I'm very grateful to be here. I love it. I live in St Louis Park so this is a nice area. I know the area well and Edina has been so warm and welcoming—every single person from the custodians to the front desk to Dr. Stanley to every single person. I've really felt warmly welcomed with my family and kids. So I'm thrilled to be here.

The collaboration that happens in the district is really special. I just left a PTO meeting where I had a student ask me to be a part of his podcast. Can you be in a podcast with me and you can share your leadership with our school? Kudos to the team for empowering the kids to be leaders and to thrive in our district.

I come to you as a former police officer and I'm excited to be here at the Edina Public School District as the new Emergency Management safety coordinator. The creation and formation of this position is a testament to the Safety and Security commitment that the school district has to its staff and students.

It's been a pleasure to be able to get to meet you all and learn a little bit about you as well. I have just thoroughly enjoyed myself onboarding to Edina Public Schools. In a system like Edina there's no stop so you just hit the ground and you start going.

The idea is that teens are going to teach younger Elementary School students all about science and plastics, but really the goal is to engage youth in experiments that address the environmental impact of plastics while also building skills in science and engineering practices.

It was so cool seeing their teen teachers' pedagogies develop throughout the week and kind of figure out how they're going to deliver this material to different students who might have different understandings or interests.

I love teaching the kids about the environment and seeing them see the relationship between the experiments that they did and helping the environment. I thought it was really fun and the kids really enjoyed the experiments and it was a completely new experience for me.

The constant presence of smart devices in classrooms transforms teachers into monitors continually policing these gadgets rather than focusing on their primary educational responsibilities. This distraction not only hampers the teacher's ability to deliver effective instruction but also disrupts the learning process for all students.

Research consistently shows that our young brains are particularly susceptible to the distractions posed by smart devices. The continuous notifications and the allure of social media make it challenging for our students to concentrate on their studies.

Cyberbullying has become a rampant problem with devastating effects on students' mental health. The anonymity provided by digital platforms often emboldens bullies making it easier to harass and demean others. This constant connectivity means that the torment doesn't end when the school day does—it follows children home.

The misconception that having a cell phone makes our children safer needs to be dispelled. While it's comforting to think that immediate contact is always available, the reality is that during school hours children are under the supervision of trained professionals in a controlled environment.

I've had a really good time working on goals and looking over the work that has been done the past three years. I brought goals to the board work session a few weeks ago and now I'm bringing them back embedded with some of the suggestions. There were suggestions about specifically stating the artifacts or measurement items that I would actually bring to the board at the end of the year or maybe for mid-year evaluation.

Thank you for adding the artifacts piece of it. That helps with a lot of clarity for my standpoint. Overall, thank you for the changes.

Thank you again not only for the artifacts but also the clarification I asked last time was where the Strategic initiatives that were a part of the different performance goals. They were there before but in a different sort of labeling. This makes it a little bit clearer for someone like me to be able to see that connection.

I feel like we're instituting and I guess we can call it a protocol, but I feel like we're bringing a policy into our schools before we're necessarily approving it. I don't know if that's the case. I feel like as a board I would like to have maybe talked more about that. The task force was doing great work but we didn't really know anything about that work going on. I would have liked to have more of a robust discussion at the board table considering we'll see things two and three times either in our subcommittees or at work session.

I know I've gotten questions from people in the community, email things like that saying well what's going to happen with this? And not having really a good sense of what that rollout looks like or what that policy looks like. We can call it a procedure, we can call it a policy, it feels a lot like it's a policy. We routinely update our policies and I would like to hear from the board if people have feelings. I feel like we could have had a much more robust discussion on a policy that's really going to impact every building in our district.

Within the framework for MSBA there's the actual goal, the connection to the MSBA standards as well as our strategic plan priorities, and then there's evidence of performance. Under evidence of performance there are benchmarks. That isn't a goal to advise the superintendent. The assistant superintendent to frequently monitor cell phone protocol implementation and ensure the school board receives a detailed report on implementation efforts—that's a benchmark, that's a key indicator of progress that I am moving in the direction toward meeting my goal.

March 15th we are required to have a policy around cell phones in place. It doesn't have to be a separate policy. Right now we have information about cell phones in policy 506 and we have information in cell phones in policy 524. I think it will be up to the policy committee to determine whether or not they want to pull that information out into a separate policy.

You'll remember that in May the board received information from the task force about the recommendations. K-8 cell phones are not to be used—they're away for the day, they will not be in the schools. For 9-12 there would be a three-prong protocol process. There will be times where teachers have students use their cell phones for learning. A teacher may say no cell phones, a teacher may say cell phones during this part of the lesson, or a teacher may say we will be using cell phones all during class.

Edina Public Schools is very committed to the Safety and Security of all students, staff and visitors to our institutions. As a testament to that commitment to Safety and Security, under Dr. Stanley's leadership I was brought on just last month to advance our safety, security and Emergency Management policies, procedures and preparedness throughout the school district.

At the building level we have school or site-specific building emergency response teams which are comprised of school level staff that are not typically classroom-facing staff members. They are our operational component in the schools—they're the boots on the ground, first to respond to incidences or emergencies in our schools.

Throughout the school year, the Edina Public School District adopted the I Love You Guys Foundation standard response protocol. If there was an emergency or any type of incident that occurs within our schools, the first action would be one of these five steps. For each type of incident there's a standard response protocol—from Hold, which is typically students remain in classrooms and business as usual for some kind of maintenance issue or low priority issue, to Secure and Lockdown which have to do with threat response, to Evacuation and Shelter which are common but have to do with formerly called fire drills and tornado drills.

From the I Love You Guys Foundation, the nomenclature and all the words—is that shared with the parents or is that only shared with the staff at this point in time?

The I Love You Guys standard response protocol is a public-facing set of instructions. The Hold, Secure, Lockdown, Evacuation, Shelter is posted publicly throughout our schools. The purpose of it is for students to be familiar with it as they graduate through our system so there's standardization in language. We do have a parent or Guardian-facing document that outlines and highlights the standard response protocols using that same language. We have a website that was created and that was set out to families. We send that out every year and it has videos, it deeply outlines the standard response protocol, goes into the reasons why we're using it, things like that.

If a student sends a text message and says we're in lockdown, that can mean a lot of different things for people but they might only use that one term. So I just didn't know if that was being socialized amongst that.

I wanted to welcome you to our school system and I'm really thrilled that you're here. I also just wanted to let the community know that the fact we're creating this position doesn't mean that there is an elevation in security issues in our district. It's really an indicator about how seriously we take the security of our students and our staff and how important this is and how complex security issues have become in this day and age with cyber issues and things like that.

There's a lot of emergency that happen that I know as a parent my heart always goes to a safety incident with my kiddos at the school. There's a lot of safety things that happen sometimes like toads getting in or smoke or something happening that we're trying to use consistent verbiage. If parents can help us in the partnership between parents and school and the community really understanding the language that we're using and why we might be using some of that language, it can really help us out in understanding what's going on in our school system.

I was wondering what our plan was for communicating this plan and the time around it. I just remember last year I think we communicated in the winter and we have some parents that were confused that we actually were having an e-learning day. So I was just wondering when we were going to communicate the updated plan.

Historically what we've done is once it's approved, principals send that information out in their newsletters to make sure that families have it.

Our negotiation teams work collaboratively and creatively to reach a settlement that both values the important work that they do every day and also respects the school board's financial parameters. We would like to commend our EPASS negotiations team comprised of Doc Kersner, Nancy Canson, Kim Maguire and Patty Lewis for their dedication to this important process.

The financial highlights of the proposed agreement include step advancement for eligible employees in both years of the agreement and retroactive application of the new agreement to July 1, 2024, a 4% improvement to the wage schedule in both years, an increase to the school district's contribution towards single health insurance to better align EPASS to other similarly situated employee groups that will go into effect as of January 1, 2025, and a $25 per month district contribution towards dental insurance as of January 1, 2025.

Thank you both for your work on this and thank you to the EPASS members that served on the committee too for the work on this. This is good work. I just had a general question for my own understanding. I noticed that in the marked up version there was an Appendix B which had an MOU that was taken out. Is that pretty standard practice?

We actually moved some of that language into the contract from the MOU. There was an MOU that specifically talked about a performance incentive based on job duties and performance of EPASS members as evaluated by their supervisor. We did take that language specifically around the performance incentive and put it into the body of the contract. Often MOUs are added to contracts to try something out and then if it is something that's going to continue beyond that first two-year term, then you look at moving it into the body of the contract. In this particular case it had been there for at least two or probably three rounds. We looked at it and it seemed to be working. We're going to tweak some of the performance requirements and we talked that through with our negotiations team and then moved the specifics about the incentive into the body of the contract.

You will notice we had no policies up for discussion this month. The policies that are before you for action have been no changes to these policies since they were reviewed and up for discussion at the July 8th meeting.

I just want to give a shout out to our Community Education Program. They held programming that had 8,000 students in programs this summer which was absolutely incredible. I had a chance to attend a few classes and the classes were absolutely outstanding with high engagement with students. I'm just really proud of them for their growth with their programs.

School will start before we know it and we have our Band Together Night on August 22nd and all of the proceeds for that goes towards supporting our mental health efforts in the district. They have quite a few wonderful bands that are scheduled to perform and I'm just really encouraging the community to come out and join us as we work to support the mental health efforts in our schools.