001all right so first up is the pledge of allegiance so if you will all stand with me we've got the flag up here at the front [Music] i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right thank you all for joining us tonight for our in-person meeting for the first in-person meeting of this school board and we do have sandy charcoal possibly joining us on video so um at this time we're not seeing her but if she joins in um that's how she will be here as well so have all of the board members had a chance to take a look at the agenda this evening are there any questions there are
002no additions that i've been made aware of all right is there a motion [Music] [Applause] [Music] all those opposed say no carrying none the agenda has been adopted okay yes sometimes they get it to work with all of us there might be some adjustments since this is our first meeting so on to item number three which is the superintendent's report so i'm going to turn this off and i will let you give you a report [Music] really again uh it's beautiful outside i think it's maybe somewhat symbolic for us now the skies open wide open we're here in person and we're not wearing masks so it feels really nice and we're actually really cozy up here um just wanted to kind of just give an update as usual about what's going on in the district
003um we in regards to health and safety uh our things are going very well you know again we monitor out for any of our students who get tested along with our staff we also watch about our fill rate for our um staff members and they're out why are they are out so we monitor those numbers and things going on and of course we're in communication with mason county public health uh and other public agencies here so we just know where the transmission rates are hospitalizations who's out what's going on impact ultimately on our students and the services to provide that maybe some people are watching for the first time we actually gone this entire school year we've never flown to school we kept our doors open i think that's something that we should feel very
004proud about um i mostly want to say thank you to the staff and our school leaders that is not an easy task so we need to continue to move forward in those areas again keep honoring it right now obviously the transmission rates are really low hopefully they stay that way fingers definitely crossed um there are still things that the department of health at washington state as well as uh labor industries and other state agencies including osbi are monitoring um so those are [Music] what are some of the health and safety mandates that we will receive further guidance from and i'm looking forward to that as soon as we get that guidance emotionally we'll put that out there for the public as it impacts the educational services for our students um we are in the middle
005of open enrollment so you uh have the students that might be coming to the shelton school district or are looking to transfer your son or daughter daughter to another school outside of their own boundary or attendance area school please do something right onto our website we have happened to help you out with open enrollment and also call your student's school or projected school for any further assistance and guidance we also have services for translation interpretation open enrollment will extend all the way to april 22nd we are also having an enrollment roundup at oms um in the middle of april and you can check out the details for that um on our website it is budget and staffing season um historically or annually this is what we go through as we look to already close up
006on this year thinking about our last bits of where monies will be spent and then looking really forward to the 22-23 school year with the state legislation just closing up uh we're looking forward to getting our state allocation we actually just got an email today from ospi letting us know that we should be able to get our projected um allocations um in early april why do you ask that's a big deal well we want to know exactly how much money we have to spend on what things some pots of money come with some restrictions or they're only allowed for certain activities but obviously uh as we are kicking off on our strategic plan we're coming out of this pandemic we really want to know every dollar what's going on and also around our staffing it's
007well documented i think it was double the number of open principal and teacher positions last year uh due to the pandemic and so we just want to be really on top of making sure that we are staffing our schools we do not want to have any choices obviously that becomes disruptive to the overall operations of our schools and also the services we provide our students so looking forward to giving that information so that concludes my comments thank you thank you very much for that report and sandy i am seeing you out there now um if you can it's great for your waiving i do want to say that this meeting is being held hybrid and which is wonderful so any board members or student representatives or superintendent if we happen to not be able to
008be in the physical location for the meeting we are able to continue with this type of format while we continue our meetings thank you very much for your report and i know we'll be hearing from you later at this point we will go into community comments um at this time we've got a sign-in sheet that's typically on that front desk and at this point in time no one has signed up for community comments so i will read through the language that we typically have there but it doesn't look like we have anybody unless you would like to sign up for that so as part of the regular school board meeting the board invites community members to make public comments in person and or by phone as conditions allowed if speaking in person please follow the
009public comment procedure by signing in and stating your name and address at the podium when called by the board chair if making comments by phone please dial one two five three two one five eight seven eight two and enter meeting id number eight seven two 872-5618-1970 each person is allowed three minutes to speak in accordance with the open public meeting back the board is not allowed to discuss items that are not on the agenda the board will direct the superintendent to follow up on any items that arise during public comment as appropriate the board will not allow complaints against an individual staff member or student in open session unless that individual has requested an open public meeting so at this time i don't see any call-in public comments either bobby will let us know if
010you're seeing anybody okay we will go down to reports and recognitions so first up we've got our student reps and it looks like we have two of them here in person with us this evening and i think that richard you had a great suggestion in introducing ourselves again so um i'm gonna let you go first and then quinn will go second and we would love to hear about how things are going at each school but first introduce who you are and which school you represent all right my name is richard beckman i am a sophomore at shelton high school yeah i'm here to represent what's going on on campus and what what's going on in charlotte high school so [Music] i would like to bring up the success that i've been having with the clubs
011and activities on campus i know i believe it was ffa they had just made it to eight i believe they made some progress there the robotics team also just came back from a competition where they made it to quarterfinals and also deca i think as i brought up last time has made it to made it to international competition and the automotive department and the um uh just all the clubs on school they're doing really well it's great to see those growing and also i would like to bring up this award a problem that a lot of these students and staff on campus have been experiencing with vandalism this has been something that i've heard a lot about and i've just heard a lot of students and teachers alike bring up and i personally have experienced
012a lot every bathroom in the a building is currently closed due to vandalism or destruction and if you want to go to the bathroom during class in a building you have to walk across campus and then walk all the way back up so it takes like five minutes to walk there and back just to use directions and so i think that's something that needs to be addressed either by having more staff in the hallway or there are way more students talking about than there are people to monitor that yeah that concludes my campus report thank you very much good i think that's working yeah okay solve high school uh starting my second year this year uh we're having our first group of seniors uh i guess our second group of seniors my first large group
013of seniors prepare for um graduation this year it's 14 of them and they're all doing fairly well a lot of them are running start students uh so they have already gotten uh we have two who have already gotten their associate's degrees and another who's about to get their associate's degree with their third uh english credit from oc this uh trimester so leading into our conference week most of our focus is going to be on preparing students for their my school data reviews which are states required it's it as you know because a lot of that fell off during the last year in the panzernik and especially the hybrid heading so we're trying to tighten all that up and get that ready for presentation especially with our seniors but also with a lot of our engineers
014because it's supposed to be updated every year uh when it comes to clubs are uh equality club recently met with employers and different groups from around mason county to help educate people on what they can do to help the lgbt community as well as get a lot of our lgbtq community employed and off the streets because there's a high percentage of homeless uh gay people here in shelton as well as a high percentage of uh homeless transplant potential often into them getting ready for their house so uh we have the shelton youth center that came and we also have the pride group that came to try and help people talk to us and try and educate people about you know how they can get off the streets and just some nice jobs that they can
015have as well as providing shelter and places oh uh answering third try we are still without a single fight at the school uh we've only had one incidence of vandalism uh and that was reported pretty quickly so we're doing fairly well with our relationship with oc and we're hoping that we can continue uh especially leading into next year we're hoping to get a couple quarters fantastic thank you both for your reports and if audra joins us through soon we will circle back with her as well too thank you both for coming to the first and for the meeting tonight you got the device working and everything so good job all right we will move on to 5.02 which is ospi asset prevention program condition update for evergreen elementary and olympic middle school and robert will
016be presenting oh hopefully you probably heard me sorry if anyone online did not uh but this uh update is provided annually and then we submit that to them and then as part of the reporting uh feature for that is that that information is given to the school board so no action is required as a part of that it's just log that the information is provided to the district so there really is not anything noteworthy on this year's update uh [Music] middle school actually is unchanged and talked about the different categories that uh that are in their excellent growth there are four undeterminable there was no uh single category that has wrapped them to the next lower rational definition at evergreen elementary there is a minor change in which let's see here the flooring and the
017facility hvac distribution systems dropped one level uh which their total building level uh is still very very high but they hold our amount and the big different reason for that is going into its 19th year and the flooring in that school is starting to get aged so cavalry's life expectancy of the building is 30 years and we try to get 30 years out of everything but you know soft good foreign some of them are being changed out as we are going along the process and so uh they were in the last um [Music] um [Music] is that we are using a higher level of energy uh to keep that system running than what is ideal because the seals [Music] every six years uh ospi requires a district-wide facility condition update and so that has to
018be in 2022 and so we're going to be working with a third-party consultant that will prepare that report [Music] that category and it has not changed uh since then and the the main finding of why the consultant put us in that is that that is considered the current education standard for writing classrooms and corridors that [Music] are there any other questions i don't see any other questions thank you very much robert all right 5.03 is state and federal programs update with marianne marshall waiting for good evening board president davidson members of the board i'm here to just give you an overview of the state and federal programs that we have here in the shelton school district all right as you see we have a long list of federal state federal programs that help to support
019student achievement here in the shelton school district all right so there are many benefits to the state and federal programs that we have here in the district and one of them is supporting our family resource center here in the district our business both supports our students and our families and it helps to provide translation and interpreting services food clothing housing assistance as well as medical and dental referrals and parents and classes and workshops these programs also help to build the relationships with our families and students here in the community by providing us some dollars to um for family engagement activities and they also help to support wrap around services for mental health and behavioral supports both in the home and at our schools all right so the benefits that our students receive from our state
020and federal programs include things like tutoring services transition services particularly for our students entering into kindergarten and our 8th graders moving on to the high school we're also able to provide staff for professional development in areas of math and reading social emotional services as well and these also these programs also support um salaries for certificated staff as well as classified staff next i'd like to show you a video of a student here in the shelton school district being in place he received special education services [Music] of the a bomb shelter that's a bomb shelter what is that for uh do a high to hide from what um yeah and so um where were they to hide from the bomb um they were under the shelter but are the shelters built on top of the ground
021or under the ground do you remember the name of it um which one did you pick no that's right so that's just a video of showing assistant um assistive technology for participation in the general education so i wanted to help um bust a miss around inclusion uh with uh it made me think of this because of some work that my son just recently brought home home and some of the myths that are around inclusion for kids with significant disabilities are like how could you possibly make my apology so david was uh using assistive technology to access the general education um curriculum um in the area of social studies and so that was just i wanted to show that it's really nice to see that in action all right that is my preposition any questions i
022can answer do board members have any questions from mary ann or student representatives do you have any questions for marianne about our state and federal programs [Music] sandy are you going to take it that you don't have any questions at this time no i don't know okay thank you thank you very much [Music] okay that takes us through reports and recognitions [Music] prior to the united kingdom uh and i don't know because this is the first we did receive a public comment email to us earlier how is that normally that just continued into printed into the comments as part of the process since they're not going to be led into it how does that work um to be honest i i received that email but i haven't had a chance to read it myself yet
023so i read it in its entirety so typically those are emails that we get as a board and read them and we will be responding the same as an email at any time okay this is for my application because it's comments to the board with specific items i would assume that they would be included in the minutes but the foreign administration would respond okay just want to make sure that those are included thank you okay so we will go to the consent agenda and there's five different items there the usual you know proposed minutes different the personnel report general fund warrants are there any questions or comments about the consent agenda or will there be a motion i'll make a motion to accept [Music] that's part of our board packet that we get so it's
024a list of different employees that are being hired as coaches or teachers or any type of staff position for the school every board meeting there's a personnel report because typically there's somebody coming or going but thank you for the question so it has been known it has been seconded so all those in favor of passing the consent agenda say i all those opposed to say no hearing none uh the consent agenda has passed all right on to discussion and action items the first item under discussion and action items is proposed resolution number 22-01 authorizing participation in the national purchasing cooperative and brenda will be discussing this with us good evening president davidson and cheltenham school board in your board packet you have board resolution number 23-01 it's authorizing the school district to participate in a
025national purchasing positive that is actually through your washington state school directors association and they go out to bed for the items from the vendors we'll have access to approximately 13 000 vendors that we don't have access to now it will save shelton school district money and time for personnel because it meets all of the legal requirements of bidding and provides an audit sale also for the state auditor when they come to office um the program is free um some of the items we can get are instructional materials library books buses portable classrooms but similar to team county directors association they also provide a rebate to us for 25 cents for every hundred dollars that we spend we would have to submit a claim to get that for this quite a simple process from what it
026was seen so if you approve the resolution tonight to do this authorization then we will enter into an interlocal agreement with bible and um we can start using the name so i would ask that you're supported thank you brenda do board members have any questions for brenda about this program are there any comments i have one question um if let's say we want to go out and buy a school bus or whatever will we be stuck with that bid or can we adjust or change or customize that bus out to a certain amount within uh within the parameters of that program so if we use this i think you still have some religion options we can do it but typically osbi puts out they did this that they have approved and typically we have bought
027off thousand house and we are allowed to make decisions to customize it for our name [Music] sandy did you have a question yes i have a question if nobody else if everybody else is finished yeah go right ahead okay um brenda's a little quieter i'm struggling to hear her as well as some of the others so maybe a little bit closer to the microphone and my question is is there any additional membership fees you know annually or monthly my understanding is this is through wasda and wasa as a member as a state association of the national school board association and that's where this is coming out of correct that is correct this program is free to us there is no cost at all as long as you're a was a member there is no cost
028to the district and um do i understand though that they there is a percentage um of the bid that an sba keeps there typically is a one to two percent fee when you're doing the purchasing and we experience that same thing county directors association when we use their bid processes to cover the cost of bidding but typically your cost is still cheaper than what you could go out and just buy directly for and have we [Music] checked with other districts that have used this i'm assuming it's a um trouble-free process but you know have we checked references so to speak i haven't that you don't have to use it um i did go through the wasda website pretty thoroughly researching this prior to bringing this forward so i'm very comfortable with it good moving forward
029okay and is there anything in particular that we are you know planning to put out to bid maybe as our first project actually there is um you have heard the superintendent discuss the library books and all of the classrooms that we're going to be doing we're hoping that we will be able to use business to start that process because we will be using federal dollars mostly to purchase those so that will meet our federal guideline for bids okay and then having just seen the state and federal programs um would one of those programs probably lap before the classroom libraries project um it will probably most likely we haven't functioned that yet but probably title one or lap will be getting down into the dollars available to make that determination lap is a state program so
030we don't have quite as stringent requirements without them alrighty thank you all right thank you sandy does anyone else have any questions the question is the comment i used uh the kcda program at transit and uh having been through multiple audits it's passed every other requirement we bought a lot of technology for our transit settings through it and as the one who mastered welfare vids and things like that i love it because it saves me hours and hours of time so the cost savings and staff resources that's good to know thank you for sharing the experience with that i don't have experience with something like that so that's very good to know [Music] if there aren't any other questions actually so from what i understand what we're going to do is we're going to be
031using this i don't know if it's a private entire program that we're going to be answering to in order to essentially bid on auction for equipment and supply something right you can use it that way mostly what we're doing um school districts have thresholds but they have to go out to a formal sealed bid process after advertising for two weeks and that type of thing if it's over seventy five thousand dollars we'll say without federal funds federal has a different guideline so it takes quite a bit of time to prepare your bid specs and go out well this um national cooperative which is national school boards that have formed this they actually do the bid specs and go out and do the bid so we can log into their website and actually see the 13
032000 vendors in washington state and see what they have formally gone to bid for and then we do our purchase order straight through that program so it streamlines the process for us having to do the bed and the cost of the bed and that type of thing i just want to include yeah and it's like you're saying it's a free service that we can choose to use as a resource or we can choose to do our own bids the same way that we have done in the past for other things so if we would like to use this as a tool we do need to pass the resolution that's listed here under 7.01 so if there are any there's a motion i moved to the board resolution number twenty two zero one uh advising participation
033in the national purchasing cooperative i think maryland it's been moved and seconded to approve the proposed resolution number 22-01 authorizing the participation in the national purchasing cooperative all those in favor say aye i all those opposed say no hearing none the proposed resolution has passed thank you brenda all right uh up next is 7.02 the shelton school board operating principles and this is uh the email that was sent to all of us that we had gone through oh gosh with that um person that we how long ago was this middle of november but we all received the email um i i've sent in my feedback that i did not have any changes i don't know if there were any corrections or additions that anyone have with that or if we are ready to this is
034the first reading of that we've all had a chance to take a look at it i did have some questions that uh allison did clarify with mr jasmine arizona highlighted that one question came to my mind you know i i have no problem with basically agreeing with you um like like uh my kindergarten likes placeology but my question is uh how's this enforced or modified or policed i mean as a board if director aide does something and regularly just like director a and all of a sudden so the checks and balances this is more of a guidelines in a guidance document for that it is a um a legal binding kind of document yes correctly yes yeah this is the agreements that we all came up with with that consultant on how we would operate
035as a board and yes it's basically all of us acknowledging that and if somebody were to choose to do something different then there's not a legal action that could come against you it would be that you know we've made we are making a statement by agreeing to this and signing off on it so um at this point in time i think if there i don't know if there's any more discussion on it and richard did you have a question yeah is this something that we also that student representatives have to agree to or is this solely uh affordable yeah this would be just between the elected board members that are making the decision you are welcome to have a copy of it i would think and read through it and we are still working on
036the student for the policy part of it but i don't see any reason why you couldn't share this and you could email it to the student representatives as well and you're welcome to take a look at it if you feel like you agreed to it too you can agree to it just verbally we wouldn't make you sign off on it i think unless there's some other guidance that you have on that no and i would just remind or mention that the school board the shelton school board has had a similar document for the last several years anyway you know this one's been fine-tuned a little bit i think it's been down to one page i think maybe some of the other ones that we've looked at in years past may have been a little longer
037this might be a little shorter but you know we've all agreed to basic methods of communication and operation and basic methods of working together in the past and so um it's just time to kind of renew this with all the new board members yes yeah and sandy and i were part of the the older board that had it's like a five or seven page document so it's nice to have this concise once we do have a second reading and approve it it would be something that would go on our website under um just under the school board this would be something that would be posted for all of the community to see as well what we are choosing to agree kind of as just norms of holding our meeting and respecting each other so unless
038there's any other discussion or questions on that we still have time to take a look at it it will come back up in april's school board meeting for a second reading and at that point i think that we will look at approving it and and that point it will go out on our website if that sounds good to everyone all right so then let's go to item 7.03 this is the strategic plan with superintendent jesse all right can you hear me my work my life's working um yeah the chemist just can't go great great so um this evening i'm presenting to the school board and to the public uh our draft strategic plan uh for discussion and hopefully approval the current strategic plan really a vision and goal statement of 100 graduation comes due here
039for 2022. so coming into this school year we knew that we needed to work on crafting a strategic plan and is also coming at a really good time um coming off a pandemic where there's been a lot of learning laws for our students and really is this a need for what are we going to do to make up for some of that learning loss and so uh working with the community best we can during this particular endemic did a lot of outreach and so i will today or this evening be able to go over the process in which we took in developing a strategic plan for the shelton school district and then talking about the specific elements of that plan and so with that so here's the elements that i'll be covering again so what
040was the development of the process um it started all the way back uh at the start of the school year and i'll be able to tell you about some of the stages that we've been going through all the way up to today there was work on the strategic plan all the way up to last week when we were meeting with the steering committee we also have specific elements of the plan you know the typical things that you would see in any organization for their strategic plan mission their vision uh we have an equity statement and belief statements so a lot of things and organizations have values we took those values and really incorporate those into belief statements that we hope to and hearing from our staff really want to say here's how we're going to
041norm ourselves kind of just like the board just went over they go here's our commitments here's how we want to respond those belief statements would guide the work of the staff here in the shelton school district all 800 employees and then what are our priority areas you know any again organization school district really needs to have a narrow focus uh i have not worked another school district that had this so uh clear up front about what it is that we should focus on i'll get a little bit into why that is um and then we'll talk a little bit about the details underneath those four priority areas talk a little bit about the kpis what are key performance indicators so how we're going to measure test what is the accountability for the school district and
042then about next steps so again uh starting in this process uh in the early fall really need to kind of do two things one you need to kind of do your own internal self-assessment what are the current initiatives for the shelton school district well the shelton school districts put a lot of time and energy into college and career readiness so whether we talk about the academies that are at shelton high school where we talk about adding um since we heard from quinn he was talking about adding cedar those are different options and different pathways that we have for our students um and i was just starting to clean him before that he's you know he's a running start he's he's that cedar those are things that have been developed those relationships over the uh the
043last six years is part of the previous strategic plan so we knew that that was really developed you know you're one and go over that then you also have constraints where's our capacity what kind of resources do we have what are the skill sets that you have for folks so you know you have readiness to take on you can't start off on a new initiative if you don't have a self-assessment of what you can or cannot do because we don't want to come up with some false promises which is oftentimes what districts really struggle with is creating a plan and not really starting off with a full assessment of where you're at the other piece that's really critical is talking to our stakeholders so we started right off the bat we had a survey specific
044to what it is that um our community members wanted to have as far as our values what did we want us to focus on and then about that accountability means how do you want to measure and check in so uh that happened uh in october we stepped on this survey it was out there we had 507 response responses on that survey 12 were students 60 were current parents or guardians um and 22 or 23 were staffed here for the shelton school district so we got all that information what is the things that we're really focused on and in particular i think that was really uh highlighted was really four areas safety i was not surprised to see that we're in the middle of a pandemic it was really a lot of lockdown coming off of
045even hybrid services what are you going to do for my students so both physical and mental health safety was one of those key areas the next one was academics really some of the comments and the things that we saw around provide us something challenging and really focused on student achievement making sure that if my kid is ready i want to make sure they have real life skills life skills and to be college and career ready and then the last one is really around access for all uh so what is it that we're going to provide for our students do they have access to specific supports as their experiences always pre-k through 12th grade and then um in particular a lot of the parents comments were about ninth grade on track really thinking about their student
046their student coming here obviously some of the survey went out to some of our theater districts so they're obviously focused around that and what's their experience um and so right there we got four topics that came off the survey and then we went out and did um focus groups so in november building off of that we got to get out there we saw something so we need to go in more depth right surveys have their limitations so we need to go out and talk directly with our community so we talked with students we talked with family members and we also talked with our business leaders so from that process you can see here some of the representative groups and the numbers of folks that we were able to touch base with kind of a small
047group setting that's really actually quite nice because you can actually actually have follow-up questions and they can engage with us too and tell us things from their own personal perspective boy i don't think there's any um more uh important to me at least as the superintendent of the shelton squid is to start with our students student voice is great it's super powerful i got to talk to high school students and hey what has been your experience here with the shelton school district and they got real they were able to tell us really it was about where there were some strengths a lot of other kids really didn't like around the college career readiness they liked their options that were afforded at the same time they came up with some things that were really key one
048they really want to stress relationships with teachers that's they were saying it's a mixed bag those are things you got to work on so my teachers i love they come in they're warm and welcoming they know what's going on some of my teachers not so much they said that they would like to have more skills more rigor and more rewards so what are the specific skills when i go in the classroom i really like it when you tell me explicitly what am i here to learn what are the success criteria for me so that i can be successful um and they would really just ultimately they also want to know uh two more things which is please can you stop the worksheets they were there's quite a lot of going on about worksheets i want
049really authentic work and then the last part is about transition it's just like you heard from the parents what you can hear here again is the themes of hey let's let's up our expectations let's give me something that's authentic real world skills and then thinking about that transition especially that transition to ninth grade and if we went back and we're looking at the data and i know this is data that i presented to school board at a previous school board meeting this year is you can see that that ninth grade has challenges a lot more uh truancy and a lot more discipline and we know also just looking at this year's grades we have some real challenges there was an eye-opener about a number of students receiving s i can't think of a word start
050really if you think about that for ninth graders is what are you doing to welcome me to the school i barely got an orientation i'm not from here i came from another school district and then i'm already getting an f and if you know the risk factors for high schoolers it can go downhill really quickly and that's not just here that's at any school district so we knew we needed to address that i just really wanted to highlight on that and especially again on student voice we also heard from family members they too were like higher expectations life and real world skills um and then the diversity of staff they really liked uh want us to have a diversity of staff here uh that uh looked uh like our student body business um our business
051leaders were also higher expectations life and real world skills um reading and math skills um and then specifically the needs of our english language learners something that they know that that's going to be the future workforce so what are you doing for them that came from them and then last one is um which uh was also kind of a focus group is i went out to every single school and i talked to every single staff including the staff here at mountain view uh elementary um it was great uh to principal johnson right over here and she was great we got into really good details staff had real questions they really gave us feedback because at that point we had drafted really about what are the belief statements what is the direction what are our priorities
052and they gave us feedback about what was what do they like and not work because ultimately they're the ones that will be lifting most of this work our foundation we are a people organization we depend on our again our school leaders and our teachers and our classified staff to lift this work so we got that feedback from them things that they really did like is literacy they really like to focus on literacy getting books um i know they even applauded for the staff here uh candy who's a librarian here i've been talking to her she's loving it um but also around like making sure that we have equitable access as well something that we've heard back in the survey a sense of community so how can we keep generating a sense of community i think
053again coming off a pandemic where we haven't been so uh in our physical presence with one another most certainly without a mask can we get back to that and can we work on it um and then ex higher expectations so that also came through that is through through all our stakeholder groups um and then the last part for the staff was believe statements please make them front and center so tonight uh school board directors you'll see those belief statements again you'll see uh probably why because a lot of the staff have similar kind of belief statements or at least pieces of them already in the things that they're trying to do at our schools here in the shelton school district so yes i gave you a lot why did i do that so because it's
054all ground the words that i'm going to present and the rest of the slides are grounded in all of that work uh so that you knew where did that come from why why did they say that which group of people felt that way which i think is really important so um then in december really putting these pieces together working on the language we also uh have a steering plant a strategic plan steering committee comprised of 12 community members and staff uh that decided um during during this time to come together they had to fight some zoo meetings and some in-person meetings so i just tonight right about before i forget i want to thank all the folks that served on the strategic plan steering committee they did a wonderful job it's a lot of work
055a lot of material to go through because they were the ones taking in all that information right from the survey and from the focus groups and really helping craft language right moving it from the things that we heard into words that fit into what you need in the strat plan those elements like a mission and a vision your belief statements an equity statement and then our priorities so that that language reflects that and then the other part is really our our school and district leaders need to also engage with this work because we're going to be held accountable to do it so again if i was with principal johnson back here and we're talking about this and i say hey we're going to really lift up literacy and i didn't engage with her about that
056she'd say well why why are we going in this direction that's actually already a strength for us and i know i'm talking my colleagues let's avoid that here's what we need so that when we lift the priorities we again are grounding ourselves in what are we truly ready for and what do we need to do starting right away and we've already actually taken some steps in that thanks to the school board thanks to the school leaders uh and of course thanks to our staff then uh here we are today you know presenting um seeking ultimately approval for this particular strategic plan and of course um as brenda was presenting parallel planning around finalizing budget and staffing as you prepare for the next five years why is the timeline now is because if you don't know
057what you're doing you can't budget accordingly for the next school year that happens unfortunately too often too many times at other school districts in which i've worked and then all of a sudden you approve a plan and then already the table is set how do we want to set the table here for the district we've already done that and again thank you because we are already lifting off literacy we're already trying to get books books are going to be hard to get in supply lines so we're hoping to just get those books just in time come august as an example all right so here we go we're going to jump into uh and again special thank you to the strategic plan steering committee absolutely maybe we can get some of those folks to come at
058the april 12 so uh here we are strategic direction what is our mission right what are we heading to our mission is to inspire challenge and empower all students again if you're looking at some of the words that i gave you and you saw coming off the survey and the focus groups kids and the students do truly want to be inspired can't be inspired by a worksheet i know i i can't could you get inspired if you fell in love with books probably a lot likely could you have a really a lot more inspiration if you were doing some real life experiences like we provide in our academies and even enrich them or to allow students to get more access to more challenging coursework that really feeds their own passions and the areas they want
059to learn in absolutely and we want to empower those students to do that so that's why this particular mission statement who's this way so our vision passing ourselves out to the horizon the shelton school district creates opportunities for students to explore discover and launch their own best futures so it's really again trying to put the onus back with this student so they themselves can take off and do the some of the things you want so we want to have a broad range of experiences for them that they are in the driver's seat as opposed to necessarily the adults always necessarily driving them to where they got to go we should provide guidance but ultimately when they walk out the doors of the shelton school district when they graduate the adults don't come with them that's
060one of my favorite sayings i mean adults don't come with them i've had many conversations with parents and guardians over the years just about that and some of those tough conversations a lot of those types of conversations have to happen even earlier your junior high years right because you're planning your pathways and where kids are going i know that we had some parents and guardians listening to this to probably resonate a little bit about some of those choices uh as you're trying to think about that because you can only lead them up to so far and then they have to start taking things over and we need to do that in a way that is very supportive and caring for our students because those challenges can be really really tough um and those are our
061developmental years as well so uh transitioning to the equity statement really is just a reflective of what where we are at in this community you know that we truly are on this uh ancestral lands of the swogson island and kakomish indian tribes right here with the sailor shiv um right at our shores with the olympic mountains on the other side a very beautiful place a place that is very um takes a lot of pride in the history of this community many multiple generations a lot of people here went to um our high schools you know i hear choice in shelton high school they talk about it with a lot of fondness that they also care enough to know that hey we've got to adjust and what are the things that we're going to do for
062them and so we know that we want to be respectful the middle statement is really embedded into what is typical to civil rights you know that everybody has a right to come here no matter what your background is um whether that's your uh ethnic background your gender a gender identity or of your own physical or personal experiences so we have that you can see that through and through through our student body and we just really want to say hey we care about you come here and how are we going to best serve you with equitable access and opportunity is to focus on the strategic plan we are a school district we are here to educate students focus on the education that's the most important thing i'm very passionate about that because if the kids don't
063have real reading and math skills and be able to know how to interview or to write an application that that is not equitable access you're cutting off options and opportunities that students and that we've heard from our community that they want we got to do a better job of that we can own that we need a plan it's a five-year plan we can move forward in doing that and taking those steps so it's really centered about here it is here's who we are here's where we're headed so our belief statement so who it is um that we're going to follow um and i think these are probably going to slow a little bit down here i'm not going to read word for word but i want to just at least certainly give you this opportunity
064to see what it is these were i mean every word was scrutinized many times over including by the school board i appreciate that by staff all all the staff at all of our schools have had input into this um so that we just know that we again we want to have collaborative cultures we want to be in a place where we empower the voice and especially the voice of our students um because we know that sometimes that we have some folks who are over represented and underrepresented we want to hear from everyone and this district needs to make sure that we hear all sides and perspectives i think even for my own personal uh experience here in the shelton district that is something that people want they want to hear their voice they understand those
065differences opinions and they most certainly should have at least an opportunity to hear that second one is around authentic educational requires cultivation of trust community and acknowledgement that this again this work is hard but you're not going to get there if we don't again build on a foundation of knowing that we're going to help each other and helping our students because we wanted to be courageous right we want them to really jump up and again if we're inspiring them and to explore someone's going to have to catch them sometimes think about your own experience as a student who is that adult that actually came through for you i bet you got a name right now right we need to have more of those experiences and so we want to make sure that happens encourage students
066to be their own agents of success this is again back to that whole thing about who is who is going to guide that path and we want to make sure that we are here to guide them and not take over so that we know that the student's voice is being heard and they're the ones that can take their own journey of course with the adults help okay two more you know relationships are key uh we heard that from our students voice you know the relationships with their teachers we know our educators want to have really powerful relationships with our students um and that also with our families you know we want to know how can we make sure that we bridge those differences that may be out there wherever it's your academic skills maybe your
067own physical uh limitations or just culturally we know already that uh 20 of our students qualify for el services how are we doing that how are we going to help build that connection with them provide translation interpretation as necessary to get them the skills up and going to be productive positive citizens and where they feel respected we have that we have to do that the last one is here is really just about high quality rigorous education again we're a school district we know every student brings their own uniqueness and the gifts that they have and so what are we doing to identify that be strength based and build off of that for their success hey look i know i was an educator i've had moments where i've been frustrated by my own students when i'm
068teaching them but what i always tried to pride myself on is that i was very respectful that i knew that they could do things and didn't want to put limits on them this goal is really set up to say don't put limits on kids you saw it in the video that jen that jenny was able to put up there if we put limits on kids with disabilities for example you already set the table again we want to make sure that they're sitting there and we're giving opportunity and we're always trying to push to see the next stop where students can go again in a respectful caring environment that we want for them so the priority area so all right well how do i get that done you leave these belief statements you have this work
069what are the areas so the four areas again are and i'm sorry about the s and the instructions high quality literacy instruction the two areas so we have two initiatives underneath each of these areas one is supporting high quality literacy instruction so it's the typical things that you would want to see as far as reading for your students we know comprehension is really great the comprehension has to be supported by the word work your phonics your phonemic awareness your fluency rate right making sure that your vocabulary is really rich that's gonna allow you to be a really strong reader but also that we have a culture of reading you know so we have a balanced literacy approach again if you're reading anthologies those really you know when you give those really big books with the
070short stories in them again we don't no one really reads quite like that i mean yeah maybe a magazine but books are really powerful strong readers have favorite authors they often students will pick series they love those we want to make sure to support that and we're already well under our way um in that area speaking of another area that we have a lot of strength in college and career readiness we know that we have some pathways set up we've got our academies they're popular it's going well we have to make a few more adjustments to our master schedule to fit those in we have some more experiences we need to get with our business leaders um because you always got to be up the date the job market's always switching i mean just read
071any any any part of a newspaper recently you have to adjust and be really fluid in your skill set and so um we'll keep working on the pathways i know we have to get some more college uh readiness courses also at our high schools um so that's another area in the pathways but it's the first one the transitions again as i highlighted is an area of higher need what have we already done about that we already lifted off and said at all of our high schools we have a multi-day orientation for incoming ninth graders collab between students and staff we also know that we're gonna provide books book choice for all incoming ninth graders and we're having a pre-eligible uh algebra readiness class we're up to 60 students again going from eight to ninth grade
072we knew that that transition is so critical we need to get ready for it already this summer so we're already setting that up our principal is already ready the teacher's already preparing this teachers were super excited about this list now i have other issues where i have principals really wanting to think about all the transitions that all the other grades can't do everything but at least getting ready for that we'll see what we can do i think we'll be getting some books in a lot of kids hands this summer and we're having a really robust summer program uh human capital why is there an asteroid next to it we're gonna change the name i think it'll really be high quality staff uh will end up being the name of this particular priority area but we
073need to have talent management again we're a people organization we're only as good as really the people that we hire do they fit our values do they fit our belief statements it's really what we have to start asking ourselves um and so that we have those folks that come on we do a better job doing orientation we do a better job bringing them on and getting them mentoring so we already have some plans set up for that they've asked for that the school leaders have asked for that so that you know when you're a novice teacher or principal you're getting support for your first couple years the work is hard you need ongoing training and you need sometimes it's just customized just for you and then just believe statements really again we're going to go
074right off the bat this uh going into school you're going to take those belief statements that you saw here what we end with and the staff are going to take those on and help again form their own norms so that they know they'll get their own posters again here for example mountain view how do they take those police statements and they're living them and so that they can own them and their explicit commitments to how they want to operate here that match up with those belief statements that you saw earlier and the last one is safe and welcoming environments we want safe and welcoming schools that addresses the the safety issues that we've heard from our community we know that we've had higher rates of discipline we've heard from richard here about some of the
075graffiti going on the a building at shs i personally know about it too i've known about it um and there's some things that aren't as seem as simple as to solve some of the behaviors and the habits that we have right now behavior is a form of communication why are they communicating that way i'm not going to get into all the reasons why we're going to address it part of that is about orientation and getting expectations set up as the start of the square what is expected me as a student what is expected as a staff member so we can start on a positive footing we need to get some whole child supports mental health is real folks um and so we're going to have to get some more mental health supports for some of
076our students some of the students experiences during cobit for example have been pretty heavily impacted on them when you come to school some of these students have had some rough times out in the community and when they come again they're exhibiting some of those behaviors are coming from their own fun experiences it kind of breaks my heart when you hear some of the stories that i've already heard right here for the school district um but we need to work with our community agencies and as a district to try to address that the last one is this culture and linguistically welcoming environment again we know at least 20 percent of our students are we cbll services i bet it's closer to about 40 where english might not be the primary language at the household being spoken
077we got to make sure that when they do come to schools that we do have signage uh and services to help them with translation interpretation it is federal law we have to do that we're working on it we're doing a lot better we're going to continue to improve on that so that we can ease their transition and get them key information and get information back from them about serve their student so those are the priority areas five years probably seems like a lot we can't lift off everything at the same time it will not look like that some things will lift off now um some of those i gave you examples this evening um some things will have to kind of be um developed as i like to say behind the curtain and then lift
078off in the years coming up obviously finances and our staffing impacts these things so there are obviously resource limitations to all the things that we can do but we've set our priorities and our time and energy and resources should match the things that are listed in our priority areas for us and i think i have one more slide around the um two more keep kpis so um what you'll see up here are six specific key big accountability measures that are student based these are all student performance accountability measures why is that well everything that we do should ultimately lead to the success of students so these are the key measures these nest underneath directly underneath the things that our community has said that we're doing there are things that we have been worked on they
079are somewhat traditional i don't think anything's wrong with that because again if kids can't read and write if they we know risk factors if they've experienced any kind of suspension we need to cut down that rate if you're not here you're not learning too much like ripping my microphone off my lapel and making sure that we're monitoring those things on an ongoing basis there are other kind of metrics that feed under that that are more leading indicators that we'll use but these are the ones that we would most certainly report on to the community we would have out there to the school board about how that's going here in this buddhist and measuring ourselves on that and then adjusting when we're not making our goals we will get specific numbers on there unfortunately especially on
080the uh espo ones we're gonna have to wait to get the numbers coming up this this spring because there wasn't other numbers in the last two years so we will have some updated we'll get numbers filled in there about what our baseline is and then we'll start setting goals out of that once we have agreement that this is the areas that you want to go on the last thing um for us is this next step so uh you know really is about finalizing the rollout plan the steering committee uh will continue to meet um help guide us in that area we have some ideas we already are looking at a kickoff date um in partnership with the chamber of commerce they were so kind to me with this this week and as we also think
081about i'm opening up um the met building over on the shs campus so we'll have a culminating event coming up at the end of may more details to come and then publication and launch as i talk about launch but also just about publication we'll be getting a lot more information out to the public a lot of things on our website a lot of snazzy posters but ultimately the most important thing to me is that everybody knows what we're doing and that we start taking action on it together so with that i'll take um questions from the board for myself and i'll start off with just some comments so that every single time i talk to you this has been a major priority and focus and there's been a lot of work put into this by
082you by the staff by the principals by the community members that have been a part of it i as all of you know had the opportunity of going to olympic college and sitting in for one of the strategic planning steering committee meetings and i was very impressed with all of the different community members that were there and how serious everyone was taking it and i was there just as an observer um it was a three-hour long meeting and there was a lot that was tackled just in that period of time so um it's it's really nice i i know that when you sent this over to us as a board it was the paired down version it's it's also nice to see pictures of our own students up there as well so i do really
083like seeing all of that um yeah i just i'm excited to do all of this work i think that it couldn't come at a better time coming right off of the pandemic where you know across the nation there have there's been a dip in you know reading and math scores and just the comprehension of all of that and so uh to me even just when we were going through our superintendent interviews getting down to student achievement student instruction i have two children in the school district that's been very important to me so um yeah i just i i'm excited about this i've been having a lot of conversations with you about it so i appreciate the presentation this evening and i will see if any of the other board members have any comments or questions
084or student representatives if you having listened to this presentation if you've got some questions we can start off with yours i was i was just curious has there been a survey conducted or anything about what what students want to do after high school whether it's military or going straight into the workforce or a trade school or a four-year college like has there been a metric to show what the students in our school district want to go do great question richard so um as you know when you you have you know uh seniors for example you know 500 at a grade level um you know kids are going in different directions one of the things is the students said hey i actually want to a balance you know it's kind of like a bold thing i
085want to be able to have enough that says i can go to college and i or if i choose not to i can be ready for my career that's been the general number one response that we've received back from students that you're preparing me for both and you're not trying to limit me one way or the other i don't on this process we don't have specifics i know if i asked some more folks or if i had a conversation with principal kipper and your counselors they would have more details and they're working on that because you have your student success you know so student success plan every student does you know in high school uh they have that one of the things also i just add on my last part would be again as i
086like always mentioning one of the things that we're learning is school districts and even higher ed or the trade schools need to think a little bit differently because if we go out and say oh this is the cast division and this is what we think they need what we miss is actually why don't we just partner up with businesses a lot sooner and what do you fluidly need now so one of the things that we're going to be doing uh richard is to really try to again we keep meeting with businesses so we can match those skills so that we're not misguiding students to say hey here's where you want to go but by the way a whole bunch of kids want to go into physical therapy and all of a sudden there's not hardly
087any more jobs or some other occupation we've got to make sure that we make that am i on can you hear me now um i kind of go back to the very first meeting that i was at when i asked you know when we were just starting to roll this out and i asked what what's the metric for success and bluntly you said graduation and in my head i went duh so i look at this and i've had i've had the opportunity to to talk to people around town and i absolutely love the fact that a graduation is implied in this we're preparing people for college and the future and all of that and and all of that involves that stepping stone uh of graduation and as i talk to people around the the community
088um this is what they want our students to look like when they come out they want them to be ready to get a job they want them to be ready to go to the military they go to college if they want whatever um and so this this plan as i read it as it's presented as we all met is very representative of mason county that i know and and i appreciate that to to know when and i i just want to say thank you for all the hard work that i know you did i mean we got the the cliff notes and a couple of meetings here and there um and we got some final say and we stuck our tongue out at each other or whatever but um at the end of the day
089it's it meets the needs and the vision and and the the appearance of our community and that's super so thank you yeah it's uh there's a couple of functions that i really appreciate about this having been involved in numerous plans of different levels across the state of washington over the years and this is setting the goals but also linking the budget uh you have a great plan but if you can't fund it you just failed and bring the balance to those two things and one of the things i want to ask about because i haven't seen it is that being a five-year plan that we institutionalize as part of process community checkpoints along the way it could be same with us you know for potentially the same steering groups but i would encourage you getting
090other to participate so that we can have those validity checks along the way with the parents and others and said yeah this is working or that's not working because the first ones are going to notice that are going to be the parents and so we need to ensure that we provide that opportunity throughout the process i know from the reports we've been given uh and it's always hard to get community participation uh once again from my planning experience it's it's challenging but i believe from what we've heard from this part this particular process we've done a good job but i don't want to stop there i want to do a great job so i come in for a local gut but i think it's a great starting point and as we continue down that road
091i think the community will be very pleased that we've we've actually built us for success versus failing along the way yeah i appreciate that eric best and um i have a strong opinion about that having done a lot of district stuff where you're i'm a representative of the district i go out i have conversations we we will be pivoting to the schools the schools is where the connections are um at least as far as with parents and guardians and our students but we still have to do a lot of community stuff our community leaders our business leaders you know that's a great interface for like myself for my senior leadership to do that work but if our staff are doing a really good job building relationships which we need they should be able to get
092that input just as you're mentioning about how is it working or not they'll get the nuanced information right that we have to filter back up to us so that we're always a continuous improvement stance absolutely and it does have this plane does have like a two-year which i haven't gone over but it's got a two-year kind of let's come back and revisit it after two years anyway see exactly if there's some bigger switches that we need to make or re-prioritize even within it there we go okay so i always like to say that for these plans uh you all will experience it uh whereas we will live it very much so what happens here will continue to follow me for the rest of my life as well as all of my partners among the districts
093as well as every other student who is currently attending especially those in the earliest leagues of their education so um you've done a great job with reaching out to people all across the district and all the different interest groups but i just had a couple questions about how you got in contact with students because i noticed the number on there was 48 and while that's probably more than before it is still in my mind a respectively small number in comparison to how many students this plan is going to have to serve but there being over a thousand at shs another hundred at cedar and i don't know how many at choice yeah uh and that's not even with me even thinking about how many elementary school students that are coming up and they're going to
094have to deal with it for even up to the next 13 years um and with that in thought i would like to know exactly where you conducted this um meetup of students exactly what schools they were from if you know that um and if you planned on maybe introducing more students to be you know interviewed if not just talked with about these sort of things because for the last administration a lot of the student body's issue was what i'd like to call administrative blindness uh they didn't talk to us and it made kids nervous and it made kids not enjoy it made them feel like they weren't being involved often compared to a prison and i'd really like to try and tie the student body as well as its concerns into the school board well
095hello quinn i uh i am very sympathetic to that in fact i have never i have not saw you yet but i've ran into both of you multiple times so far this school year i'd definitely like to be more of a president i'd like to even be more of a presence now with our mass off and i can get into schools a lot more it did provide some limitations just even with every constituency group quinn uh for sure there was just an inability to really kind of pull people the way we want social distancing the mass um we went out to the counselors uh that we had and we did reach out i also did that with um both of the uh native american tribes um so that i can make sure that we hear
096their voices as well so i went out to squawks and island myself and we conducted a group with the students there those students go to shelton schools a couple were from um obj age and then the other ones went to all three high schools i believe all three at the time i also went to shs and i met with uh two two rounds because it was past and period two groups of students there and then we had a kind of a governing body of uh students from all three high schools we met at cedar and then we heard their voices there they were kind of representative of their uh student groups um so that's how we that's how we configured it to get the student voice um and you know there's a lot of themes
097like you know i can keep driving on it you know 12 percent again on the survey some of the themes that you see there and some of the things i heard from the students those things that i talked about were pretty consistent no matter who i talked to and the part about going forward is is the key that you can still have a life i've been thinking about it's a good time to get a student advisory group that i just meet with um so look for that to start coming up this next school year again the pandemic didn't allow me for maybe so many opportunities to do that but i can most certainly i'd love to do that um because i think empowering student voice is really powerful so um that'll be another piece coming
098up so i appreciate that i have some questions so i wanted to give her an opportunity yes are you waiting on me okay hear you sandy i do have some questions um a couple of comments maybe not so much questions observations it was mentioned that both students and families asked for more rigorous content more emphasis on um you know learning and education rigorous content and so as i look through the belief statements i notice that the belief statement that talks about we've lost your volume here so give us just a minute okay i can hear you now just fine okay as we were going through the um presentation and thank you very much for everybody that was involved with that there was a lot of progress made from the uh the point in time in
099which we saw it um at its various stages so there's been a lot of work done and i appreciate that it was the comment was that both students and family asked about more rigorous content and so as i was going through the belief statements i thought that i think it's belief number five which actually talks about rigorous content and i thought you know maybe that should be on at least page one instead of on page two if that is something that both the students and the families have asked for i mean there are [Music] you know there are primary focus and so that was just a you know an observation the another one you know i was looking at the six student performance indicators and those will be um very helpful and i hope that
100we can have them or have updates on them [Music] as appropriate but as often as we can and not wait necessarily and hear about it once or twice a year so i'm hopeful that we can set up maybe even our board calendar um a little bit reminders or something so that we can stay on top of those uh key performance indicators and um you know we've we've richard brought up um vandalism i've heard a lot of uh i've heard some complaints from community members about bullying classroom disruptions and i just wonder how to rebalance that with our you know our desire to reduce in suspensions and you know work with more positive interventions rather than negative ones so those were just some of the thoughts that came to mind right off the bat i appreciate
101the work on the strategic plan um so thank you for my listening to my thoughts thank you sandy [Music] i'll just uh thank you director as well i think on the last piece what i would say is uh one i know that the shelton school district in particular needs to work on focusing to support our students around their mental health their overall wellness um we've had a number of instances i've talked to some of my colleagues on their school districts it's been a real it's been a real issue especially secondary schools or at least they're more high profile we have a responsibility to respond and have a plan um and some of those things start with even some of the things that um richard was saying um is just even like basic things around expectations
102and supervision um shs is a tricky campus to provide supervision on um i know you call them california schools we have to bring up california but there are there's a lot of hidden areas in those kind of schools even at obj age there's a lot of stuff going on so we'll be working on that about how to supervise and then also teach kids about how to to do things and un more unstructured what we call unstructured environments because if we don't explicitly teach them what we're expecting them to do they don't know what to do and they'll take it upon themselves so we'll be working on that and then i i really like the part director todd's really about positive versus negative so um the weed two will be working we already have kicked off
103things around restorative justice our our principles are right on this we don't have an adopted approach for the district and i'm like very i have very high expectations for our staff and i said we need a approach not eight different approaches to it so that we can do professional development and support those practices across all eight schools um and so that is part of that work too but it's not just the only answer there's engagement around learning if you're going to a class and you're presented with things again i hate to hover on this but i've heard it loud and clear from the students like worksheets and you're not engaged in learning you're going to see behaviors it's just it's as simple as that anyway those are i just want to address that because it
104is a big issue and i and i i know i've heard from the community as well um and i have expectations we already talked about it um endlessly we are planning on it so you can hear some of those plans and you can you'll see those plans in action okay are there any maryland do you have a comment or question yes yes [Music] and going through this plan um it's really been very very very i've taken in a lot of things and learned a lot of things and i really really think thank you the superintendent and jesse for all you really and all the hard work and for all the members of the strategic planning board because i think this is a very very good uh strategic plan plan after looking at the other weapons
105that we were presented with you know to go over from boston and all the different schools or school districts um i think this one so thank you thank you all right we've got one more question or if there's even more than that that's fine too so richard go right ahead i i just had one thing that i wanted to add i think that the um what was the standard was like welcoming and inclusive or making sure that everybody felt like welcome and stuff i think that i agree that that should be a really big push like uncharted high school i've heard um racial slurs used on like a number of occasions and to put it bluntly like shelton it's i mean it's based on a logging town and there are a lot of people that
106just still have like really old-fashioned opinions and they uh share that with their kids and so just on multiple occasions i've heard slurs used like that and that's that's not okay so i just i thought i'd share that and i completely agree that it should be a push to make everybody feel welcome yes thank you very much i actually just went through a work training that was all about stuff like that and it was very powerful to hear people in my work environment who were saying that to be welcomed and to be embraced for who you are regardless of what that is is very powerful and if you can be your whole self at school and not be concerned or be upset about certain things then the learning environment would be even greater so that
107is definitely something that we were hearing throughout and i it's a great part of the plan i'm glad that you brought it out i will bring up one more thing i will say very much thank you i've been on the school board going on seven years now and i know that sandy especially and myself have wanted more student involvement and you have done that um i know we have you know if you do a student committee too that would be great but having more of a voice on the board i appreciate you know you both coming and constantly giving good feedback interactive questions and if we can have even more student involvement so we are hearing directly who this impacts and when it's not lost on me part of the reason why i'm involved i
108have two children so i'm living through it with them as well too walking through all of these things and the impacts that it has on my own children with their education that's why i would love for it to just to continue to improve to continue to give all the kids in our community just opportunities that they can be excited about so um not to go off on my own comments there either but i think at this point we've we're good unless there are any other questions or comments for the superintendent i think that we're good so that's it for the strategic plan for now and it will continue to get finalized as we move into the april meetings so now we are on to the community comment period number two which is number eight and
109again there is a sign up sheet that's actually now up here with me but anyone is welcome to call in or sign up to make a community comment or know that for future board meetings your opportunity to do that is to sign in up there if you're calling and you're welcome to do that it looks like nobody else has joined us online and so we will move to board member comments and why don't we start with maryland we'll start just we'll go right down the line i just want to comment on to sandy and tarzan for sending us [Music] thank you very much for that you're welcome it must be you you've got a lighted box around you but maybe you're muted yeah i'm not sure oh i'm sorry i didn't realize i was going
110next oh yeah sorry about that are you ready right now or i am i am um again i'd also like to thank quinn and richard and nadra again for participating you know i'm realizing we're at the end of march already and there's only a few more meetings left where sandy your audio what's that oh okay okay we're from zoom um i really can see that it is key for everyone to be um you know that it's key to be close to your mic so that anybody that's participating this way can uh hear and you know kind of gives me edit an idea of how the public would experience this so thank you all very much yeah thank you for that feedback sandy [Music] uh it's nice to see everybody face to face um some of
111you are taller or shorter than i expected so um this is coming up on my really my favorite time of the year uh having kids in the school and going through all the processes and and seniors coming up on the end and um you know everybody getting ready for for summer or the transition into the next thing or getting ready to go to college and i guess it's kind of a global reminder keep your foot on the gas this is the time where we polish everything and just keep pushing through to whatever is next i've had too many friends relatives colleagues whatever not do that and kind of coast into the end and make mistakes trash a gpa or whatever and and have negative consequences and going into spring it's that time keep your foot
112on the gas polish the axe go and have fun thank you marty do you have comments um just kind of reflective moments had a very good conversation with a good friend of mine who's been employed with the school district for some time and we're chatting about circumstances and histories and things like that and uh reflecting upon where we were and where we are and we both agreed that we didn't get to the situation we are now overnight it took us a while to get to this point but we both agreed that it's going to take an accelerated pace to get out of it because our students and families and our community deserves more and so that's why i'm really happy about this plan because now we actually have something we can measure us as a
113board in the school districts and how we're going to implement it and how we could hold the system accountable that we're not meeting the metrics that in the past have been somewhat ambiguous that we can address the safety concerns of the student on student violence the student on teacher issues et cetera and it's not just the sheldon school district i have the opportunity to work to nearby county and it's there too uh we have an endemic of violence uh from the pandemic and the only way to deal with that is to provide the student-teacher relationships and to perform that in a respectful way so i look forward to the next steps in this process that we can ensure the community that we're doing the best we can to provide a safe welcoming encouraging challenging environment
114for our students that we hear the complaints or the concerns of our parents and our our community and that they know that we're going to respond and take appropriate actions within the realms of our responsibilities there are things we can't share as i know we've had silver conversations that but i have to rest assured and trust in the process that we are going to be making steps as i said we didn't get her overnight but it should be nice to be done by morning but we can only do that with the community and with the parents and the teachers and the staff pulling together that all of them feel that they can contribute all of them feel protected all of them feel safe and then we can march that way so the student will hear
115the student voices i wish i had you guys when i was in school you know we were just told what we were doing and we smiled and marched off you know uh so it's it's a i look at where we are now as a positive beginning of some very positive changes but we've got to as uh matthew says we've got to keep the pedal to the floor and press on thank you thank you all and and i would like to say a lot of things tonight thank you to scott bob glenn all of the technical people that are working behind the scenes for hours to make this first hybrid meeting actually work so thank you very much i know that it's it's not easy and we appreciate all the work that you've done for this
116and our zoom meetings online and always answering technical questions that all of us have i want to thank the principals for sending us your newsletters i think all of us appreciate seeing and hearing what's going on in the schools and what goes out to the students that's been really helpful just as you know as we all get acclimated to what's happening in the schools and thank you to the superintendent for sending out the friday reports that include even the activities that we've got going on through the rest of the year we do have several graduations coming up spring musicals there's all sorts of things and it's nice to see that there's a lot of different athletics clubs musicals and things going on thank you to everybody in the audience for coming to the first in-person
117meeting that we've really had or been able to have in two years it's pretty amazing to me that it's been two years since we've sat here and had a meeting so thank you for that and thank you to all the administrative staff that work so hard to make all of this happen for years you guys have just been doing so much and that's i know the superintendent and i've talked about that several times i've been whether it's the strategic plan that all of you have been focused on you know whether it's your leadership that has been managing to continue on even amidst the backdrop of all of the pandemic and hopefully we are able to get past some of that and really um you know i'm glad that our school district didn't lose focus we've
118been focused on a strategic plan focus on you know what we can do to help with learning and helping our students achieve and that's what i am excited about that we've got a plan and we didn't just wait until things cleared up to get started on something like that thank you to the school board members always i appreciate your time i know how much time it takes i know you guys look into a lot of things you get a lot of different community feedback i appreciate all of the work that you do for the community and thank you to the student representatives please keep using your voice keep asking us the questions you know we need to hear about whatever we can do to make things more involved and more relevant you know this board
119this superintendent would like to listen to that so thank you very much and with that we do not have an executive session this evening there's no reason for us to have one so we can move to item 11 which is adjournment if anyone would like to make a motion to adjourn is there a second to this movement i i guess i'll second that all right that's been moved and seconded all those in favor say aye aye aye guessing no one is opposed all right this meeting is adjourned you