Yeah. Okay. Go. Okay. All right. Good evening. It is 6:31 and I'm going to call this study session of the St. Park School Board to order. Um before we get going, I'm going to read the land acknowledgement. We are gathered on the land of Dakota and Ojiway peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Dakota Nojiway community, their elders, both past and present, as well as future generations. St. Louis Park Public Schools also acknowledges that it was founded upon exclusions and erasers of many indigenous peoples, including those on whose land this school district is located. This acknowledgement demonstrates a commitment to dismantling the ongoing legacies of colonial power and a district's desire to support the ongoing work of local indigenous communities to thrive in our schools. All right. Um for our agenda tonight, this as this we've talked about this is a study session. So we're not voting on anything. We're just getting some updates on things. So um we have the first thing is an update on our CI on our continuous improvement plans. We have budget discussion talking about fiscal year 2025 and 2026 and we have a first reading of policy 715 and then we're going to talk a little bit about city commission's seat restructure. So with that, let's bring up um our guest here to talk about 3A which is our update on the school year 25 site goals and preliminary planning for school year 26 continuous improvement plan. Our presenter is Dr. Lafayette and so I will turn it over to her and she can take it from here. All right. All right. Good evening, Chair Cox, Superintendent Dr. Hines, members of the board, and cabinet. My name is Sylvia Lafayette. I'm the director of assessment research and evaluation. And I am just here to uh welcome and reintroduce our site leaders who will be giving us an update on this year's continuous improvement plan. Um, as a reminder to our community, so our principles were here back in February and we described how our continuous improvement planning process has about four stages. We plan around this time of the year to think about next year. We implement strategies throughout the year and then at this point of the year for next year, we will be evaluating how well those plans went. For this presentation tonight, our site leaders will be giving us an update on this current year's uh continuous improvement plans and site goals. Just as a reminder to our community, our continuous improvement planning process this year has been revamped. So we were in year one of beginning in the spring to prepare our continuous improvement planning goals. In August, our leaders will be finalizing SIP goals for the school year 2026 with their leadership teams. And then in September, they will be seeking approval for their SIP goals and then planning to communicate them to families at schools. And then monthly, just like we did this past year, we will have monthly data team meetings and principalled learning walks that are supported by our teaching and learning team at the district level. Uh, also as a reminder to our community for our SIP goal plan itself, we ask our sites to create one care team goal for the school year and up to two smart academic goals. That doesn't mean that there's only two or three things that they're working on. That means that these are precise data points that we try to measure to see if the activities that we have worked on throughout the year are getting us the results that we want in terms of our SIP goals. And then the fourth goal is usually a building culture andor a climate family engagement goal. So without further ado, I will be inviting our site leaders up to give us an update on last year's goal beginning with Kim Rashold for our early learning program. Good evening. I'm Kim Russell. I'm the Kids Place preschool supervisor and I'm here representing all of Early Learning this evening. Um, our SID goal was by August of 2025 to develop and implement a formal MTSS process at Central Early Learning Center. It's continuing to be an ongoing process. But what we did do was do a lot of professional development on our tier one instruction to make sure that that was really strong and ready to go and ready for the next step. So uh the leaders in early childhood will be attending the compass training to help us continue with developing and implementing our MTSS process. So for care team this year we focused on identity identity of ourselves in our first round and then identity of the children in the second round. We um gathered input from our families and we actually created two art projects with local artists so that we can put them in our building. One was at the winter meltdown and it was a painting activity um which was amazing and the other one was part of our Earth Day and you can actually see that one. We're still working on getting the winter meltdown ready to be hung but the one on the Earth Day is actually in the front entrance of our building. So, um we also worked a lot on alignment. We visited kindergarten this spring. We will continue to work on alignment with kindergarten in the next year. And um we are we changed our care like presentation process this year which made it much more um teacher friendly meaning everyone had to participate because we made it a round table and we took different areas from different programs and put those people together and then everyone had to share in the time about their cares. So everyone got a chance to participate and share rather than just being a presentation. It made it much more meaningful for them and we will continue that next year. Any questions for me? Should we do questions as they present? Any questions? I guess I had one on the previous slide. next year uh looking at creating an MTSS team. Is that right? Um what is an MTSS team made up of and what would be the function of an MTSS team? So the MTSS team would have um someone from our community or families. It would have a teachers on it assistants. It would have someone from administration on it. And basically it's designed to if there is something going on with a child that everyone has a chance to be a part of the discussion as to what we are going to do to support that child and that family not just the child but the family as well. Thank you. Can I just a very quick followup? It says on here that you were anticipating having this in place for August. Is that still a realistic timeline? Uh, no. We were going to continue on it next year, like the actual process and the team putting it together. So, we focus really on the tier one um teaching, which is really the core or the the bottom tier of the MTSS is our teaching practices and meeting children where they are. Mhm. Yes. Well, appreciative of that. I think I'm always appreciative that um we've always had a strong early learning program here and I know we've been making lots of strides sort of continue to bring it into the fold here and make sure that it's aligning that that feeds into nicely into our elementary schools and um and that we're being as serious quote unquote about early learning as we would any other area. So, really appreciative of that. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Hello. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Um, and I apologize for coming in a little bit late. My daughter turned 21 yesterday and she was in Duth. She came home as I was leaving. So, I took the opportunity to hug her and like sniff her as parents do. Um, so I'm also really happy. Maybe other parents don't do that. I do that. Um, I'm really happy for the opportunity that we have to share our progress on our continuous improvement plans, which is something that Dr. Hines and Dr. Lafayette and Dr. Robinson have really um given us the chance to do. And so I know we had the opportunity to share um midway through the year and I'm excited to to tell you some results that we can share and then just give you some news about uh results that we can't share. So just to review um as we headed into the year we really wanted to as a team across uh Aquilla we wanted to focus on um building our muscle meeting and exceeding the ME standards for students. So that's something that we hadn't been focused on. So that was our sitewide care goal and every grade level had care goals that reflected that directly. So that's our first goal. Our second goal was a specific literacy goal goal that focused on increasing our grade three through five reading proficiency from 49.33% to 52% based on our MCA data. And so you'll see that we have some early inklings about that, but that data is still embargoed. So we won't be able to fully share that. Similarly, our um our mathematics goal was based on our MCA performance. Um and we have we have some inklings on that as well but can't fully share that. And then our culture and climate goal we are able to share those results. So um looking forward to sharing those with you forward. Do I advance? Oh okay. Right on. Um so our first goal is our care team smart goal which um is similar across elementary sites. So, as you as you hear these um our staff, as with all um site staffs, completed two care cycles and then shared their findings and suggestions at our staff meetings. Um and so those care cycles, care researches, collaborative action research for equity. um those are based on focal students and what we can do to move our students specifically moving students that we're focused on but also moving all students. Um and so our findings gave us some things that we could do and I just have included a few here or we just have in included a few here although there are a lot of findings that we are now acting on. So, um, some changes that directly related to the work that was done across our site. Um, we're regrouping students using our collaborative classroom mastery assessments. This is kind of a big deal for us because it's our second year of implementation. Um, and we hadn't been consistently and successfully using these mastery assessments because we didn't really know how and now we do. So, we've had great guidance there. Um, as a site, Aquilla had 33 teachers participating in letters training. So that's directly related to uh the legislative um mandate but something that our teachers or and something that our teachers also found really helpful. So letters training is based on the science of reading um and is really about using morphology um and phone names to help students acquire acquire reading acquire the the the need the what am I trying to say like the building blocks the need for reading. So very different from whole language or things that we've had in the past. So, we've been leveraging that as a site for just a deeper understanding of how to use the data that we collect because and you've probably heard Dr. Lafayette say this, but we can have all of the data, but if we're not interpreting it correctly or using it to the best result for our students, like it's useless. So, this letters training really helped our staff to have an understanding of how to use the fast bridge or curriculum based measures um data to move our students. Um it also changed how we use SIPs intervention. So SIPs is an extension of collaborative classroom and it's a tier three intervention. Uh but it changed how we are thinking of it. Um so that that was another intervention. And then I want to just really thank Dr. Robinson for this because prior to this year we had our um nurses and our OT we had all everyone doing care work but we didn't have everyone sharing care work. And Dr. Robinson made that request like let's have everyone share their care work and what we found. So this this last thing has to do with the care work that our nurse um Danielle Kerry did. And at Aquilla we are lucky to be a site that welcomes families that are new to the United States. That's who we are and we love it. But what we discovered is that we didn't have a systematized process for welcoming families and ensuring that they have those basic things. basic access to health care, other resettlement resources. And so the care work that um that Mi Miss Carrie did was based on that and it has shifted our practices and so that's something that we can offer to other sites should they need it. And we had a lot uh a lot more changes that directly related, but these are the ones that we just wanted to highlight tonight. So we definitely met that goal of completing two care cycles and then utilizing what we learned from those care cycles to better the experience of our students and also our families which is something that I know that we are focused on as a district and is directly in line with our mission and vision. Our second goal um we are not able to completely report on. It does not look according to our preliminary MCA data that we met that goal of successfully increasing our third through math grade reading proficiency. However, I want to highlight that um within that work, we have all of our students. We were able to exit eight students from multilingual learning services this year, which is a a huge gain for us at Aquilla as a site that has the most students of any elementary, second only to the high school who access MLL services. And if you think about that proportionally, we have 116 students. I believe the high school has 166. And just in terms of our um total population, we have 512 kids and the high school has, I think, close to 2,000. So we have that as a mandate and a responsibility to ensure that we are sending our students forward if they're accessing um English or learning to speak speak English as a third, fourth or fifth language for some of our kids, sending them forward able to access curriculum. Um, and so in terms of our literacy data, I it doesn't look as though we met the MCA goal, but we we are moving. Um, and with the care work that was mentioned on the previous slide with the suggestions that came, some that were listed and some that weren't, we are confident that we can continue to move our kids. And we know that we have to continue to move our kids because that is our goal. But our goal, we know that education is liberation here in St. Louis Park. So that's our goal to make sure that all kids have access to that liberatory narrative. Um our third goal was to increase our math proficiency. It doesn't look as though we hit that but again we are working towards that and my hope is that as we continue this process of reporting on our continuous improvement plans to the board and to our community. I'll be able to say Aquilla met its goal or we're this much closer to meeting our goal. Currently our data is embargoed. Um, but I believe that we are we are well in hand in the process of meeting that goal. And I'm sorry that director Ibrahim is not here tonight because I loved using this picture of of him and Omar. Um, and then our last goal was to ensure that we had systematic facilitation of lessons and continued practice around self-regulation and identifying the size of a problem. What we know as a district as that is that social emotional learning is a foundational skill that all students and adults have to have if they want to be able to successfully access and absorb the learning that we're offering the academic learning. And so uh we were very lucky this year we had a team including our restorative practices coordinator uh Mr. Graham who was honored yes or honored this this morning wasn't yesterday at Algar our field finale the days are blending right um including myself um assistant principal Tolene um both of our social workers uh John Vivikananda and Jesse Casease just ensuring that we are delivering lessons to students. So these lessons were delivered beginning with K12 at the beginning of the year utilizing zones of regulation which we use across elementary sites. So for students to be able to identify how they're feeling and what they might need um after the work based on the student survey that was sent out what um social workers Vivacananda and case found was that students reported feeling more equipped to deal with bullying to identify do I walk away who is my upstander who can help me in this situation. um comfort, reaching out for help. And this is kind of a big deal because across our school, it it takes a lot of courage to know which adult or older student or other students in your class you can ask for help. Students are reporting that they are comfortable doing that. Um we observed increased kindness and students also reported observing increased kindness throughout our school environment. Um I believe that Aquilla is a really welcoming place. And it's a great thing for me as an adult leading the school to believe that, but when our students report that, um, it hits differently. So, that's that's a huge one for us. And then increase strategies to help themselves and peers handle bullying. I I don't and I'm usually aware of everything that happens involving bullying. We don't have a lot of issues with bullying at Aquilla. I I believe that Aquilla is a place where we invite students and staff and community members to show up as their full selves and we celebrate that. Um and within that we've offered students opportunities to learn about and absorb these ways to to identify things that shouldn't be happening to them um and to to deal with them th those things um with their peers and by themselves. So this one we we definitely feel as though we met. This though I should mention was a a base goal. So we're using this as base data because um we haven't consistently had uh two social workers or a social worker and a counselor. Not because our district didn't provide that, but just because we couldn't find folks to meet those needs or to fill those positions, but this year we did. Um and so this is our baseline data. So I I believe we can only go forward from here and that enables students to access the learning um even even more completely. I don't have another slide, but I'll get it ready for Corey and I'm happy to answer any questions. Oh, I don't have a question. I just um was happy to see that you're systematizing the process because I believe when um director uh Williams and I visited there um Phil talked about it. Yeah. And then I think I also recall um right didn't you talk about it at a probably that's great because they uh when we had our tour they um you and Phil really explained it why it was necessary and why we didn't want families and students falling through the cracks and missing those opportunities to to make relationships and stuff. So that's great. Yeah. Building relationships and then just in terms of of students and families falling through a crack. We've had such significant opportunities to partner with community education with uh with director Howard um has brought the mobile unit to our site twice this year just to meet the needs of families because we know that when when students and families have those basic needs met, they're going to thrive. And also at Aquilla and I think throughout St. Louis Park. Um, our goal is to return our school buildings, our community buildings to the hands of the community and to let people know that you can rely on us to meet the needs that that we can meet. And if we can't meet that need, we have social workers that can help you find that for the growth of our community and for the growth of our students. So, I I definitely appreciate that. Thank you. Other questions? This question is probably more for Dr. yet. Just for somebody following at home, I don't know, we have school board elections coming up this fall, so maybe some people are watching at home and trying to track on things here. Um, DCIP goals are really different than our world's best workforce goals, but they sound similar, right? Yeah. Some of the metrics are similar, right? So when we talk about MCA and reading proficiency data, yes, some of the ways that um our sites are measuring the activities to see if they're effective based on those metrics, yes, they overlap. So yeah, but it's not like one for one and I can just looks and feels some of this. So um yeah, that would make way too much sense if all of our goals were completely aligned. Well, thank you for the opportunity to talk with you and thank you for um allowing me to be a few minutes late to be with my own kiddo. All right. Good afternoon. Good evening. Uh Buenos Buenos Mesowski, the proud principal of Park Immersion Elementary School. Thank you for allowing me to be here tonight um to talk about some of the great work that happened um with our 75 adults in our building. um on behalf of our 530 amazingly brilliant uh and capable children. Um so these are our four sick goals. So similar to um what Dr. Lafayette mentioned earlier and uh what we heard from our two previous speakers, we also had care goal this year. Um our our reading and math goals were focused on uh the MCA proficiency and increasing that. Um preliminary data would indicate we didn't quite make the goal. Uh having said that, it looks very similar and there there are a lot of bright spots uh that that I'll speak with or speak to and that we want to celebrate. Um additionally, um our community goal u related to family engagement and engaging families with our um with our regular newsletters. We send our newsletter every single Thursday um with information, with pictures um and uh finding new ways to engage people as um I remember it is not that many years ago when we sent home a hard copy, right? And so as we continue to evolve and ask families, what do you need? What do you want? Um that was a metric we were utilizing this year. Um, additionally, we documented family engagement opportunities um and sought feedback from families through Lrena and in other venues um to get uh to see the effectiveness of what we were working on um and if it aligned with what people had wanted. So, I'll speak a little bit deeper for those things. Um here you can see this is one of our care shares. So all of our teachers, grade level teachers, um as well as some of our specialists focused on our literacy goal to help us uh with that. As I believe we are all literacy teachers, we we are all literacy teachers. We are all math teachers. Um especially at the elementary level as we're building those blocks to ensure that students have what they need. Um and um our teams did a great job um really asking good questions. some uh some of them uh uh had revisions on their care goals and and really for us to take a look at what's what's beneath um uh to ensure that we are pushing our our children academically, socially and emotionally um and they all go hand in hand, right? Um our so our SIP goals um two and three were both related to increased proficiency on the MCAs. And you can see here this is our internal document for all the things that we were working on related to these goals. Um and we did a mid-year revision um as we continued to look at how are we best serving our families in particular um our families who speak other languages um at our school. And so we continue to make revisions um thanks to board policy changes um that we've welcomed u more families who speak Spanish as a first language into kindergarten and our initial numbers would indicate we also have an increase for uh the following kindergarten year which is super exciting. But one of the things that our families have have told us over the years is sometimes if a family is choosing not to attend PSI and they do speak Spanish at home that the reason is they're concerned about the English. So, we've been doing a lot of research and trying to make those connections more overt um throughout. And so, this year, for the first time ever in the history of PSI, we taught uh English phonics in kindergarten for 100 minutes a week um and saw some great connections. I have a lot of anecdotes of families um sharing that kids are not only reading in English or in Spanish, but also in English. Um and so for families that have had kids go through our school previously, just noticing that difference, right? Um, and also we have a long-term plan as this year's kindergarten class continues to move through our school um, at how we're bridging between the English and Spanish languages and also increasing the amount of time in English as we get ready to um, hand off our our amazing kiddos to the middle school. Um, and so a lot of great things. A couple pictures here of uh, using math in real life and measuring. Um, the middle one is our Cartoneria project. It's our annual project. Been doing it about 10 years where every single child in the school writes a book. Um and it's a we tie it into our literacy. Um and uh sometimes it's teacher directed. Um sometimes it's uh a little more open. Um but then we invite families to come and celebrate with us on the lawn. Um and uh it's one of my favorite days of the year um to see it happening. And so um our primary homework at Park Spanish Immersion is reading, right? We ask that of families um that u help our kids continue to read at home. Um and um you see some of our kiddos, they're reading. Um another thing that was a little bit different this year was we did pacing guides for both reading and math. Um we had a calendar. Not going to say there wasn't grumbling at the beginning of the year. That would be a lie if I were to say that there wasn't grumbling, right? Um but um in exit interviews with staff overwhelmingly one of the things that I heard people say was we are so amazed at how far we were able to what additional things we're able to teach kids this year. Um, and so in our in our bi-weekly meetings with teams, checking in at where people are at on the pacing guides, um, a as well as um, within our curricula, we know, for example, with Benchmark that if students have access through unit 7 that will have taught the grade level standards for that grade. Um, and many of our grades uh, got through uh, units eight and nine. Um, and so I'm really excited. Um, I can consistently say that every single kid in our school um I I have data that would indicate um that they've had more access to the reading and math standards um than we have in a very very long time. So, I'm excited for next year, too. Um and then our fourth goal was um family engagement. And one of the things that um our assistant principal Megan Ranhell and I uh when we met last spring that we wanted to really focus on was our racial affinity group, our Latinx affinity group. Um and so we got that up and off the ground and had great participation um at our end of the year uh party. We had about 60 people uh come and just celebrate uh who they are and being a part of our community. Um and we took feedback that uh families had given us along the year for u making modifications to what we were doing and what we were sharing um along the way. Um and one of those things um was early on we asked families like what do you want to see in our weekly communications, right? Um and uh one of the things was wanted to see more culture embedded and see more pictures of kids. Um and so we attribute that to um you we did meet our last goal that every week when we sent out the newsletter we had 81% o open rate consistent we end of the year at that and so um we'll continue to take feedback. We'll continue to uh lean in and be there to support our our children and our families. Um so thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit about the work that we are doing this year. best questions which is gracias. Thank you. And I believe if I'm doing it alphabetically, it is our oh and one last slide. Um, we're going to continue with the same goals for next year, but additionally, uh, tying it to social emotional learning, um, with being our fourth goal and having consistent tier one expectations across all of our classrooms. So, thank you, Peter Hobart. Aaron, uh, good evening, Chair Fox, Dr. Hines, members of the board and cabinet. Thanks for having me. Mson, principal Peter Hobart. Um, we have the four goals um that everyone else had. a care team goal, literacy goal, a math goal, and a school team climate goal. Um, our first goal was that all teachers at Peter Hobart during the two care cycles will focus on collaboration with special education for academic scaffolds and behavioral deescalation techniques. Um, one of the really amazing things that came out of this work, we started with just carved out collaboration time um throughout the school year during their common prep time. um our special education team really took this idea um and they came up with the Peter Hobart pit stop. So what we did partway through the year is we started having carved out time for um somewhere between 5 to 15 minutes of professional development for staff from our special education team on strategies so that they could take directly to their classroom right after the staff meeting. Um so um I just want to give huge kudos to our special education team. they spearheaded this on their own as part of their own care work and then developed that um and continued to present at every staff meeting. So, um it's something that they got really excited about and we're going to continue into next year. So, um we achieved this first care team goal. Um our second goal is around literacy. Um and it has to do with the MCA reading assessment similar to what um Aquilla and Parks immersion talked about. Um in the spring of 2024, our MCA reading data was at 55.6% 6% um as you've already heard that it that data is embargoed, but based on the um current preliminary results um we are most likely not to meet this goal. Um and so uh we're kind of still processing what that looks like and um as a site we'll be looking to move forward. Part of that work is a data to action process which I will hopefully be able to share more with you um next year as we kind of work through some of that um learning together as a site. Um our sub goal three is around math. Um and we use NWA for this um for this goal and we really focus on um racial equity in this one and the difference between the achievement gap between black students and white students. Um that was in at 50% in the spring of 2024. Um and um we were hoping to make some gains in closing that uh this year. Um as you can see in our data um we did not uh close that gap. um our white students did better this year on NWEA and math, but unfort students um were stagnant or um stationary in terms of their growth. And so um again for our site just we're really wrestling with how do we look at data and then have instructional matches and um adjustments as a as a site and as grade levels and as teachers to impact that data in um ways that show academic success for students. Um our fourth school or our fourth goal is around school team climate. Um and this is about non-exclusionary disciplinary practices. Um when I was here in February, we talked about the matrix and how we implemented that as a site. Um since then we also had um we had some consultants come in and talk about understanding behavior and deescalation strategies. And so that was presented at a whole staff meeting. Um really exciting work just in terms of how as adults we can own how we respond to when students have behavior and what are ways that we can help deescalate instead of escalate students. And so um all of our staff got that at that staff meeting. So I would say that our fourth tip goal was also met questions. Questions for members? I do have a quick question about this fourth poll where it says increase the use of non-exclusionary discipline by 30%. Do you actually measure that? Um I uh so I presented this at our PTO. Um I that was I made up that metric. I mean honestly I mean so often we do right I mean like the 3% on the different math goals for the sites. I mean like where do these you know they're sort of arbitrary in my opinion but I'm I guess what I'm wondering is that like are you measuring the degree to which you're using exclusionary versus non-exclusionary. Yeah. I think when we look at suspension data and when we look at other ways that we when we respond to behavior calls um being able to track that um as we enter things into powers school or deciding whether or not to enter in um a practice like that. to me when I look at this particular climate goal, if I got a chance to rewrite it, it would be how do how are we offering that to staff like and so really thinking about more of the professional development that we as adults use in order to respond to behaviors when they happen. Um and so uh I kind of owned in our PTO meeting like I wrote a lot of these in isolation and now that I've been at Peter Hobart a year um and we'll be able to work with our um pedagogical leadership team in the fall on creating them collectively. Um, I'm really excited about what that could look like differently next year. Is it something that you could just easily track on a through a Google form only because this is one of our cycles as well as the is bringing down um our numbers with the non-exclusionary discipline and so we um quarterly look at the disciplinary forms about who so I'm just the problem with it is that everybody sort of has a different definition for particular things and so you know one person's disrespect is another person's insubordination and so having a cleareyed goal about like what the heck those things are but it is I mean it does like just to say like seeing the numbers is helpful. So when you when you actually see the numbers and being able to connect them to what I wish that we c we had de isolation strategies I wish I had been invited to that I would have totally gone but just like the things that we're doing in our classroom. So I applaud you for taking it on but and we did we had to get a baseline. So we took one year to just like look at all of the forms and just say okay this is what we see now. Let's start to figure this out. Yeah I appreciate that. We uh we did have it was our first year and whenever someone made a behavior call and our team came to support teachers did fill out a form and so we do have a lot of the data. I think to your point we need to be better at naming what we're doing on the back end to help support it so we can label it either non-exclusionary or a different way that we're helping support that. Um but yeah, Google forms are great for helping disagregate some of that. Sometimes yeah they can be but yeah I think I just um I'd be curious to know like I was going to ask you then or you can just share later, but like some of the examples of what they were what the special ed teachers were sharing. I think that would just be really interesting to hear more about. So yeah, I'd be able to um share that with the board after this meeting. Um yeah, and they have they had a full plan. So they each took a week. Um they had a strategy like our OT and SLPs also joined that work. And so um lots of different quick tidbits for people to say that somewhat selfishly because I feel like we focus a lot on a lot of what's happening mainstream wise or you know more consistently. And then sometimes I don't know what's going on in special ed. We have great people who are presenting great information and stuff too, but learning some of that stuff and and learning a little bit more about how that's integrated into the classroom and could be enlightening for me and maybe if we share it with others. So, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. And I think um I like to tell uh our Peter Hobart staff like special education and multilingual strategies are just good teaching and so just good reminders that's great for all learners. Um and the strategies that they brought that I'll share with the board um are just really great teaching strategies. I think also though for community members to understand is that yeah it's really important and then consistency is key like I think as an outsider if you see well this is a strategy they used it once but that doesn't but I mean no they're children so it you know the consistency is really key and um I think that it's not just like oh this is a strategy we implement once it's a strategy we like we it's you know we got to figure this out there you know like shorter are human beings that need a lot of support and a lot of help. Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I'm going to pass it over to Carl Principal who is 65. Yeah, I know. I know. Good evening, school board members, chair Cox, Dr. Hines. Thank you. This will be my last presentation at a schoolboard meeting. Um, as my fellow colleagues have said, um, back in February, real quick, um, I talked about, uh, consistency this year at Susan Lingren, um, I talked about the three, three, and four um, as my message, three um, Susan Lren team expectations, three asurances for me, and four SIP goals. And I embedded this throughout the year. This is my first year I have tried something like this and it really had a lot of success. The teachers grabbed on to it that it was easy to remember, easy to um know, easy for me to repeat. Uh these are your expectations. This is what you will get from me. So like my fellow colleagues have talked about our first SIP goal was our care team goal which was to um have one cycle minimum of two cycles care cycles one in literacy and one in math um and June um updates care cycle 2 completed with care share happening on Monday June 9th just yesterday morning and I want to give a shout out to my friends and colleagues at um early childhood. Uh Kim McBy, one of our wonderful uh culturally relevant literacy coaches who works at Susan Lrren um also works in early childhood brought over a different way of doing carshare than we did in January and it was a huge success. So I appreciate the partnership Kim. Um all teams completed one car share in math so we met that goal. That color is showing up a little different, but that's green. Green is good according to according to our SIP goal two. Again, like my colleagues have said, our um scores are preliminary. um they're embargoed, but I am pleased and tell me if I share too much, I'm not going to, but our preliminary our preliminary scores show improvement across some grade levels. For example, two of our three tested grade levels, remember MCA testing is for third, fourth, and fifth grade. Um two of those three um grade levels had improvement. we went into the green which I'm very very proud of the teachers and staff members at Susan Lingren for working extremely hard this year and collaborating. Also giving a shout out to the coaches which started a little bit later this year um for different reasons and they started data dives which was a huge success. Data dive is a meeting where the coaches come to a specific grade level uh and they talk about data and how are we going to use this data. So kind of coaching them, helping them um and it was a great success. Uh by monthly data dives and our SIP goal um this SIP goal is not being met or will not be met. Our goal three very similar to our literacy at the top 56.4% to 58%. I can tell you we came close but not quite. And our preliminary scores ironically share the same two grade levels which I can't share. Um improved um which I was very very pleased. And as we dug into the data this is really important for people at home and in the community. You have to look at like last year's third graders for example to this year's fourth graders. You have to look that way and you have to look across because there were some huge increases from different grade levels. So I was very very pleased again with the teachers and what they were able to uh accomplish really um following the bridges curriculum to fidelity number corner section is really being taught with fidelity across Susan Lingren. And our last goal which was our school team climate goal this was a unique goal that I um wrote and I shared last February with Dr. Star. I really appreciate our collaboration. It's a unique one. During the 2425 school year, 75% of the staff evaluated will excuse me will be at proficient or higher on the TDN rubric. So for those people um listening and watching within the TDN rubric there is unsatisfactory, basic, proficient, and distinguished. And all of us need to remember that we don't live in distinguished world. We visit it. Um so we really want our teachers to be in the proficient rating. Um so can you just tell me what is a TDE rubric? Yep. Teacher development and evaluation and evaluation. Sorry to interrupt. And um it was a group of teachers, administrators a few years ago that put to that collaborated together that put together a um a rubric um that specifies things that like for example myself as an administrator would be evaluating teachers on. So those are the ratings again bas uh excuse me unsatisfactory basic proficient and distinguished and I wanted um or we wanted the goal for teachers to be at that proficient or higher. Um it was completed. Uh this goal was met. SL or excuse me Susan Lren team completed the book study like I shared in um February the thin book of trust this year. Um I shared in February I'll share again. Um there was very high levels of trust amongst the team members at the site level um that shared with me. So it's not just me saying this. These are voices from the teachers. Collaboration and collectivi collectivism was at a high level and data dives. Um again I want to give credit to Rachel Horseman Jang Ma and Kim McVey for helping um develop those and incorporate those at Susan Ligren. I do um this is just a communication of when we did different things just to keep us accountable. myself accountable and the teachers. Um so those are just some dates. I will be meeting um one last goal and then I'll share the transition. Um this is not a SIP goal but I'm very proud. It's an academic goal that the teachers at Susan Linger and this not the same goal but there's goals at every one of our sites that have to that are connected with ATPPS which is the Q comp um teacher Q comp. and we met our ATPPS goal. Our goal was um to increase from a certain percentage on the fast, which is the fluency testing that we do across kindergarten through fifth grade. Um and in the fall we were at 48.6% and in the spring we were at 54.7%. So, I just want to again give a shout out to the teachers and staff at Susan Lingren for their hard work. Also, I wanted to share um I don't have necessarily goals for next year because I want Miss Bang um to help develop those. I'm going to have suggestions and we are actually meeting this Friday um Friday the 13th but we're still meeting Friday the 13th uh for a good portion or all day to transition and share all the important things. So I'm looking forward to that. So any questions? You mean you didn't check out the last day of school? You didn't just shut down and no um like our principles don't continue also let me know questions from board members. Yeah, I don't have a question. I just want to say thank you. I didn't um I couldn't make it to your celebration um because I had the your chaos as a teacher. Um but you were are the principal to for my daughter. So I just really appreciate everything that you've done for Susan Lingren and Susan Lingren family. So thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart and um good luck to with everything. I appreciate that. Thank you. Similarly, I but I go back a little bit further because you were at Aquilla, so I I remember you from your Aquilla days, right? Yes. I think except for a couple people here, I might have known you the longest here, too. But guys, really appreciate you're a great principal at Aquilla. We were sorry to see you go. Um glad that you continued on with us. And this this was 33, can I say? 32 32 years. That's that's a strong commitment to our community. Um that's that's something I think we we wear with pride too that we have people that really do come in here and stay committed to the work and and um put in that time and energy and it's that's a lot of time if you've been in elementary school, you know, and you've been you've been in a few different buildings, too. High school. Yeah, you went to high school in some too. So, really appreciate that and appreciate all that time. And um do you have any retirement um goals that you're sharing too today? You know, you don't have any have to worry about nothing set in stone. Okay. Okay. Not like you're going to hit some different countries for the next few years or something like that. Your travel plans? No. I do love to travel, but no. Yeah. Well, we wish you the best. Thank you. Thank you everyone. I will turn it over to the middle school. [Applause] Good evening. Um, thank you, Principal Pollock. We will miss you in our principal cohort. So, um, thank you so much for this opportunity to provide some updates on our SIP goals. At the middle school, as you have heard, um, we also implemented two care cycles. Um, and at the middle school, we focused ours on valuing student experiences into their instruction, which is one of the elements that teachers are evaluated on through the teacher development and evaluation rubric. And so we did a lot of work around unpacking what does that um element of the rubric mean? And our learning walks were centered around that. And we would go and looking for uh we would build look fors and sounds like. What does it look like when students um experiences are valued in instruction? What does it sound like? Um and we would find evidence of that and then have discussions of that and then the teams would choose you know something to focus on related to that particular element to implement. Um and so we have really tried to bring this to life. We also had two different staff sharing outs. Um the first share out that happened in January or February. Um each individual member of the care team had to share to a different group and then in the spring we allow them to share together. Um but it's an opportunity to hear about a lot of different work. Um and in this last care cycle sharing some of the staff reflected that the care work has brought about meaningful changes to their instructional practices that they're going to continue moving forward next year that they they have learned a lot and I said that is exactly the point of what the care cycles are supposed to do is impact your own instructional practice to better the experiences of students. So would consider this to be a goal met. Um our second goal uh was to increase the percentage of of students grades six through eight prof proficient in math. Um as director Davis pointed out sometimes these goals are a bit uh arbitrary in choosing the numbers. Um and of course the actual numbers are embargoed but um it is looking like uh we have increased our proficiency in math um this year and we worked as a building around aligning instruction to grade level standards and benchmarks working as a school to say what is the level of rigger that the benchmark is indicating that students need to be operating at. Um, and in addition with math, I believe you're aware that we did implement a new curriculum, CPM, and the math teachers did a fantastic job of implementing the curriculum with Fidelity. It was a heavy lift to learn all of that and it was a lot of work um to prepare every day for new lessons and there were moments where they're like, who made this decision again? but they stuck with it and um I think we're going to be pleased with what that um is looking like at when we actually get to publish um our numbers. So um an increase in proficiency based on where our numbers were at the middle school a couple years. I consider that to be a goal met even if we didn't get our specific numbers. Um uh but we're trying to, you know, turn the tide and and be continually improving. And so I feel very proud of our staff on this. And I made sure that we celebrated that yesterday as a staff before we came to the feel-good finale as a district. Our third goal was centered around our ML students uh and in particular increasing their speaking proficiency as measured by the access test. And this goal was selected for a couple of reasons. One, our ML data also needs to be improved and we needed to be really intentional around using strategies to uh support our ML students. But additionally, student voice is an important part that teachers are also evaluated around. So again, in our learning walks, we really unpacked what does it look like when students have voice in a classroom? What does it sound like when students have voice in a classroom? And I should mention that every student or every teacher at the middle school this year got to go on a learning walk with their collaborative team and get to have that professional development. Um, and so we really built our muscle around what does this look like and saw many many different examples. We also leaned into a a resource that has been provided by the district called elevation which takes our um all students that are coded ML have their data in here and then has many different strategies and what's beautiful about it is if you want a speaking strategy which elevation offers many speaking strategies you can actually click on the strategy it will tell you what's where students are at with their access scores what scaffolds they need to be able to do the activity. Um, and so we trained teachers on how to use elevation. We encouraged them to try a strategy and then we had them come back and share how did the strategy go? Okay, now go try another one. Um, and staff reported that was some of the best professional development that they've ever had and they want more of it. So um and our preliminary data is showing that we have increased our ML students speaking scores. So I would consider that to be a goal met um as well. And our last goal uh around family engagement was around communication. And so at the beginning of the year um every course created a year overview which included all of the units all of the academic standards that are being taught in each unit and those were published on our academic page um on our website. So a special shout out to Ashley and her team who worked many hours with us to say we need to get this right and worked with us to do it. We also um digitized our course catalog for registration in conjunction with this. And additionally uh we asked teachers to email families at the start of every unit and a little synopsis about what the unit was going to include as well as then send a follow-up email a week before the summitive was due to let families know what their students should be working on at home and what was coming. and um our students through a created student advisory board decided that they wanted to lean more into using their schooly calendars and so they led that initiative. So we've been working with families on how to use the schooly calendar to also see what their students have coming up in class. So, I should have been collecting more data around the emails that were actually sent, but I know they were sent because if there was a teacher that missed one, I actually got an email from a parent saying, "I didn't get that email this unit." So, I could have the reverse data on that. Um, but um, in communicating with our families around what is happening in our classrooms because it's important that they know what's happening and that there are rigorous learning opportunities available to students. Um, I believe that we met this goal as well. And I want to just give a shout out and celebrate all of the staff at the middle school who really dug in and committed to these goals. We came back to them time and time again and talked about what it would look like, what does it take, and they did a fantastic job. And so, it really is their work and effort that I get to sit before you and say we had a really successful year at the middle school this year. So, more slides. Were you gonna share these? Oh, I can share. Yeah. Yes. I was like, where do we end on that? Um, wait. You were waiting for big rounds of I know. Thank you. Sorry. Okay. No, our highlight as I kind of already mentioned was the high level uh care cycle work. Um, and then the learning walks that we had for every middle school teacher. Um, we're going to be continuing to lean into unpacking benchmarks to create success criteria for assessment next year. And we'll be focusing on literacy, especially with our ML students and just literacy across the board for all of our students, tier one literacy practices. So when does the when does the when does the middle school have to implement the readact stuff? Next year. Next year, right? Because I'm getting trained in fast bridge over the summer. So is that something I mean like what's a it's a little bit not formed very well at the state department. So if you don't have anything for that, well we we actually were meeting about it just this very m this morning. Um you know so we are going to be planning to use a uh map NWA map as our universal screener. We're still determining what that cut score will be to then deliver the CAFTY which is MDE's designated screener. Right. Um, and it sounds like this upcoming year we can deliver or put the capy in place more winter instead of fall because it rolled out so late. Yes. On that. Yeah. Yeah. So, so with the secondary reading screener, so four plus, right? So, the middle school is in a good position because they're already administering the MAP reading. um something that then what I also like about the guidance at least from MDE that it's not based on a cut score. It's based on a cut score and then multiple data points. And so when we have our MTSS process in place, that should ideally be a place where if a student is being um brought forth by the collaborative team, if you will, because of a MAP score, in addition to formative assessments, in addition to observational data, things like that that a teacher is concerned about, then perhaps the student would then be administered the CAD. So it wouldn't just be all students that were below the 20th percentile, for example. Right. So will we have to purchase new curriculum for the middle school for the making us do a curriculum? No, it's the the screening guidance is what has been screening. It came out in March. So and then there'll be more intervention resources and information later in the fall winter. I think um this is great. I think focusing on unpacking those benchmarks and understanding the benchmarks and looking at the data is really um and I wrote down data to action. I will I'm gonna put that on a like a bumper sticker somewhere. Give Dr. Lafia credit. Great. Yeah, we are definitely interested in becoming more data literate and how are we using different forms of data. So yes. Okay. I had a question. Well, first off, thank you uh very impressive work. Uh thank you to the middle school staff and everyone who uh you know made it such a success this year. Uh one question I had was on goal 4. Um did did you get feedback from families on how they felt about uh both the the website and the emails? Was it like wellreceived and something we're going to continue doing? Yes, it was very well received. I had many parents come to me during conferences or when we had site council, they really appreciate the email communication. And part of the goal is also to kind of break that barrier where the communication happens. So then there's a a place where parents if they need to respond back on anything, they already have that email. They've already established that um relationship with the teacher. And so it is also about building relationships in a partnership between um home and school to really support students in doing well. So awesome. Well, thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Questions, comments. I'm I'm appreciative of this presentation. I've been noticing as we get in there, this gets wordy. You guys put more words as we get to the secondary levels and fewer little icons. Next time I will be better with more pictures happening, but we appreciate understand the complexity of your work too. High schoolers aren't as cute as appreciate that. Yes, I have one. And then as like you know um Janette and I and Ann have been we've been through the high school and I think if we would go back and look at those materials I'm sure that we're going to see huge improvements. This is for me this feels like one of the first times I really feel like I know what's going on to improve things at the middle school. Um, I haven't felt that for a long time. Like just knowing that I know that we continuously work on this stuff, but that we're really being serious about this and we're taking this with maturity. And that's again not a slight against our staff or anything, but just saying that th this presentation and some of the stuff that you're talking about here feels like we're really listening to the community. We're taking a lot of things to heart. We're as as J was saying, data into action. A lot of those things that I think people have been asking for. So So that's not easy work either. It's hard work. So, thank you. Well, you're welcome. We're here to serve. Yeah. Thank you. All right. What's that? No. All right. Good evening everyone. Lisha Pat with the high school. Um, so I want to start, um, this is one of our highlights, but I want to start with the highlight because I believe that this goal really encompasses some of the achievements we've been able to make as a school. Um, and our our first goal is really about um, creating some alignment with our content standards, creating scope and sequence um, and a cultural culturally relevant curriculum. Um, and when we had talked in February, our school was the only one in the district that didn't have something like tangible to go look at. Like if a parent or a student said, "Hey, what am I going to learn in your class?" It was like, "Well, whatever that particular teacher might have um or team of teachers might have, but there wasn't something to say, hey, this is what our standards um here's curriculum aligned with our standards. It's culturally relevant." And so that was something um that through our equity learning walks last year had kind of led us to design this five-year plan. Um and my leadership team had really talked a lot about um last year about just transparency like we are not trying to hide or catch folks learning. We want to be transparent about what the standards are that we are teaching. you want to have clarity about how that will inform my practice because when I better know what I'm supposed to be teaching students, then I can better um address those standards and then um gather data that informs my practice. Um and also create uh uh experiences in the classroom that where students are valued centered. Um so it's been a kind of a merging of all of those things. And so a part of our first uh year in this five-year plan was that all of our staff were going to create uh they were going to unpack their standards. They were going to and benchmarks. Um they were going to look at scope and sequence. Where did these standards best fit throughout the year and then put that into a course overview that would be shared with not only our students but their families. Um, and so I am happy to report that 100% of our staff has completed at least one course overview and then they've been given an opportunity to work over the summertime and by October 15th, we will um our goal is to have all of them completed. So for every course at the high school, we will have a course overview that we will be able to share like the middle school has on our website in our course registration guide when we're making big decisions about what pathways we want to take for our students. that will be um we'll be able to share that with our families. And then the next step um that we where we're going with that for next year or consideration for next year would be actually looking at how we write those curricular units align with the standards. Um and then um just leading right into our next goal is that we were looking at the retention of our students of color and AP and IB classes and we wanted to increase the retention by 2% and after looking at the data um we were able to increase it from 86% last year to 94% Um and so um looking at all of that, we're going to like we did exit uh tickets if a student all any student at the high school said that they wanted to opt out for semester 2 out of an advanced course um they got like an exit ticket and created a survey. And so continued work in this is like what are we going to do with that data to unpack it a little bit deeper because there was all kinds of different reasons that we uh that we noticed students were sharing with us like it might be the content seemed too hard um I didn't there was comfortability right there was kids shared um I was the only student of color in my class right there's all kinds of different reasons um and so what our um team will do next is um to dive a little deeper, maybe have some focus groups, have some individual conversations with students. I also had the opportunity to talk with my principal's ad advisory council over the course of the year. Um Dr. Lafayette was there for some of those conversations just about what do those classes like of those of you that are in the space, who's taking that and what do you what is your experience in that class? And so we got a plethora of different um experiences and some of them liked the way the classes were being taught and were like that's how I learn and others were like well that isn't quite why I learn and so I could understand why students might want out of the class. And so I think um the positive thing is that we know we're on the right track and we know we're doing the right work. But I really believe that goal number one is going to directly impact our ability to retain our students of color in um our advanced courses. Can I just ask a clarifying? Um, so when you say retain, are you saying from semester 1 to semester 2? Correct. So not like Yes. Sophomore year to junior year. No, we looked at like a full school year. So we looked at all last year and we compared the two semesters and then we looked at this year and compared the two semesters. Yeah. So from semester 1 to semester 2 of 2024, semester 1 to semester 2 of 2025. Yeah. Um and then there's one other thing I unless but if it comes back to me I will go back to it. Uh goal number three was um really looking at the number of FS that we had from semester 1 and semester 2 of 2024 and semester 1 and semester 2 of 2025. And um we really wanted to um solidify our multi-tered systems of support or MTSS and um academically and um decrease those numbers by at least 2%. um by the spring of 2025. And so um I know that you all had the pleasure of having our bar team here or some members of our bar team here last uh I think it was was it just last week? couple weeks ago um to present just some of the work that they're doing. And we're um continuing to strengthen our tier one supports by trying to take things that they're doing and expand it schoolwide. Um but we believe that uh some of these core or foundational pieces of the bar model will really has really helped us to significantly decrease our failure rate. Um and I think uh bar had presented a couple weeks ago that this is the lowest failure rate that they have seen in nth grade which is really exciting when you look at the trajectory of like what that could mean as students uh for like graduation rates and all of that. Um we want students to have a transition into high school that really puts them on that tra trajectory to being college and career ready and that really is like that ninth grade year is like super important. Um, and then lastly, uh, we wanted to reduce the number of suspensions and dismissals of our black students by 5% through a deepened understanding of non-exclusionary practices and intentional implementation of restorative practice. Um, so we reviewed their suspension and dismissal data and the last time I talked to you, I was really apprehensive. I did not think we were going to make this goal to be honest with you. Um and we after reviewing it with our leadership team, we saw a 13% decrease in exclusionary practices um with our um African-American and black students um from last year to this year. Um, and some of the things that we believe have led to this is um, like our work with res restorative practice and continuing to focus on um, how staff are able to show up and how we're able to share spaces, restorative spaces with our adults because we know that um, how adults show up drives how students are able to show up, right, restoratively. Um we've been doing professional development with um those tenants of restorative schools. Uh we have an RP team that meets monthly and kind of designs curriculum, talks about restoration and how we can better integrate it into our school. Are we have we arrived? No. Are we still on our journey? Absolutely. I mean it's a lifelong journey quite frankly. Um we have had quarterly schoolwide community building circles for all of our students. Um so we we as we build out our park pride schedule, we make sure that at least one um advisory is dedicated to restorative practice and some type of a community building. And then our admin team participated in a care in care teamwork and our um we really wanted to analyze the restorative readmit process. So when a student has to be excluded from school, we wanted to look um at students that had repeated exclusion like we had excluded them uh repeatedly and what was our role in creating a restorative space when they returned by asking questions. And so my team asked questions like when they when for students that were currently on a dismissal or suspension when they returned, we asked some very pointed questions like what what brings you joy? Uh where do you feel confident? What's a class you feel confident in? What's a class you feel not confident in? Um do you think that your behavior defines you? How do you view yourself? And how do you believe others um view you? And it was just like just very interesting to hear how our students spoke about their beliefs about school. Um what brings them joy, where their confidence lies. Um and so my team took that and has implemented some um additional non non-exclusionary practices where um students have spent spaces with teams of people. might be their bar team or whatnot in order to repair harm or problem solve. Um, and so our continued work there will be looking at how do we create a readmit process that would interrupt that um pattern of repeated exclusionary practice or exclusionary practices. Um, let's see. So, as I said, I started with our highlight, but I'm going to reiterate the highlight. I really believe that our continued work in like identifying what is supposed to be taught in our classrooms, knowing better how to um use it to inform our practice and also making sure that it is culturally relevant um and and sharing that with our students and our families has led to some of the achievement of our other goals. I also want to commend my staff because they've worked really really hard this year on all of these goals and my leadership team has has um has built their capacity and taking back like how do we dig dive deeper into our data and use it to inform practice and then um look forward to what we can do to um to provide additional supports and interventions for our students. Um, an opportunity that still exists is we are like super excited because we did not have an MTSS team in August of uh, 2024. Um, and we put that together and we've really dug deep into what does it look like to focus on not only academic tier one um, supports but also um, behavioral tier one, right? And um, so now I feel like we we're we're pretty good at it. We're pretty good. We've got some growing to do. Um but there's always improvement in development. But now I think that opportunity really exists in our tier 2 process and it's if this what our tier one isn't working um for particular students, how do we as teachers identify and then what's the process for that so that they can get the supports they need in order to support those students um academically, behaviorally and social emotionally. Um I did have a couple of other comments, but um I'll keep it I'll I'll try to keep it quick. Um some of the things that we think are contributing factors are unpacking our standards, benchmarks, determining scope and sequence, intentional alignment of our professional development like MTSS tier one, restorative practice, culturally relevant pedigogy, and our course overview design. Um we've talked about and we will continue to talk about in our next steps what is uh what are our grading practices and what is proficiency look like once you know your standards and you understand them deeply. Um we've used exit ticket surveys andu surveys um on students learning experience. We have implemented um monthly learning walks and had the noticings and wonderings drive some of the um conversations that we've had and that that actually drove our question number one for our uh number one care goal and then data digs. Um I think let's see next things that we will do our next steps is each summer I prepare with each of our teams. So we have an MTSS retreat coming up. Um so that team will meet and we will look at what does it look like to implement and and create a tier 2 system. My park leads built bolt retreat will be coming up on June 26th and our like headline is learning through reflection where we will reflect back and celebrate the 2425 school year. We will be working with Dr. Fuller on root cause analysis. So, she'll be joining us and she's a consultant that's going to be working with the middle school and the high school on um development of block and um depth of learning and and things of that nature. Um and then we're going to reflect forward with a focus on that depth of knowledge and then out of that will we will come the the considerations for the 25 26 SIP goals. Um some of them might be stay the same with minor tweaks, right, and deepen them. Um but that could be uh curricular unit development block schedule will be integrated for sure that'll be a part of it. Um MTSS tier one and tier 2 grading practices and then that will bring us full circle where we start off our year with our YDA students at data advance and um so we're really excited for the the the summer work that we have ahead of us. Questions comments right there. Yeah. Uh well, first of all, thank you all. Um trying to mostly hold my like I just have general thoughts and comments, but I just want to say I mean it's it's apparent how much work has happened this year and just grateful to all of you and your leadership in your buildings. Um, you know, I I think I love this that we're setting goals and talking about them and being transparent about them because we can't be accountable if we don't share with people what we're trying to accomplish. Um, and so that in and of it in and of itself, I want to say is an accomplishment. And I thank you for that. um like we're hearing things in these spaces that I haven't heard and I'm not the longest serving board member here but you know just the ability to sort of have these really in-depth conversations about what we're trying to accomplish. Um so thank you. Um I also want to acknowledge and I don't I I say this knowing that I think this applies to all of us that I'm not satisfied. Um, and I think we just need to continue to say that like we need to celebrate the successes and and also acknowledge that like, you know, we'll get the scores when they come out. And you all know how I feel about these arbitrary 2 or 3% increase goals. Or if you don't by now, then tonight you know arbitrary 2 or 3% increase goals that year after year we hear about and and and quite frankly like it doesn't feel like we make progress towards. This feels like progress. Do you know why? Because we're talking about it. We're talking about why we're not meeting those and we're talking about what the plan looks like to actually change that. That's progress from my perspective and I am confident that in the years to come like we will see that not in 2% increases but quite frankly in like doubledigit increases in these because of the work that that you all put in this year and that is happening now. So, I'm not satisfied. I'm being clear about how I feel about these goals at the moment, but also just a lot of gratitude to the work. Thank you. Other board members, too. Oh, you can go ahead. I I have something, but I forgot what it was. So, go ahead. Well, just to build on Director Davis, I think that as an educator, what I understand is success builds on success. like the best way to help a kid learn is to build on their success. And I think that's what's going to happen with our with our teachers because we're just building on success. And so that's really um heartwarming and congratulations to the staff because this is hard work. And I think it really speaks to the fact that teachers are professionals and that we don't we're not babysitters. This isn't glorified daycare where you're sending your kids. um we are professionals and we work hard and we're smart and we do these things because it matters and it makes a great deal of difference in young people's lives as well as their um families. The other thing I just wanted to own is that um I've never been a big fan of test scores and when I joined this board I made it really clear um that I don't I think children are more than a test score and I But I understood and I came to understand better especially when I was door knocking that um parents and comm community members don't really understand anything except for test scores. But what this shows what the SIP process shows is that we can see growth and development and areas of opportunity and success using data and it doesn't have to come down to the MCAs. Um, I was and I don't know if it's Dr. Hines's um or if it was a collective agreement, but I love the fact that there's a cultural goal that it's not just increasing particular test scores or things like this, but it's the focus is on um the social emotional I heard and the the culture of a school and making sure that teachers are supported, that they know what they need to do um and that they're supported to get there. So, I just really thank you and I agree with Director Davis that this isn't something that I've heard necessarily um often, but there was like inklings of it, but it feels like there's now, as Dr. Heis has talked about, like the system, we're working together as a system. It's exciting to see and exciting to be a part of. I'm sorry. One other quick thing. Um I I can't visualize what a care share is. I just as much as you all talk about it pictures like I just don't it's just not a part of my life and so I would like to be invited sometime to come and watch one or participate if that's okay. We should do a cartoon with the car share bear. But I agree that it is hard for us sometimes as board members. We appreciate hearing and seeing all this stuff and we don't we can't always be everywhere but it is nice to like to have those invites or to experience something or we've talked about the walks and some things like that. on the learning one. Yeah, that helped me understand what that was. And now I would like to do a care whatever you call it, a care something share. Share everybody. Well, I would just echo what my colleagues have already said and then thank you to everyone who's presented and I would just want to extend my appreciation for all the hard work that went into these uh these slides that there's a lot to celebrate. Um, I did have one specific question uh around uh goal number two on on this one about the uh retention of students of color in AP and IB classes. It sounds like a lot of what we're what we've been doing this year is in collecting that data on why hasn't been retaining, but is there anything different that we did between last year and this year specifically that helped improve the retention? Um, I believe that what we were if when we originally looked at the data, so we looked at this I guess probably in the fall, it was a long time ago, summer. Um, we looked at the experiences that were brought to us from some I think YDA students and like um just sharing what their lived experiences with were within those classrooms. We also kind of like looked at who was leaving the classes at which rates. Um, and so your question is a great one. I think there's there's opportunity. Like I shared, we got exit ticket data and that's one of those ones where we're going to have to dig deeper and like what's the next step? So, we got all kinds of different reasons why students are leaving um all the way from like it's too hard to um to I don't feel valued seed and heard in the classroom, right? Um so, is there something specific we did? I think some of it is trying to create those learning experiences based on that overarching. That's why I started with the highlight of like if we know what we're the standards that we're teaching. If we know how to create a culturally relevant experience in that classroom, those students will be valued, seen, and heard and we should be able to retain them. So, do I have an exact No. But we are going to do that root cause analysis at our retreat this summer. And that's where we're going to try to pick pinpoint like did we do something different? And if we didn't then we need to reanalyze that too and just be like was it just this year we particular we just held on to those students maintain them. So um that's why that particular question um or goal may be a revisit a revision and a dive deeper. I'd say the high school did do something though in the last couple years. I'd say I think about the counseling department. Um, and with the gifted and talented design team and the YDA work that happened and the recommendations that came out of the design team and YDA, I remember when the counseling department started asking students when they wanted to drop an AP or IV class, why, right? Just asking that question just allowed people to just pause for a little bit and ask why that was happening. And then when it went into the SIP goal, I think the leadership team started looking at it. Here's our goal, right? And so just the idea that there is an intentional focus on trying to understand why the students were leaving and just pausing to ask that question is also an intentional move. Yeah. Yeah. Other comments, questions. I I I the appreciate the uh idea of sort of um demonstrating the coursework and talking more about that. I think it's been hard as a parent and even somebody on the schoolboard to navigate sort of what this means or what's going on in the courses and our children are somewhat reluctant to share too much about some of these things. What are you doing? I don't know. We're just reading about something. Um, but to have that stuff and it speaks to demonstrating to the community what what our courses are, what they include, what's the information and I I think they would appreciate that and again trying to understand sort of what is you know what do we mean when we're talking about um you know uh excellence and and some of those things. So really appreciate some of that work. The other thing that I heard through a lot of this um these presentations tonight was just how much other people here at this stable and elsewhere have played roles in important roles in this work. It's not just you as a principal teacher but a lot of people Dr. Robinson, you know, director Sugu, you know, all sorts of people have played different roles in some of this work and really appreciative that we that people are collaborating, building on this and you're not out there on your own doing all this work. And we appreciate like you guys taking the time again and this is this is summer, right? You guys, you know, you the doors closed and you just party, right? Like you're just partying the rest of summer. No, we realize that you're doing work. We realize that you're doing work all summer, right? Thank you guys and and that we really appreciate that this is um that you guys take the time, the effort to focus on this, to be here tonight, to spend your summers working on this and you know as an as one class goes out the next come in and you know start the cycle continues again. So really just appreciative of of all that extra time tonight too. Thank you so much. Can I just say one more thing? Absolutely. I wanted to just share one like this is forward thinking. It's it wasn't it's not an intentional planning, but looking forward like all ninth graders are going to get AP human geography. And although that isn't it wasn't a result. It wasn't didn't come out of this like our our social studies teachers did not say, "Oh, well, this is our goal, so we're going to do this." They really with the student centered focus said they believe that this is best for kids. But forward thinking, I think that experience in ninth grade where they'll have the bar support will also help students to see themselves in those advanced coursework. And so I see this um the retention of students in those class students of color in those classes only increasing to be quite honest with you. So lots more unpacking to do and how we maintain these these um numbers. Um but do that work over the summer. So to be continued. All right. Well, we're releasing you into the summer now. Go party. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to have a little fun here. But bright and early 8:00. Superintendent says you have to work. So, have a responsible evening and thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Um that brings up Director Magnus who um we're glad to have here to do as she always promises which is to keep us up to date on the budget. So, Dr. Magnus is here to talk about fiscal year 25 and 2026. Yes. Good evening, Chair Cox, um, Superintendent Hines, members of the board and cabinet, we are here to talk a little bit about, well, mostly about fiscal 2026 and a little update we want to make for the current fiscal year 2025. Um, you know, coming off of that, I want to make sure that the board is aware that all of us on the operations team also had um care team goals this year. And the goal that um we focused on in oper in our business operations area was on increasing transparency um and sort of demystifying the budgeting process. And one of the ways we did that is we met monthly with budget managers. And we have some data that we shared yesterday. um at our feel-good finale about you know some technical data about what people learned during the year and what they're hoping to continue with next year. But I think I can observe that we also increased alignment across um these budget areas. It increased our effectiveness in making sure the budget follows the strategic plan and the needs of the schools. And it helped us f helped us to focus on areas of the budget um that that are difficult to manage and difficult to stop the growth like the cost of subs, like the cost of transportation, um like the costs of additional costs of um classroom teachers and overtime. And when you start looking at the data, we don't have the answers yet, but the practice of looking at the data helped us to understand how to organize our work better so that we can start making headway into that. And it was one of the um sort of directives that came out of the finance advisory committee that we would spend some time focusing on cost drivers and driving down cost drivers. So that care team work was really important. So, it was Josiah um in the business office, Jin Lange event in facilities, and Tammy Borggan in um school nutrition. We worked together on that and we'll continue to have a a goal again next year um continue that work and keep improving that work, but keep continuing with other goals as well. So, we were all um working to um lift up the strategic plan. I wanted to make sure you knew that. And so we're going to talk about some final updates to the 25 budget at the end of the presentation and our initial budget for fiscal 26. Here we are at the bottom of the page. Can you believe it? Can you even believe it? Party. I'm trying to get us a party, but says no. We still got work to do. And and you will notice on here that we had monthly budget manager meetings and they were I would say close to 100% attendance at budget manager meetings and people stayed. It was a three-hour commitment and um it was really good work. Um and this business office team is doing really great work automating processes and helping to train staff. So that was a really good time for budget managers to have time with content area experts. So it improved all of our work. Um I want to just highlight um we know that the session ended in May and the special session sort of happened and you know everything got closed up yesterday I believe. I don't know if it was early this morning or but we do have a um a education finance bill or you know a new uh new um education finance laws. We aren't changing anything in the budget. If there was something that I thought was extremely um different from what we had built into our assumptions, I would we um it appears that the inflationary increase in the funding formula has remained and so the the amount that we set in the budget assumptions is intact. Compensatory funding is going to get held over. We weren't really at risk of losing compensatory funding with changes in law. Um there might be some small tweaks. We'll update those for you once we've had a chance to unpack the details of the budget. So, here's the big assumptions that the board approved about the budget uh at your March 25th meeting. These came out of the work of the finance advisory committee. Um, and you can see there's an an X for things that the budget that we're presenting tonight um include and things that it did not include. So we are presenting a budget with a 7.95% unassigned general fund um balance and the goal from finance advisory committee was that that be at 8%. We can talk a little bit more about that. Um the board policy um 714 calls for a 6% fund balance minimum. We als we actually presented a goal to increase fund balance. Not only hold it at 8% but to increase it to between 12 and 16% as per neighboring districts and um sort of fiscal standards. We still hold that goal. Um and we'll talk about why we think this is a solid um budget for next year. The funding formula is as in the current funding bill. Student enrollment projections haven't changed. 4,326 overall, 302 kindergarteners, which is about 30 fewer than this year. Um, and the numbers look to be on track. At this time, I'm not seeing anything that says it's going to be wildly higher or wildly lower than that. I think we're in the ballpark, and we will do everything we can to make sure we have to add sections of kindergarten this fall. Um, and we have some really good practices in place that we do over the summer. Um, local revenue. So, um, our recommendation is that we're going to add a technology fee for lost or broken items. We don't have a budget for that. Hoping that nobody that happens to no one. Um, community education will work on um adding increased um fees for premium rental space like our performing arts centers, our stadium, and our new um stadium spaces because they um it costs a lot to replace items um in those spaces. So, um they'll be working on that. Can I ask a question there? I'm I'm learning too that the city now is charging fees for some of their meeting spaces and stuff too and that's that's causing some conflicts or something. I have not heard that. Okay. So, I don't know if there's going to be increased interest in our facilities and some things like that that we want to prepare for or think about in terms of that as well, but I don't know. That's just something that I had heard. So, Okay. Yeah. We do have certain fees that we pay to the city on an ongoing basis. I haven't heard about changes in fees for rental spaces. Yeah. Okay. And then this is that focus on cost drivers. Um the directive or the direction recommendation from the finance advisory committee was understanding reducing and stabilizing cost drivers. Um hoping to um work on strategies to um retain direct studentf facing positions as we faced budget cuts. And you will notice that in budget cuts we did not impact um classroom teaching positions. we maintained our class size ratios and we have very low class sizes in our district and that should that should continue and that we should be thinking about return on investment for changes that we do make to the budget. So we also aside from that we have some just general routine assumptions that you should be aware of. We did increase special education revenue for next year to reflect what's happening with current year expenditures. Next year's revenue is a reflection of what we spend this year. And as you know, our costs within special education continue to rise um for lots of reasons. One of them being that teacher salaries rise and a lot of special education is teacher um and paraprofessional costs. So revenue in special ed isn't flat, it's increasing in the budget. Um our employee contract settlements, almost every contract is open this year. Jason has got a heavy lift in front of him, but we do have contract settlements built into this budget that reflect historical patterns. And I'll just remind the board that we don't use the budget as a means to negotiate contracts that we we go to the table um in a fair way. And if this and if where we get requires us to come and say we don't we don't have enough, what can we do board or if it comes in under what's built into our historical patterns, we'll make those adjustments along the way. Um, we also put market-based increases in other cost drivers like transportation, like utilities, and like property and liability insurance. Um, we we think we'll have about a 6% increase in transportation. Our property and liability insurance coverage, we're in a in a consortium with several other school districts and it's only going up by about 3% next year. So, that was really good news. That's I was not expecting that. and just want the board also to know generally we have a $200,000 contingency because of um all that we have been through this year and as we shift the budgets around um we wanted to be sure that we don't have any big surprises or try to minimize big surprises. So we did set aside a $400,000 contingency to address class- size needs. We are very optimistic about our work over the summer to make sure that our families are staying with us and um there's a fairly good chance we will need to add sections. We aren't going to make those decisions until we know. So, we have a a a good contingency built in. If we can send that back, we will. And just to clarify that 400,000 is not a piece of like the 7.95%. It's part of the It's part of the expenses. Exactly. Yeah. So, in theory, if we didn't set up a contingency, we'd probably meet the 8% goal. And only a finance person would say we're not meeting an 8% goal because we're only at 7.95, right? You could just eliminate those business. Like, it's the opposite of car sales. say we have a 7.9% financing program. 7.99% right every penny. I hear you. Thank you. Can I just I think since we're talking about that just right now rather than wait till the end why um why set that aside separate from the 8%. I guess what? Oh, it's part of the seven,00 Why are you Why you pull out the 400,000 as a contingency for a separate line item? I think that's just the label or the description of the line item, but that is reflected within the budget. I know it's within the expenses side of the budget, but why not just leave it in the contingency line or to leave it in fund balance? Yeah, like in fund balance. we wouldn't really technically have board authority to spend it then. So, we'd have to come back to if we wanted to add sections over the Well, that's helpful. Yeah. Thank you. I just didn't I didn't know if it was just It's a common practice. I've done it for 30 years in other districts. It's a common practice in districts to have a contingency. And as we look at our projected enrollment and where our kindergarten um where we're sitting as far as our kindergarten, we're keeping a a close eye on that because we have a couple of sites that are very close um as far as at capacity for their their their grades. So we we just have it on standby because if we don't have it on standby, we would have to wait for a meeting which we won't have in July. So, we're waiting until August in order to get board approval to increase that budget line item. Then, we have to post. And so, we're now be we are late in the game when it comes to hiring. If there is a need to um hire on any additional new teachers, I think if we get to that point where we're worried about needing more teachers, I think we might be okay with you calling a special meeting, too. But I hear you. I hear you that it's nice to be well in advance of that too and that we're not having to think through that or waiting for a contingency on something like that. But and it could there could be other things that pop up um aside from classroom teachers, but that's the main um reason to have a contingency. So I'm going to just run through all of the funds. This is the budget that the board will adopt, a revenue and expense budget. And this was what our auditors will evaluate our actuals against at the end of this coming year. You can see that this is the total general fund um a revenue of 80 just over 85 million and expenditures at 85 um.9 million almost 86 million. We'll talk about the details of that. Um the school nutrition fund is um expenditures are just a little bit higher than revenues. Again we'll talk a little bit more about that. The community service fund is increasing its fund balance and the debt service fund increases its fund balance. I'm not going to talk anymore about debt service after this. All you see here is the revenue and expense for debt service which is just the tax levy and we must levy at 105% of our needs and then it's given back to taxpayers through the um levy process. And we'll talk about that in September when the preliminary levy comes up because the the Department of Education watches the fund balance and calculates how much gets paid back. Where are we at? What year are we at our referendum? The most recent one. Oh, yeah. That was probably 20-year debt. Um there I will um put a big question, but I just curious. Yeah, there's a debt schedule in the budget book that um you could look at last year's budget book. You can see the debt schedule there. There's, you know, we've got a good 15, 20 years left of debt service. Yeah. Were you talking about like when it comes up again? Not well, I mean, it wouldn't necessarily come up again unless we needed it to, but but I'm just kind of curious. I just couldn't remember. Like there was like we levy though for we levy for the principal and interest annually. Yeah. And it's for 20 years or it's for the initial was probably 20 years. I I just don't have all those details right now. But the backup or the the principal and interest schedules are online in the budget book. So I'll and I can bring that back next time too. So and then this is just an overview. We have a lot of history now in our um finance system. We've been in our new finance system for several years now. So I can e more easily provide a little bit more um context. The revenue budget in the general fund is going up by 2.84%. You'll notice here that we have not moved the school nutrition fund budget. We're leaving it flat. We don't know a lot um about federal rates yet. And once we are able to analyze the summer data, we'll be able to learn more about whether we should increase or decrease that budget. I think it was a strong budget this year and we should come in pretty close to that budget, but we made the decision to not make an adjustment there. The community service fund is going up by about 685,000. the majority of that is in kids place additional fees and we also approved an increase in the tax levy for community service. We are able to um levy for the cost of school age child care for students with disabilities. Those costs went up. We were able to increase the levy and now that's reflected here. And then in the debt service fund obviously it's just um whatever is needed for principal and interest. that won't move very much because as you know we try to set up our debt to sort of wrap around each other so that the tax impact stays fairly steady over time. Can I can I ask a quick question on the school nutrition fund? So I mean just looking at it looks like there's quite a big increase from FY2023 to FY2025 and then we're remaining flat. Um, is there any I guess does that impact what kind of food we're able to source next year? Does that impact our ability to staff? No. And you'll see that their fund balance is still strong. We can't really take food service funds and spread them around in the general fund. The new statute gives us a little bit more leeway to leak into the cafeteria a little bit, but we can't really buy teachers. Um so their fund balance is remain strong because we did increase the cost for food and the cost for staffing in school nutrition. So our budget exceeds this flat revenue. I suspect their revenue will continue to increase. We just do do not have enough data to comfortably or confidently project an increase. The big increase between 23 and 25 reflects all of the changes in our cafeterias and the the newer menus that the staff at all of the sites have been able to provide which increases revenue as well. Universal meals too. Yes. And then universal meals and the closed campus at the high school has helped us. So I don't think I I don't suspect that there'll be a jump of that magnitude. Again, this is just to give you a visual of we've got all of these funds, but really we talk about the general fund because it is the biggest operating fund. We've got community service and school nutrition, which are really important. And those funds um and programs are self- sustaining. And of course, the debt service fund, which we don't talk about very much, it just happens. Um we make those principal and interest payments twice a year. um is an is the second largest source of revenue for the district. This is then just an overview of all the expenditure budgets in the general fund. Um expenditures are going up by 1.87% 2.23%. Keep in mind that we cut $2 million to get to an increase of only 1.8%. Costs would have grown by more like 4% um a little over 4% had we not done that. and we would not be even a rounding error close to 8%. The school nutrition fund um is increasing by $127,000. We did put a a healthy inflationary increase in their food costs and then a a standard historical increase in their employment um salaries and benefits. So that's what's reflected there. the community service um expenditure budget is basically flat and then the debt service fund is you know it reflects the increase in revenue and this is just a picture of in that same way to just remind ourselves again um of the magnitude of these funds I'm going to go through a little bit of details I tried to highlight a few things here what I want you to see this is just the general fund and it's a snapshot. You got a fund balance page in the board packet and here's what you're looking at. This is the beginning fund balance for next year. So, this is currently our budgeted ending fund balance in the general fund for June 30th of this year would be at 10.3 million. This budget we're proposing has $85,171,000 in total expenses and a total uh revenue that is and total expenses of 85.9 million. So, here's our ending fund balance. The total funded fund balance going down by $811,000. The the um important thing here is the details. The unassigned general fund balance is only budgeted to go down by $33,000. That's how we're able to maintain that 8%. And one would think if the fund balance is only going by down by 33,000, how do we get from 8.2 to 7.95%. And here's why. You know, you guys can see the math right away. As this expenditure line grows by 3 4%, um salary costs alone um create those kinds of increases. Um and you have a stable or declining fund balance, the numerator divided by a growing denominator. Fund balance will go down if we do nothing. it fund balance goes down and we cut two $2 million because you're ju we're going to continue to have a a growing expenditure budget because we are a staffheavy um organization. So it's going to take monumental increases in revenue and really strategic changes in our expenditure patterns to build this fund balance back up. So I just wanted to make sure you understand that. The other thing that's very important is that this budget assumes that we use $400,000 for severance costs, which is written out of contracts except for those employees who have been with the district for many, many years. We still have employees retiring um that have severance as part of their employment contract. We're getting close to the end, but we still have um I would say at least five years worth of retirees. And perhaps these changes with TRA will cause an even higher increase. Um there's changes in um the the age level at which folks who are teachers mostly that um retire with TRA. Um it makes it easier for someone to retire sooner. So I wonder if $400,000 will be enough to cover severance and we'll have to talk about that as the time comes. However, um I just want you to see that we're driving down a reserve that we've been trying to really thoughtfully use over the years down to $276,000. We're not going to have a reserve for severance to to cover the continuing costs of severance. So, if we think about continuing severance, we just have to pay attention to that. And there's also for the largest group um in the teachers it's $475,000 that the district is liable for within a given year. The person then if they were at the cuto off they would roll to the next year. So I mean it's something we have to think about but there's also you know some safety measures built into the contract to allow for us to account for those costs over the course of there's a $600,000 line item for severance in the budget. We're only taking 400,000 of it out of the seance reserve. And and then there's it grows and grows every year. You'll see on the fund balance page the number of line items that are in these non- capital finance codes. There's set aides for literacy, for gifted and talented, for literacy incentive, for pair professional training, for read training. it just for um class size reduction for a formula that goes back to like 1993. There's just the accounting and jumping through hoops for this $7.5 million to make sure that we are spending correctly according to each line item. I still don't know if there's new reserves coming out of this year's um funding formula, but our job every year is to make sure we strategically use our expenditures and assign them to those reserved expenses. So pulled out of that unassigned general fund is $7.5 million of expenses that go to that go to these reserved types of funding and law requires us to set it aside. So we can't really call it unassigned fund balance. Um, we also have a lease levy that has to be spent in precisely that way. And then there's three capital related items where we and here's the other thing. We cannot carry a negative fund balance in any of these funds. We can carry a positive fund balance, but it would be unwise in our financial position to carry fund balances and and have a fund balance percentage only at 8%. So we do everything we can to make sure we use that specialized funding. So there's three categories. There's the capital projects levy for technology that we are basically saying we're going to expend the revenue that we bring in through that voter approved um levy for for capital projects for technology. So, we we're holding the fund balance and we are working really hard to make sure that um that we're expending everything that applies in that technology levy. Um so, for instance, I can't just go up and say, "Let's just take three or four teachers and put them down in technology." They have no relationship to the technology levy or what the voters voted on. We just don't have that leeway. Um long-term facility maintenance, which you'll learn a little bit more about at at our next meeting. We are going to make a bigger investment in using long-term facility maintenance this year. We suspect as we start to wind down um the other the bond issue that included some deferred maintenance. So, we've been building up that fund balance over time. We're going to use next year to start to draw down some of those projects. Um and then operating capital, we've been um drawing down that fund balance over time and we've we're stabilizing now. We've made investments in music, in curriculum, um band instruments was the music. We've made um investments in athletics. Um so we can now start to stabilize the spending within operating capital. And again, none of these areas we can't just willy-nilly take expenses out of the general fund. They have to be very precise. And then of course, we hold a balance for student activities, which we might try to do. We might do something. No, student activities we we maintain. Yes. Y Um, we hold student activities within the general fund. Anyway, I wanted you to see a little bit about that picture that these ending fund balances are there by design. There's nothing we can, you know, we can start to just spend them down and buy stuff, but that isn't a wise thing to do. So, we're retaining those. We need to be thinking about what we're going to do about severance in the future. We'll do all that we can to make sure that this fund balance can be as high as possible as we end this year. Um, so is that I guess I'm just trying to if you did spend down the fund balance, it would still be its own line. We would just have to budget for it. Yeah, we'd just have to within this budget support perhaps up to $475,000 worth of costs for severance. Got it. So that would just equal to general that would one day eventually eat into the uh on the side. Exactly. There is $200,000 of severance costs built in here. We split it 400 and 200. So here's some detail about the general fund 2.84% increase. Um you saw in December when we um set the tax levy that there's a $479,000 increase in um the levy portion. That's across all of the funding formulas, some of them reserved, some of them not reserved, LTFM, operating capital for instance. And then it's also the operating referendum and other categories of general fund. For the most part, property taxes are usually just a shift between state aid and property taxes as equalization changes. State revenue is going up by 1.8 million. Almost 100% of that is um special education revenue, which reflects um cost drivers from this year. We also have the increase in the funding formula, but it's offset by a decline a projected decline in enrollment. So it's we're basically, you know, our our revenue is being driven up by special education, which has been the case for two or three years as the state has um finally made some inroads in that cross subsidy for special education costs. That change has been a really important part of school district budgets. Federal revenue, we are anticipating to be basically fat. There's there's nothing that we know for sure about changes in federal revenue for next year. And then local revenue is budgeted to go down. And for the most part, that is because um in the current midyear budget, there's some gifts and donations that were added to the budget. So we could set up the offsetting expenditure amount. We aren't we don't budget for gifts. So if they come, they'll be spent accordingly. Is that what makes a a majority or a good amount of that $2 million from No. No. Majority of it is athletics fees and other activity fees, parking fees. Um, that's where the transportation or the technology fee would go next year. There's no budget for that. And interesting, a big portion is interesting. Okay. Oh, is that Yeah. kind of drives that 2 million in FY 2024. Yep. Okay. Yes. We had a really successful year and um we still do maintain healthy cash reserves. So, um we'll do all that we can to keep that number up. Um this again is just a picture of that. So you can see state revenue is important for school districts. That's where most of um the funding has been moved um over the last 10 to 15 years. And then property taxes still um is a really important part of the budget. All of these are important. Federal revenue makes up about 2.7% about $2 million. And then that local revenue um is really important to offset um all of our costs in the general fund. We don't set aside revenue that's earned for athletics to cover athletics. It goes to the general fund and we fund all of our programming out of those revenues. Here's on the expenditure side. Salary and benefits are going up by 3.26% in this budget. Keep in mind that all of these in are after reductions. um after our $2 million in budget reductions most well I think 100% was in salaries and benefits um there might have been some small reductions in other areas um just to underscore we are you know 85% salary and benefits the majority of that is teachers and step and lane costs alone even before we have a salary settlement is well above um 2% and then if we add some projection for salary settlements this is not a surprising increase even with reductions. Um purchase services um the costs are um projected to go down in purchase services and I think some of that is related to transportation. We're getting that under control. Um transportation we're um we are going to um watch our substitute cost which is a purchase service from teachers on call. And then um and we've made some changes to things that we will be doing as a district next year to pull teachers out of classrooms. So that um also will aid in reducing that substitute teacher budget. Thanks for the reminder. Supplies and equipment is basically flat. So a 2.23% 23% increase is is a pretty minimal increase, but keep in mind that we cut $2 million to get to this place where the budget is still going up. So, here's a picture. Salary and benefits, there's purchase services. Transportation is a big portion of our purchase services. Um, and then supplies and equipment. And also keep in mind that technology, LTFM, and operating capital are in this general fund. So equipment and purchase services includes all of those things we do with technology, um, heat, light, all of those things are purchase services. These are the budget reductions. Um, I'll just walk through these line items. We have a reorganization in our instruction and learning department, which will save $641,000. Um, elementary staffing changes due to a decline in enrollment is about $540,000. That's really a right sizing of staffing due to enrollment and is a and that's probably where we would spend $400,000 if we have to add teachers back. Um, so just keep that in mind. It's like the good and the bad. We want that enrollment to go up. Um but we'll we'll hold as much as we can because we do have good class sizes. Our high school and middle school um staff um were adjusted due to the schedule change for next year. You can see each of those. We made a plan to reduce substitute teacher costs for next year. We're reducing pair of professionals um through attrition. actually nobody in that in that bargaining unit um is not being brought back. We through attrition were able to get um our prayer professional footprint down to the the place where it's um that that it reflects what our students needs are. And then we are pausing our design team work which um reduces some costs in extra salaries that we pay to teachers to come and do central office um type support. um with the elementary staffing changes. Um so looking at where we were projecting earlier this year, our numbers going into next year are still a little bit higher than what we had initially project or estimated. Yeah, our current numbers are high are higher than we thought we would be starting next year and those will go into next year. But because we have a smaller kindergarten class coming in at kindergarten and a large larger than kindergarten 12th grade class leaving. I believe enrollment is going down by about 29 students. But the big thing at elementary is that we had a really large fifth grade class pushing its way through. That big old class has moved its way into the middle school. Got it. And as far as class sizes, are are there I guess how how are we still within our our previous limits? Yes, that nothing has changed about our class size ranges and I can't think of a grade level at least at elementary way where we are not at probably at least three below our class size targets. So there is room to fill in in all of those areas. It would take a pretty significant shift and it would it's probably most likely to happen at kindergarten. There's some little pockets where we're close but aside from PSI because we can pretty well plan our class sizes for PSI but our three boundary schools have very positive class sizes and that's what we've got a lot of room to fill in or some room to fill in before we start to hit target start to hit our targets. So, it's not a foregone conclusion that we would have to add staff. That would be a good thing. Yes. So, I want to remind the board that there's a lot of really solid things that this board and ad and other administrations over the years have done to put us in a really good place. We have a 10-year operating referendum. We're currently at the cap and that was put in place in 2017 and I believe we can renew that one time um without voter approval. So that's something that soon, you know, 2017, pretty soon it's going to be 10 years. So we'll want to start thinking about whether a a board wants to um renew that at some time. I believe you can only do it once. Um we have a 10-year capital projects levy for technology that was renewed in 2022. That saves a lot of school districts budgets. If we had to spend $4 million for technology in the general fund, it would be a different organization. And that's why wisely many school districts started implementing capital projects levies for technology many years ago just like St. Louis Park. LTFM funding um we are at our cap. There's new roofing funding coming out of the 2025 session. It will help our district a little bit because the downside for St. Louis Park is that we've done a lot of our roofs over time under our current um roofing plan. What this would allow us would have allowed us to do is invest more deeply in any given year in roofs and get extra money out of LTFM. It would be a tax levy. So, we'd be talking about an increase. You know, it's a voter approved LTFM tax levy. We don't have a really deep need right now, but over time it will make a difference because roofs don't last forever. And the downside for St. Louis Park is that we didn't do 30 to 50 year roof replacements. We did what we could afford. You know, maybe a 15 to 20 year um repair to our roofs. So, that will help us, but it's more of a long-term help. We still need long-term facility maintenance funding to the the entire kitten koodleoodle to look just like roofs that we can spend what our board believes our our taxpayers um want us to spend and need us to spend to keep our buildings like the 25 districts who are who were above the cap when this came into place. So keep talking about that. Thank you for all your work. Yeah. But to that point, the roofing thing I Were you involved with any of that? I did testify to that. I had one minute. We appreciate that. You know, we're not in a regular board meeting, this board, but study session stuff, but a lot of people around the state, but we're involved with a lot of things. Yes. With the session that just wrapped up and you started talking about some of that stuff, then thank you. I think that doesn't just benefit us, but it benefits all our education. I think everybody at this table was down at the capital this year at least once. So, um the other thing, okay, long-term facility. We also, um have our OpEd trust. So, we sold bonds several years ago. There was this one time little bitty window gosh 20 years ago or well 2009 almost 20 years ago. And we've been doing also an annual levy since 2020. That's a practice we put in place um because what is not going to be funded by the trust from 2009 which we did not sell enough bonds to cover our anticipated costs in OP that that um annual levy will keep us from having to dip into the general fund. It's sort of a a safeguard against that. So those are really important practices to keep in mind um and keep our eye on maintaining those funds that that keep this general fund safe. We'll be continuing to look at efficiencies and staffing adjustments to like staffing adjustments to reflect enrollment, energy efficiency. We will start to see the fruit of all of this construction. Uh the energy efficient um changes that we're making even in this building with a new um boiler will start to reduce our energy costs. It's just going to take time before we start to see some of that impact. We have a self-funded medical and dental program that again this year proved to us that um it's important to um be it's important because it helps us keep our increases stable. It doesn't keep costs down, but it does help us to increases stable. We're going to continue our budget manager meetings and with what we learned this year, we're going to be so much better focused in our budget manager meetings and Dr. kinds has really brought our attention to return on investment and cleaning up practices around spending and buying. Um, that's just been new for us. And as we meet as teams once a month and people are committed to the work, we will have cost containment. We'll see the fruits of that too. It was just a start this year. So, we're really looking at subs, substitute teachers and pair professionals, additional salary that we pay outside of just the basic contracts um for work outside of the basic contracts and our transportation costs. And I'm cautiously optimistic that we are going to come in under budget on transportation this year. And um I think we've seen our last bill now. So, that's really good news. Party. Okay. All right. All right. All right. All right. And um of course we will my prediction is we're going to be facing budget reductions again, expenditure reductions again next year to reflect funds that are available. I don't see a good pathway out of that. Even with increased enrollment, which I hope we end up um enjoying this year, as you saw, our costs go up because we are a people business and our people deserve to be paid um what the market will bear. um and revenue is just not keeping up. That is, you know, it's just a really important um message to drive home to our community and to our legislators. Yes. Because if you go back to that chart that says where do we get our money from, it there's a lot that comes from our property taxes, but it's not that much when you state. The state is our big driver for that. So if they're not funding, if we're not getting enough in education, it's because our states and we're very very thankful of the hard work that people are doing, but we just know that's the key. That's the key there. It is. And you said, and like you said, sorry, I'm going to get up on the soap box. We're just 20 more seconds. You have those funds in there that you have 75 different funds. It's not 75, but it was whatever. So many different funds that are like, nope, it has to be spent for this and show us the work and you're for like $1,000 or whatever, right? So, it's that kind of stuff that we keep banging the drama on. So, like like we need this to be simpler, we need this to be more consistent, we need this to be real, needs to match what the real expenses are. But anyways, I'm off my soap box. Just out of curiosity with those funds that um areas that Colin was just talking about, if we're short, it comes from the general fund, right? Right. If we were short, yeah, there's an automatic sweep and during the audit process, we have to Does that happen very often with those those specific things that the state is telling us this is where for the assigned? We try to be strategic about what we assign. I mean one way or the other it's general fund costs especially for those teaching and learning type funds. We're spending that money anyway for our teaching staff and for our professional staff. So we try to be strategic about how we assign it. You would think that it would be better to just like slightly overspend it. we put up in the general fund then to understand it and not that's what happens that's why it's at zero. Yeah. Um Okay. And then we we would like we haven't done this before made a final year end budget or adjustment to the 2025 budget. And we're going to try to do this this year. And here's why. It's all of the things you might recall in the fall when the budget when the audit is over and we come in and go, "Well, there's this audit adjustment that we have to do every year." And so revenue and expense are off by the same amount, but we don't budget for that. So, we're going to try to eliminate the we don't budget for that thing and start to build this practice um and then perhaps we can get that into an earlier budget adjustment um for next year. These things are not included in the current year's budget. So there's um Gatsby 68 requires and this has been maybe five years, time flies sometimes, requires that school districts reflect on both our balance sheet and our income statement, the impact of the statewide underfunding of PER and TRA. So we get our dollar amount at the end of the school year and we book revenue and expense. They offset each other. But then I sit here trying to tell you that, you know, we didn't go over in benefits and we just don't budget that thing and it sounds weird. And when things sound weird, people don't believe you. So, we're going to try to get the budget set up. It's about $190,000. In the community service fund, you can talk a little bit more about that. You're much closer to that than I am. Sure. Um so, um when we got our final, um non-public people aid, the allocation from the state, um it came in about $200,000 higher than what we originally budgeted for. So, this is just chewing it up to uh what it's going to be. And the, you know, the UPARS requires us to run non-public pupil revenue and expense through community service. Um Patrice and that team have nothing to do with monitoring that. We monitor out at the business office. Tell me again asking about nonpublic. That's chartered schools. Um, private school. Private school. Private. So Benil is probably our biggest um nonpublic. So what the state does is they provide funds to us to in essence provide funds to Benil, right? And that is for things like for the text and stuff. What textbooks? Okay. um health services and guidance, secondary guidance, counseling services. Private schools can handle all this accounting. So, we get to do it for them. I think they're trying to do a little bit of separation of church and state, but yeah, but keep going. So, we're going to we want to chew that up so we aren't in here talking about something we knew was in the budget, but we hadn't really paid attention to making that adjustment. And in fund 20 and 21, our internal service fund, you've heard me for years say we don't budget for self-funded medical and dental. We have enough track record now to kind of know it's about a, you know, a $10 million revenue and expense. So, we're going to build that into the budget. So, we just don't come in with this $10 million variance to the budget and say we don't budget for that. We know enough to know that we can put a placeholder in there. So, we'd like to bring just a a short um adjustment for fiscal year 2025 and those three four funds at the final meeting of the year. There's nothing significant. It's just that we want to budget for standard practice. So, here's our next steps. that the next meeting um we'll approve um the board will recommend that you approve the budget as we have presented it and then we'll start again. We're the auditors are here next week and we start the levy process for fiscal year 2027 this summer. So we're off and running. Audit time, right? Mhm. They're crawling around. We're in good shape. You done my shopping yet? I'm I know it's on season. I should [Music] do or something. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Very good detail and we really appreciate this. Do we have any questions? Any more questions board members? We hear a lot. I guess I was just going to ask like how how are we how are we feeling about the 7.95% is are we very confident in that number? Uh is it do we expect to actually maybe get to 8% by the end of the year? I mean it depends on the contingency, right? Um if we get an influx of need romance and we need to add sections then we have to see how it plays out. It also another um thing in our favor is I suspect we might end this school year at or perhaps a little bit higher. So that's going to drive next year's year end fund balance up right away too. So, if we can, you know, if we've been successful in reigning in costs in some areas that we can um that will make a difference as well. I guess one of the things that makes me nervous is uh I'm I'm very happy and appreciative that the legislative session ended and it didn't impact the uh ties to inflation with the formula. Uh however, I don't believe we're out of the woods quite yet. uh when you look at the potential Medicaid cuts on the federal level, even if the federal funding for education remains the same, if those cuts happen, it impacts state revenue, which then could have a downward effect on education funding. So I think it's really important and incumbent to keep an eye on that and do whatever we can uh as community members uh to make sure that story is being told that education is still very much facing funding threats from all all corners. The other thing the board should be aware of, I didn't pull it out as a line item for discussion, but the earn safe and sick time will have a payroll deduction and a and a matching employer contribution beginning in January. I think the percentage was driven down just a little bit in the final bill and is not being delayed. We wondered whether it would be delayed again. So, we did build in an increase. It was about $100,000 because it's only for half of this year, but that's going to be an ongoing payroll um cost. over time. I had a quick question. One of the things that we've talked about um when we think about source like just our revenue sources are so limited, but you've mentioned um the need or how ideal it would be if there was a district-wide booster club that could support some of our athletic um costs so that they don't have to come out of the general fund. And I've thought about that a bit and just wondered like um what are the steps to make that happen, right? And you know, sort of who's responsible for that. I wonder if some of that could come out of the strategic plan and some of the areas that have been highlighted about community involvement. Yeah, I don't know how one starts that. Um there's a there's a I know that uh director Ewalt has sent out a message about the athletic advisory committee too and that we're trying to grow that and have some more involvement with that and maybe that could be topic of discussion there um to see what we could do to kind of streamline that. Yeah. I just know I mean I hear from community members who are like you know who how can we help what can we do and that feels like a tangible thing that folks would potentially be interested in but I don't know. Okay. If there was a community member, where should we sat them if there was somebody who wanted to come forward? Director Zuku. Director Zuku. I I guess one one thing I wanted to say just bouncing off of that is I think we've also talked in the past about taking or yeah, I guess taking uh the local gifts out of the consent agenda. Does that make sense to try and drive more donations to the school district? I don't know. We've taken it out of there, but we've talked about whether we might or announcing it or talking addressing it more publicly. I don't know. That's to make it more aware people for people who want recognition or to I don't know. But those often I those can well whatever sometimes it's not you don't get as much whatever leniency with how we use those dollars either. Sometimes gifts come with, you know, an expense. They aren't generally a gift to offset current costs. It's generally a gift so that we can buy something that we would that wasn't already in the budget. But obviously, it will show the generosity of our community, which we have these like Amazon teacher wish list. It's like a district-wide thing that we could almost, you know, suggest like here's what we need the money for. Here's what, you know, here's what would be good to if we can get contributions, matching contributions, whatever. It's good thinking. Um, all right. Anything else here? We just again appreciate the work and we're happy that the legislaturator is doing some what it's doing, but people, we got to get more. We got to find it somehow. Um, got to keep pushing those people. We'll be back in two weeks. Yeah. So, we're just got to hang around. Okay. Good. All right. Let's move on to NM3C which is first reading policy 715 uniform guidance policy regarding federal government sources. Um so pointing out this back to you. Okay. So um you introduce yourself for people at home that Sure. Sure. Um my name is Josiah. I'm the assistant director of business services here. Um let's see policy 715 the uniform grant guidance reading for federal sources. So um basically we always have policy 715. Um this update is just to update it so it can be more in line with the uh with the new standard that was passed last year. Um you guys have the actual policies and you guys have the memo as well, but I'm just going to go over some key highlights of what changed. Um the main thing is here we're increasing our um uh thresh um micro purchet threshold adjustment from 5,000 to $10,000. Um this will just make our policy more align with the federal um standards. Um another update to the policy was the procurement enhancements. Um, one of the things that they want us to do is, you know, um, when we going out to a procure for goods or services, they want us to give preferences to like domestic, um, manufacturers or companies with veteran um, identities, etc. Um, another big one that's in the new um, guidance is cyber security. um they are requiring us to um at least have a reasonable effort every time we're dealing with uh personally identified information or sensitive information. Um so we currently do have a pretty good cyber security policy uh especially when we are sharing sensitive data. Um, one of the things that we do, um, we try not to send sensitive data outside of our server, but if we do have to send it to like another district, we'll send a, uh, uh, what is it like, uh, lock PDF and then maybe call the recipient and send them the password for that. So, um, another item that came up was the subreient monitoring. Um, the district, all the federal awards we get, we are not technically subreients. Oh, I'm sorry. right? We are not we are subreients but we're not the recipient because the MDE is the recipient and so therefore um there's just additional um I guess compliance that they want us as the subreient to adhere to. Uh I think the and the main thing of that is mandatory reporting of non-compliance. So with this new standard, we're required to so if we if we have reasonable assurance that laws are being broken, we are required to contact not just MD but the federal government agency and report that. Um and then there was just a few terminology updates as far as just specifying between recipients and subreients and just clearing out some of the language in the code. Um so any questions probably this would be on the consent agenda next time. Well we have to do a second read second read next. Oh then we can approve it then other so questions comments about this policy. We're good. Thank you. Thanks for doing the work and putting it forward. appreciate it. I also just I did want to say thank you for the memos. That was that's a I feel like that's new and I love it. I love the summary. So help me to know what I'm looking at when I actually open the the document. So thank you. Thank you. Um all right, final item on the agenda here. City commission C3 structure if you want to express that. Yes. So, um there have been conversations since my appointment in regards to um seats on commissions with the city and the the seats being voting seats and if board members are expected to go understanding that there's not a lot of information from an operational side that they could provide perspective for the district. So, in conversations with the city manager, we um had some just had some questions in regards to the structures of the commissions and what we landed on was um because many of the seats are up for reappoint at the end of May. I want to say that we are going to release the board identified seats for the commissions that's attached to the school board. And if any board member would like to sit on those commissions, they will go through the regular process of appointment for the city as opposed to be a default um member of those commissions. in its state, cabinet members would um fill in as far as liaons for the district on those commissions when agenda items warrant perspective from the school district. So, this memo is just to um highlight what our current reality is as far as our city commissions and school board seats being on those commissions to um how we're going to move forward with cabinet members attending commission meetings when the agenda items warrant a school district perspective as liaons. And if board members would like to continue because we have um you should say board members and appointees. We also appoint Yes. and appointees. Yeah. Um if they would like to continue their um service on those commissions, they would go through the the city's process to be identified. I have a couple questions. The first just um what Colin brought up because we do have some appointees. So do are we voting on this? So this is it for information now, right? So will we vote on it eventually? My only thing my only thought is to add that held by um school board member or my team. Okay. Because we don't we have two. We have technically we can appoint I mean we have no like currently. Yeah we have uh one on planning and we have two that we can on parks I think in Brack and I think we have one person on there currently maybe. Yes. And then we have one person on sorry technology or what's it? I think we have one person on community technology. We have one employee there. So, um, my first question is, did we decide to do this change, which is fine, um, because we're just at as a school board, we're just at capacity and we just can't take on more committees. Is that kind of where this is? Um, so I believe there's a capacity concern for board members. I also believe that there is um information and clarity of information that they're seeking from an operational side from the district that cabinet members would have more depth of of knowledge and information to share when it comes to things that they're seeking from when it comes to better understanding and impact. Um, and then what do we know how our like the city council members feel about this change? We know how the city manager does, but do we know anything about our council member? No, I don't. So, our council, from my understanding, the city council members don't sit on the commissions. No, they don't. I'm just wondering how they feel about us the changes cuz this would be so a C so if we have cabinet they would be non voting correct um and so I'm just curious what the city council members would have they expressed anything I mean I don't know for me it's more about we're trying to flow information I you know as I've been chair here um for a year and a half I I don't know what's going on at these commissions I'm not hearing information. I don't know that there's information that they're getting from us directly. And so I just I think it was well intended, but I don't know that the model really works. And I understand where some of this comes from. But I think if we're looking to share information and have things that are saying like here's how that would impact us or here's how we could collaborate or figure out how we could do that, I see more of that being happening in terms of that conversation and being benefit and having people that we've sort of I don't know. I don't want you know. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, I just had a a couple maybe a concern and a question. Uh first of all, I do think this has the potential to be like uh Chair Cox has been saying a better uh format for us. Uh I I guess the concern I have is how do we ensure cabinet members are invited uh when the when school district input would you know pertain to agenda topics? Um not sure I I completely understand what it means when they need input like who who determines that and how is that determined? So we will be monitoring the agendas with Jasmine. So and Jasmine has a contact with the city that she is um in the loop with. So their liaison will be in in communication with Jasmine when there is a need or an agenda item. Okay. That they need perspective or representation to be present. Do we have any like examples of an agenda topic of I don't off the top of my head. Um I haven't heard any. Yeah. Right. Right. I mean, I think of things like even like we had the challenge with Rise on 7, you know, as an example of something where it was like and people were like, "Oh my gosh, we didn't really think about this impact, right? Oh, we have a lot of families that are moving in here." And like some of those things would seem like if we see developments, those would be cues of things that we know that would impact us if we see, you know, I think I think some of that and I think we can as community members, you can sign up to get the commission. um you know agendas too and as members we could also be reviewing that and asking you know is this something that we're tracking on or something too which would seem fair too but the the other question I had was um I think it on the on the proposal it had said that uh uh the executive assistant and the school board will serve as the contact so that would just that would be Jasmine. Okay, got it. And I didn't put names in in here in order to just codify the titles and we don't have to come back and update that information. And then would there be a information flow back to the board? Absolutely. Um I would just note I I'm I'm in favor of this change. Um, I do have, you know, I don't pay close enough attention to the agendas of these commissions to really know how frequently it's going to be something that would overlap or, you know, require input, but I think it would be interesting to sort of try this and kind of get a report back in a year. I could see some of these like parks and wreck would be one probably where we I'm just guessing more likely to be regular and present at that versus maybe the planning commission. I don't know. Um but I just I think that um it would be really valuable for our cabinet level leaders to be in those spaces so that they can actually share about like up-to-date information about what's happening and what they're working on and bring that back in real time for you all to be able to coordinate and collaborate. I think we've talked a lot about how can we collaborate more effectively with our city partners and this feels like a step in the right direction to me. I also think um you know the as a school board member you know our commitment to be here it's also a lot to ask for folks to then also volunteer to be on these commissions. I mean I can only speak for myself but it that always I haven't done it because it has felt so overwhelming to me to feel like okay and I have to go to this district and so to me I think there's a lot of upside. I I have some questions, not concerns as Taylor, but I think I'm just interested to see how this goes in the next year. So, I would be supportive and I want to make sure that we are keeping the school board seat attractive and not overwhelming, especially as we are in the process of looking for more candidates to sit on the school board. um understanding that life gets busy and how can we continue to get those that want to serve on the school board um seeing this as a viable opportunity for them and not overwhelm. Yeah. And I would just I mean this is this is just my observation from having sat on the human rights commission for twice um with Dr. Osai. I think that sometimes um what is beneficial about having cabinet on it is that some of the asks that come from the city aren't necessarily within our capacity to do that. you know, because um I think public schools are kind of uh special in a way that we do touch so many of our community members and so it's often sometimes, oh well, we'll just talk to the school and the school can. And so it it makes sense to have cabinet on there because we we know um as board members, yeah, it's fun to promise, oh yeah, we can do that. We have the greatest staff in the world. Of course, we can. But like having cabinet members say, "Well, this is act the reality of our situation and our our capacity to kind of help." But I also want to echo um I like the report backs would be would be helpful so that um because many of the our city council members are our friends um or at least our acquaintances and if they bring something up and we're like I don't want to be caught um unaware or uninformed. So that would I don't know how that would happen but Not that we're being informed right now because nobody's on the commission. So like we have some people and I do want to recognize and acknowledge the people that have volunteered to do that. They have not been paid, you know, anything to do that and some people are doing it just because they continue to have an interest in those issues and I really do appreciate that. So and I can't say that they never have helped us, right? We just don't know exactly what those impacts are. And in a time where nowadays where it's getting more complicated about what we can fund, what we can't do, what our budget is, where we can be, I think we want to have some other types of conversations about how do we strategically align more than like you know how can we figure out how we can collaborate, where can we do this, this these are our stipulations within this. So, um, sorry about that. And and the other thing I wanted to say too was that as you might recall, we um also give ourselves some other assignments to the board members. I'm just sharing this for any community members still awake watching us at this point. They haven't tuned away to watch the end of America's Got Talent or something. But um that we um we each board member is a liaison to a school or to a program. We also are um serve on things like the strategic planning um committees and we have some other roles that we take on too, not to mention parents and community volunteers too. And so we're involved in a lot of ways in these schools too and some of those things are to me way more obvious ways for us to be involved for me to be in that high school and hear from the parents and stuff like that. That's a key. Not that I don't want to hear from the community too, but that's going to be key to the work that I'm doing here too and seems really important and I think you know those are nice things to prioritize things that we don't have to do. Not every school board appoints somebody to a school to do some of that. So we do do some of those things that go above and beyond too. So appreciate that. Anything else that we need on this? So we're just trying I don't know is there next step on this? this is something. So, one thing I'm not clear about, but I'll do some research on is um when the initial decision was made forward to have the commission the seats on the commission, was that a vote? And um if we need to put this on our regular business meeting in order for you to have a policy related to this, I don't think so. you know, this could be something from the sense that I have and I haven't had a lot of conversations and I I I do need to follow back up with the city council member that reached out to me, but um but um the that this is more of a city policy, right? So, I'm more thinking of landlines that impact some of the things and I know from my understanding they're rewriting their policy because it's time to do the reappoints or the selection. Well, I appreciate you taking a look at this. This is actually something that I've requested us to consider to look at. So, thank you. All right. Anything else then? Again, appreciate all the work and appreciative of our legislature and everything. So, thank you everybody for being here and extra time tonight. Thank you.