Well, good afternoon. Thank you for everyone that uh has chosen to come here. We're going to go ahead and get started. Uh I need to start on time because I have to get to a board meeting event uh at 6:00. And for those who don't know me, I just introduced myself. I'm Superintendent Michael Bowman. And again, thank you for coming. I do want to start by saying that your students are the heart of our district and that is not lost on any of us who work uh tirelessly to try to do the right things uh for our community in this district. We want to help them succeed academically, socially, civically, and personally as they come through our system and move on to their next stages of life. and it's the entire reason that we're here. Now, I'm charged with helping each student succeed through a strategic lens. I have to look at the whole district and the whole community. That's what I'm responsible for, which means it's important to ensure that our system is set up adequately to support students and staff. The reality of Lakeville [clears throat] today, I've lived in Lakeville since 2005. Um, I've been in the district since 2013 and our reality is that we're a growing district. Um, and that's a challenge. That's a a challenge for us to be able to deal with new housing as it's being built and it's being built at a rapid pace. I think as the economy adjusts, uh, that pace also adjusts. The school district has no role in determining how much or how fast new housing is going to be built in our city. But we have to respond to that. And this district is responsible for responding as best that we can with the resources that we have and to deal with enrollment increases that occur because of this growth. Which is why we are recommending changes to our elementary and middle school attendance areas for the next year. And I recognize that there's a feeling many of you have that it's not fair and that your children have that your children have to move. And you're right. It is not fair. That said, I have to deal with the realities of what we're faced with. And I'm going to walk through some some more details about that so that I can maybe connect the dots and the story of of how things uh have progressed to where we are now. I recognize that there's a feeling many of you have uh beyond that it's not fair, but it's not equitable either. And we're trying to get to the right uh situation in our district so that we can get a little more stable as a community. I know that I'm accountable to you and that I'm accountable to the students for the outcomes of this process. And it's my goal to be fully transparent with you. And over the course of the next hour, we want to answer as many of the questions that were submitted to us via the RSVP form and get to as many of those as possible so that you can leave tonight with a little bit more clarity. So, one of the biggest questions you have is how did we get here? How is it that we keep doing this boundary adjustment scenario and the adjustments are here today and and we want to discuss this and it's part of a continuing process. Uh I departed the district in 2022 and and retired and then the following year um we were getting in a stance to open High View Elementary School. And whenever you open a new school, you're going to have to do boundary adjustments. And I think that was the start point for much of this challenge that we're faced with. During the 2324 school year, the district utilized a consulting company named Teamworks to guide the district through uh what the process was going to be. And it included data review and feedback collection from internal leadership and a working group of community representatives. And they also collected information via surveys from the entire community. We have all that information. We archived that. I when I returned to the district, I reviewed that um very carefully. Ultimately, that process narrowed down uh to two potential solutions. the school board chose a model that was not recommended by administration and that was a very difficult situation to walk into. Um, and that put High View in [clears throat] a situation where it opened at a greater occupancy than I think made made sense for us long term and at that time it was known that the additional changes to attendance areas would be needed shortly thereafter. Following that decision, growth in the area of the community serving High View Elementary and Century Middle School occurred rapidly. So during the 2425 school year, and that is the year that I returned to the district, uh principles and district leaders met to review the updated data and determine possible solutions. An initial proposal was brought to the school board on m March of 25 and that was to make smaller changes just to the area surrounding Century and High View. Ultimately in June after several iterations of refinement an option was approved by the school board that only made changes in the Century and High View attendance areas where houses were not yet occupied or construction wasn't completed. administration was charged by the school board at that time to develop a solution that would be stabilizing for the district and capable of assimilating the anticipated growth as we move forward. So that leads us to this year where we are at in which uh we have century that's over capacity and we have high view that is beyond 100% capacity and I think uh some of you may be aware that we've had to convert some spaces that weren't intended for classrooms into classroom space and that's not a um that's not a sustainable situation for us. All of our assessments uh with regard to filling a building, 85% of building fill is about the tolerance you can have in order to function as buildings are designed. And again, principles and district leaders were convened to review the updated data. We looked at the historical data and future projections and ultimately have to make a recommendation to support the needs of our students and staff across the system. Now, I want to be clear that although all historical data and feedback was reviewed, the district isn't working with a vendor or a third-party consultant or any external consulting firms on this process. Um, so I am the sole person who's responsible for what the staff team has put together and I didn't spend 607 $80,000 to figure it out. I took all the data that we already had. I looked at the situation, worked with my staff team. We did the analysis of projections on numbers. We triangulated that using uh a demographer, our internal uh person who does enrollment counts and does that very accurately and a third party um who um also does school finance demography and we triangulated that to come up with our current projection. Uh having three sources I think is um gives us the best validation of what our projections are for our community. The planning criterion objectives were reviewed by the school board this past November. An initial pro uh proposal was brought to the school board in December. And we've requested that the school board make a final determination at their meeting on January 13th so that the district can plan staffing requirements. Everything that occurs in a school district, if it's finance or staffing, is predicated on enrollment. So where are the kids in our buildings, at what grade level are they? so that we can make sure that um we have the um teachers necessary to deliver our teaching and learning models to our students. Our goal is to work this process so that current teachers know where they will be and where they will be teaching next year. And we do that at the end of February, early March to optimize selection opportunities and allow us to retain and attract a high quality staff which we think is very important for our students and for our community. The data we used is based on current enrollment numbers which are the only hard numbers and projections are based on assessments from internal staff and as I said two external demographers. We feel these provide us with solid picture of what we look like now and what we look like over the next 36 to 60 months. And I'm aware that there were several surveys sent to families in 2324 school year about boundary adjustments process including seeking the community's preference between the final two options. While we're not sending district-wide surveys in this round, I hope you will see in the adjustments that have been made to our maps that we are reviewing your feedback and have been able to make some changes to reduce impact. Ultimately, this decision has to be made based on balancing our enrollment and accomplishing our strategic objective, which is to uh balance out our elementary schools, not have overconentration in any one, and be able to assimilate the growth we're going to have in our middle schools. So, I'm going to hand off uh an opportunity here for our executive director of operations, Lucas Yoho, to walk through uh what the updated recommendations are, and I'll come back here shortly. Thank you. >> All right. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Lucas Yo. I'm the executive director of operations uh for the school district. uh primarily responsible for leading this effort under the direction of the superintendent. Uh we're going to go over some of the proposed adjustments here. Uh and and if and if you've been monitoring this closely, you know that this has changed slightly from our first iteration. And really we did that based on the feedback from the community as well as some direction from uh the school board to go back and look at uh a few things. So, if you look here to the left, there's the map uh that that lays out where the attendance areas are proposed uh for the elementary school level. Um and if you look down here to the bottom right, you'll see at the left hand side, uh that would be the um attendance or enrollment, if you will, occupancy of each of our schools if if uh the the attendance areas remain unchanged. And I would just kind of highlight, you know, uh, High View Elementary, for example, would go up to over 107%. So really that's the strongest indicator based on our project projected enrollment that we definitely need to make a change uh in our attendance areas. So we went through that process as the superintendent has laid out. And if you look over here to the right, you'll see that we've balanced each of the schools based on whether it's a high growth area. For example, High View would be considered a high growth area. Uh if you go out walk outside the front of High View, you can see houses being built right around High View Elementary. Uh so that is a a high growth area. So we've brought that down uh considerably to uh ensure that we have enough room uh for that growth. And then we also have some other high growth areas. Uh Lake uh uh Lake Marian Elementary for example and then uh Cherry View Elementary. All the schools there in the northeast are considered in a high growth area. And then we've moved those students to our more low growth areas kind of the central uh part of the school district uh to ensure that uh we have room in our high growth areas. Uh so what we did here also is uh go to the next slide. Oh no back one please. Okay. So what we did here is you know based on the second iteration we were able to reduce uh the number of total movers from 605 down to 568 and then the number of multiple movers uh from 228 down to 160. Uh and so that was a good refinement that we've we've were able to accomplish. And then looking at that total aggregate, it's 11% at the elementary level um of total students and then two 5% uh for the total district. So um not a a large amount but still uh an amount to be moved multiple times. And then all the demographics that were required by statute uh are within the prescribed tolerances here uh in the um current proposal. Let's go to the next slide. All right. So, here's the middle schools. Middle schools um um you know, even with these adjustments, our middle school students are still beyond that ideal occupancy of 85%. So, again, if you look to the left hand side here, if if nothing has changed, you'll have Century Middle School at 103% almost 103% uh and then uh Ken Kenwood Trail at 85% and then Magguire at 80%. So definitely have a capacity problem uh that we're going to address through some proposed middle school expansions. Uh but then of course, you know, we do have a slight concentration problem and we do want to provide some relief uh to that school, specifically Century Middle School. And so you see the proposed um attendance area there to the left in terms of the map. [clears throat] So, it's really bringing a lot of the western side of the district into Meguire Middle School uh and then a little bit of chunk of the norththeast uh portion of the district from Century to Kinwood Trail just really to provide some relief to uh the middle schools here. Let's go to the next slide. Okay. So, here is so the last slide was what we call mic one, middle school one proposal. So, that's what we're requesting that the board approve uh on the 13th of January. But in anticipation of expanding our capacity at each of our middle schools and really try to to balance out uh the enrollment at each of our schools, we're proposing in the future uh what we call Mike 2 here and continuing to expand um McGuire Middle School's uh attendance area up and more aligned with Lake uh with uh Lakeville South High School. So that will remain some alignment there. Again, this is just proposed at this point, but really uh we built uh mic one based on mic 2 just to make sure that we're not incre, you know, we're not creating multiple movers uh in the future. And you can see there once we build that capacity, it's going to drop CMS CMS's occupancy down to 68% which is great. And then Magguire Middle School will be at 72. And then with Kinwood Trail being a very low growth area, we'll try to keep that between 80 and 85% uh based on projected enrollment. Okay. All right. So, there are a lot of questions uh regarding uh what path the students would follow either to north or south high schools and we hear your desire to ensure students have peers who will transition with them to the middle and high schools. As you can see here, um, you know, with the growth in our district and the geographic location of our schools, it's really not possible to make every elementary transition entirely into the same middle school. However, students will have several of their classmates continuing along with them to the next school. So, you could see those splits from the elementary to middle on the left, and then you can see those splits uh from middle to high school on the right. And that really remains fairly unchanged with CMS going 100% to the Lakeville North and Maguire going to Lakeville South and then Kenwood Trail remaining split. [snorts] Okay. So, what I'm going to do now is kind of go through kind of the decision making considerations that we've had uh you know during this whole process. Let's go to the next slide. Okay. So you see here, here is where our current elementary schools uh capacity or correction enrollment is at each of our schools. Again, High View being uh at 106% and then we have some schools that are down at like 60%. So Christine Huddleston, for example, at 59.3 and East View at 62.6%. So it's really a concentration problem uh in the northeast of our school district. And also noting that we don't have a capacity problem because across the district we're only at 76.6% full. So really we just need to rebalance um our elementary school enrollments uh across the district and our proposal has done that. Let's go to the next slide. So here uh with the middle schools you really have two problems. You have a capacity problem. So we have too many middle school students and not enough seats. Uh we also have slightly a concentration problem with Century Middle School there in the northeast. And so we're tackling that really through two ways. One, expanding our middle schools. The board's approved us to go to a bond referendum for that in May. So we're going to do that. That should give us increased capacity and solve our capacity problem. And then with some small modifications to the attendance areas, we are, you know, ensuring that our schools are balanced um across the district. Okay. And really this slide here just kind of lays out and really explains or demonstrates where our growth areas are in the district. So that's a picture of our district there and you can kind of see some of the schools and if you look at where all those boxes are really northeast and southwest is where we're going to see our future growth uh in terms of new housing developments. Uh and so that's kind of where we focused our high growth schools is in the northeast and to a lesser extent in the southwest. We've worked very closely with both the Lakeville uh city planners and the Elco new market city planners to kind of get this data and we review that periodic periodically with them to make sure that we can see future developments uh that are coming online. Let's see. Okay. So, how do we decide what right looks like? Uh, in order to accommodate that future growth without having to make significant changes, we align those areas to grow low and low growth and growth areas. Okay. So, once a school gets to 85% capacity, that's when it it becomes full. All right. And so, what we try to do is maintain uh our schools at 80 to 85%. uh that keeps them adequately staffed and full but not too full to where um our students and our our principles feel overwhelmed and we can't uh achieve our learning outcomes. Let's go next slide. Okay, so here's the objectives and criteria that we use to determine our um our proposed uh attendance areas. Okay, we wanted to ensure that we have long-term growth. Um and so that kind of goes back to where I explained about high growth and low growth areas. Um we want to make sure that we're maintaining a diverse and balanced student student body. So by statute we have some requirements there to make sure that uh we are socially racially um you know balanced and we making sure that we have a good cross-section of both general education uh and special education. And then we want to make sure lastly that our students and our staff can maintain those daily desired experiences. Okay. And then of course there are some challenges uh to that uh is is really how do we maintain that long-term growth uh and that's by balancing our attendance areas to make sure that they are properly sized and so that we have room for growth. The other challenges we have is a a diverse student body. we have students of uh across our school district and we need to make sure that they are balanced and sometimes they are concentrated in certain areas. So that really affects the way that our attendance areas are shaped. Uh and then again you know making sure that our schools are in the right spot uh and that we have um you know all the right tools you know necessary to ensure that those daily experiences can be met you know through properly sized facilities and attendance areas. Okay. So, here's a good example of, you know, one of the issues that we see is, you know, we get a lot of complaints about, well, I can see my school from my house, but I'm going to a different school. So, you know, most of our schools, especially at the elementary level, are very close together. Uh, as you can see there to the left in the north, you have a lot of the schools are really within one mile or less of each other. Uh and then in the south again they're really, you know, within 1.5 miles of each other. So that makes it really difficult to have our attendance area centered around each of our schools. And then it makes it really difficult, you know, in terms of where do we draw those boundaries to make sure that, you know, we have some semblance of neighborhood schools and you're not um you know, you don't live next to a school and not go to the school. So that's kind of just demonstrates if you kind of take a a district-wide picture or look at this that, you know, kind of presents some of the problems that we have in our school district. We want to get this right. So in order to achieve that, accommodate that future growth without having to make significant changes, we need to make sure they're geographically aligned. Uh the areas of low growth and growth, um this is what why you see some some neighborhoods moving into schools while others are moving out of those schools. We believe this is the best way to accommodate that future growth. We have several We have received several concerns that we seem to be prioritizing future students over current. We are trying to do right by all of our students and set the district system up for future success and long-term uh stability. It would not be appropriate to not to not try to provide the best possible teaching and learning environment for our students. The only way to remedy to the current situation we are in is to rem is to move current students. Uh we would not recommend that if we didn't have to, but is absolutely necessary. All right. We cannot fully eliminate multiple movers either and achieve our strategic objective to balance current enrollment and prepare for future growth. However, we have refined a proposal to reduce the number of multiple movers uh by 30% at the elementary level. Additionally, there are many very large subdivisions. individual perceptions of a neighborhood tend to be based on their personal experience of who their kids play with, whether it's across the street, across the backyard, or down the road. We have worked to keep subdivisions together whenever possible. We use a Dakota County uh GIS uh mapping to ensure that we are um you know moving subdivisions together uh to the greatest extent possible. Safety and transportation were considered in our process and we do consult with our transportation partner about the phys feasibility of our bus routes and there were no concerns about increasing costs or being able to safely transport our students uh to school based on these new proposals. Uh there are currently priority guidelines for interdist transfers. These are currently available on the website and information about how to intist transfer will be provided once a decision is made about the attendance areas and there's those there. Okay. Uh and in terms of our special education population, we are monitoring that closely with our special education team. All right. >> Okay. And so what we're going to do with intra district transfers is we if you are a multiple mover, you are going to be allowed to submit an intradist transfer and apply for that. And then based on the thresholds and capacity uh of each of our elementary or each of our schools, we'll go ahead and assign based on the current process that we use. We will add additional students where we can and when we can. All right. We have not determined where exactly to put that prioritization in terms of the pri the district prioritization list. Uh once the board approves the school uh attendance areas, we will uh go through a planning process to kind of integrate that in and then we will publish that uh for your use as well. Okay. So special education. So bottom line, we we're monitoring our special education population closely. Um our resource um model will continue. they will be subject to move. But if you're a center based, if you have a center-based uh student and a center-based uh uh support, then they will remain there uh just like we do now. And if you are concerned, uh special education will offer uh affected families and IEP meetings so we can ensure a smooth transition and then answer any questions for you with that. Okay, at this time I'll go ahead and I will turn this back over to Mike. Just so everybody knows too, we will uh provide these charts for you uh email. Is that correct? Um because I know people want to maybe study them a little bit closer. Um and I'll just go back to sharing. I do understand that this is hard and I do care about our students and I do want them to do well. Our students are who we are as a system. Our teachers are who we are as a system. And we're going to do everything we can to help with transitions. A comprehensive plan is in is uh in development. I'm working with our principles to make sure that we have the right openhouse events, that opportunities for school tours are provided. Principles are going to work to review student classroom placements. There are counselors at all our schools who will be engaged to support students. There will be overall support for transitioning students as well as opportunities for individualized support for students who may have additional needs. Resources for parents to support your children through these big transitions. Again, our mission is academic, social, civic, and personal readiness. The social and personal support is a critical component of what we do and we have not forgotten that in our process. We will do everything that we can to help our students be resilient and successful and I am sure that uh we will be uh challenged on that matter and I'm trying to stand up for that challenge uh so that we are ready. I do wish I could uh tell you there is something different that can be done. Um there are refinements and we are open to that. What I can say is that I assess that the plan we have presented here and will present to the school board uh does meet our strategic objective to balance enrollment among our schools and prepare us to accommodate growth without significant changes each and every year going forward. We have to stabilize our system. Our We have to stabilize our system from the opening of High View Elementary. That has not been accomplished. Our enrollment is growing and that's being driven by decisions um that are outside of the school district's control. Um but we have to respond to those and we're partnering with our cities and trying to understand and see the picture um on an ongoing basis when it comes to additional school space that we uh need. We do need more middle school space. The projections do not show a need for a fourth middle school. Several years back it was trending that way. Then I think the economy slowed and our projections had to be adjusted and they don't indicate that we need a fourth middle school. Uh projections for the elementary level indicate that we have enough space among our elementary schools and that once attendance areas are addressed the imbalances occurring because of the concentration uh issue that we have will uh we will have the space that we need for the foreseeable future. And we can anticipate that down the road additional space may be needed at the high school level. And at this time we do not see a need to do uh or to change our attendance areas for our high schools. We think that's fairly balanced when you have two schools. It's um not so complicated. But we will continue to review attendance areas on an annual basis. Uh this gets to the question of stability. While there is some level of uncertainty that comes with territory being a growing district, our goal is to provide your students the stability that they deserve. We haven't done that over the last 3 years. As uh I think everybody here is is aware and frustrated with stability is what we believe this plan can accomplish. This should provide us with our and our community with plenty of notice uh to be aware of changes that may be needed down the road and proactively plan to address those changes with the least impact to our students as possible. If you could, I'd like you to go back to the chart that shows our proposed elementary percentages. So, this is this is essentially uh the the key element of our problem. on the left is what we look like right now. And when you have 107% in one school and 59% in another, uh, and you go across and see that the the balancing there is not correct. On the right is where we will land. And uh if we use the 85% goal, we're going to have all of our schools [clears throat] below that, which is is intended to create that stability because we will continue to grow. We know this from conversations with both uh city planners in Elco New Market and in Lakeville. We have to create that condition in our system. If we do not create that condition in our system, we'll be playing that game on the right every single year and it's not it's not good for our community. And I say that as a member of our community. So I hope you can see that that's my case. That's my concern. What I walked into is on the left. this is where we need to go and so that we can stop doing that which is I think the most important thing that people tell me we got to quit doing this. Yes, we need to quit doing this. So um anyway I I do want to say thank you for coming. I do want to also uh tell you that you'll get these charts. If you don't get the charts directly um get a hold of communications department but we will get these out to everybody so that you have um you have the charts and can study them further. Again I just I thank you for your kind attention and um ask you to support what you can and if you have uh concerns please continue to send them. Uh, I know the school board gets them, I get them, and we're trying to look at each and every one of them. So, thank you very much.