Um what I always talk about with had talked about with my students is that equity is not everybody getting the same thing but everybody getting what they need in order to succeed.

75% of our budget is allocated in some way. The state dictates how we go about spending it and we have a lot of unique and diverse u uh needs in Colombia Heights and we're not able to uh address that.

Um, MCA's I think about if you think about academic achievement as a book, MCAs are really a page in that book. And if you don't look at the rest of the story, it's really hard to understand what's happening there.

but wherever you are on that uh what happened during operation uh Metro Surge, you can't uh justify um the methods that they used and and coming onto school property or being near school property, following kids, um you know, going after some of of our students here. It's just not the way to do it.

I mentioned I have a spouse who teaches in the district and when he was first teaching, not in this district, but his first couple years teaching, I we had I bought him a kit for his classroom, a rope ladder, a doors stopper, bandages, and the reality of thinking that he might actually need to use that is terrifying.

One thing that I know for sure is that if students don't feel safe, students don't learn. And so there was a lot of learning that could not happen even after um the surge sort of uh died down.

When we lose as a district almost $4 million in a district our size, that's not something that we're able to reallocate or cut our way out of. We talk about trying to keep cuts outside of classrooms or far away from the classroom as possible. and we can't continue to do that.

I am in support of that because I feel like that uh their ask is reasonable. What I will say in the broader picture, and this is where I always come back to for people, is those that are on the fixed incomes, those that are in low incomes, I worry about because while we're asking for this, and we have to ask, the cities and the counties don't have to ask you.

Just to give you kind of like a global perspective, that's like what it costs to like the staffing for an entire school in our district. That's what we're talking about when we're talking about this this amount of funds.

AI is increasingly being used in the workforce and our students on some level will be expected to know how to manage that technology. At the same time, um AI as we know uh creates uh many concerns around uh intellectual property. This the the stealing of intellectual property.

But if you're a parent out there and you're looking for a school and say well which school should I pick? This is what worries me. Uh this year Columbia Heights High School math proficiency is 9.9%. Reading 25. science 8.7.

And thinking critically is going to be the thing that's going to get them very far. And AI can be that thing that can assist that, but it also could be that thing that that um disables them from being able to access those parts of their brain.

when we have threequarters of our district uh budget that we can't even move around, we need to tell our state legislators, so those that are running for state house and state senate, ask them, ask your governor candidate, will you give an independent school district more flexibility to actually allow us to do the diversity that we actually want to do in our district? Let us be independent.

I fundamentally do not understand the desire to use legal protections as a shield to be cruel, to bully children or to pass policies that institutionalize cruelty. While we failed when we fail to support our students, the consequences are devastating. It is a heartbreaking reality that LGBTQ plus youth face some of the highest rates of self harm in our country.

Our students and our parents uh continuously uh report on all of our climate surveys that they feel safe at school, that they feel that they belong at school, and not just a majority. Um, over 90 95% uh in some cases depending on the population you're looking at.

What I know from research and from my experience as an educator is that creating spaces of belonging um providing social emotional learning opportunities to support students um understanding emotions, understanding how to talk about them, identify them, be able to um empathize with other people, be able to talk out um problems are going is that's going to be a much greater um safety measure than armed officers or any of those things in a school building.

I think it's also important that uh they have a good relationship with the school leaison officer. Uh because it's important that uh students that their only interaction uh with the police officer is not when they're having um when they're in trouble, but that uh that they can uh have uh that relationship with uh our community, including our our uh our police in a productive way.

I do believe that the best way to protect our buildings and protect our kids is making sure that no one is left to struggle in the shadows.

We really do need to pass this this levy coming up here. It's going to be tough enough to trim a million dollars out of the budget even when it passes. Um, so I I can't I can't say much more. This really is a hard question because there really there isn't there isn't much left meat left. There's no meat left on the bone.

Insufficient funding impacts everything from academic growth and success, the interventions we can provide, class sizes, curricular offerings, uh workload and burnout of our staff and recruitment and retention to the district. So it really does impact every single part of our mission and everything we're trying to advance.

any kind of a cut that I'd be looking at, I would make sure that it wouldn't be shortsighted. So, I know Laura was mentioning about uh band and I remember and she's been on the board long enough to remember we've had at one point we did a fifth grade band uh cut and that was shortsighted. Uh it destroyed the viability of the music program for years after that.