like to call to order the Jackson Public Schools board work session for February 9th. Please do >> here. >> Valdez >> here. >> Brophie. >> Peterson >> here. >> Aldridge >> here. >> Johnson >> here. >> Smith >> here. >> Sha >> here. >> Ed >> here. Join me in the pledge of allegiance. >> I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> Good evening. It's nice to see a full house today. All kinds of students and staff. It's great to see everybody tonight. We um have a few things for our Saber Pride tonight. Uh first, we're going to start with special announcements [clears throat] on the Unified Champion School District designation. I'm going to turn it over to Tiffany Olsen, our director of communications and strategic development for a presentation. >> Thank you, Chair Peterson, members of the board, Superintendent Redmond. We have two great topics. We could have 20 as always for Saber Pride, but we narrowed it down to two. uh and really appreciate those that uh gave us this information so that we could showcase it for you here today. So, there's a throwback slide up on here. It's a remember when and I'm not I think most everyone was on the board almost. Uh but back in 2023, we recognized uh the high school for not only being a unified champion school, but we made the ESPN honor role, which was very fun. And we were only one of five schools in the state at that time to earn the designation. and we made the top 10 list for the Midwest region. But today, we're here to share some great news that our entire district, formerly for this school year, is considered a unified champion school district. And it just so happens you're going to get great information later today from Julie Fred, our director of special services about curriculum and programming and all sorts of other things that we do. Uh, but wanted to put on the screen here. There's some of those banners that you'll start to see throughout all of our schools. Um there's some bullets on there, but you can see the goals is just when you are part of this unified champion school district, it's really just ensuring that we welcome all people and we know that's important on many levels. Choose to include and you can see on the bottom there what signifies a district or a school in our case all of our schools uh to be a part of this is the inclusive sports which you'll hear a little bit more about. um the leadership opportunities for our savers supporting savers. We try to showcase that all the time and just whole school engagement. So to have an expert share this information, we have Matt Iverson who's going to come up share a little bit more. We have a little Q&A and we'll only spend just a snippet of time on something we can talk about forever. Right. >> Yeah. >> And here's I'll actually I'll move this for you. Okay. >> Hi everybody. My name is Matt Iverson. I teach at the high school. Uh I'm in a the health science academy. I do lots of anatomy and physiology and exercise science classes. Uh and a huge passion of mine is our goalies program. I'm also the head coach of our adaptive floor hockey team um with a lot of our kids as well as in collaboration with Prior Lake. Um I you know I just love the Glomies program. I think anyone who's been in our schools have seen the amazing things and the the culture that it has created in school for all of our kids. Uh, and it's just something that I think is such a great benefit to our community and to to all of our students. And I'm really proud of all the work that we've done at the high school and other staff have done in the district to make it um, you know, now K12 and to be uh, one of the kind of premier um, one of the shining schools that other districts and the Special Olympics program has used as kind of a guide to other other schools to start unified. Um there are now over 425 uh unified champion schools in the state of Minnesota. And so the movement is it's more than a movement now. I think um I think that it's more um it's just kind of taken on its own identity and really changed the culture of school for a lot of kids. Um which I just think is an amazing thing and it's really fun to be a part of. >> And Mr. spoiler alert because I saw ears perk up over there. early childhood team is excited to share a special Olympics designation later on one and one in five preschools but we'll we'll we will keep everybody waiting until but I know our early learners have heard of that as well. >> Yeah. Wonderful. And um I would like to keep everything you know as cheering and as as lovely as possible but if you would go over to the next slide. Um, last week we lost one of our students, Xavier. He was a wonderful kid and uh he will be severely missed. Um, Xavier was in the class of 2024. He was a great He was a wonderful kid, a great friend, just a shining light, always a smile. Um, and I just thought it would be really nice if we just kind of honored him with a a short moment of silence. Thank you. [sighs] share why this matters, right? It matters for Xavier. Um, if you think about for decades of public education, our special needs community and our special needs students were part of school, uh, but they weren't a part of school. And for the longest time, as I remember, and as many remembered, could remember, and think back to school, we had these populations of kids that were there and were around, but weren't included. And it wasn't part of the inclusion. it really wasn't part of school. And to be able to to say that now, not only are they a part of school, they are like a pinnacle of what our culture at school is. And these these kids are celebrities. When they walk through the hallway, everybody knows them and everyone loves them. And they're high fives. And it doesn't matter where they are, what class they're in. It's completely changed their lives and everyone's lives. And so kind of the silver lining in all of it when I think of Xavier and I think of the things that he experienced and you know to the bitter end he was just the smiling happy kid and he brought all of that joy in school as well. And that's the whole point is just making those opportunities in school the place where these kids love to be the best experience and opportunity that it can be. And so when we think about the perspective of it, that's why we do everything that we do. That's why we have the Glomies program and the expansion of the unified programs and we just want all of our kids and [clears throat] and just continue the culture of inclusion and the culture of care for everybody. And um so yeah, it's just uh it's just something that's really special, you know, to witness. And for anyone who's been to our events like the track and field day or or the tournaments and everything, there's just nothing but smiles and cheers and joy in and all of those kids. So, um just some of the highlights that we have coming up. We just hosted a a basketball tournament um here at the high school. We have the track and field day coming up. Um our glomies are going to be going to Launchpad and we have kind of a partnership with Launchpad now to go get some unified golf in. So, we're just really trying to explore and kind of push our boundaries of what the things we can do and provide as many opportunities as possible. And so, you know, the why behind it is is creating the best most inclusive and caring environment for everybody, right? Because sports and and inclusion is for everyone. And that's something that the Special Olympics really push forward is it's it's not just for our special needs students, it's for all students and for all communities to enjoy. And so, as you can see, we have such great programs going uh and we're continuing to to expand and we're so grateful to have new expansions and other classes and programs and to see, you know, these things reach into other parts and and be leaders in in in our community and and for other districts like Prior Lake now has a great program built off some of the stuff that we've done. And I have other schools and other teachers reach out like, "How do you do this? How do you start?" You know, and so it's just it's just really it's really great. So, And you obviously see the passion from Matt and others. And Susie Piercefish, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention she's the one who said, "Hey, by the way, did you know this happened?" And just a little email. I said, "What do you mean? This is great. We got to share this." So, I really appreciate her work, Matt. So, other you can see we have liaison at all of our schools that are really there to not only be the contact for this unified champion status, but obviously go further, promote all of the opportunities that we have. Um, talking about sports and athletics, you can see the three that we have. So, make sure the softball schedule's coming up in spring. You can check that out. Be a part of that. Uh, and I know adaptive water skiing clinics. It's something that we're going to start testing the waters with maybe to see interest for students. Um, Matt mentioned all the great things. We have a project behind Sha there that on your way out today, one of the design challenges is we had team jazzy. Uh, we also brought that to MSBA [cough] there. That's a great thing to look at. Uh, and I know all of us um sat in this room or the majority of the board sat in the room first week of January and we were going over the vision and priorities, equity, inclusion is one of those three and there was a lot of talk about what does that mean. So, I think Matt did a great job representing our district and sharing what that means and open it for any other questions. Otherwise, we thank Mr. Iverson for being here and sharing some vulnerable and awesome information. Let's do a round of >> applause. Our next saber pride tonight is a spotlight on the academyy's shock mentorship program. >> Yes, I'll just [clears throat] do the intro of the least important here. the important ones are coming up to the table and I'll have Mr. Hendrickson introduce them in one second, but January was National Mentoring Month. Um, and at the end of 2025, we had roughly 170 students that were interviewing [clears throat] for internships that are going on right now for March. Mr. Piki is very familiar with all the cool things our students are doing. Uh, but there's also projects that go on in fall and winter and honestly every day. This is part of themies of Shakape. So, what we are excited to share today, we really wanted to recreate an 18hole course in this room, but it was a little tough with the space we have. Um, so we're going to share a little bit on the pop-up put and play project in honor of National Mentorship Month. But before we do that, because there's a fun video, I'd love Mr. Hendendrickson to introduce our guest. >> Yeah, the video's up. Um, we've got Kaden, Jake, [laughter] keep that in mind when we get to the video. And then we've got Jack at the end here. All All three of these guys were part of the project. Um, we had 18 students. They had 18 holes, which was very interesting. And then the curveball with them is they all had to have a Harry Potter theme to and then they planned it out for all age levels of kids, including uh sensory deprived group. So everything had to have sounds, but then they had almost have to turn it off. You name it, from robotics to simple machines to electronics. Um, and then the community center was unreal with how they rolled out, helped the kids. Probably my 30 some odd years in the district, the most involved a group has ever been with mentoring. It was very, very fun. it it just was playing out fun and and it was rewarding to watch [snorts] them work with students. So, it was kind of shouldn't say it, but it was nice to sit back and kind of be able to watch there. I felt guilty getting the paycheck, but it was really it was really neat to watch this part happen. And every kid brought something very unique to the table and they showed up on a Friday night after school was out all day Friday setup. Friday night after school they said I can then bunch of them came back on Saturday so I don't require students outside of the school day to be there but they all took time some of them rearranged work schedules so it was really kind of a new event >> so before we let our experts share some of their insight they had a great teaser video prior to the event that was what January 16th 17th does that sound right at the community center and this video was fantastic so we're going to watch it [clears throat] >> basically is kill more. [laughter] As cool as that shot was, wait until you see the rest of the hole that we have planned for January 16th and 17th to pop up. >> This year, we're partnering with Shock Cap High School students to blow all the holes. >> Why don't you come join things? >> Hi, I'm Kayen Juel. I'm in the shock stem cats engineering program and I'm super excited to be working on this project community center. It's been super fun so far being able to be creative and showcase my talents with uh designing, manufacturing and engineering all these fun mini golf holes. And it's super fun to know that my work will be enjoyed by all members of the community and super excited for that day to come and everyone have some fun. Hello, my name is Mallalerie and I am a senior in the Shaki STEM CAPS program and I'm also really excited to partner with the community center. We get to start with the design process and work through that and be creative and we have a realistic budget um that would be used in real life and it's really fun and every day I get to come to school and work on these fun projects. All right. So, give us the behind the scenes, guys, on all that great work in your cameo that you had. >> Um, sure. So, started early October where we met with Rachel and Mason to kind of get the uh gist of the whole project and then it was kind of off and running from there. um meeting with them, presenting our different designs and ideas that we had for these mini golf holes and being creative. Uh it's been a while since I've dived into Harry Potter. So, that was that was pretty fun. And then just not only designing the holes, but building the holes, seeing them pretty much come out of nothing, and then having the really fun two days on the 16th and 17th with all the members of the community and just seeing the smiles upon their faces. bit come full circle as I take these skills that I uh gathered at over the course as a student at Shaki High School for the community of Shaki. >> Yeah, one of my favorite parts of this project was working with our mentors Rachel and Mason and it was surprising for me how much they actually challenged us which was really big for me. I first presented my three initial designs to them and they chose my easiest one. So I was super pumped. It was coming through the year. just had to putt it up a little tube into his mouth. I thought it was going to be super easy. And I come back our next meeting and they challenge me to make his eyes light up when the ball goes into his mouth. And I do not have much experience with coding or circuitry or anything like that. So they really did challenge me and push me to learn that stuff. And it was super fun being able to learn, look up different tutorials how to code, how to make circuitry. And eventually getting it working and getting that final product was way more satisfying than if I had just taken the easy road. and I'm super thankful that they were able to push me to do that. >> Yeah. Um, our mentors were super helpful. Both Mason and Rachel, they urged us to kind of express our creativity. They wanted our ideas to work. They wanted us to push to reach our goals. Um, a lot of the times, as you can probably summize, with a lot of projects we have in this CAS program, a lot of things do fail and we do have a lot of kind of setbacks, but they were always there. They met with us like seven to eight times trying to just see where we were going, how they could help. And they kept urging us to express our creativity and to not scrap our ideas fully. Instead, kind of build them up to make that final 18 putt golf ball golf hole like the best for everybody included. >> And Mr. Henderson, I believe there were some awards at the end. Is that correct? >> Yeah. So the awards and gez Ken voted on me awards. Um but we had they decided that they wanted two word awards to go out and so this was unknown to me. They came on the last day and said really like to talk to the students and they one of the awards was on the professionalism of the communication and how they worked with others um getting constant feedback being receptive to feedback processing it. So, as you guys all know, part of the problem is is when you get feedback, you might tend to just do the feedback. The way it was presented to the students is they had choices. So, they were still able to, as Jack said, express themselves. So, that's one of the awards. The other one was for the best hole, which we had um if you guys have ever wandered the schools, you've seen the floor dryers that they use, the big fans that build the floor. >> So, they took about a 15t piece of PVC pipe, cut a hole in it, and that was the hole is they dropped a ball into it and would shoot it out of the PVC pipe for the Quidditch, and then they set up the rings to go all the way through all the way down. So, that went down the entire side of the community center. Um I don't think you guys had a hole in that one, Ken, did you? Or was it just getting through the hoops? I can't remember. >> No, we had a hole down the end. That's for the sensor friendly. We couldn't have the blower going. Okay. >> So, do a normal hole. >> Yeah. So, the entertainment for me was uh watching the little kids literally I watched one little girl at one point in time come in and do one hole like 15 times in a row. [laughter] And the parents were like, "Let's take her." I'm like, "Let her." I mean, and what she was doing is literally breaking down each step. Like, it went through one part. She'd watch it. and she'd go back and test it again. Soon as she figured that one out, she'd like then she'd let it go a little further and she's figuring out the next part. It was the coolest thing to watch. Um, so very very proud. The pictures on the side there, the second one Jack Jack made and the bottom one was another student. But each phase of it, like Jack's had a mouth that would open and close. So the kids were kept on trying to talk Jack into doing the old line and had but there was a lot of really cool things and the lot of words that was one day of feedback that they emailed the kids. So the kids were getting constant constant feedback loop which in in my world in the engineering and design world that is beyond you can't put a price on that. So, and they did it in a way that made the kids feel really good about the feedback. >> Thank you. Any questions for our outstanding engineers that we have in front of us? Otherwise, we know there's a round of applause, but >> I just want to make a comment. I went and tried the test and it was awesome. It was just really great to see the designs and the hard work that you guys put into it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm not good at it, but I tried. >> That's awesome. Any other comments? All right. Well, well deserved round of applause. Thank you guys. >> Item four on our agenda this evening is the consideration of the agenda as presented. >> I make a motion to approve. >> Second. >> Have a motion by Aldidge. Second by Johnson. Any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor say I. >> I. >> Oppos. Item five on our agenda is our public comment. This is a time where members of the public can participate in the meeting without being part of the meeting agenda. A member of the public may address the board on any agenda topic or on another topic pertaining to schoolboard business. We allocate a total of 15 minutes for public comment at this meeting. Each individual speaker may speak for up to two and a half minutes. The sign up for public comment has been conducted online and in person prior to this evening's meeting. No one has signed up for public comment prior to this evening's meeting. So, we will move on to the next item on our agenda, which is item six on our consent agenda. Let's see. We have um some requirements. We have our other personnel items, school board meeting minutes from January and December and then also authorization to pay the bills [snorts] which is always important. >> I will make a motion to have a motion by second by Smith. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor say I. I oppose. Motion carries. Item seven is a list of donations that the district has received. And you can see um on the screen that we've received many wonderful and generous contributions to our districts from families and businesses um not from just here in Chaki but Twin Cities. So we are very appreciative of everything that they do for our schools and for our students. >> Motion by Aldridge. >> Second by >> Any further discussion? >> This is a resolution. Tiffany, could you please do the role? >> Yes. Valdez, >> yes. Peterson, >> yes. >> Baldridge, >> yes. >> Johnson, >> yes. >> Yes. >> Item eight on our agenda this evening is ourformational section. And our first informationational item on the agenda is 8.1. And that is our early learning program update. Tonight we have Sarah Molen, our Pearson Urban Learning Center administrator, and Deb Anderson, our special services supervisor for early childhood here to present. Welcome. Thank you. >> Good evening. Thank you, Chair Pearson, members of the board, Superintendent Redmond. Thank you for inviting us to do an update. So, we will start by talking about all the different things that happen over at the Pearson Early Learning Center. Um, we have our early childhood family education, our stepping stones preschool, our early learning screening, our early childhood screening, um, family literacy, early childhood special education, a wraparound preschool care, and then also our early childhood advisory council. So, we'll start tonight with ECF. Um this year we have launched 32 unique classes for infants, toddlers and preschoolers. And so we have run 30 of the 32 with enrollments um strong enough to run most of those classes. There were two classes that did not have enough enrollment to run. And so we did look at our weight list and and think about what opportunities we have to take some of the students off the weight list. We had two and three-year-old programs that continued to have a long list of families that wanted to get in. So, we took those two classes and repurposed them into new classes um that were able to serve more families. So, really looking at the need of our community and who is wanting to be in programs. So, we ultimately did run 32 unique classes, but 30 at first and then repurposed them into 32 classes. 182 unique enrollments. So that means that one student or one parent um would count as one of those. So some of our families do um register for multiple classes, but we're pulling the numbers of 182 separate people. And there's still time to join for our second semester. We just started at the end of January and also we'll be having um programs this summer as well through ECF. Then Stepping Stones Preschool. Um, this is our general education numbers. And so I wanted to look at a little of the history of how many friends have been included in our preschool in the past. And then currently to date, we are 286 enrolled. And we continue to have um tours and families that are interested in joining throughout the year. Just having tours even as recent as last Friday of families that want to join midy year. Um, and I just wanted to note that we added that three-year-old full day preschool if you remember from last year. And um, really excited to continue to offer that because it's been popular for our families. Early childhood screening and this is an opportunity that we're wanting more and more three-year-olds to be screened early on um to catch any um, needs that arise in the early childhood screening process. And so this graph will show um our kindergarten group of when did they get screened. So were they screened at three, four or five years old. And so that's what you've seen this graph before. And then also to the left that is our mailing, our most recent mailing. And so we're always sending out a new batch of um inviting students and parents and families to come in and get their screening. Um, and don't wait until they're five or right before kindergarten. It's early. Um, earlier the better. We're excited to be able to offer day appointments, evening appointments. Saturday mornings have been popular for families um, year round and now district screen year round. And so we're able to do that at um, Pearson. We also have appointments. We've been going to Sachs Playworks. Our weed mobile goes around at various locations and so we're going to be doing that more this summer as well. Our family literacy program formerly known as PACE. Um here's our current enrollments. We have um 18 adult learners and while they're learning English Monday through Thursday afternoons at Pearson, we are caring for the infants. Right now we have six and we have five toddlers. And then you might remember that we um did a a shift in the preschool. And so our preschoolers are now part of the Stepping Stones preschool program. And so they're included in the other um sections of preschool going on at Pearson instead of a separate preschool experience. They're all included together in Stepping Stones. And it's a partnership and a collaboration with Southwest Metro that we're able to offer that English class um all the different levels at Pearson. I'll pass it over to my friend Deb. >> You might have to keep running the CL. Okay. But um so in terms of special education students that we serve at Pearson Early Learning Center, we have um two two groups of um staff that we work with. Um one being early intervention staff, which is our birth through two or two to three, either one is acceptable and those services are provided to um families. It's a coaching model. And what we do is our staff go out into actually families homes and work with families setting priorities and services for their students there. And we currently have uh 52 students within that particular program. Then we also provide services for students who are ages 3 to five before they go on to kindergarten. [clears throat] And we currently have 90 students within that um that cluster and our services are provided [clears throat] in the least restrictive environment as everything is special ed. Um and we typically will provide services. We have students that we place in the stepping stones program. We also go out into daycarees and um and um we also have a couple of center base for for students who are more involved also at Pearson with that SEI. So, a lot of partnership. It would wouldn't be possible without the partnership of Stepping Stones and our early childhood friends. Next, um excited to highlight that we have a child parent advisory council that we have been cultivating and getting back into order last year and this year. Um Tim um that is not here tonight is on that board with us. And so um we have many goals but excited to have that parent and staff connection and we have a monthly evening meeting at Pearson. I'm really looking at um a monthly theme uh some learning so we invite different people to come in and present and share their expertise um talk about the resources the curriculum program offerings and so really trying to get voice and choice in what we're offering for our early childhood programs. And then some fundraising and celebrating and recognizing staff is always a highlight. Some other highlights to point out tonight. Um our TS Gold assessment, we are doing it in full fidelity now. we're doing that fall, that winter, and that spring to be able to look at the difference in the growth and where can we um group students or where can we um add additional support when needed to really lean into where a student is at. And so with TS Gold, it's under color banding. And so you'll see a typical four-year-old would be doing this. What should we do to help them if they're not quite there? And so it tells that story from fall to winter to spring. and that was not in place before. And so we're excited to be able to have that data and to now talk about what that is going to look like for PLC's for our teachers. Our curriculum selection process has happened. We are now piloting and we are planning our full adoption of the creative curriculum for preschool and we will be having a training in May and then in the fall um workshop week to really have that in place for our teachers and for our students and then the teddy bear clinic that is a long-standing partnership with themies of Shaki. So those high school students having um an opportunity to really have a clinic in our gym that the students get to bring their stuffed animal and walk through all the different pieces of what does it look like to go to the doctor, get an X-ray and a shot with their stuffed animal. So always so much fun. Um we had our family funfest. We had our annual event not that long ago and so we had over 250 attendees on a cold January night. We were happy to see that many families out and about checking us out and then also our internal families and having dinner and a DJ and activities at Pearson. Um we're doing literacy trainings of our teachers that read from last year and then any new staff and then our pair professionals are also going through all of the literacy training as well at Pearson. our mobile early childhood screenings, like I mentioned, partnership with Scott County with the Reed Mobile and then um we're going to do some here at the welcome center this summer. And then the kindergarten information nights um we're we're having a presence there and a table there to talk about screening and make sure families are um informed about that. And then ongoing mailtome digital and grassroot engagements as you can see in this picture. really trying to get out to the different opportunities to meet families where they're at instead of out expecting them to come to us. And then a highlight here, we're 10year celebration, one decade of our social emotional pyramid model at Pearson. So all staff are trained and then we have this teapot fidelity where we're going in and making sure that the staff are using that language appropriately with students and really um encouraging that um skill level with social emotional learning that taking turns and um body in the group and expected and unexpected behaviors and things like that. And so really excited that we have what decades strong. these two um in the picture here were able to go to Illinois and share our knowledge with other districts across um the United States. And so they went this fall and and um able to share about what we do here in Shaki school. So I wanted to highlight that and Deb and I get to highlight the Shakip Young athletes program. Um, and did you know, here's our our big announcement that Pearson Early [clears throat] Learning Center is only the fifth preschool in the state to officially become a unified preschool through Special Olympics. So, that was definitely celebration worthy. are um it is it goes under the title of Shaky Young athletes and we are starting up again [snorts and clears throat] tomorrow and we um students sign up they come in we have volunteers that are trained to work with um students and they're in our early learning center and the gym for an hour from 5:30 to 6:30 and we've really had great participation Um, I wish we had a bigger gym to put more kids in. Right. So, that that has been super exciting. In fact, one of the on the previous slide, Steph Cassie is on the right side of that photo. She is our layup to the Special Olympics that has been um really a critical part of getting it rolling at Pearson. So, There's some photos from our recent event. A lot of costume friends there and staff that were so excited to greet families. Any questions, comments? One quick one. I know that um you guys presented the the curriculum to us and and we voted on that and it sounds like you're in the infancy of piloting. How is it? Have you had any feedback from the staff so far as far as what that's looking like, good or bad or or how far along they're ready? >> Thanks for asking. Yes. So, we received 40 boxes of materials. So, unpacking it, getting it labeled, getting it ready. And so, the staff have it in their hands now. Um, and so the the implementation team of our ILT, our instructional leadership team are now taking a look with a rubric of looking through the different components of okay, what does it look like for our writing? What does it look like for our phonics and are there things that we'll need to talk through of adding to it perhaps or does it have everything that we need? So the next step is to come back together, look at our rubrics and do some some comparison. And then um the initial has been very positive. There's so many resources online as well. And there's cohorts that staff can join um any time across across the United States. There's different groups coming together to talk about this um study or this um approach. And so they can learn from each other, not just Shaki school teachers. We can really connect with others across um the nation that are using this curriculum already. Um and so high um accolades and also we watched a webinar that was so exciting and powerful to have more opportunities to have books um in the hands of students and have more mighty minutes and more solution um toolkit pieces to um have at our fingertips that we haven't had before. Yeah, thanks for asking. questions. >> I just have one from a capacity standpoint. [clears throat] I know there's several different programs that we talked about, but how much capacity do we have to grow these programs in our community? >> Great question. So we do have the capacity a lot of times in the afternoons for example ECFV um doesn't have a robust um need in those classrooms and so we're using them for um the family literacy but there are times where a room is um open right not often but there are times where we could add to that and so um we're looking at what what are we offering what days of the week where are the holes that we can plug in a separate class that isn't running now and then where are the moments that we can um get creative around a class that we haven't ever tried before and so we've been brainstorming and really partnering around that and Chrissy great question because like for example there's a waiting list for our afterare right now and so how can we find another space for that that afterchool time to be able to expand and and offer that to more families because that continues to be a need that 3 to 6:00 p.m. So, we're really thinking outside the box of okay, we've maxed out this room. Where else can we have so we could serve more families? >> And is there space at Pearson to add additional programs or number of programs um for particular subject area or theme or whatever you want to call it? Um because I know we moved from central Pearson >> and I just wonder how much Pearson is being used. Are we using most of it? Is there an opportunity for growth? >> We are using most of it, but there are these nooks and crannies that we can get creative because typically preschool um classes are done at the 3:00 time, right? And so then how could we use a room that's done for that 3 to six or something that's like that? Um there's also certain days of the week that are more popular than others. So then we could capture, oh this room has a Friday afternoon open. What could we think about? But most spaces are used regularly. There are just a few little pockets. >> Questions. All right. Thank you for your time. Appreciate. Our nextformational item is 8.2 two on our agenda and that is our secondary assessment for learning and tonight we have a group individual here with us Sarah Worberg our assistant director of learning is uh here with us along with some of our secondary principles it looks like service and welcome thank you for being here >> thank you so much for having us here I am just quickly introducing two of our secondary principles, part of the dream team who are working so hard to lead change this year with our secondary teachers, both with instructional practices and with how we're thinking of grading and assessment. So, you've heard from the group I think September and November and they're back with an update. >> All right. Well, good evening everyone. Chair Peterson, members of the board, Superintendent Redmond, assistant superintend, you know, we're we're back again. So just a brief update on the on the fantastic work that has been happening in the AFL task force. So uh in this presentation we are going to give an update on AFL implementation the work that has been taking place in all the secondary schools. uh we're going to review task force progress with assessment of learning and highlight the next steps for the uh task force and you can see our compelling vision is there which is those guiding you know statements that that really guide a lot of the work that we're doing when we talk about AFL work um so uh progress AFL assessment for learning then we have assessment of learning so I'm going to give an update on assessment for learning um So the the AFL work right if you recall that goes back to previous school years and uh we last year we did a lot of work around just a lot of teaching a lot lot of learning around those seven AFL strategies. We did walkthroughs, right? And so through those walkthroughs, we identified what are some of those areas that we want to take as we go into this school year. What do we want to take a deeper dive on? What do we want to spend more time when we think of early release dates, PD? And so we identified through that data from doing the the various walkthroughs that we really want to focus on doing PD around strategies 2, four, and seven. Uh so what we have been doing uh this year we still uh have oh actually we just finished up right we just we did we did four seven and we just wrapped up with two. So our AFL task force they've uh they've spent time working many lessons uh around those specific strategies and we take that back to our buildings for PLC's to plan and put those into implementation. So that's uh from a PD standpoint that is work that the AFL task force has done. Uh we continue to do walkthroughs. So members of teacher members of the AFL task force uh we find time for them to do walkthroughs of their peers to continue to measure the implementation of those seven strategies. So that occurs three times during the year. We are currently um getting into round two. And then just recurring in those meetings, just discussions on how to make uh AFL a regular part of of the PLC work, right? Instead of having it be like this thing that we're doing, right? Just how do we continue to embed that and weave that into our our everyday work because remember when we're talking about these seven strategies, we're just talking about good solid instructional practices. Some data to share with you. So the dark is the 24 the dark blue is the 2425 school year and then the lighter blue is quarter 1 of 2526 when we talked about implementation. So on the bottom each of those are the strategies one through seven are the strategies and you can take a look at what that uh that implementation is. So that percent is observed. So if I'm a, you know, I'm a teacher, I'm going in. What is, if I'm in for a 15 to 20 minute walkth through, right? What am I seeing in that classroom? Am I seeing evidence, you know, in any of those seven strategies? I think when you're looking at this, I think the key thing that you want to take away is that you see an overall upward trend, right? And you got to think when you go into a classroom and if you're in for a 15 to 20 minute walkth through, we would never expect to see all seven of these strategies, right? It's not it's not a linear like I need to see this and this and this depending on what is happening in the lesson. A lot of different factors. What are you know what evidence of of those strategies are we seeing? So you know seeing incremental growth through the years that's a positive thing right and so we want to continue to see that that trend moving upward having that incremental growth and then just you know maintaining those efforts what gets talked about right stays uh front and center stage. So, um, we're going to continue to do that. So, that's the work that has been happening with AFL. Next, I'm going to switch it over to Mr. Service, and he is going to give an update on assessment of learning progress. And and this is kind of the the second over emerging charge of this task force is to explore um you know practices related to assessment design and reporting practices um that can help improve student learning and reporting in our district. And so a little bit of framing um specifically when we talk assessment of learning we're talking um how we set up our report cards. We're talking grade books, recordkeeping, some of those practices that we often refer to as grading practices. And um as we've kind of built deeper into this work, u we developed a guiding question to help us kind of stay on a railroad track in our research and exploration. Um you can see the question up here that's been guiding our work over the past few months. When we were back here in November, we kind of mapped out this um tentative projection on some of the milestones we wanted to hit on this journey. Um right now we are still in that research and exploration exploration phase. If you think of it kind of like a funnel where you start with the dragon question and then you just start to to grow wider and go deeper with concepts, ideas and philosophies. Um we are at a point now where we've done some really solid work with covering breath and depth on different approaches to grading and assessment reporting practices. Um, and as I'll talk about in a little bit, we're at a point where we're starting to turn the corner on where to go next. Um, we are still on track with these milestones. Um, and I think, um, you know, some of the accomplishments that can kind of, um, we can celebrate here that that evidence that we're on track, but we've done some work with recruiting more voices to our task force. Um, and most of the work in the past few months is spent really digging in deep, not only with literature research, but we've been going out to other districts that have are further down this journey that are in year two, year three of implementation of um different approaches to grading and reporting. And so we brought different voices in as guest speakers, as a leadership team driving this work. We've been consulting with other leaders from other districts on how they've mapped out their courses of action and and strategically um led this work. And so in the last two task force meetings as we're trying to consolidate um the learning, we have pulled our task force on just um kind of getting a pulse on where they're at in terms of ready to kind of put a stake in the ground about um any concrete direction we might want to head as secondary schools in our district. um in January when we asked and pulled um our task force members you can see that we had a pretty wide spread of kind of readiness um as we repul here in our last meeting we're starting to see some coalesing happening and um and it's an indicator that I think philosophically the task force is starting to to get to a point of consensus and so um as as we drive this change closer towards consensus. You know, we we have earmarked these four guiding principles that are still driving the work. Um and these guiding principles are principles based on accuracy, fairness, clarity, and timeliness. And so, for example, you know, accuracy, if if you're to break that down in our reporting practices, in our assessment practice and grading practice, we we want to make sure grades um and assessments are aligned to standards or outcomes. Um we want to make sure that there's consistency and implementation across teachers within PLC so that regardless of which teacher a student might have for a course um there is a similar experience and how that students assessed. Okay. And um you know for each one of those different um guiding principles we have um kind of different earmarks on on what exactly they need. And so where we're at now is we are ready to kind of almost take a consensus poll. And um specifically what we're what we're putting on the table is are are we looking at making some tweaks to our current practices which are kind of in this middle land of traditional hybrid with some teachers kind of in some directions going more towards mastery learning some still more traditional so there isn't a lot of consistency um or are we ready to more you know I'd they directly say we want to head towards a model that's philosophically rooted in mastery learning and whether that's standardsbased or whether that's competency based we're not getting into the weeds we're keeping it still high level um because before we even um kind of dig down and get to the specifics we need some philosophical alignment and so that's where we're headed next once we get that consensus then we'll start breaking out the different components that are connected to grading and reporting practices um and get some more details to put forth in a proposal um that can drive our pilot work heading into next year. And I think that's the end of our update. So we'll kick it over to you for any feedback or questions. Um, so the seven strategies for for AFL. Um, curious, you were focusing on two, four, and seven. Curious what those work. >> So, great question, Jeff. You want to take that? >> Yep. We can both take it. >> Let's take it. >> You know, strategy two is on um is on uh examples of strong and weak work. Right. Right. And so that that is one. So, and that's a good example of like right when you look when you you go into that classroom, right? You're there for 15 20 minutes is, you know, you're you're there for that amount of time, right? So, you're looking at, okay, was that did I actually see that happening? So, just because you don't observe doesn't mean it's happening. But, we found that it's one as far as it was one of the lagging ones, right? So, it was an area that we wanted to um you know to to focus on. um you know when we when we get into strategy four and and seven it it that is centered around like that peer like that peer feedback like students giving like peer feedback um those types of things. Um those are another areas that we see lagging especially with that that strategy 7 to just add to that like one one of the the key underlying like essentials to strategy too is typically you assess strong and weak work with rubrics um rubrics um we're not built out in every course in every unit and every lesson with rubrics to measure strongly work and we haven't curated all the examples in across all content here. So that that is going to take that's a time process. Strategy four and seven are are are truly agency um strategies where we're starting to build that metacognition and reflection in students and one of the biggest challenges with those strategies um I think is number one time because those strategies take a lot of feedback loops um and to integrate that into just a daily sequence or you know a scope in sequence especially at the secondary level there's some trade-offs that have to happen and so that's also part of the I think the philosophy topical shift that that we're still working on um across the schools. So to give you an example like on an early release date then what we'll do is that mini lesson might be a 25 to 30 minute lesson right where they will give maybe there's a middle school example or a high school example to get teachers thinking about okay what does implement implementation of the strategy look like in a in a practical setting in a in a school setting and so while that's still fresh in their minds we'll have them go into their content level PLC's to do some work to see where you know where where does this currently live and reflect in your current in your current practice because I think what you find is again going back to all seven of these strategies are just good solid instructional practices and sometimes you just need that time to but what you give teachers that opportunity to time like where did where does this live in my practice and if it's an area that I need to you know pay more attention to is give them that opportunity to do this that's what we're trying to do within those PLC's is just kind of create that natural conversation to happen >> thank you [clears throat] quick one I think I guess my question is more for the assessment for learning. I think you mentioned you're going to potentially pilot some new ideas next year for that, right? I I'm curious how that's going to work. Is that you're going to implement that in a certain group of classes? Like if if some peers some students are being tested one way and others are being tested another way, how how would you pilot that? >> It's a great question and and I think you're referencing assessment of learning, right? The grading and assessment. rice room. >> And so this might you might be able to do a pilot contained into a PLC where where it's a group of similar teachers taking teaching light courses. Um, and for example, you may take some English teachers and and again truly an example here like in English 10 and you may build your courses around standards or competencies and you may have rubrics and you may have, you know, grading scales instead of points and you may keep it contained so that students get a similar experience um, but it's different than what a different PLC might get. And so that's one way to roll out a pilot. I'm sure there are many other ways. >> There's a lot of ways. And I think part of this is we don't we don't exactly know how we want to roll it forward yet. Any kind of shift in assessment practice over just takes a lot of time and planning. And so it could be, you know, we've got social studies, middle school social studies that is going to adopt some new curriculum later on this year. So that could be a pilot group that as we're rewriting the curriculum as we just do it in a way that is aligned with the new assessment philosophy that we want to adopt and they're kind of the early early adopters or innovators rather than like a formal pilot. But I think we're going to work with the task force to really figure out what makes the most sense in terms of how we're we're moving forward um the digestible point of change for teachers and which groups do we want to start with to field test it to make sure it's working for kids before It's clear you guys are doing a lot of intentional looking at all these decisions and not just jumping in on that. >> And and I think I there is one other thing that that I forgot to mention is in terms of next steps again our goal is is to kind of get task force alignment so that we can start digging in deeper for some of the more detail work but part of that also includes um feedback loops. feedback loops with, you know, our community, feedback loops with other educators, feedback loops with students, and we're not at the phase um yet to do those. >> So, I just have a question about the grading piece of it. Um, mostly from the slide on driving change. Um, when you talk about grades must be timely, are you speaking more to the length of time that it takes to for a student to learn what their grade was on an assignment or is it where that student is at that moment in time in their learning so they so the teacher knows how to best address their learning moving forward whether they need some extra help or maybe they need to move a little bit faster because of their grasping of the content. Is that it's a really great question. You like hit the nail on the head as to why this is such an important topic for us as secondary leaders. >> Sorry, that's I want to acknowledge that. >> I think it's it's both. I think part of it is as we assess students in their learning, we we want the most recent and accurate snapshot of their learning and not necessarily, you know, the the one month ago versus the now. We want to take the most recent evidence and then we also want to do timely feedback so students are aware of their progress u not only on like their current assignment but their progress towards mastery. So, how do you handle or how would you handle this situation where you've got a class of 20 and you've got a quarter of your class that seems to be lagging [snorts] behind a little bit. you have another quarter of the class that is pretty middle of the road where they should be and then you've got the other half of the class that's seems like they've mastered it and could probably go a whole lot faster with the content that's being presented because I mean at the end of the day this is really about the individual student and how they're grasping the information and mastering the subject matter that they're learning about right >> you respond Um that's a challenge I will say that that's challenge our teachers are facing right now and that's when we two very technical terms that we talk about is differentiation and scaffolds and differentiation is when a teacher is looking at their class of 30 students and saying not all of my students need to do all of the same learning at all at the same time and so we're [clears throat] creating different avenues for students to show what they know um in different sometimes it's like reading different books or being assessed in different ways. So trying to open up opportunities where it's not that pressure for every single student to fit a mold or be a cookie cutter shape of each other within a space. That other term scaffold is sometimes some students receive a little bit of extra support. Um an example of that might be like a sentence stem. Not all students need a sentence stem to write a really wellought out sentence that can base their thinking. Some students might benefit from a sentence stem and that's just one example of a scaffold. So we're hoping that through those AFL strategies and and our PLC's and a planning time at early releases that our teachers are getting time to work with each other on. How do you plan for those differentiation and scaffolds within class? Um and and hopefully I think one of the things that we're trying to avoid is that grades are a reflection of work. We want grades to be a reflection of learning and there's a really important difference between the two. And if our grades can be a reflection of learning and can very accurately communicate to students and families about that learning progress, then that really that differentiation within that classroom make a lot more sense to every quick add on I I think years ago I taught business classes right and so business you could have nth graders you could have 12th graders one of the things I really like about our block schedule and I taught on a block years ago is that that's differentiation played a huge role I would say what is the standard like what is the thing that everybody wants to know right but then I would break it down into three different categories like a a mild medium and spicy if you will Right? And so to kind of cater to all the basic needs of the students, you would kind of, you know, students could kind of pick, right? So they would be in control of what their learning is. And then the nice thing is in that block, I could create little smaller like groups, right? And so maybe there's my my spicy or my, you know, the kids that want to go a little further. And so that's, you know, and and I've observed that many times through the years. And the nice thing about that block is that it allows you that time to be able to have the opportunity to do that to be able to give that feedback to allow those students to work together. And that's where those strategies, right? When you when you were talking about the agency strategies of of like how do you how do you like that cognitive lift shifting that back on to the students, allowing that time to do it where I'm more the facilitator of the learning and then you have the students doing all of that. That's that's what we're trying to to get ourselves moving towards so that there's that high level of engagement because you're right the ability levels and where pe where where kids are at it's going to it's going to be different right >> I just want to thank the uh secondary principles for your work on this appreciate the teacher engagement in the process and we uh look forward to your next in a series of periodic updates coming soon. Item 8.3 under information is um elementary in STEM programs and presenting we have summer assistant director of teaching learning teaching and equity and you have some friends with you introduce Um, greetings board members. It is so great to be back tonight and I am really excited that I'm not talking and I have a guest for you tonight. Um, we have Mati who is one of our STEM teachers and I just want to give a shout out to our STEM teacher in the back is at Jackson Elementary and Josh Greger is at Eagle Creek and they are all wearing their STEM shirts so you can see them very easily. Um, and Monica Miller is one of the LPG coaches and she is supporting the STEM teachers this year in the design and implementation of the curriculum. So I am going to turn it over to you and I'm just going to put this on. Okay. Thank you for inviting us in. Um our um we talk about that or your this is why we're here, right? We're changing our system. [laughter] >> Okay, there we go. Um, so we're excited to share an update on our elementary STEM program. Uh, we launched this work to be able to give students hands-on inquiry based learning experiences that build critical thinking, creativity, and perseverance. And this year, we've really seen some amazing progress in our students. Um, one of the biggest successes, um, has been the level of student engagement. Kids are enthusiastic. They're asking for more STEM time, um, more challenges and more opportunities, and they want to be able to create and problem solve. Teachers are seeing students who are fully absorbed, curious, and proud of what they've made. Families are noticing it, too. We've had a lot of parent comments through Seesaw and emails, and at conferences, our STEM rooms have been busy with families stopping by to learn more and ask questions. um showing real excitement for the program. Um a lot of our kids have taken home some of our take-home STEM kits and sent in pictures of what they're creating at home as well. Um and again, they just they keep asking for more. We can't get those take home STEM kits out fast enough for them. Uh what we're learning um sorry there was a video. >> Oh yeah. Um we're learning that um implementing a strong STEM program takes time. Um and we're trying to have a willingness to try and adjust and improve as we go throughout the year. There's a lot of flexibility between our teammates. we um sometimes are on day one and get done teaching a day's worth of lessons and texting um emailing each other hours after school and trying to reassess what we can do to make the lesson better. So, there's been a lot of um change and a lot of things that we've worked on. Um we've been testing materials and strategies to see what engages students best. A key part of STEM is letting the kids go through that productive struggle. They need permission to fail so that they can build coping skills and develop perseverance. And we're really starting to see that shift. At the beginning of the year, they'd be nervous or apprehensive to try something that looked hard. And now even our youngest students are starting to just dive right in and learning that it's if it if a Kuba plank tower falls down, it's okay. And the video that was there was actually some older students that had built it and um knocked it down. And the way that it fell created such an amazing pattern that that was something that they were super excited about. And we've kind of um tried to teach the younger kids that too. Like if it falls down, look at the pattern that it created when it fell. So it doesn't have to always be a failure. um they're willing to attempt hard things because they understand that it's part of the process and it's okay to make mistakes and they're beginning to learn from this the successes that they're having as well as their failures. And we've seen how powerful it is for us as teachers to model our vulnerability. Um we don't always know what we're doing when we walk in that class and if it's going to work. Like we have our plan, we have our things, but it's a first time for us doing it and um the students have been really receptive to that. and supportive to us like, oh, we'll just give it a try and see if it works. Um, so when they see us taking risks and learning alongside them, it strengthens the connection and builds trust between those two. As we move forward, um, we're focused on building a stronger and more consistent foundation in our STEM program. Um, we just started reviewing curricula to ensure that we have high quality materials to support inquiry, experimentation, and skill development. Um, we began this we began this process by developing a criteria rubric to evaluate resources. Um, and whether they're from a developer or they're free resources, we just want to ensure that what we've put in front of students is high quality, researchbased, and meaningful to them. We will also be launching feedback surveys in the spring for students, families, and teachers. And this will help us to refine our implementation as we build cycle year B for next year um and ensure the program is meeting all of our members. >> And then finally, um they are going to have some STEM nights coming up that we invite all of you. I will um as they approach closer, I will email them more just to remind you of the dates and the time um and really getting families engaged if if they haven't already. And as you can see that the kids are just really excited about this in their rotation and they they come here to learn. I've been lucky enough to work with all of these teachers and be in their classrooms. Um they're committed to this program. We even um developed a rubric a rubric that aligns to our mathematical practices because it aligns to STEM very well. um so that we can reflect on our own instruction as well. So that there's there's a lot of heavy lifting that's going on by these teachers and they're always like, "Well, let's give it a try. What's the worst thing that can happen?" Right? And that's what we want to instill in our kids is that they're not um so and I heard some of the high schoolers talking and I was like, "This is we're getting them ready for, right? And we're doing it at such a young age. Um but their identities are starting to be formed at such a young age and it's very positive for what we see." >> Okay. Any questions about STEM? I just have one. I I really like the fact that you're one of the things you talked about when we approve the implementation of this was how can we tie classroom learning into the STEM piece of it. So, I'm glad you brought that up that some of the mathematical things are being applied to some of the STEM curriculum that or programs that you're developing right now. >> Yeah. So, because I really I think that's a really important piece that what they're learning in the classroom, they can actually take and practice what they're learning in real application to something at their grade level. Um, I think it just helps them understand a lot more than just >> looking at the whiteboard or the screen. Yeah, it's those practices of engagement. How do I persevere and all the things that we want for our kids? And then we're looking at like five different standard documents anywhere, you know, science, technology, computer science, math, general ed, like they're they're really melding a lot of things so kids can start to see the connection. So even if they're doing something in your classroom, they can see how we can further it in another avenue. So that's been fun to work on. And we've been we've tried to be really mindful about making our activities hands-on, as hands-on as possible. So it's not a sit and get when they come to STEM. Um the kids are active, they're working partners or game groups and we really try to foster the collaboration and communication between the students. Um, and we're building in the engineering design process and even some of our young learners are using some of that vocabulary now. So, it's been really exciting to see. >> Would you ever consider like taking some of the kids that are in the engineering and manufacturing um program and coming into the elementary and working with them on some program? >> Yes, we would love to. Absolutely. Um, our STEM nights are one that we're hoping to reach out to see if somebody would help on that. Um, with a 4-day cycle, at least makes the scheduling a little bit more challenging to have somebody come in because they would have to come in for four days in a row and to all the different schools. Um, but definitely we're trying to find a way to um bring families in and parents who are in STEM careers so that they can be part of presenting what they do in their STEM career so the kids can see that as well. Um, it's it's a definitely a a work in progress. We are are hoping to continue to build it year after year. >> Comment, excuse [clears throat] me, on a question. I I got to go sit in in one of Gigi's classes this fall and and it was it was really fun. It I I think everyone on the board seemed to be excited about the addition of STEM and I'm included in that. It didn't look like reading and writing and arithmetic that I remember. you know, kids were moving around and that was all the things that we discussed in making these decisions that we're excited and looking forward to. Um, so that was my comment that I think it looks like a phenomenal program that you guys are working on. Question was when we made these decisions, we talked about are we going to track this? Are we going to have some sort of data points or anything like that as to whether the changes we made are positive for our elementary learners? And I don't know if that's something we are tracking and if it is, you know, what type of data points we're going to be collecting and are going to be able to share at some point in time. >> Um, so we'll have Patrick Leonard in the hot seat in a little bit, one of our principles. But, you know, we did just kind of a check-in before we came tonight um in the PLC and just asked, are you noticing >> more behavior referrals? Are there specific things because I know that was a concern that you know reducing PE time would increase behaviors and qualitatively we are not um we will have those numbers hard data numbers we can look at um I just looked at Sweeny's referrals and actually they're they're way down this year so I don't can't just say it's because of this or it isn't right but things that we could look at that would help us you know get a fuller picture of programming um does not seem to be really any change in terms of those kinds of things. And just qualitatively I know um Steph Baker shared that she has kids come up to her and tell her like it's my STEM day today and that they kids know what day it is for them. Um you know that 10 day we saw it was confusing and kids didn't always know where they were going on what day and what they were supposed to bring. Um, I will say it does testimony is that it's much easier to know where I'm going on the 4 day rotation. So, but we can definitely formalize that for you guys a little bit more. >> I just want to give gratitude to the teachers. Um, if you can imagine designing in something from scratch, uh, that is what they were are doing, right? And so how successful it is is really a testament to the efforts that you are all putting in and Monica for for coaching and supporting and digging into rubrics and planners and things. So I just have gratitude for all of you. Thank you. >> One last comment for me. Um I love how you mentioned that the STEM program teaches children it's okay to fail and being vulnerable. I know as a secondary student and um even just going into the adult world, it's kind of hard to be vulnerable. Um especially in these spaces, but especially for my brother, he's a fourth grader at Red Oak. Um he and STEM has really I guess I've seen him flourish because of it. He's not one to really gravitate towards math and reading, but more of the Legos and coding kind of stuff. But with him being able to learn how to be vulnerable and learn how to tackle challenges, it's really actually helped him in the math and reading sections where if he doesn't know how to sound out a word, he, you know, tries it. If he gets it, if he gets it wrong, it's um and ask for help. If he doesn't get it the first time, usually just tries again when he usually just give up. But I've really seen how STEM has not only impacted him but his friends as well. So >> that was great. And it's been interesting because I would say that my teammates will probably agree the first couple of months of school we saw a lot of tears and not just from kindergarten first graders. We had >> I was on the floor. Sorry. [clears throat] We had some fourth and fifth graders that would really get angry with each other if they accidentally knock their build down or if they touch something and it it ruined what they were creating. And that it's really been a shift the past couple of months to see the collaboration that the kids have had and the different mindset of okay it fell now what like what can I do and not get angry not get sad but really having that problem solving with them. So, it's been fun to see and we're really excited starting with the K1s to see what that's going to look like in a few years to see what more. And then for the win updates, I brought uh Patrick Leonard who's the principal at Sunpath and Ky who teaches fourth grade at Sunpath. they're going to kind of share with you the experience um that they have had implementing that [clears throat] what I need instructional time at SunPath. So um our comprehensive literacy framework you have seen this many many times um and we're really talking right now about that adequate instructional time and how can we ensure that we have time every day for kids to get literacy based instruction around what they need. All of those other components are important during wind time, but specifically that use of time is what we're going to be talking about today. So, what I need time, we have kind of three parameters going forward this year that every single site is implementing. Um, it has to be literacy focused, it has to be data driven, and you have to make needs-based groups. And so you can just kind of see one example of um our data trackers and how teachers are using these trackers to kind of um identify an instructional need. You see those in the colorcoded areas where it's fluency, um on track, um reading, there's different areas there. and then an instructional match, how they're going to monitor that progress during that win rotation, the teacher that's responsible, what date it's starting, and what date they're ending. So, every every site has these at every grade level, and they're all using these to kind of track what's happening during time. And I invite you to add anything here. >> Yeah, this has been a great change. Um, some of us that have been here for more than 10 years, when we first started professional learning communities, we was part of that. we were supposed to magically just make it happen. And we added a little section of time in our day, but we didn't have any support staff. We really didn't have full direction and we were doing 10 days and then doing another 10 days and it just felt kind of chaotic. This year it's been very well laid out. Um, one of the great things is it's a half an hour every day. So like when we first look at this and kids need fluency or comprehension um back just a year ago the kids would be in a small group for 15 to 20 minutes and you weren't getting through as much that you can this year. So for example we were getting through those first few weeks of having our groups and our in my team we split our kids all up. So at 1220 all the fourth graders move. There are four classroom teachers, three ML teachers and interventionists. So that's eight of us and then the special education kids get there needs that as well. So all of our kids are moving and we were teaching and we're like fluency it's a long time to do fluency just if you're doing repeated reading and working on that. So we found hey there's so much more time you can now layer in more comprehension you can go back and work on phonics and so this year when I really think of this half an hour it's been a game changer. We have found ways um to this. Yeah. No, go ahead. Go ahead. There's lots of things that are going well. Our kids love that everyone moves at 12:20. Talking about behavior, I haven't thought about this till you had me think what's going well. We don't have behavior issues. We have kids from all four classrooms come in. They're excited. They come in and this is just my grade level. I don't I know everyone's kind of getting to take a bite out this year of like how it's going to work for them. My team was like, "Let's go all in." And it's been awesome. >> What grade level? >> Fourth grade. Fourth grade. So, everyone's getting what they need. The time goes by fast. They're excited to come. Um, learning is happening, teachers are learning, good things going on. >> Yeah. I think, you know, the biggest part kind of touch on is impact the whole change in schedule that's impacting it. in that you know we we've always had something like win or targeted reading but this first time we've changed our schedule where hey everyone's in at this time you know in fourth grade you'll have ML teachers special ed teachers intervention teachers and our teacher uh working small groups or you can say but actually they're just taking their group and in fourth grade they mix the kids around and change it as it goes I think um we've been doing data dies for two or three years at at um sudden path and we slowly kind of went from hey we're going to show you how to do it or we're going to give you the data to this last time around the grade levels and the ML teachers and the win groups or win teachers deciding on the looking at the data deciding on we still have the data die but they kind of did all the work and I foresee a year from now when the data is in there it's going to take it no we're not going to have a designated day to die day or anything like that so I think that's that's kind kind of a nice nice thing to to see. Uh currently a sun path. Um we have two grade levels that aren't mixing everyone up. They still get you mix up with ML and intervention, but elementary teachers, they like that. They're they're responsible for their kids. They're responsible for a lot of things, but sometimes I give up that responsibility or they find things that work for them. just met with the kindergarten teacher this morning talking about how they're doing there. They still have intervention teachers come in, ML teachers come in, special ed, but now they're doing kind of what their daily five or target targeted times do. And because they have so many more help during that time, the group that remains in the classroom is much smaller. So they can get to their two or three groups each day, which is kind of nice, too. So I think that the schedule itself is nice and I think the other thing with um foundational skills, you know, we use a lot of the uh fastbridge to [clears throat] identify kids and work with the kids and identify interventions, but they also use the foundational skills. Hey, I got a few kids that just didn't get this lesson this day. Here's what I'm going to focus on. So I think that's kind of a big big part of it. >> We've learned a lot. Um, as Pat said, phonics and wind have now taken an hour of our day. So, it's been a unique way of how we used to have an hour and a half to two hours depending on how many minutes you had. And now you have an hour set aside for this. So, it feels like we now want arts and letters. we want our no new core curriculum because now you're feeling you've had to give stuff up because you just have a different um way time period that you have to teach everything but now you're like I need the core to then add on to it. It's kind of like Pat was saying about phonics. Okay, we're not really getting a syllable type or multi-elabic words. Great. We can add that to our wind time. But we're feeling a little wonky right now because our core feels a little off this year. So, I think it's actually creating a space for everyone to go, we need the new stuff. Um, definitely up there that word flexible, I think that's been a big part of it. Our kids have when I think to our first um two rounds of six weeks, we had movement within and the kids kind of knew, hey, this isn't the right fit for you. Go this way. Um right now we're in a longer period of time um for third quarter because we have access testing coming up for a multilanguage learner uh children that have multil languages and um one of my kids had that have been in my room. I'm the on grade level the first two rounds. She's like, "Oh my gosh, I have to go to this new teacher." I'm like, "Oh, it's going to be so great. You're going to do something." And then she goes, "Oh, but let's just I'm going to pass my access test and then I'm just going to come back." Two days in, she's like, "Oh, I'm fine. I'll stay with Miss Bang. Like they're finding and they're they're successful and they're feeling good in those environments. We I don't know we talked about behavior but like kids are behaving. They're just they know what to do. They're feeling successful. We're able, you know, we have our ML groups, our intervention, and I forgot enrichment. But we also have a classroom teacher that has six kids. They're working on phonics. They're working on fluency. And those kids feel so good in that room. There's not like the stigma of, hey, I'm going into this classroom. It's they feel successful. They come back. We've learned also um at the beginning the the ML teacher or the intervention teacher was doing some of the progress monitoring. Some of the classroom teachers are feeling left out or weren't reading or having that opportunity. So, we've created space on Thursdays where we say if these kids are in a formal intervention, we're going to keep them to do the progress monitoring. So, they'll read with us, they'll do their comprehension with us, and then their classroom teacher has a better feel of where they're at. I can talk to parents with more um confidence, but then that um ML teacher, that intervention teacher is also doing things all the time to meet those kids needs. Um I do think there's a need for growth. Um, as someone who's been teaching kids and are on track, we've found ways to progress monitor them. But that is definitely something an area for growth as we go forward as well. >> Next step. >> Yeah. Thinking about um, you know, I think what you alluded to, you know, data around this um, it feels good when you are successful and you're meeting goals. And I think about the secondary assessment for learning presentation. This is our elementary assessment for learning. And when you have a group of six kids, you can teach them to set a goal. You can teach them to watch their own progress. I have sat in and observed teachers just masterfully showing kids, okay, last week you read this, we're going to try it this week. What do you think you're going to your goal is going to be? Do you think you're going to improve? you know and then after they read how do you think you did what got better for you assess yourself and so it's really been powerful to see that and you know I mean that is teachers also feeling that success and seeing their students grow it just motivates you to to stay in it right um whether you're a student or a teacher we are looking at growing our our data process as Patrick said you know when you first start something you put the guardrails up and everybody kind of lives in container and now we're we've got it going and we can be more flexible. We can have teams they want to meet more frequently. Great. Meet more frequently. They want to change their groups up sooner, you know, great. Do all those things. So now we're we're removing scaffolds because people see the power um and and that whole idea of like collective efficacy on the teams, right? You are the smartest people to respond to your student needs. Try something. So, we're going to continue to grow our mindsets there. Uh, looking at our progress monitoring systems, we feel really good about the systems we have in place for students um in those incremental foundational skills areas. We feel like we could definitely work on kids who are performing at and above and what are we going to monitor and how are we going to show growth there. So, we'll continue to work on that and then we really need to protect that time uh for collaboration. So, you know, teachers, our our our English language development teachers, our intervention teachers, our special ed teachers, they are now teaching all day, you know, and so it's really hard to find that time to meet. So, we need to figure out how to protect that time so their voices can be at the table when they're making those decisions about about student groups. Yeah, it's easy for the collaboration within the the grade level team, but getting the ML teacher there that's seen all six grade levels and now I try to talk to all six different grades sometimes can be a challenge. So one thing we did a lot of school was in different ways took a day and went over and developed those they provided input a lot of greats did invited their PLC's to do some pre-planning and things like that. I see in the future that'll continue. Got to figure that out. That's that's probably the toughest part is getting those wind teams to collaborate even more and discuss this even more. How about make a comment? >> Mine's small. I just I you know my I get to live this through my daughters you know in these grade levels and it's fun and and I think they like the wind time rest mysterious we talked about I think it's three different groups of kids that were separated out in win time right essentially like on track and n helper >> I wouldn't even say that it's that >> not even that >> no um it really goes back to when we first started back at the beginning it was a phonics need a fluency need comprehension what am I for an accelerated >> and So you do have kind of that you can group them like that, but then as we sat down, Cat might remember the second time we sat down, we're like, they're not really fluency. They're fluency plus they need to learn how to comprehend what they're reading, even a small paragraph. And these kids, yeah, they need fluency, but it's really going back to multi-elabic words, and it's the phonics part of it. So there's like groupings, but then there's also like, well, it's this kind of it's mixing the skills together. keep going because I don't think I >> No, that's Yeah, you're right. And I was just thinking logistically and having the flexibility of, you know, sending assets or teachers or [cough] educators trying to figure out like one group, we have like 30 kids that are all in this particular area if that's been a challenge or if that's something that obviously you're giving them the flexibility to judge where they need to be at to get the most attention. >> It feels like we've kind of layered in how we group. So we find the kids that fit and meet the enrichment group. So Mrs. Franen can take those kids. We move them off. They're good to go. We have our special ed education kids. We're moving there. Adam Weiner can take our intervention kids. That might be, you know, one to four kids depends depending on what we need and how many kids kind of fit together. And then our ML groups, what do we need them to work on? And so you're able to kind of layer all these needs. And then when they come to us then that's how we've done it this year. Fourth grade then goes oh we have 50 kids and four of us. How do we group these kids the best? >> So we have been fortunate because we have so many adults and so many people helping us. We have gotten even the highest group has been 23 kids in a row down to like I said six in the one room. So it kind of just depends on what your needs are and again how we've done it this year. We just kind of went off the top and moved kids where they needed to go and then figured out within our grade level how to do that. >> And the and the 23 usually are at or close to grade level. >> Yes. I think to your point, we've learned that we don't always get it perfect. And like that's okay and just being willing to change it, right? If it's not working, you know, within a couple weeks of of what you're doing if you hit it out of the park or if you need to rewrite, you know. Yeah. So I think it's just empowering teachers again to feel like they have the flexibility to make those shifts so that we can respond to the student needs. >> Krin brought up a great point. I think when you would look at our trackers, those PLC trackers at the beginning of the year, you had literally like four colors and now you'll see trackers with like nine different colors. So, they have already evolved because they're looking so much more deeply at that data to find a specific need, right? You put all these kids in fluency. Fluency is not fluency. There's different ways that kids can grow within fluency. So, I think it's just been so fun to watch on, you know, in the back end, look at the trackers and see how they've evolved. And we're only a half halfway in this year. Another positive byproduct was is for the schedule we had to we had to scaffold or separate out all the different wind tanks because you can have two grade levels have wind time at the same time. So then telling the staff classroom teachers intervention teachers you have to be on time you have to be there ready to go and pick up your kids and go into the classroom and you got to be ready to go. And I think the positive thing in there, I think in the past when we try to provide those intervention service and different things, maybe the teacher was just finishing up science or doing something else. And what would happen is they'd be off by a few minutes, 10 minutes, and maybe they ML teachers were a little late getting the kids back. So you had kids [snorts] coming and going during our core instruction time. So I think the nice thing about the schedule, the changes we made, you have more kids [snorts] in core core core reading, core math and theme more of the time. You don't see as much. I used to always hear I have a revolving door. I have a revolving door. That revolving door slows down or in some cases been eliminated. >> Chair Pierce. So what I wanted to say and Patrick provided a perfect segue. I mean, a year ago, we were having very real conversations about elementary schedule. And I think you're you're starting to hear both on the STEM and win front. You know, what the decisions that we made, you know, the impact that they're really having. You know, I'm fortunate enough to be in and out of the the STEM rooms and and the type of learning that the students are doing is different and unique. And I think it it trickles into the way they learn and interact throughout the rest of the day. you know, when when we talked about the productive struggle and learning how to fail. I mean, I think it really supports students throughout the day. Patrick said at the beginning of this, um, you know, we used to we used to have win time and it was, you know, kind of, you know, do as you want and come and go and do whatever and you called it win time. But what I'm really seeing this year, um, is is a high level of organization. It starts with learning, teaching, and equity, our five building leaders, and then our teacher leaders. And I I hear all the time about the work going on in our building leadership teams to really make sure that when time is is is organized, there's fidelity, there's a plan. Um, you know, the teacher attitudes and beliefs. It's been fun to watch them over the course of the year. I mean, I think there's always a healthy skepticism at the start. And now when I'm out in buildings talking with people, like everybody's excited about wind time and and what it's providing students and how it's really allowing teachers to focus their instruction to meet meet teacher needs. And and lastly, I just want to say that the use of data just continues to grow and evolve. I think that we've talked about PLC's for years, but what I'm seeing and hearing is that, you know, PLC's really have tangible data and a place to apply it and make real world instructional decisions on the spot and and and really move kids. So the, you know, we had this conversation, this debate a year ago, and I'm I'm grateful that we are where we are because I'm seeing, you know, really significant changes in our elementarymentaries and our our administrators are doing a great job and and at the same time our teachers are just doing amazing work with our kids and, you know, hopefully um hopefully we'll have data, you know, over time that's going to show um real growth in what we're doing. So, and I'm excited to hear you say, Karen, that you're you're waiting for arts and letters because I know that's going to be a big lift, too. But >> but hey, then we're then we're then we're there and we're through it all. So, thank you to to each of you and especially our teachers. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Right. >> We are up to item 8.4 And that is a tech from our director of instructional technology. >> We know how far on the agenda we are by how much room [laughter] [laughter] >> terrible. >> So I got a few topics tonight. Um, we're going to be mostly in the red on that graphic. So, a lot of safety and security and student learning focused items tonight. Um, so I'm not going to go through the tech report right now. I want you to know it's out there. I I do these every couple of years. Um, this one's a mere 33 pages long, so we're not going to go through it right now. [snorts] Do that at your leisure. You'll either be really into it or it'll put you to sleep. you can, you know, test out that theory and see how that goes for you. Um, but if there's anything in there, if you look at it that you want me to circle back and talk about, we certainly can, but I'm going to stick to a couple topics tonight. One of them is just an update. We talked about cameras a few months back. Um, this is a very brief installations have started on that. This is mostly replacing existing cameras. Um, I'll just point out one item as far as ads. Um, I don't know if I mentioned this last time, but we are adding a few cameras at Bond to address kind of the area behind concessions and also sort of there's the like team room space on the other side of the field like the gate and stuff. So, didn't have good coverage there. So, that's going to be dealt with. Um, so we're on track. another year or so, we'll be through everything and then we might have to circle back and do some start over stuff. But we're doing all um and this is just an updated budget sheet and again I'm not going to dig through that just just an update from the last time we talked. So the big focus tonight thing I'm going to spend most of my time on is artificial intelligence. What we doing about it? How are we handling that? What's our plan? What's our well, what's our framework? That's what we want to get into. So, we took a little time last year to update our policies and had some language in there around AI and academic integrity and honesty and all that. So we had some guardrails in that sense around what the expectations are. But we don't want AI to be treated as something that's all or nothing gotcha combative or anything like that. What we really want to do is put this in front of people in a way that is productive, constructive, and clear. Um, so I'm going to go through a few pieces of that. And a lot of this work was put together by Eric Hills and our husband, our learning coordinators, formerly digital learning coaches or specialists or it depends on the year you ask me what their title is. um they've done a few things, but the purpose of this is to really put things in categories, put it in clear language, and then put it in front of students in a way where it's very specific about what's allowed and what's not, right? So, if you want to have a certain outcome, you need to set the expectation. So these buckets, they sort of meander through plan, research, create, review, refine, interact. These are all just different ways of saying, and I'll go to this one because it's a little more specific. It's a little hard to read. It's a little small. Sorry. But planning might be how you brainstorm, how you develop your topic, how you get through your ideas. And sometimes you want to do that yourself. and the teacher can say, "I want you to do that yourself." Or sometimes it's, "Hey, this is a good chance to go ask the computer, ask the the AI for some ideas and kind of like work through the brainstorming, have a partner, have a have a way of working working the problem. The teacher has control. The purpose here is to kind of put it out there and say, "This is okay. This is not." And there's sort of clarity around that. you say, "Here's sort of like a an item like planning. Here are some of the things that might fall into that category and then put it out to the students and say, "Okay, these things are okay. I want you to use the AI tools to do these parts of the steps. These other things, no, that's on you. You got to do that. You got to show your work. You have to own that part of it, right?" Really, just make it as straightforward as possible, not treat it as something that is banned. Still have still have the option of the teacher to say no AI on this assignment, but really just say this is what we expect, make it clear and not have to hunt down all the time and like search for like, okay, did the kid do something here they want to do? Um, that's not productive and that's not really a good situation for anyone. So that's I mean that's the gist of the framework and that's what we're doing our PD on. This is what we're talking staff about like this is how we want to present this. This is you know all year we've been talking to staff about how we want to do this. Has it gotten to a level of implementation I'm like happy about yet? Not yet. But we're it's a process. So, we're working toward that. Um, I'll talk about this in a second because I want to stay here for one second. Questions about the framework. I kind of ran through it, but I don't think it's like super hard to understand. >> I've got [clears throat] a quick comment or whatever. like those of us that we were just it seems like a while ago but we just went to the Minnesota schoolboard conference and it's crazy how literally last year my first year at the conference there was maybe one two three type of AI presentations and all the great breakouts and presentations that this year there was 10 12 of them you know it's not only is it growing so fast it's going to become part of our schools really quickly here and I learned a lot and the whole idea of grasping this and actually using it and taking advantage of it in our schools rather and then fearing it, which I'm a little it's hard for me to do, but um are you talking specifically with this type of plan or strategy? Is this going to our teachers right now? Now, is this something that we're developing as a a facility or staff or are you talking just >> this has been this has been in front of teachers all year or it's we've been developing it over time like in years past and through last spring and then in the fall there were some initial PD around it and we keep trying to meet with groups to you know different PLC's to kind of bring them on board with this [snorts] approach. Um, you know, again, kind of a process. Everyone's got their own depending on your subject area or your comfort level or whatever, like take on it. But, you know, it it's like any tech innovation sort of goes through those cycles of, you know, resistance, fear, early adopters, you know, those groups and but it's not going away, right? So, we need to be really distinct and and clear about how we're working through that and and getting people to be comfortable, right? So, yeah, Brian, if I could add just I think it was two summers ago at our leadership retreat, we used the phrase embracing AI and we did that purposefully because I think at that time there was still, well, is this something is this going to impact me or not? And it's like, you don't have a choice. it's impacting our entire world. And by saying we're going to embrace it doesn't mean, you know, it's going to be without guard rails or whatever. But it truly that that was our mindset that this was something that we it's going to be part of education. It's going to be part of learning. It's going to be part of our world. How do we make it a productive part and minimize or mitigate some of those dangers as best we can? And so you know and that was you know AI was on you know it was around then and people were doing things with it but I think that was our mindset to say that's kind of led us here and obviously you know you watch people and you go my gosh just the pace and you know the the change in AI and the change in power and capacity um and not that that doesn't come with some fear and anxiety it certainly does but how do you embrace that? How do you make it part of learning? It's going to be part of the world that our students are going to live in. So, >> a question is the magic school AI the only one they have access to. >> Yeah. So, let me jump to that for a second. It's not the only one, but I'm highlighting I put it up here. I'll talk about it now. So, I kind of lean into your question. Um, we subscribe to that because it's a nice safe space that's used that you can use K through 12. Like it has sort of like a lot of ways to apply that to any grade level where it's like you can set up tools or spaces like they have like rooms basically where you kind of say this is your objective in this space and let the kids use it. So it it's very easy to get into and monitor and sort of make sure nothing goes wrong. It's a very protected space and the whole purpose of that and you can kind of see the traffic on it. It's not skyrocketing or anything but it's steady and it's level and it's gradually increasing in terms of how people are using it. Um so as a entry point we wanted to have something we could say to people this is your entry point if you're not super comfortable or if you think the kids aren't ready to do anything too out of the box this is your safe space to use. So that's important to kind of have that. There's other tools like Gemini is similar to this but a little it's protected and everything but it has a little more power and a little more flexibility in terms of what you can do with it. Um [clears throat] a little more open-ended in terms of broad AI LLM models like those are the two that we're using primarily. Um there's some other ones that are >> Do you use copilot? >> The kids are not using it. staff can use it. We don't have that open to students at this time just because of the protections around it are not sufficient to what we want. Um Gemini because it's part of our because we pay for Google Google Workspace, we have a lot more control over that and oversight over it. Um so we've tried to find that balance of you know availability of tools without creating a space that you know is going to basically get me in trouble. So yeah, [snorts] >> so I've actually tried using magic school a couple times and the thing about magic school is it hallucinates a lot and it makes up information and research which other like GPT models um I mean they're less likely to so I don't know if you guys just it just needs you're a bit hallucinating >> kind of thing. Yeah. >> And I >> Yeah, I'll grant it can be a little do that a little bit depending on how open-ended your questioning is. And you're probably correct in that like at the upper >> at the higher grades tool, but I'm not arguing that [snorts] you've seen that a little bit and that's one of the things that'll it's part of the experience of like learning like okay the tools are not infallible and these are things you need to kind of be mindful of or take take into account as you're using them. Um that being said, the other advant so that's a drawback but the advantage to it is like as a teacher you can kind of monitor those spaces or go back and you point out hey this thing's giving me like garbage. the teacher can kind of review that and say, "Okay, yeah, so I can build this space better or I can give it a better prompt or we can talk about what the prompts might look like to avoid that, right? Because in the real world that's going to happen, right? So the experience in sort of the space that we can monitor is is it great that that happens?" No. But is it good that we are doing a space where we can do follow? That's a little bit of a trade-off. >> Do do you foresee Gemini um having enough guardrails to be a replacement for this at some point? >> Gemini has a decent amount of guard rails, but it's kind of constructed differently. So, it's kind of like there's advantages in magic school in terms of what you can construct and sort of like set up for the students to use versus Gemini is a little more open. Okay. >> So, they're they're they function a bit differently in terms of can experience it as a student. I have one more slide, but I think we're going to have a few questions on this, so I just wanted to take those down. Um, this one's a teaser. So, we've touched on previous presentations tonight have touched on multi-tered systems of of supports on TSS in from different angles. Um, wind time, right? Um, how you put together those data trackers, how you gather all that information. We are working [clears throat] really hard. People are working really hard. to pull data out of various places in the campus, Bathbridge, other areas. So, extract the data, massage the data, put it into a spreadsheet, make the spreadsheet available to the right people who then have to go through and sort the data, who then have to go through and decide which students are maybe at risk or need some sort of intervention or have a need in one form or another. You then have to go into Google and create a document called a record of student. You then have to then share that document to the right people. Get the right people go into it and add stuff to it and then action upon it. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of hands in the pie. And it's sort of like this thing we built because that's what we did because we had a purpose to serve and students to to support and that's what we've been building over time. It's this big thing. So, we looked for we spent almost a year researching and purchased and finalized that purchase in December, a system called NextPath. And I'm hoping in a future meeting kind of really dive into what it is and what it does. When you start hearing about it, it's a system that pulls in the data. It's a system that lets you sort the data. It's a system where the intervention information and who's doing what and for whom can live all under one roof. H realistically see the big picture for all these students and oh by the way also do some sorting and oh by the way also do some things around incident tracking defendants tracking and all that stuff. So I'm really looking forward to talking about that at length. I just wanted to like put it out there like this is a thing we're going to return to. I will definitely be in the room with LTE and other staff to talk about it because it's really in their ballpark. I'm just kind of laying out a field for them, but they're going to be living there. Um, yeah. So, just sort of a preview of something to look forward to in that vein. And again, people are doing great work. They're working really hard, but I want I really want them to be working more on helping the students versus putting all the data in front of we want to make that simpler. So that's next questions. One question um with the implementation of AI Are we going to put any sort of a district policy for students with expectations of public using [cough and clears throat] it? Um I know every class is going to be different with how they potentially would use a tool like that. Um I know there are some districts that have been putting together working on policies for students with expectations and probably more so something that would go in the handbook I would think. Um, but is that something that we're considering doing at this time? >> We have language in handbook and it's it's in the same section as our current academic dishonesty language because there's a lot of overlap in terms of expectations and what's considered like you know misuse. it really it's falling into similar buckets like cheating is cheating whether you use an AI to do it or you're from someone else's paper right so rather than reinvent all that right now the language lives in that space so it is in the hand in that area if technology evolves to a point where you need to break that out that's a discussion but right now that seems the most logical way to approach Well, Cher Peterson, it is on I'm in the high school handbook right now. It's under academic integrity and um to Brian's point, we stick with our typical academic integrity language and then there are artificial intelligence usage expectations that are somewhat summarizing how it applies to what's above if that makes sense. So, good question >> and I think it's the nuance of it and that was your earlier slides with where can you use it? Yeah, >> a lot of things pretty clear if you were plagiarizing 20 years ago. Um [snorts] it's kind of an all or none thing. Now the research part is that okay to you know to pull data or it's what is the learning activity and sometimes that's going to be parsed out in different ways and now it's kind of the green check boxes and the red X's and that's certainly adds complexity and again it's another tool of you know right now you can kind of tell if something's written a five years from now five months from now I don't know so but yeah and that is and it's a tool that you know most people are going to use in their lives. So how do you use it with integrity? How do you use it you know giving credit where credit's due? Those parts and that's become more complex. But in some ways it all goes back to that basic thing of academic integrity. Is this your work? Did you create it within the parameters that you were supposed to? Great question. Quick comment. The big fear of AI, at least to me, next to taking my job is uh that it's going to take away the ability of people to think on their own. And that is and and 5 10 years from now, it'll be interesting to see what kids growing up as they grow up with AI. Are they going to be able to think on their own or is it just going to be tell me what to think chat? And it's that that's a scary thing especially when it comes to the future of education. I mean it's [clears throat] a fair concern and I think it reinforces why you need to be really explicit about the steps and the use cases and what's allowed and what's not. I think that if you do it well, you're setting it up where you're breaking down the assignment such a way where kids are you make it so that you have to think about what each discrete thing is in a way that you may not have before. So you can spin this the other way in terms of like being more constructive or deliberate in your thinking >> because it fun to type in the chat GBT if a bus leaves Chicago >> at 9:45 you know I mean that could be fun answer seven by the way um you know just apparently don't ask it's going to sub like >> right well it's just it's a concern and it's going to be really interesting because what's what's this all going to look like in 20 years? >> And it's interesting the tools that they have out there that you can take something that you've written, run it through an AI tool and say, was this really something written by AI or yourself? >> Yeah. >> And how that is so wrong. I've tested it and it's interesting to see how much a wrote 75% of it wrote nothing. So that's concerning to me from a how that gets implemented because I I've heard from teachers that I've talked to about what they're seeing at the high school for AI usage and I mean they definitely can tell when they know their students and they know their abilities and when something comes in that doesn't really match there's a question of is this really their true work? You know, this kind of brings up a subject in general on technology and in schools, right? I feel like it's changed so much. 11 years ago, we had a levy to because we needed to update and get iPads in our kids' hands and all that. And I've seen now just in the last year or two, a lot of educators, parents, everybody kind of concerned like and questioning that like do we necessarily need electronics in third graders hands? Is that best? What's what's best for them as learners and all these technologies? And I just hope that we all keep our eyes open to figuring out what's best for our students as we navigate through these technologies because what we thought might have been great, you know, 10 11 years ago, you know, maybe it isn't great for a third or fourth grade learner and and so I just hope that we're all present and constantly looking at those things. >> Questions. >> Thank you for your time. 8.5 on the agenda is uh another presentation um supporting students with special services and tonight we have Julie Fred our director and hello to the rest of the board. I am really going to hope that I can run the clicker [snorts] should ride for a while. There we go. I always start with measurements. You all read, you know, backwards and forwards. But anytime we start with something in any of our meetings, we like to put it up there as well because I think it's important to ground ourselves and what we're always. So, special education and inclusivity is what I'm going to talk to you about tonight. I want to start out just by a big thank you to Matt Iverson for being here tonight. One of the really cool things about math in here is that being a general education teacher who has so embraced everything that we do in special education from these track and field day that if you haven't been able to ever see you have got to get there at some point. It is the most amazing thing. I can't walk out of there with a dry eye. They run the kids through the gauntlet and every kid is there cheering them on and I I'll cry thinking about it. But it's just really cool that he has embraced it and that um some of what we'll talk about a little bit later is how the general ed team is really just coming together and working with us. Um but tonight I am going to talk to you a little bit about um our student numbers, our unified classes, our special education curriculums, and just supporting students overall. What I want to start with is what I think is kind of crazy to look at. So what we're looking at right here are are child counts. So MDE calls the number of students we have in special education child counts and they pull that number December 1st of every year. So we always are on our case managers that we use sped forms as our platform for IEPs and that you have to finalize it um in order for it to count and that's where we draw our numbers. So we're always on them to make sure they have that stuff finalized before then. But what we're looking at is from 2020 and I'll talk about our numbers that we have right now too from 2025 the growth that we have seen in our special education population um is sort of phenomenal. And so they just we got the results or the the draw the poll on January 20th of this year that talks about where our numbers are at for our current school year and we're already at 1564. moving up from that 1410 of last year. We're currently at 1564 with 54 of those students being either in one of our non-public schools like STAX, we have some kids at Living Hope, or if a student is homeschooled, um it is still shockingly school district's obligation to provide their special education services should their parents choose to do so. So that's a growth of 350 kids from October 1st um of 2020 until now. >> That's 20% of our student. >> That's a big part of our student. I know at last year at this time we were 14% and that number is jumping up. And are all of those receiving services from shock people public schools or are they receiving services from like Southwest? >> This is our well some of them might be this is our unduplicated. Okay. >> So any kid that is out placed somewhere else or if they open enrolled somewhere they're not covered in this number. >> Um but then our duplicated count would say here's the kids are your residents and so this is our unduplicated. So I show you that um because what I also then want to show you is this is what I find extremely interesting and it gives a unique challenge to our special education department. We've started to look at the number of students that enroll in July, August and September. Only the students enroll that receive special education services. And the reason we've been looking at this is we're starting to talk about staffing right now. And it's really a challenge for us the staff moving into any school year knowing that in July we could have or will have most likely 24 students or around there showing up. August we had 39 kids this year or last year, excuse me, 24 25. We don't have this year's data yet um that showed up that have an IEP. And then September when schools already started, we're still seeing nine or 10 kids. And most of the kids that we're seeing come in that late in the summer are pretty significantly impacted and need a setting three program or high setting two program. Not all of them of course, but that's where some of our challenge comes in. And when I've talked to you guys in the past couple years about adding a centerbased program here or adding one there because we just have such high numbers, we're seeing a lot of them come in in our summer months either from moveins or we do have a couple of homes in the area. So sometimes we get kids that are now placed in a group home that we will start to serve. But one of the things that we are faced with is also still a shortage of special education teachers. And so we do have a number of students or excuse me teachers who are working off of what is called an OFP or an out of field permission license. Um, the interesting thing about that is MDE is starting to tell us that, hey, if you teach special education, you can't have an OFP. You have to have a special education license in order to teach special education. But Pelby is still granting OFPS in special education fields. So, you can get an OFP from Pelby for ASD, for autism, for ABS, for academic behavior specialists. yet MDE is telling us they don't necessarily recognize those. I will tell you I'm not alone in the fact that most of the directors in our region and throughout the state are still hiring teachers off of an OS otherwise we would not have people in front of kids. Um, so that's part of what we're really talking about when we go to say our major state of the capital and that type of stuff is if this is going to move forward and we're not able to hire teachers on OS, how are you going to support us and what are we going to do to work with our universities? Um, I'll also tell you some of our teachers on the website are amazing people who are doing some of the best work I've seen in special education in a long time and I hope we're able to keep them employed doing what they're doing. They can always go back and get special education license and some of them are um but some of them also have teaching license and a master's degree plus 20 and they don't necessarily want to incur the cost of another teaching license. I just put that out there. That's sort of some of the challenge that we have. And when we talk about our numbers growing, that's a big number of kids coming into our well that actually that includes early childhood kids, but our um mostly K through 12. So the Oh, I flipped it up. Changing gears a little bit here. if we have questions you guys want interject at any time or you can ask it again. But one of the things I'm finding really cool is our our unified classes and they're starting to grow. So we've had unified by Ed for several years and that's been a huge success. Um next year we're definitely going to be adding unified hearts. Robotics is a little bit still up in the year and I just learned that about 6:15 today as they got the registration numbers from the high school that there aren't quite enough kids in there yet to run that class. So, we'll see if that runs next year or we have to start to look into something in the years to come. Um, but the really cool thing about this is it's been the general education teachers that have asked us to consider this and to say, "Hey, we'd really like to look into a unified art class." Well, Christine Brown brought it to us last year. We looked into it and we're going to be able to offer it next year for two students. So that's something that I feel is really cool and a testament to our journalist staff as well as our specialist staff. Um the link below there, this is for you to look at when you want to. It talks a little bit about um what our unified courses are and Susie Fish who was really kind of spearheading getting all this done with Matt Iris at Unified PE presented at the high school. And so that's what that slide deck is. It's just a really quick over what she showed them. So, I'm going to talk a little bit just because I know we know a lot about our general education curriculum. I wanted just to put in front of you what some of our curriculums are that we use in special education and some of the processes that we've started to go through in the last really two years. Um, we've adopted some curriculums that we've gone through the whole articulation process with. We brought teachers in, they've looked at them, they've picked them, we bring in the trainers from the companies, and so now we're really able to put these into a spoken sequence for our special education students, which has been pretty cool. Um, so STAR, functional academics, language, live, and trans math, I probably should have put these in a different order, are all what we would consider replacement curriculum. So for our students that need that um they're not at grade level but they're also not in a functional level. So they are replacement curriculum for our students that are most of the time our students with specific learning disabilities that receive a higher level of service. So you might and that is only in star actually goes from early childhood all the way up through 12th grade. Um but the others are for middle school and high school. um rewards and Sunday are they can be used to supplement our language arts programs. They really focus more on the phonics and the morphology and that type of stuff when we need to be more specific with kids who have learning disability or um it helps us to drill down more into just maybe their specific needs. Um, SMARTS is a um, executive functioning curriculum. Be good people's social regulation, our our social emotional learning. So, zones and sometimes used in general ed as well, but it works across the board and we started with special education and so if it's in a building, we can't be a part of special education dollars, but we still use it in our classes. And then the pay lineup which is practical assessment exploration system is at our high school and kids can go in there to have real life opportunities to figure out what it's going to look like to have a job to build an application and to have a career. [cough] [clears throat] And then finally giving the full grab bag tonight I wanted to talk a little bit about CIS or coordinated early intervening services. CIS comes in either voluntary or mandatory. And what that is is you satisfy 15% of your special education fund in order to depends on if you're involuntary or in mandatory. If you're involuntary, it's to try and support students from not needing to go special education. So more of that intervention type of stuff. Um we currently for the first time are under mandatory CIS. You can be identified in many different categories. We were found for a year three letter for disproportionality [cough] in over [clears throat] identification of black students in setting three programs. [snorts] Um when you get that you could have a year 1, year two or year three letters. We got year three last year. Um it's another one of those things from MDE where you don't provide you the data to show you how you got there unless you ask them for it. So I did ask them for it and we do have a high number of our students in our setting three programs that are black, African-American, small and all of those categories fit into that identification. Um, so we did set aside for 15% of our federal funds in order to try and move some of those students into a lower setting. The challenge there is if you are in the 73 program for ECD or ASD, it's because it's a functional program and you are operating at a functional level. Um, but that's not to say how do we start to be more inclusive with all of our students. So, the way that we use the funds is we've hired another PCBA on our student support team and I know I brought them here when we spoke to you guys last time. So, they're a board certified behavior analyst um to really get in there and continue to work with our centerbased programs and how do we better support our students. Um Susie Fish, who's our program specialist for center mostly centerbased programs, um was with us last year, but we were able to lump her salary into that one because part of her time then is working with case managers on how do you integrate students more into the general education setting regardless of what their disability is. Um, so that's how we were able to use some of those funds. And then we also were able to put in Susie created um kindergarten for kindergarten teachers that are just kits that have different things in them, different strategies to try and support kids who maybe would have to leave the classroom because of something that's going on based on their disability. But these kits have fidgets. They have um different strategies in there. They might have things that teachers can take kids and get them to do and then bring them back to the classroom. So we conducted our year three letter for the first time and we have to track all the progress that we make and turn all of the information along with um the child prompts to MD and they will continue to review it and see if we stay there for a while or what we can do to come out of your group and you they don't go in order. You can get year one one year and year three the next year three now one year year one next year. So it just depends on where our data li is a crab bag. I don't have a slide that asks you a question. So I'm just ask questions. [laughter] >> I have a question actually for David or Dr. Redmond. Um what is our budget for uh special ed and how much of that is reimbursed by the feds and state? Well, I mean the budgets are relatively low. I think last time we talked was total spend on funds is 1.87%. >> No, no, but just how much total I know that the the federal is not that much. It's how much do we spend total on special ed and how much is that reimbured and how much of that comes out of the general fund? >> Okay, so special as a round number our our state spend is about $25 million. So off the top of my head, maybe I can pull up actual numbers, but it's roughly around $25 million is what the cost of state running state federal is. >> And the CIS, you have to set aside 15% of your federal funds, remember, >> right? Because I think the federal funds is only a couple million dollars. So we're not talking more than 300 grand, >> right? Oh gosh. In fact, I follow it up, but it was it was >> Well, David and I check in first thing tomorrow morning. Let's let's put that answer in the wrap. >> Okay. >> Thank you. Yeah. >> And just to talk about the federal funds, we do use 800,000 of it to reimburse our commission to buy that down. So it actually generates we go staff into state which generates us more money. We did that last year. And we can put portions of their like we didn't put all of their salaries into that because they're not only working on that during the day. Julie, one question with the growth in the numbers um and with special education teachers really hard to get. What is our plan to meet our students needs in our district when they're those teachers are so hard to come by? because you can control what you can control. And one of the things that we could control with starting the apprenticeship program and what the apprenticeship program is is simply it's only for special education right now. We'll have four students [clears throat and cough] moving on. Um and they actually they're parent professionals who will be working through Minnesota State Manag Works. Um and they will go through a two-year program. They'll end up fully licensed. They get to keep working during that time. They increase their level of responsibility throughout those two years. So we have four pair professionals that will start the summer in that program. So in two years we'll have four more staff members should they choose to stay here and should we have a spot for them which if history tells us anything we will have more spots for them than four. Um so we're doing that. I know we're working with the grow your own program. Um, we're really trying to work with our centerbased programs in the way that they instruct because we know we can't just manufacture more people, but can we give them some more support? So, now you've got three centerbased programs in elementary school, three autism center based programs. Can they do more of that team teaching model, which the case loads are still high, but can they alleviate having everybody having to teach the same thing all day? Um, we're still having a high number of absences and holes in our special or our par professional high much better than in the past. I would say most of our buildings are between 70 and 90% full, but then you've got absolutely so. So, it it's a challenge for them. And I know that they feel it and I know that my admin team feels it. hear from the staff frequently. What I'd love to do and we've talked about is hiring um special education not necessarily [clears throat] building subs but district subs for teachers as well. Our problem being we don't even have all of our full-time positions built. So although we've been given the go ahead to yeah do that we have to place them in building question [clears throat] for you looking at all these curriculums I didn't realize how many we actually have >> this is just a I mean >> just a piece of it >> just a piece of it these are the main >> so I'm curious I mean some of these are very specific to the the learner right and and do most of our staff our special staff have access to all these parts of these some of these require some specific the training I know to do that. >> So the functional programs like the star program, functional academics, language life, those really are focused on the teacher who's teaching those either classes or the star program is in all of our centerbased ASD and DCD programs. Um so they have access to that. Um now should somebody want a piece of one of those, we would really talk to them about let's look at the general ed curriculum because these are replacement curriculums. Um but if you're looking at things like Sunday or rewards um they are available to everybody. However um they also require some training. So it's mostly our teachers that teach students with um specific learning disabilities that would do one of those because they would be looking at supplementing the general ed curriculum because they have a more specific need in a certain area. >> Sure. Great. I have a question for you. This is a really hard one to answer because I don't know the answer, but the [snorts] growth that we're seeing right in in this population of students, are we are we testing more? Do you think there's maybe is there some results that we're getting because we're doing something better? Do you think it's just there's more need than there ever has been based on >> I think a little bit of both. >> Yeah. >> Um I would say our goal is always to find interventions that don't students need to be in special education. That said, if there's a true need and a kid has a disability, we want to be able to serve them. We saw an increase a little bit after CO just because there was um kids were in school and so our younger kids coming up didn't have the same experiences. So, they looked more like they needed special education evaluation when some of them really just needed more time. They needed to learn how to do school. Now, the other That is the biggest increase we've seen is in our our study three population are kids that are pretty impacted by their disability that have a medical diagnosis of autism um that are born with Down syndrome or have a developmental cognitive delay. So we've seen a big increase in number of students coming to the district with those. So I'd say that's the biggest increase we've seen. It's important that we learn this as a board when we're looking at future budget items or whatever that we need to pay attention to our needs where students are growing at this space. >> And as you're moving into next year, we're adding a another based program to the middle school level and we're starting out what I would consider full between eight and 11 kids and six to eight is where we would like to see most programs. So we or adult support in there. Um, but when the kids come, when the kids come and you teach them >> who gets the clicker, >> the clicker goes to David. He is going to talk to us next about the optimum busing of eligible high school general ed students starting in fall of 2026. >> Thank you for having me. >> Just a heads up, I actually have to go into >> uh just to start off, there was a lot more people involved than just me sitting up here. Uh, I wanted to give a shout out to our communication department, Tiffany, Jeff Policki, uh, Homer Bus Servicing, uh, also to Jim in some of the meetings. It just there was a lot that went into this, you know, as we move to the next fiscal year. So, what we're going to talk about is just the optin busing eligible at the high school for GenEd students starting in the fall 26. The goal is to share the why in the solution and also share some of the work and system structures in place to support this change. Uh we'll provide some informative assistance assets along with next steps. Uh and we'll answer any questions and continue to refine the process for the board meeting coming up February 23rd. Uh what is changing? So it will be the change will be for 9 through 12 uh also 8 through 11th that is going into 9 through 12 for FY26. Uh eligible students will must actively request bus transportation each fiscal year. Um students may opt in for morning afternoon routes or one direction only or they may opt in for no transportation needed. Uh transportation eligibility distance also remains unchanged uh for future fiscal years and there will be no change for grades K through 8 um and students receiving special education services. Why is the change being made? Uh the purpose of the change is create efficiencies um and also look at creates more reliable and predictable routes and schedules for our districtwide. So what Palmer used to do is they take they would take the high school students and routes the majority of them in hopes of capturing all the students. What would we find is that majority of students would ride. So we'd have routes running with very little students and having to adjust that as school year goes on. So what we're doing now is capturing the information up front which is going to allow us to route these buses in much more efficient and effective style. Uh it also strengthens and student accountability particularly at the high school level. Um it starts with grade levels that are generally engaged in transportation decisions. um student supports long-term sustainability and financial efficiencies for the transportation department along with the district and also meets the students needs as they evolve. safeguards. My god, I'm blind in one eye, so I need my computer. Safeguards eligibility standards remain unchanged as we talked about. That was the 1.5 mile radius for the high school. uh internal collaboration amongst the high school Shakan High School and school counselors, cultural family leaison um to ensure maximum student engagement as we go through this process um during the registration period. Uh no impact for younger students or those who receive special services uh grades K through eight along with students that receive the special services. uh multiple communication and confirmation steps. Students will complete an opt-in through infinite campus. Uh after that is completed, it will be routed to uh Palmer for routing purposes and we'll continue this as the school year goes on for this year. Um confirmation emails are sent to students and primary parent and guardians. Uh once submissions are reviewed and finalized, additional visibility is presented in Newman campus via Shocki High School front office. Uh support of new and transferring students. Uh transferring students that are coming in will fill out their enrollment which will also be a tab within independent campus for them to choose one of the selections whether it's AM, PM, both or no transportation needed. uh clear timelines and predictable access for information. Bus routes will continue to be published annually in infinite campus mid to late August. Annual optin align with students need transportation selection uh do not automatically carry forward. So we want students to fill this out every year as their needs evolve. Some students might need it one year, they might not need transportation as they move forward through future fiscal years. uh TLC will continue to route on a one one-on-one basis. How opt-in will occur? Uh centralized sur infinite campus for student action clearly defined opt-in window which is from February 24th through June 5th after board approval on February 23rd. Uh beginning in 2728 transportation optin will align with the winner classroom registration. So when students fill in their registration, they will also choose their opt-in time. Um families enrolling in prior to this change will receive direct followup from district in February and March. Uh confirmation verification managed by the Shaki High School staff. So the Shaki High School main office will will look at these students. So for one ops, they will call into the office the parent or the student and request information. and the staff will fill out everything in the campus which will then be routed to our Mars coordinator Katie Ross which will then transferred over to Palmer overnight. Uh there'll be weekly changes in selecting bus services to four specific days of the week and not be accommodated for students. If they're selecting every day every other day they need busing services, it's something not accommodated. This is kind of the timeline. As we had worked through this process, we had met, you know, September and kind of reviewed what we were working on for the FY25 26 fiscal year. October 25 systems and structure meeting. We had a group discussion on it. November 20, 2025, Mike, me and Jim met with Palmer and talked about our bell times, which was one of the things we brought up often, busing transportation to provide us better um better information for routing. Um November 25th through January is one-on-one planning meetings. We had multiple meetings over the time where we discussed with Jeff Delicki, Tiffany, myself, and Palmer how this transition process would work along with uh our technology department, Brian, and what communications would need to go out. Um February 29th is where we are. It'sformational to the board along with February 23rd being the school board action. This is kind of the staff external timeline. As we move forward, I'll kind of jump down to on February 24th. If it is approved by the board, we will start communications for the optin. Uh from the website, we will remove 9 through 12 opt out and we will keep uh K through 8 opt out and then we'll move forward with weekly completion of the form messages to families who have been, you know, have missed the opt-in window. um they will go out to make sure they fill out those forms so we can capture their routes uh integrated back into the school district communications one to one follow. And then this is what the multilingual resource draft will be and what it will kind of look like finalized as we do the communications question. So, so day one of school in the fall, somehow all these messages just didn't get through and a student student tries to get on the bus. What's going to what's going to happen to them if they didn't pop in? >> We'll deal with that just like we currently have. Sometimes we've got kids that have been missed or whatever. We'll take care of it. We're always going to serve kids needs. >> Thank you. I mean, we'll we'll clearly be able to see if in a campus if they opted in or opted out, right? There's one option. So, people that don't reply or they going to get some sort of email reminder saying you haven't opted in or opted out or >> Yeah, there'll be email reminders. So, what we can do with Palmer viewfinder, um, it has a 1.5 radius, so we can see all of the students and who is eligible for transportation. And that's something we'll rely on Palmer to feed us that data and also look at it through Infinite Campus to see who's completed the form, who's eligible to complete the form, and making sure that we do capture all those students. >> I think you covered it, but I'm trying to grasp this. Uh, so they get optins at the start of the school year. You think in the future they'll also get to change that at each quarter or period? >> Uh they'll be able to do that at any time. >> At any time you can. >> Yep. So as once the window registration closes, say a parent looks at it or a student looks at it and says, "Well, I know I did football in this fall. Now I'm going to need transportation." They'll be able to call the main office of the high school. They'll be able to log into Infinite Campus, route that student, say they need AM PM busing, and then it will be routed through Infinite Campus over to viewfinder where Sean will then offer will route that student. >> And that was how much lead time do they need to generally a day or two to switch their >> I'm going to say day or two. >> Day or two? Yeah, >> day or two. >> Just thinking about, you know, my first car was about as reliable as a water man. Just think about those situations for sure. >> So, a certain temperature for you off the low. Yeah. >> Can't go to school today if I don't ever ride. >> What what this does at its simplest is it takes what we've been trying to make an educated guess on who's going to ride and have actual data of who's telling us who's going to ride. And a number of school districts already do this successfully and have for quite some time. And it tends to make the whole system much more efficient. And so do we know how roughly what we're what our expectations for efficiency? How many routes we going to save? Is this is this a guess? >> And I don't know if it's I don't know if we'll know how many routes we're going to save. What it's going to create is more efficient routing. So you won't have as many stops and then finding out that those students are getting on the bus and then adjusting that throughout the year. So you won't be you won't have to adjust routes throughout the year. You still will, you know, if students call in, you know, family members call and say we need busing. You'll have to add that route in if you don't have a bus stop clos there. But it's going to give you more efficiency of just saying like, well, here's the route. Here's the students that have completed it. This is what it looks like to maximize efficiency. We'll be able to get to school on time, pick up all these students, and then you'll be able to onesie twoosy add those kids in. It just creates much more efficient time frame. first routing every student at the high school and then pulling back. >> Is there any impact for sex? >> Not a question, but it seems like a no-brainer to me. I know my high schooler second school bus. So [snorts] I imagine that's pretty. [clears throat] [cough] >> So then this will come back to us for normal approval action item next week. >> Any questions? Okay, related Sean Van is here from Palmer. Uh certainly he and the Palmer team really done some really good work with this and other things we've been working on. I also you may duck out that this whole Schmidz farm thing. He's the one that pointed out. >> Oh, you are saying that my bedtime [laughter] want to, you know, I've told him thank you, but uh it's one of those why is that not a straight line? I don't know. So, but thank you. Thanks for your work on this. Ultimately, it hits my computer. I'm the one who does all the routing for the district. So, um general ed part of it. So, basically, I hope we're scheduled buses by about 110 kids knowing that that's not how many people will ride. It's about 40% ridership. So to kind of answer your question, I don't know that we're going to save any bus routes, but I'm going to be able to save miles where the buses go because I'll know where the kids are that will ride. That's really what comes down to for me. You're making my job easier by saying yes to this. Is there any just spitballing on the fly here? Is there any correlation or use we could use to that new bus tracker that we just added in these routes, you know, for kids and maybe leave enough for this initial pilot here. >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's all one system. It's all one piece of software and the way Stopfinder works, it's information out only. So it's it's only tracking where the vehicle is for this the parents benefit. >> Yep. So in terms of um knowing how many kids are on the bus at any particular time. There's no real way to do that. Um I I ask the drivers to report back to me the high school routes. Scheduling elementary and middle school is easy because that's you're not going to drive. So it's figure that out. Yeah, hopefully they're tall enough to reach the pedals. Maybe. Um, it's it's the high school part. So, there's certain parts of town that I know I can schedule over by 60%, some by less because I know ridership is higher in some parts of town than there are in others. It's that guessing game that gets rough. And this year it worked out pretty decent, but I've seen it not work out. And it just gets I get phone calls when buses are too full. That's really >> We'll keep you at the table for our next agenda item, which is the monthly budget update. >> Perfect. So this is as of December 31st. Um we'll start off with revenue. Um state aids are coming in just slightly higher. It's also due to we have a better student code that we had projected for our budget. This will come back when revised is done in February. So that will align those numbers. Um federal we just made draws as of end of December. Um, so those will start showing up in January when we see those budgeted numbers. We'll start to get some actuals in there. Um, still relatively in line with previous years. Federal depends on when you're making those draws. You have to have those expenditures completed before you can draw down all the funds. Property taxes still relatively in line at 70 77.12% comparative to prior years. What we have, so we've received all of our payments. We received October's November's payments along with a small payment at the end of December and then what we had received in June and May was for this fiscal year of last year. So those are sitting in deferred once we finalize the books at the end of the year. Those will be booked as revenues and that will be made whole as 100%. um local which is fees interest and donations uh is still trending relatively above projected budget. Um we've done quite a bit of investing just with where the market is going. I've worked with TMA Dave Anderson there. Um so we made some long-term investments and it's actually turning out very well with that. The market has dropped on the interest rates. So we're earning better interest on those CDs um from US treasuries um which is doing well and also we've received quite a bit more donations than we have in prior years. Um so in total still within line of previous years when you look at the total um like I said when we come back when I come back in February we'll have a revised version of this along with the revised budget. So salary and wages uh definitely trending within reason of previous fiscal years just slightly up. We will see a like I said with the revised budget this will be adjusted slightly. Um I'll increase the budget just a little bit. Um employee benefits right in line with previous fiscal years at 9.9 million. Purchase services trending still in line um with previous fiscal years at 6.2 2 million or 38.54% of budget spent. Um supplies, this is where you're starting to see the trend just up a little bit. Um we are trending higher than previous years at 82.87%. Some of this is to do where things are budgeted if it's budgeted. So how you budget as a whole other places can be spent in supplies and materials versus like let's say equipment. um budgets are built on like a larger basis. So I will adjust those with a revised budget and you'll start to see this number be more in line with previous fiscal years. Equipment uh we're actually trending down on that compared to previous fiscal year at 5.8 million and then other expenditures relatively in line with FY24 but a little bit lower than I a little bit higher than FY25 at 33.47%. um or 255,000. If you look at expenditures as a whole, we are trending just slightly above previous fiscal years at 43.5%. None of this sticks out to me as a a red flag. It all looks good in my realm. With a revised budget, these numbers will be adjusted and we'll be able to look at something that what's projected to the end of the fiscal year is a little bit closer where we will end up. At what meeting will we see by the budget? >> Uh, February 2020. >> Um, are you uh going to uh include uh your your new cash flow tracking process here next? >> I should. Yeah. Actually, I want to have Dave Anderson come out and talk a little bit about I think it would be great from uh someone else talking about how we did our investment just you know versus me talking about it having PTMA come out. I think it would be good for one of our financing facilities. >> I attended a round table at the MSBA that talked about cash flow and it was eye opening and I know you that's like a new tool you've been using here so it's just interesting. Yeah, I' I've really developed it when I was that light up previously and then we kind of implement it to work here and it's it's done wonderful. We've been able to invest compared to what we had done previously. Um I think we're investing 70% of our funds earning a higher interest rate compared to just letting it sit in our kind of a PTM liquid. So >> questions. >> Thank you. 8.8 underformational is adjustment boundaries. >> Yeah, is gonna help me here. If you could scroll down. We really just need the back. Oh, no. Sorry, that map. Um, this property is currently on the market. It's a Schmidt farm. There's some writing in here, and I know I wrote this in the wrap. What I really want you to notice, um, that's a pretty good rectangle with right angles and straight lines. And you'll notice on the west side of that or the left side as we look at this map, uh, it's a straight line as it butts up to developments which are which are completed or or filled out, if you will. And for some reason, if we scroll down, let's go all the way to the the last map, Tiffany. Um, yep, that one right there. For some reason, if you notice, uh, you'll see an orange line. That's the Schmidz farm line. Uh for some reason, and and I've said this before, I don't know why, uh but the western border between, you know, which is a straight line on county GIS systems and uh any other plats, it's a vertical north south line. It's a typical, you know, uh, so the suggested, and this will come back February 23rd, would be for our school board to adopt the elementary boundary in a straight line north to south where that orange line is. And the very kind of southwest corner as the the bottom of that property that we saw goes from west to east. U, that also should just be squared off. And so doesn't impact any anybody living on either side of that line. It's just a much more accurate representation of the actual property lines uh in something I I don't even know if postdevelopment I I expect that at some time uh that Schmidz Farm there's a decent likelihood that that would be developed in some way. Um but it just makes sense to uh to have our our school boundary actually align with the property line. So any any quick questions? So, as I always do when we do this, we went and asked everybody who's living there right now, right? >> Yeah. There's nobody living there. >> Yeah. >> And if we did change, there's a possibility that if depending on where the room is in the house, that one kid could go to one school and go to the [clears throat] other, >> especially in the southwest corner. >> Yeah. Yeah. There there's a slight chance of that. Or >> great, my property now is in two two school zones. What do I do? We try to avoid that whenever possible. So yeah, >> so if we change this and it gets developed, it's currently allowed to go to Red Oak. What school would it be going to? >> They don't it's going to stay in Red Oak. It's just that that boundary curves just a little bit. >> Okay. So >> and it's the property is going to be a straight line. So the development be the right side of that line. >> Yeah. So it's really not changing anything. It's just a more accurate representation of the property lines. after all the substantial information you received tonight, we wait for me to give a presentation. Uh that's about as basic and simple. But I I do think it's, you know, it's one of those things for us. It's important to be accurate and and uh if this can be proactively avoiding some problem down the road, great. But we pretty much eliminate that question. I mean, we've always tried to put the boundaries in for on developed land before anybody starts building just so that people know when they start building where what schools are set up for. I always love that idea. >> Yeah, that's true. And the very southwest it could, you know, map could kick it into somewhere else. This will help us to make sure that, you know, when we're doing those property addresses as they're developed that it clicks the right way. So, that's it. questions. We'll [clears throat] move on to item nine on the agenda, which would be reports and start with Nick. >> Man, feels like it's been a while since we've done this. We've had a lot like we really had a chance to unpack the MSBA, you know, in a meeting setting. But again that being my second year with that that whole conference it was great and attended a lot of interesting classes some on literacy AI was in the one with Jeff when we learned about cash flows and I couldn't help but think about David also in that class um but uh we've also had a handful of committees I I know of special or community ed we met a while ago and met with um we met with uh the partner commerce um chamber of commerce was there that's what it was and uh learned a bunch of stuff there also had the district advisory council last week was there at that one too that we had great attendance we didn't have enough chairs um and so there was a lot of bright minds in that and I'm hoping that we continue to expand the time available for that the content of that everyone was in agreement on that and was at that so yeah the temp committees and looking forward to the daddy daughter dance guys for the first time here this week. So, you want to see some dancers, just let me know. Come check it out. >> Well, yeah. And then also, I learned that if AI takes our jobs, we could probably get a specialist job or maybe a drip bus driver or something like that. >> We're always hiring. It sounds like a great job. um committee today. I went to the special education advisor council meeting that was really interesting just learning about you know different activities with community and then we had community engagement and we talked about maybe community chat and different places we landed on one we don't know which date but we did land on a place um we talked about uh maybe being more involved involved in city council and different activities. So each of us that are on the committee would maybe substitute it. >> Yeah. Um leadership conference. Um I think I recovered from that. I mean there's just so much that I guess for a couple days after I got home from that. Um I went to the one axe play uh the state competition on Thursday of last week and I mean our kids are just did a tremendous job. They were the last show or last play of the day. Um there were eight plays that were presented one from each section in 2A and I mean the kids just knocked it out of the park. They just did a fantastic job. first time shock he's ever been there with one act and to see the looks on their faces when they got the star award was just tremendous. That is quite the honor. Um they don't the judges don't have to give a star to anybody, but a star represents like outstanding exceptional work in the play. Um, and so they were one of the three that were honored with that award. So that was really, really cool to celebrate that with them. And then I had Southwest Metro board meeting the last month and then I have one on Tuesday, next Tuesday. >> Basically, I work in sleep, so I haven't done anything. But I do want to uh thank the uh um Scott County uh commissioners that were there two two weeks ago. Um great great collaboration. I mean we all have the uh the goal of better education for our kids and just that the more you can collaborate um with different entities, the better it is for everybody. >> Uh community engagement. We talked about activities setting up another uh event sort of similar to what we did at Robbie's year or two ago um where people can come and chat with us. Um and then we kind of spent some time just kind of brainstorming ideas. I did go to a community engagement presentation at the MSBA conference uh that was hosted by [clears throat] and they talked about they have a uh like an occasional video series that's produced by students and just kind of like what's going on around the district just like a short five minute video thing that's of interest. Um yeah and then I have been spending a lot of time my son decided he wanted to work on the middle school play uh doing set design. So that means I work on the middle school play. So, I've been there every Saturday since the first of the year from [snorts] 12:30 to 7:00. Um, uh, building stuff and taking other stuff apart and uh, helping reorganize the backstage space and it's been exhausting, but a lot. Um yeah, in addition to the things everybody else mentioned, um I did the uh the AMSD meeting on Friday and it was like a legislative update. So they they had a lot of uh um state senators and >> [clears throat] >> um representatives there. Um the one takeaway I have that that I'd like to share is that they they're all over the compensatory revenue. well aware of the challenges with that and that was encouraging to me that they they understood that with the introduction of free and reduced lunch that there's really very little incentive for families with need to fill out the forms. So, um legislators are well aware of that. They're they're working on addressing that and trying to hold harmless the districts like ours that that need need that. So, >> Jim Yeah. Um I [clears throat] think it's chamber of commerce season. Mike and I were at the city chamber meeting a week ago and we'll be at the state chamber next Tuesday night and uh it's just it's a great opportunity to interact with our business community and uh promote the academy as a shop. >> I'll save myself. >> Okay. Um then coming up um I just want to mention one thing. Day at the capital. >> No, I'm good. >> Um day at the capital for MSBA is on March the 9th. So you have time available to participate in that. Um it's always a a great event, a chance to uh meet with your legislative people. um both house and senate. Um and the best thing apart about it is you don't have to schedule the appointments. They do it for you. So you will get a time slot with the meeting and sometimes they'll consolidate with other districts like sometimes we'll come with Jordan just to consolidate but um so if you're able to come that would be great. So upcoming meetings and important dates Tiffany. >> Uh yes. So few items in there. There is the February district e newsletter. So that has a lot of updates in there as well. And then in the wrap um you know like um Jim said we did have the annual chamber meeting and want to make sure um as serving on the board there. Want to make sure you have all those details and the deck and everything of that nature. But uh tomorrow is a big literacy event. It's our second annual launch into literacy uh event that's going to be at the high school. So we attached the flyer there. Uh other items about the community chat were shared. There's conferences that continue to go on. So good engagement opportunity for board members. Um and then you can see there's a lot of other items that we're celebrating this month. So happy to help oneonone. Uh there's a lot of resources out there that I like the great things going on. >> Anything else for tonight? Seeing none, then I would entertain a motion. Second motion by second by Smith. Any further discussion? Seeing not all those in favor say I.