Director Dana Abrams is going to provide an overview of this information, and I think it is important to have on record that members of our GSPAC said that they want to share information with us, but quite honestly, they do not feel safe coming out publicly right now, and I think that that um is a horrific statement in and of itself.

One of the huge challenges right now is the fact that the way in the Spanish language in order to change the pronouns, changes the way the language is taught. And so if and we have a parent that is feels extremely strong about this and so this is where I, I won't be the decision maker here. I look forward to connecting with perhaps Doctor Yowsky along with Doctor Sarah Smith Kotwa. Esperant to look at what are we following, what are we obligated as a um learning institution to put on the pronoun, um posters for the Spanish language.

We are focused exclusively on this fiscal relationship between charter schools and district schools. We're not looking at educational superiority of one over the other, um. Whether one is better or worse or how this financial relationship may be beneficial or not. Uh, what we are looking at is this conventional wisdom that money follows students, right?

So the school now has fewer resources but is spending the same amount of money on that bus. So that means basically the, the school in which that bus is running has to provide a a larger share of its funding to maintain the operation of that bus. That money has to come from somewhere else, perhaps from a. Teaching budget or something of that nature.

I just wanna, just for the record to be clear um, we are, we cannot bill for students, special ed that are not enrolled in our school district. So we're even though we're paying that 80% out, we are not billing for those students, correct. That's my understanding.

It's not to shame or blame or um cast any sort of judgment on the Areas of choice that we have across the city, but instead to name that if the goal is to continue to invest in our public schools, and we actually need to understand all of the different places and ways in which we are losing revenue and that there are actions that can be taken.

So for instance, um, One of our, um, schools, one of our middle schools, we share, um, bussing with one of the charter schools because we are, um, liable for bussing all the charter schools if they elect to use our system. And so this particular charter school has elected to use, um, our service for that school. We pair the two buses, the two schools together because of the close proximity, and without that, um Busing those charter school students, we would be able to save um. Two, this year, two routes, or two buses, and our buses, each bus costs about $879 a day to operate. And so over the course of 170 days two routes, it's about $300,000.

Our revenues. 814.5. The difference is that 14.35 million shortfall that we've been talking about, uh, for quite some time. Um, and that does represent 1.7% of our total, uh, budget. That number would be much bigger if it weren't for the successful referendum.

And the reason was because survey said that this is gonna be kind of it, and we couldn't have asked for much more because we're almost really at that limit. We're, we're slightly under, but we're we're there, we're already there.

The other thing we, we, we point out, and it's important, is that a lot of the Expense that we incur, we don't have a lot of flexibility over. You know, so we put that in there, um, we know that that those types of things fall outside of priorities but must be funded with our resources, and these things are like utilities and we have to keep the lights on, we have to keep the buildings, um, insurance, state and federal mandates, staffing ratios, and, and other fixed costs.

It is you know, in, in a really strong way, it's sovereignty in action, um, and the work that we have all done up until this point through this. the school year and even being here today speaking to you all, we are working on our indigenous sovereignty for our students and our nations too.

a non-concurrent vote solidifies that we have the opportunity, our parents have the opportunity to bring forward formally to a school board meeting their biggest concerns and advise how we move forward. To address those um concerns that they have and so we voted no concurrent this year.

One of the things that we've been trying to focus on is creating land acknowledgments for each school site, um, even though, um, we're working to standardize things with standards-based learning this year and last year I got to visit all the schools and each school has its own culture. So we felt it was appropriate that each school when they create their land acknowledgment they do it with intent and meaning and really connect to the land.

Everything I'm doing starts with literacy um, you know, and, and there's been times when I thought you know, maybe my, my role would not be here. What could I do to leave a sustainable impact on our district? Something that our district can take and something that will hopefully be there forever. And so with that idea of literacy. I've really updated our website Saint Paul Public Schools website, and the indigenous integration website, and I've included so many resources for all of our contents, pre-K through 12th grade um, to help people do that.

In regards to our hiring numbers as of late March, we have 35 new staff members to Saint Paul that are self self-identified American Indian staff members. That is up from last year's actual 19. Um, overall in the district, we have 146. Self-identified American Indian staff members they are in, and I gotta look at my numbers here, they are in over 39 of our different builds, um, schools as well as 4 of our admin buildings, um, in classroom specific positions, so teachers, EAs, um, and TAs they are in 30 different buildings. For 30 different schools for us.

No, you do. As a matter of fact, here's how you pull up the ad hoc report on campus. You have 5 American Indian students, and 3 of them have been attending school inconsistently. So Like who's called the family, who's made a home visit, who's reached out. And so that's the type, kind of how granular we want to get with that is so. Maybe I look at the quarterly reports, but we're trying to get school teams to look at those reports much more regularly.

I've been in many conversations over the last couple of weeks with SPF leadership and Lauren did a presentation earlier, and I and Brenda, um, actually met with, uh, several people from SPFE on Friday. We met for over 2 hours. Um, and we, um, have some agreements on a couple of things.

We also talked about the fact that we're working with Doctor Schmidde Carranza who is then going to be pairing positions together um and one of the things that we specifically requested was that 0.2 positions not be posted in the interview and select process, but that rather, um, Doctor Schmidt Carranz. We'll actually be able to pair that with the existing 0.8 and make sure that schedules match so that people would have the ability to remain at their current locations.

I will also say that I do realize, and I've said this to many community groups as I've been out speaking, that it seems like this $14.35 million reduction has had a greater impact than even the 160-something million that are before, and I completely acknowledge that, because people are really filling this in our buildings, that coupled with um The fact that we did overstaff for our EL ESL teachers in our buildings. Uh, I think that I heard one board member say it seems like a double whammy, and I honor that as well, that it, it, it does seem.

I think that's real and I think that's true, and I'm not surprised by that sentiment considering that over the last few years, one of the repeated requests that we've made is to keep cuts as far away from the classroom, keep them as far away from the classroom, and now we're at the point where the cuts are, there is really nowhere else for them to go.