I apologize for the late start, very late start of our meeting but we just came from our joint meeting with the Board of Aldermen which ran a little late which is an annual meeting that we have with them to review the budget of the Center of Clayton which we share so now we will begin our Board of Education meeting. Adequate notice has been given and I would like everyone to stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance please. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. To the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay. Okay. Chris would you read the motion to adopt the agenda please. I move that the Board of Education adopt the agenda as posted. Okay. It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Nope. Motion passes. Okay. Next on the agenda is recognizing our own and I would like to call on Dr. Poole who is going to recognize Katie Burkhart. All right. Good evening. So today we want to recognize Katie Burkhart who was one of our district social workers. She was recently awarded with a 2020-2025 school social worker of the year by the school social workers of Missouri. So let's give her a hand. Katie has been phenomenal not only as a social worker but as an advocate for children and an aid to many buildings in terms of serving especially some of our children with their highest needs. Katie has been with the district since the inception of us bringing in social workers so she's been very instrumental in building the foundation for social work in the district and being very instrumental in the systems that we have within student services. I can recall from this past school year when we had the tornado that devastated a lot of our citizens and a lot of our students. Katie working over the weekend and tirelessly through nights to create systems for folks to donate, for us to serve families, reaching out to families, making home visits, dropping off supplies and needed items for groceries and toiletries and a lot of the work that we were able to do through the tornado was pretty much because of Katie with her hard work and her determination and took a tragedy and really, really helped the district come through to help a lot of families so we are extremely thankful for Katie for her work and her service and yeah, we're extremely blessed to have her in our district. Thank you. Thank you Katie. Her family is here too. Can they come up for a picture too? Perfect. We're going to take a picture. Congratulations guys. Your mom is a rock star. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations Katie and family. Thank you so much for being here tonight and I'm sorry we started a little bit late for your family but we appreciate everything that you do and thank you so much for giving her such a great and thorough accolades. Thank you. Okay. We are moving now on to public comment. We do have a few public comments tonight and I'm going to start with Meade Greenberg. Good evening. I'm your resident squeaky wheel about this topic, the tech self study, so I just wanted to come back and kind of re-up some of my thoughts about it. First of all I was so pleased to see it on the agenda tonight. I'm really looking forward to hearing what the team has to say and I also just want to say thank you for doing it. I know it's going to be a lot of work but I'm really excited about it. I wanted to share sort of the way that I've started to frame this and the way that I think it kind of pulls together a lot of the concerns that I have and that other parents might have or that I do have. I think as we all know whenever there's a screen involved it's going to pull our attention, a child or an adult, our attention into that screen and my feeling and I think probably all of us in this room is if we are going to pull our children's attention into a screen, into a device, into something that takes them away from the teachers that are in the room, their peers, all the opportunities to learn with them, the materials in the classroom, the wonderful facilities that I know we're going to invest in, if we're going to take their attention away from what's in the room and pull them into a screen, into a video, I want those experiences to really be worth it and they should really be furthering an educational purpose and it should be mission driven and it should be backed by what the district believes about child development and our education system and what we want our kids to learn. So I just hope that the board can keep this in mind as well. I was so excited to see that there is a mention of balancing screen time with technology use in the classroom and that is so important and I just wanted to highlight that it's not just about screen time but the intentionality of how it's being used. I care so much about child development and I'm a mother of young children so my focus is obviously on that age group right now. I think particularly in the elementary years, but middle school and high school as well, the children's surroundings and their teachers that are in the room and socializing with other kids is so important so I want to make sure that any time that they're interacting with screens or videos it's worthwhile. But I also know that there are ways, there are reasons to use technology that can only be done through technology. My daughter came home and she was so amazed at me and I was amazed at myself but she said she saw a hippopotamus eating a watermelon and an alligator was eating a watermelon and the teacher was talking to them about the different animals and I thought great, there's no other way for my kid to see a hippopotamus eating a watermelon. That's totally wonderful. So I support the different ways to take coding and all those sorts of things. I know that presentation skills are really important so there's totally a role and a purpose for technology and education. I just want it to be really intentional particularly with our youngest learners so thank you so much. And I apologize. I meant to before you, thank you Meade, meant to remind everyone before you spoke about kind of our practices with public comments as you see the clock on the screens. Everyone has three minutes and also we don't respond to public comment at the meeting. We follow up afterwards so anyone who makes a public comment can expect an e-mail as a follow-up. Next, Ellie Gund. Hi. My name is Ellie Gund. I'm a Clayton alum and I'm also a current public school teacher. I'm here to address the board about the Clayton School District's partnership with ADL and I think that's inappropriate. Something that I learned through my Clayton education and something that I try to embody in my classroom now is that we should always be gentle and supportive to individuals while being critical of systems including governments. I think the Clayton School District had good intentions with partnering with the ADL. They were trying to support their Jewish students. Unfortunately in this partnership they've precluded students and teachers from being critical of systems which is an important thing for students to learn to do through their education. The ADL's definition of antisemitism includes that any criticism of the state of Israel is in itself antisemitic. That's simply not true and that's not aligned with the beliefs of Jewish adults on that topic. In November 2024 800 Jewish voters in the United States were surveyed as part of the biannual debate which is a liberal pro-Israel lobby. Those Jewish adults, 71% of them said it was not antisemitic to criticize how Israel was conducting the war in Gaza and 59% said it was not antisemitic to accuse Israel of war crimes. Now I want to be clear. Those voters did not necessarily think themselves that Israel was committing war crimes or was conducting the war poorly but they said simply to hold those beliefs is not antisemitic. It's not in itself antisemitic. I also want to highlight that the beliefs of young Jewish adults are very different from the beliefs of older Jewish adults on this question. Less than half of young Jewish adults ages 18 to 34 have favorable views of the Israeli government. Only 45% of them view the Israeli government favorably. And so by choosing to preclude criticism of Israel, the school district of Clayton is not criticizing Israel. What we need to do is put ourselves out of alignment with what their Jewish students probably believe. We need to be supportive of Jewish students, of Palestinian students, of Muslim students, and of Israeli students. We need to be supportive of those individuals but we cannot let this good intention of being supportive of individuals keep us from being critical of oppressive systems and oppressive governments. By supporting students, by supporting each of these individuals in our care, we can make sure that they are able to develop the critical thinking skills to form their own opinions but by precluding criticism we cannot fulfill our educational mission. Thank you. Francis, I can't read your last name. Okay, Piras, sorry. I wasn't going to speak today but I guess I'm up. So I am a resident of Clayton. I also serve on the Clayton equity commission. Two months ago parents from Glenridge addressed the incident that happened at Glenridge at our commission and that was sort of the first time I was introduced to the topic. They also expressed extreme frustration at the response from the board of trustees and the administrators of Clayton. Invited to the meeting was a person from this organization called the ADL, an organization I knew only by their nice sounding name, anti-defamation league, but not much else. They kept touting their program called No Place for Hate. Over the next 30 days that preceded our next meeting I did some homework on the organization as well as what the district does to make Jewish children above to look after the well-being of Jewish kids and as they should. There's partnerships with the Holocaust museum for example, there's people from local temples invited in to come speak to Jewish kids and so on. The Jewish kids in the high school even have a club. There's a lot that goes on. As far as the ADL goes suffice to say this is not a neutral organization and you don't have to dig very deep to find this organization. that is building a community including safety of Jewish Americans. Yes, anti-Semitism is wrong as is racism and anti-gay stuff and the list goes on, but surely there's a more neutral organization that gets us there. If we want to build an inclusive and respectful city and school district we need to stop putting our thumb on the scale for one side. Kids can see inauthenticity a lot of the time. I think we are in, I think we defeat the purpose of trying to stomp out anti-Semitism honestly and the last thing I would like to say is the graffiti also mentioned anti- black hate or racism but this has been completely lost in this discussion. The ADL is here for anti-Semitism. Who takes care of our black kids? I think we need to find something that's neutral that encompasses all these isms and there has to be something out there. That's it. Jessica. Jan code. I apologize if I mispronounced that as well. That's okay. Jan cozy. I also scribbled so that's on me too. Hello. My name is Jessica. I'm a CHS grad and current Clayton resident. I too am here to express my concern over the requirement that Clayton school faculty undergo a mandatory training with the anti-defamation league also known as the ADL. According to the largest progressive organization in the world, Jewish voice for peace, for years the ADL has used its credibility as a civil rights organization to silence critics of the state of Israel and their work has labeled anyone opposed to the state of Israel's suppression of Palestinians as anti-Semitic. This makes it hard to identify actual instances of anti- Semitism that are on the rise due to right wing extremism in this country. As such, I'm concerned that the ADL's presence in our school system will not contribute to erasing anti-Semitism. Instead it will contribute to an unsafe environment for students, teachers and school administration to engage in open dialogue and discussion around what the UN along with Israeli human rights organizations have deemed a genocide. The role of local school boards is to create a space where students can dialogue with others and learn, think critically and share their thoughts and experiences respectfully and safely. My concerns are shared with the largest union in the United States, the national education association who overwhelmingly voted this past June to cut ties with the ADL in recognition of this consistent bias and unreliability. This is the same teachers union that represents the majority of My questions are who made the decision to partner with the ADL for this training on anti-Semitism? Were other programs from other sources considered? Were students considered at all or given a chance to provide input? Were a diverse array of parents consulted? And on the topic of equity, what is the Clayton school district doing to address Islamophobia? Do Muslim and Arab students have a student group where they can engage with others? When I was a student at CHS, I valued that in my classes, clubs and as part of the globe, I was given the opportunity to think and speak critically about local and global issues. It was such an important part of my becoming a person in this world. I'm concerned that this partnership with the ADL is a step backwards. It creates a culture of silence and a fear within the school system for those who fall outside of ADL talking points. I ask the school board to reconsider your source for trainings on anti-Semitism and to share your plans for ensuring that Arab and Muslim students also feel safe and welcome in Clayton. Thank you. Hello. I won't speak as eloquently as the last three speakers because I don't have anything written down but I did want to talk about the same matter. CHS for me was very formative because of my history teachers and because of speech and debate. One thing in AP World that we learned was to take into consideration the bias of the articles and the first accounts of situations and topics that came about. So what was very important was not just the content that was being put out but who was behind putting out the content. Was it the farmers in the feudal system or was it the feudal lords who were standing idly and were in the palaces? Who was best equipped to tell us about the occasion and to tell us about information? In speech and debate we looked at both sides and were able to have conversations very openly about things that were happening around the world. What I'm concerned about is that the ADL has like the previous speakers have said has an inherent political bias that's going to take shape and that is and I'd also like to know why how we came to this decision to partner with the ADL and also what our relationship with the ADL is going forward as it has very concerning political views when there are other organizations that are more equipped to deal with training for antisemitism. Thank you. Thank you all. Moving along, agenda item four. I will turn it over to the superintendent for her superintendent's update. Thank you everyone and thank you for everyone who gave a comment. As Stacey said we don't respond but we will be reaching back out with e-mail responses so thank you for giving up some of your evening to be here tonight. Superintendent update, first thing, this is our first board meeting for the school year since school started so I should put it that way. First two weeks went really well. I got to visit all the buildings and went into the classrooms, the students, the staff, everyone had great positive energy. It was a very smooth start and everyone I spoke to I'm like where do we need to knock or keep this going but it went really well. Even the parents it was great. I'm trying to get in front of all the different schools at the start of the school year, school day I should say so I tried to rotate myself. Usually I always started the past few years at Clayton High School and I got to meet this wonderful group of seven to eight families who it was their first time in Clayton dropping off their kindergarten students so it was a great way to connect with the families and how excited and nervous they were but I'm already in touch with many of them who have said that they've had a great first week so it's been great just having that energy back. Then on Friday we had our first professional learning day of the year and in the morning we actually did a morning of service. Usually the first professional development day of the year. Half of it we do it from a district perspective in terms of bringing the whole district staff together so this year we decided to give back to not only Clayton but our surrounding communities and we gave all of our staff choice sessions and so over 65 staff members ended up helping at the North City Neighborhood Cleanup whether it was cleaning, we were making sure all the bricks were laid out, cleaning debris, picking up items, whatever was needed and it was interesting their feedback, of course it was amazing but their feedback was sad because many of them didn't realize the devastation that's still out there and as they drove away they felt like they didn't even make a dent, you know, spending the whole morning there so a lot of really good experiences for them and just for you and what you're doing in front of you but really for the greater community so that was one of the choice sessions and the others over 300 staff members were at Clayton High School and the rest of them in their choice sessions were either putting together care kits for our families in need or other families in the community we had over 50 that were packed and that was from supplies from our food and essentials drive that we did that parents also had staff baking treats for Evelyn's house for the families whose loved ones are part of hospice so we delivered those there. We had staff members writing hope notes for first responders. We partnered with BJC with that and then we also had a huge area where Jen McEwen from the wellness center at the high school ran and staff were writing notes for our students that were going to pass out throughout the year so a lot of variety, a lot of choice and a lot of really good feedback that they felt like yes it was part of giving back to the community but also connecting with one another as staff members so it was a great morning and the afternoon was content driven professional development where they all got together in PLCs to map out the year for them so great first professional learning day and then of course the work continues with our long range facilities master plan. Our workshops have continued. We had our athletic two athletic workshops in the past couple of weeks. We've had next week is a full day elementary workshop, Clayton High School workshop and we also last week for two evenings we took a tour to Spadey Elementary School and we had about 40 people that joined us including staff. We had students who came on the trip and we even had former board members that came with us so that was a great way for them to actually see the elementary schools. They had great questions and one of the things that was a theme from the tours was that it's something to see pictures of facilities like that but it's something different when you actually go and tour it and so they walked away just excited and energized with the possibilities of having new facilities that can help their learning and teaching move forward and so we felt like that was two really productive evenings and I'm sure Nina is going to talk about it because Nina joined us as well on one of the tours so that continues and one of the things I want to highlight with our community is as you know we've been working on this for I would say almost a year and a half now when we started the long range facilities plan journey and the board has prioritized three areas, right? Looking at our community and looking at our athletic fields and including Wyden Middle School and looking at the field there so with those three priorities means we need to have heavy community engagement and we invite everybody to our community engagement forum which is the first one. We're going to have three. The first one is next Wednesday, September 10 at Clayton High School at 7 o'clock and hopefully you're getting the emails and social media share the architect design team that we've assembled is going to share some initial concept designs for what the elementary schools could look like, what the high school edition could look like and what athletics could look like and that is just another place where I feel like we can get input from our community which is very important and then after that Friday we're going to be releasing a survey that will go through September 10. Parallel to that will be a phone survey that will be about 300 patrons who we're going to try and get phone calls from and we actually have a presentation tonight from the individuals that are going to be creating the survey and actually doing that. Excellence K-12 will be here later to explain that more in detail but again the point being we really need to have community input on it before the board and administration really be doing that in December. There's more workshops, more conversations but really when you look at the timeline it's between now and October when a lot of the work needs to happen for us to have a better direction on next steps so this is just the first community engagement forum and hopefully you get a chance to visit and if not we will obviously give a recap on e-mails, put it on our website and continue to share it. And then lastly we have three presentations tonight. As I said Excellence K-12 will be presenting a little overview of what the survey will look like. Dr. Garganigo will be giving a curriculum update that we do annually and ask the board to approve the curriculum and then finally we have a text study overview that Luke and Dr. Garganigo will be also presenting and that presentation is really just a forecast of what's going to be happening in the future. Okay. With that I'm going to hand it off to Nina for our student board update. Hi everyone. So like Dr. Patel said Clayton is currently in the process of developing a plan for a long-term facilities update and last Wednesday I got the opportunity to tour Spadey Elementary School along with a few other Clayton community members and teachers. Spadey Elementary underwent a major renovation in 2022 and now they have a new school and they're working on a new school. I know Clayton values and definitely emulate in a future remodeling. The layout of Spadey is designed so no time is wasted which is super important for younger kids. For example it takes less than a minute to get from their gym to their cafeteria meaning kids have more time to play and less time to be disruptive in the hallways. Additionally many of their classrooms prioritize flexibility and are beneficial for young learners because it prevents them from getting bored and feeling stuck while encouraging them to experiment with different ways of learning. Lastly my favorite part and the aspect I think is most valuable to Clayton is their focus on creativity. For example their garden which is small and doesn't take up that much space helps kids get outside and work with real life plants and animals. Their video lab which airs live announcements done by students every day is a great chance for kids to practice writing, public speaking and video production especially at a young age. All in all Spadey Elementary school provided a great example for what I think Clayton Elementary facilities could one day be. In talking with CHS students about the possibility of renovating gay field I got insight on what many feel would be most difficult. Right now many of them say they have a hard time finding a ride to practice. When I asked them why it was so difficult they said they were too intimidated to ask a upperclassman or they didn't know enough people with licenses to have a consistent ride. When I asked about the current state of athletic facilities they said they don't match the rest of the district in terms of efficiency and up to date. I was surprised to hear that practice. Some specific comments I got were the locker rooms at gay field aren't in great shape certain dugouts need more covers and when there's a game at gay field it's almost impossible to find parking anywhere. Even in speaking about these renovations hypothetically many of the students acknowledged it would be a long process and surprisingly almost all of them seemed okay with the fact that remodeling may mean a drastic change in day-to-day routine which was nice to hear. From these comments I think it's safe to say the student body wouldn't be opposed to facility updates. Next I'll talk about the phone policy. As I reflect on the first three weeks of school I can say one thing for sure. The phone policy is working. Not only are students not on their phones whether it's because they're doing other things like work or scared they will get in trouble but doing exactly what the phone policy was trying to encourage. Throughout the past two weeks I see more people talking and socializing and doing their work in school than I had seen in the past two years. While it's effective now I think it's important that teachers continue to encourage and remind students to ensure the success we're seeing now continues to happen presentation of the entire student body. Sometime in late September to early October I plan to meet with fifth graders from Glenridge, Merrimack and captain to discuss their comments and suggestions about their school experience. Additionally I'll meet with student council and SPSA club to talk about what's working Yeah, great job. Okay agenda item number six we're going to have the presentation from excellence K-12 and Gina Tart will be joining. Good evening. So I'm here with Rick. He's our partner from excellence K-12 and working with the Paragon and Perkins and Will team and give us an update on how the survey is set up and some of the details. Thank you. A little bit how do we advance this? Go ahead. A little bit about us. We're in Blue Springs, Missouri so we are in Missouri. We've been doing this for 17 years. We've experienced with a lot of school districts. We've had a lot of money. The national average for passing municipal bonds which includes school bonds is 55%. Our clients pass a rate of 95% and I say all that just to tell you you're in good hands. We're going to take care of you. Go ahead to the next slide and let's talk about the telephone survey so we're going to do a random digit dial phone survey of 300 individuals. We will call landlines and cell phones. We get a list of new phone numbers from a company in Fresno, California that does that and provides us with the numbers of everyone in the district. We start with number one and jump to number 20 and go to 40 so that's how we randomize it. It will be matched to your population pattern so that we'll ask you to and you already have given us three zones of the city of Clayton that match pretty much the elementary zones and we will complete calls to match the number of people in each of those, the percentage of the population in each of those. So if we do those two things it gives us a 5.6% margin of error. This is the same thing that Gallup and Pew in USA Today do. Random digit dialing has been used since the mid-1950s. I first used it in 1981. It's old technology but we use it because it works and nothing has come along to replace it yet. I'll talk about what we're going to ask in the survey. We're going to ask first of all about your brand. We're going to ask people to give you a grade on a variety of things, everything from safety to classroom to facilities to preparation of kids for college, everything you can think of about your brands will give us a grade, ABCDF. We're then going to ask if patrons are civic minded. We want to find out if you have people who understand that I will plant a tree today and I will never enjoy the shade of that tree. That's being civic minded. Then we're going to ask about each of your projects. So you have four projects we're going to talk about and then we're going to do tax tolerance and the way we do that is we have the amount of money it's going to cost the owner of an average home in the district to pass the bond at three different levels. At $200 million, $150 million and $100 million. In that way if they say yeah I'll go for the $443 a year at $200 million they're done. If not we'll skip down to the next one and then we'll go down to the next one to see where the tax tolerance lands. When you put together the interest that people have in the projects, what projects they like and what projects they don't, with the tax tolerance you have the formula for a winning bond issue. The next category we're going to ask is about communications. How do patrons get information about the district which will help Gina when you do your marketing campaign for the election and then the last section is demographics. We ask age, we ask time in the district, presence of kids today in the district, presence of kids or grandkids in the past in the district and we're going to give you in addition to a written report and executive summary we're going to give you a digital dashboard that will enable you to look at all of the answers to the survey against the demographic so you can kind of slice it nice and easy any way you want. Hearing the voice of the customer at the same time that we do the phone survey we're going to have three companion online surveys, staff and parents and general public. Staff and parents are captured audiences so you'll get great feedback from that and if you don't have your staff and parents on board you'll know that you're in trouble right away. The general public online survey does not have much in the way of a statistical accuracy but it gives us the chance to say everyone had a chance to have their voice heard and that's important from a PR standpoint. Same questions on the phone survey without the two, three open ended questions on the survey which are what do you think is the school's greatest strength and what do you think the school needs to work on and the communication question other than friends and neighbors where do you get your information about the district and we'll list out the different things that people can check off on that so we don't have a bunch of open ended questions on the phone survey. All of these will run concurrently and they're all going to start next Friday the 12th. Timing so the calls start on the 12th they will conclude on September 26th. My company will have analysis the week of September 29th providing the executive summary to the school district on October 3rd and then the digital dashboard will follow one week later so you should have the information that you need to have by October 3rd in terms of your bond issue and whether it's going to pass or not or what people like and what they don't like. Questions? Thank you. Whoever. Is that package of questions that you just went through basically the same one that you use if you've used for other districts you work with? Are you using it in a more deviating way? Yeah. The sections are the same so we ask questions with ABCDF answers but what we ask about is all yours. The same thing with the civic questions and the projects and the tax dollars so we feel good about the sections that we have but then it's all your information that you want to gather from there and I should say that we are at draft two on the survey. Dr. Patel and Gina and John have all had a chance to look at it. My understanding is that it next goes to the larger leadership group that includes the architects and then it will go to the Board of Education so everybody will get a chance to see the survey in advance and make any comments that you have about it, edits, what have you. We just need it by the 10th. But in any event you know what a good question is for this kind of survey and what a bad one is and you're going to exercise your judgment if you think we're asking a bad one. Yes. It's always the fun part of the job. Any other questions? I just thank you so much. I just wanted to comment that I really appreciated the civic minded questions and your tree analogy was perfect because it obviously works so well with what we're trying to do and hoping to get the community's support and hoping they're civic minded and realizing that what we're building is not for anyone here today. It's for future generations so I appreciate your focus on that as well as the tax tolerance questions. I think those are going to be really important and maybe the most important ones that are going to guide us. So thank you for that. Okay. I think a good point that you may want to make is the phone calls that you do, those are to registered voters. Yes. Or no. They are to people who have a phone in the district. We ask three qualifications questions up front. One are you a registered voter? Two are you male or female head of household and three do you live in the Clayton School District? We know they live in the Clayton School District because that's the list we bought but if they don't know that we probably aren't going to get to talk to them. But you'll be able to aggregate that and know the registered voters which is important to you. Great. Likely voters? No. Why? We have found in other markets over the years that the likelihood of likely voters is not projectable. I'll give you a quick example. We did a survey in Platte City which is north of Kansas City where the average number of voters had been 2,500 and if we talked to likely voters it would have been 2,500. Ran the bond issue and 17,000 people voted so depending on how volatile the projects are and the tax tolerance is you don't know who's going to vote yet. I would just ask us to really think about limiting the universe to likely voters and I would take two out of the last three municipal elections that happened, the last two competitive April ones and the one in August that just happened. You wouldn't take also in November. No. I would take the one, I would take your guys' one and I would take the one that happened last April and then I would take anyone who voted in King's election. Sorry. I would just. Or maybe look at 2019 where we actually had a bond issue. It was our last bond issue. There's a lot of transit. He's saying no? We'll trust the expert. I do think our community is unique. I do think Jason our community is unique and it might be hard to. But we do have more people come out on bond years in terms of voters than not. If we, when we get it will we be able to see for ourselves any breakout by age would be a question. Yes. We do have a age. So we can. That's a very helpful. As somebody who knocked on the doors from the list of that election that will be a very helpful thing for us to see. And I can tell you from experience if you ask people are you going to vote everyone will say yes. Yeah. That's not the question. You're talking about using a list of people who have voted in the past. Correct. And I'm telling you it's not projectable to people who will vote today particularly with the tax tolerance that you're talking about. Okay. You're looking at the top end at a tax tolerance of $443 a year. I realize it's a wealthy community but I will tell you I have never seen a school district pass anything remotely near that. Oh, so what is the highest? That's a good question. What is the highest that you have seen a school district pass as far as the tax tolerance? Good to know. So you're more than double that. I'm not saying you can't pass it. I realize the wealth here but that is a big number. All three of those are fairly big numbers. I feel like I should say we're not trying to get a $200 million. That's my question today. Huh? That number you just shared with us the 205 which of these are where in that range of your 200 150 or 100 million dollar bond issue which did that fall in? I have no idea. I don't remember. We usually don't do the total numbers. We usually just do the tax tolerance. I understand he's saying our highest of the 200 would be about $400 something a year. You said the highest thing you have seen pass is 205 per household per year and so I'm wondering about-ish what is How much did that get? Is that the 100 million? That's what I'm asking. If I take what Kim just said and I can answer that. Yes, John. 100 million is zero. Okay. Well, 90 I think. So then it's- So- Correct. Correct. Right. Because we already have- I'm sorry I didn't understand your question. Well, that's okay. He did. That's good. Thank you. I did wonder who came up with those numbers. Are those the specific numbers you're going to-we'll see the survey eventually but those you're going to put right now. Yes. Okay. And who helped-did John help you come up with that or is that something? Yes. You guys work together. John's been very much involved. We've been working through the different options and obviously calculating it together. Perfect. Yes. Great. The 200 million Chris if you remember like if all the projects we do the range that we originally heard was 150 to 200 million if you take care of everything on our list. But remember other school districts did multiple. They didn't do it all at once so that's the other thing so 220 might have been the highest or 205 might have been the highest you've seen but it doesn't mean that same district didn't go out two or three years later and ask for another 100, ask for another. And the 205 is tax tolerance. $205 for the owner of an average home. Got it. Okay. So not 205 million. Oh, got it. Okay. Okay. Any other questions or comments? Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm now very much looking forward to this draft and the results of course. Thanks so much. It will be a great process for you to go through and see what your patrons think. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Curriculum update. Dr. Garganigo. Thank you. Ready for a lot of me? Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. No, it works. Okay. Great. Good evening everyone. So I just wanted to recap why I come to the table every year so policy IF states the following things and we're really going to focus mainly on bullets two and three tonight so what you direct the staff to implement as far as the curriculum is concerned and then the fact that you will review and approve the district develop curriculum each year. So I'm going to go through some I've given you access to the documents that I think are the most important for you to approve and then I'm going to go through and just sort of highlight some of those pieces for you tonight. I'm back to networking. Gina. I can go without slides too if you want. Okay. I'll go without slides. So imagine a slide that talks about the self-study process so just a reminder that as a part of policy IF we talk about a curriculum review process. We have a six-year cycle for each content area within the school district. Years one and two are really mainly a self-study and some time during year one each area goes to the teaching and learning advisory council which is a committee made up of a group of students throughout the district and administrators to just provide input through our work as we're studying, as we're determining what we're going to study and how we're going to approach that work and then year two sometime in the spring of year two we give a presentation to the board where we ask for your approval of long-range goals, the financials that are attached to those goals and you re-approve the curriculum for that content area at that time so just a reminder that the focus tonight and also in the spring the humanities groups are the ones that are going to come this spring so that's literacy, English language development, social studies, world language, fine arts and then we're going to have a technology piece which Luke and I will talk about later. Okay. So our big focus with our curriculum Marzano states that in order to be a high reliability school you need to have a safe school, a safe school and a guaranteed and viable curriculum and guaranteed meaning it's aligned vertically and horizontally so across classrooms as well as across grade levels and then viable meaning we have enough time to implement that curriculum so a lot of our work we do in the summer is tinkering with that and making sure we have things that are aligned with state standards that are aligned within our system, within our district and then making adjustments to that. We developed a curriculum website as a way to be transparent with what we teach within our classrooms and so we put a lot of work into that and curated a lot of information for the public with that piece. This site will change with the upcoming changes to the district website and we're making some different kinds of changes to help make it a little easier to navigate and to understand some of those pieces so I think our time and theory of practice has shifted a little bit but always our goal is being transparent with what our teaching and learning environments look like in our classrooms so the pieces I'm asking you to approve tonight fall into four categories. One is our new courses and complete rewrites and we have a process we go through each year around new courses that I highlight. Some work around alignment within the district so when we make changes throughout the system. Reinstatement of courses so sometimes we, a course goes dormant for a little while because of student lack of interest or because of training for teachers, et cetera, and sometimes we reinstate courses and then just some minor adjustments that we make. So the summer work really falls into these categories and this year our new courses, so part of our new course proposal process is that a curriculum committee goes through the approval through the committee, goes to the building leadership team for approval, comes to the curriculum coordinators council which is all disciplines and then ends with me so I have the last right of refusal or approval and so our new courses this year are amped on algebra which is a combined algebra and business course and really is something that we're super excited about because it's really moving into this real sign up for this class it's anybody who their course as a freshman would be algebra so college prep algebra they can sign up for that course. It's a two period course in conjunction with business and their work is really around running the school store and understanding algebra concepts through this idea of business and then when I met with the teachers the other day they expanded my mental model of this because how much of the class is it? on the class and they're using that class to print all of their shirts and everything so they're working on all of those pieces so it's an exciting course and it's team taught with a business teacher and math teacher so the students get credit for both. Can we ask them to get extra credit if they run the concession stand? I mean seriously we can't get anybody to run those and we get complaints from visiting teams all the time that we have a concession stand that is always closed. I can ask. Yeah. So our second new course is walking fitness so we add new courses and we review existing ones to determine what to sunset and so the PE Department is a good example of a department that has worked to freshen their offerings over the past several years from traditional courses like net sports to walking fitness and strength and endurance in hopes of meeting the needs of our students so walking fitness was their new course. The total revisions are complete rewrites. Middle school literacy all three grade levels we did a complete rewrite with a focus on increasing the volume of reading and writing and math. You all approved the accelerated courses last year and so we completed the curriculum work this summer. These are compacted courses that move at a more rapid pace while still addressing all standards so it's a compacted 6, 7 class and compacted 7, 8 class. Latin we chose a new resource for our Latin courses. The new text takes a more up to date approach to language learning which is interesting for Latin and the topics are more relevant to learners in 2025 so we're trying to make Latin a more relevant kind of exciting topic for students to study. And similarly Spanish adopted a new resource last year which you all approved and we had rewritten the college prep Spanish 1, Spanish 2 last summer and this summer we finished the sequence rewriting Spanish 3 and Spanish 4. So then our courses around alignment within the district, our biggest example of that is social studies so if you remember over the past couple of years we've talked about the changes at the elementary schools to put the standards back into the grade levels particularly at key stage 2, grades 3, 4 and 5. That then subsequently had a change to 6th grade social studies last year which was a focus more on sort of geography and that type of study of social studies and then this year the changes in 7th grade which is a statement of courses at the high school we've had a change in teachers in our theater program and so we reinstated musical theater 1 and 2 and technical theater so what was happening prior to this was those courses were offered outside of the school day and we're in conjunction with the productions so the spring production and the fall production and so this puts it back into the school day allowing wider access for students and it's not tied to the production anymore so it's allowed students to study musical theater without being a member of the cast of the after school production and then we worked on alignment with the musical theater program at the middle school and then finally the small adjustments so most departments will have one or two courses that will adjust each year. I don't bring a lot of those to you because they're not big enough to feel like it's not a good use of your time but the ones that I wanted to highlight are the So with the development of the character with the bringing in the resource of character strong some of that resource is divided in a way that grade levels were sort of overlapping with one another on what they were doing so a child could experience the same lesson multiple times because of decisions that teachers were making so we developed a scope and sequence for it to say that these were the lessons that should go with kindergarten, these are lessons that should go with first grade, et cetera, and that has proven to be helpful to the teachers and I think will be more engaging for the children because there will be new lessons each year. And then elementary phonics continues to be a place for us to study and the addition of elementary grammar in making sure that we have a good solid scope and sequence. So as we've been training all of our teachers with letters, we've been making different decisions about what the phonics instruction looks like within the classrooms as well as just like what the sound walls and those kinds of things look like in the classrooms and so developing those tools in order to be aligned across the system. What questions do you have? I'll be really easy. I want to thank you so much for answering every question I had emailed to you before you got them all in there. No problem. I always struggle with this because I think that the boards of education weighing in on curriculum has basically been a negative process in a lot of cases so I don't have a lot of input on this but I'm going to break my own rule and note that some very activist and vocal constituents have over the years observed that there were not a lot of middle school literacy texts with female protagonists and there is now one in the eighth grade and I think that's a positive development. That's my comment. I'll also say with the middle school rewrite. With the literacy rewrite at the middle school some of what our decision at the time was in increasing the volume of reading and writing was to keep some of the core lit texts the same as they are right now because we have a process and it's like a financial process and a decision making process to cycle core lit texts in and out and so that continues to be work that we'll continue to do and diversifying the collection is one of our goals as a part of that work so I think you'll continue to see movement in that way. So I'll just say seven words you said that were really important because we also and again I'm not speaking on behalf of like speaking or not on behalf of but just articulating what I've heard from constituents is there's been a criticism of it seems like there's less reading and writing in the curriculum especially in the elementary and middle school and you said emphasis on increasing the volume of reading and writing so those seven words are very important and I want to make sure that I repeated them so that it's heard because I know that Nisha you've also heard that. Probably everybody at this table has heard that at some point and I think we heard a lot of noise about that particularly around the issue of are you getting rid of certain books that were beloved that I read and my father read and my grandfather read and are those now gone and so some of that's been kind of tied down but we still get pretty frequently like I don't see enough reading and writing so increasing the volume of reading and writing. Yes. That's great. I think the courses that you mentioned like AMP that are new are so exciting to me and I think actually there are like Kim mentioned there's so many other possibilities with that class that I think is really cool and I also think like the musical theater in the school day will be great. I know a lot of kids including my own daughter who had that been in the school day would have been really exciting but couldn't do it when they got to the high school because they played sports or whatever after school so I think anyway I think all of those changes the additions or bringing classes back are all really exciting so thank you for that. Any other comments or questions? Yep. So I'm going to go and piggyback on what Meade brought up and instead of just talking about screens in relation to what Luke's going to come up and talk about how much when you're doing your curriculum adjustments and corrections and all of these things do you talk about screen usage, how often it is but also the intentionality of it, et cetera? Right. So I would say historically we have not spent a lot of time talking about that when we've been doing the curriculum writing. I think what you're going to see in our next presentation is a forward thinking approach to how do we do a little bit of an audit of sort of where we are with that while also refreshing like I don't want to steal our thunder but a little bit of like refreshing our philosophy around technology within the system so I think it's going to come through that study and then that will apply to the other disciplines as we once we get that sort of landed. Yeah. I guess I'm just trying to help us see that we should also be looking at this while we talk about curriculum, right? They go hand in hand and if we do one without the other we're kind of chasing our own tail. I would agree. I think also Luke and I did some work this summer with the Ed Techs at the elementary level in particular to think about the connection between technology and empowered learning and so in particular instead of talking about technology for technology's sake talking about empowered learning and what are the tools which some can be screens but they don't all have to be screens. Exactly. You've said that before. That can help empower learning and actually on the 29th we ran Luke and I with the Ed Techs ran professional learning for the Key Stage 1 teachers specifically around that so it had a focus on empowered learning but there was a component of it that had technology use and it was more about the quick use of technology within a classroom as opposed to these long drawn out projects that have to be polished. There's ways to and Meade referenced it in her comment but there's ways to address the use of purposeful integration of technology into teaching and learning and that's what we're trying to tie that in with the idea of empowered learning. That's great. Thank you. Nina. All right. These all sound so amazing. I'm just thinking a little bit about what this will look like at the high school especially with the AMPED program. I'm just wondering would this be something available to all grade levels or could you only be enrolled in the class if you're currently taking algebra or is it just a prerequisite? So it is an algebra class so if you're ready to take college prep algebra 1 you could either take a traditional prep algebra 1 course or take the AMPED course which is college prep algebra 1 with this business component. Next year our plan is to put geometry and construction into the program of studies which would be a similar thing of like a combined CTE geometry course so it would be a geometry credit plus a CTE credit. So it would like count as your algebra or geometry credit? Absolutely. Thank you so much. It is. It is. It's two periods. Yeah. So they're meeting every day. So the way that we schedule it is so they can meet every day so they're meeting on an A day and a B day. It's like fourth and eighth hours so they're meeting every day and the teachers are dividing up what that looks like as far as the algebra component and as far as the business component but the goal is that all of it focuses on the algebra 1 standards. The students would take the algebra 1 EOC at the end of the course so that also will give us a good read of the algebra learning within that course by having that sort of formalized measure in place. I have one other question. I was wondering when I heard you say that it satisfied a business requirement does it by any chance also satisfy the state requirement for personal finance in the way some other high school business classes do? So that one does not. We have a personal finance component that's embedded into econ. Right. That can meet that but the amped class does not. Okay. I will move that. Thank you. Okay. And we'll move right into the technology study overview. Oh, wait. Sorry. We have to approve the curriculum. I apologize. I was getting confused because it was a presentation but we do annually approve the curriculum. Go ahead, Chris. I move that the Board of Education approve the district curriculum as presented. Second. Okay. I guess we already have our questions and comments. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? None. Motion passes. Thank you. A lot of exciting stuff. Okay. Luke, now the technology study overview, please. You're still stuck with me. Okay. Ready? Okay. The first slide of this presentation is going to be a little bit more complicated. This presentation is going to look very familiar because I just talked about it. So, again, our self-study process, we're going to move into a technology self-study. This is a little off cycle for us but we think it's important to start this year with the self-study. So it would be a two-year self-study. Sometime during this year we'll meet with the Teaching and Learning Advisory Council to talk through some of the work of the committee and we'll go more in depth with what that work will look like. We plan to come to the board with a device recommendation this spring and then year two coming with the long-range goals, financials, et cetera. So those are going to look like two separate reports and then we would have the four years of implementation. Self-study really allows us for a deeper dive when we're looking at these content areas. We're constantly working and making adjustments throughout the years so we don't wait for the right time to do it. And within the self-study we have a tendency to look towards site visits, consultation with outside people to help inform our deeper dive. So just a recap of sort of where we've come from. These were our goals that we developed in 2022. They really fall into two areas, one around teaching and learning, so the what we do with technology within the teaching and learning space, and then the other is like the stuff. So what do we need to buy and what do we need to have in place in the walls and the ceilings and everything in order for the hardware to work and also with the hardware? And what are we provisioning both to students and to staff? So those were our two main areas of focus with those goals. We felt it important to talk through a little bit of the background of the fleet of devices and this is really student devices that we're talking about. So in 2016 when we came with the technology study our recommendation at that time was a one-to-one Chromebooks at the high school and not be one-to-one at the elementary and the middle school, but they were carts of Chromebooks, iPads and MacBooks K through eight in order to really diversify the thinking of how we could use the tool in the teaching and learning space. As a consequence of the pandemic in 2020 we split those carts up and went one-to-one. So that was really what allowed us to when we had to go to remote learning the fact that we had all of those carts and that we had a fleet that really could have gone one-to-one if we needed it to. We ended up needing it to in order to continue teaching and learning at that time. And so we moved to putting all the iPads in grades K through two Chromebooks in three through twelve one-to-one at the elementary school. Generally the students do not take those devices home sometimes in fifth grade or in fourth grade. There may be some movement towards students taking devices home. And then we maintained some specialized devices in some teaching and learning spaces. So our project Lead the Way courses had some different devices. They needed more powerful devices in order to do some of the work. This cycle then aligns somewhat with the life cycle of our devices. So we cycle devices out of the fleet every four to five years. So you'll see that like the 2016 to 2020 to now we're at 2025. We're sort of paralleling the life cycle of devices. So it's a good time for us to be studying this to make a recommendation to you as to what we would want to move forward with and what are our needs within our teaching and learning spaces now as opposed to where we've come from through the pandemic. So I'm just going to hang on the fleet for just a moment longer because we're already there. It is part of the year one in the study. We thought it would be important. You know, Malina had mentioned earlier that this is kind of like an audit and so we've kind of gone back and we've looked at some things that we've heard and feedback we've gotten and then how we've kind of worked with that feedback. Also mentioned earlier that, you know, challenges that we've had have not we've not waited until this process to fix. So we are constantly working to improve all areas as this goes along. So just real quick, some of the things that we heard, you know, when we when we originally rolled out the iPads, you know, there was a little bit of a learning curve, I think, for some of that and how we deployed the apps that teachers and students need needed in light blue there or anything that we've already really come up with solutions for. And so we were able to get an MDM that kind of handles some of that process like allows the district to retain ownership of applications and things like that, which was important. You know, with Kate through two students, they're younger. The process of logging in needs to not be complicated. And, you know, and this was this was a common theme that we've heard and schools have heard having done this work for many years. It's been common in that process this year. We're really excited that here early on we've rolled out a new tool that is allowing our K through two teachers to really make this process super efficient through a company called Clever and it is cleverly getting our kids in so that the teachers can do what they need to do and make sure that it's not spent, you know, typing in things and passwords and emails and all of that to get kids in. To kind of just transition, our Chromebooks we've heard a lot over recent times and, you know, just to share with some of the things that we've heard from students, from staff, you know, common things that we would hear would be processing power, the speed of login kind of is connected directly to that. We hear repeatedly that they're clunky and heavy and the screen resolution, a lack of touch screen. Just so you know some of those things we do within the larger cycle have smaller cycles for, you know, just being able to roll in and out devices. So the devices that we did bring in this year actually were meeting some of those needs. So really honestly improving a little bit of the processing power even though we didn't highlight it there but it did improve screen resolution and it did add in a touch screen. But that is a portion of our student body because that's how that process rolls in over time. One of the big things that we do see commonly obviously with Chromebooks being a web centered device, right, it is based and built to be just a web browser. That we have a lot of situations and courses that do require more than just a cloud solution or being able to do something through a website, whether that be through, you know, certain computer engineering programs or design work, whether it's with the Adobe suite and beyond. There are a lot of instances where these just don't do that work. And so that is something we do here regularly. We do meet that need through, you know, fixed labs and things like that. So those are just some of the things that we're working through. This is, you know, an audit headed into this study of kind of some of the things that we've heard and some of the things that we've been working through. We do know right off the bat that, you know, we have areas of focus, things that we've heard, things that we know are prominent in the space right now. You know, you get five years down the road, four or five years down the road and much in this area of technology changes. And so there are some big things right now, especially as we approach the subject of AI and artificial intelligence and its role within our classrooms. You know, we want to make sure that we have a district philosophy around that use that protects students. That is it makes sense to be able to be used for educational purposes. And we want to make sure that it is a clear a clear picture of what we expect as a district. And then we've we've spoken a couple of times tonight, a major part of this study. We do envision that it's going to be the role of technology in teaching and learning as a whole. Right. So what does that look like? What is balance look like? What is equity look like within all of this? You know, we want to make sure that when we are using technology that it does it has a purpose. It is a tool. It is a resource. And as the technology person, yes, I love that, you know, technology is growing and everything like that. But it is also our job to make sure that, you know, we are we are making sure that the learning outcomes that we are supporting that and it's not taking the place. It's not becoming the goal. It has a tendency to become the goal. We hear technology and then our our our mind runs there. So we don't want that to necessarily be the case. And then we already talked a little bit about the the replacement cycle. We know that's an area of focus. We know that that first year we're going to look hard at what is most appropriate for for for our students and more. And then an infrastructure analysis. You know, when we talk about technology, one of the biggest things that we continue to have to invest in and look at is cybersecurity, student privacy, and then just some of the bare bones things that we know we have to keep up with. And that's just the stuff that nobody sees behind the scenes. Some of that infrastructure related items. So on that note, it's kind of the high level view. Are there any questions that we can answer? Anyone have questions for Luke? Hi. Would you speak to how the new policy JFCD slash state law will impact this work for you? Yeah, I'll speak to a couple maybe ways that I envision that we kind of have talked about some of some of how this work is going to be a part just natively of that. We know let's just we can see that we have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to do to start with the device fleet itself. So one of the things that we will really be studying is that we have the right device for our students that can meet the every need of our students. And by saying that we have situations now, obviously, where our devices may or may not meet every single need, in which case that has brought in the need and the use of external devices. Right. And so we are going to be asking the question, OK, what can we do as far as the device fleet that will diminish any use of external and with the diminishing use of external, it does allow us to manage the devices more aptly. Like we're able to control those devices better. We're able to guarantee safety better for those devices for the students, which is ultimately the goal as well. Our goal being to to the sort of line that we put into that policy about during this year that we would be on a B.Y.O.D. To remove that and to be able to have a device that meets the teaching and learning needs and that the children would be using the district provision device. I just want to say I like that you said that you're going to be presenting this to the teaching and learning committee, not just because I'm on it, but means also on it. And it reminds me back to what Chris was asking that that's a group of people who this committee is comprised of parents and teacher other teachers, staff members who usually what we discuss is curriculum. So to have this piece into our discussions as the teaching and learning, I think is a great way to see how they come together. Anyone else for Nina? I'll make a comment and then a question. Just as you go through this process, I do think it's important to keep in mind how policies and practices around technology in school play out at home. Just keep in mind that, you know, the device that you give these kids to use every day is also the one they have at home. And I know certainly during the pandemic, it felt like I in my house and I think a lot of people felt this way. You lost control of technology in your own house because of what was necessary for the education. And then the question is, have we looked into obtaining a hippopotamus and bringing it in to eat a watermelon? I don't know that I could say a hundred percent we haven't already looked into it. We do have a pretty great zoo, so it's possible. I'm just saying we could look into it. Nina, did you have any questions or comments? You don't have to. I mean, this is just a comment. I really like how you guys kind of talked about maybe talking about a strict wide policy or philosophy. I know from my experience, it can be a little bit confusing because in a lot of my classes I hear that, you know, is not acceptable. And in other classes I hear that it's fine to generate ideas. So I think that's definitely something that I love. Great point. Okay. Anyone else? Okay. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okay. We'll now move to number seven and start with policy 7.1, the first reading of policy IND. All right. Here I am again. So policy IND about ceremonies and observances, the change is simply a change of name from math, engineering, technology and science to science, technology, engineering and math. So my recommendation is that you accept this as proposed. I just want to know why we are required by law to recognize bird appreciation day. I would actually like, I thought she was going to ask, I would like to understand how we're celebrating this. And I said we're on spring break every maybe time. Because I've never heard my kids talk about that. Imagine the amount of feedback I got from the principals when I told them that, when I gave them this list of things. That one was the one that was highlighted, but I reminded them that it's during spring break. Okay. That's fine. Because I was like, I have a graduate of the high school and a junior and a senior and they've never come home and talk about it. But our way of acknowledging a lot of these is through morning announcements. And then some of the bigger ones would be things that we would focus more on within the classrooms. But bird appreciation would be something that if we were not on spring break we would acknowledge through the morning announcements. Do we do any of number five? Sorry, what did you say? Do we do any of those? We do disability history and awareness. I guess that's true. We do emancipation. We do that. And Emancipation Day, that's right. And then there's some things that happen within social studies classrooms. But I wouldn't say that they're like, we're not big patriotic day celebrators. Do we know why Bird Appreciation Day was? I do not. But I think it was in a previous version of this that you all approved. Okay. Okay. Just a first reading. Let's move on to the first reading of EGAA, the copyright compliance. So this policy language change really in response to COVID when online education and the use of copyrighted materials became just a little bit different because we were doing things online. And so educators traditionally have operated under a fair use provision. And I think as a consequence of COVID that started to bring up more thinking about what is fair use and things that were traditionally seen in classrooms on walls or used in classrooms were moving towards digital spaces and shared electronically in cases. And so that generated some new interest in this policy. The language to me feels tighter but not drastically different from what has been in place before. So I would recommend adopting the changes as proposed. Any questions or comments on that one? Anyone? No. Okay. Policy IGCD virtual courses. Uh-oh. What about IGBI? IGBI. Oh, sorry. Yes, IGBI. Okay. I thought I had them in the wrong order. So IGBI homeschooling and other educational options. This is updated to align with Senate Bill 63. There's language and clarification including defining the terms like family-based educational schools and homeschool. That's the main changes here. So again, I would suggest that you adopted as presented. Any questions or comments on this one about homeschooling? Oh, I'm still on green. I sent this in my email to you. But like homeschool and homeschooling is spelled I think in three different ways in this document. And I know you said it's probably because of which grammar tense it is. Yeah. So it is intentional that when it's a noun it's spelled as two words. When it's an adjective it's spelled as one word. And when it's a verb it's spelled as one word. That's silly. I felt like a good sentence diagramer in doing that. To be in a more informed board or at least board member, how many folks do we have homeschooling? We don't know that because families are not required to let us know that information. But what about one of these policies talks about they need to let they encourage the family to let. They encourage them. But it's not required. But it's not required. But we are directing staff to conduct outreach to those that are telling us. So when they do contact us or when so when families generally speaking it's the direction of family is enrolled in the school district and is making a different decision. So it's not often that we sit down and have conversation with them. It doesn't often happen the other way that somebody is already homeschooling and that we reach out to them because we don't know who to reach out to. Okay. Yeah. That helps clarify. Okay. Thanks. Okay. Now IGCD virtual courses. So the specific changes in this one relate to districts not being able to deny enrollment because we prefer in person learning. Also the district has 10 business days to make a decision when a family lets us know that they that they want their child to enroll in a virtual course. And then if a student is denied access for some reason they have a right to appeal to the Board of Education within 30 days. I would just say for in practice we do not deny. So we let a family make a decision that's the appropriate decision for what they feel is the appropriate decision for their children. So I have given direction to the principals to actually not deny that when the first virtual laws were put in place they were written as very family friendly student friendly language. And at that point we really weren't allowed to deny any of it. So we've continued that practice. If we feel like a child might not be successful or as successful in a virtual setting we may have that conversation with a family but we're not going to deny their access to the course. We feel like that's a family decision. And then this update says that we don't have to allow students to participate in extracurricular activities who are in virtual courses. But that's coming in the next IGCDA. And so we're so I would suggest that we adopt this as presented and then we're going to talk about IGCDA and the language in that one. OK. Any other any other comments on this one. OK. IGCDA full time mocap virtual courses. OK. So the difference between part time virtual and full time virtual. We the part time virtual courses the district pays for for a student to participate in those a full time virtual student who's applying to be in a mocap program so mocap mocap providers are ones that have entered into a contract with Sometimes their school districts so Springfield is a mocap provider. We actually don't use Springfield as a mocap provider because we're a partner district with them. So we started before all of that happened. But there are other districts within the state of Missouri that are mocap providers and then there's other companies that are mocap providers. So a full time when a student wants to be full time virtual they are disenrolled from the school district of Clayton and they enroll in the partner district. They are not if it's a company. So if it's a school district they're going to enroll in that school district. If it's a company there's no there's no district to enroll in so they stay on on our books in that case. The the language throughout this policy I would suggest that we adopt it with one change. And we've already asked MSBA to make it red for you. So the paragraph that talks about access to district facilities I'm suggesting that we not adopt that language. I when a student's a full time virtual student and they're enrolled in another school district in order to do that full time virtual I don't think we should be providing the facility for them to do their schooling. I think that's the responsibility of the family to figure out that piece. So I would suggest that we line that out. So we actually asked MSBA to make it red for you now. The other things that are coming in this update it's to comply with Senate Bill 63. Sorry just in case anyone didn't see it it's not red it's just lined out green. Oh yeah it's red on mine. Sorry. The the other thing the update is really to comply with Senate Bill 63 and this is going to go with a policy that Cameron's going to talk about and it's about residents students who are in a home school a family based education or a virtual school that they are allowed to participate in extracurricular activities through the school district of Clayton. So that's an important change which in IG CD was like you you could choose. No we can't choose. Now the statute is that that we would allow them the students to participate and the changes are that the other changes that are included in this are updates from Senate Bill 727 which talk about the parents enrolling directly with the mocap district. It talks about the host district initiating an IEP process. So if a child unenrolled from Clayton enrolled in Springfield as a full time launch student through mocap Springfield would take care of the IEP process and reinstating that piece and then that mocap providers should inform the home districts of disenrollment which does happen. They let us know when a child generally they'll also let if we have a friendly relationship with them they will generally also let us know when a child is not being successfully like not successfully completing the course and if we have a relationship with that family we can reach out to that family. So my suggestion would be that we adopt it with my one suggestion of a change of the facility piece. Sorry that was a lot of words. Yeah. Any questions or comments on that one from anyone. When it says access to district facilities does that mean like having a classroom to use in our schools. That's how I interpret it. OK. It is not the part underneath it which is if you want to participate in our sports. No no and we did check with MSBA about we we weren't really comfortable with that idea of just opening our schools to people who are taking courses with some other school district and they agreed that we could a lot of liability there. Yeah yeah. OK. I L A test integrity and security. OK. This one is really if you notice there's a whole lot stricken from this. It's really about simplifying the language to be more overarching about assessments in general and ensuring that practice administer assessments as directed by the individual assessment manual. So the training that we do with our teachers so they sign off on the test integrity and security policy every year before they practice any assessment we go through each assessment with them and go through the manual with them to make sure that they know what they're doing for each individual assessment. So I would suggest adopting this as presented. It fits with what our practices are you the district wide test coordinator. So I am like technically yes it's but it's because of the hiring of Robin Hogg we sort of share that role right now and we haven't really made a decision about what makes the most sense. So where we've drawn the line right now is anything related to the state falls with me anything that's local falls with Robin. OK. OK. Any other questions or comments on this one. I actually really appreciated the changes in this one. I could not believe how wordy it was. I agree. Like some of those are so redundant and unnecessary. So thank you for all your work on that. OK. I G D A A. That's Cameron is Cameron. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good night. Resident participation student involvement in activities and events. So I G D A A is a new policy that MSBA drafted as a result of Senate Bill 63 which grants residents students who don't physically attend school. So homeschool students family based education. So we're going to be providing a policy that outlines the guidelines and guidelines and kind of guardrails around protecting those students rights to participate in activities. Do you have any idea like the number of students this would impact for us. Hard to say. Do we have any you're aware of that would do that would that currently would want to participate in sports or something like that. Yes. Homeschooled are all virtual. Definitely. We over the years we've gotten inquiries especially as it relates to music band orchestra things like that. So it pretty much creates again guidelines for those students to participate and be a part of that. This is oh sorry we're going to go. No this is not about the policy and so I you know about this policy particular but I can tell what I'm about to say it's about to become a issue of mine so I'm just going to say it so there's language in here about in fact it's one of the questions on the cover page about vaccinations and students should have the same vaccination rules. I don't know if everyone saw there's a now issued push in the state of Florida to remove vaccination requirements for schools. If that's successful this board will end up dealing with that. My guess is sometime in the next couple of years. So just to put that on everyone's radar that's just you know I can't imagine that's not coming down the pike. Well and at the same time with California Washington. So following that under health and safety section. The first line where it says you know district requires parents to provide proof of residency proof of age proof of immunizations or exemptions from immunizations. Can we put an adjective in there of something like approved or legal exemptions from immunizations for now until the state changes this. Under health and safety I don't know what page it's on. I got you. OK the first or the second actually the second line to just add instead of just like an like a legal exemption or a medical exemption from immunizations rather just any exemption from. Does anyone disagree I don't know what word would be better legal or approved or professional or something authorized maybe authorized. Thank you. Attorney. Very easy to get an exemption. But it's good to have that word. Anything else any other questions or comments on that policy. From anyone. OK. Thank you Cameron. Thank you. We are going to move now to GBC staff conduct. This is a second reading but it doesn't need to be the final reading if we have if we have additional comments or suggestions we could have another reading to. Thank you Kelly. We had our first reading at the last meeting and we had lots of discussion. We made many changes and then from there sent those to MSBA to see what they said that we could do and made those changes. I know a lot of our board members had questions that they submitted in advance that were really probably things that this group wants to continue to discuss. And I'm happy to continue to take notes make any changes and then whatever we think we want to bring back for a third reading if we don't think it's ready we can do that too. I have a few questions but I'll let anyone else go first. I'm happy to go through my list. Sure. OK. So number four I'm going to have to be going back and forth. I have could you move the third clause we emailed about this. Can you move the third clause to the first clause as the negatives of the first two are confusing to the positive of the third? And I just wanted to see if people agreed. Yeah. Meaning it would read this includes refraining from disparaging comp. Wait this includes refraining from addressing concerns through appropriate internal channels comma disparaging comments. Well could you move the third clause to the first. So it wouldn't be refraining from addressing. This includes addressing concerns through appropriate channels comma refraining from. And. I got to read this again. Avoiding contact that undermines the work of others and addressing concerns. I just felt like that addressing concerns through appropriate channels should maybe includes refraining from and then putting that one first disparaging and then avoiding. Refraining from first. Includes refraining from. I think the refraining from applies to all three clauses. No we want them to address concerns through appropriate channels so that's not a refraining. But it says handling. So I think that's why this includes addressing concern. Thank you. That's why it sounds like it's part of the appropriate internal channels comma refraining from disparaging comments about colleagues of the district comma avoiding conduct. OK. That's what it is right now. The way it is that refraining it looks like it goes with all three of those things but we don't want them refraining from addressing concerns. OK. So addressing concerns from appropriate channels would go first. And then refraining would be. Then refraining from those two other things. It's not refraining. Refraining doesn't go to all three. There's three verbs refraining avoiding and addressing addressing goes first. Yeah. That's actually really important because that has a totally different meaning. Good catch. We had a couple of extra commas and they got five without comment. We'll talk later. We'll talk later. We'll talk later. OK. Go on Pam. Sorry. Number eight. I'll just say my question and then we can say your comment to me. My question was the words appropriate and board policy seem vague to me. Could or should they be clarified and what is appropriate and what is appropriate differs by the eye of the beholder? And you said that it's about professional boundaries and you could reference our student staff relationships policy to anchor it. Yeah. So in that particular one like it's hard to explicitly prohibit everything that anybody might ever possibly do. Yes. So that's so weird. Right. So that's why I don't know that we would want to add a whole bunch more but in other areas of policy some of these things show up like in our staff to student relationships policy. So I didn't know if that would help to clarify to direct them to that policy as an option. Another option might be for us to consider having a procedure that goes with this policy. So in other places we have you know policy is much more of you know bullet pointed sort of broad statements and then the procedural part is more of the specifics that we would get into one of the other pieces with procedure. Is that something like a CO team meeting we can adjust the procedure as needed. It's not something that the board has to write the policy. So it also gives us a little bit more leeway at making those adjustments when we need to make adjustments too. So that might be something to consider. I like that idea. I also like what you said. It says that aligns with board policy but there's a lot of board policy and so maybe anchoring I like how you said to anchor it in the specific board policy. I'm speaks to this. Does everyone agree that we want to try to anchor it to back to the student staff relations policy. If that as long as we're sure that's the only one if there's another one it might also pertain to it we should list that too. Well you're already saying that it aligns with board policy. Once you start listing yeah then it kind of everything else. Legal counsel. The phrase you're looking for is including without limited to. But yeah but you could use that. But whatever the appropriate whatever the policies are they're there. There's probably more than just the one. I am I be afraid that it's a mouth as Kim just said I just it feels so vague to me and I understand there's a reason. I think. Every single policy. Yeah. So maybe we should make it a plural world plural word board policies. I don't know. I agree that that's what it means. It means all board policy. That's what it means. So is consensus aligns to board policies. Do we need to do that or no. We don't because board policy just encompasses everything. So I think consensus I agree it's vague but I think it's intentionally vague. It's precise but complicated. If you followed it all out there would be answers but they're long and they're in other policies. So it's a tree. You just have to go out and find all the leaves. Skip to my last one and I will no longer go for the after the vague ones. Number 16 is saying that our teachers cannot under any circumstance without violating policy tutor students in the district even if they are not their own students. We have a policy that says they may not tutor their own active students. But this is saying they can't tutor any student in the district. All right. In the very last sentence it finally makes it explicit. But yeah I do think there's strategic there. It could be clear. I don't think it's something that I agree with. To limit it or to which don't you agree with? Right. There's a kid wants to be tutored in math and there's another math teacher who's not that kid's teacher who can help this kid. So this is one of the areas that we've had a lot of conversations related actually more specifically to the staff conflict of interest policy. With that it came up to even how different departments are interpreting our current conflict of interest policy. For example if I'm a geometry teacher and Nina's in my class Nina might get tutored in geometry by one of my colleagues but because we're both geometry teachers we have access to the same assessments. We are in a PLC together. We have professional relationships. Perhaps you know if the other tutor is telling Nina things that I'm not doing correctly that's creating a hardship. So we do see areas that potential problems could arise by having one teacher in the same department in the same course tutor someone else's kid. Obviously it would fall under our current conflict of interest policy that I would tutor Nina if she's in my class. I wouldn't do that but we don't have policy that would explicitly prohibit Nina from being tutored by my colleague even though we teach the same course. So that was like one of those interpretations in a different area. So I don't know what the board wants to do as far as that policy is concerned but it is an area that needs discussion and clarification. So if we adopted this as is saying no teacher can tutor any student do we need to then go amend the other policies? Right and I think we are all under the impression that no matter what our staff conflict of interest policy is in need of review. So that would probably happen no matter what but what direction that goes will be a result of the direction that you guys provide. Do you know what other districts do? I was just going to ask the same question. What's the standard? I don't know what every other district does specifically. I know in Rockwood it couldn't be your same content area so if I was a math teacher I couldn't tutor in math so it was content area. But like you know Nisha had given an example of tutoring for the SAT would be different than me tutoring for math specifically. That suggestion is actually maybe a good compromise is not in the content area because that would avoid departments having the issues you kind of described earlier. But I don't know what else you would do. So then how does that fit for like elementary? If I'm an elementary teacher I teach all content areas probably. But maybe not your grade level. But then you might have that kid the next year or the year after. I don't know. You're doing a good job convincing me that this is the way to go. Yeah I actually think that's. We're the highest paying school district in terms of salaries. That's the other argument for. Well I have no problem with a teacher tutoring kids at Ladoo or Burroughs or Brentwood or like name your area of school. I just think if they're looking to do that you start accepting money private money from district residents while your kids in the district. I just think that you can see how that snowballs five or six different ways over time and ways that we don't really want to deal with. Yeah. That's a good point. Recommendations for college all kinds of elementary school student teacher whose buddy teaches at the high school and you know I mean I could make up. We could all make up a dozen things. And I could see the situation you're describing Kelly's and math is the one that comes to mind for me too. They give all the same tests. They're very well coordinated. And I do think based on our conversations our math department has been interpreting the current policy of that if I teach geometry I don't tutor in geometry. Like I think that was how they've been interpreting it. But I don't know that that would be the way other departments are interpreting it. So we need to make it more black and white. No this would mean if I teach math I'm not tutoring and really this is even more specific as written right now. It's that we wouldn't tutor school district of Clayton students because we have access to them and in other ways if I want to tutor students I would tutor students to go to Liddy or M.I.C.D.S. or somewhere else. And I would provide my services to my school district of Clayton students you know through study or help sessions or Greyhound time or whatever. I wouldn't be making additional money off of them just because I already have access to them that I am paid a salary for. So I'm not saying whether I agree or disagree with that but if that's the case then why do we have this clause? If our policy is going to be they can't do it no matter what we should take it. Then we don't need that. Then we don't need that. We don't need that. You're right. I totally agree. Take out that phrase. Because there won't be an activity that we're describing. No I agree with deleting that phrase. That clause because it's unnecessary if they're not doing it all there are no activities. So the consensus I'm hearing is that we as a board do not think that our staff should tutor give private lessons make money off of any school district of Clayton student and that we want to take out the last part about the Which we should do soon because now whenever we if we approve this tonight or next time. Should probably do it at the same time. Right. Right. It's maybe a reason to put off voting on this tonight as we approve them at the same time. And then you guys in that same section it says employees may not use their position district resources or access to students for personal financial gain such as promoting wish lists or soliciting gifts. I'm not sure exactly what that means by wish lists. But what I do know is that the PTO collects wish lists and what and like places that teachers like to go in terms of telling that to the parents so they know what kind of gift cards to buy as gifts. I had a question about that too. If it was do you if you mean like for personal things or like teachers that post on Amazon wish list for their classroom. I don't know which way you. Teachers that post the Amazon wish list for their classrooms is what we are trying to say we don't want to do. We are very blessed that we have the resources that we have in the district. There are avenues for teachers to get whatever they need for their classrooms and we would like our buildings our district to be getting teachers what they need for their classrooms and not having teachers put out wish lists for you know a new chair. Yeah because they do. Yes. And so this year as those have come to our attention we've let them know that like we it's not really a look that we're going for is it explicitly prohibited in policy right. Like up to this point it wasn't. But like I think there's a lot of good reasons why that's not something that we want to do. OK. Are there PTOs that do this in an organized fashion. Yes. Yes. I know they do it like like at Merrimack they do for like meals for parent teacher conferences. They want to know like teachers where do you want dinner from. You know they do it for classroom supplies too. I do think in my opinion it would be different having the PTO run it versus I'm posting it on like my Facebook page. The employees do they're not. Taking the action. It's parents taking action. I like that. Because there are many parents that I was included that wanted to donate often and still do donate often to classrooms. So I don't want to preclude parents from being able to donate. But just through the PTO. But it should be through PTO. When the PTO promotes it it's OK. The PTO may be outside the purview of the district or might totally off base on that. They are outside. Yeah. So. It says employees may not use access to students and families. That would be the PTO. Personal financial gain. That feels like the PTO. But how is that the personal financial. But that's employees using their access. If the PTO is promoting it. It's the other way around. So the way and maybe the. How do you think the PTOs know what the teachers want. They come to the PTO. I guess my point is. Well Kelly you're going to say it better than me. I don't know that I'm going to say it better. But what I was trying to get to with the with the way it's written which evidently it's not. So we probably need to rewrite it. But is the whole idea of like if I'm teaching this group of kids and I'm the art teacher and I say I'm going to run art camp and you're all going to come to my art camp like I am benefiting personally financial gain because I had access to you all. You're my students and now you're going to come to my art camp. So it's more of that. So like wish lists are actually a separate thing than this like whole idea of like I'm making money off of you in a different way. No idea. Your art camp idea. Yeah. Is covered in the new first. So maybe we take it out of that part. Take what. Though the second part. So let me go up here. I mean I know I think we still need to mention the wish list. If you're wanting those to go away. Are we wanting wish lists to go entirely aware. Are we wanting inappropriate. Inappropriately used wish. I mean this is really for a kid for the holidays. Here are my favorite stories of Plaza Frontenac. You know. No but she's saying that's what we're trying to avoid. No she's also saying they're trying to avoid Amazon wish list for their classroom supplies. But if the PTO is organizing it that's right. But teachers. I don't think it does. It's not intended to. It's prohibiting teachers from posting on Facebook and Amazon. And you're sending them just to me. If the PTO is asking for our favorite things or buying wish lists like that would be separate. It's still initiated by the PTO. Right. And not by the employee. I don't remember what they do it when the choir sings at Barnes and Noble and there's a list of books to buy for the classroom. That's not intended to be captured by this. I wouldn't think it's for the classroom. It's not personal at all. But you had had an event planned at Barnes and Noble and they're. Yeah I think it depends. Maybe all the schools do it. I don't know but Merrimack has like every December there's a book fair at Barnes and Noble. You know the kids every kid grade choir comes and sings and then teachers have sort of like these are the books I would like for my classroom. You know since you're here. School sponsored. It's not a teacher promoting their own. Like I want these like posters for my class. If you want teacher wants posters for their classroom we can get a poster. And that's a PTO event. Oh yeah. If it's PTO then that's separate anyway. And with heavy school involvement because the choir classes. Because Miss Schenker says I'm happy to bring my kids to sing for Saturday morning. Yeah that's right. No I'm going to beat it a little more. So you said your intention with the wish list is for parents not to buy things for the classroom because we want the school district to purchase everything needed for the classroom. Not exactly. It's for teachers not to advertise their own personal wish list for parents to buy things for their classroom. If the PTO if the building if something like if there are drives happening if a parent reaches out and wants to you know give something. But what we want to avoid is teacher A is making an Amazon wish list and putting it on their personal social media and sending it out to everyone. Like that's the kind we don't want people soliciting gifts if a parent provided a gift that would be different. OK. So the only thing that I think so I'm going to beat the horse now too. The only thing that I that I was thinking which maybe could get a little murky here is our social workers which are employed by the district often put out lists of things that they want for families. And those really are considered wish lists. We might want it is not for it's an employee but it's it is an employee. And you're it's kind of like a very gray line then between well social workers can do it because they need it for their kids. Well I need spiral notebooks for mine and it's the procurement process going through the district is takes two weeks and I could send something out to the parents and I know I could have 12 spiral notebooks here at 8 a.m. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. So I think it's important to have social workers do it for personal gain and not coaches that look for separately. I do think that's an important distinction. The social workers aren't doing it for personal gain. They are passing it on to our needy families. The teachers are doing it separately. Neither is the coach who says I would like parents to throw in for a new fill in the blank. The wish list that we're really trying to prevent are I'm going to say are still personal gain. If you see some of the stuff on the wish list it wasn't that all the kids want basketballs to play with at recess. It was more specific to classroom decor and things like that so it was kind of different. So how do we how do you feel about Jason's suggestion or Nisha? How do you feel about getting them approved first? How about we add without prior approval? Or you take it offline and discuss. I'm not trying to put anyone on the spot. I think Kim's point is an important one with the social workers. They are still employees. We're not voting tonight anyway so you and Nisha can talk this out. I think this year Kelly already emailed the principals, gave them guidance on the wish list and instructions basically on if you have someone who is putting out a wish list please make sure we have a conversation about it. It's not formalized. It's not a procedure or any of that so I think the discussion that's happening right now knowing we have the staff conflict of interest policy that we will bring together that Kelly and I work on a procedure about wish list. Right. Building level. If you think that's the best way to go. Yeah. Because I know that also then brings in subjectivity as well. Yeah. That's hard to how we write that. Okay. So we will, Nisha and I will have a conversation about the wish list and potentially look at turning that into a procedural piece instead of a policy piece. Okay. I had a couple questions too. On number 12, only district approved platforms and accounts may be used for official district communications. The second sentence employees may not use personal or private accounts to communicate with students that communicate with students. I'm just wondering does that to you mean like a private direct message somewhere with one student or could that be interpreted also as putting a post on their like you know Facebook or Instagram page or whatever that is also communicating with students if the students are following them I just wasn't sure what you were intending. How do you deal with coaches that have text threats with students or teachers? That's pretty broad. So I thought it needed some clarification. The coaches use the group me a lot. So is that, is group me district approved platform for our coaches? I don't know what platforms Steve Hudson has the coaches will also, for the captains of the teams they're reaching out directly to say hey I've got this, I'll give a good example. Soccer jerseys were designed after the boys one state championship last year. They had three designs they reached out to the captains of the team via text and said what do you guys think? I want to get your input since you're captains. Directly from the head coach to the boys soccer captains. We're going to prevent that. So in our student I think it's the student staff relations policy there is a whole part on there about electronic communication and it does have some of these exemptions like needing I don't know if the coach one is specifically called out but it's like if you were chaperoning a trip or something like there are some exemptions in there already so the essence of the way this or my intent I guess of what I was trying to get at is we don't want a staff member communicating one on one with a student through different social media platforms. So you meant one on one. Like DM. Yes but to go back to your question Stacey I do think although maybe we don't want to explicitly call it out in the policy it would be a problem if a student is going to a teacher's public facing social media and writing that they disagree with the teacher and the teacher is commenting back and forth like it's not appropriate. It's not professional. Do we need to have a policy that explicitly prohibits it? Probably not but I don't think we want that happening so even if somebody did take it a step further to think like oh this is being prohibited you probably shouldn't do it. It's not a great idea. Employees may not use personal or private accounts to communicate with students. It doesn't say social media accounts either. You have to limit it if you're going to do that. Yeah. Or you just have to take it out. I mean is this covered in number eight? Sort of. Yes it is. Maybe we just leave number eight. Maybe we don't need number 12. Omit number 12. Got it. I mean again I see there is a line. We also don't want our teachers and our students texting. You know what I mean? That becomes an okay thing for them. Yeah and like I said I do think that where we have the more concrete prohibitions of these things are in the student Which we're going to look at next time too. Okay. I had one more question. On number 10 which I know we kind of went back and forth about the very last line unprofessional offensive or discriminatory content even if posted on personal accounts may result in disciplinary action if it undermines the district's reputation. Could we add or consider adding if it undermines the district's reputation or causes a disruption of the educational environment? So I think we could send that one to MSBA for their approval. Their guidance was actually to omit number 10 as a whole. I know. So they're probably going to not want to add anything. And let one in three cover it. Basically what they're saying is that ultimately teachers do have First Amendment rights and they said at a minimum we had to omit like the last sentence which I did in what is presented to you here so I mean I can definitely add that and send it to them and see what they say. I was just looking for like that type of discriminatory offensive content. We don't want to just take action if it's undermining our reputation but also if it's like disrupting the classroom environment or the educational environment. It already says it. Does it? Second sentence of 10. Personal social media use must not disrupt the work or school environment. Oh, okay. Never mind. Never mind. Okay. But remember even if it disrupts the environment if it's protected under the First Amendment it's protected. It is protected. I know but I wanted us to have something to be able to say. There isn't any disciplinary action we can take against a staff member of the district if their conduct is protected under the First Amendment. Nothing. If it's black and white. Yes. I mean yes. That's the question. Yes. Of course if it's protected under the First Amendment but it's sometimes... But whether it's disruptive of the educational environment may impact whether it's protected and also this is a lot of legal analysis that we can't really do at this table. Correct. Okay. Never mind. But never mind. I saw it. I didn't see it earlier in that one anyway so forget it. Okay. So we're going to let that one stay how it is for now? Yeah. Did MSBA recommend we take it out? MSBA's initial... We had another sentence. When we initially got it like when we made the changes after first reading they said they're recommending... I mean I can read you specifically. So why did we not take it out? Because we opted with the lesser one which was to take out the last sentence so their quote was... Are you taking it out too? I mean it's quite a long answer. Do I prefer to take it out? No. I mean I don't really have a strong preference. I feel like the contents of number 10 are covered elsewhere and if it's going to bring in a question about the validity of the entire policy or undermine the policy then I would say take it out. If it doesn't then I don't think it's going to be a good I don't really care. What he said. That makes sense. So we're okay leaving... Cutting out all of 10. Cutting out all of 10. We think it's covered elsewhere. This is coming back. There's like two or three other places where it talks about social media. My comment was I don't know why it's limited to social media. It's just model professional ethical behavior. Behavior and show respect. Like the end. So I don't feel strongly about number 10. That's my position on that. Well I'd be curious to see if the other policy addresses this. So I guess. MSBA their statement was much of speech issues are legal gray area. Additionally these are the types of issues that often end up in court. I would recommend at a minimum leaving off the last sentence of 10 as many of those things are too vague and should already be covered by one and three. We did that. Ultimately a teacher does not lose their right to speak on this matter of public concern just because they're a teacher and districts need to be aware that there is some level of protected speech for their employees. So then she says please let me know how you'd like to proceed. To be safe I think it would be best to remove 10 altogether and let one and three cover everything. However as the legal review states at least some of 10 will need to be removed. That's what we did. Even if you don't remove it in its entirety. Please let me know your thoughts and I'd be happy to adjust your draft. So we took out the last sentence and left the rest of it. Here's really the question is could someone come up with an instance where we would need number 10 in order to hold that staff member accountable because it's not addressed elsewhere within the policy. If no one can come up with an example of that then we should just strike number 10. It becomes superfluous. Superfluous. Let me help you out there buddy. Thank you tag team partner. So. I see it's also in number four. Like some of that stuff is covered in number four. So. Did they recommend we take anything else out? No. That was the only one that they recommended that we take out. And I mean they gave like this is the whole you can see like there's a lot. They gave some legal cases on why which I know we're not going to bring up at the table but so anyways. We need to take it out. Yeah. Okay we'll take it out. Okay let's take it out. Let's take it out. All right. Omit 10. Got it. Okay. Are there any other comments or questions? From anyone? Oh go ahead. The email that I sent yesterday Nisha did you get that to Kelly about the few couple of things that I said? Yes. Okay. Did you see those Kelly? There were two. One of them was adding a couple of I think you already did you take out Did you change number six? Number nine? I don't think this is what I. No I didn't change anything after we submitted this draft. So anything that we wanted changed because it really needs to be a discussion once it's like posted it hasn't been changed in here but if there's something that you want changed we can definitely discuss it at this table. I wrote staff I feel like it should say specifically staff are encouraged to include it says to share concerns about staff conduct specifically instead of just saying to share concerns I'm saying to share concerns about staff construct staff conduct. So staff are encouraged to share concerns about staff conduct? I don't know if we want to limit it. No are we asking staff to share concerns about staff conduct? Are we asking staff to rat another staff? That sounds horrible. I think the point is don't go telling other people about it but tell the I'm sorry which one are you looking at? Nine. We're looking at nine. Of course we want staff to be able to talk to whoever they need to talk to about how they feel about their work environment. Don't you want to treat don't you trust that our staff will act as professional adults and are doing that anyway? I think that's really outrageous and that seems like really a little I just was going with Pam with saying just share concerns is very concerns about what? That's all I was getting at. About what? So it's just about anything? Yeah. I think I wouldn't want to limit it because what if they have concerns about it? Okay. That's a good point that you're making. And staff conduct does that concern would fall under concerns? I guess I'm trying to empower the staff to know that they are allowed to talk about it and that's Kelly? How would you? I think this one is actually more intended to kind of encompass like if I have a concern with like my supervisor I don't go ranting about my supervisor on social media. I go to my supervisor and I say listen. Exactly. That's how I was interpreting it. Yeah. So it's more about like expressing concerns, questions, things like that through the appropriate channels which would be with that person involved. That's how I interpreted it. Yeah. So I don't think it's just about staff conduct. I think it is meant to be concerns and constructive criticism. That's helpful. Okay. Great. And then the other comment was that those three paragraphs at the end I feel like those should be at the very beginning of the policy. I feel like those paragraphs are very powerful. They're very well put. They seem very in our language and they literally ground everything that we're going to say in all these points. Yeah, I agree with that. Okay. I like that. Move the last three paragraphs to the top. Got it. Thank you. Okay. So anything else? We need to make a motion to bring it back. Oh, we hadn't made the motion yet so we're good. I don't think we need to change it. Yeah. I don't think we need to amend it because we didn't even read it yet. Correct. Okay. Great. So we're bringing it back. Good job, Leo. Thank you. Thank you, Kelly. But you need to make a motion to approve these. I don't think we need to change the other policies. No, those were all first reads. Okay. This was the only one. Okay. Okay. We're moving on to action items. Your board curfew should really be like 9 o'clock at the latest. I think 9 o'clock should be or whatever you feel is appropriate. If you, yes. Yes. You too. Thank you so much for all your input and your report. Thank you. Nina also was on the calendar, is now on the calendar committee and Kate was at a meeting the other day with us which was like again very valuable voice to have there. Okay. Moving along to action items. Our first action item is our resolution condemning anti-Semitism in schools. I'm going to read it aloud and then Chris will read the motion to adopt it. School district, well I guess I should preface this by saying. Oh yeah. Can, Gina, can you click on the resolution? I guess just for a very quick background on this. In light of anti-Semitism we saw last spring physically on our own school building and what happened in our own community in August in addition to everything all other kinds of anti-Semitism we're seeing in our region and the country and the world that the board felt this was an important resolution to adopt and write. So I will read it aloud before we make the motion and have comments. School district of Clayton board of education resolution condemning anti-Semitism. Whereas the board of education of the school district of Clayton affirms its commitment to ensuring a safe inclusive and respectful learning environment for all students staff and community members and. Whereas schools play a critical role in fostering understanding empathy and appreciation for diversity while preparing students to engage in an ever changing world and. Whereas anti-Semitism has no place in our schools or community and causes harm to individuals undermines a sense of belonging and conflicts with the district's core values and competencies outlined in the profile of the Clayton learner and. Whereas the board of education recognizes the long and enduring history of anti-Semitism and acknowledges that in the present generation anti-Semitism has experienced a drastic resurgence through harmful words actions and symbols. Whereas the school district of Clayton is committed to actively combating hate speech harassment and discrimination by advancing policies practices and education. That promote respect safety and inclusion and. Whereas the school district of Clayton is committed to implementing protocols and procedures to report address and track incidents of anti-Semitism and. Whereas standing against anti-Semitism aligns with this district's mission mission to provide all students with equitable access to high quality education free from fear intimidation or exclusion. Now therefore be it resolved that the board of education of the school district of Clayton hereby condemns anti-Semitism in our schools and community. Affirms its commitment to fostering safe inclusive and respectful learning environments where every student staff member and family feel you feels valued and protected. Stands in solidarity with Jewish students families and staff who have been targeted by hate speech or discrimination affirming that they are valued members of the Clayton school community. Calls on students staff families and community partners to join in actively rejecting anti-Semitism and to work together toward a culture of respect empathy and unity. Supports the implementation of enhanced anti-hate curriculum for professional learning opportunities educational community programs and academic programming for students. Adopted this third day of September 2025 after the meeting we will all sign this and this will live in our documents online with with our other resolutions. Will you read the motion and then we'll have any questions or comments. Thank you. I move that the board of education approved the resolution of the. Board of education condemning anti-Semitism. It's been moved and seconded any comments or questions. I do have a comment prior to being a board member in 2020 I was very I took a lot of pride in knowing that our board at that time made sure to create a resolution around anti-bias and anti-racism and it was a resolution that was it was in reaction to what was going on in our community at that time and a way of supporting all of our community members and making sure that this that board at the time was very clear on their values and their support for everyone in the community and I am really happy to be on the board now to be able to have this resolution at a time when I know this has been something again we are addressing a real need and calling on the school board and the board to make sure that we have the support of everyone in our community to make sure that you know hate is addressed in all forms so I really appreciate that we're doing this and I I'm sad that we have to do it you know I'll just say that but here we are making a stand and I think that's the right thing to do. Thank you. Any other questions or comments before we vote? Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Motion passes. Thank you. And action item 8.2 is the Paragon contract for architectural services. John? The contractual agreement before you engages Paragon and their collaborator Perkins and Gold for architectural services. This particular agreement also will interface with the construction manager at risk contract. It's been a long time coming since we selected them three months ago but I can tell you that June and July were interrupted with many people's vacations and so it didn't make a lot of progress during those months but it is finally negotiated and it has full legal review by our lawyers over at Toothkini and it's ready for your approval. I'll be happy to take any questions. Any other questions? No. Do you want to read the motion? I move that the Board of Education approve a contract with Paragon architecture for architectural services related to an academic wing addition at CHS along with renovation and or reconstruction of all three elementary school buildings. It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor? Oh, yes. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Yes. Any questions? Yes. Thank you for this and when you shared this with Toothkini did they have any comments or suggestions for change that you had made before we got to see this? This document has had many changes and the areas of discussion were really around our expectations that they take responsibility for code compliance in all forms that they don't limit their liability whatsoever. There's various attempts to do that in the original drafts and really then finally limits to fee that fee cannot just accelerate due to cost of construction, due to tariffs or other unabated inflationary influences. So those three issues took lots of back and forth. Joe, the contract is with Paragon. How does that relate to Perkins and Will? What's the relationship there? Paragon is the architect of record. Perkins and Will is a collaborator. They're the design architects on the project. They are under contract specifically with two Perkins and Will. Perkins and Will is under contract with Paragon. Gotcha. Okay. So not directly with us? Not directly with us although their name appears in this document several times. Okay. And they have been part of the negotiations and legal reviews. And one would presume that as contract provisions flowed out of them similarly? Yes. Okay. Thank you. And they're on the hook as well from a liability stance. You know it shouldn't be, you always think back to the classic problem of the Hyatt disaster many years ago when there was a major architectural failure. I mean school buildings shouldn't present that kind of risk but nevertheless we didn't think that their liability should be limited. Anyone else? Okay. Okay. Thank you. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Motion passes. So now we will move to consent agenda. If you could read that motion please, Chris. I move that the Board of Education approve consent agenda items 9.2 through 9.9. Okay. It's been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments about anything on consent? Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Motion passes. So board communications. Leo or Ben, I think there was a CRSWC meeting. Do you have anything to report from there? I would direct you to our previous meeting. I mean we discussed the budget which was the subject of our meeting earlier today. We discussed a request from the opera theater to use some parking and I think there was an openness expressed to continuing that conversation with them. I think those were the highlights. Okay. Great. Anyone else have any committee meetings? I had a PTO council meeting last week. It's what they call their kick start or jump start meeting to kick off the year and so everyone, a lot of new PTO officers so everyone meets each other and I gave a board report and Nisha gave a report and I updated everyone on facilities and I updated them on policies and things we were reviewing or would be reviewing soon and we talked about that we're going to be attending PTO meetings so we can give them brief updates on facilities as one of our many avenues for communicating all of this out to the community. They then break up into small groups based on their positions. All the treasurers meet, all the secretaries meet and they kind of get little training and bounce ideas off of each other so all the schools are aligned. Gina is there as well as the staff person. It was great. They have a lot of energy, a lot of energy to start off the year which is great. Okay. That's all. We can motion to adjourn. I move that the Board of Education adjourn. Okay. Moved and seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Good. Motion passes. Thank you. We're adjourned.