I pledge allegiance 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. Thank you. Chris, will you please move to adopt the agenda? I move that we adopt the agenda as posted. Second. Okay. It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Aye. Okay. The motion passes to adopt the agenda. We're now moved to recognizing our own, and I will call up Jenny Todd and Dr. Kachewski. Good evening, everyone. We're extremely excited to be here tonight to recognize our own Clayton High School students and an absolutely amazing achievement to discuss this evening. So every year College Board recognizes our students who demonstrate exceptional academic achievement through their performance on AP exams, and so last year we had a total of 187 AP scholars that were recognized, and of that 187 students, 91 earned the top honor of AP scholar with extinction. What that means is that those students earned a total of on five exams a score of three or higher and averaged a total of 3.5 on all of their exams that were taken, and that is a testament to the hard work of the students, of our educators, and their families. Now because the tests were taken last year some of our students actually graduated in 2025, but we would like to recognize those students and our current students who earned this amazing award. Thank you. Thank you. I would also like to note we have so many. This is a great problem to have. We have so many that we couldn't have them all come here tonight, so that's why their names were up on the screen, and I just want to congratulate Dr. Kaczewski and Ms. Todd and everyone at the high school and especially the students who put in all the hard work studying for the exams, so thank you and congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Do you have any idea, do we have like more than most schools in the area? Or the most? I thought so. I have compared over the years actually our average scores in the public areas of other districts and our scores are generally better. Great. Well thank you and congrats. Moving on to public comment. We do have a few tonight. I'm going to start with Sarah. You can come up to this microphone here. Before you get started I want to remind everyone if you have not made a public comment before. You're each given three minutes. There will be a timer on the screen and we don't respond publicly here at this meeting but you will get a follow-up email so that we don't engage in discussions about public comments. Okay. Thank you. Can you hear me? Go ahead. My name is Sarah. I'm a resident of Clayton and a former Clayton student K-12. I'm here because I'm concerned the district doesn't have the full information about what partnering with the Anti-Defamation League entails. I'm also an educator and instructional coach and in that capacity I've worked in a number of schools and districts across the country and we've had conversations about the ADL so I'm here to share what I know with you all today and hope you will reconsider this partnership. The Anti-Defamation League presents itself as an anti-hate and inclusive organization but it is in fact deeply biased and political and they have a history of fostering environments of fear and intimidation through their work that I think is important to consider when bringing this into our district. I'm worried that it threatens the tradition of fostering student curiosity, student voice and critical thinking that we have at Clayton. The ADL is in fact an anti-Semitic organization. It regularly attacks Jewish organizers and individuals and organizations that don't align with them politically and I think that's also something to consider. In addition to other Jewish organizations, they attack other civil rights organizations, often civil rights organizations that advocate for the civil rights of minorities. In the 90s, they were sued and fined for amassing illegal information about members of the NAACP, ACLU, organizations that work with LGBTQ members and congressmen. The other thing that I think is important to consider is that their definition of anti-Semitism really craftily includes this idea that criticism of Israel, the state of Israel is anti-Semitic and the program that they are talking about. The program takes something that we care a lot about, which is prejudice based hate based on prejudice and involves their political agenda of quashing anti-Israeli sentiment. So one of the things that concerns me is their practice of encouraging students to report and surveil on their teachers and their peers. It's kind of reminiscent honestly of China under Mao in the 1930s Germany and I'm worried that bringing that type of surveillance into the school will threaten what Clayton promotes in terms of free speech and conversation. The National Educators Association this summer voted to distance themselves from the ATL and sever current and future ties and that is the biggest teachers union in the country and I think that speaks volumes to the fact that educators across the nation understand this organization is not what it claims to be. So I really encourage you all to look into these things in addition to their commitment to police training before continuing to partner with them in our district. Thank you. Thank you. Jess. Hello everyone. I'm in CHS alum and I wanted to talk about how my education at CHS earned me a full ride merit based scholarship to college where I had the privilege of studying human rights. Education around anti-Semitism was a major part of this curriculum. One of our core classes was a Holocaust education trip to Poland where we spent two weeks visiting and paying our respects at 13 of Nazi occupied Poland's most notorious killing fields and concentration camps. Because of this, because of the many hard conversations that I had as a student about how our history impacts our present, I want our students to be able to dialogue about these same hard questions in their educational spaces. And because I know that if we do not learn history we are doomed to repeat it, I want to share with you some history about the ATL. In August 2017 following the white supremacist rallies in the city of New York, the ATL was a prime for law enforcement advising cops to film and plan undercover agents among anti- racist protesters in order to use surveillance footage to prosecute them. The ATL's actions in Charlottesville are part of a long history of surveillance. In the 90s the ATL was investigated for surveilling and infiltrating human rights organizations including groups opposing South African apartheid and US racism, United Farm Workers, Jewish peace groups and thousands of members of the Jewish community. Today the ATL continues to attack black and Arab organizations that advocate in particular for the rights of Palestinians. This well documented history of surveillance is mirrored in the surveillance system that the ATL introduces into schools through their incident reporting form that they have used as evidence in their multiple civil rights complaints against universities and school districts. Bringing the ATL and their reporting measures into Clayton schools opens our students up to risking their chances of college acceptance and teachers up to losing their careers if they dare to share critical information about the actions of the Israeli government in something like a history or a literature class. It encourages students to snitch on each other rather than engage in a hard dialogue with hard but necessary dialogue with trusted adults. And there are alternatives. I definitely sympathize with you all that you care about the students in the district and you want to offer anti-semitism trainings. You want to do right by students. I understand it's very convenient that the ATL comes in with a prepackaged curriculum that's free. However, this training is not free. It costs us the Clayton school district's vision of developing students who change the world through independence, creativity and critical thinking, and it could cost Clayton students their chances of getting into college and educators their careers through their reporting measures. The ATL is a highly biased political lobbying group and at the end of the day educational decisions shouldn't be used and should not be made by political groups. I have here a list of alternatives for anti-semitism trainings including an organization called Parseo that teaches curriculum on anti-semitism in the framework of collective liberation. Thank you. Maxine. Hello everyone. My name is Maxine and I'm a resident of St. Louis and I was once a Jewish high school student not too long ago. Actually in the Bay Area in California but I work for Missouri coalition for the environment now. I'm doing this in my free time though outside of my school and I'm not sure if that works just to be clear but I hope that you see that we are all a group of people that really care about anti-semitism and really value opposing anti-semitism and I want to thank you all first of all for bringing this to attention to really wanting to do something to bring in curriculum that does address anti-semitism. I speak from personal experience when I say I experienced a lot of anti-semitism growing up as one of very few Jewish students in my high school and I take the issue very seriously. And I echo what other speakers have said when I say that the ADL curriculum is just not the way to address anti-semitism in schools. Luckily there are many great alternatives and I would love to hear what Jess has to say about all the alternatives but upon a cursory glance there's also J-FREJ which is Jews for racial and economic justice which offers a very holistic approach to anti-semitism as a part of a larger framework looking at how white supremacists and Christian supremacist systems impact all minoritized communities and how we all suffer under a regime of white nationalism. As people have mentioned before but the ADL has a long history of actually targeting groups that speak up for civil rights of all kinds and they do something very dangerous I think for Jews which is to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-semitism and to label all criticism and I mean all criticism of the state of Israel as anti-Semitic. I am a Jew who has participated in protests for Palestine and for just collective liberation and have been labeled as a terrorist by the ADL for my participation in those protests which is a little bit absurd to me as a Jew. And so I would just encourage you all to really take these criticisms seriously and once again I just want to reiterate that I appreciate your attention to anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is on the rise along with many other forms of hate right now and along with Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism and anti-black racism and I think in this current administration and this current governmental structure that we find ourselves in it's really terrifying and I think probably many of us have experienced what it is to feel utter fear at the political climate that we're in right now. And I really encourage the anti-Semitism education to reflect that spirit of collective liberation. Thank you. Thank you. Maxine, we didn't get your email address. If you'd like us to follow up could you please give that to Gina in the back corner. Thank you so much. Michael Berg. My name is Michael Berg. My father graduated from Clayton. A lot of my family is from Clayton. I've got a 13-year-old son here and I'm speaking on the same subject as the previous speakers. No school district should work with the anti-defamation league. The anti-defamation league claims to fight for the rights of Jews but that's not true certainly for all Jews such as myself. I'm part of Jewish voice for peace, a very large and the fastest growing Jewish organization in the country and the ADL actively opposes us and works hard to undermine the rights of Jews and the anti-Semitism. The ADL does this specifically because we oppose political Zionism. We believe everyone in historic Palestine and Israel deserves equal rights regardless of the religion or ethnicity and the ADL smears us and claims our actions are anti-Semitic incidents and because we believe in racial equality the ADL calls us a hate group. The ADL claims to be a civil rights organization but it is not. The CEO of the ADL recently denigrated black lives matter and compared American student activists to ISIS. He said this about left-wing activists. They're opposed to the West, they're opposed to capitalism, they're opposed to America. This is not a neutral civil rights organization to talk about hatred. At the same time a few months ago the ADL went out of its way to excuse and explain away a Nazi salute given by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. Musk has a long history of expressing unambiguous anti-Semitic ideas. How hard would it have been for the ADL to say that what Musk said was wrong? It would have been a Nazi salute and we oppose it but they did not for various political reasons. Right now the state of Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people according to all reputable observers, the United Nations independent commission, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Anybody observing this sees what's going on and the ADL sees as one of its primary missions to the protection of this genocidal state from harsh criticism. That's why it's much harsher towards anti-genocide activists than it is towards Nazi curious billionaires. It's not a civil rights group and has no place in public schools. Thank you. I'll turn it over now to Dr. Patel for our superintendent update. Great. Thank you everyone. Thank you for being here and thank you again for the public comments. We will make sure that we respond to you so thank you for sharing that with us. Okay. So this week it's exciting to be in Clayton. Every week is exciting to be in Clayton but this week in particular you will have noticed an enhanced level of school spirit occurring from our family center, elementary school, middle school and high school and one of the things that's been really neat to see I would say over the past five years my time here is how much school spirit community feel and how much of it has increased throughout our district. Quick example I was at Weydown middle school today and they were having their pep assembly in preparation for homecoming which is this Saturday and the band, the high school band was there, the cheerleading group was there and what I noticed was I remember five years ago we had three cheerleaders and now we're up to 17. Wow. That's a whole other engagement that our students are having and participating in so that's again just one small example but tomorrow morning starting at 6 a.m. Fox 2 prep zone is going to be at Clayton High School so we're hoping even though there's no school for students we're hoping that gym is going to be filled with students and we're going to highlight all the activities and just get excited for homecoming and that's a great segue for Saturday. I hope the community shows up for the parade that starts at 11 o'clock football game against U City at noon and then we're going to have the alumni barbecue that we have every year and we have a huge alumni turnout and support that comes to our games so again thank you for participating and I'm looking forward to Saturday so hope to see everyone there. Switching, transitioning off to the next part and the second part I want to talk about is our long range facilities master plan. The work continues to happen. We're making strong progress in this area. On September 10th I believe yes. On September 10th we had our first community engagement forum. We had a good crowd, a good amount of people that came in. We had our design team. They went over and they shared the early preliminary design work for our elementary schools. Our Clayton High School, the academic area that we're trying to look to enhance as well as athletics and activities in terms of what does early concepts look like? So we shared that. Then we had some time at tabletops conversation and we got some initial feedback from the community from that so we have two more community engagements coming up, one in October, one in November and I hope to see a lot more individuals come to those and if you happen to miss that we do try and update our website and give all the information that we shared that night there as well so we did the community engagement forum. In addition what we're starting new and we're going to be uploading all the information on the website, sharing it on social, sharing it via email and we're going to be launching our community survey. We're going to begin our building tours. Elementary schools is one of our priority areas so we're going to open our buildings to the community to come and see firsthand some of the challenges that we face at our elementary buildings so more information to come for the building tours. That should happen this month which is October or I guess next month which is October and then tomorrow we're launching our community survey. The survey remember we'll have a telephone component so there will be randomized calls that will be made. If you get a phone call from that please answer and please do respond to the community survey. If you don't happen to get a phone call you also have an opportunity to give us feedback on this important work that's happening online so we'll have the survey that launches tomorrow. It's going to be open for two weeks and the feedback that we get from that also is additional data for us to decide where we're moving, which direction we're moving forward with our priorities so it's important information that we really ask our community to please participate so again if you can't be there in person we've got information out there for you to find and we will share it with you. Please engage with us with our survey and or telephone survey as well and again we'll use that information and then as a last reminder community engagements happening in October and November so that gets to our presentations for today. So we'll have a presentation for tonight. Our design team is here. They're going to give us a presentation and update on all of the early design work that's been happening. Please know this is preliminary work preliminary designs but a lot of work has already happened to get to this stage so we'll share that and that'll be a presentation the first one for the night and then the second presentation for the night is Dr. Solberger and Mrs. Turner will be here and they're going to talk to us about our partnership agreement with special school district so packed agenda today and now I'm going to hand it over to Nina our student board rep. On Wednesday September 10th a select group of 45 seventh grade students from Rydow Middle School got the opportunity to see Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor speak at Wash U which is the picture you see up here. Right now the seventh graders are learning about politics and government so the opportunity to see what Justice Sotomayor had to say was pretty incredible for them. Not only did they get to hear about her experience as a lawyer and judge but they also got the chance to get a hard copy of her book signed. This is a great chance for students to hear about a career in law and justice from a professional. Additionally here's another update. Last week I met with Clayton High School's principals advisory club. This club meets roughly every one to two or three weeks sometimes and is composed of around 15 students who are nominated by teachers for having a unique or interesting perspective. Our first gathering was meant to serve as an introductory meeting but our group was so eager to get started that we ended up discussing everything from new school policies which I'll talk more about in the next slide to the overload of nachos in the cafeteria which we spent a lot of time on but was fun to talk about. Our next meeting is next Thursday and we are planning to discuss the possibility of a facilities update as well as what can be done to combat hate and anti-Semitism in our community. I had a great time meeting everyone and I'm super excited to see what this group can do. So for the next slide. Additionally on the topic of focus groups next Wednesday I'll be having my first focus group meeting with a group of fifth graders from Glenridge Elementary School. In the week following I will also meet with fifth graders from Captain and Merrimack as well as Why Down Student Council. I plan to ask these students a variety of questions including how they feel about their school building which will hopefully provide valuable information that can be used in crafting our long range facility plan and I am very eager to meet with these students because I'm sure they'll provide me with a lot of important feedback as well as a lot of laughs. Speaking of feedback I'll kind of now touch on what I got from the high school students who I met with last week. They had a ton to say about the implementation of the new cell phone policy. When asked if they felt like the policy was effective an overwhelming amount said yes. While some say that they don't particularly like the policy or find it necessary the majority concluded that although it's been an adjustment the policy has been beneficial. Here are some examples of specific pieces of feedback I got. Someone said the policy was hard to get used to at first especially for sophomores, juniors and seniors who experience CHS without the cell phone policy but they think it's a good thing in the long run. They say that the school has a lighter mood which I got a lot lighter happier mood and then one person said my friends and I get so much more work done during Greyhound time which is kind of fun to hear. Additionally I talked to an English teacher a little bit. This is just a little anecdote I thought was really interesting. She told me that last week at lunch they thought something crazy was happening outside their office in the cafeteria because it was so loud but when they went to go look at what was going on they realized it was just people talking and for the last couple of years it had been so quiet in the cafeteria this was just such a change. All in all CHS community members are seeing the success of the policy and though many were annoyed at first they are excited to continue the year cell phone free and I really do think it's working. Thank you. Thank you Nina. That's all great reports. Thank you. Okay. Item 6.1 we're going to have a long range facilities master plan update. Come on up team. Yeah. John and team. Yeah. Thank you. We have Paragon and Perkins and Will. BLDD, BSI. Everyone here to give us an update. Thank you. Thank you John. It's a pleasure to be here this evening and to share an update on the work that's happened. Just trying to provide in one on one slide a lot of things that have been underway. Color coded your board meetings are of course up at the top including this evening's board meeting the 25th so that's just a point in time in terms of where we are. There have been building tours that have happened, the elementary workshops, three of those have taken place, the last of which was last week. Two high school workshops. The BLDD team has done athletic workshops as well. Meeting engagement started last week with our first session on the 10th. Surveys about kind of repeating a lot of what you just said Dr. Patel. The survey is just about to roll out and all leading up to a potential bond vote in April. Which is really what was our starting point in terms of laying out the overall schedule, working backwards from that and understanding that if that is to occur in April you need to finalize your ballot language at your January board meeting so there's a lot of work that's been done. There's a lot of work that's in front of us yet to be done. How about that button instead? Okay. The elementary schools. I just talked about we had between the last time that we met with you we've done our third working with you and we had a workshop with the elementary schools where we were pouring over building diagrams, different options, weighing pros and cons for each of those and trying to narrow the focus a bit. The same thing happened at the high school with its second workshop and of course again just mentioning the community engagement session that happened just last week. One of the things that came out of our very first workshop with the elementary schools was a set of guiding principles that we considered the options moving forward. I'm not going to read these. These have been presented a number of times but just really a guide post for us and for the building teams and the community at large as we start to develop options to really keep these issues and ideas and thoughts in mind. So this should look familiar from the community engagement session if you attended that. It really summarizes the programmatic elements of the challenges that are addressed in the elementary school options that you'll see tonight and you'll see them morphing and changing as we iterate with all of the input from the educators, administrators, community, et cetera, so this is just a summary, a couple things we're doing, right sizing classrooms, providing a larger indoor space for school and community activities, creating storm shelters among many other things programatically that are being addressed. So what we'll share tonight are each of the three things that We're trying to share the context of the three elementary schools with the existing site plan so you can have some context for some of the challenges at Captain. We know that there is a right of way in that hatched area on the west side of the site so we're trying to steer clear of that and you can see the area of the site that does not have a building on it which would be a logical place to put a new facility of some kind. So what we'll share are the options summary that we shared with the workshops as well as the community and the slashes are showing what the workshop group recommended moving forward with. There were strong opinions throughout the day of what was the best option so this is representing what the workshop group wanted to move forward which was the larger footprint building at Captain, the one that we're working on and the one that had better adjacencies or more ideal adjacencies of space and it says shifted so it avoids that right of way that is not owned by the district. The next slide shows where we've gone from the feedback on September 10th from both the workshop as well as the community and sharing the two options that are moving forward at the moment. One is that same option one that you just saw which shows an idea of phasing which comes about by avoiding the right of way and needing to build a building in phases. Option two is an option that came out of the community engagement session where somebody asked why would you not save the existing Captain? It's the newest building even though it's over 50 years old so we did some due diligence and did some test fitting of that existing building and showed what the new building footprint would be and we did a lot of work on that. And what you see is that the Captain is two stories and the new building that would have to supplement the program there would be two stories. The option one is a three story building so more efficient, more compact and it means that option two gets less playground space in the end so that's really the major difference there. Steve will go through Glenridge. Glenridge Elementary School. Again the existing site just for context but moving into the three options that were presented during the workshop. Differences between these would be how the lower level is used. Option one and option two no students on the lower level and option three we put specials being art, music, science and so on and the workshop group really sort of vacillated between option one and option two throughout the day but gravitated toward option one at the end and what that's progressed to now is three options and a little bit of a different take on where the addition is mostly in the back side of the building. We actually pulled the addition off the front side of the building so the front side of the building is exactly what it is today, consolidated everything to the back side of the building and the building is now on the back side to make one more consolidated addition to the building but you can read in the descriptions across the top that options one, two and three one thing they share in common is they don't have classrooms in the lower level and then option one has got administrative space in the lower level and then it's also one of the descriptors there is where is the gym and the cafeteria? Option one is that it's new, it's combined and it's at the main level. Option two, the cafeteria is renovated, it stays in the lower level and the new gym with a stage now is on the main level. Option three, the admin and cafeteria are renovated in the lower level and the gym and stage are on the main level so there's slight variations, you know, sort of variations on a theme here and then option three, the cafeteria is renovated and the building is on the site and option four which is not illustrated here would be a new building of the same square footage on the site so basically taking down the existing building and building something new on the site. And if I could add that option three, there's a little more site because you're using more of the lower level by putting both the admin and the cafeteria down there so that's the main kind of footprint difference with that option. For Merrimack, here's the plan. The outcome from the workshop group was that they were happy with specials in the lower level of Merrimack. The gym cafeteria combination was in all of these options at the time and the smallest footprint on the site was option two and that was why the group gravitated toward that option. They wanted to preserve as much play area as possible so that's the one that they wanted to move forward so we actually studied a couple of iterations of that option similar to Glen Ridge. The first option one is very similar to what was presented to the workshop group with that combination gym cafeteria where the cafeteria serves as the stage so the gym is the house to the theater if you will and that's all new together on the main level and you can see it just takes up more space because the cafeteria and gym are the largest areas. If you leave the cafeteria where it is and renovate it in option two and provide a smaller stage for the gym still allowing performance to happen on the main level you get a smaller footprint and so that is the option two here and again option three showing kind of just book ending costs because there's going to eventually be costs associated with these that we have renovated area, new building area and sometimes those complexities of renovations can be more expensive or nearly as expensive as building new so that's where option three and option four for Glen Ridge come in just to provide that book end so you can see what that cost could be not suggesting that that's what you want to do or that you should do but just to give you a sense of what it would cost to build brand new. So just looking at some of the challenges at the high school similar to the elementary, those right size classrooms and the specialized learning spaces such as geometry and construction and robotics. Also looking at how we can come up with some more collaborative flexible spaces and looking at the quality of those spaces as well and making sure that the spaces are as good as possible. Looking at the adjacent C's and those circulations and also making sure that we can get a storm shelter at the high school. So here we have the CTE wing addition at the high school so the colored boxes there in the middle is the addition so on the left of that main image is the edge of Adzic field. We have the back drive right adjacent to that that we're protecting just for circulation, fire lane access. On the right is the gray area that is your existing school so we're looking at a one story addition there in the middle. We went through some iterations with the workshops but right now we've got a one story addition. Start at the top there we have the pre-engineering space that will reuse that existing classroom. Below that is the shop area, reuse that as well and that purple box there in the middle that is the new addition for the geometry and construction space so having that direct adjacent C to the shop and pre-engineering is important and then switching over to robotics there in the green having a 27 by 54 practice field in there and an area for robot staging and working on the robots as well. Below that in the yellow is a connection corridor from the math wing through that existing corridor and having also a dedicated vestibule entrance off that back drive and then the three blue spaces that you're seeing below that having a dedicated space for large storage area, have all their equipment in that space, a classroom setting and then to the left of that is a CTE classroom or a flex classroom that could be used for robotics or different needs and then we are proposing to demolish two existing math classrooms so that's the red dash box so we'll have to relocate one math classroom in that addition and the other on the existing building on the north side there. Some other things that we're looking at is the school store at the main entrance of the school so that's the center image there on the left. Right off the main entry there high visibility, heavy traffic right next to the auditorium so having a glass display to display all your school gear. It does take over the hound's grounds so we'd have to relocate that to the bottom level of the commons area and then something else that you're not seeing on the screen is the performing arts work. We've got some renovations included in that as well so looking at the! We have a new HBAC noise in the back area for band, orchestra and choir. We did a walk through and did some testing with our engineers and the levels are above the standards so how do we address those HBAC needs and improvements there? Also at the back of the performing arts area behind the auditorium and the stage is they've got multiple levels that create some ADA challenges and some logistics issues so while there's an ADA lift on the stage a student can get stuck on the stage for a while until the end of performance so creating an ADA lift behind that backstage area and an equipment lift for some logistics needs is something else that we're looking at and then just some renovations inside the auditorium, replacing the seating and then that lobby area is pretty tight so how do we expand that a little bit by pushing that vestibule out to give a little bit more breathing room and then looking at those restrooms in that lobby to give them a nice refresh with some finish upgrades and fixture upgrades so that's the work we're looking at the high school. Okay. It's great to see everybody again tonight. With me tonight is John Whitlock. He's our president of BLB architects and also our in-house athletic expert so he's going to present the three conceptual designs that we've gotten to thus far. I guess I've missed something. Okay. So okay. So we're going to get to that. Okay. Looks like we took the timeline out. Okay. So all right. So as Stephen mentioned we've done two workshops so far. Workshop one, workshop two. I'll get to that right now and then we did the community engagement. Workshop three we still need to get scheduled and that will happen before community engagement number two so workshop number one really was discovery envisioning so we had the participants where I got into groups and the first activity was a scatter map activity so we asked them basically to write down any activity that happens at an athletic event so this could be the actual sport that was being played. It could be any social interaction that the spectators are doing before the game or before the event, during the event, after the event. What are people's children doing? Are they watching the event? Are they just running around? Are they in a playground? What are all those activities that they want to see or that they do see? So all the groups broke out, had a lot of things written down. The activity two of that workshop was we let them play designer so we had them take all those activities to the best of their ability and put those activities on the three different sites so and where they made sense, where they fit best so that was at the gay field site, Y down as well as the shop park area. With all that information we took that and developed two different design scenarios which we then presented at workshop number two so that was the first time that the participants saw those conceptual designs and so we asked them to give us pros and cons of each of the scenarios at each of the three sites. We also asked them to give us recommended improvements or other information they wanted to see so we took that information which helped us refine concepts number one, number two which we then presented at the community engagement meeting number one. During that meeting the other groups broke out. They gave us a lot of good feedback, a lot of input. We went back to the drawing board and essentially generated a third scenario which John will get into at the end of this. I will pass it off to John. John, what are the three scenarios we designed thus far? Thank you. Scenario one. The good news is I'm going to explain these at a very high level but scenario one reflects the committee's desire and the school district's desire to have all of the athletics in one place. That's obviously beneficial for student safety, eliminates having to drive, a lot of benefits but does it fit and how does it work? For scenario one there is work at all different sites so I will start with Y Down. The good news is this happens at all three scenarios and so Y Down has trouble growing grass in its current location so replacing that with a multipurpose play surface with a surrounding running and walking track and then shade shelters at team areas would be the work at Y Down and that is included in all scenarios. In all scenarios ADZIC, the ball field will have improvements to the dugouts and a two-story press box. What you see here in scenario one is at the area of the ball fields just southwest of this building is what it would look like if we put two stadiums on site and so right now you actually have access to three what I'll call soccer fields so it allows you to play field hockey, soccer, lacrosse and football and so by using ADZIC as your field hockey you still have a football field stadium and then a track, soccer, stadium, lacrosse and you can cross the turf sports amongst the different stadiums. The problem, issues, challenges with this scenario is getting people efficiently and more importantly effective out of this site, parking. Those are some draw backs to this site and then also what happens in gay field is we're replacing those ball fields that we would be displacing by these stadiums having access to soccer fields, improvements to parking, adding playgrounds at gay fields. So scenario one is really reflective of trying to get everybody, all the student athletes and all the community where they gather right next to ADZIC field. Scenario two says okay again our work at Y down is the same, our work at ADZIC is the same and actually the work at gay field is the same. The difference is we'll use one stadium. That allows us to have a larger stadium with home and visitor bleachers. It does accommodate all of the throws and jumps and everything associated with the track but the drawback challenge to this one is it does require you to still use some of the fields at gay field so while it's an improvement in terms of space and efficiency and getting people in and out it doesn't really allow you to have everybody in one place. So scenario three is the obvious thing. All right, let's again do the work at Y down. I failed to mention on every scenario there is improvements to the softball field and I'm going to go back to the slide here to provide some turf so easier maintenance for the softball field. Sorry I missed that. It's in all scenarios. ADZIC field would still do the work for the dugouts and the press box there and then creating a one stop shop in gay field for all of your athletics which would have a large track facility where you play soccer, lacrosse, you play field hockey. Again, providing perimeter fence so that these are all well protected and so that it's your field. It's taking the existing soccer field, putting a fence around that so you're able to control the use of that field a little bit better. So where the parking lot is now we're suggesting that for the stadium where that parking lot is now we're suggesting that's a pedestrian way, an area where you would gather before a game and enter the stadium so it could be a really dynamic place to be and gather. Using the areas north of that for parking for the stadium, have the throw areas basically where they are now and again improvements to all the parking so you have a little bit more parking and area there so scenario three really says okay we're going to put all our eggs in the gay field basket we'll call it and go from there. Thank you. Well thank you so much. Appreciate you being here and sharing all the options and scenarios with us. Does anyone have any questions? I'm sure people have. Everyone has questions? Okay. Anyone questions for them? Go ahead and ask. Jason or whoever. Okay. I have a question. For the Parkinson's and well team so can you one of the things we heard in the study that Paragon said was that some of our buildings particularly Glenridge and Meramec are starting they're not very close but they're starting to near the end of their useful life. If we're to renovate pursue renovations at Glenridge and Meramec how far out do we push out that useful life? Do you have any sort of sense of that? Yeah so the renovations we're talking about on both of those campuses within existing space is pretty significant in terms of the level of renovation so we'd be talking about new mechanical systems, new plumbing and electrical systems so the infrastructure piece of it the stuff that's above ceilings and the everything gets refreshed from an interior environment standpoint. The addition of course is substantial and brand new so that's got a long life ahead of it. The existing building that remains the structural systems of those buildings is sound so I have no qualms about saying that will extend out into the future as far as the new construction would. The place that you would want to look would be like your exterior enclosure so the buildings of this vintage oftentimes and there's not a lot actually suggesting that we're doing to the exterior enclosure like facing the public streets just because of the look and feel of those buildings is so endearing to the community but the exterior enclosure is very sound and solid but wouldn't it do that? So I don't have any issues saying we're going to extend the lives of these buildings for decades and via these renovations otherwise why do it? So they've got a lot of life left in them but doing a lot via the renovation to extend that life so both things are kind of true at the same time. They are nearing the end of the useful life today but we're going to be able to extend that life so we're going to be able to extend that through pretty extensive renovation. Okay. Well, I understand it's hard to give an exact answer. I guess my concern of renovation versus a rebuild is what I don't want to do is saddle this community, this board 20 years from now with having to just rebuild the entire school because we didn't take, you know, because we pursued the cheaper option the first time or whatever it was so I guess like what I hear you saying is there's some degree of confidence that you're not doing that. When you say decades I hear 20, 30 plus years. I think we're talking about a long time. At the same time even a new building there are systems in a new building that after 25 years, an air handler for instance is typically going to get renewed or replaced after 25 years so even in new construction there's typically a rolling schedule of things. Carpet doesn't, you know, 10 years probably, right? You're painting rooms every five years so there's that ongoing maintenance that needs to happen even in new construction. All right. And then I guess for the BLDD team so one of the things we heard in the community forum just at least some concern about switching from grass to turf or at Y down can you talk about some of the struggles of growing grass at Y down and why it makes it difficult to do that? You're trying to grow grass over a parking deck, right? So the ability to maintain that at the level that you would have to provide fertilizer and ongoing maintenance is just overwhelming amount of work and really your best option in that area. Also because of all the use that it gets that's another what's happening to the turf that's there now is the excess amount of use that it gets is deteriorating at a faster rate that's making it even harder to keep up. Okay, great. Thank you. Anyone else can jump in. Any other questions? Chris? A follow up on both of those. First, can you tell us more about it? It's it's doesn't seem at all a stretch to understand that the grass is, you know, it's an issue, right? Because of where it is, etc. It's getting so much use. So it seems like there's this logical sense of oh, we go to something that's like we have at GAE, etc. But can you talk about those if there's concerns about health and safety around turf versus grass? Because we're not just talking about usability. We're talking about the fact that one is a natural substance, one is not. So just give us your thoughts on what turf how that compares in safety and health to grass. Difficult question to answer. There's a lot of surveys and reports done from both sides and you all kind of wonder where they're who's supplying that information. And I don't know that I can speak to necessarily the health. I will say that pesticides and herbicides that need to go into your grass or can be just as dangerous as the plastics, the microplastics, the rubbers that are in your turf. So there is some danger in both of those, right? And I'm suggesting that to get your turf to grow the amount of maintenance, herbicides and pesticides that are probably required are a lot. I will say that there are hybrid synthetic turf systems. Now, I like to say I practice architecture but I don't practice architecture on my clients. So this is probably leading edge technology where it's actually tying both synthetic and natural turf together and it has been used. It's being used. There are organic infills where it eliminates the rubber that you typically see when you watch college sports or the NFL on Sunday. All that black stuff gets kicked up. So there's organic solutions to that that's been used fairly successful. And there's a lot of products out there right now that are non-infill. Now, it's still a plastic grass in both of those scenarios where you have organic infill but by eliminating that factor which is kids crawling around and digging it up, that's sort of benefit. It could help. Have you guys done any of the hybrid? No. I've just read about it. Okay. So it's that new? Yeah. Yes, please. Yeah. With this hybrid one, one of the issues with the grass there is not only that the grass isn't growing but that it's so many days wet and unusable. With this hybrid thing, is that still an issue if it gets lots of rain or snow? I'd be afraid to answer that because I don't know enough about the system to answer that question. I do know that with turf systems that there will be a drainage system associated with that. A lot of rock and drainage to get that out. So you wouldn't have that wetness typically associated but to get the grass to grow I would assume that we're still dealing with an amount of dirt so my guess is that they still struggle a little bit with the wetness. Yeah. Yeah. Since probably one person. Yeah. So to follow up on what Jason asked also of you guys, I mean it's the biggest, you know, most important question we can ask whether or not we want to do reno versus new construction completely. Obviously the other big question that goes alongside it which is what the community will support but in your eyes I just need to hear from architects' point of view that now that you've sat at all of these committee meetings and you've heard from our teachers, staff, et cetera, what it is that they're looking for for the next, you know, as many years as possible. Glenridge it's been 100. Can you tell us in your eyes whether or not a renovation which is going to be of grand scale obviously? Whether that how that is comparable and whether or not you feel that there are things that they aren't getting in a renovation that they would be getting in new construction. Again you've been at these meetings. You've heard our staff talk about what it is they're looking for for future ready learning and what they'd like to do in spaces that, you know, allow the types of learning that they are trying to make do in hallways now, et cetera. So I'm just curious about really your thoughts on what we might be missing out on if we don't do a full complete, you know, from scratch. I'm going to try. I think it's at Captain I would say your existing infrastructure is really challenging for a lot of reasons. The structural system, the floor to floor heights, the lack of windows, the lack of windows, the lack of windows. That is something that would be an extra challenge with the renovation and also as all of your sites are challenged with size when you take a two story building and you just extend it as a two story building versus building up you get less site area so if I were you I would look at Captain as probably your best bet would be two story building, but they're new just for those reasons alone. When you look at Merrimack and Glenridge they're stately buildings that are part of those communities so there's some aesthetic value in what exists so I think you have to weigh that and also the love of those facilities from your community that have had them around for 100 years. They have good floor heights. They have really nice spaces. There's some challenges with a little bit of maybe some columns in places you might not want or a little bit of a narrow space but for the most part the programs that we have planned and any new option are the same programs that we would be renovating the renovations to and by kind of peeling off some of the areas that are not functioning very well along the back sides of both of those buildings we solve a myriad of problems and keeping the front keeps that aesthetic that you've had for 100 years and fixes everything behind it. Those additions are significant and they fix a lot of wrongs in the existing building and allow you to have those collaborative spaces and those relationships that you want so I would say could you do it better in a new build for anything? I think always you can recreate it probably better, like perfectly better the exact way you want it but there's so much that can be done with a really good renovation and sometimes if you talk about sustainability the best thing to do is reuse a building so there's a lot of embodied carbon that comes with a reno versus a new build so there's a lot of things to take into account so I don't know if I have a good answer for you for Glenridge and Merrimack as clear cut as captain seems to be. Those are a lot of things that you could weigh and cost will come into it. Community sentiment will come into it but does that give you a decent answer? It does. It sounded to me like you said during the presentation that the cost of a reno can be very comparable. It can be close, yeah. I don't have those numbers today but what we've done in the past in situations like this is it always comes up in a community meeting whether or not somebody asked for it is well you tell me it's going to take longer to renovate and build an addition than it would to build new and you're telling me it's going to cost about the same. Shouldn't I consider that? The new build may be significantly more and you don't want to do it so it really provides when we get those costs added in just a way for you to weigh the options and be able to make a more informed choice. Like the renovation option of captain fully informs you the cost and the pros and cons of that whether or not you would actually do that? Maybe not but it will allow your community to make a more informed choice. Right. I actually think not you apologized for not giving a clear cut answer. I think that was helpful because to me it tells us if we choose the route of a renovation over a new addition there's nothing clear and obvious that we would be giving up. So I think that was helpful. Yeah and I was going to follow up and say it sounds like maybe the only thing maybe that we could pinpoint is is it useful use? Is it the longevity of the building? Is there longer useful use on a brand new building than there would be on a renown? I think Steve touched on it. All of the systems that age and are at the end of their useful life at Glenridge and Merrimack the expensive guts of the building that would be the same in a new build as you would get in a reno and exterior wall as anyone who owns an old home you're always going to have things go wrong with it and perhaps an older building those things may happen a little bit more often but the general gist of the recommendations is to make sure that you've got a better and you may improve the windows. You may tuck point where you need to. You fix the roof so you have done it once and for the next however many years until the next cycle of repair comes along but the goal would be that you're not going to have a leaky roof or a bad mechanical system in a renovation that you're starting at the same baseline but you options are good. I appreciate you bringing up the sustainability of the renovation option as well because that is something that has come up in the forums and with our steering committee and the workshops. That's something that is asked about a lot. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Kim? Yeah. So I guess I have a more fundamental question that I want to ask because I heard it from the community so when you talk about writing the existing wrongs of the building and talk about these extensive renovations to a lot of things that are behind the walls, right? The ceiling and the roof behind the walls, underground, plumbing, all of that stuff. So as a school district we have never really deferred maintenance on any of these buildings so the perception in the community is that we have kept these buildings in good shape so then the more fundamental question is why do they need to be renovated at all? So I would like to get your expert opinion on why they should be renovated, why we should make this investment at all and what happens if we don't? I think there's a lot of different layers to the answer to that. The first one I will start with is just dramatic question. It's a very dramatic question. It's a very dramatic question. If you look at the goals that came out of the very first workshop and the guiding principles and you try to lay that or stack that up against your existing buildings you fall short in a lot of areas in terms of flexibility, adjacencies between spaces that you would want to have, size of spaces and so forth, so like a lot of buildings and your buildings don't suffer from this so much but buildings of this age have been added on to so many times. Oftentimes daylight gets compromised because we're closing off windows to spaces and so forth, so I would say programmatically is definitely one part of this that would weigh heavily. I think if I were sitting in your seat and looking at thinking about the next 50 years, what is education going to look like? What does it look like today? You do great in your schools today. You're a really solid good school district. If you think about what is it going to look like 50 years from now and trying to set yourself up from a sustainability standpoint, a flexibility standpoint, those would all be considerations that I would be thinking about in terms of why you would want to be acting now and doing something with your buildings, so I think programmatically is one. The infrastructure is a whole other layer. I think that buildings of this age, those systems are just worn, right? You know, school districts do a great job of trying to maintain and a lot of school districts have an attitude of we fix it when it breaks, right? Deferred maintenance in terms of the way the commercial building sector does deferred maintenance typically does not happen in public school districts, so if you look nationally at deferred maintenance in public schools it's literally billions and billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of need, so addressing that and setting yourself up again for the long term is really important and those all three of the elementary schools are more so in Glen Ridge and Merrimack because of the age of those buildings. I'm talking infrastructure now is a need, so I think there's a number of different layers in terms of your point in time today and looking out into the future why you would want to make the investment. So even though we have not deferred maintenance on those buildings there's still significant upgrades to infrastructure that need to be made just based on the age of the buildings is what I heard, right? In addition to the programmatic benefits of if you have to do them anyway then this would be the time to change the interiors because you have to take out the walls and you have to take out the... in order to get to the studs of the building to where you need to do this work. If you're going to do that then you should start thinking ahead. I think that's a great point. In fact that's an example that we use quite often when we're talking to school districts about doing a long range facility plan. At some point you need to change an air handler. Before you make that decision maybe the spaces that air handler serves need to change themselves, right? The configuration of those that maybe then is a different mechanical system solution so don't invest the money to make that first fix without understanding what the programmatic needs and do them both at the same time as possible. That's the best use of your taxpayer dollars that you're going to get I believe. And do you believe that we're doing that through this process? Absolutely. We're accomplishing that through this process? Absolutely. Great. Kim thank you for asking that and the way you summarized what he said was perfect so thank you because I think it actually helps all of us. That's what we're going to get asked by the community. Why are we doing this? Why do we need to be doing this? And I think that question and answer was helpful to me at least but I think helpful to everybody so thank you. Any other questions? Comments from anyone? Ben, Leo? Most of my questions have already been asked. Mine too. But I just had two questions. Kind of tactical I guess. So at Glenridge one of the big problems is moisture in the basement. Would that be remedied through this renovation or obviously the new building would be renovated or is that just built into the way it is? No. I think we would it's something that we are certainly aware of and we're looking at. In fact we have received a proposal from a forensic building experts to go in and take a look at those issues and advise us as a team on what the possible, what needs to happen relative to that. There is a lot if you can imagine if you look at those diagrams for Glenridge we're removing the large sections of the back side of the building so anywhere we're touching it there we can get down below grade and address any, we're covering it up with new construction so we should be addressing it there and we may need to go as far as doing some excavation around the perimeter of the building to do some exterior waterproofing to mitigate and do some drainage as well to pull water away and get water away from the building so there's a lot that we can do to help with that. Okay. I would like to note too we're also actively getting our mechanical engineer engaged on that process to look at the HVAC systems for Glenridge as well to tackle that component. Okay. Awesome. Thank you. So another issue that's come up I know if I go back to the original Paragon study there was air quality was something that was identified as a concern among parents so I'm just curious with some of the newer HVAC and so forth would that include some kind of filtration or other air quality enhancements? Yeah for sure. Any new mechanical systems going to have filtration associated with it? So that's maybe the short answer. Yes. Sort of rhetorical I guess I suppose but I'm assuming that it's basically the lifespan of these systems are just kind of like they are what they are and that's maybe a result of some of the air quality concerns and this would be remedied by this. That is definitely the goal. Okay. Absolutely. That's it for me. Thank you. Go ahead. No? Any more questions? Okay. Nina do you have any questions? Great. Just kind of like a little bit of a clarifying question. For scenario three so what exactly is being like condensed into like the gate field area in this situation? So you would still so again you have access to three what I'll call soccer fields right now so you use ad-zic for field hockey right and so you would have soccer lacrosse inside the track and you still have access to a grass field which would be your existing field would still be there. Okay. That's kind of what I wanted to know because I know it's kind of a problem sometimes like after school practice where everything is going so I just want to make sure there would still be like enough space. Thank you. Okay. Well thank you so much. This was really helpful. You know each time we hear from you helps us more and more kind of narrow our decisions you know what we're thinking of and narrowing the options helps so thank you all for being here. Appreciate it. Thank you. We'll see you again soon. Thank you. We'll see you in two weeks. Yes I meant it. We'll see you soon. Oh my gosh. Safe travels. And now Dr. Kelly Salberger and Ms. John Turner are going to present us with the special school district partnership agreement which we will need to vote on as well. I also see Dr. Macklin's name on the board. I see Macklin's here. He's the superintendent of special school district. Oh we've got all kinds of other people here. Great. Thank you everyone for being here. Oh Chiquita Moore. Thank you. Oh yes. Hi. Hold up the chairs. I'll turn it over to you Kelly. Good evening. Tonight we're going to present the partnership agreement and the partnership agreement is really just a framework that we use to make sure that our collaboration is effective between the school district of Clayton and special school district. I want to start off with some introductions. So we have the superintendent of special school district. Dr. Macklin is joining us. We also have to my left over on the other side we have Chiquita Moore and her title is chief partner district's officer. So thank you guys both for joining us for this meeting. We're really excited too because this year we have a new member of our leadership team in special education so Shannon Gerald is joining us. So she's our special education coordinator and then you guys all know John Turner. Our director of special education. We're also really fortunate to have a couple of our parents here. We have our president of PAC Ed Megan Lennahan is here as well as Michelle and Naja. They're all here too. There might have been more parents who have come in afterwards but big thank you. Oh and Kate Pavlison our coach will talk about her too when we get to our org chart in a little bit. So huge thanks to everyone who's joining us for this presentation. I think it's just an excellent example of the close partnership that we have between the school district of Clayton and special school district. So our role as partners is that we have a long standing relationship between the school district of Clayton and special school district and it's really to deliver that high quality education to our students because they're able to bring in resources that would not be sustainable for just the school district of Clayton to have on our own so that's really what it's about. It's high quality compliance student centered special education services that we have here in our school district. Within this partner district model SSD is responsible for providing our staffing and evaluation instruction related to special services compliance oversight and school district of Clayton has the things like the curriculum piece our assessment systems school operations and then also that family engagement structure. So it's a partnership between the two school districts working together in these concentric circles you'll notice that it starts off all the way at the top with our federal regulations like IDEA and then this is just outlining that legal framework that guides the relationship between special school district and the school district of Clayton. You'll notice that within this there are some parts that are separate but we all work together on them. So for example separate compliance areas we collaborate on matters like child find our evaluation and eligibility least restrictive environment. Those are things that we have separate compliance but we work on together so it's a strong partnership and then we also have resources that fall within that too. Last year we spent a lot of time in this presentation talking about the principal and coordinator collaboration tool. We're actually going to spend less time talking about it this presentation and more time being able to update you on the progress of the goals that we had from last year and what the new goals will be moving forward into next year. So in our partnership we have 271 students throughout the school district of Clayton that are also receiving special education services through special school district. You can see the breakdown on there. I'm not going to read through all of those numbers but similarly to last year the highest area that we have students identified is that OHI, other health impaired. We also have many students who have learning disabilities and students with an autism diagnosis. Those are kind of our highest areas as far as percentages of those 271 students. All right. And I'm going to turn it over to John. She's going to talk about the staffing that we have. Can you reach that? You got it. So our staffing through SSD like Kelly alluded to is really based on student need and so we receive staff that are in the district and we receive staff or staff might leave the district based on the number of students that we have that require that service so as a result for example last school year we received a part-time social worker because our number of students who required social work services through SSD increased. This school year we have moved a couple of teachers throughout the district to support student needs. Of course in collaboration with the principals and other admin so we have a teacher who is traveling between Glenridge and Merrimack to support students and we also have moved pairs based on student needs so some of our students receive pretty significant pair of support on the middle school level. They graduated eighth grade and they're now at the high school so those pairs have moved with them and that's usually how SSD does staffing. This is just a picture of our organizational chart at the foundation and of course at the heart of what we do because 85% of our students with special needs spend the bulk of their time in the general education setting so again at our foundation we have our general education teachers, our special education teachers and Ms. Pavlison who supports both special and general education teachers with instructional strategies and supports for students with special needs and students who do not have special needs and then we of course have our principals. We have Ms. Shannon Gerald who is our special school district coordinator, myself, Dr. Tammy Yates who is not here this evening but she's the executive director of partner districts and so we collaborate with her quite often and of course with the support of Dr. Patel and Dr. Macklin. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the purpose of the partnership agreement. So in general it is a document that provides an increased knowledge and awareness of the expectations that we as both special school district and Clayton school district are using to provide what our students need. It's an inclusive and collaborative approach that puts all of our stakeholders on the same page as far as what our students need and it's also a tool that we use to monitor decision making and guiding our practices in seven different categories which I'll talk about briefly in just a moment and it also guides our conversations and the work that we are doing for our students to ensure that they are getting the services that they need. So the next couple of slides really are just a brief overview breakdown of those seven categories. They cover quite a bit of information so I'm just going to briefly touch on some of the highlights for each of those areas in staffing in order to collaborate with our Clayton counterparts. We have and we're trying to create an inclusive environment and welcoming environment for special school district staff so that we can retain those staff and provide high quality staff to our students in the district. In the teaching, learning and accountability area one of the focuses is on shared resources that we can provide for both special school district staff and general education staff as well as allowing our special education staff to also participate in the resources that Clayton has for teachers as well so it's that shared piece and then the collaboration category. Again many different areas that that covers but one of the areas that I wanted to highlight was the partnership that we use to ensure that we are implementing a variety of IEP services throughout the district for our students and to support our students who may have some social emotional learning needs and may go into crisis at different times and making sure that our staff have the resources that they need to support our students with that. Student services includes a partnership with our MTSS process, our social emotional learning as well as transition plans just to name a few of the services that we provide. Our data and technology component includes sharing of student data so that we can make database decisions for our student needs as well as provision of technology resources to the staff and augmentative communication devices for students who are in need of that. Our transportation category focuses on making sure that our students are receiving transportation in their least restrictive environment and also helping guide those conversations about when it's required as a related service for our students and then finally career and technical education provides access to programs that are aligning with our business industry standards and the community so that we are providing an alternative pathway for students and post secondary education and career choices. So these seven categories are really again that guiding people to the next piece that allow us as a partnership of the two districts to have an agreement that's prioritizing equity, collaboration and excellence for our students. Okay. And so now to bring it back to the school district of Clayton in particular in regards to the partnership agreement. Last school year we came up with several goals that align with the needs of our community. The first goal was to take a look at our transition process to make sure that families receive the support that they need with some of those milestone transitions from preschool to kindergarten and from eighth grade to ninth grade. To do that we said we were going to be focusing on charting the life course, having our teachers trained and implementing those particular IEP meetings with that format which we did for all of those transition meetings. We got our special education teachers trained and also the school district of Clayton guidance counselors were trained in charting the life course too so that they would be able to support families in those meetings. The thing I like the most about charting the life course is it allows families and the students at the center of the IEP meeting and not the IEP document so it turns more into like a conversation about the whole child versus compliance so that's why we chose that and I think we got some really great feedback. Also collaboration between myself, Kate and the family center administrators. We had a good time with them talking about all of our incoming kindergartners and also getting the little kid feel. I really like it there and I like to go back. Yes. Yes. It really is. We took a look also at our continuum of services for sixth through eighth grade and we had a lot of work with the kids in the sixth through eighth grade because that's the, I would say that was the most challenging transition for kids and families because it's the shortest amount of time that kids are in a building in Clayton, that middle school time and making sure that our services are aligned with what kids received in the elementary schools and also what they're going to receive in the high school so we spent a lot of time looking at our continuum of services and making sure that there weren't any gaps. One of the biggest celebrations for this particular goal is that we got a lot of feedback, anecdotal feedback from parents that they felt heard in their meetings and to me that was a great import and we also completed any kindergarten transition IEP that families were willing to complete. I think we had one student who had the privilege of traveling through Asia and so we postponed their IEP into the fall. Our second goal was to align our resources. Both SSD and the school district of Clayton have a lot of resources and a lot of experts in reading, writing, math, social emotional supports so we worked very closely with our, oh thank you, changed on my paper not up there, sorry. All right so we worked very closely with the reading specialist and the math specialist in the school district of Clayton. We did some collaboration with instructional coaches from SSD and also the reading and math coaches from SSD. I would like to highlight some of the hard work that the school district of Clayton staff did to support us in the areas of reading and math. Angela who is the district math coordinator for SDC she collaborated with us. We had a lot of work throughout the school year and played a pretty big role in us identifying appropriate curriculum for our replacement math courses on both the middle and high school level. That was a huge, that was a huge, that was a really large amount of work that she was passionate about and purposeful about and we really appreciate it. Not only did she help us with the curriculum but she also came throughout the school year and supported and coached our staff which I think was really beneficial. She also this summer said, well in the fall she said John I would like for you to go to this virtual PD and I said yes I want to go to this virtual PD and so we did it and it was on a book called Rethinking Disabilities and Mathematics. There isn't a lot of research on disabilities and mathematics so she found this book, we went to the PD and then we did a book study this summer for the school district of Clayton teachers and special ed teachers and she co-facilitated that book. to do that and really took the lead so that's something that's very unique to Clayton. We also work pretty closely with Julie Parr who is the school district of Clayton literacy coordinator and she helped us pick out curriculum for our replacement classes for ELA on the secondary level. She's also someone that helped us figure out what program, what reading program in particular we could get our teachers trained in that kind of way and so Julie and Angela really helped us with this second goal here and we appreciate that. Highlight them. We, our third goal, okay this time I'm on it. Okay great. Change of both places. Our third goal was to increase collaborative walk throughs and we did that. I just want to focus on the result of that collaborative walk throughs between myself and the principals. There's some big changes in the play box. There were some revisions on the playground at Marimack Elementary School to provide more accessibility to students. One student in particular there like the principal really did make a lot of changes for one student to be included and to have a really amazing play time on that playground so I thought that was really something to highlight. We changed the format of our study skills classes on the middle school level. The principal Jamie Jordan there, she spent a lot of time with us going into special education spaces trying to figure out how we can make it best work for students, both the physical space and the academics. As a result of that our teachers, we have a teacher, three teachers and then also Kate and myself are going through executive skills coaching for students who have some of those executive skills deficits with Dr. Pegg Dawson. She's one of my heroes and we're taking a course with her so we can revise our study skills curriculum K-12 and so that's pretty exciting. They also added classroom space at Wydown and Clayton High School. We have beautiful classrooms in particular at the high school with a lot of windows, tons of windows for our replacement classes and then we also added a room like a calm down room at Glenridge which was really amazing because it allowed us to have a room that allows for some of our students with big feelings to stay in the building no matter what and be able to be with their peers and get their work done so that's some of the highlights from that goal. Goal four was to expand that two way communication with parents. Parents in this, in all areas in all of the goals but in this goal in particular very, very important. I think in Clayton the parents are extremely involved and really do guide the work that we do to support parents. We have a lot of our students are very vocal and able to advocate for themselves but our most vulnerable students who are not able to use their voices in a traditional way. They have really passionate parents who work with us to make sure they receive the things they need and I personally appreciate that. I have not experienced that anywhere else so we work closely with PAC ED. We co-planned two events with them last year. We also worked with them to figure out what parents need from us for that fifth to sixth grade transition so we held in addition to the general transition meeting for parents coming into Y Down Middle we held an additional meeting just for parents of students with special needs at Y Down Two based on that. We also have a podcast. I don't think any of you have heard this podcast because it has 15 listeners and my mom I think is like 10. I appreciate her. It's called it takes a village. This year we're going big. We are going big. We are sending it to everyone. Yes. I think the more people we get on there the more mothers that listen and so if one of you come on maybe your mom will listen and be like this is my child. So that's something to work on for this year. Yeah. All right. So looking forward into this school year we would like to increase of course family participation. We send out surveys to parents each semester in particular for the students who receive services in Clayton, their general experience and then also for their experience at IEP meetings. The feedback from parents really helps us drive the work that we do as a partner and so it's very, very important for us to increase the amount of parents that fill out those surveys and so that's one goal that we have for increasing parent and community engagement. We would also like to unify our progress and specialized measures. For our students a very small demographic of students. Let me go for the bulk of our students we have we use FastBridge and now we've changed and combined so that we don't use FastBridge just for students with IEPs and then the students with IEPs also have to take two other benchmarks for the school district of Clayton. Now they just have to take the school district of Clayton at benchmarks throughout the school year and so we're doing that so that our data is on edge of climber like Clayton and that we're able to really have data conversations across districts about students. We're also trying to come up with some ways to track data on our students who are not in traditional classrooms and a way to really monitor their growth for their social communication skills and then also for their academics. For that we have a cohort of students that we're working with and we're collecting the same data and sharing that data and having data team meetings and coming up with ways to problem solve to better instruct our students all of them but in particular some students in our essential skills classes. This is really, really important because our parents want to see comparable data for all of our students and I think this will give us the opportunity to do that. Let's see. I don't know if we have a question. Okay. And then the next goal is family engagement in post secondary readiness so we have this again is where the podcast is going to come into play. Okay so we're going to have some new guests on the podcast but we have a lot of our students go to college and we're very lucky for that. For our students who might go to different programs, alternative college programs or work programs or assisted work programs. We want to make sure that their parents have all of the options available to them so really spending some time investigating those options, bringing some of those options to the parents of the school district of Clayton is a big priority for us. I think that's all I can get. I have to stop talking soon. Do you have any questions for us? I don't usually talk first but I'm going to talk first. I just want to commend all of you on this work. It is truly remarkable how far we've come with developing this agreement from where we were a few years ago. I see parents nodding in the back. I think that's all I can say. I think that's all I can say. I don't know what other districts are doing. I can guess because we used to all use the same template for this agreement but I truly believe that we are leaders in this work and this is to me a great example. This is a real partnership. Everything you're describing, I'm so proud of our Clayton teachers for how they're partnering with you like the examples you gave about Angie in the math and getting new classrooms and all of those examples to me are just such great examples of how we collaborate and work as one entity, not two separate entities, not two separate districts. I'm not sure anyone would know in our buildings or in this process who works for special school district and who works for the school district of Clayton because it feels like we truly are one team and so I just want to thank you all for bringing us to this point and developing this partnership agreement that I really do think is a great example for other districts and so thank you all of you and Dr. Macklin and Dr. Moore and you and your staff too. Thank you for what you're doing on your side of this too to collaborate with us because I'm just so impressed especially knowing where we were a few years ago with this agreement and how hard we worked to get to this point so thank you. I don't have any questions. I just had the comment so I will open it up to everyone else now. Yeah and I'll let go of some of the same things. So this is the sixth time, sixth year in a row that I've heard a presentation from SST. It's the seventh year for Stacy and last year it was better than the year before. The year before it was a rough meeting and previous to that I would say I was too new on the board to really know any better what it should sound and look like and at that time a lot of parents, some of who are sitting in the audience in person here today, you know, they're not really interested in the board. They're not interested in the board. You know, it kind of brought to our attention, hey, it kind of feels like, yeah, it's great. Our kids are getting great services compared to everybody else but there still doesn't feel that great. I mean to kind of some, you know, there was a lot more detail behind that, right? There was a lot of tough conversations that were happening and to see how far you've come knowing that there's still, you know, improvements to be made and I love that the goals that you have here now, they're smart goals, right? I mean they're specific, they're flexible, they're actionable, all the things that we've asked for and requested a few years ago is really great. So, you know, well done and keep up the good work. It's really hard work but these are very, very valued students to our school district and to their families and to you guys that participate in this work as teachers and administrators so keep fighting the good fight there. So I just have a couple of questions. Do you feel like we've, you guys have heard, maybe you have, I hope you have, but do you feel like SSD's voice is in the Long Rates Facility Master's Plan that we've been talking about a lot in this last year? Have you guys had the opportunity to participate in any of the workshops at the schools, you know, and do you feel like your voice is represented in there? Yes. So I was able to participate early in the process and I did feel like my voice was heard in there but I also felt like I did not have to speak. There were several general ed teachers and parents who said a lot of the things that were on my list already and so to me that also speaks to the partnership. Great. That's wonderful. And then I know last year there was, I remember there being that you guys, new teachers that were coming in from SSD but were full time and even some that might have been part time coming to work in the Clayton School District participated in onboarding for new teachers at the beginning of school year. Did that happen again this year and are you guys, besides the unique professional development opportunity that Angela found on the math program, are you still getting access to all the PD opportunities that our full time Clayton teachers are getting? Yes. Shannon actually went through it because she was new to the district so she was there with us. Okay. That's great. We went through it and then we're doing, we're working, we are going through the same PD. We have the same PD days, we have the same PD opportunities and I really try to make sure that I'm not pulling my teachers out so that they're getting the same PD and really focusing on the priorities that the school district of Clayton has for them. And some of our teachers with special school district even lead the PD opportunities for our school district. It goes both ways. We're both contributing there. And then my last question is I notice that the numbers of students we have, we have, there seems to be 30 to 35 students in each of the elementary schools. That number shrinks in the middle school and then it grows again in the high school. Can you speak to why we see that trend? And it's been pretty consistent the whole time that I've been here. I don't know why that's happening but I can find out. I can do some digging. Is it just a natural, since those are natural kind of, that's my question. It's kind of a natural next stage in adolescence at the end of elementary, at the end of middle school. Do we pull in more kids that were not in the middle school into the high school? We get a lot of students, so we get a lot of students coming in from other middle schools to enroll in Clayton High School. That number is very, very large. That would explain that. There was a little bit of, we're getting parents coming from Merriam too. Okay. I don't know if you're familiar with Merriam. There's a couple of parents coming from Merriam for Clayton and we have people coming from a couple of the other private schools that work with students with special needs to attend Clayton High School. We spend a lot of times with those transitions so that the parents feel comfortable coming here. Right. So I do, as I'm looking at it too, the other thing is Wyden has three grade levels. The high schools got four. Right. So it's not that far off. Yeah. Great. Thanks. Any other questions or comments? I just want to say thank you. In January of 24 we were here and as a new superintendent that night was a very long night. Yeah. You guys can remember that night. So we knew that some things had to change and I'm very thankful to Dr. Patel, Dr. Poole who I saw when I came in and really for the leadership and being able to really buy in and stay with us to make some key changes and so that the students of Clayton felt really what they needed. I'm thankful for those pieces and as we continue. Yeah. I just want to say thank you as one of the newer board members who has not seen these years that hearing this presentation from the board. I'm really excited to hear more about your first one, the It is so incredibly clear and to echo what Kim said about these smart goals. You gave us your four goals from last year, explained how you met them and then your three for next year and I'm really excited to hear more next year about your first one, the increasing family participation. In my experience I remember hearing about the district and the families really wanting to hear more from each other about what was needed and how different families were being met or their needs were being met or not being met and so thank you so much for making that a goal. Yeah. One more thing and then I will leave them. We have to go over the goals. The goals stay the same but we go over these goals with our pack ed with our parent group and there will be additional benchmarks that they will add. We will get their feedback and add those benchmarks and when we are finished with that meeting Dr. Patel allows for us to present a similar presentation to the principals and the leaders within the Clayton School District of Clayton and there might be some other things added in terms of benchmarks, right? Clayton does that so these goals don't just stay here. All of the stakeholders get an opportunity to get feedback and to figure out what their role is in making sure we reach these goals and so I think that's unique and really important. Right. Any other board member questions or comments? I'm just going to echo what everyone has already said which is that this is incredible work that you guys are doing and that we are so appreciative of the time and the effort and the clear just passion you have for your work. It's really shining through and we're just so thankful to have you here and yeah it's gotten better every year. I mean this is my fourth and yeah this is pretty incredible so I just want to give you huge kudos for being the people that you are and doing what you do for our students. The one thing I will ask more about is PAC. Have we seen better, more involvement in terms of the numbers, et cetera? Can you talk a little bit more about the experience so far? I'm not sure who came to the PAC meetings before but there are a lot of people that come to the PAC meetings. We have snacks. And I think what Megan who is the PAC President has done is she has recruited parents in every single school to be a representative and then she's also working with other parents. I think I had a conversation with Najia and Michelle about planning for people to take over their leadership roles when their kids age out so they're really planning so that we can have a strong PAC for years to come. I was previously a part of the PAC committee prior to being on the board so I know what great work and what great support that is for parents and I'm so appreciative to both of you, to all of you for making sure that that piece is there. And what was I going to say specifically? And I remember prior to being on the board thinking about all those things like shouldn't we do this like PTO? Or we have one in every year and it's happening so this is extremely cool. It's small steps, right? But you're going to make it happen because you're committed just like these folks here and we are here to support you in whatever you need so yay for our families. I'm very, very happy for you. Thank you for doing what you do. Anyone else? Nina, do you have any questions or comments about this? Good. And I just wanted to also add despite I'm reassured despite what we may be here like in the news or whatever that we have the staffing we need for our kids and I appreciate you pointing that out to us so thank you. Thanks again and thank you again Dr. Moore and Dr. Macklin for joining us as well. It's always a pleasure to see you all so thanks so much. Thank you. Oh, we do need to move. We do have a motion to approve it. I forgot. Chris, if you would read the motion. I forgot we need to vote on the agreement. I move that we approve the special school district partnership agreement. Second. Okay. It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay. Motion passes. Great. Thank you so much. Yes. You're going to be here for a little bit. So we have four policies for first reading all with Dr. Sahlberger. First one is policy EBC lactation support. Yeah, so all four of the policies that I'm going to talk to you about first tonight are really the results of either federal or state law changes so the first policy which is the EBC lactation support that is tied to the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and we are recommending that we do review and make these changes. Leo actually brought up a really good point. If you look at on for me it's the second page but it's under the part where it says employees. It says the district will not deny employment opportunities or take adverse employment action against an employee who has requested reasonable accommodations. Leo pointed out that that's imprecise because we may have to take adverse employment action against somebody. It wouldn't be because they need lactation support so his recommendation was maybe we clarify it because they requested reasonable accommodations so that's the only thing that I would suggest that we change. I'm going to turn it over to Leo unless you have any other questions or thoughts on this one. I don't necessarily have a question about the policy. I agree completely with Leo's suggestion by the way, but so we obviously have lactation rooms in our buildings now. We do and when I was reviewing this policy that was one that you'll notice that the word exclusively was taken out because I reached out to the buildings and I said because I even thought about central office. We don't have a room that's exclusively for that. That's why I was asking. Right. So that's why we're taking out that word exclusively. We do have places that can be used for it that are not bathrooms that meet all of the parts of the law. And we can take that word out? Yes. It's not by law. This was already sent on to MSBA. And obviously because it is law it will be included in any new facilities planning. Correct. Okay. That was my only question. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions for lactation support before we go to the next one? I thought you wanted me to make the adjustment. All right. Okay. We can move on to GB1 part-time and substitute employment. Yeah. So this one they changed. The state changed the minimum wage. So we have a lot of people who are in the state that are in the state that are eligible to be substitute teachers. So really because of sub shortages. That being said though you could potentially have people who are younger that now would be eligible to be substitute teachers. So one of the things is that if you're under the age of 20 you will not teach in grades 9 through 12 so we're going to add that in. I confirmed with Rachel Benz and HR who is the one who staffs this that she has been doing this for a while. Offer a survey to any of our substitutes for them to get feedback that's required by DESI and they collect that information. We have already been doing this. It's in our front line absence management system so when the substitutes take positions they automatically get that survey so we've been doing these things but it's just putting it in policy. So since the state decreased the requirements can we or will we keep our requirements higher than these standards? That's a great question. Are we hurting and need to decrease? So to be a substitute teacher you have to hold a substitute certificate that DESI gives so we can't change how you would get a substitute certificate. What we have done is put more things in place to be hired as a substitute teacher in the school district of Clayton so we started using specific questions with Spark Hire which is like our online video interview so everybody goes through that process now and submits that. So if we have any of the interviews that maybe people are unsure if they would be the right fit I review all of those before we move forward with hiring. We're making sure we have three references with everybody including their most recent supervisor. In Missouri if they have been substitute teaching or working in any other school districts by law we have to get a DESI disclosure from that other district that they were not dismissed as a result of any sexual assault or misconduct and obviously all of our employees including our substitutes are entering into that mock system, our Missouri automated criminal history system and that gives us ongoing background checks any time somebody who uses our code is arrested so I feel pretty confident that we have a lot of things in place. The other thing that we did this year that I would say was a huge success. I can't take all the credit for it because professional learning did a lot of it but during back to school time we allowed all of our, we had professional learning specifically for our substitute teachers so two of the instructional coordinators from the elementary school came and facilitated that with Robin Hogg from professional learning and we had like over 40 people that came in the summer and participated in the half day of professional learning. Half of it was like classroom management and engagement and relationships with students and the other half we had Mike Parkinson do a safety presentation and Officer Riley came too so it was a huge success. It was I think actually a really great success so those are some of the strategies that we're using to make sure that we have really safe qualified adults with our students. I would not recommend that we make like different requirements there because I think you could have a substitute certificate and be, you know, less experienced and still be a great sub in our district. Yeah, I don't think we need to change the policy. I was just curious if we had other standards. Yes, we have some stuff in place and we have been gradually increasing the number of students that are in the school and we do see that it's really important. Great. Any questions on that one? Anyone else? Pam? I think I have two. You just spoke about the option for that, the trainings for them. That is not a requirement. It was not a requirement. So they all go through onboarding but to attend that was not a requirement. That was the first offering. We did get really great feedback and they all want to know when the next one is so that's definitely something we would want to continue It's not a requirement. They do go through all of our annual compliance training so all of the training on policy and everything like that they do just like all of our other teachers do. So my question was how do we ensure or have assured learning about our emergency procedures like those people who chose to do that do and do they get some TGX badges on the days that they are subbing? So they don't have the TGX badges on the days that they are subbing and they don't have the TGX badges on the days that they are subbing. So I don't think that's something we want to do yet. As far as the assured learning that was some feedback that came out of that day too was that it's not the same in every single one of the buildings like where the folder is so those are things that I then emailed out to the principals of like okay in your buildings we need to make sure that it's stationed at the same spot and this was the feedback that we got that day from the subs so they are trying to make sure that it is more stream line inconsistent because that was identified as an area for growth. Any other questions on this one? Okay. GBCBB protected staff communications. Okay. So this one MSBA is recommending to districts to add the section that's in green on protected communications. It's specific to federal programs and so it's really protection for whistle blowers so we are recommending that we accept their wording unless you have any questions. Anyone? The only question I have is actually not in the green section and maybe Leo you can help answer it. Under protected communications that whole sentence seems a little walkie to me maybe because I'm not a lawyer. But it says district administrators or supervisors will not prohibit and then blah blah blah blah blah and then it says unless allowed by law. Why would the law allow you to prohibit it? That unless is what hangs me up. Lawyers aren't always great writers Kim. I mean I think the meaning is what you suggested. Okay. I agree with your interpretation of the sentence. I also agree that it is a very obtuse sentence. Yeah, it's like we won't prohibit it unless it's allowed by law. I don't understand like what that means. You have to go dig up this language was presumably descended from some statute X years ago and somebody interpreted it in that way and you could try and figure out what they were doing with it. It is not a model of great drafting. Okay. But it doesn't be personal. That's not in conflict as far as what you see. No, I don't see it as allowed by law. I don't see it as incoherent. I just see it as awkward. We can agree on that. Anything else on this one? No. Okay. I see two academic calendar. So this one is because we are in St. Louis County. We are supposed to take this updated version of it. It basically is because in 26, 27 there's going to be our calendar has to have a minimum of 169 student attendance days before it was just based on 1,044 hours. I think because some school districts were starting to move to those four day weeks they wanted to have a minimum number of days or you had to take it to the voters so that's what it's about. I will say we are already protected against this because we build 173 days in our calendar so we already have over the 169 but we're just aligning our policy with state statute. Good. Any questions on that one? Okay. Thank you. All right. I'm going to take a break and then I'll see you again in a little bit. Okay. Now we have some second readings. So first policy EGAA copyright compliance. Do you want to read that motion? We do. I got it. Mine was just out of order. Do you want to go ahead and read the motion Chris and then we'll see if we have questions. I move that the board adopt policy EGAA copyright compliance with proposed changes. Second. Okay. It's been moved and seconded. Does anyone have any questions on this for Dr. Garganigo? Okay. It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay. That motion passes. Now we have the second reading for policy IGBI homeschooling. I move that the board adopt policy IGBI homeschooling with proposed changes. Second. Okay. That's been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments on this one? As it's proposed? Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. No. Motion passes. IGCD virtual courses. I move that the board adopt policy IGCD virtual courses with proposed changes. Second. That's been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments on this one? No. Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay. Motion passes. So IGCDA full-time mocap virtual courses. I move that the board adopt policy IGCDA full-time mocap virtual courses with proposed changes. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments on this one? Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Motion passes. ILA test integrity and security. I move that the board adopt policy ILA test integrity and security with proposed changes. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments on this one? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. That motion passes. Okay. Policy IND ceremonies and observances. I move that the board adopt policy IND ceremonies and observances with proposed changes. Second. Okay. Any questions or comments? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Motion passes. IGDAA resident participant student involvement in activities and groups. I move that the board adopt policy IGDAA resident participant student involvement in activities and groups with proposed changes. Second. Okay. This one's been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments for Dr. Poole on this one? No, except that the title says activities and events. Does it matter? When you read the motion the second time? Maybe just read the motion again, Chris. Or do we need to, it's been moved and seconded. It's been seconded. What do you think, Leo or Felicia, that we do? If probably we... Move to amend it, you know, to conform to the title, I guess, or something. Yeah. I mean, it's probably just... I'm sorry. I brought it to us. No, no. No, but you're right. Chris, why don't you just move to amend the motion to read as events and not groups? I move that we amend the motion to read as events and not groups. Second. Second. Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay. So we amend it. Now we need to vote on it. Now we need to read it. Right. I move that the board adopt policy IGDAA, resident participant student involvement in... This is where I say... Activities and events. Yeah, activities and events with proposed changes. Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay. Motion passes. And now we have a third reading of GBCB staff conduct. I move that the board adopt policy GBCB staff conduct with proposed changes. Okay. It's been moved and seconded. Oh. It's been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments on this? I did. I was just going to ask, we removed the staff conflicts language. Is the intention to do a more holistic revision of that and bring it back later or where do we stand on that? Yes. That's exactly the intention so I'm going to go to the coordinators council meeting where all of the coordinators are at and kind of see what does tutoring private lessons look like in the different departments? What's the kind of the current reality so that we can get more of an understanding of what's going on and then use that input to make an informed decision of what we think would be best for the district as a whole so rather than just kind of unilaterally making the decision we want to kind of see what's actually going on and try to do something that's in the best interest of everyone involved including our students obviously. Makes sense to me. Any other questions or comments? Yes. I have a few. Second paragraph paramount in the district's ability on the first line I believe it should say paramount to the district's ability. The first line. Yes. So the public stress and educators is paramount to the district's ability. Yes. That part was copied and pasted from our old but if everybody wants to change it we can do paramount. Okay. Third paragraph. The second where it says that it is important that all educational employees exhibit good judgment and conduct both on and off duty. This second sentence to me feels like an aspiration and not a fact. Such good judgment and conduct will result in a culture of trust and safety so I would recommend that we just take out that whole sentence or we say something like the hope is. So I would. It fosters a culture. We hope it will foster a culture. So. I don't think we need that sentence in there but if you like it we could reword it like that. So I would recommend we just take it out unless someone wants the idea and then we can speak to it as an aspiration. I'm fine taking it out. Okay. All right. Take it out. And then we have that one sentence left that you can easily move up to the paragraph above. I'm happy to. So that it is important we'll go to the one before. The paragraph before. To the. I had suggested as the third sentence that just makes sense when you read it through that way. Take the high school teacher out of me. Sorry. Okay. So that it would become it would be before the district has the utmost duty. That's where you could move. You're you're suggesting we move. It is important that all education employees exhibit good judgment and conduct both on and off the And put that after public's one two three the third line of the second paragraph. So put it after support and cooperation. And before the district has the utmost duty. Okay. I see we've lost Oxford commas in this one. Just wanted to point that out. Don't remind us. Oh number. Okay. Go down the number eight. It says like it will be protected by law. That is repeated in number eight and nine. But it's all of this is already said it already says to be like unless as protected by law. So I don't know why we have to repeat it and eight and nine what it already said it above. I think we added it in the first reading. I think we added that in a lot of places because we felt like some of these were trying to prevent some of the freedom of speech but we wanted to be clear that they still had freedom of speech so it was like almost we were adding it as like a disclaimer in places if I recall that correctly from that first meeting. Yeah that's fine. Okay. That's it. Those are my so if we're all agree with those few small changes that Pam suggested can we can change that. We didn't just approve it approve the policy tonight to the right like with the proposed changes because I don't want to bring this back. Okay. Do we need a new motion. So now I have the proposed changes I'm going to have those are these are the proposed changes so I'll fix them and that's what we're approving. I think can I can can someone just move that we pass the policy as amended. Perfect. You say second this time. There you go. Okay. All right. All those in favor. Aye. Any opposed. Okay. Motion passes. Thank you for the suggestions Pam and thank you Dr. Solberg. Okay now we're moving on to actually voting on the property tax rate that we discussed in the tax hearing earlier. If Chris you could read that motion please. I move that we approve two thousand and twenty five property tax rates as follows three point five three. Wow. Okay. Three. It has to go all four of these numbers. That's amazing. That's why I don't do treasurer or those three dollars. Yes I do. That's it. All those all four of them. Yes totally part of the motion. All of this is very important in the motion. Okay. Three dollars and how do you say that. Thank you. Three point five zero three. Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol Fol which includes .511 debt service levy. Okay. It's been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments that we talked about earlier? Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay. Motion passes. And next we'll be moving to approve the CRSWC budget which we all were reviewed and discussed at the last board meeting. So will you read that motion please? I move that we approve the CRSWC budget for the year beginning October 1, 2025. Okay. That's been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments on the budget? Okay. No. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay. That motion passes. Consent agenda. Chris, if you'll read that motion please. I move that the board approve consent agenda items 9.133 and 9.12. Second. Any questions or comments on any consent agenda items? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes. And now we're moving to board communications. I think a few of us have had some committee meetings. Chris, you maybe had a couple? I did. I had two on the same night. SSD governing council as well as my first of the year meeting of the health and SEL and wellness committee is what it's called. So I'll start with that one. We had Mike Sebe, is that how you say his name? Sebe. That was his first meeting that he did for us in that role and it was fantastic meeting. I called Nisha right away afterwards to say I really want to talk about how great this meeting was because Mike has done a great job of looking back at what we've done prior to this in terms of our assessment for our health and wellness and what we offer here in terms of resources and services, et cetera, and realized that we're really overdue for another assessment on that, and, you know, he engaged the committee in such a way that all of us, you know, he gave us the option. Would you like the district to work on this assessment and what it should look like and making sure this gets done or would you as a committee like to be involved? Everyone was yes, we all want to be involved and it made perfect sense for everyone at that table to be part of, you know, a group that looks at what assessment tool we're going to use this year and then making sure that is a very streamlined, efficient assessment tool and all of the different disciplines in that committee, you know, food services, social work, counseling, all of the... Nursing. Thank you. Big one. So anyway, we have the fitness director from, you know, the center, so anyway, all of these experts in this area are going to be really vital in making sure we have a great assessment and I'm really happy that Mike initiative and we're committed to making sure we get this assessment in front of us by April so we get to hear all the great work that is already happening but we don't get to hear about it enough especially if we haven't done an assessment recently in a timely way so I'm excited for us to get to hear about that work by the end of the year. SSD governing counsel was very basic. It was basically an introduction for all the new council members which I'm not so it was a, you know, here's what SSD governing counsel is, here's why we have it, here's how it's different than SSD Board of Education, etc. So not a lot of meat there but just a general first meeting of the year. Dr. Macklin and Shakita Moore were there as usual and they're doing an amazing... I want to give a give them again more props for continuing to fight the good fight and what they have to do in order to right the ship. They continue. The numbers they show at every single meeting are continuing to improve and faster than they even thought so I'm pleased to be able to report that. They're doing a great job. Before we move on to the next committee reports I apologize. I skipped over. I didn't see that. I wanted to announce some donations that we received in the consent agenda items. I wanted to thank Jay Douglas and Gail Workman for their donation of $2,000 to the globe. The Jewish Federation of St. Louis for their donation of $250 to the CHS debate team. DAF giving 360 for their donation of $500 to CHS soccer and also thank Big River Running Company for their donation of $700 to CHS track. So we thank all of them for their generous donations to the district. Gail Workman was my 10th grade English teacher. Oh, that's great. Ben, I think you had a couple of meetings. I had just one meeting so I joined the tech study committee which was awesome. Luke and Milena led that effort at Glenridge in the library. Very engaged group. It was really awesome. You would not believe how much tech is being used in the classroom. I mean the number of platforms and titles and electronic devices in the classrooms that assist and what the teachers do and it was really kind of structured around the empowered learning framework and sort of this is a tech study that's happened before so it's kind of a cyclical thing. Some of the key elements and we'll hear about this more like for example in the spring there will be a recommendation around devices but I think the work of this will also branch out into some different subcommittees so AI is going to be a huge topic. Obviously it's front and center for everyone these days and kind of looking at AI how it's used today, what are some best practices. There's also looking at some of the governing bodies around this kind of work like ISTE and others. I think the AI is a really important thing and I think there's a lot of good guidelines for this kind of thing and yeah there will be other things like infrastructure but really I think AI and the devices are the big goals for this year so it's been great. I'm excited to be part of it and it was really a lot of fun. Yeah. Great. Pam, you had some meetings. I'll start with the equity committee. So the equity committee was formed five years ago and so Cameron, we, Cameron has just completed the first five years and so he reviewed what has happened in these five years and set up goals for the next one to five and so just for all of us to hear that in the last five years there has been an expansion of affinity spaces at K-12 for our district, expansion of cultural celebrations, they have done the equity walk-throughs which led to building improvement plans for each of the principles, building principles, using the implementation of data driven platforms like Educlimber and the MTSS system so that was very exciting. He discussed kind of the new district initiatives now and there are four of them, two of them I think. Yes. One is the Clayton cares community series. They will be focusing on issues of anti-Semitism, LGBTQ plus, African-American and Asian cultures I believe. Okay. Then he also spoke about the no place for hate curriculum that is coming to or has come to our district and they really gave some time to these intercultural dialogue groups that we're now having at Wyedown and the high school that include students from the community that are from many or all cultural, I'll say many cultural backgrounds and the intention of this work is to maybe transition our focus of teacher to student to also add student to student and help students learn how to communicate with each other about their differences and I thought that that was really, there was a lot of emotion in the room when we talked about that so that's the equity committee. The second one for me was the Clayton education foundation which Nisha had updated us about but they basically made some bylaws, changes, they voted in two I think new members, discussed homecoming and the rack and roll bingo that is coming up November 1st as a fundraiser or soccer. That's it. Great. Any other committee meetings anybody had? Pam mentioned this but I was going to mention and thank Dr. Poole for organizing and creating the Clayton CARES community speaker series events as Pam said that highlight the Jewish African-American, Asian and LGBTQ communities and I assume there will be maybe one a quarter or I think that's how it's signed out and that the first event that's in partnership with the Jewish community is coming up on October 9th and it's been publicized on social media and on the website and I know the district has reserved a block of tickets for Clayton staff and families and community members for free so if you're interested in going everyone can go to the website and register for that so thank you Dr. Poole for I think this whole year all these events for the Clayton CARES community speaker event series will be great so thank you for setting that up. And for that event that you just mentioned as of today 71 people. And there's a block of 100. Hurry get your tickets. And I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about that as well so thank you Dr. Poole. I'm attending so I look forward to it. And with that I think we can adjourn. I should also mention or maybe we should mention that we're also been visiting the PTOs to talk about and to answer any questions that you have about the PTO and how we can get any feedback from the attendees there about our facilities planning and all the things that we talked about here tonight so I was at Mayor Mack. I went to Glenridge today and I know he's been to the high school and will be attending like all the PTO meetings for the next handful of months so thank you. Now we can adjourn. I move that the Board of Education adjourn.