready to receive the proceeds. So in essence, that's what the board is establishing and that's the specificity identified in the resolution. Anything else? Great, there are additional questions. We're happy to

164address those, but otherwise, it's really the approval of the resolution and the acceptance thereof of Eller's investment partners in order for us to facilitate the establishment of the accounts, they will be managing that and the funds that are along with it. And just for context for our community, if you would like to go back to our workshop and watch the beginning, we started at five, which is where we talked about the budget and this issue. But just so we know what this is for, so this is for phase one of the capital projects, referendum dollars, and that we will be going through this process again when we come to phase two. Did I accurately reflect that? Yes, you did. Okay, great, thank you. Any questions from my board colleagues? Great, I will read this then.

165A resolution, approval to open custodial accounts with Pershing Advisor Solutions LLC and engage Eller's investment partners as investment advisor. Whereas Eller's investment partners LLC recommends opening custodial accounts for investment of Hopkins public schools funds, and whereas Eller's investment partners LLC as the school district's investment fiduciary will help manage and advise the school district on the investment of these funds in accordance with state statute. Now therefore, be it resolved by the school board of Hopkins public schools that it hereby approves the engagement of Eller's investment partners LLC to open Pershing Advisor Solutions LLC accounts to aid the school district in the management of investments and designate Pershing Advisor Solutions LLC as an official school district depository. The above and foregoing resolution, well, I would look for a motion to have it adopted by the board. So

166moved. Oh wait, clerk, call the roll. Sorry. Director Hyman? Aye. Director Zhao? Aye. Vice Chair Roper? Aye. Chair Andresen? Aye. Treasurer Heartland? Aye. Director Thompson? Aye. And the clerk also votes aye. All are in favor. Thank you, clerk. So the resolution is passed. Thank you. Thank you for being here with us for that. That now takes us to our next order of business, which is the CFAC Citizens Financial Advisory Committee budget report for 2026-27. Thank you all for being here with us this evening. And we get to have Treasurer Heartland and director, oh, directors Hyman and Zhao go down and join. There's more of you than us. Thank you so much for being here. Appreciate all the work you put into this. All right, as, do you want introductions or just present to you? Yeah,

167that would be great. I'll start. Luke Jacobson, parent of a seventh and ninth grader and have been on CFAC for 10 plus years. Hi, Carl Shepherd, a parent of a first grader, a preschooler, and then one to start preschool who I can't leave off, so. Andrea Simmons, I have a former student who just graduated the 2025 class. And then I also have a 14-year-old in eighth grade at North and a 10-year-old at Gatewood Elementary. Hi, this is Jimmy Joe. I've got two kids, Eisenhower, fifth grade and second grade. Johanna Hyman, I have two kids, a third grader and a kindergartner at Meadowbrook. Treasurer Rachel Heartland, this is my third year on CFAC. It's always the role of the treasurer to sit on CFAC. And I have three children in our district. Nick Lightfoot, assistant superintendent,

168eighth grader at North Middle School. Jessica Olson, Interim CFOS Cecil. Thank you, welcome. All right, as a CFAC group, we've met over 10 times since October to discuss the district's financial health. This report is usually presented by the end of February, but delays related to personnel and system changes also delayed the audited financials, as you heard in the treasurer's report. The June 24 audit was completed in February. The June 25 audit is in process and expected by the end of June. And then the audit for this upcoming year ending June 26 is expected to be on time and completed by December 31st, which will get us back on a timely schedule for next year. Despite the audit delays, completed financials and the most recently available financial projections show that the district's general fund remains in

169a healthy overall position. If you wanna turn to a couple of appendixes, first appendix B, enrollment, shows enrollment remains steady and consists consistently over 6,900 students, which helps to support a consistent revenue stream for the district. Appendix C, this is a big change and win for CFAC in the district for fiscal year 26, that's upcoming ending in June. CFAC is recommending to pause the funding of its other post-employment benefits or OPEB. As you look at appendix C combined, they're over 96% funded as of June 25 and investment earnings are expected to support funding levels going forward. Five years ago, OPEB was around 70% funded and this has increased due to investment earnings in annual operating expense of 2 million that supported contributions to the fund. The big thing here is the pause is expected to

170support for a $2 million positive impact to this year's budget as well as going forward. If you look at appendix E, the unaudited unassigned fund balance decreased to 11% at June 25 from 11.9% at June 2024 and is expected to increase to 13.6% at June 2026. CFAC continues to recommend an unassigned fund balance with a long-term range of eight to 12%, which compares to a district board policy of 6%. Prior to any budget adjustments, appendix E shows the unassigned fund balance falling below the board policy of 6% in fiscal year 2029 and below 0% in fiscal year 2031 if no adjustments are implemented. To support a healthy unassigned fund balance, CFAC is recommending budget reductions of two to 3 million for the fiscal year ending June of 27, which is based on the following assumptions.

171State funding, primary source of revenue is expected to increase at 2.69%. Estimated increases in staff compensation are expected to increase at 5%. Purchase services increase at 3% and utilities and transportation at 5%. Since staff compensation represents 80% or over 80% of the operating budget and it's increasing at a rate that exceeds increases in revenue. So revenues are increasing at 2.69 and staff increases are increasing at 5%, leaving a 2.31 gap there. It's the biggest kind of driver for changes in the district's operating budget. Budget adjustments for fiscal year 27 will continue to support a healthy unassigned fund balance and keep the district in a strong financial position going forward. And lastly, thank you to the board and admin team for your time to work with the CFAC citizen volunteers. Thank you. Thank you. And really

172the gratitude is toward you for volunteering your time to do this. I know it's, I know that you have early morning meetings and I don't at all envy you those. Any questions or additional comments? Yes. Chair Andresen. Yes, Clerk Wilhelm Garbers. Thank you. First of all, I echo just the gratitude to all of you and especially to the three of you for your particular volunteer involvement in this. I think one of the things that just strikes me as a person who is both a general citizen and not a financial wizard, but cares and knows money matters, I'm just so struck by when you say, like, you know, here's what the revenue increases and then here's the realities of what we're dealing with. And to really name that over 80% of our budget does go to

173ensure the compensation packages for our staff and educators. And so I just want to just pause and say, like, that really hits me in just the real complexities and challenges of you can't make paper money to make up that gap, right? And that compounds as that keeps moving forward. And so just wanted to name that. Yeah, I agree with that. Like, I don't, I wish I had a magical solution to fix that. Yeah, I think we all do. Director Thompson. Thanks, Chair Andresen. Yes, I'll echo what people have said about thank you for the time you all spend on this. I really do appreciate it. I guess I have two questions. The first one, regarding the unassigned fund balance and how our policy says we have to maintain 6%, but we're up in that eight

174to 12 range, even slightly over 13%. Is there any thought of like allowing some of that to come out so that we wouldn't have to make as many reductions by, you know, drawing that down towards closer to the 6% or what's the calculus there? I can answer, I can start. I mean, the biggest thing if you look at Appendix Z is if there's no adjustments made, it just quickly goes down. It'll go down. And even it kind of, historically it'll compound exponentially. So, you know, if you borrow 2 million from the fund in one year, it could easily turn into 4 million the next year. So you're just kind of delaying. I think the other piece is as we've gone out for bonding, and that's one of the things that they look for is a

175strong, healthy fund balance. The board policy is a minimum of 6% with anything above in excess to help support ebbs and flows and revenues and expenditures. And just looking out where the projection model is, it's going to be a deficit spend by 31 if nothing is done. So that's where the recommendation of those reductions are to help stabilize the future so that you don't have significant cuts come two, three years down the road. I was just gonna add too, I think you guys all know that the district's been a little behind in their financial reporting. So it'd be prudent to wait till we're fully caught up and confident in the projections. So we've seen a little bit of swings or decent sized swings even the last couple of weeks looking out. So I would wait

176until everything's locked in. Well, thank you for that. I appreciate that. That makes total sense. And then that actually was kind of a segue into my next question is, you know, when we had seen this, oh, things are, it's kind of a better situation than we had originally realized. Like, when do you see, maybe two ways to ask it. Like, when do you see it getting to a point where those swings aren't gonna happen? And then like, how confident in sort of our starting point here now, are we at this point? So I think that this year is unique with the fact that it was converting data back from Oracle. So in the original model, there was data that came from Oracle and there was assumptions that were put in there as well. So as

177the data had come over and as the reconciliation process has gone, these numbers are more solid than they were prior. There are still some adjustments coming, but from what I have seen and had conversations with CLA, I don't see any major swings like there was this last time. All right, I think the 25 audit should be done by the time the budget's finalized too. So I think there's a lot of confidence in that is this is one part of the process, but by the time the final budget is done, the audit should be complete and on schedule. That's great. Thank you. Chair Andresen. Yes, Vice Chair Roper. I echo a third time for what everyone said, thank you so much for dedicating your time and volunteering to do this really critical work. I just have

178a quick question about Appendix A with staffing benefits composition. And this may be more of a question for Dr. Mary Perry Reed, but I would like to just ask. And so I'm just looking at our employee contribution rate for health and I see that we're at 17% and was wondering with the current trend of healthcare in our country, our nation, do you foresee that number going down in the future for the contribution rate? Cause currently we're at 17%. So don't know, again, this is a kind of a complex question, but do you, as we're understanding like where healthcare is and as we navigate that, is that something that we may possibly need to? Sure. Yeah, I can take that one. As we're self-insured, we do look at all of the complexity of that, knowing that

179when we manage our self-insured plan that we are looking at the claims that come in. And we're also looking then at, of course, the cost of the administration of the plan and all of that that goes with it. And all the intricacies of things like reinsurance and of course, all of that information goes in to set the premiums. And when we look at those premium level of contributions, we are fortunate that we were one of the first in the state to really get at self-funding and have a solid history with it, such that we built between that four month and six month reserve when we start to look at where we sit with our overall fund balance in managing those swings that come with different years, because part of management of the system is management

180of the claims. And in any given year, depending on the level of high cost claimants, we can see things go up, we can see them go down. So it's also very difficult in the sense of looking at where healthcare trend is, because as you identify for many years in many districts, double digit increases are very well expected. What we have been able to manage and still maintain are in those single digit increases based on a lot of the work that we've done with plan management and working with third party providers to see if we can create options that help people manage their own costs when they think about how they plan and how they save for healthcare expenditures. So in answer to your question, it's variable, but we feel very solid about the funds that

181we have dedicated to help us manage some of those swings. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for the question. Thank you. I'm looking for the treasure in your chair. Yeah, you don't have questions. So I did just want to wrap my head around a little bit around OPEB, because I remember this distinctly when I came on the board that we, in my opinion, were not funding it adequately. And so I just wanna make sure that your recommendation is not going to get us back into that same where it's funded pretty low and we need to make significant investments. Like I think I heard you say the ideas that investment will make up for that. If you could just clarify a little bit around that, I think it would be helpful for me. Yeah, I guess two

182things on that. First, since it is almost 100% funded, the earnings on the investment should keep pace with the growth. And I think some of the discussions that, over the last five to 10 years, maybe when you joined the board, I think we've seen the liability decrease over the last five years and hold steady just based on personnel changes in that based on kind of staff longevity and movement. And do you think we made a note as well to make sure that that stays on as something to review year over year and make sure that we're keeping it at that rate and that we don't see any changes to it that we'd need to address? Okay, great. Thank you so much. I appreciate that additional context. I just wanna make sure we are keeping our

183eye on it and it doesn't ever dip way down again so that we're behind as we, this is a promise made to our employees and I wanna make sure that we are keeping that. So thank you. Any other comments or questions? Great. Thank you so much. So the recommendation is that the board accepts the Citizens Financial Advisory Committee Report. I would look for a motion. So moved. I have a motion. Is there a second? Second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The chair votes aye and the Citizens Financial Advisory Committee Budget Report for 2026 to 27 is accepted. Thank you so much again for your time and for being here tonight. We appreciate you. Thank you so much for all

184your time. Thank you. To stay with us for our next order of business is a resolution of financial sale for the 2026A bonds. And I will turn it over to you, Assistant Superintendent Nick Clay. Happy to as well. We'll have Shelby join us and Jessica's here as well. And Shelby, I'll kind of turn it over to you so that we can go ahead here and walk through the financial sale. And then within the documents, excuse me, we will need to do the resolution approval and we can walk you through that when it's ready. But we'll first walk through the sale and the set of information. And we're here to answer any questions that go through that. So Shelby, we'll turn it over to you. Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the board, Dr. Mary Perry-Reed,

185here to present the sale results this evening. This morning we took bids at 9.30 for the sale of almost $90 million of bonds for both Facilities Maintenance Authority and the Voter Approved Authority. Those bonds were actually awarded earlier today to the winning bidder based on the resolution that was established and approved by the board on February 10th. So in that resolution, we set some parameters by which that could be awarded just so we could have some flexibility in the day and the mode. So all went well in terms of the competitive sale this morning. The district received nine bids. The winning bidder was Bank of America Securities out of New York. And that low bid was at 3.99%. Our estimate when we presented earlier in February was a 4.3%. So actually every bid was under

186that. And then between February 10th, beginning of February and kind of starting before that and getting to the sale today, I just wanna extend our appreciation really to administration with Dr. Lightfoot, Dr. Mary Peer-Reed and Jessica Olson in working through a lot of the details that needed to be put together to get a bond sale to market. And that included a meeting with the rating agency to go through a lot of information that they had not kind of seen for quite a while just because of the delayed audit. So bringing them back up to speed and bringing a rating back to the district and that underlying rating was the A1. So I can talk a little bit about that too as the report also includes some of the rating report. You'll have the funds available

187as anticipated at the end of April. The results were good based on that lower interest rate but what that meant for the deposit to the construction fund. You'll have $1.8 million more as a deposit to the construction fund and that all comes with about $1.3 million less in principal and interest. So we collectively look at an average interest rate based on a number of these factors. And so lower levy for the taxpayers and a higher deposit to the construction fund. Just some of the overall details that we can walk through as I mentioned in the sale day report, the cover bid, the winning bid was Bank of America out of New York. The cover bid Wells Fargo at just over 4% and the high bid again being under where we had estimated and within 15

188basis points of the winning bidder was Jeffries out of New York. So included in the sale day report is also all the schedules. As you'd mentioned earlier, this is phase one of the building project and we'll move to phase two and determine the issuance based on the cadence of the construction schedule along with those investment earnings that you'll be able to then put back into the project. We do plan at this point to issue in a couple of years. And so the overall term of the payback of all of the building bond debt will be a term of 22 years though this one is 20. So at the end of the sale day report, a lot of the comments included in Moody's rating report have been, are very consistent with the conversations that were as

189part of what CFAC presented. A lot of what we talked about was ensuring that your expectation to have the FY25 audit data before June 30th would come to fruition and administration assured Moody's or tech through that in terms of what Moody's was getting comfortable getting Moody's comfortable with that deadline date. They've cited a couple of your credit strengths as your overall resident income being strong with the high value per capita and your growing enrollment trend. One of the factors that could lead to an upgrade was an available fund balance of upwards of 20% and a downgrade at that 10%. So kind of paying attention to that in terms of your overall management or governance of the district really and Moody's does factor that in in terms of where they expect the district to be and

190where they come in with ratings. Towards the back of the rating agenda I think is just a helpful key indicators or excuse me, scorecard which identifies each of the factors and the category that they put you in to kind of get you to that assigned rating of an A1. So it's just a helpful context over all that fund balance ratio being in the A category for your 15% measure as it was as the latest measure there. So a lot of information in here that I touched on maybe more in detail because it's relevant having been presented or CFAC having presented to you tonight. I'm happy to answer any questions on this. You will have the funds available on April 30th to start paying for those projects and the resolution is actually the action item tonight.

191Thank you. Anything to add? Are there any comments or questions from my board colleagues? I would just like to say to reiterate that thank you for investing so much and making sure that we did get this bond rating and that we, I think got a really great rate and I like hearing that we're gonna have lower levies for our taxpayers and more money for our projects. So that's my takeaway. I hope I'm correct in that. So thank you to everyone who made that happen because I know it wasn't a given. So appreciate all the work that went into it and our families appreciate it as well. So thank you. I would then, I am then going to ask Assistant Superintendent Lightfoot to help me out with the resolution because I looked at it and I'm

192not gonna read it all. Well, and credit to Shelby as well because I didn't want you to read 26 pages. Thank you, thank you. So it's reduced to a paragraph and that paragraph is on page two and that is in bold. So whoever would be presenting the resolution can read that paragraph on page two in bold into the minutes and then if the clerk can take the roll call vote, that should suffice. Thank you. I would look for a motion to approve the resolution awarding the sale of general obligation school building and facilities maintenance bonds series 2026A in the original aggregate principal amount of $88,650,000 affixing their form and specifications directing their execution and delivery and providing for their payment. So moved. I have a motion, is there a second? Second. I have a motion

193and a second, any discussion? Seeing none, clerk, please call the roll. Great, I will call the roll in alphabetical order. Shannon Andreessen. Aye. Rachel Heartland. Aye. Johanna Hyman. Aye. Brooke Roper. Aye. Kai Thompson. Aye. Sarah Wilhelm Garbers. Aye. Zhiming Zhao. Aye. All have affirmed the resolution with ayes. Thank you, clerk Wilhelm Garbers. The resolution is passed and thank you for being with us this evening. Thank you. And that takes us to our next item on our agenda, which is the superintendent search. I would invite Barb Dorn with MSBA up to the table to help us facilitate this conversation. For some background, I gave an update at the workshop where we talked about the process that our applications is closed, that the board was able to view those applications and that MSBA has been working diligently

194to provide us with a list of semi-finalists. It is our duty this evening to have an idea of approving the semi-finalist that we want to interview in the first round. We have a couple of options before us and I want the board to be aware of that before we begin our discussion. We can rely on the search firm that we employed for a reason and go with their recommendations. They have recommended five semi-finalists. We have already on our calendar a day reserved to reserve six, to interview six semi-finalists. We could approve them as a slate. We could then also approve them one by one. We could decide that after reviewing these that we don't necessarily want to do a round of interviews with semi-finalists, but instead we have our top three already and wanna go

195ahead with that interview process as well. So we do have options and please direct me, Ms. Dorn, if I have missed any or misstated any options that are before the board and then we can move forward from that. And if you wanna give just a quick update overview for the community about what your process was in getting to this recommended slate. All right, thank you very much, Chair Andresen, members of the board. It's nice to see you all. We do have a couple of things I'd like to accomplish in my time here. The first is the packet I just handed out. Those are just some logistical arrangements for the interviews. I wanna confirm those with everyone to make sure we're all ready for your first round of interviews on Monday the 13th. After that's all

196wrapped up, we will move on to the recommendations for your semi-finalists and answer any questions the board might have. Remember again, you will be discussing private data in a public meeting, so we'll need to be very careful that you not share any identifying information of any of the applicants in any way during that discussion. I think at that time, I'll provide a more in-depth review of how MSBA arrived at these decisions. So if it's all right with the board, I'd like to start with the packet that you do have in front of you and ask a couple of questions to make sure I understand your intentions for the interviews. Okay? So you can see the first document is the draft round one interview schedule. At this point, we are looking at calling the board meeting

197to order on Monday the April 13th at 8.30 in the morning. I do have some items to cover with the board before the interviews can begin, so we have slated the first interview to start at 8.45 in the morning. These are at this time planning to be one hour interviews with 15 minute breaks between each. We are holding spots for six candidates. You can certainly choose to interview fewer than that or more than that. So this is why it says draft, but we'll circle back to this when the time comes after you've named the number of semifinalists you'll be interviewing just to confirm this as well. So at the very bottom, I wanted to just confirm the interviews will be held here in this building, correct? So I'll place this building and the address in

198the information down below. We've talked previously in our meetings about MSBA's recommendation that you not live stream those interviews just to ensure that the candidates later in the day don't get a significant advantage by knowing what the questions are and seeing how other candidates answer the questions. So I wanted to confirm that you are not going to live stream the interviews. Are you, however, going to record all of them and potentially post the candidates moving forward to the second round? You could post those up for a couple of weeks as well. So I just wanted to share that with the board, to see what your thoughts might be on that, as well as whether or not you're going to live stream or record your deliberations about the interviews and who you're choosing to move into

199the second round. So I'd like the board to discuss and let me know the direction you'd like to proceed with those things. Thank you for that. Any initial feelings from my board colleagues around are those two separate questions on if we're going to record and post the interviews and then are we going to live stream and or record our deliberations? Correct, two different questions. Thank you. Thank you. So the first, let's talk about posting the interviews. In favor of it. After them. After them. Chair Andresen. Yes. I agree with Director Thompson. I think we should not live stream, but we should post after the fact, just like any other meeting. So it would be accessible. Chair Andresen. Yes. There's a question for Barb then, is that a standard? Are the candidates expecting that or would

200we tend to get permission or? You don't need permission and every district does it slightly differently. What we're seeing most often is out of courtesy to the candidates themselves to post the people who were successful in round one be moved on to round two. And perhaps the one, two, three or four that are not being moved forward to not post those interviews. Generally speaking, the community and stakeholders do really like to see the folks that you are seriously considering and moving forward to the second round. And sometimes those are also not left up into infinity. Sometimes they are left up until the day of the second round, which in your case will be April 20th. So then the first round interviews come down. And then the, let's say you have three finalists, you would eventually

201put all three finalists interviews up. And after perhaps two weeks, you take down the two that were unsuccessful and your lone finalist, it does stay up indefinitely. And that's a courtesy I think to candidates so that their interviews are not up forever if they do choose to pursue other opportunities in the future. That tips typically is what's occurring but you certainly can do anything you feels right for Hopkins. That feels respectful to me. Wondering any other thoughts? Chair Andresen. Yes. So I agree with everyone. I just have a quick question for Barb. As we're discussing tonight, do candidates know their letters? They do not. They do not, okay. So am I hearing consensus that the round one interviews will all, let's say there's six, that's just an assumption right now that you would record all

202six. Let's say you choose three to move forward that you would put those three up until the round two interviews on the 20th at which point you'd take all three of those down and then that evening or the next day put up the three finalist interviews and then take two of those down after two weeks and leave the one successful finalist up indefinitely. Is that what I'm hearing from the board? Okay. Yes. I can't get over wanting to say Clerk Thompson. So when I don't say your name, that's why my brain is stuck. Okay, sorry. So you were the one with the emphatic, yes, post-em, so you're feeling comfortable with just the three finalists? Okay. That's what I meant, yeah. Okay, great. I think yes, that's consensus. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. For that middle

203of the road. Yeah, full transparency and being respectful of people who are putting themselves out there. And then how do you feel about your deliberations on Monday the 13th? After all, again, perhaps six interviews, you will be discussing as a board who you'd like to bring back the next round on the 20th and so do you want to live stream and record your deliberations as a board? My question. Oh yes, go ahead. Chair Andreessen, my question would be, I'm gonna follow my colleague here in asking Barb for some of your wisdom here, but because my wonder would be is if we do live stream it and or post it, can we take an approach like we will tonight where we're not saying names? Where we re-identify, do other schools do that or is it you're

204saying everyone's names if you're doing it? If you're deliberating after the six round one interviews, you definitely have to use names so that you can talk about who you are bringing forward and they no longer after tonight, the alphabet identifiers have nothing to do with it. The names are public. So whoever you interview next Monday the 13th, you will be speaking about their interviews with your colleagues and choosing who to move forward. We will ask, as you'll see in the packet a little bit further here, that we ask you to keep your conversation positive about the strengths of the candidates. We really don't want you to use your deliberation time to criticize anyone's performance or criticize anyone's candidacy. Keep it positive, advocate for who you feel is the strongest group of folks to move into

205the second round. Keep in mind if you're live streaming it that the candidates will be watching and hearing what you say about them and their interviews and their careers. So we wanna be very careful again with what you share in terms of your thoughts. But some districts live stream and record deliberations and some districts choose to do neither. It really truly is your call. And just to be clear, this is an open meeting and anyone can come here if they want to be a part of the entire process. So we would not be closing off access. We just would not be live streaming it. Chair Andresa, can I ask a clarifying question? Yeah, when I finish. Okay. So I just want us to be clear that we're not cutting down transparency, but we are choosing

206about live streaming in the moment. So just wanted to make that clear. Yes, Director Hyman. Just a clarification, if we don't live stream they will still be posted, is that right? The interviews will be of the top three. But not the deliberations. You certainly could not live stream the deliberations and post the deliberations as well to mirror what you're doing with the interviews. You really could do either. Okay, thank you. And Chair Andresa, yes. One more clarifying option, you know, matrix. Can we do, so it's open meeting, open to the public, in person, say that we record it and or live stream it. Can we do something similarly where we delete that after, once we get to the final interview? So give it a viewing space, again, up until, you know, the same amount of

207time that we would do for the folks who are the finalists and we're showing their interviews. I would think so, unless for some reason you have a communications policy that addresses what you do for your meetings, whether they're special meetings or regular meetings. And if they are automatically always posted or recorded, I'm not sure. Our Assistant Superintendent Lightfoot gave a thumbs up that we do have the option to delete it subsequent to having either live streamed or posting it. That was a lot to get out of one thumbs up. Good reading of body language. So yeah, so then the questions before us, and this is just about the deliberations, our deliberations as board members is to live stream. And well, if we're live streaming, it's being recorded. And, or just to record, and then to,

208then the option would be to just record and then post after the fact. And another option, regardless of which one we choose, to take it down at a certain point when we're taking down the finalist's interview. Did I get all of them? All right, so if people feel comfortable just giving a quick like round table, no need to say Chair Andresen of where you're feeling about live streaming. I'm indifferent. I think I would prefer recording and posting after the fact. If people wanna be here live, they can be here live for deliberations. And then I would also support taking them down after a predetermined amount of time. Yeah, similar. Indifferent on live streaming, recorded is fine. Similar as well. I just kind of like the idea of live streaming, because it's what we do with

209our board meetings. So I'm gonna go on live stream. I also am in favor of live streaming, but not, I don't feel that extremely fervently and would be fine with the board's majority decision. Yeah, I'm similar. I lean towards live streaming and then I really do like to take it down after at the same point as we take down the finalist round ones. I would like to encourage live watch parties. Happy hour. I honestly, I'm indifferent, but I'm very strongly supportive of us taking it down. So you are the deciding vote. Oh, geez. I would live stream it then and. All right, live stream. And then we'll take it down. I think we're unanimous on the taking down when we take down the non-selected, yeah, right before the finalist interviews, yes. Okay. Thanks. Great, thank

210you everybody. Okay, so thank you. As I understand it, then the deliberations will be live streamed and recorded and the recording will be up on the website until April 20th, which would be your second round of interviews. And then it would come down just as the three interviews would for folks who've been moved forward. Okay, thank you very much. And not that I'm a board member, but Barb, do most districts of our size live stream semi-finalist interviews? Just out of curiosity. The interviews themselves? Or the deliberations? The deliberations, it's about 50-50. Okay. Yeah, some choose to and some choose not to. It depends somewhat on the precedent that's been set also and what's been normalized in the community as far as access to things like this that are sort of personnel related discussions at the

211board table, but it, I'd say it even split. Thank you for asking that. Both interviews and deliberations? We have not had anyone live stream interviews. Thank you. Those, at least in my experience, have always been not live streamed in order to give everyone the same experience so no one has an advantage later in the day. Okay. The second page in here is round two and this is very preliminary. I'm just suggesting that on April 20th, we would call the meeting to order at 430 with your first interview at 435. These are one hour and 15 minute interviews. They're a little bit longer because round two, you do go deeper. You ask for more specificity in their answers. You may ask them to make a presentation on some topic. So for now, we're holding place for

212maybe three people for one hour and 15 minute interviews, but this is something you'll finalize after round one as you plan for the second round on the 20th. And then I'm assuming that the same thought process around not live streaming but recording and putting up all three, perhaps for two weeks and then take two down similarly with the live streaming of the deliberations in the final round. Same thing that you just decided for round one would occur in round two. Does that sound okay? Yes. Okay. I always wanna make sure I'm clarifying expectations because you'd be surprised how many times some people think it's gonna be this or it's going to be that. So I just wanna make sure. Then my other question is during interview training, we talked about the fact that between round

213one and round two, typically one or two board members will make some reference check calls on behalf of the board. Did we have some folks that were willing to volunteer to do that between April 13th and April 20th? We only need maybe one or two people, but three certainly could if you'd like to. It's up to you. Chair Anderson. Yes. I'm willing to do that. Great. One. I'd be willing to if no one else. I will make a note that the two of you are willing to do that between round one and two, which means I have just a very small packet of two or three pages of information for the two of you to talk through how we're going to do that to make sure that it's fair and objective to all candidates. Okay,

214great. Thank you very much for your willingness to do that. Yeah, you're welcome. All right, so moving on through the packet then, you'll see that there is an outline of a candidate interview page, the third page. I will be here, but I will be sitting off to the side. I'm the timekeeper to make sure that they know as their time is being used up that they can get through all of the questions. We will have a rubric developed for you for your interview questions that we selected at our last meeting, so we're working on that right now. But you can see here that the board chair welcomes the candidate. This would be for each candidate. There are 12 questions that you identified. And then I'll be sitting probably over there holding up time cards at

21530 minutes and 15 and five, things like that. And then I would like each board member to introduce themselves at the beginning of the interviews. Please limit it to your name and how long you've been on the school board. You could share also if you have, if you're an officer of the board, for example. What we don't want you to share is personal information, how many kids you have in the district or you graduated from Hopkins, anything like that that might open the door to candidates feeling some pressure perhaps to share personal information, which we talked about were in protected classes the last time I was here. So each of you will do a quick introduction of yourselves and then you begin with the first question. I'm going to bring the questions in hard copy

216format for all of you and we will rotate asking the question. And you'll want to ask the same question for all of the six candidates. So that's partly why I need that 15 minutes at the start of the meeting on the 13th is to assign those questions to you. I want you to take all of your notes on that hard copy of the EMD form, exceeds, meets, disappoints. I don't want anyone doing the electronic form. I don't know if you practiced with the practice link I sent you for EMD, but until you've been through at least two or three interviews, you have to get your sea legs under you as to what you feel these answers are really telling you. So it's easier to change your answers on a hard copy than it is to

217do it electronically. So I'm going to wait and send you that link after probably three interviews on that day. You'll notice that the chair opens and then closes with the suggested closing for every single candidate. So you are running these interviews, but I will be here if you have questions at any point as well. Any questions on how the interviews unfold? It's very simple. It starts to feel very natural after the first interview or two. We're good, okay, great, thank you. Chair and Jason, just a real quick question. So each question that each of us has, or two of them, we're going to ask that same one or two to all six of the candidates. Correct. Got it. And remember, we talked about not asking follow-up questions unless it's a clarifying question. You let the

218candidates answer and you thank them when they're done, but if you didn't understand an acronym or they mentioned a program you're not familiar with, you can certainly ask for clarification on that. What we don't want is you engaging in a dialogue or tell me more about that while that's fascinating and asking them more, because you want to give each candidate the opportunity to answer the question without you giving some candidates additional opportunities to add more. Does that make sense? Okay, thank you. In terms of deliberations, this is a guide. This is something you could use for both round one and round two. Generally speaking, the first thing I do is a very high-level overview of that EMD form. It's not going to tell you who to move forward into the second round, but it will

219give you an indication of how the board members were leaning, how good the answers were or how not good those answers were. So I'll do a very short two-minute overview of that, and then I will probably maybe go sit over there again and let the board deliberate. The first thing we'd like you to do is each of you share one thing that you really liked about that candidate. So you'd start with the first candidate. If the first candidate is Jane Doe, the chair will say, okay, let's each share something that we thought Jane Doe really did well or something you really liked about her answers. So you can each say one. You could do another round if you need to, but we want to get through all potentially six people, because I'm going to be

220taking copious notes. There will be people disappointed not to be moved on to the second round, and I'd like to offer them feedback from the board about what they did well. So you'll do that first, and then what you will do is move on to sharing who you're leaning toward, bringing back. You will potentially then have reference check reports in the second round, but not the first, and it may sort of happen naturally where you start to see commonalities between who board members think they'd like to see again. Please don't rank them and say my first choice, my second choice, my third. You maybe will say, you know what, I really liked Jane Doe and John Doe. I think they both should come back next week, or you have three people that you liked, or

221maybe there's one that you really want to bring back. Feel free to be very honest with your thoughts, and again, framing it in a positive way. Do not share who you are not interested in seeing again. Share only who you would like to see come in. So we're talking about an abundance mindset here versus the scarcity mindset, right? Okay, so then you'll see there'll be a motion, second vote. I'll be over there if you have questions. Sometimes it happens pretty quickly. There are people that rise to the top very easily, and other times you have to sit here and go through the stakeholder report to remind yourselves what they are looking for. You have to go back to the leadership profile. If you have people that you are really torn between, you could move toward

222deficits where it says note. If discussions plateau and you're stuck, you could identify growth opportunities or deficits in order to break a tie. That is the only time that perhaps you point to an area where someone is a little weaker than another candidate, but that's the only time we might find that to be necessary. Typically you aren't going to have to do that. And that's the end of deliberations in round one, but we do still have some homework then on the 13th. I will bring that evening some suggested questions for round two for you to look at, much the way that you already did it for round one. I'm basing those on the information gathered in focus groups and the survey, as well as your leadership profile. They will be more specific questions for round

223two. You drill down quite a bit deeper. So I'll bring those for you to review. We'll confirm the interview schedule, also the tours. I know that staff is working this week on setting up tours for the 20th for your two or three finalists, seeing the buildings, meeting with people. We're going to be collecting feedback from the people on those tours like you decided at the last meeting. We also will confirm the reference check process with the two of you after round one. And then we just want to confirm very briefly what the negotiations process will look like. So this is your guide. You, however, should feel comfortable to make it fit Hopkins. Do with this what you need so that it's comfortable for your board. This, however, does tend to work really well with almost

224all the clients we work with, okay? It'll make a whole lot more sense on Monday, I promise. All right, I'm going to now move into the second part of our meeting, which is to talk about the finalists and semi-finalists and see what the board would like to do. This is where I would like to talk about our vetting process and how we arrived at the recommendations that we have. The first thing I want to do is congratulate you on having a very strong pool. It's always wonderful when the deadline passes and we can start looking at that. And I'm glad that you took the time and as individual board members enjoyed the opportunity to look through the applicants for the position of superintendent here in Hopkins. So you had 20 applications, as we spoke about

225earlier, 20 people applied, they came from 10 different states. Most were from Minnesota, which is always how it occurs, but you did draw from 10 total states across the United States, which is wonderful. Eight of your 20 applicants have been superintendents before and another five have served as assistant or associate superintendents. So when you're looking at superintendent experience as an associate or as a soup, you had 13 of 20 people that have served in those capacities, which is also quite remarkable. In addition of those 20 applicants, you had 12 that have their doctorate already. So more than half are doctors. It's a really good pool. So congratulations on that. How we arrived at what we're gonna share with you this evening. I know we talked about this a little bit when I interviewed, but we

226have service providers in the metro area that assist us winnowing down the pool. They are former administrators and former school board members who have experience in looking through these. They align them with the leadership profile from the board. They also align them with what the results were in the public input report and the focus groups. Everyone individually scores the 20 candidates on a five point scale, from one, not very strong, to five, which is exceedingly strong. Individually, everyone does that. We then convene a meeting online. I have a great tool that shows a bar graph with who has support. It's very colorful. The more orange and red, the stronger the feelings are. The more blue, the less strong the feelings are. So then we talk about that pool. And there are some people that immediately,

227at least on our initial sweep through the applications, rose to the top. That people just, yeah, we have to talk to these people and make sure that they still want the job and they still align. So those are easy. There are some that are simply not as qualified or they do not have a Minnesota license or do not understand that we don't have reciprocity here in Minnesota. So they've underestimated the amount of work it's going to take to get a superintendent license, even if you hold one in another state. So those folks are a little more easy to not consider. But there's a whole bunch in the middle, whole bunch of people that we need to talk more about, share our thoughts on the applications, and arrive at a group of folks that we want

228to do additional vetting on, which means interviews with those individuals via phone and also checking references that they have provided to us. So in doing that, what we came up with eventually was a list of seven people, yes, seven people that we decided to do deeper vetting on. So we divide those folks up, we do interviews with them, and we talk to their references. Now keep in mind that we are bound by data privacy laws to only call their references that they've provided. We cannot reach outside of that because then we would be outing their candidacy and their name is private data, so we cannot do that. So we spoke to people they've listed as references or whom wrote letters of recommendation for them. And I know you've seen all of that material as well.

229So after that, we reconvene again to try to winnow it down to the strongest folks that, in our opinion, should be interviewed here in Hopkins. I know in the workshop earlier, you talked about the fact that you don't have to take our recommendations. You're the school board. The reason that we trust you with those applications is you will choose to interview who you feel are the best match for Hopkins. What we ended up with were five people that we felt were the strongest, along with two people that were certainly strong, but perhaps not as strong as the others. So if it's okay with the board, what I'm gonna do is read some presentation forms on those five, and then I will turn it back over to Chair Andresen to facilitate that conversation, okay? The last

230couple of pages when the time comes have the motions that you could use. And the first motion at the top is what you would use tonight to select your semi-finalists. Please be very, very careful that whoever makes the motion makes the motion with the alphabet identifiers only. Do not make a motion with people's names in there, because until the board has selected them to be interviewed, their name remains private data, including in that motion. Okay, I will, at this point, if you'd take out the list I shared with you, and I do need to collect these from you when we're done, because I need to shred them. These are all private data. There's 20 names on here that we cannot share. So I am going to be reading for you our impressions of candidates G,

231K, M, N, and S. First of all, candidate G. And for all of these folks, I'm going to give you a high-level overview of their experience, their current licenses, and their education, and then a very short paragraph of what references say about them, and then a short paragraph of why MSBA is recommending them. So to start with, candidate G. Their experience includes working as an assistant superintendent, a principal, assistant principal, director, and teacher. Their current licenses are as a superintendent and teacher, and their education includes a master's degree and bachelor of arts. References describe candidate G as a strategic and big-picture thinker who is steady, reliable, and trustworthy. They are known for their ability to collaborate and build deep relationships. Candidate G is well-respected by their peers and their direct reports, and they also have

232a broad knowledge base of all aspects of pre-K-12 education systems, and they are known to follow through on initiatives as agreed to between the leadership team and the school board. References state that candidate G is also student-focused and has a strong belief that all students can be successful. MSBA is recommending candidate G because they have experience in leading a district through difficult circumstances and achieving positive results. They are well-versed in all aspects of school district operations and value the board, staff, students, and the community. G is a systems thinker and works through collaboration to enhance the student experience for every single student and every single family. They also have a belief in the value of meaningful relationships, and they understand the importance of transparency and clear communication in order to succeed as a school leader.

233That is candidate G. Next, candidate K. Candidate K has experience as a head of school, district vice president, assistant superintendent, principal, assistant principal, and dean of students. Their current licenses include a superintendent and a principal, and their education includes a doctorate, a specialist degree, master's, and bachelor of science. References describe candidate K as a student-centered, ethical, and innovative servant leader who leads with humility, collaboration, and a focus on student excellence. Candidate K aligns district priorities through disciplined monitoring, reflection, and continuous improvement while maintaining fiscal stewardship. References also state they communicate decision-making clearly, they elevate stakeholder voice through strategic planning, they advance equity for all students, and they lead with high expectations and support that build trust and sustained improvement. MSBA is recommending candidate K because they bring broad K-12 leadership experience across public districts and

234private schools nationwide, and their background reflects strong district-level leadership and skill-navigating complex organizations. Candidate K has led complex systems using strategic thinking and problem-solving, informed by lived experience and a clear understanding of student academic, social, and operational needs. They also prioritize students in program design, collaborate rather than work in silos, engage community partners, and communicate effectively with diverse audiences. That's candidate K. We're also recommending candidate M. Candidate M has experience as a superintendent, assistant superintendent, principal, chief of academics, leadership and learning, chief of schools, and as an equity coordinator. Candidate M's current licenses are as a superintendent and principal, and their education includes a doctorate, master's, and bachelor of arts. References describe candidate M as a leader of exceptional character whose practice is driven by a deep sense of purpose to meet the needs of

235students and to ensure that all learners achieve at high levels. It is also said that candidate M works strategically to build a shared vision and seeks common ground through inclusive processes in order to identify actionable daily practice to achieve goals. M's positive attitude, collaborative mindset, steadfast determination, strong communication skills, and thoughtful, caring demeanor inspire others. Further, candidate M understands that schools and community thrive in partnership, and as a result, they are known to be a trusted civic partner able to build coalitions across government entities. MSBA is recommending candidate M because they are an experienced superintendent whose purpose-driven leadership is grounded in a deep commitment to equity and high levels of achievement for all students. Importantly, candidate M has demonstrated measurable results in multiple districts by ensuring inclusive processes, building a shared vision through meaningful collaboration,

236and then bridging vision and tactical execution so that daily practice of all staff reflects the district's identified strategy. Candidate M has outstanding relationship-building skills and statewide is recognized as a highly regarded educational leader and thought partner who is actively engaged in their community. That is candidate M. Two more, we are also recommending candidate N. Their experience includes being an assistant superintendent, principal, assistant principal, and teacher. Current licenses are as a student and teacher, and their education includes a doctorate, a specialist degree, a master's, and a bachelor of arts. References state that candidate N is a strategic, systems-level thinker who excels in times of complexity and change. They possess the ability to hold a broad vision for a district while simultaneously engaging at the local level to build the relationships and trust necessary to move that

237vision forward. Candidate N is also known as a masterful communicator whose written and oral skills are polished and persuasive, and they connect authentically with people of all ages, backgrounds, and perspectives. References state that candidate N can translate strategy into action, co-designing vision cards and board-level metrics to monitor progress toward the district's strategic directions. MSBA is recommending candidate N because they've demonstrated successful experience in transforming district outcomes. During their time as assistant superintendent, graduation rates reached the highest level in a decade, with one lower-performing high school improving 12% in two years. N is also a systems thinker who uses data-driven, continuous improvement methodologies to track and advance strategic initiatives. They are a strong fiscal steward who anticipates funding changes and builds reserves to sustain programming. They also value community engagement and inclusive leadership, actively participating in

238cultural events and building partnerships across all stakeholder groups. That was candidate N. And finally, we are recommending candidate S as well. Candidate S has experience as an assistant superintendent, principal, assistant principal, dean of students, and teacher, also director of strategic projects. Current licenses include superintendent, principal, and teacher, and their education includes a specialist degree, master's, and bachelor of arts. References describe candidate S as an effective and respected educational leader whose practice is characterized by a results-oriented mindset, a collaborative and inclusive spirit, relational, interpersonal style, and an equity-driven purpose. Candidate S centers students in their decision-making and utilizes data effectively to inform practices. Further, candidate S is described by references as a driven and conscientious leader who holds high expectations and provides a high level of support, developing and bringing out the best in others. Candidate

239S is also known as an instructional leader who is visible in schools and who builds trust with staff. Finally, MSBA's recommendation for candidate S is because they are a well-regarded educational leader who strives to include multiple perspectives in decision-making that is squarely centered on students. As an instructional leader, candidate S is visible and present in schools, which is appreciated by leaders and staff and students. S possesses strong relationship-building skills which have resulted in successful collaborations within school districts and among community partners for the benefit of the districts they serve. That is candidate S. So at this time, I'm going to turn it back over to Chair Andreessen. I'd be happy to entertain any questions from anyone about why or why not other candidates. Again, you have an exceptionally strong pool. There are many good leaders

240in here that we struggled with whether or not to recommend, but we had to try to winnow it down so that you don't have to interview all 20 people. Okay, Chair Andreessen. Thank you. I appreciate that and the overview of the process I think was really helpful for not only us to hear, but our community as well. I am going to diverge a little bit from how we usually do things here because I think we have, this is a big process. There's been a lot of the deliberation already happening with our search firm. And so board members have had a chance to ask questions already. And so what I'm thinking, and I definitely want the board to weigh in on this, is that we do our motion first and then have our discussion about that

241particular motion. If people are feeling comfortable with that, because we can still have our discussion and ask the questions, just doing it after the motion because I feel like it will help us move forward more quickly. Does that sound reasonable? Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Then I would look for a motion to extend an offer for first round interviews for the Hopkins Public Schools Superintendency to the following candidates, G, K, M, N, and S. Do I have a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Chair Andreessen? Yes. Sorry, I have a question. If we wanted to consider a candidate, could we say that? Could we do it during the discussion? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. Yep, mm-hmm. Okay, second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Vice Chair Roper. Okay, I would like to

242consider candidate D to be added into the pool. For consideration? Mm-hmm. Could we do an approval of, could we vote on this and then do another motion to add another candidate? Certainly, you can take as many motions as you need to to get the folks on the slate to be interviewed, yes. Great. Group, individuals, whatever you'd like to do. Okay. So before we do that, I wanna make sure, are there any other board members that want to make a motion to add another because then that might potentially put us above six? Chair Andreessen? Yes. Yes, I would like to add, for consideration, candidate R. Okay, so then I would say that we do not vote on the motion that was made, although do we have to? Yeah. So let's vote and I'm assuming that we

243can, well, I'll just see where people feel. Like we can approve this slate that presented by MSBA and then discuss the other two or we can choose to not pass this motion and have individual discussions on each candidate. So is there any further discussion on the motion before us, which is the candidates selected by MSBA? Yes. Chair Andreessen, like point of order, just to say, I think we can amend the motion that's on the table and then vote on that. Like, so someone could make a motion, like to amend the motion until we get to a finalized. It's just, that's one of the options. Okay. Would we like to amend the motion? It might be less cumbersome to just not approve it. Okay, yeah, I'm just bringing it to the table. Is that how we're

244feeling? Okay. I get confused when there's like motioning to amend and then approving the amending and then going. I just like getting like five of those. We could do five amendments. Okay, so we'll start on that. So with that, I would, seeing no further discussion, I would look all those in favor, please say aye. Any opposed? Nay. The motion fails to pass. So now we can look for a motion on individual candidates. So we can do it one by one. So does anyone have a motion about a particular candidate and we're gonna have to do, or we could do groupings? Who has a motion? I'd like to make a motion. I'd motion that candidates G, K, M, and S all be moved forward as a for sure set of, that is one, two, three, four,

245right, is my for sure four, and then we can decide who our final tour. So my motion is that we would invite G, K, M, and S to join us as semi-finalists for an interview. So I have a motion. Is there a second? Second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Chair and reason? Yes. I don't know. If this isn't a fair question, don't even answer it, but Clerk Wilhelm-Garbers, is there a reason why the one you removed was removed? Like I said, if you don't wanna answer, that's okay. Now, happy to just, just to make sure, so we could do basically two sets of motions here to get to six. So I thought these- Or we can just continue to deliberate. Yeah. I mean, we could do them one by one if

246that feels more comfortable. Yeah. Or, yeah. I think in this case, if it's, can I say something that's a concern about a person by letter? Yes, as long as there's not in any way possible that it identifies the individual. So you would not wanna use a gender pronoun or where they work or where they've worked or what you've heard, things like that. Okay, nothing. But if I were to just say- I never seen my question. Okay. I just felt confident for sure about those four. How about I say that positively? I felt very confident about those four. That works. Thank you. We have a motion in a second. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? I'm sorry, I wanna be the pickle here. I don't even know

247why I call myself a pickle. But I was just wondering when we, so when we're saying like the motions, so is that like the final four that we're going with? No, we can add. We can add, okay. This is just four that we're saying, yes, we definitely wanna hear from. So you can say yes. You wanna hear from these four or no. You don't. Okay. Okay. Okay, aye. Any opposed? The Chair votes aye. And candidates G, K, M, and S have been moved forward to a first round interview status. Are there any other motions for candidates? Chair Anderson, I would like to make a motion. I would like to consider candidate D in the candidate pool. Would you like to make a motion to extend an offer for the first round interview for Hopkins Public

248Schools Superintendency to candidate D? Yes. I have a motion. Is there a second? Second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Nay. Nay. Am I the deciding vote? Yes. So that was three ayes and three nays. Chair Anderson. Yes. Should we discuss why we should choose them or should we just vote and then decide? Well, there was a call for discussion and there wasn't any. Okay, yeah. And the chair, the chair doesn't wanna vote. The chair votes, the chair votes aye. And the motion is approved. So now we have five candidates. Are there any other motions for candidates? Chair Anderson. Yes, Director Zhao. I would like to nominate candidate R. Do you would like to make a motion to extend an

249offer for first round interviews for the Hopkins Public Schools Superintendency to candidate R? Yes. Is there a second? Second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Chair Anderson. Yes, Director Zhao. The reason I'm nominating this person is, well, the resume was very, very strong. Superintendent experience and really good evidence of closing gaps, having equity minded kind of progression on outcomes, had a union endorsement, which I, you know, of the candidates that we talked to, everybody that we were passing on had a union endorsement, including this potential individual. And my understanding is that, well, I don't know, there was some discussion over whether this person could be a superintendent here with the licensure, but it sounded like that was more or less cleared up. So I don't know, Barb, if you want to weigh

250in on that. I think this is actually probably our strongest candidate in my opinion. I did actually, and just, I feel like this is part of, a question that I was wondering about is, are there any candidates that do not have licensure? Of the ones you're considering? Yes. At this moment in time, there are two. One for certain will be able to get a license by July 1. And the other is very probably going to be able to get a license by July 1. Very probably, very probably. But I cannot promise anything. It's up to them to work with BOSA and Pelsbee to get that provisional license ready to go. Okay, thank you. Chair Andresen. Yes. I'll just add to what Director Zhao named that I also agree that Candidate R was one of the

251strongest, if not the strongest candidate in the field and similar understanding about the superintendent license that it shouldn't be an issue. And that the reason they were not initially recommended is because of that reason. And so I don't, I would encourage us to hear from Candidate R in the first round and see how that goes. Thank you. Any other discussion? Chair Andresen. Yes. So I would just say given, you know, and I think we initially did the four, we added a fifth. I would say that I would feel very positive about us adding Candidate R and then not extending any additional offers to make it a seventh. So for me, this R would be a replacement for the originally recommended N. I don't think that that's the motion on the table. No, I'm just saying

252discussion-wise. I'm commenting about in the discussion. So there's no additional motion or anything. I'm just saying where I'm at. Oh, okay. Sorry, yeah. No motion. I thought you were saying that that was. No, no. Okay, yes. I am under the auspices of the motion and second related to Candidate R who I'm supportive of as being our sixth and final extension personally. That's not the motion. I'm just naming my own. Thank you. Yep, thanks. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The Chair votes no and the candidate is moved forward. Are there any other motions for candidates? I would like to make a motion to extend an offer for first round interviews for the Hopkins Public School Superintendency to Candidate N. So there is a motion. Is there

253a second? Second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Would say that for me, adding Candidate N back in supports the trust that I think we put in MSBA to do a large part of this process for us. And so I wanted to honor that and make sure that we're seeing the full breadth of what's offered to Hopkins Public Schools and recommended by MSBA. Chair Andresen. Yes. Can I ask a question? That would potentially put us at seven. Would you be wanting to advocate for interviewing seven in our first round or? Yes. It would by necessity have to be seven then, which would add an hour to our day on the 13th. I think I both. Chair Andresen. Yes. I really appreciate what you named about just the work that MSBA has done

254to get us and help us to really identify the strengths of each of the candidates and what they would bring. And so I appreciate you naming that and I honor that. Thank you. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Nay. The Chair votes aye and the candidate is not added to our pool. Is there any other discussion of candidates? Okay, it looks like we have our list. Thank you so much everybody. Congratulations and thank you. I truly, truly appreciate it. That was very thoughtful. I also appreciate you respecting confidentiality of the applications and not discussing anything in such a way that people know who's applied for this position. Please remember that all applicant names will remain private data forever. So if someone were to ask you tomorrow

255about someone that they heard applied but it was not named as a semi-finalist, you can't comment on that. You must say names are private data. The only names that went public are those that we are interviewing. So I appreciate your understanding. So don't let people press you into talking about the rest of the pool. So thank you for that. If you also could, I wanna collect those highlighted sheets again, if I wanna collect all seven of those and take them back to the office and shred. Yes, those, I do need to collect those. And so I'm going to share with you real quick that my next steps tonight will be to call all seven of these individuals and six, sorry. Yes, I'm gonna call all seven though. So that they, I make a personal phone

256call to everyone that we've vetted in depth. So thank you. I will call all seven of them and let them know whether they were or were not selected for a semi-finalist interview here in Hopkins. I will then, I have an email going out first thing in the morning from MSBA that has them schedule, thank you. Schedule their interview times. We're talking Monday, April 13th with the first interview at 8.45. The last interview will begin at 3.15. And one hour interviews are okay with the board, correct? And I will have that rubric done. I'll try to get it to you in time so you can study even before Monday. I don't want you to see it for the first time Monday morning. So I will make those phone calls, send out a press release right after

257this meeting as well. After I've made my phone calls, I'll send the press release to TOIA and copy the chair as well and Natalia. And so the press release is yours to do with it what you will. It will only list the names of the six individuals and their titles that you have chosen to interview. So congratulations. The last thing I'll do is read the names out loud unless you as board members have anything further for me or any questions about what's going to happen next. Going once, twice, okay. Sounds great. Okay, so the big reveal. This is what people are always waiting for. So I want to make clear first of all that I'm reading these in completely random order. I am not reading them in order of their alphabet identifiers nor in alphabetical

258order. So no one will know who we are talking about in terms of those alphabet identifiers. These are in totally random order but I want to congratulate the board for selecting the following six individuals to interview for your position of superintendent next Monday the 13th. Dr. Michael Lehan, Rebecca Brodeer, Dr. George Nolan, Andrew Beaton, Dr. Michael Thomas, and Dr. Thomas Ahart. Congratulations to those six people. I will leave you now and go make some phone calls and I appreciate the time and attention you gave to this matter. You have a very exciting week ahead of you next week. So feel free to reach out to me if you have any other questions between now and Monday and I'm very excited for your district and the students that attend Hopkins Public Schools. Thank you. Thank you

259so much. Can I ask you to again, reiterate one of the things that I've been carrying with me throughout this entire process, which is now in particular that the names have been released. We're gonna hear from a lot of people and to make sure that we are not, yes, I feel like you put it better than I would. So if you could remind the board members. You will be lobbied. You will be lobbied for and against these applicants. All of these candidates will have some battle scars. Anyone in educational leadership these days, the longer you are in it, the more battle scars you have. So there will be people asking you if you have read this or seen this article and there are many, many links. I have about 15 pages of social media suites

260on these folks. We know what's out there. We still remain very, very comfortable that they are well equipped and prepared to lead Hopkins. When people lobby you, please thank them for their input because as elected representatives on the board, your job is to listen to your constituents, correct? So feel free to thank them for participating in this process, ask them to come and watch these interviews and don't engage. Do not feel pressured to defend your decision, to engage in dialogue with anyone about the assets or lack of assets that these candidates bring to the table. You have enough on your plate. You've made a decision as a collective board and we'll now see what next week brings but don't get dragged into rabbit holes discussing the pros and cons of all these folks. They're strong

261leaders but they're all very different from one another so I think you're gonna see that next week when you speak to all of them. Did that help? Okay, if you for any reason are concerned over the course of the next week, call me. You'll hear a lot but if you have a question, call me. We'll already know about it and I can share with you why we are recommending these folks still. So thank you. Thank you. Okay, congrats everyone, take care. Thank you too. Chair and Dr. Singh, can I ask you a question? Yeah. Are we going to, for any of the candidates who are traveling from out of state, are we covering their lodging? Sorry, I should have asked it, I'm so sorry. We had talked about that at the beginning, right? Yeah. You

262talked about that at the planning meeting and I believe what you decided is not for round one. Round one would be on them to get here, to stay overnight if they need to. But round two, if you invite them back for round two, I believe you discussed reimbursing them for mileage up to a point and perhaps a hotel stay if needed for round two. And I believe that was something that Nick also endorsed. Okay. Thank you. So not round one but round two if you invite them back. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That's fair. That's fair. That takes us to policies in first read. I would like to invite assistant superintendent, Nick Lightfoot to the table and turn it over to vice chair Roker. Hello. Hello everyone. So tonight we will be, just

263a second. We, oh, sorry, my screen. I have to get my screen back up. Oh my gosh. So thank you Dr. Lightfoot for joining us again. I'm sorry everyone. I'm having just a little bit of screen problems. Yes, thank you. Thank you chair Andreessen. So tonight we are reviewing policy 354 which is the program consultants. And so we do have some edits on here that we will be going through and I will let Dr. Lightfoot take it over. Sure. We'll do the easy one first. How about 853? 853 is the one that the monitoring committee is proposing we remove. The reason we're proposing we remove that, it's after nine o'clock. Sorry about my speech. The reason we are looking to remove 853 is that it is contained in the crisis management policy that you already

264have. So 853 was a Hopkins only policy in the revision that we did of the crisis management policy. All of that information is contained. So really 853 in consultation with our security and school safety staff really was looking at this is just repetitive. It's not adding specific information and we can use 806 to do that. So that first is 853 if there are specific questions on that one. Chair Andreessen. Yes. Yes, director Zhao. Hi Dr. Lightfoot. Are we, is there a thinking about renaming the other one? Because when I think crisis response it's very I guess narrow and specific and security is maybe broader. So are we gonna keep crisis as is and totally understand if it's redundant but to me security seems more bigger than crisis. So it hasn't been discussed as to what

265we would do with 806. The feeling was that the content is already contained in 806. So is there a specific content component or is it looking at the naming of 806? Yeah, I guess just to me, right? Just on the name of security versus crisis, right? Like crisis is like, okay, something happened and we're reacting and security maybe is more proactive and like kind of how we're dispositioned. So I mean, I guess it sounds like what's named security is really crisis, right? So. Well, I would say 806 if we look I believe it's crisis management. And in the management of that, I have to go back just to double check my own thought. As we look at 806, do I even have that right? Gosh, my mind is running a little bit. Crisis management plan

266and in that plan what we're looking at is we are looking at in addressing that. The specifics that you identified, the procedures to look at potential, the responses and the training, certainly within that. If there are some ways in which we can highlight the safety and the proactive measures, we certainly take that back and can also go back. 806 is an annual policy. So we can easily look at that and go back to do that if you feel that would be more kind of robust in the analysis, I'm happy to do that either way and seek additional comments from monitoring committee members as well. Okay, so one of my examples would be so right now we have this thing about what we're gonna do with security doors, right? And so that's an item that's kind

267of preventative and stops crises from happening. So A, are those kind of things in the crisis? Policy and if not, then this might be the more inclusive run, right? Versus, am I kind of making sense, right? It is late, like you said. So I think that the discussion and correct me if I'm wrong other monitoring committee members is that the content of this policy is redundant because it's already in our crisis management policy. And I think that when we read this security policy is the action part of it is the board directs the administration to develop and implement security procedures at each district facility and to address security concerns on an ongoing basis. So that I think is the actual meat of this policy and that is essentially the crisis management policy. Okay, so I

268mean, is it literally a copy paste? Like in the security, in the crisis policy, do we talk about preventative or for example, the locked doors and everything like that? Is it literally 100% overlap or is it mostly overlap? Are you wondering whether there was a line by line analysis? There was not a line by line analysis. That really wasn't the, because with the regulations in part, the board has had that conversation about what specifics it includes in that so as to be mindful of what specific information is shared publicly and what is part of the prevention plan to enhance that work so that we do within policy 806 identify the frameworks, but many of the particulars are part of the specific individual plan that is developed that isn't always outlined in that particular fashion because

269it communicates to the public facing specific sets of information. And I guess maybe that's what I'm maybe worried about is like, well, Hopkins got rid of their security policy and now there's no locked doors. Like, is that true or not? No. Chair Andresen. Yes. Can I share some more concerns as Director Zhao mentioned, looking at the two policies side by side, I think they serve different purposes. And so when you are analyzing the intent of a policy or how it applies in reality, I believe the intention while they both cover security issues and stand for and reflect different things. For example, the security district policy 853 that's being proposed to completely remove from the policies describes that, and I'll just read it, that Hopkins School District 270 is committed to providing a safe and secure

270environment for all staff, students and visitors. And I don't believe that same sentiment is in the policy 806 crisis management plan, which speaks more to as Director Zhao mentioned the purpose as described in 806 is to develop for the school district to develop and maintain a crisis management plan to address potential crises in the school district. So I do find that while they may have the same underlying theme and are both going towards the issue of security, the purpose of each is independent of one another. So is there, so then my question would be, so I hear both Director Zhao and Hyman advocating if I'm clear to keep this policy as is. I think either keep the policy or they could be combined if we're looking to eliminate policies, which I don't know what the

271purpose of that would be, but they could potentially be combined. So the recommendation from the monitoring committee was to remove it because it's redundant. So what I hear you two saying is that not necessarily and let's talk about keeping it because you feel it's important, is that accurate? Yes. So then my question would then be to Assistant Superintendent Lightfoot, is this, and I'm speaking to the regulations portion of it at all current with our practice? That would definitely need to be reviewed as that is dated material. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Like I don't recognize any of this verbiage as our current practice. So we, I think might be another reason why the monitoring committee was saying we have a policy that reflects our current practice. So we could go back if the board

272feels it's important that the monitoring committee, we send this back to the monitoring committee and adapt it so that it is reflective of our current practice. Is that where the board is landing? And Chair Andresen. Yes. I would just comment as a person who's on the monitoring committee but had a work event during when this was considered. So just to say, I would go either way welcoming the feedback of what the rest of the board wants us to do and Assistant Superintendent Lightfoot, your thoughts about it as we might re-approach it, which sounds like. Yeah, absolutely. As I hear what's brought forward, I think what might be helpful is guidance if there are specifics and looking at those items that are important to specific areas that people want to identify, getting that feedback to the

273monitoring committee so that we can bring it back to our holistic safety group and the construction of that, certainly we can take a look at. And especially if there are particular items of note that people feel that are of that value, we can easily make sure that there's specific attention in 806 and its construction to do so. And I believe this was adopted in 1996. Yes. And again, a policy that Hopkins devised on its own, this doesn't come from MSBA. So I think that we might want to take a look at is this a policy that we feel is appropriate to keep on when we're not necessarily using it? How would we like to move forward? Vice Chair Roper. So I would, Chair Andreessen. Yes. Just to say, I would be happy as, and I'll

274defer to you Vice Chair Roper on this, but I would just say as a member of the monitoring committee, I would be happy for us to spend some time, make sure we're consulting with the folks who are our holistic safety team, and that we come back in view of what we've learned from them from MSBA, and we're able to just give a little bit more context so then that way, if indeed we come back with the same recommendation to strike it, then we can say that, and then everyone can feel more comfortable, and or we may come back with an edited version. I would be fine with reconsidering it, and if I can help support that, I'm happy to. I would agree. I would like to consult with our holistic safety team as well just

275to kind of get some feedback and also go through that process as well that you had mentioned. So I'd be okay with that if everyone else feels like that would be okay to revisit this. We could also then look at it in conjunction with 806, and say, like, is there a place where we can pull this first paragraph out and put it in 806? Yeah, Chair Andresen? Yes. I would be supportive of that. I think for me, the concern is that first paragraph and publicly recognizing in written policy what our district is committed to as an overall concept and idea and commitment. And so while I appreciate that the regulations and the security and the security management program and program administration, that's all dated. My concern with fully striking it really does focus around that

276first introductory purpose paragraph. So I think the direction then, Vice Chair Roper, if you agree, would be to send this policy 853 back to the monitoring committee for consideration alongside policy 806. That's doable? Yeah. And I know it's a lot with the safety, holistic safety team. So thank you for taking that on as well. Of course. Any other thoughts, discussion on 853? Great. All right. If we're ready to move on, 354 is the program consultant. The program consultant was done in revision. Again, this is another Hopkins policy. Really the guidance was as we looked toward the information coming forward from the FY 24 audit and the specific information, it was to look at the alignment between program consultants and the policy that you had on purchasing to make sure that we were aligned and looking

277at some of the procedural elements. So much of the additions that are here are specific to that. In order to get that aligned, what we looked at were some specific thresholds. Those thresholds were added as part of the board approval. In addition, the oversight was designed to mirror the requirements of requiring multiple bids, making sure that as we moved forward, specific information would be brought forward to the board and to make sure with specific call out on the internal controls that were mentioned as well as transparency and reporting. So specifically, those items were built in. We also added the annual review so we could make sure that we were looking at a policy. It wasn't overburdening with any of the numbers of these that were coming forward, but with this amount of change, we wanted

278to make sure that we were at least looking at this annually to give the opportunity for you to have feedback as well as the business office and administration to make sure that we were giving and meeting the terms of this and then giving the information that was needed. So that's the general component. Are there specific questions around 354? Chair Andreessen? Yes, Director Thompson. Thank you, Assistant Superintendent Leif for this update. I think this is pretty good. I guess just one question I had for you or for the monitoring committee. I really love this thing about the administration providing periodic updates to the board, summarizing consulting contracts over 10 grand. Was there any thought given to defining periodic, like I guess what I would like to see is at least yearly? Just throwing it out there,

279I don't know. Yeah, I believe it was even smaller when we were looking at this smaller than yearly. I mean, whether that be quarterly. I mean, that's what I was thinking, the periodic more toward. Certainly not going in any respect longer than a year. Just as an example, we've even tried, I appreciated the mention of the grants and the grant information and the gift information that we're trying to bring forward to the board as well on really kind of a monthly basis to try to get that into a report for your knowledge. And so I would hear you clearly on that periodic being less than a year. If we wanted to have something specific there, we certainly could say quarterly and meet that term as well. Thank you. My only, and this is just a

280blanket consideration for policies in general is I feel like when you get too directive with policies, you run into issues of the board being in violation of their own policy. And I wouldn't want that to happen. I think that when you have language like this, it then falls, it's incumbent upon the board to enforce their own policy and say, hey, listen, it's been six months, we have this policy, we need the report, which I usually lean toward being less prescriptive in policies as opposed to more. While also understanding that timeframes are nice to have of expectations. So that would be my only advocacy for keeping it less prescribed. Chair and reason. Yes. Just a thought, instead of putting a defined amount, could put a at least amount, at least annually or at least biannually or

281at least twice a year, then it's not so time constrained, but you know you will get at least one report or at least two reports over the course of the year, just thinking out loud in a way to kind of meet the middle. Chair and reason. Yes. And to piggyback on that, I mean, and I don't know Skyward at all, but is there some scripting or a job we could do that runs a report every quarter and spits it out to the treasurer? Like, can we take all the burden off of manual stuff and just create a report out of Skyward that the treasurer would get? Maybe that's a John Wetter question. Skyward isn't necessarily the contract repository itself, but wondering if we use that repository in generating a repository statement, there may be a

282way that we could configure it and I like that as a desired outcome that certainly would be the desired state. Yeah, then we wouldn't need to think about it and we're kind of the control then. Yeah, no, I mean, and we are, just so you know, I mean, we are looking at software which would allow us to do that and our goal was to look at that as we were trying to get something for our purchasing and procurement to store and be that contract repository and if there is a way, we're pretty close. I mean, that would be a great question that we could ask the software provider. So that would be very helpful as well as kind of the technical support. Chair Andreessen? Yes. I am in talks with Controller Emily Westrom about some

283changes to the Treasurer's Report to make it more useful to us and to provide some more transparency. I've made a note of that, Director Zhao. I think it's a good idea. We'll follow up. So with that being said, would then the language perhaps stay the same because we have a practice in place that could be precedent setting that this periodic report, however it turns out to be, is provided in the Treasurer's Report and then that is something that's part of our board practice and becomes precedent. Chair Andreessen? Yes. I don't mind the thought. I have not connected with the controller on, right, like the timeframe and the possibility of that and so we're like looking into this software with additional reporting capabilities and so encoding it into policy right now feels slightly premature. Yeah, saying

284we're not going to put it into policy but knowing that we will have a practice in place. Okay, yeah, I'm fine with that. Thank you. Chair Andreessen? Yes. I'm fine with the wording as is because it seems very understood that the periodic is not every three years, every five years, that it's like. Yeah, like when I saw it, I was thinking, oh, monthly, like that's, yeah. Okay, Lee, I'm good. Okay, daily, no. Daily? No. No. Do not want daily reports. Okay, great. So I think any other discussion on this as it sits? No, I think monitoring committee, we're good. I think we're good. I think so too. I think this looks great. I also appreciate the work that was done on this. Thank you. So then I would look for a motion that the board

285approve the above policies in first read. Well, that the board approve policy 354 in first read and further the board directs the administration to prepare that policy for approval in second reading at the next meeting as part of consent and that policy 853 is sent back to the monitoring committee for consideration. It's all moved. I have a motion. Is there a second? Second. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The chair votes aye. And the policies in first read are approved. Thank you. Thank you. And that then takes us to our board member reports. I would look for us to go around the table and we can start with director Zhao and just give a report if you have it. Otherwise,

286tell us a little bit about yourself. Hi, yes, this is Jiming Zhao. I've got two kids in the Xing Xing program here at Eisenhower, fifth grade and second grade. Not much. I mean, well, did a lot of work with the superintendent search and with CFAC and I'm very overall happy with both, especially how our financial numbers are landing this year. We'll, you know, the board is, at least since I've been on it, has always been keeping cuts away from the classroom as much as possible. And I think we can continue that with the levels of constraints we have this year. So that's always a good thing. Vice chair Roper. Hello, my name is Brooke Roper. I am serving in my third year on the school board. I have two amazing children. I'm in the district

287who I think is still up trying to watch me tonight. And I would really like for you all to go to bed. Okay, it's hard to get you up in the morning when you're up late. So I love you. But I would say I don't have a board report tonight. The only thing I wanted to do was just to say thank you to all of our assistant and associate principals. Today is, I mean, this week is associate and assistant principals month. So thank you for all the work that you do to help our district move forward and to support our leadership with caring for our amazing scholars. And that's all I have for tonight. Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Shannon Andreessen. I'm in my seventh year of service on the Hopkins School Board.

288And I have a parent, two kids. One is a graduate of Hopkins and the other is a soon to be graduate, fingers crossed, of Hopkins. And I also work at Gatewood Elementary. Oh, and I do have a report from 287. I think that it is important for everyone here to know that there is consideration and likely a closure of one of 287 schools. So there has been a very careful analysis of cost versus usage. And we are making a decision that is being good stewards of our member district dollars. So I wanted you all to be aware of that. If you have any questions about that or concerns, please send me an email and or give me a call. I'm happy to talk with you about it. Hi, everyone. I'm Rhoda Mary Peary Reed, Superintendent.

289I have a child at West who will soon be at the high school. I have another child not in the district. This is my ninth and final year and I will be lovingly and strategically passing the torch to one of six semi-finalists named this evening. Good evening. My name is Rachel Heartland. I'm currently serving as the board's treasurer and I have been on the board for five years. And I would say that this season has been one of the busier times in those five years. And I do not know how many district meetings that I have attended over the last two weeks and will not keep us all here late to name them. But I do wanna say that I'm really honored and energized to do the work and that I have spoken with a

290lot of community members who clearly care really deeply about the district. And so I don't know, I just thank them for their attention and their time and for entrusting us with these decisions. It means a lot. And I have felt overwhelmingly from the board that we are excited and motivated to do a really good and transparent job with this search and with this budgeting process. And a couple of more fun things, our Legislative Action Coalition is, I co-chair that committee and we are 41 years old and a model across the state. And we were interviewed as a group by the Sunsailer. So I believe we will be seeing a news article about that coming out. And then additionally, I saw the middle school play. I saw many staff members attend. They don't even necessarily have

291children, though of course some of them do actually in the play, but so many staff members turned out just to watch their kids do the play. And that means a lot to me that teachers care that deeply that they wanna come see the other things their kids do and are giving their own time to do so. The play was fantastic. The director, Adam Hibison, was ill, recovering from a pretty intense illness, but did a wonderful job and the kids enjoyed it. The high school robotics team had a competition at the University of Minnesota and is a contender to be in the state competition, so they will find that out shortly. And I think that concludes my report. Congratulations to them. Hello, I'm Kai Thompson, third year on the school board, three kids in the district,

292fifth through 10th grade. Only thing I'll say, board report is just, you know, to reiterate kind of the excitement that we have around this slate of six that I think we're bringing in for the first round. Yeah, and you know, appreciate the way MSBA has helped us through this process and I'll conclude there. Sarah Wilhelm-Garbers, she, they, and I'm in my first year and in my immediate household, I'm a parent to a seven-year-old puppy and a four-year-old human, who one of them will be enrolled in the district eventually. It's the kid, in case that wasn't clear. No, we can break and bury you. And then just in terms of involvement, there was this thing called spring break that I heard impacted people who have children who were in the schools. It did not impact me

293in the same way, but I'm glad that we were able to have that space for families and educators, and then also just the beauty of being a part of a district where we also get to celebrate and honor the diversity of just the traditions that we have, whether it's celebrations of Easter or Passover, getting to observe those things as community members and then observe each other, observing them as a lovely. And as a part of that, was present for some trans day visibility work in our broader community and just supporting all of our students is such a high value. I know of all of us and that's important work. And superintendent search has happened, continue to have community meetings. I'm always so grateful for conversations and folks being willing to engage. And then the final

294update that I just have, which is very important is that at the half gala, my spouse missed out on the page, Becker's sign, Connecticut, Yukon Jersey, and then went online and bought one that was signed. So I guess we have to donate more money to have somehow. Maybe it wasn't signed, but he has one now. So therein ends my board report and go Hopkins Royals. Thank you. My name is Johanna Hyman. This is my first year on the board. I have a third grader, sorry, it's late. A third grader and a kindergartner at Meadowbrook Elementary. I second a lot of the sentiment, my fellow colleagues and board members have stated tonight. I have also been very busy reviewing superintendent, submissions, which everyone who applied, I just wanna say thank you so much for the time

295and care you gave to us and putting yourself out there and to the process. And even if you weren't selected, keep your chin up, keep trying, keep moving on. There's gonna be a place for you that's a good fit. Also been doing a lot of early morning meetings with CFAC, which has been not always fun to do early in the morning, but it is great to do when you get good financial news at 7.30 a.m. So I appreciate that and appreciate all the hard work. CISO, Jessica, CFAC, Treasure Heartland, and everyone has done. Superintendent Mary Perry Reed, Assistant Superintendent Dr. Lightfoot, everyone just appreciate all the immense amount of work that has gone in to get our finances to where they are right now. And then finally, I just wanna echo what Clerk Wilhelm Garber's

296mentioned and that over the past several weeks, there's been many holidays that have taken place for those in our community. And I just wanted to say for those in our community who celebrate, I hope you had the opportunity to spend some meaningful time with your family and friends and loved ones and reflect in a meaningful way that's important to you. That concludes my board report. Thank you. And that also concludes our meeting for this evening. So I would look for a motion to adjourn. So moved. I have a motion. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The Chair votes aye. And this meeting of the Hopkins School Board is adjourned at 10.03 p.m. Thank you all for staying.