May 27, 2020 — Meeting Transcript

Okay, welcome everybody. We are going to, is everybody ready to get started? Everybody good? Okay. So welcome. Adequate notice has been given and we are going to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and that flag behind Sean. So I'm going to just, we're going to start with the Pledge of Pledge allegiance to the flag, to the republic for

which it stands, one nation under God, with

liberty

and justice for all. All right.

Awesome. Thank you all. So we are going to start dive right into recognizing our own.

So Sean. All

right, thank you. Can you hear me okay? All right, thank you. Well, good evening everyone. It's good to see everyone. So as part of our recognizing our own, we're gonna recognize a few individuals who've been doing some amazing work in our district and one of the ways that our community has been able to stay connected and to celebrate our students and our families and our teachers has been these community parades. And I know some of you have attended some of them and we really appreciated that the city of Clayton has sponsored these parades and they've gone through our neighborhoods and have been an opportunity for our kids to come out on their front porch to be able to see their teachers and be able to say hello. And We also know that our families belonging to Clayton is not defined by their proximity to Clayton. And so we have members of our community who don't necessarily live in our neighborhoods in Clayton. So I think that when we're thinking about an equity lens and we had some leaders in our district who said, you know, we really need to be thinking about how do we expand those parades beyond just the city of Clayton? And so two Saturdays ago, we held parades in the neighborhoods of our students who participate in the voluntary transfer program. And then we also went through the neighborhoods of our student who live in Normandy. And so to get the organization to make that happen took a lot of leadership from several different people in our district. And so I wanna recognize a few of those people tonight. And I mentioned this at the last board meeting, but really wanted to take some dedicated time to recognize Robyn Wiens and her department, which includes Julie Englehart. And Robin really pushed us to make this happen and said she was gonna be able to take lead on this. And then she solicited the help of Doug Weiner and Tarita Rimes who are the assistant principals at Widown Middle School. And collectively, they came up with a plan which engaged the police department of the city of St. Louis, which engaged the police Department of Normandy, which engaged many, many teachers within our district and community members. And it was a true celebration. And then Robin not only was able to engage our leaders, she asked Tammy Webb and I think Tammy might be on the call. I'm not exactly sure, but she oversees all the transportation for our voluntary transfer program. And she is just a truly dedicated person to the program. And so she helped arrange to get bus drivers from the voluntary transfer program to be part of the parade as well, which was very touching because they have special connections with the students as well and for them to be able to see the students. And so the day was quite magical and it was just amazing to see our families come out and we were able to celebrate them. And honestly, more than just our students, The community just loved seeing this giant parade and it was a really exciting day. And so I just wanted to take some time at this board meeting to recognize those leaders who are constantly making sure that we're taking an equity lens on what we do in the district and then also making things happen. And it took a little bit of planning and they made it happen. So thank you to all of you folks for doing that. Bravo. So Joe, I also want to go ahead and take some time to recognize two other very important people. And so we want to recognize two board members who are actually leaving the board. And that is Lily Raymond and Kristen Reddington. And so we wanna take just a few moments tonight to recognize them for their years of service and uh just to i'm gonna the way we're gonna get started is i'm gonna get started and then uh joe is gonna uh also say a few things but um lily i'm gonna start with you and um just wanna say a few things to you about your leadership and your dedication to the district it has been so unbelievably evident in all these years your dedication to our equity work is going to have a long lasting impact. And I know that no matter what your role is in the district, you're gonna continue to push us to make sure that we are making that a priority and we appreciate you holding us accountable to that. I do appreciate your extreme commitment to the board And making sure that you look at a lot of the details and making sure you are asking questions to push our thinking and to help grow our thinking. And you've done that consistently throughout the years. Just personally, I admire you for... The things that a lot of people don't see about you is that like the way you dedicate yourself to the student that you tutor and what you've done over the years to have an impact on him and how to question the support you have for students that you are volunteering for. And also just, I love how you get excited when you talk about your daughters and when you are just sharing their accomplishments. And they're an extension of you, and I just love seeing how excited you get with them. So I want to say thank you for your service, your dedication, your willingness to push us, and the time that you gave to this board. You definitely have a legacy. So thank you.

right, thank you. Can you hear me okay? All right, thank you. Well, good evening everyone. It's good to see everyone. So as part of our recognizing our own, we're gonna recognize a few individuals who've been doing some amazing work in our district and one of the ways that our community has been able to stay connected and to celebrate our students and our families and our teachers has been these community parades. And I know some of you have attended some of them and we really appreciated that the city of Clayton has sponsored these parades and they've gone through our neighborhoods and have been an opportunity for our kids to come out on their front porch to be able to see their teachers and be able to say hello. And We also know that our families belonging to Clayton is not defined by their proximity to Clayton. And so we have members of our community who don't necessarily live in our neighborhoods in Clayton. So I think that when we're thinking about an equity lens and we had some leaders in our district who said, you know, we really need to be thinking about how do we expand those parades beyond just the city of Clayton? And so two Saturdays ago, we held parades in the neighborhoods of our students who participate in the voluntary transfer program. And then we also went through the neighborhoods of our student who live in Normandy. And so to get the organization to make that happen took a lot of leadership from several different people in our district. And so I wanna recognize a few of those people tonight. And I mentioned this at the last board meeting, but really wanted to take some dedicated time to recognize Robin Wiens and her department, which includes Julie Englehart. And Robin really pushed us to make this happen and said she was gonna be able to take lead on this. And then she solicited the help of Doug Weiner and Tarita Rimes who are the assistant principals at Widown Middle School. And collectively, they came up with a plan which engaged the police department of the city of St. Louis, which engaged the police Department of Normandy, which engaged many, many teachers within our district and community members. And it was a true celebration. And then Robin not only was able to engage our leaders, she asked Tammy Webb and I think Tammy might be on the call. I'm not exactly sure, but she oversees all the transportation for our voluntary transfer program. And she is just a truly dedicated person to the program. And so she helped arrange to get bus drivers from the voluntary transfer program to be part of the parade as well, which was very touching because they have special connections with the students as well and for them to be able to see the students. And so the day was quite magical and it was just amazing to see our families come out and we were able to celebrate them. And honestly, more than just our students, The community just loved seeing this giant parade and it was a really exciting day. And so I just wanted to take some time at this board meeting to recognize those leaders who are constantly making sure that we're taking an equity lens on what we do in the district and then also making things happen. And it took a little bit of planning and they made it happen. So thank you to all of you folks for doing that. Bravo. So Joe, I also want to go ahead and take some time to recognize two other very important people. And so we want to recognize two board members who are actually leaving the board. And that is Lily Raymond and Kristen Reddington. And so we wanna take just a few moments tonight to recognize them for their years of service and uh just to i'm gonna the way we're gonna get started is i'm gonna get started and then uh joe is gonna uh also say a few things but um lily i'm gonna start with you and um just wanna say a few things to you about your leadership and your dedication to the district it has been so unbelievably evident in all these years your dedication to our equity work is going to have a long lasting impact. And I know that no matter what your role is in the district, you're gonna continue to push us to make sure that we are making that a priority and we appreciate you holding us accountable to that. I do appreciate your extreme commitment to the board And making sure that you look at a lot of the details and making sure you are asking questions to push our thinking and to help grow our thinking. And you've done that consistently throughout the years. Just personally, I admire you for... The things that a lot of people don't see about you is that like the way you dedicate yourself to the student that you tutor and what you've done over the years to have an impact on him and how to question the support you have for students that you are volunteering for. And also just, I love how you get excited when you talk about your daughters and when you are just sharing their accomplishments. And they're an extension of you, and I just love seeing how excited you get with them. So I want to say thank you for your service, your dedication, your willingness to push us, and the time that you gave to this board. You definitely have a legacy. So thank you.

Thank you, Sean.

Kristen? I want to say thank you for your consistent leadership on the board and your emotional investment into the board. You are a person who is constantly comes back to holding us accountable for doing what's right and making sure that we're working in the best interest of our students. And I would say that you're a person who leads with heart and creativity, like always willing to ask the question of have we ever thought of this or have we ever wanted to do something like this and kind of pushes us outside the box of maybe what people think the mental model should be. I think that it's really important to recognize that your leadership has expanded beyond just the board in terms of all the committees that you've been a part of that have also a long lasting impact on the district in terms of expanding our programs within the district, our science curriculum, looking at how you were the board president during the Prop E campaign. That has a systemic impact on our district and will have an impact for many years to come. And then just on a personal level, too, I, you know, echo what I said about Lily. I love when you talk about your kids, just being able to hear you tell the stories and how you not only show that excitement for your own personal students, for your kids, but you also talk about the other students in the district and seeing how excited they are. And I know that you've gone far and beyond for individual students in this district as well and making them feel part of your family. And that is very admirable. Both of you have been on the board for a number of years and your input in leadership has had a systemic impact on initiatives, capital improvements, learning and the direction of this district. On behalf, I wanna thank you for the countless hours you spent reading materials. Thank you for missing the time with your own families to make sure that you're impacting all the rest of the families in our community. Thank you for being student centered. And thank you so much for the emotional energy that you've given to this role. And then just for me, I want to say thank you for being someone who's helped me personally grow as a leader in this district. So on behalf of the district and our district administration, we can't thank you enough for your years of service. And one of the things that we're going to, you know, we wish we could be there. I'm giving you virtual hugs right now to both of you. And one of things we're gonna do is we want you to pick out your favorite book And it's going to be in each of our elementary schools. And we're gonna dedicate it from you and it's gonna be always in the cover. And whenever anyone reads that book, they're gonna say, who's Kristen? Who's Lily? It's a question they might ask. So thank you. That's great.

Thank you, Sean. That's wonderful.

So I will confess that maybe Sean and I should have rehearsed because he stole a little bit of my thunder. But so I'm going to start with you, Lily. And I clearly want to compliment you on equity. I mean, I want and I know it's a repeat, but you really have driven equity at a deeper level into the district. And I think that's awesome. And I think You know, you are somebody who is willing to show up and really give it all. And I think that's really impressive. I am quite confident that the 52-page fine arts report and the 18-page literacy report, you've read them, you've studied them, you've made notes on them. And that's awesome, right? I mean, people don't realize that you really got how much work you put in. So I really appreciate that. I think that's awesome. And finally, really the mental health perspective. I think you've always pushed us as a board to really add that mental health perspective. So kind of on behalf of the board, thank you very much, Lily. It's been an impressive 12 years, right? That's very impressive. And so Kristen, I think that what's amazing, Kristen, I think you're like a revenue machine because everything from bond issues to propositions, right? And to think about that you were the leader, right? I mean, because Clayton doesn't do propositions very often and we waited 15 years. So for you to be our board leader, when Prop E happened, that was a big deal. And so that, I mean, that's really, it was an inflection point for us. It's a step change for us, right? It really literally maintained our excellence. And so thank you for that. And also thank you for, I mean, you were also the leader of the board as we transitioned Sean to permanent superintendent, right? From interim to permanent. And that's... That's great. You know, we're very lucky in that way. So thank you for that too. And then I'd say finally just your heart. You've always just given your heart and it shows in everything that you do. So thank you. And what I want to say to you both, Lily and Kristen, is that we also wanted to, of course, we wanted to have a reception and a party for you, but we can't do that. So we have to do it via Zoom. I'm sorry for that. But we did want to also give you a gift card. And we thought each of you and we thought that it would be nice to have a Clayton based business. So Sean in his hands has a gift card for each of you to almonds, right? And we know that almonds is in Clayton and is a Clayton family, right? So Kelly and Tony almond, right? So we wanted to also give that to you. So thank you again both for your service and we really appreciate it. Thank you.

Yes, thank you very much everyone.

May I, is it okay if I say something? Go ahead. You can do something else.

No, go ahead. You can go. Yeah,

go ahead. Okay. Okay. I just, I just, I promise it's a brief statement, but I've given some thought to this and would like to say something. It's been an honor and more importantly, an enormous responsibility to serve on the board for 12 years. And I want to leave you all with this. And that is that I urge you to be both a questioner and a listener. They go hand in hand. As a questioner, I hope that you ask the hard questions, be a critical eye, keeping the highest standards for our teachers, administrators, and students in mind. It can be uncomfortable to pose difficult questions, to inquire where we might be missing the mark. It's not fun to be a naysayer or to slow down the process. It's messy, especially because we do this work in public. to sometimes be the only one out there presenting an alternative point of view. But we know that diversity, not only in terms of race and gender and ethnicity and religion, but also in terms of viewpoint and experience and even style makes for a more effective team and better decision making. And then secondly, be a listener. And I mean a true listener. We have structures in place on our board to check in with each person, and that's great. but truly listening isn't always easy. How do we avoid disconnecting or discounting or dismissing an alternative viewpoint, keeping an open mind and always remember that each person was elected by our community, that each person on the board has an equal voice in the process and that we make better, more informed decisions when we've examined a topic from various vantage points. You owe it to the students, the district and the community to question and to listen and to be willing to be the diversity of thought and to welcome, invite and foster that diversity in others. Thank you.

Thanks, Lily. Kristen, did you want to say anything? We'll just give you the opportunity if you wanted.

Sure. I definitely want to share my expression of gratitude and thanks for every student that's walked the halls of Clayton Schools and dreamed big. Here's my emotional side part. Dreamed big, worked hard, and had successful outcomes and is making this world a better place. So thank you to all the students that have done that. We continue to do that. I look forward to all the great work that's going to happen with this board and the board to come. I truly am thankful for working with each and every one of you. And Adam, thank you for joining us this year. I've had the privilege of working with three superintendents. The Prop E was the last of Prop S, Prop W, chairing all those. And through all those, I had the opportunity to work with a lot of great people. Don Senti, Sherman Wilkinson, and Sean, but also our past board members who have really laid the foundation and done so much of the work and were mentors to me. And I thought I should say their names. So I wrote them down and wanted to acknowledge working with Steve Singer, Soni Buttar, Jane Kramer, Daryl Higuchi, Omri Price, Janelle Centeno, Susan Buse, Mary Pat Gatter, Brad Bernstein, and all of the great board members that came before them and their sacrifice from their families and the time that it takes to do this work. It's super important. Our public schools are super important. They're the heart and soul of our communities, and they do great things for kids. So thank you, each and every one of you, for all that you do, and our staff and our administration. Awesome. Thanks.

Thank you both. We appreciate you. And so we're actually going to move to public comment. So I think we have two public comments and maybe Chris, are you going to read those or Sean?

Yeah, absolutely. So we had two public comments and I will read them verbatim as submitted. The first public comment is from Suzanne Whitman. Her comment reads, A big thank you to the board members for carrying on so well with virtual board meetings and making the recordings available to the community. It's great for us members of the public to be able to keep up with board business, even if we can't do it in person. Regarding a final report on equity in our district, please give a date for providing the final equity report that will be available to the public. If you don't know a date, please provide a date by which you'll have a date. As you go about making equity a three point in all that you do, I want to share this quote by John Powell of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Quote, to belong is not just to be a citizen or member in the weakest sense, but to be able to participate in co-creating the thing that you belong to. This makes it different than inclusion, end quote. Regarding the literacy report that will be discussed tonight, it's thrilling to see phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, and vocabulary discussed and to get the impression that our district is really understanding and grabbing onto the need to possibly use a different program for teaching our kids to read. The Reading Success Bill, Senate Bill 966, which in a nutshell will require schools to provide reading success plans for kids to test at risk and kids that are separately diagnosed with dyslexia nearly made it to law this year. It was included in the Massive Education Omnibus Bill, House Bill 1540, that on the last day did not proceed. The bill will be reintroduced next legislative session. Given the district's success with beginning early to plan for the COVID-19 situation, I hope that the district will similarly be proactive in planning and beginning to plan now for how to implement reading success plans. Finally, a huge thank you to the district administration and teachers for the quality online learning that they provided for the last few months. The fact that you all anticipated this by a month and started getting prepared, I'm sure helped with the quality when online learning began. My daughters have been engaged with learning for three to four hours a day, and having music, art, and PE on there was also great for their emotional health as well. This was really well done, and as a parent, I appreciate it. Warm regards to all of you. Suzanne Whitman. The next public comment, adjust my screen here. The next public comment is from Susan Buse. Her comment reads, Lily, Kristen, I want to express my thanks on behalf of so many of us for your board service to our schools and community. It's not really a question of years. The better measure is your impact on individual children and families, on the culture of our schools, and in helping each other and the board as a whole to lead. Lily, you stepped up at a time of national math wars And these were certainly hot in Clayton. Parents filled the boardroom more than once. There were parent meetings in school library, and we were pulled into neighbors' living rooms for smaller meetings. A lot was accomplished, but one early and critical lesson for board service. The work of raising and educating our kids is both rational and emotional, and it's critical to respect and value both. And it wasn't just math. Board members looked hard at literacy, at social studies and history, world languages, PE, health, music, and science. The community pushed on this with studies, data, best practices, and options. And we had board discussions with community and science staff. Again, not easy. Staff was vocally split. Change comes hard when a district is already excellent. Easy route would have been to do nothing. But our community vision was pretty clear. the board led and you were part of the board's decision to hire science specialists and to build science labs for elementary children. Kristen, you took a lead in supporting the bond issues that made those science labs happen. And not only did you do that well, but you kept going, stepping up for board leadership. Thank you. So many steps forward over the years, establishing high school parent conferences, again pushed by community vision, data, best practice, study, It took years and a change in school leadership. Now, like the elementary science curriculum and support, there is no looking back, only forward. What else? You helped lead the district through changes in superintendents, through retirement, medical challenges, relocations. As a board, we learned a lot through that about other schools and school leadership challenges and opportunities. Time-consuming. A lot of reading and brainstorming. and that made us better. Add to all that the missed family dinners, odd and sometimes heartbreaking parent calls, frustration of not being able to solve every hurt, challenge or wrong for our children. So much. I will circle back around to racial equity work. Lily, when you first joined the board, it wasn't just math wars. Parents and students were vocal Preserve BST, not only the program but the strength of the program, number of children enrolled. Some community members were vocal otherwise with fears that city diversity threatens academics. With any diversity comes the need to expand teaching and learning practices and we still have a long way to go. Best evidence of the impact of this work is in our kids, our globe riders who are now taking on these issues of equity and in Clayton's graduates. many of whom came back last year on these equity issues telling us that, yes, it was hard and we all need to improve. But even so, please protect that experience of learning with diverse peers, our students, past and present, telling us how that diversity enriched and expanded all the rest of learning and opportunity this district offered them. You have contributed in establishing a strong base from which the next board will be poised to lead. There's a lot left to do. There always is. Our kids are worth it. Thank you for positioning the next board to continue this critical work. Susan. And that's all the public comment.

Thanks for reading those, Chris. And thanks, Suzanne and Susan, for your comments. So we are going to move on to superintendent communications. Sean.

So tomorrow is the last day of school for our students. And this is definitely not the way that we wanted to end our school year with our students. But it definitely won't be one that they will ever forget. And again, I hate that we're having our final board meetings of the year in this format as well because I really appreciate that personal connection. And I know that our students miss that personal connection as well. Although some think that now that we're moving into June, that this might be a time to take a breath, but we're definitely not stopping. We're gonna be working diligently for the fall and we're still unsure what the fall is going to bring, but I feel we will be prepared. I know we will be prepared, we're taking into consideration teaching and learning, the social emotional wellbeing of our students, equity issues, communications, the facilities that we need to maybe make some adjustments, safety protocols and governance. And there might be times when we talk about governance that we come back to the board to discuss policy changes that might be needed based off the recommendations that we're bringing forward. We're currently in the process of getting feedback from students, parents and teachers about what worked well and where we could have improved with our continued learning. Based on my initial review of the data, parents felt if we ever needed to do this again, it'd be integral to make sure that we have more robust structures and systems for interactive learning and making sure students have more opportunities to interact with one another as well. Also, parents were also emphasized in the data how we wanna make sure that we're taking care of the social emotional wellbeing of our children. Students have shared that they really liked the Google Classroom format, but they also felt like it would be helpful if there was more consistency with teachers, especially at secondary level when you have multiple teachers. So that way you get used to a similar system throughout the day. We have also developed beyond just a survey, an opportunity for us to get feedback from our young learners from kindergarten through fourth grade. Part of our fifth grade students are participating in our thought exchange, but we wanted to see if there was input that we get from our kindergarten through fourth grade students so our teachers are having lessons that is going to give us input about their experience as well. We were very happy that we saw a large percentage of our students who did actively engage with the online learning, and we're still working out the analytics to see what that percentage was. But there was also students who did not. And so we worked diligently to try to reach out to those students to make sure that they were connected or see what was the why behind them not engaging. And we have thought about ways that we can change that for upcoming years if we have to do this again. The ultimate goal is the continuity of learning. But ultimately, we also believe it's important to get our students back in school. And one of the things is that no matter what, we need to make sure that we have the best system moving forward if we do have to go to a virtual model again. And my message that I sent out to the community on Friday, I think we did the best we could with the time that we had, but there's definitely things we'd do differently if we would do it again. And so we need to collect that data and make sure that we are adjusting in the future. But I also think that there are some things that we've learned in terms of how we can explore more personalized approaches to instruction for our students, even if we're not in a virtual model. So that is kind of an exciting outcome from that. I also know that people appreciate being in the know. So I will be committed to sending biweekly updates to our community until we send a communication mid-July telling our community what we're going to be doing in the fall. So I will be doing that in multiple ways through letters and video updates. Since it's been the last week of school, we have had some opportunities for celebrations. Last night, I had an opportunity to be part of the eighth grade students who were driving by Y-Down as all the teachers lined up and to wave to the students as they pass by so that way they could have some type of celebration for their transition to the high school. What's really neat too is that there was high school teachers that were there with signs saying, welcome to the high school, which I thought was really incredible. And again, although we've rescheduled our graduation for a different date, we are gonna have a parade for our seniors on May 28th and that's at 6 p.m. And board members are welcome to attend. You don't have to be a part of it. In terms of being in the parade. If you want to come and cheer on the students, but this is really about the students and opportunity for them to See teachers lining and community members lining the streets and we'll follow the same route as homecoming day and we're going to make sure we're practicing social distancing But really the focus of what our energy now is on the fall. And as I said at our last board meeting, do we know what it's gonna look like? No, but will we be prepared? Absolutely. But school is going to look different no matter what the structure is. If we're in school, we're gonna have new procedures and new systems that are going to be different than what we've done in the past. So again, I am grateful to the board for their support during this time because we've done some things very differently this last semester and it feels really good to the administration and the teachers to know that we have the board's support when we've had to make some very difficult decisions and decisions we've never had to make before. So thank you for your support as we end this semester and I'm proactively thanking you for your support, as we move into the fall. So tonight we have two study items. One is the fine arts program and then the other is the literacy program. And as we come to the end of the year of our curriculum reviews, I hope the board can see how we've been able to make equity a constant in all of the reports that we've been bringing to the table. And hopefully you can see that thread in the goals. And when we talk about a system approach, it's not just about building awareness. It's about making change in systems and doing things differently and putting measures in place. We are moving well beyond awareness and we are purposely applying culturally responsive and equitable lenses to our decisions and actions. And we're disrupting and changing systems that we haven't ever done before. So, and I would actually say that we've done that with our continued learning process as well. So I hope the board can see that we are continuing to make equity a focus in our work and making it a thread of our decisions. Also tonight, we have a study item. And the study items can be an opportunity for our board to discuss and provide input about the student board representative. And this was a new structure we put in place last year and have implemented it this year. And this is gonna be the opportunity for the board to discuss how it's gone, thinking about benefits of it, thinking about ways that we could improve for the future, and also thinking about adopting policy that's aligned to that structure. So I'll give you a little bit more introduction when we get to that. But I'm now going to turn it over to our student and see if he has any reports to give.

Thanks, Dr. Doherty. Yeah, I had a few things that I wanted to talk about just as the school year's ending, and it did. I sent an email to Dr. Gattuso today actually talking about next steps for the student representative, and I was thinking about it, and when I finished my work, I think it was yesterday, it was just this weird feeling of like, I'm done, but I'm not really done, and it was just a different feeling that I've had before. And so I wanted to talk you know seeing if you want to continue the student representative process and discussing it but um assuming that we'll move forward with it we were putting in a place to select the new student representative and we were going to have that done hopefully by uh around a month ago at this point but due to COVID-19 we've pushed it back a little bit to give everyone some time so that they can um had some time to adjust and they'll have the whole summer to work on their app well actually not the whole summer but we'll have the summer to work on selecting the new student representative and so i just wanted to give you an outline of what that process will look like so we have the application all already and we're going to send out the email to the rising junior class within the next few days and they'll have until july 1st to complete the application So that'll give them enough time. It'll give them around a month and with vacation and other commitments, we think it'll still be enough time to have everyone submit their applications. Then so the high school administrators and myself and a few district advisory council members will review the applications and then we'll have interviews on zoom most likely with the candidates that we have and then Following that, we'll discuss with the district advisory council members, the high school administrators and myself, and we'll go through and appoint the next student representative. And so that should hopefully be in place before we have some meetings towards the end of the summer and then we'll be able to appoint the new representative at the start of next school year. And there's one more thing I wanted to talk about and Dr. Doherty actually mentioned a lot about it was looking at the student perspective of online learning and just moving forward with uncertainty what what our thoughts were. And so I've talked to a lot of students and one of the big things that Dr. Doherty mentioned was discussion time and just no matter what, making sure that we're leaving room for discussion in our classes. Another was everyone really enjoyed Zoom calls and being with each other and having that time. And so we can utilize tools like Zoom, like our breakout rooms where we can go and have discussions within a group and really doing everything we can to get as many people on the Zoom calls as possible in our classrooms our meet calls. And so the last thing was just looking at how we're going to time the Zoom calls and just making sure that everyone has adequate notice of when that's going to be, which goes back to more of a robust schedule for learning, no matter what that looks like. And the last thing I wanted to say was just, you know, going through this process this past quarter, it's been, you know, amazing how the administration has done and helped us and how teachers have been so thoughtful for helping all of us. And I think there have been some really good things. And I think personalized learning, time management skills, a focus on mental wellness. I think they're all things that we can take from this and silver linings moving forward to help students and to make it and to make Clayton a better place for us. So there's good in everything.

PB Harmon Zuckerman, Great. Thank you, Sean. And thank you, Adam. So we're going to actually move to. We have two information items. So we're gonna move to our first information item which is the fine arts year to self study PB Harmon Zuckerton, So who is who's up there. PB Harmon Zuckerson, We

have Milena coming up and then Paul Varley is going to be part of that as well.

Hi, everybody. Where is Paul? So Paul Varley is here with me. He's the Fine Arts Coordinator. When we think about fine arts within the district, it's really actually four departments. It's theater, visual arts, vocal music and instrumental music. So Paul and I are going to give a brief presentation about the report. We aren't going to go through it point by point, but just to give you a couple of our highlights. So I'll highlight some of the things that we heard the last time that we were at the table. then Paul will give some highlights of the goals, not going into each one individually, and then I'll finish up with some thoughts on how these goals will help us to improve for students. So last time we were at the board table, the board expressed interest in us pursuing ways to tap into individual talents. We wanted to explore how we might focus differently on students who have gifts in the arts. You asked us to consider in our programming how to focus on confidence, diligence and how to take and give critical feedback. You acknowledged our approach to the study and our deliberate focus on the profile of the graduate. So now I'm gonna hand it over to Paul to talk a little bit about the goals.

And I understand I have 30 minutes, is that right?

No.

No, okay, all right. Okay, so... So I think as you looked over the report, you can see that we pretty much addressed all of the district attributes of a Clayton grad. And I think that things like... working collaboratively, empathetically, culturally, those are pretty much a given for the arts. But one of the things that stood out was the fact that most of the study questions dealt with the intellectually curious, self-actualized, I practice saying that, believe it or not, And the creative thinker. So what I like to do is just go through each one of those three and just give you an example of the other type of things that we're doing right there. So intellectually curious, you know, we asked students to ask a lot of questions and not the superficial kind of things we asked them to dig a little bit deeper and And so the visual art department and the theater department are both working with this approach called studio habits of mind. And in the studio habits of mind, they have a lot of different approaches which include stretch and explore reflect observe develop craft um and so all of those things as they're um as they're emphasized um they all push our kids to be intellectually curious self-actualized maslow right you all remember on you know up at the top of the of the uh Oh, the pyramid there. And so basically what he was saying was when you reach that point where you've fulfilled your potential, you've gotten as good as you can, then you're going to be self-actualized. Well, we all know that... You're never really going to get all the way up there. And so one of the things that we try to do in in the arts is to is to push kids to try to get as good as they possibly can. And one of the things we're looking at right now to help that, for example, is private lessons. What can we do to make private lessons available to every kid so that they can reach their potential because they can get that individual attention on the instrument or voice or whatever their choice. And then finally, the creative thinker. You know, when I think of the creative thinker, I think of something thinking outside the box. And there was a story told to me one time about a kid a teacher that was asking the class to write a report and include artwork in it. And so as teachers walking around the room, the teacher noticed that there was a student drawing a rabbit on the report. And after the rabbit was drawn, the student takes out a blue crayon and begins to color it blue. And the teacher goes up to the student and says, well, honey, there, there aren't any blue rabbits, you know, it's supposed to be either brown or white or something that happens naturally, you know, something in nature. And so what the teacher basically did was, um, crushed the imagination and the creativity of the student just by saying that one thing. Well, we're trying to actually do the other thing. And one of the things that there's a goal in the general music classes in the elementary schools where they're talking about um, learning how to teach the kids, excuse me, to improvise. Okay. And they use ORF instruments for this. And the idea, if you ever watch a jazz musician, um, when they start to play, there's no music there, they're making it up as they go. And, and, and by definition, you can never do the same improvisation twice. It's always going to be different. You're always going to be thinking, so what can I do? How can I be creative? And so what our, uh, our music teachers in the elementary schools are doing, they're using ORF instruments and using that particular system to, to, uh, or to teach the kids how to improvise, how to use that creativity, take a chance, see what happens when you play it that way. And so, um, Was that succinct?

Yeah, thank you. Okay,

good, good,

good. So how will we be better as a consequence of our work? First of all, students will have agency and choice in the programs and create and promote confidence. The department will address the individual needs of musicians and artists in a more personalized manner to better align to the profile of the graduate. And then Joe, I'm going to hand it back to you.

Great. Thank you. So this information item. So we're going to try something. If you go to the bottom of your screen and go to reactions and you click on that, you could either do there's a little thumbs up or a little almost like hand clapping signal. So I'm going to ask you, like, if you want to say something. put one of those signals. So I'll demonstrate, right? That puts that see on my screen, right? Exactly, kind of corny, but we're gonna, that's what, so that's what I'm gonna ask if you would like to say something about this information item, you can see it disappears after a while, just disappeared on my screen. So does anybody have any questions or comments about this report? Okay, all right, we'll start with Kristen.

Thanks, Joe. Thank you, Paul. So, you know, fine arts are such a huge part of my life and a big part of what I've pushed and appreciated about our school district. And I really enjoyed seeing the idea of the Clayton Conservatory and the list of the resources for the music, private lessons and different things that are available for people in the Jazz U. I didn't even know that was a thing before. And I was wondering if there might be an opportunity to do that for the theater and for the fine arts, you know, accessing those individuals in our community that can support our students outside of the school day. And I think that would have been a wonderful thing to have access to. personally. And then I also wanted to acknowledge and say thank you for thinking about fine arts and the idea of being creative and having the creative thinker. And I also just want to acknowledge how important the arts are, whether it's playing the piano or doing a painting or sketching and notes, that it helps us cope with life's stresses and anxieties and that being a lifelong lover of the arts is a huge part to our mental health to our enjoyment of life, to connecting with others and for being at peace with ourselves. And so I appreciate, um, I get emotional again, sorry. The last meeting I'm allowed. Um, it's just huge. This is great stuff. And I, I really appreciate all the hard work you guys have put into it.

Thank you. Thank you.

So thank you so much for this thorough report. And I agree with Kristen, I think there's so much benefit to the arts. So I'm just hoping that we can figure out how to get around or break down any of the barriers we have for some of our students to access it such as scheduling conflicts or even like Kristen mentioned something like a conservatory or that you mentioned that the Alton School District is doing using grants and donations to help the free and reduced lunch students who maybe can't afford private lessons, maybe our Vic students that can't come before school. So I know there are some barriers to all of our students accessing this. So I'm just hoping that we're looking at all kinds of solutions in order to do that. And that is one reason why I love that you researched these other school districts because the Alton one in particular mentioned the funding from donations and grants to help the free and reduced lunch kids access that for free. And I think the conservatory would help some of those scheduling conflicts, especially our busy kids that we have in Clayton with so many extracurricular activities for something during private lessons during the school day, I think would help alleviate that too. Thank you for working on trying to make the arts accessible for all of our kids. That's right.

You know, and in the interest of full disclosure, the work that was done on the conservatory stuff was done by Kim Shelley. And she lives over in Alton and she had a chance to see all that, but she's real passionate about that whole process, the program, so.

Awesome. Thank you, Amy. I saw your virtual hand up too.

Yes. So, um, Kristen, both Kristen and Stacey kind of said a lot of what I wanted to say, but I definitely wanted to thank you Paul for such a thorough and a thoughtful report on this. And I love that we're thinking about ways to encourage, um, our kids and encourage their, their individual talents. Um, And I just feel like so often it's a fine arts that might keep a kid inspired and engaged in school. So I love that we're putting so much thought into this. And I will just echo what Stacey said about making sure that some of the opportunities, especially the private instruction is that we make sure that we could make that available to all of our kids That might even, you know, some of the students that might not otherwise be able to afford piano lessons or vocal lessons or private lessons that some of our other students are able to access. So I would love it if we would continue to give that thought and make sure that that happens. Thank you.

Thank you. So I don't see any other virtual hands up. Remember, it's reactions go like that if you want. So nobody wants to say anything else, right? All right. So thank you very much, Paul. Thank you very much, Milena. We appreciate it. Great report. And so we're going to move on to the literacy year two self-study.

Thank you. So now Jennifer Selenrich is going to join me. Maybe. Can you hear me? Oh, now I can hear you. There we go. I can't see you, but I can hear. Oh, there you are. Hi, Jen. So again, I'll begin with what we heard the last time that we presented to you and then Jen will focus on the goals. And then I'll talk about how we will be better as a consequence of focusing within these goals. So last time we were with you, we expressed an interest, you expressed an interest and had questions about digital portfolios. You asked us to consider the roles that portfolios can have while not being only a subjective tool. You appreciated our desire to focus on reading in the early grades and looking at support for students for whom learning to read is challenging. And you wanted us to consider our partnership with Special School District and how we might strengthen it to support our students. So now I'm going to hand it over to Jen.

Thanks. Dr. Bettina L. Love states that there are many paths of liberating education. As teachers of reading and writing, we know well the truth and complexities of her statement. and it's why we are dedicated to growing our practice through the self-study. The four goals we have identified are dependent on one another, something difficult to separate into different pathways sometimes, but we do believe that they are essential in our continued journey. By assuring that we have a responsive curriculum, we will leverage our students' curiosity, their creativity, and their knowledge by building authentic reading and writing experiences that support and inspire our kids to meet high expectations. We know that a truly responsive curriculum would also be an inclusive one, but by articulating this as a separate goal, we emphasize the importance of using an equity lens in the revision of our curriculum and the way that we implement it. This responsive and inclusive curriculum will be strengthened by meaningful transitions that assist teachers in knowing the specific needs of their students, but furthermore, in assisting students to become reflective and independent learners. And finally, we know that while students will find different pathways to their liberating education, they require strong foundational skills in reading and writing. And when these skills become difficult for a student to attain, we must have a collaborative and current literacy intervention program. Ultimately, we're not looking for the easy pathway. We're looking for the many paths that will best serve our students. If there's anything that I've learned in the past few months of emergency learning, It is that we have a dedicated faculty that will light the way for each of our students. I look forward to working with them and with you in achieving our goals.

So as a consequence of this work, our literacy program will encourage students to become agents of change through a personalized learning approach. Our program will have systemic structures in place to address equity, both through the content we teach and the processes we use to group students. And finally, with the help of others, we will have a more comprehensive program to support our striving learners in both reading and writing.

Great, thank you. So any virtual hands that would like to say anything? Remember reactions like thus? Any comments or questions about this report? Joe? Yes.

I don't have, I don't know if it's because I don't have the app, but I don't have that, those options, but I do have something when you get to me.

You go ahead, Lily. No, you go ahead. You start.

All right, thank you both. And I appreciate the follow up from our prior meetings and can really see that in the report. I wanted to ask about just a few things. And I think my question is both what you can fill in for me now and also to think about it as you guys move forward. So I don't expect I think with any of these to have the full answer tonight. My first question is from page seven. And this is about kind of dealing with the work around dyslexia and You note that we see some difficulties in realizing our ideal and hope, that by looking at alternative schedules, delivery methods, or maybe even programs, we can build better support for our striving learners. And I was wondering if you could just kind of spell that out a little bit, what you're envisioning there.

Well, one of the pieces is working with a consultant. We're looking forward to working with somebody who's well-versed in structured literacy, for example. which is the recommended intervention around dyslexia, but also someone or maybe an additional person who can help us in a broader sense with a systematic approach K-12 to our reading intervention. And we have great work going on and really dedicated faculty, but we know we can do better there. So that's the one place that the consultants I'm scheduling it's interesting that that comes up in the arts right, so we know, and I think Stacey mentioned that sometimes our kids who are. Maybe working with a reading specialist are missing an opportunity for a fine arts section, you know so that's actually a I see a connection there, so we need to look at. How we use our schedule to help kids not to put intervention in the place of something that's important. Or, for example, creating an intervention time that's intentional for the needs of the group of kids instead of for the time block that's been set aside by some other factor. So those are, I mean, we have a lot of ideas where, like I said, kind of that consultant piece, like we're hoping can help us put all of our, realize all of our ideas. And we've already started some work with our special ed colleagues and looking at how we come to the table together instead of separately, which is sometimes what happens unfortunately because of schedule and time and planning, et cetera. Does that give you a little?

Lily,

you're on mute if you're talking.

Thanks. Yes, I was. Okay. The next one is from page nine and that is where you talk about, um, looking, employing an equity lens. It's kind of midway through the page where you mentioned that a couple of times and, um, I guess one question is, are you thinking racial equity lens? Because this sometimes comes up. A lot of what I read sounds like it's mainly about racial equity, at least in that section. So that's one question. And how are you thinking of operationalizing that? And I guess I'm not going to be on the board, and I think about the things when they become that I sometimes worry about certain words, even self-actualized or equity lens, that they become buzzwords and really trying to think about how are you going to operationalize that? What does that really mean that you're going to be looking at these three things through an equity lens? And I'd love to hear your thoughts now. And then just to keep, I hope that you keep that in mind as you continue to work on it.

Of course, I think you make a good point. What I see in an equity lens is we've already done some work around that and there are pieces out there like when you're adopting something whether it be an intervention program, a book that we're all going to read together and approach even like project-based learning. So a framework or curricular framework looking through it and making sure that it doesn't support stereotypes, that the implementation of an intervention is culturally responsive. Even, and yes, absolutely around racial lines, but additionally we have to look at gender, class, culture in general. So this I would almost call it a lens or a filter. If we're going to adopt something, we would take it through a series of questions, a series of tests almost, to see if it passes this equity lens. We have some work to do in actually reviewing work that we already have. And we've started a little bit of that work, but we haven't perfected our protocol yet.

OK, thank you. Then. Yes, my last question I looked over I looked over kind of the list of resources that you guys cited and I had a question about. Many of them were not real recent. Like. past, I don't know, 2016, 17, 18, you know. And so I was wondering about that besides kind of some of the Missouri standards, nothing was all that recent. And I was wondering if you see yourselves kind of going to get some of the most recent stuff, especially around when I think about dyslexia or anything that has stuff that has to do with brain research because it's changing so quickly. and I just want to ensure that you're using the most recent. And I don't mean to make it sound, I don't mean just to sound critical, but I'd love to hear your thoughts about why there aren't more recent citations there.

I guess, thanks for pointing that out. I hadn't thought about it. It's a Works Cited page just for this report. It's not for all the work that we've done and that we do. So I think like, This book sitting in my lap is from 2019, you know? So I don't think that it's not that we're not doing the most recent work. We're working hard on recent dyslexia research. Actually, a lot of it is a little bit old. So that's something that we're working hard to make sure that we have that, especially with a recent piece and also culturally responsive pedagogy.

Excellent. Thank you.

Great, thanks. So I think I saw Gary, then Adam, then Jason in terms of virtual hands. So Gary.

Thank you. And this is good timing because my question I think is primarily focused on kind of the same area where we're talking about in this dyslexia and literacy uh, challenges area. I think, um, I haven't kept an actual account, but I think probably in the last year or maybe even two years, we have probably had more public comment at our meetings on this topic than on any other. Um, the parents that are, um, parents and other community members that have been interested in this have been, um, extremely, uh, knowledgeable, extremely organized, extremely, um, vocal. They've talked to, I know a number of us outside of board meetings and very engaged in this. So I think two questions with all of that in mind. The first from a bigger picture standpoint, do you all feel that the issues and the concerns that have been raised are sort of thoroughly addressed here or are we still in the process of addressing all of those things? So I'll let you take that one first.

I think that, and first of all, we've been fortunate to work with some of the families that may in fact also be the ones making public comment. We meet with them periodically as a way to kind of see how our work is impacting their children maybe, but also their thinking around dyslexia or characteristics of dyslexia. So we have not solved all the problems in our report. I'll be really honest with you. We don't have the, you know, we're still working on a very individualized level, meeting the, trying to meet the best needs of individual kids. And so that's part of why we would like to hire a consultant to look at our program K-12. That being said, I think we're addressing we've recognized the issues that the parent community has brought to us and we're appreciative of that communication that we've had with them.

Okay, I think that's definitely glad that you've been working with them. I think that's really valuable too. I just think that we need to be mindful of when we see consistent communication and feedback on something, we need to make sure we're giving that not just the right amount of attention, but that we're communicating back in the ways that address what those questions are. And I know we're not always going to agree on everything necessarily or come to the same conclusions or whatever it might be, but I think it's important that we be thinking about that. So appreciate that focus. And then I do have some kind of questions or a question more about kind of that same page of the report that that Willie was talking about, mainly around that chart of, the chart of percentage of identified in spring 19 and then unfortunately winter 20. It's a hard, those are hard numbers to kind of grasp any kind of pattern or really make a lot of sense out of, to be honest. And maybe I just didn't understand a better explanation that was in there, but I have a sense that there's not a real great explanation that's going to be satisfying to us. But I wondered if you could just talk about that a little bit as to why you see some, in some grades numbers go down year to year and some they go up, some they don't change much. So it's very puzzling to me just to look at the patterns that are there. I

think you're right in that there's not much of a pattern, right? So it's very limited data. It represents the work that we've done since we instituted the screening for characteristics of dyslexia. So it gives us a little bit of information. To be honest, the screening we've done has helped us with individual kids, right? So that we've used the results from a pretty significant battery of tests to plan and implement interventions for specific kids. There are places where this data helps us look at how we've looked at classroom instruction more carefully. And so for example, when you look at that really big number for the percentage of class identified in spring 2019 at 22% in first grade, right? So when we did our initial screening, we were really taken aback by the high percentage of kids who we identified with some foundational literacy skill difficulties And so that was a look at a class instruction. How can we change class instruction to help a large group of kids? This small piece of information also helped us make the commitment to adopting a phonics curriculum in kindergarten and now in first grade. So it doesn't make a lot of sense here in this table. There are not significant patterns but it has helped us consider both individual intervention for kids and also classroom instruction. Does that help, Gary?

Yeah, it does. And I know there's, you know, you can't make things that are difficult to draw patterns from fit into a pattern. I think maybe, I mean, tell me if I'm reading this wrong, but one thing that we do see is that the spring 2019 first grade class was the highest tested percentage. And that's also that same class of students the next year is also the highest. So I'm not sure that's maybe grasping for something in terms of pattern, but that is at least some consistency and maybe should focus us in some way on why that is.

I think also that when looking at those numbers, I think Jen's right that the screening has allowed us to look differently at individual children. When we look at those numbers and then we unpack those numbers and we start to look at transients of students and those kinds of things, we're not necessarily talking about the same children. So where it is the same cohort of children, we have students moving out and moving in. So it's not always an... So we can't say that like 22% and then... of that 22%, only 14%. There's actually differences in children there. So I do think it was hard for us to think about what's the data that we put into this report around dyslexia that paints a little bit of a story, but it's such a small data set that I agree with you. It's hard to identify patterns with it right now because we haven't had enough opportunity in testing groups of children. But like Jen said, it has influenced some of our thinking about programming.

Yeah, that's an interesting point that it's not necessarily, the 14% isn't necessarily a decrease in, you know, a 7% decrease of those tested or it's not very well And this is, you know, I guess my last point, and this is a lot in a row for me, so I'll shut up. But I do appreciate that that data is not necessarily easy to project out there. It's like, look, we found data that makes it look good that we're doing. And I think that when you do get a lot of criticism, and we've gotten some on this issue, it's sometimes easy to just find something that makes us look good. People, we got to have an answer here. I don't think that this does that. We may want it to say better things, but it's at least, I appreciate that we're giving some information and it's maybe not all answers are the answers that we want, but we're sharing what we can. So I do appreciate that point.

Thank you. Thank you, Gary. So I think Adam next, then Jason, then Amy.

Yeah. Thanks, Ms. Ollenreich and Melaina. Uh, I just had one quick question, which was, I noticed a lot about independent reading and especially, you know, I, from my experience and other students experiences that as time goes on, and especially if we get to secondary education, that it sometimes becomes more difficult to incorporate that independent reading into our daily schedule. And I'm, I'm wondering what, what you all are doing to encourage independent reading, especially in our advanced programs, as we get to secondary. That's a

great question. I think part of what we're doing is actually looking, it's two pieces here. We're looking at what is it that we want our kids to read across from K-12? Like what are the reading experiences that we want them to have? And what we've realized is that there's too much, right? There's so many things we want kids to read. So what it means is we may have to look, we're looking at some grade levels and including the honors track at the high school. Where do we pull back from a core experience lit book, a book that everyone reads? And where do we make that choice? So where does it become a book club where kids are reading books around the same theme but different books so they have some choice? And that might not be exactly independent reading, but it's getting closer to some of the structures and programs that we've had in the past. It allows us to have more diversity in our characters and our titles too when we have choice. So does that make sense?

Yeah, I just think it's important. So yeah.

Yeah, and we've just identified a lot of redundancies in our core literature. So if we back that away, it gives more time for independence and choice. And so that's my hope.

All right, thank you.

You're

welcome. Great, thank you, Adam. Jason?

How are you doing? So I think you mentioned that you wanted to use a consultant for dyslexia, is that correct?

Pardon me, I'm sorry.

That you wanted to use it a consultant for dysleksia, is that right?

For our reading program which would include intervention around characteristics of dyslexia, yeah.

Do we have a short list of consultants that you may have identified that we can actually tap into?

That was my work for after spring break. So I had some appointments set up for that week right after spring break. What we have is a profile. We have what we're looking for, what we need. I talked to Milena just a couple days ago about maybe even looking at splitting so that we have two consultants who would offer us different perspectives so that we'd have a more thorough look We want somebody who can help us evaluate our program, help us think about what it would look like and then provide professional development to realize this ideal program that we'd like to build.

I think some of the models that we've used before with social studies, with science, where we've brought two different people in together to do that work has been really valuable to us because sometimes just us being present while they're negotiating meaning with one another and thinking through those pieces has been really helpful to pushing our thinking differently.

Gotcha. And Milena, we haven't used an insult in throughout the course of this time we've been talking about dyslexia, have

we? We used one person to come in and do some professional learning for us from Webster University who did some professional learning with our reading specialists. So sort of a consultant, but she wasn't looking at our programming. She was providing learning to our staff.

My other question is, we do mention the word equity a lot. It's become kind of a fashionable term. But I think you mentioned earlier that equity included people with gender, all types of stuff. How does that play into the part of literacy in learning how to read and things of that nature? I just want to make sure we're on the same page.

I think in a lot of ways, number one, being a strong reader and writer is important for everyone, right? And we need to make sure that we're teaching in such a way that we're not creating inequity. So sometimes when I talk about equity, I actually like to talk about, you know, equity is when we finish fighting against inequities. And so if we have structures, whether that be reading intervention, classroom instruction, that enforces or creates inequity, then we don't have equity, right? So there's part of that. It's instruction and it's programming. It's also the books we read. For literacy, that's kind of maybe an easy thing to look at, but a hard thing to change. And so, for example, when Adam talked about the required reading at the high school, we have work to do there. We want to make sure that we are developing a story that is not stereotypical, that's not oppression driven, for example, and that everybody can see themselves in.

So I guess my question would be, what do you hope to get? What do we want to get out of the idea of being equitable in literacy? What's the return on that investment that we're looking for?

I think it means that Um, that all of our students have the same opportunity to see themselves as agents of change and, um, to see themselves in that profile of a graduate. I think it means, um, it might mean, um, breaking the status quo. It might mean changing things that serves a large group of people well right now so that we can serve everyone. So for example, we're looking at ninth grade honors. That's an entrance into Clayton High School and we feel like it's a place that we can make significant change so that honors in ninth grade is not primarily white girl, actually, is what our data showed.

So I think that's my point, is that I just want to make sure we're driving home the point that, like Lillian mentioned earlier, that equity really has a lot to do with race. I mean, we could talk about all the other inclusions when it comes to equity as a broader topic. But when it comes down to it, we're talking about privilege and race and access to resources and who's alienated from the opportunity. So I just want to make sure we're not using equity as that fashionable word. And we're thinking about what's the outcome? What are we looking for as a return on the investment? What's going to get us to the next level to push the envelope for an equitable institution. That's all I have

to say. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. Amy?

Yes. Thank you for the report. I have two points. The first is just that we're continuing and I think we've done a good job with this. But just continuing to make sure that whether we have, you know, a child with dyslexia or just a struggling reader, that we have lots of tools in the toolbox to help the child, whether it be, you know, the Reading Recovery or Lucy, what's her name? Hawkins, Lucy, or Wilson, or, you know, all different sorts of things. And we continue to keep that dialogue going with, you know, looking into Wilson because I really feel strongly that every kid, what works for one child might not work for the next child. And so we need to continue to keep that dialogue going. The other thing that my other comment was just the, I guess I'm speaking now more as a parent with a child with dyslexia, that the social emotional component with a struggling reader or child with dyslexia seems to be very, seems to be pretty substantive and what we're doing to, um, to help kids socially and emotionally that have dyslexia or, or struggling readers. I'll say that my son Chase had just had this teacher, Ms. Lapierre this year, who was so amazing with him. And he, um, you know, she was able to just instill confidence in him and instill this notion that, you know, he can be a great reader and a great writer and it doesn't matter that he has dyslexia, that he could still do all these amazing things and have a career in writing. And, you know, just to the extent that I don't know if we're talking to other teachers too about how we encourage our kids the way that she was able to encourage him and making sure that every child gets to have that type of support. because it was just so, so critical for him this year and just completely transformed him as a reader and his mindset.

Cool. Amy, thanks. I think that's something, I mean, I think Milena wrote that down, but I think that would be something we could add to our consultant work. Like how are we making social emotional well-being part of our reading? Thank you for that. All

right, Stacey.

Thanks. Thank you. Amy just reminded me about something that I wanted to say. And that is, as we talk about our struggling readers and you talk about different interventions that can help them, I can't help but think that that this isn't only a struggle for these students in English and literacy courses, that there are many other subjects where reading is also so important. Being a good reader is so important. And so I would just hope that whatever you find, you would share with your colleagues and teachers of all subjects because I think it could be helpful in all ways. Like I said, you know, reading is obviously important in all of our classes, not just English and literacy. So hopefully what you find can be shared. That's all. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

So I don't see any more virtual hands. So thank you, Jen. Thank you, Milena. We appreciate it. Thank you. Harmon Zuckerman, And we are actually going to move on to our one and only study item which is the student representative on the board. And I think Sean, you're gonna leave that right

Yes, thank you. I just want to take a quick moment to, first of all, thank Jen and Paul for their presentation. But just throughout this entire year, Melaina has really worked hard to provide a consistent structure for our curriculum reviews. And I just want to say thank you to Melaina for the work that she did this year. There's a lot of time and energy that goes into that. So tonight what we're gonna do is have an opportunity for the board to discuss the student board representative. And the way that I was gonna format this night is to give just a little bit of background, and then I'm going to kind of give an overview of what I heard from the input that you provided already, and then give the board some opportunity to, and that may serve as some context for some discussion that you might have. But ultimately, we want to think about examining the structure that was new to us last year and thinking about how we can make it the very best and thinking about how are we experienced this year and how do we move forward? So just to give a little background, the Board of Education approved the Student Board of Rep in April of 2019. And the board really made it clear during that time that you wanted to make sure that there was an advisory as part of the student board representative. We looked at and researched different districts. Some districts had a student board representative, and some districts had an advisory, and the board challenged us to have both. and we were able to do that this year. And we wanted to do that because we wanted to have a broader perspective and more voices that were gonna inform the student board representative and what he brought to the table. So one of the things that we also talked about is that we wanted to have an opportunity to talk about how it worked, giving our feedback. And then the board also wanted to have an to vote again on whether or not we were gonna continue with the structure for the upcoming school year. And so tonight we're not voting on it. It's just an opportunity for us to have discussion And then the other thing is that since this was something new, we thought this would be an opportunity to evaluate it. And then if we do move forward with it and make some tweaks based off this experience, that we would then adopt policy. And I have shared some example policy language that I want us to consider for the future. I gave the board an opportunity to give some feedback about the student board representative, and I asked about what people thought were some benefits to it. And what I heard was that they really appreciated the opportunity for there to be a real-time perspective for students, feeling like we're constantly having our why right in front of us in terms of having a student focus, and then also giving our student a learning opportunity that was around public service. make this also make sure that we're staying student focused and centered in our decisions. And then an opportunity for students to voice their concerns or to give their perspectives about study items or information items ever brought to the table. Some of the concerns that people shared was that they wanted to make sure, does the student board representative have the represent has the ability to represent all voices and then. Making sure that it was not just dependent upon the personality, but it was the structure of the the student board representative that made it highly effective. um. The other thing that people were concerned about is that we heard a lot from perspective of the high school students, but where are we going to expand it beyond that with our eighth grade students and eventually our fifth grade students? And I know that there was some work that was moving towards that that may have been hijacked a little bit this year. Some of the things that people asked us to consider or questioned were, do we think about a way that we would rotate this position and not have it be one person for the whole year? And then the other question was, how can we make this as part of our curriculum? Could there be something that's integrated into our curriculum that talks about board service and then having students be part of board meetings and having them participate understand the governance aspect of board service. And then the last one was just wanting to know if we were going to continue with the advisory and if we had the advisory, were we going to get new members on the advisory next year and what was going to be the process for that? So that's a little bit of some general context for you based off the feedback that you've already provided. What I want to do is I'm going to take down some notes and just give the board an opportunity to generally talk about what were the benefits that you saw, what were some things that we, you know, maybe some concerns you had, and what were some potential recommendations you have moving forward. And then I'll keep that information and use that to inform this process. Does that sound okay to everyone? And Joe, I don't have the hand thing either, so I don't know if you want to help you know, if people want to just raise their hand, if they want to talk.

We'll do the same way, which is virtual hands. So anybody who has a comment, if they could raise their or raise your hand, Kristen, that's fine. You can start go for it.

So I was just curious, Adam, did you prepare anything about any of the challenges that you've encountered through this process or how you would like to see it differently for the next student that's coming on? Some of your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, I've got that stuff. Dr. Doherty, you want me to kind of go over a little bit of my stuff as well? Yeah, I don't know if you

have that.

I can talk about, and especially some of the things that you all brought up as well, but So there were a few, the biggest thing was for me was working with the district advisory council and kind of connecting the student representative with the district advisory counsel. And I think that one of the challenges was just we didn't have really a set leader for the district advisory council because the process really works that the past student representative will then serve as the head of the district advisory council. and so i think one of the big things will just be focusing on expanding the district advisory council and and really solidifying its role in the process so next year that's really going to be my main focus and i think and i think the focus should be on the district advisory council to make it as effective as it can be so you know that would be working on like you said working with the eighth and the fifth graders expanding that and um also making sure that you know, someone mentioned that the structure is effective and that that's how we're getting the voices. And I think that, you know, I was very lucky that I had a really strong district advisory council already, and they were able to support my thinking. And I think it'll just be more creating a process that we just know can last and not just such great members on the council and how we can ensure that that will continue, um, on, I think, uh, everything else from the student representative side, it was, you know, for me, I felt like the work was, you know working with the district advisory council was probably what took the most innovative thinking. And I think that that's something that we can really work on and the connection between the student representative and the district advisory council and making the entity separate, I think is going to be really important for next year. And one of the things that I've been working on and trying to, work with other district advisory council members to ensure that they're not really as much as they're a part of the same structure and they're working towards the same goals. We're also going to work on creating the district advisory council separate so that they can help with administrative issues as well. One of the things that I noticed the most was that in district advisory council meetings, When we'd be discussing policies or general ideas, a lot of it had was more information that would help the administration and not so much ready for the board table. And so I'll be really working next year. And with Dr. Doherty, we've discussed this of really trying to help the district advisory council funnel the information. And so as much as I was doing that this year, because I had the knowledge of what belongs at the board table. and what didn't that's going to be one of our goals next year is trying to have the district advisory council help the board as well as the administration so those are the big general ideas that I noticed but if you have any other questions like let me know and I'd be happy to talk about them

thank you I asked that because I was wondering about and I it was my feedback that I talked about somehow figuring out how to get poured service into the curriculum in the classroom level And the reason why I was bringing that up is because thinking about who is going to search out for these applications and apply for it and do it, it seems like it's going to be certain kids that are gonna do that. And how do we really get the representation of all the different students in our schools? And so it made me think, I was wondering if it was part of the sophomore history curriculum or something like that where all the kids are learning about what board service is and have an opportunity to learn about this experience or process, because then they'll be exposed to it, they might be more willing to participate in it. It might become of interest to them that they will have voice and have opportunity to be a part of the change. So that's where that came from, and I'm just wondering about that. As far as in general, just in general comments about this experience for me, I've really appreciated Adam being at the table. And I definitely am supportive. I obviously won't be voting. But if I were to be here, I would be voting to continue this and appreciate the value that it's brought to the table. So thanks.

Thanks, Kristen. I think Lily, I saw your hand. Did you have something?

Yes, I was going to ask Adam kind of a follow-up question. I'm curious, Adam, in terms of adults or staff time, you know, that was one of the questions I had last year, like what would be required of Sean as far as his involvement with the student representative and the advisory team? So from your point of view, Adam, who was assisting you in this and how did that work as far as adults and staff?

So it was for the district advisory council. Dr. Kachewski was the one that helped us and a lot of the information, you know, when we had questions and just general ideas, we would first go to Dr. Kachiewski who would help us kind of filter and see what the administration had already discussed and if he had any knowledge of whether it was brought up at the board table. I think in general, as we expand this next year to the eighth graders and the fifth graders, We'll be able to work with the administration at all their respective schools as well. I think that that'll help. And so we can again start to funnel that information. And then for me, Dr. Doherty was a big resource for me and he can speak to if you know I how, how that worked. And if, you know, time-wise, if, if that was good for him, but, um, you know, for, for me, it was, you know, when I'd have a question that, you know, maybe Dr. Gachewski didn't know, or I was confused about, uh, Dr. Doherty and I met, I'd say around once a month just to go over things. And, and, um, it was really helpful for me.

Yeah, I mean, from my perspective, I feel like we got the system going and then Adam and the administration at the high school kept it going. And so I was there just as almost like a consult to the group and was able to check in with Adam just to make sure that he was feeling supported. Usually over a sandwich from Straub's and some chips.

Awesome, thanks. So I saw Jason's and then Stacy's. Yeah,

so I think, Adam, you personally did a good job. I mean, you're an interesting person. You're inquisitive. I mean, your well-spoken, which then makes it kind of hard to really critique this position, right? Because I'm also thinking about what if they're not Adams? many of them are on diet or they have a lot on their plate. And then the other thing is, you know, we didn't get a chance to really build out this model like we wanted to. We wanted to get it down to the junior high and get the elementary schools involved. So I want to know what we got out of it because I know what I saw at the table and I know what I experienced speaking to you, Adam, personally, but But to everyone else, what did we get out of this that says we should continue putting effort into building this out model and getting kids to invest their time into it? Because now that means Adam would have to find a way to invest time to work with someone else and then get other folks involved. That's my question and concern. We can banter back and forth. I don't want to just be talking and then like you all just sit there and listen. I'm looking for a conversation.

Yeah, I think that that's a good point. And I think that one thing to mention, I appreciate all the nice comments, but If you think I'm good, just wait for the next people that are gonna come. There are so many amazing students and knowing this class under me and folks who have been interested, they're phenomenal people and they're gonna continue this process and take it to new heights that we don't even know. and so i think that the thing the one thing that you mentioned which was um expanding this to our eighth graders and our fifth graders that is something that i'll be taking over next year and i'll have direct you know access to that and really focusing my time on that because i'll be leading the district advisory council and so this year where you know i didn't feel like it was necessarily entirely my place to to be leading the advisory council as well as the student representative process i still wanted to create two separate entities and so um I think next year that's gonna be a great opportunity to really work on that. And we've planted the seeds throughout this year to expand it. And, you know, I think that with COVID-19 and some other challenges along the way that, you know, it was, it lined itself up well that at the start of next year we'll really be expanding it and adding more voice. I think that as much as, you know, you mentioned what are you all getting out of it? I think it's again, you know, students are getting a lot out of this process. And so, you know, I was reading the paper the other day and where we were talking about gender neutral restrooms. And, you know, yes, the administration was amazing and phenomenal, but that was a student movement that was from classes above me that said we need gender neutral restrooms and then that eventually, you know, came to me and that I brought that to you all. And so, you, know, that article wouldn't be written, you know, that wouldn't be in the paper if we didn't have these student movements and the ability to get that information. And so, No matter what, there's always going to be benefit from having a student at the table and someone there to provide perspective and to let you all know that what's going on with the students. And anyone who will take this position will make sure that they're able and ready and have the resources to do that.

So I think it would be really important for our, and Adam, I really appreciate how you shared that. I'm wondering like Jason's question is good. I would be interested in hearing what the other board members thought and like that question, like, do we feel like, what did we get out of it? And so I think it'd be important to process that before making some decisions for next year.

Well, one thing that I know that I had heard some maybe concerns, maybe that's a little bit big of a word for it beforehand was whether or not having a student at the table would change the board dynamics in a way that was not constructive or not a good thing. And I will say, and I don't know how much of this is because of who Adam is and his style, but that didn't happen. I feel like the board was still able to interact, you know, when Adam may not have been part of the conversation and or, you know, whatever that I feel like it preserved aspects of our dynamics and interactions in a way that I think was good. So, you know, so that I think is positive. I think if we can find ways to build in, you know, like giving thought and maybe it is even at the beginning, if you all do this work, I hope you do, where you look at the whole school year before the beginning of you know, August or September's meetings to see those agenda items where it's going to be really valuable to have student input and get it out there ahead of time. You know, that we're going to be talking about literacy and we really want to know what you all think about, you know, honors English or whatever, you know, whatever topics that we might know ahead of time to really solicit the input of students better than I think we might have done this year. I think that would be an improvement. So they're just some initial thoughts and Jason, I like what you're saying. This is really supposed to be a study item where we can go back and forth. So I'm glad you brought up a question and invited us all to respond.

Yeah. And I just want to make sure, because I know Stacey had her hand up and Amy had their hand up. I mean, I don't, I feel like the discussion and the questions are also part of the discussion. So, I mean, it will come out. So, I also just want to make that everybody's voice is in here as we talk about it. So I'm going to go to Stacey and see what she wanted to say and Amy wanted to say, and we can continue the conversation.

Thank you. I just wanted to start by saying voting to have a student on the school board was my very first vote as a board member last, a year ago. And I frankly can't, so I don't know the board without a student on the board really. And I really can't imagine not having a student on the Adam's voice or any student's voice is so important because it's central to what we do. I mean, we are in the business of educating kids, so we need to be hearing from our kids. So I think it's been overall a very positive and helpful experience for me as a board member to center and focus our thinking around the students at every discussion we have. I'm glad, Adam, to hear that you're going to be leading the eighth graders and fifth graders on the advisory board because that was one of my comments to Dr. Doherty is that I did feel like without those representatives, we were very high school focused this year. And I've kind of been waiting to get those eighth graders and fifth graders involved. So I'm really glad that you'll be the one leading them. I had another thought that was a little bit to Kristen's point too, not about adding to curriculum, but I think I had a thought that maybe the advisory board, either as a group or individually, should attend some board meetings. I think... they're advising you on things, but to not even know what a board meeting looks like or how we interact and how it's structured is a little abstract that way. So maybe then some of the advisory board members after having been to meetings and part of the process, maybe they would want to step up to apply to be the representative. So that's a little thing maybe we could do to help. But again, I can't imagine the board without it. And I think it keeps us all student focused and student centered, which is how we should be making all of our decisions as a board. So, so thanks.

Thanks, Stacey. Amy, did you want to, did you have something too?

Yeah. Do you know, let me say something right now.

Yes.

You want me to say something? I do. Okay, good. Well, first I just wanted to thank Adam for his efforts, all of his efforts this year. And he's obviously, I think we would all agree that he's just done a tremendous job with navigating this for, especially since it was our first year. So on a go forward, I think it's gone great. On a go forward basis, at the beginning when I started all this, one of my main concerns was that I wanted to make sure that we were getting able to hear all of our kids' voices and not just kids that were in the honors and AP and that we were getting a really good diverse audience opinion from, from our kids. And I'm, I, um, so I will say, you know, I do still think that's super important and I want to make sure that, um, the kids that are applying are, I know that it's, I don't know what the process is, but I don't, I want to make I guess that Dan is encouraging all different types of kids to apply for the position as a student rep and not just a certain type of student. Um, So that's one thing and that's still, I still don't have like a good answer. Cause I think the type of kid that might naturally navigate to applying is might be a high achieving student. But I do think it's really important that we would encourage all different types of students to apply for the position. so we could hear, possibly hear different voices. And the same thing with the advisory committee is I suspect I've heard through the grapevine that a lot of the kids that are even on the advisory committee, I think it might be, it might be like racially diverse, but I want to make sure that it's, you know, we have kids in there that might be struggling learners or kids that might, no, I just want to make sure we're getting a good cross section of our students and hearing everybody's voice and not just getting one type of one type of student voice. And maybe we are, maybe that's happening. I just want to make sure that we continue to take a look at that.

Can I add to that to Amy? Because I completely agree and that was kind of what I was trying to get to earlier was trying to create an opportunity for all kids to have an exposure to this being even an opportunity that they could take advantage of. And another wonder that I had was using some kind of survey thought exchange or something that accesses an entire classroom of kids that would have, you know, in history, it's definitely a broad spectrum of kids, accessing them with questions that, again, goes along with understanding public service and government. And how could we utilize those opportunities to get the information and that voice, that collective voice that we really want to hear. And not to take away from kids who naturally are driven and want to, you know, take advantage of all these opportunities, but many kids don't even know that it's an opportunity and how do we make sure that they have access to that? So thank you for bringing that up. I agree.

Thank you. So Gary, I know you had your hand up. I want to make sure you get your voice in here too.

Yeah, definitely. And I think this is a great, great thing to be going back and forth a little bit. So maybe we can return some of that. I want to take us back one step first, if I can ask a question, which I think is to Sean about the document that we were kind of using to go through this. Am I right about this, that the section that talks about, and I'm sorry to put you on the spot or pulled up or whatever, but the section that talks about the background information and says, the board discussed several times about having the benefits of having student up on the board and kind of list some of the concerns and positives is really kind of how it reads. I think, but tell me if I'm wrong, maybe that was just more feedback from this year. I think that reflects our discussion last year leading up to this, is that right?

Yes, so what I did was I put in there what was the discussion at the time. What were some things people were at that discussion when we had this last year? What were some things that people were wondering about and then what were some concerns? And I just put that in there just so that way if people wanted to revisit those again as part of this discussion.

Yeah, that's how I was reading it. And then I kind of got a little bit confused towards the end. And it's like, wait, did I miss something here? Am I remembering this correctly, that this is kind of reviewing what we talked about last year? The only reason to make that point is I want everyone to understand that some of these things that we were wondering aloud about this time last year, or really way before this time last year were before we actually had Adam with us for a year. So I don't know why that seemed important to me, but I wanted to make sure that was right and just be clear about that. So then obviously, you know, we've all I think I don't have to repeat the praise for Adam as a person being involved in this and his role. I think he's been great. You got to watch out for him. He will tend to make you look not as smart as him if you're ever in a situation where you have to answer questions with him. But other than that, I think we've all had a great time with this. And then Jason, I like how you focused us on, hey, what did we get out of this? What was the value of this? And As I think about it, I think who is the we, right? I think the we, the board, in my opinion, we got a lot out of having Adam here with us. And we've all kind of echoed that. I don't know if we, the district, has yet gotten enough out of this or we, the students, have gotten enough out of it. Um, but to me, uh, I'm hoping that that district advisory council is the key to that, that that is where this will go from just helping us as a board. in our function, in our process to actually making the district better, which of course the board being more high functioning or making better decisions helps that too. But I think that impact can be much more widespread and is it good for we in a bigger sense is yet to come. And that's what I'm kind of hoping about. So I'll leave it there. I mean, if we talk more specifically about the proposed policy, we can get into that too, but I don't want to rattle on too long so um those are those are kind of my i had the benefit of talking after you all so i can uh it's easier to respond to things you guys have already i've already said

i want to say too just because everybody's given their opinion and i will give my opinion up on this one which is, I think we got a tremendous amount of value actually. So, I mean, Adam, obviously you did a great job, thank you. And the position, I think the gender neutral bathrooms is a great example, right? We didn't come up with gender neutral bathrooms on our own. The students gave us that one, right? I mean, that was clearly from the students and then we thought, oh, that's a good idea, right? That's a perfect example. Did we get as much value? Well, I don't know in the first year, I think we got pretty much value, but can we get a little more value? Of course. Can we tweak it? Of course. But I even want to go back to what Stacey said, which is it's absolutely a best practice to have those that you serve sitting at the table. And so we serve students. That's what we do as a school district. So have a student and a student representative sitting at the table? I think it's awesome. And can we make it better? As many have noted, of course we can. Can we make the advisory council and do some? Yes. But I think it's, I mean, I'm strongly in favor of having a student rep on our board. I think it's a step change and something I think is important for us to do. So

what other thoughts do people have? Any? Yeah. I just,

sorry, go ahead Jason.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

I just wanted to throw out there and I'm sure maybe Adam you could speak to this that you've thought about this already. about, I guess you said that this was supposed to take your appointment for the next rep was supposed to have taken place already. So things got a little thrown off but I was thinking about the timing of it and that ideally it would coincide with our election so that maybe some of the onboarding we do for our new board members could include the student rep as well. So I don't know if you've thought of specific or separate onboarding for the new rep, but you know, this pandemic and distance learning didn't help. But I think ideally we would, you know, do that all together with our new board members in the future, I guess. I didn't know, Adam, what your thoughts are about that or any kind of onboarding process.

Yeah, that's a great question. So we were hopefully going to announce everything was in place to be done by April 15th and then. But so and On the other point of, sorry, I'm blanking. You were talking about how the election and then what was the other? The

onboarding. So

I actually have, when you all made your onboarding document, I tweaked it all and made a student representative onboarding document. So I have that already. And then the other thing was just the process was going to be a lot of having me work with, and we were going to have some time if the April 15th worked out, where there would be time to have the student representative come, the new student representative come to meetings and, you know, have me there as well to just kind of walk them through the process. But we'll start that next year. And hopefully, if we can get them to an online meeting or two, that that would be helpful as well. And so it next year, you'll you'll see me in the audience and sitting with them and chatting with them during breaks. And you know, just that that'll be a big part of it. And I'll probably be at the meetings for, you know, if not a quarter, a semester, however long it takes.

Great, great. Thanks.

Jason, do you have some? Yeah, so just to

summarize what I'm thinking, you know, once again, and this isn't just to praise Adam. To put it into context, I was running the other night, like 10.30. I saw Adam driving out to the house. I was going to see a friend. We chatted for about five minutes, right, Adam? Right? Yeah, yeah. And so all that to say, man, like, I'm not just, like, struggling at a legal. I think he is a sharp kid. I recognize talent when I see talent. But at the same time, I'm just trying to figure out, like, you know, could we get the same thing if we just do a better job of engaging the student body, doing a really good job of, like, making sure that we value what they say, value what they have to offer. You know, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't have a, you know, a student rep. I'm just saying, what do we want to get out of it? It's kind of the same question I asked earlier. What do we want to give from this? It's not just to have, not just to say surface level that it's good to have somebody on the board because we should represent, you know, have someone, whoever people we represent should be sitting at the table with us. I'm saying, you know, measurably, when should we be getting out of this? How is it going to make us better? Otherwise, we're just going through the motions. I mean, we can kind of fall back and allow an Adam, for example, even the next Adam, for example to come along and just kind of like, you know, do his thing because they're so sharp that we don't have to necessarily give them a lot of guidance and ask much from it. So I don't want to hide behind the fact that a lot of our students might have the savviness, the privilege, the resources, all those things to make them sharp. But I'm saying, well, what do we want to get out of it? That's what I'm asking. So you don't have to answer that now. We'll just continue to pull on the conversation. I would say that's where I am with this conversation, is to try to figure out what we want out of it.

You know, it brings a thought to my mind that, you know, I mean, this is all going to be the rest of you. I think there is room for improvement in terms of the board functioning. And I would hope that what I think is important is that the student rep, that the seven elected board members work together in retreats and in whatever other ways, whether it's protocols or whether it's, you know, how we do agenda planning or how we look at the year, how we do committees. I think there is work to be done within the board and that I would hope that having the student doesn't get in the, I'm not gonna say this gracefully, doesn't get in way of that work. That doesn't take time away from that work. And that if it doesn't, then I think it's very beneficial. And so that would be my hope for the board that you all continue to work as the seven of you and have that board voice also there too to contribute and add to your effectiveness.

Any other thoughts? Gary?

I've got one if we want to talk about anything in the rest of the document that was raised quickly. And I actually would, not to put him on the spot, but again, but I would love to hear Adam's thoughts on this. We have our policy, the draft policy is pretty clear about the student is not a voting member. But I know that, I think we've talked about this, maybe it's just been another context I've seen it. There's sometimes something essentially preferential voting like that person, whether it be an ex-officio participant or whatever the title they're given still voices a preference, whether there's a binding vote there. And I've, I don't think we've ever talked about this, Jaffe, but I think I would be curious what you think about that. If you had had to do that or if you had had the opportunity to do that, what you would think of that?

Yeah, that's a great question. I've thought about it a lot throughout the year and there was never a time that I felt the need to say, and I think I was coming from a place of If there was ever a policy, if there was ever a decision where the students or the district advisory council felt that it was so egregious that we really needed to state our preference, that most likely that it's a strong no or a strong yes. So for example, if the gender neutral bathrooms came back up and we were discussing it and we were talking about policy, that might be a place where I would say, I just want to, again, the students really support this initiative and- just during discussion, I can voice my opinion on that. But I don't think it's something where every single vote, I think it will just take time to ask the student representative. So I think that they'll be able to gauge and on those certain occasions if need be that they'll be to provide their input. But I don' think it's something that we need as a general practice.

Thank you. Are there any other thoughts on this?

I was just curious if anyone had an opportunity just to look at the policy and had anything that they felt was not a good fit or what we did was we took several different policies from different school districts and tried to blend them to match what we were

doing. So I don't have it pulled up in front of me right now, Sean, but doesn't it say in there something about electing one person for the whole year.

Serve a one-year term. Serve a one year term.

Yeah, so I don't know. I still feel like serving a one year term it's fine. I still have questions about having one person doing it for the entire year or you know so I don't if that's too restrictive and maybe allow flexibility for the students who are applying to be able to share. I know there's an alternate that could take on but is there? I don't know. I just think a little restrictive.

Sorry. No,

I'm sorry. I just was saying otherwise, that was the only comment I had for that.

Okay. And I don't think the draft policy, as I'm reading it quickly again, does take into account an alternate or more multiple people filling the role. So that might be something, I hadn't thought about that, but that might be something to-

We did put in there, the student or their alternate shall represent the views of the students. But maybe we need to emphasize that more in the direction.

More on the bullet points or something. Yeah,

I think that's a good point.

Any other thoughts?

My only thought, the only question that I had about it was that I wanted to ask Adam what he thought about voting on things. So you all heard what he had to say about that.

Anything else? Sean, you want to just do checkout real quick?

Yes. So what I'm hearing from the board is that, you know, the board feels like there is value in having student at the board table. But it's not more than just having a student at the table. It's about making sure we have the right mechanism in place to get student voice from a larger representative of students. to the table. And so the conduit would be the student board representative, but there may be some things that we can do to make sure that that advisory has a better capacity of getting student voice from different diverse perspectives. I think that there has been some questions around whether or not we can think about how this can be integrated into some curricular areas, thinking about If there's a way for us to expand it to our elementary and our middle school is going to be important. And we do have plans for that. And then the other thing too is making sure that we have the right process in place to train the student and the onboarding process for our student. And, you know, we have to... You know, the student also has to understand that this is, you know, this is an elected position to be at the board table and that they are giving advice, but ultimately the board is the one that's making those decisions. And so making sure we're emphasizing that. We did do that with Adam at the beginning of this year. I think the one thing that I would say just from my perspective is that As much as this was a new initiative, and I feel like it has gone very well from my perspective, I do think it's interesting to have high school students that... I've had more high school students talk more about the Board of Education this year than... they have ever talked about with me. And there was lots of misperceptions about like the Board of Education was hired or they didn't really realize it was elected. And just having that conversation in the school, I think people are more aware of the role of the Board of Education Board of Education. And so I think that that has been good in terms of awareness for our students. So what I'm going to suggest is trying to take together, put together some of the ideas that you have maybe making some adjustments. I'll talk to Adam and then bringing forth some recommendations that we would consider for a future board meeting, and then ultimately voting to see whether or not we wanna continue with the board rep. I feel like from my take from this meeting is that people find value in it, but there are some tweaks that need to be done to make it even more highly effective. And then making sure that we have the right policy language to match what we're doing.

Great. Thanks, Sean. So we're going to move on to action items, but I have to recuse myself from this next action item. So I'm going to leave the meeting. Somebody text me when you're done. Goodbye.

All right, guys. So this, I'm sorry, my screen just shut down, but we need to, Gary, we need to get a motion on... the part-time temporary employment 8.01, please.

Absolutely. 8.01, I move that the Board of Education approve the part-time, temporary employment report as submitted.

Second.

Is there any comment? Okay. All in favor?

Aye.

Aye. Motion passes.

I just want to make sure everyone voted. I don't know if I heard everyone.

Did everybody? I'm sorry.

Thank you.

Yep.

Okay.

I'll text Joe. Okay. Thank you. All right, guys.

Okay, thank you. So we're moving on to then the consent agenda. Do we have a motion for the consent agenda, Gary?

9.01, I move that the Board of Education approve the consent agenda. Second.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments? All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Passes unanimously. I do want to note that there is a donation in there and it is from Ms. Tricia Centeno for $1,000 for the speech and debate at Clayton High School. So thank you. So we're then moving on to financials, 10.01. Do we have a motion for that?

10.01, I move that the Board of Education approve the financials as submitted.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded. Does anybody have any questions or comments about the financials? All in favor? Aye. Okay, it passes unanimously. So we're moving on to board communication. Does anybody have

maybe not all right

oh oh joe

go ahead

i'll say something it's not it's just a i got a um letter i just thought it was nice that i would share with you guys i got a letter from a parent um saying that she has um some some of our kids are at burroughs and some are at clayton and she wanted to let us know how what a great job we had done with um the whole online learning. And she said that we had done a much better job than Burroughs had been doing. So I just, she was really impressed and she's got that perspective of having kids at both schools. So I thought that was kind of cool to hear. And so I just wanted to share it with you guys.

Dave Kuntz, Awesome. Thank you. And I will say it's not a report yet but Amy and I have a center of Clayton board meeting on Friday. And so we'll just have a sense of what's going on there. So I'll just share. I just will be able to share that next time. Dave Kuntz , Any other board communication. Dave KuntZ , Gary, go ahead. Gary Kuntz,

I just, just real quick. I heard a couple people talking about already having participated in the thought exchange that we put out just today, I think, but specifically around what we've done the last couple months. And I think it's good to be encouraging people to get their feedback about that. And sure, we've all heard a lot of feedback about it and from various people already. And I think we really need that too. The district needs that to evaluate what will happen. going forward. So I'm glad that people are paying attention to it and giving their feedback and maybe good if we could just encourage people to do that in your own circles.

Thank you. Any other board communication?

There's an election. Are you going to say anything

about that? There is an election. June the 2nd. That's correct. And we will actually have a board meeting Um, on June the 3rd. So it'll be, um, and just in case anybody's wondering, uh, unless for some reason the it's very, very close within 1%. But, um, if it's not, then, uh, we will be swearing in new board members on June the 3th. So just every, yeah. So, yes. Um, I will say, um, Again, Lily and Kristen, thank you. 21 years of service between the two of you. That's a lot. That's impressive. You're the two most senior members of our board. So it is impressive your service. Thank you. Thank you. So I think we have a movement to adjourn a motion to adjourn.

Certainly. 12.01, I move that the Board of Education adjourn.

Second. All in favor? Aye.

Aye.

Aye. All right. Aye. Anybody opposed? We're adjourned. Thank you all. Take care. Bye. Bye.