our role is to prepare students for the future so when we go to a phonefree environment in the schools how does that impact you know the the people who say well we should be teaching kids about digital citizenship Etc like that

since this is so new we don't necessarily have a lot of um assessment true assessment about how this is all going

you know what types of tools and approaches have you seen that uh work in terms of helping to educate families to make sure there's the buying at the household level so that they can be you know better partners with the schools and the teachers

I think that the benefits definitely outweigh what's going on right now but I do think it needs to be promoted and Mark like advertised to the student body in a positive light instead of like we're taking away something from you

I wonder too one of my thoughts was you know when you were talking about the school safety because that's probably the number one thing I've heard right now is I need to be able to get you know there's unfortunately a lot of um you know just a lot of violence in schools and I need to be able to reach my child and I don't know if I'm you know comfortable not being able to reach my child when I need to reach them

it's a lot easier if we say no phones then if we say okay can't have them in your classroom if the district says no phones then the administration is saying no phones they're telling parents no phones and then we deal with the isolated pieces that that pop out of that but if we go with an approach that is well you can have it from here to here but not here then it puts the onus back on the teacher and it it becomes much more uh of a challenging uh environment to enforce

the one thing I wanted to talk about on this is right now we are meeting at six o'clock and we are doing that um we had a former director um poor Benny had some work conflicts she was coming from the cities it was just really hard for her to make a 5:30 start time and we were hoping to perhaps revisit that and move it to 5:30 as a start time for our meetings

most of the courses that we're going to talk with you about today are proposals along the lines of what we call concurrent enrollment and what we believe is we believe that this has the potential to offer kind of The Best of Both Worlds the the college credit um that is attractive to students attractive to families and represents absolutely a pathway to equity for us and and for our students.

we saw last year about Le 1100 course registrations between just the University of Minnesota and Century College the year before that I believe we had 680 so we are seeing the amount of students leaving our campus increase by significant percentages each year

if we lose our a full student all six hours of the day that's significantly more than what we would pay to have a teacher teach 30 students in their classroom.

The irony of this is that one of the driving forces behind PSO when PSO first started was to try to provide Equitable access for students from disadvantaged backgrounds... our data does not support the idea that PSO has been Equitable for our students right now.