December 16, 2020 — Meeting Transcript

Is everybody else ready? Other board members, you're good? Everybody good? All right. Yeah, we're

live.

All right. Adequate notice has been given. So we are going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance to the famous flag in Sean's office as we always do. Oops. All right. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. All righty. Thanks. And again, sorry we're starting a little bit late. A few technical challenges and a few challenges from board members jumping on. But so we are going to start with recognizing our own. And first up is the National Merit Scholars. And I'm going to hand it over to Sean.

Thank you, Joe. So tonight we are going to recognize our National Merit Scholars and we're being joined by our school principal, Dr. Dan Kaczewski, who is going to be helping us with this recognition. And so normally we would have our students at the board meeting and we would normally have their parents there as well. And so we encourage them to join the board meeting on the live stream so that way they can watch from home. And we are going to recognize each of the students. And then there's also been a certificate and a plaque that is going, that's been sent to the school. So that way they have something to remember this by. So what we're going to do first is recognize the 2021 National Merit semifinalists. And there were 11 students. And so we're just going to say their names. And so that way we can recognize them publicly. So first we have Corey Akin. We have Luca Bassnet. We have Madeline Blatt. We have Pablo Buitrago. We have Josephine Gillette. Jack Hansel. Grace Homan. Danica Lee. Mason Petrovsky. William Reddington. and Sara Robles Razic. So those are our semi-finalists. So we wanna give them a round of applause. And then we have our 2021 National Merit Commended Students. And we had 16 students that we are going to recognize. First, we have Julia Bout, Sarah Centeno, Disha, excuse me, Disha Chatterjee. Ella McPherson, excuse me, Ella Ferguson. Belle Gage. Carolyn Good. Noor Jareth. Maxwell Keller. Anastasia Kroger. Rachel Liang. Yiming Ma. Charlotte Rose McDonough, Siti Narayan, Olivia Whittle, Cameron Williams, and Carol Zhang. So let's give all of those students a round of applause. Dan, did you have anything that you want to add or anything that you want say to the students?

Other than thank you for representing us so well, it's been challenging conditions over the past year and our students and families have persevered and we always thank our teachers and our staff and parents actually for all they do to support our kids.

Thank you, Dan. And then next on our Recognizing Our Own, we have, we wanna recognize Inclusive Schools Week. And I'm gonna ask Robyn Wiens, our Assistant Superintendent of Student Services to introduce this recognition.

Thank you, Dan. And then next on our Recognizing Our Own, we have, we wanna recognize Inclusive Schools Week. And I'm gonna ask Robin Wiens, our Assistant Superintendent of Student Services to introduce this recognition.

Thank you, Dr. Doherty. So inclusive schools, week is the first week of December, and this year was December 7th through 11th. And this annual event was created by the Inclusive Schools Network and was created to celebrate the progress schools have made toward providing a quality education for our increasingly diverse student population, and those students marginalized due to disability, gender, socioeconomic status, cultural heritage, language preference, and other factors. So before we move on to two of our student presenters, Dr. Daugherty, I'd like to invite you to share the Inclusive Schools Week proclamation.

Thank you. And I'm going to go ahead and read it because I really feel that this has some important information and language in it that is important for us to remember in thinking about creating an inclusive environment. This year's theme, A Time for Inclusion Is Now, provides an opportunity to celebrate the journey of educators, students, parents, and community members who navigate to arrive at the destination of inclusive education. Working together, we can steer our schools and ultimately our society towards that place where all students belong and are successful. Inclusive Schools Week provides an opportunity for educators, students, and parents to discuss and initiate practices to continue to improve their goal of successfully educating all children. Whereas the School District of Clayton is committed to providing an environment in schools and classrooms that emphasize the importance of welcoming and educating all children. And whereas the school district of Clayton staff recognize that each child is unique, learns differently and therefore learns better when teaching is tailored to their abilities and interests. And whereas the educators and families in the school district of clayton work diligently to ensure that inclusion is an integral component of exemplary student achievement in our schools and classrooms. And whereas The School District of Clayton is committed to the practices and philosophies. It is not possible for a school to be truly excellent unless it's equitable, and it's not possible to be truly inclusive for some students unless we are inclusive of all students. Whereas by the efforts to make our schools inclusive and our students well-educated and aware, the staff and families of the School District of Claydon have contributed significantly to building a stronger and more inclusive environment. And whereas the staff and families of the School District Clayton deserve to celebrate their successes and wish to reflect on how they might even further improve. And now, therefore, be it resolved by the School Board of Clayton, Missouri, that the board joins with the Inclusive Schools Week Network schools, districts, and communities around the world in declaring the week of December 7th through the 11th, 2021. as inclusive schools week and encourages other institutions to do that as well. So I'm gonna hand it back over to Dr. Wiens who's gonna introduce our speakers.

Great, thank you Dr. Doherty for reading the proclamation with our community. I have two incredible families who are joining us tonight. I'd like to welcome the Blankenships more specifically Hayden Blankenship who's a ninth grader at CHS And the McClendon family, their son David is a sixth grader at Wydown. Hayden's mom Christina is the president of our PAC-Ed and David's mom Felice is a member of the PAC-Ed Steering Committee. And Hayden and David are gonna talk to us a little bit about Inclusive Schools Week.

Say hi Hayden. Hi Hayden. Say it again. He needs to hear you. Say hi, Hayden. That's Hayden. See? Say hi, Hayten.

Hi,

Hayden.

Are

we ready to present Davey?

Oh, Davey already said hi, Hayden, he only wants the what are you getting for in exchange for this meeting?

Ice cream.

Yeah, so I'm on borrowed time. I got to show up with ice

cream

cone soon. That's really what he cares to talk about if anyone really wants to know. So Hayden, it's on you. Okay, here we go, buddy.

Thank you for having us here. My name is Hayden Blankenship. I am a freshman at Clayton High School. The Inclusive Schools Network has designated December 7th through 11th as Inclusive Schools Week. Since 2001, this annual event has been held during the first full week of December to celebrate the progress schools are making toward providing a quality education for our increasingly diverse student population and those students marginalized due to disability. gender, socioeconomic status, cultural heritage, language preference, and other factors.

This

year's theme, The Time for Inclusion is Now, provides an opportunity to celebrate the journey of educators, students, parents, and community members to arrive at the destination of inclusive education. Working together, we can steer our schools and ultimately our society toward a place where all students belong and are successful. As this year has progressed, we have an unusual vantage point for understanding an even broader meaning of inclusion. You simply cannot and should not compartmentalize inclusion. All means all. On a worldwide basis, we have seen the true meaning of inclusion in the struggle for social justice. When we recognize the deep and yes, inclusive meaning of the inherent right of every individual to be equal in the eyes of society. and in opportunities life offers, we can appreciate the movement to gain inclusion for students marginalized due to disability, gender, socioeconomic status, cultural heritage, language preference and other factors. Inclusive Schools Week provides an opportunity to discuss and initiate practices to continue to pursue our goal of successfully educating all children. Please join us in continuing to celebrate Inclusive Schools Week. Check out the following. Inclusion Basics, online presentation provided by the Inclusive Schools Network, the Pack Ed Poster Contest, Essay Contest and the Pack Ed Inclusion Awards. Please note that all contests and award nominations run from December 7, 2020 to January 5, 2021. An award ceremony date is to be determined. Thank you and have a good evening.

I hope you all were able to hear that.

Yes, we could hear it. Say bye, Hayden. Bye-bye, Hayden.

Bye-bye, Davey.

Thank you, Hayden. Thanks, Davey.

You're welcome.

I'm glad you could be here with us.

I'm going to go do the ice cream now, but thank you for having us. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Thank you for being part of this.

And as Hayden shared through his augmented communication device, also referred to as his talker, I'd encourage folks to check out the PAC-Ed website to learn more about the essay contest and poster contest and some of the other events they're hosting as part of Inclusive Schools Week as they run through January 5th. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you, Robin. And thank you, Hayden and David and the Blankenship and McClendon family. That was awesome. And also certainly want to congratulate, you know, on behalf of the board, these two families, but also these two brave individuals for showing up at a board meeting. That's impressive. And then also just want to say on behalf of the the National Merit folks too before we move into Dr. Doherty's superintendent communication.

Thanks, Joe. I'm going to share my screen.

So good evening, everyone. And tonight, what I want to do is kind of give an update about what's been happening with our district with our return to earn in-person learning and then just give you some updates about some other things that are happening within the district. And so just want to remind everyone that we've had all grade levels back since November 9th. We've had a pre-K through five, a pre-K five through pre-K through for five days. And then for six through 12, we've had a hybrid schedule where our students are going to school for half days. And the reason behind that is it allows us to have proper social distancing, but it allows our students to come to school each and every day. We've maintained our learning at home students, and we did allow families to provide, we provided an option for them to have another learning at home opportunity for third quarter. And then we also gave families an opportunity to switch back to responsive learning. And so we collected that data and making those adjustments. We did notice that the majority of the families are returning back to responsive learning, which is good. We are continuing to monitor our own district data. We're looking at the number of quarantines and positive cases within our region, excuse me, within the region but also within our local district. I will say that we have been very proud of our risk mitigation measures We continue to do contact tracing, which is showing us that the transition is very minimal within the school setting. We've also had to do some quarantines though of athletic teams, but we're very proud of how the risk mitigation measures have been showing that they've been working. So I will have to say and recognize that we have had a personalized approach from our nursing staff when we've had to do quarantines or reach out to families And I think this is very unique to Clayton because our nurse coordinator, Heather Chrisman, as well as some of the other nurses, have been making personal phone calls to our families because they know that this is kind of upsetting to get a phone call like that, that they have to quarantine. And it allows them to have some questions to be answered. And really, I feel like gives a personal approach and also helps people keep their mind at ease. So I really appreciate that. The other thing we've been doing is doing stakeholder surveys. We pulled our staff and got some survey data from them. And then just last week, we took that survey data and pulled a working group of staff together to hear their concerns, thinking about second semester and ways that we can improve. We also have currently a thought exchange that is out for both our students and our parents. And we're going to use that data to inform some potential ways that we could change for the second semester. We know that going back to this in-person learning was going to have both benefits and some challenges, and we recognize that. Some of the benefits I just want to point out is that we, and I pulled some of these from the survey that we got from the staff. is that they really appreciate those daily interactions with the students. They're able to come each day. In other hybrid models, they may come maybe two and a half days a week, but this allows our students to have consistency each day. Teachers have said that they've been able to be responsive to the students' needs in a different way than they're able to remotely. Students have shared their appreciation for being back, not only just in talking to us, but also through their surveys. We have also, we have gotten some responsive, the teachers are able to provide, said they'd be able to provide responsive feedback to their students when they're in person. They've been able to do that remotely, but it does feel different and more instant when they're in class. You know, continuing to make strong connections and relationships when you're able to see the students. And then it also gives us better opportunities for check-ins on social emotional well-being of the well-being of our students. And then, it's also a step towards returning back to a full schedule. And I share that with you is because but I also want to say that our teachers did a tremendous job when it was remote learning and trying to build relationships and trying to maintain that the learning and they continue to do that and as in learning at home teachers. but I think that there's been some true benefits of having our students back in the schools. There are challenges that we need to also be aware of is that teachers are still concerned. They basically have been frontline workers and they're feeling that they need a little more time for planning and having at the middle school and high school level, they are teaching twice the same lesson for the afternoon and the morning And so they're also thinking about, you know, they're just concerned. I mean, I think that's reality of coming into an environment with lots of people is concerning, but we have been putting the risk mitigation measures and teachers have shared that they've appreciated those risk mitigation measures. The other thing is parents at the middle and high school want more time in schools. And so we started with this hybrid model and We did it because we wanted to make sure we were doing everything possible to keep our kids safe. And one of the things that's been good is that we've been able to keep our kids six feet apart at all levels, but we've been able minimize other quarantines because of those mitigation measures. If we have all the students back at the same time, that's really pulling back on the risk mitigation measures. Students have shared that they are concerned about their mental wellbeing, and they've shared that as part of the survey as I started looking at that. This is stressful for them as well. And some of these years are very critical in terms of applying for college and making sure that they have the content. And so it sometimes is exhausting for them and they're not able to socialize the way that they were previously. We're also continuing to work on leveraging technology in the best way possible. We've been very cognizant of providing teachers with the tools that they need to be successful, but we can always look at ways to improve on that. And so teachers gave us some feedback on that last week. We know we continue to make sure that we're looking out for the student and teacher's wellbeing. And then the other thing too is like making sure everyone's taking that collective responsibility for following the risk mitigation measures when they're not in school. I think one of the challenges we have is that as we move forward, there are people who have different beliefs and we know that we're not going to make everyone happy with the decisions that we make. We know that some people want more time, some people want less time, some people are worried, some people are not worried. And so when you work in a school district, you have so many different opinions. And we're not able to please every opinion, but we're trying our very best to do what we think is in the best interest of our students and staff. And then the other thing is sustainability. What we're doing right now is very different than what we've normally done in our teaching practices. And I think that we're able to learn some things from that and think about how we can grow But as I was talking to one teacher, she was saying that we're able to do what we're doing right now because it's a need to do this. But this isn't something that we can sustain for years to come. And so right now, even though we're feeling some pain in terms of doing things differently, it's not something that you can sustain for many, many years or a long period of time. So we're being cognizant of that as well. For the second semester, the third quarter, we are starting on January 4th back with our teachers for Records Day. January 5th through the 8th are going to be remote learning days and we were intentional about doing that so we can build in time after the holidays to have contact tracing. and to avoid some additional quarantines. What we're asking people to do is to, you know, we can't control what people are gonna do outside of the school day, but we're asking them to be cognizant that if they have been exposed over the holidays not to come to school, But we're building in time to be able to do some of that contact tracing. And we felt like we found that it was very beneficial after the Thanksgiving holiday. So we're returning on January 11th with in-person learning. And we're going to start with our current schedule that we're in. And we'll continue to look at ways that we can possibly, you know, possibly, you know add more time to that later on in the semester. But at this point, we're not going to take away a risk mitigation measure. We are going to continue with that as we start. We have had some, some teachers gave us some ideas about ways to do the live streaming and thinking about ways that we can improve that. And so we're trying to look at ways that we can implement that in terms of scheduling. And again, when we continue to monitor the situation for schedule changes later in the semester, and then we'll continue to implement the best mitigation measures we can possibly do to keep everyone safe in the schools. We, as I said earlier, we have, we, We have been very proud of how there have been very low transmissions within our schools, but we still have cases where there are positive cases and we do have to quarantine. And so we are keeping track of that data and we feel that the data is showing there are, you know, we're seeing that our risk mitigation measures are working and we'll continue to monitor that, but we'll be as transparent as possible by reporting this each Friday. The one thing I think is, the other thing I want to just make sure that we are, that I share is that we're trying to be as intentional as possible about everything that we're doing. And so again, this is the first time we've gone through any of this and we're trying to make the best decisions possible. But we're looking at, as I said, being intentional about risk mitigation or being intentional about our communication, making sure we're putting things out weekly and keeping people updated. We're very intentional about our supports for students, not only just academically, but the social emotional needs and also some of those needs in terms of like food and those things to just stay healthy. And so I've been very proud of how our district has been responsive to the needs of our students. And if there has been an issue, we have a system in place to make sure that we're addressing it. And so I think that and also collecting data from our panorama to see what people need has been very helpful. And we're being intentional about that. We're also, we're intentional about the development of our schedules. As I said, we did it so that way we can have the best social distancing possible. And then also utilizing our resources as best possible in terms of human capital and some of the expenses for the measures we put in place. And we've had to spend money that we probably wouldn't have spent if we didn't have this issue with the pandemic. But I feel like we have been very thoughtful about our expenses and feeling that those expenses are paying dividends for us. And so fortunately, we are in a place where we're fiscally healthy, where we're able to have those funds available to make sure that we're putting everything in place and while maintaining a fiscally healthy school district. And then the other thing too, is that we're looking at the best way to support the needs of our educators. And our educators gave us some good input last week and thinking about ways that we can make sure we're sustaining them because if the teachers are emotionally healthy, physically healthy, then it's also ultimately gonna have an impact on our students. And so we're trying to be as intentional as possible. The other thing I just think is important is that COVID is not the only thing that we're focusing on. We have to make sure that we're continuing to move forward with our work around the strategic plan. Tonight, I was able to be part of a meeting with all of our curriculum coordinators and we're talking about the connections between deep learning, our profile of the graduate and our strategic goals. And it is exciting to see that we're moving our work forward even in the middle of all this pandemic. Our communications department has a plan for communicating the positive stories that are happening within our schools. We've already started putting those out on our website. We're continuing to move forward with our hiring practices in terms of having a diversity recruitment event in January, and I thought there's some people who are not moving forward with those kinds of opportunities because of everything going on, but our district is trying to be creative in a way to do that because it's important and it's a priority. We're continuing to do our professional development for teachers and making sure we're thinking about different ways to do that. And then there's other just neat things that are happening within the district. Today, I got to be in one of our social studies classrooms at the high school and they had an hour-long session with Nina Totenberg from NPR. I mean, it was incredible. We were very fortunate that She has a relative that's in Clayton and we were able to make that connection, but the teacher was able to make that happen. The students came up with such great questions and it was an incredible learning experience. And then we also have a project that's happening at one of our elementary schools where it's Hope for Haiti, where their students are thinking about ways that they can problem solve issues in the world and thinking about ways they can contribute to making change. So I share those stories with you because it's important to know that, yes, we can be inundated with everything COVID related, but we also are trying to look at how we can move forward in a positive way. I am, as a leader of the district, I'm working to also, even when it's really hard, to maintain a positive tone and to look for silver linings, even though that's You know, that's hard, but we have to set the tone is that we're continuing to do what's best for our students and thinking about how we can move forward as a district. So I just wanted to share those things to you. I will have to say again, I have to thank our educators for doing such a tremendous job. Thank you to our families for what they have been doing. to make sure that they are supporting the district and giving us input. I did want to also share that there's the thought of how we've had to change systems within the district as well, but we're being flexible. So for example, at the high school, normally we have our final exams So we build in a final exam schedule. So this year, we've had to change that a little bit because we don't want students in 90-minute blocks. We're asking teachers to figure out how to do their assessments within their normal time. We're trying to protect instructional time as much as possible, but still putting in ways to have summative types of assessments or summative type of projects that are allowing us to see what our students are learning. And then the other thing too is that We are looking at our normal benchmark assessments so we can see where our students are in there, you know, with the benchmarks. So that way we can reflect as a district and say, you know, this is these are going to be some priorities that we need to focus on when our students, you know, are fully back in their schedule. But I really do feel overall that our students are still continuing to move forward, no matter if they're learning at home or an in-person learning. So. I just said a lot to you. So did anybody have any questions about that before we move into our student update?

And maybe Sean, we just stopped sharing your screen for a second so we can all see each other just in case. Thank you. I'll just go around the horn. Amy, you got any questions? Stacy, thank you. Stacy, any questions?

I don't have any questions. I just want to say, Sean, thanks for all you're doing to help get us through this and continuing to share those silver linings, I think is so important. And although you mentioned, you know, this way of teaching is not sustainable, I do think there are some creative things like you mentioned that have come out of this that are worth sustaining. I think like Final exams is one example of something that probably could have used some rethinking and this kind of forced us into it. But I've seen other things with my own kids too. I mean, Y-Down is having a play and a musical virtually this spring and the kids are submitting video auditions. And so I've just been really impressed with everyone's creativity and like you said, taking advantage of the silver lining. So thank you to everybody for making the best of it.

Thanks, Stacy. David, any comments or questions? No?

OK.

Thanks. Jason,

any comments or question? No. Thank you. Good job, Sean.

Thanks. Caitlin, any comments or quesitons?

No questions. Thank you to the administration.

Thank you. Kim, any comments or questons?

OK.

Thank you. Gary, any comments or questions?

No. But I do, just as a parent of a high school student, have to echo what Stacy was saying about the rethinking of exams in this time. I'm just glad that we have had an opportunity to think about some of these things and appreciate all the hard work. It's not perfect ever or this semester, but appreciate it.

Great. Thank you, Gary. And I would just say, Sean, to you and the whole staff, the administrators, the teachers, everybody, this is really, really difficult. And we appreciate how hard you are working. You guys are doing a Herculean task. And please know that the whole board appreciates it. You guys are a very, very challenging environment.

Thank you. And I would encourage anyone that's watching the live feed is that if you A quick email or handwritten card to a teacher, just thanking them for what they're doing. It goes a long way.

Awesome.

And I'm going to turn it over to Caitlin to see if she has a report.

Yeah, so as students wrap up the first semester here are a couple of updates. So finals took place at the end of last week and is continuing to this week. So with the new schedule then teachers are exploring a couple of different options. Some of these options are having no finals, having a project based final, And having a final within the 45-minute time period, that's sometimes weighted as 10 to 20% of the grade as usual or weighted like a regular test. And student feedback about this new final schedule has been generally positive. And however, since there wasn't a time blocked out for finals, some of the last large assignments that teachers were getting in before the end of the semester coincided with finals week. However, this year brings up a good time to take a look at the role that finals are playing in a college prep education and looking forward, perhaps there could be some conversations around rethinking finals. As for in-person and online school, the format of school has been basically the same so far. And students are feeling more comfortable being in person because of the sanitation and quarantine efforts done by the school. As for some club achievements this past month, Science Olympiad is participating in their first competition of the year this weekend. History Bowl won first in the junior varsity in the Missouri division of the National History Bowl. and Globe won several national awards for cover opinion and feature stories. Ivy Reid also placed second in the nation for Writer of the Year by the National Scholastic Press Association.

Thank you, Caitlin. So we're going to move on to 5.01, which is actually the fiscal year audit for the 2019-20 school year. I do want to just share that Mary Jo's going to go over it and then just kind of, it's going to be a little bit seam out of sync because Mary Jo's going go over it. We can ask any questions and then we're going to moved to an action item. just to respect the fact that the auditors are with us. And then we'll go back to an information item. So just FYI for sequence for the board. So Mary Jo, I'm gonna hand it over to you and your team.

All righty. So thank you. I will present Brian Wertz and Allison Weems. They are our two auditors. Brian is the managing partner and partner of our audit from Kerber, Eck, and Breckel, and Allison is the manager on the audit. We did, as a requirement of board policy, meet with the audit committee, which consists of the board president, the board treasurer, the superintendent, me, two people from my office, the auditors, and then a resident. And it's supposed to be a person on the Long-Term Financial Planning Committee. But since that committee has been kind of a little defunct the past couple of years, we've been using Rick Bliss who was on it previously. And so he joined us and had an hour's worth of questions and went deep dive into the audit, even had to add followups with some questions from him. So we always appreciate his input. He is a very thorough resident and takes his job seriously on that committee. So, with that being said, I don't know if at the end if Joe or Jason will have any comments on that meeting but I will go ahead and let Brian present. I also want to publicly thank Brent Bell and Adrian Loft who are the two people who really do the majority of the work on this and spent a lot of time on the audit this year, especially with everything being a lot of it being virtual at the beginning so they did a great job. So I'm going to share my screen for the presentation and Brian will present.

Can Brian unmute? I don't

know.

Can you hear me now?

Yep, I can hear

you. Yeah, I'm too old for this Zoom stuff. I have to get my kids down here to help me. You want to go to the next slide? As Mary Jo did state, we met with the Finance Committee on I don't know what day, Monday or something. And so we went through all of this stuff in pretty much detail in the audited financial statements themselves and answered some questions. But this is just sort of an overview of an audit. So we're just going to present that tonight. If you look at our audit opinion, there's an introductory paragraph. And then the first bullet point after that is management's responsibility as what it means when we do an audit. And so it's management's responsibility to prepare the financial statements in accordance with GAAP, which is generally accepted accounting principles. And to basically select the accounting principles to be used to prepare the financial statement. So the accrual basis of accounting is used for the government-wide financial statements and business type activities and the aggregate remaining fund information. And the modified accrual basis is used for the fund financial statements. So the full accrual basis of accounting is much like a for-profit entity. And then the modified accrued basis, the significant differences between the two is how we record fixed assets and debt. When we issue debt it's revenue in the fund financial statements as a liability on the government wide financial statements and fixed assets the same way when we purchase a fixed asset for fund financial statements There's it's a, it's an expense. And for the government wide financial statements, it's, it's capitalized and depreciated. And then also within the financial statements, there's a reconciliation between the two, how we get from the modified accrual fund financial statements to the full accrual government wide financial statements. Um, the other piece of this that is, um, responsibility of management is to maintain an internal control structure to, uh, safeguard the assets of the district and to also, um, make sure that there's not a material misstatement in the financial statements. So that's part of the internal control structure. And we can't be a part of that. So if management were to rely on us to find a misstatement in financial statements, we would be then considered a part of the internal controls structure of the district and would no longer be independent. So then our responsibility is to take those financial statements prepared by management and determine the fair presentation. In our opinion, we talk about, we do not give absolute assurance that there's not a material misstatement in the financial statements. And the reason we say that is because we don't review 100% of the transactions. We're allowed to sample transactions and get certain coverages and extrapolate errors, but we do not test 100% of the transaction. The other thing as it relates to internal controls, which is in our responsibilities, part of the opinion is We review the internal controls of the district. We may test internal controls of the District, but we do not give an opinion on the controls. And then I also like to talk about fraud as it relates to the audit. We will interview employees and management of the district and ask if they're aware of any fraud that might exist and what would they do if they encountered such a thing, who they would report it to. And then if they mention anything to us that we feel like needs to be extrapolated into our audit and procedures performed, we will do that. Also, if we're doing our audit procedures and something comes to our attention that appears that it could be fraud, we're required to extend our audit procedures for that as well. But we're not required to develop audit procedures to detect fraud. So I think that's important. Our audit is performed in accordance with generally accepted auditing standards, government and government auditing standards. We did issue an unmodified opinion this year, which is the best opinion the district can get. So based on our audit, the financial statements are free of a material misstatement. If we had any weaknesses in internal controls that were detected as a result of our audit, we'd be required to disclose those. So we're happy to report that there was no material weaknesses noted in the internal control order financial reporting and we didn't note any instances of noncompliance with laws, regulations, contracts or grants. Part of the audit is as it relates to Missouri laws and regulations, as it relates to budgetary and disbursement procedures and accurate disclosure of attendance. That part of the audit is performed in accordance with attestation standards established by the AICPA, and we gave an unmodified opinion on

those as well. Other

required communications, the significant accounting policies are described in note one to the financial statements. As we discussed before, we'd use the accrual basis of accounting for the government wide financial statements and the modified accrual for the fund financial statements. There were no new accounting policies adopted and application of existing policies were not changed during the year. There are significant estimates in these financial statements Most significantly, the net pension liability or the district's proportionate share of the PSRS and the peers, and also the other post-employment benefit obligation, that's OPEB. These estimates are significant. They're basically prepared by actuarial information. And so we determined that the assumptions used are reasonable based on historical information. And that's what we're required to do from an audit perspective. No transactions lacked authoritative guidance. The financial statement disclosures are neutral, consistent, and clear. Other than the pension, I would say that's a pretty extensive footnote, and there's a lot of information in there. We encountered no difficulties in performing our audit and had no disagreements with management. If we had any audit adjustments as a result of our audit, we'd be required to disclose those to you. We had no financial statement misstatements detected during our audit. We received a management representation letter from management dated December the 9th, which is also the date of our opinion. That date is significant because that is the date that we'd be required if there was any Subsequent events or commitments or contingencies that changed from June 30th through December 9th are required to review those and determine if there's a disclosure that's required or even an adjustment to the financial statements. Anything that happens after that date, we're not required to review. And the management rep letter also basically says that Management provided us with all the financial information we asked for. They didn't withhold any information. They gave us the board minutes. They made us aware of any contingent liabilities or subsequent events. If management had any other consultations with any other independent auditors or accountants during the year, we'd be required to disclose that to you as well. To our knowledge, there were no such consultations. Then just to follow up, we'll even include Mary Jo in our appreciation and Brent Bell and everybody else that cooperated and helped us get to this point. COVID's been kind of weird, even from an audit perspective, where we get to clients when we can. We do a lot of stuff as we're doing now virtually. So it's been a challenge for everybody and we appreciate everybody's help in getting us here. So if anyone has any questions, we'd be happy to answer them. Or get Rick to answer them, maybe.

Yeah, maybe. Thank you. We appreciate it, Brian. We appreciate it Mary Jo. So I'm just going to go ask if folks have questions, but maybe Jason, I'll start with you since you were part of the audit committee, if you had any questions or comments.

I don't have any questions at all. I think it was really good watching or listening to Rick because from an outsider's perspective, him reading it and the questions that he had were, uh, were really good clarifying questions. And it's, it made me realize how, how sometimes I assume everyone should get it when they read it. Um, but that's only because, you know, I'm engaged throughout the whole year, uh, watching this process take place. So it was just good watching Rick, good watching Mary Jo answer those questions and, um, as well as the audit team. So good job, guys. I have no comments. It's crystal clear to me.

Thank you, Jason.

Yeah.

Gary, any questions or comments?

No, thank you.

Great, thanks. Kim, any questions or comment? Thank you. Caitlin, any questions or coments? Thank you. David, any questions or commets?

No.

Thank you. Stacy, questions or comments? Thank you. Amy, questions, comments? Harmon Zuckerman, All right. And again, I just want to say also having been part of the audit committee meeting. It was Harmon Zuckerman , Rick did ask a lot of very detailed and it kind of exhaustive questions which were good and Thank you to the audit team and Mary Jo and Brent for answering all of them. I thought it was a good, and to Jason's point, it was interesting to watch somebody who's not in it ask a whole literally about 55 minutes of questions straight. So thanks to everybody. I think you guys did a great job, right? And even with very, very, very detailed questions. So we are going to then move to our action item, which is actually an approval of the audit. So Gary, will you read the action item please?

All right, 5.01, I move that the Board of Education approve the fiscal year 2019-2020 independent auditor's report of the financial statements and federal and state programs as submitted.

All right. It's been moved and seconded. Any other comments or questions? All right. All in favor?

Aye.

Opposed? All right. It passes unanimously. Thank you all. We appreciate it.

Thanks, Brian and Allison.

Thanks for having us. Everybody stay safe.

Thanks. So as I said, we're again, we're jumping around a little bit just to honor the fact that we didn't want to have the auditors have to stay on for our whole meeting. So we're moving to an information item. An information item is a little bit of a different information item. It's one that I'm going to speak to, which is just board candidate filing. So right now. We have two people who have filed, our incumbents, Amy Rubin and Jason Wilson. So congratulations to you both for refiling for another term. Just a reminder for the public, the filing opened yesterday. So yesterday was the first day, Tuesday, that somebody could file. And it goes all the way until January the 18th. I'm sorry, January the 19th, excuse me, Tuesday, January the 19 at five o'clock. And so the deal is between eight and five, somebody can come and sign up. But what we do ask is, is, and this is as much for the public, that if somebody wants to come and sign up, they should call or email Sandy Mancilla to make an appointment just to kind of honor COVID precautions. And of course, when the district is closed for the holidays, you can't sign up. So hopefully that's obvious, but you can't any... any day that the school is not in session because of the December holidays, that's not a day that you could, including weekends, that somebody could come and sign up. So I think that's really all there is to say about that. There's not really a lot more. Just again, a reminder, I will... Well, it's an information item. So I'll go around and ask if anybody has any questions or comments, but just honor that it's information item. So, I'm gonna start with you, Amy. Any comments or questions?

No, but thank you for the reminder.

Stacy, any comments or questions? Thanks. David, any comments or question? No. Okay. Thank you, Jason. Any comments or questions?

No.

Thanks. Caitlin, any comments or questions? Kim, thank you. Gary, any comments or question? No. Thanks, Joe. Okay. Thanks. All right. So then we're going to move on to the strategic plan update and I'm going to hand it over to Sean and the team to give us an update.

Sorry. So

thank you, Joe. So tonight we're going to be giving a update about our strategic plan. And in November, the Board of Education approved our most recent strategic plan. We have been working on it for some time, about a year and a half. And so we were very excited in November to get it passed. We feel very positive about our strategic plan and the goals tonight is to inform the board and the public about the action steps that we're moving towards reaching those goals and objectives. And so, um, we're not, we're not asking to change the scope of the strategic plan. We're not changing like the objectives or the goals. It's just to really make sure that the board is informed about what is happening. Um, also to ask any questions. Um, this is not going to be a comprehensive list of everything we're going to be doing around this strategic plan for the next three years because it's going to be very fluid. We're gonna be monitoring our data very closely, we're gonna be seeing whether or not we need to adjust those action steps and then coming back to it every year that evergreen model to see what adjustments we need to make. So as a reminder, we built this strategic plan in thinking about as an excellent school district, how do we become How do we become transformational in our approach? And it's opportunity for us to be thinking about different approaches, thinking about ways that we can approach learning in new ways. And I know coming out of the pandemic, we might be able to learn some things about what we had to do this past year that could influence some of the things we do in the future. And as I shared to you when the board approved the strategic plan, is that there are certain givens as part of the work that we do within the district. And those givens are high academic achievement, making sure we have high quality staff and that we're being fiscally responsible. And so those are going to be things that we're going to continue doing and continuing to measure. But we also are gonna develop goals that are gonna cause us to be aspirational, thinking about making sure that we're being learner-centered, thinking about ways that we can make sure that the learners are not just our students, but they are our teachers and our staff as well, like parents as well. Thinking about different innovative approaches And then making sure we have that equity focus as part of it. I wanted just to point out to the board is that if you go to our website now, you'll see that we do have our new strategic plan up on the website and we do have an introductory video that is on there as well to kind of explain the strategic plan. And then our strategic plan as well as our profile of the graduate is all part of this, all part of this part of the website. So just wanted to point that out for both the board and for the public. Again, the other thing is that we were very thoughtful about starting with the end in mind and that was developing the profile of the graduate. And what I would say about this is that we have been very thoughtful about getting input from the community and looking at the needs for our students and thinking about how do we develop good humans and give them the skills that are going to help them be successful beyond their years. One of the things I think it'll be important to do is put in a system for getting input from our graduates after they're finished and making sure that they are giving us back input about like, how did we do? So that way it could potentially influence our profile and the work we're doing as our strategic plan. The catchphrase for our strategic plan of the tagline is a place for everyone to grow as learners in head and heart. And so we are going tonight to give you an update about each of those goals and talk to you about how we're currently putting things in place to actualize those goals. And we're gonna have, very fortunate to have our team who is going to be joining us from central office to go over that. And so we are, we have Tony and Cameron and Robin who are gonna talk about goal one And again, they're going to give an update around some of the action steps that are pertaining to goal one. We'll go into goal two. We'll go through this presentation and see if people have questions. So I ask that you take notes if you have any questions pertaining to these. So I'm going to turn it over to our team, Tony, Robin, and Cameron.

Thanks, Sean. So looking at the first point under the goal for goal one talks about anti-bias and anti-racist learning sessions being implemented, you know, for all district personnel. You know, that's something that's beginning to take shape. We actually just had a big development session with a lot of our staff last night with over, you know, with over 100 staff in there. And as we, you know, as we continue, especially working with, you know, our district equity committee that's composed of different faculty within the district as well. We're just getting that off the ground. kind of creating a robust system of professional development throughout the district moving forward. So there are embedded times within each development day that we have within each building, as well as having a district focus that stems from the top and kind of trickles on down. And then also for our cohort of teachers. So as you come in as a year one teacher, this is your equity training experience. Then into year two, year three, and as you get into those tenure years, having a track of equity training and development that takes place so that once you're in the district for so much time, you've been through so much and there's a robust system that continues to keep flowing. Then I'll show looking at kind of some district equity coaching that's been happening, you know, with different district leaders and personnel within the district kind of, you know, on a level of consulting. You know, so when different issues arise, you know, just from a district standpoint, you know, I've been tapped a lot in terms of helping to problem solve and go through different situations. So almost, I guess, like an equity coach, you know, kind of, you

All right. Thank you, Cameron. So some of the other things that the Office of Student Services has been working on has been interviewing practicum students from the WashU Brown School of Social Work. And last week, Mr. Poole and I were able to select a practicum student who will start with us second semester to support our work and efforts around equity and inclusion. We also have worked hard to increase our collaboration with the SSD leadership team and have recently started meeting regularly with the packet steering committee, some of whom were with us during the recognizing our own. And then lastly, I recently finished our audit of district wide restorative practices, and I will be taking the next few weeks to make some decisions related to some fine tuning adjustments to what we have been doing And we'll be making some decisions related to professional development for our building leadership team moving forward.

Great, thank you, Robin. Some of the information from Human Resources. One of the things that we've done this year is we've adjusted the hiring timeline. And we've done that to have it better align our job postings with the advertisement and the promotion of the diversity recruitment networking fair. So this year, we were really intentional in posting our positions early. so we could have all that go together seamlessly. So we posted the openings last week and they will close the week after the Diversity Recruitment and Networking Fair. This timeline will provide us with an earlier recruitment period and also help attract talent to the January recruitment event. Our hope would be that many of our diverse applicants that we interview at the fair will be personally invited back to interview at the building level after the event. We also developed and began the implementation of stay interviews with teachers of color as a process to monitor how we can continue to increase our staff retention. I believe that the stay interviews is one of the best tools that we can implement for measuring employee engagement. It's a focused effort that will help us collect one-on-one feedback that can provide us with ways to better understand why employees stay, what they enjoy about working in the school district of Clayton and what might cause them to leave. I also think this information will allow us to look at our systems and design individual plans to help with teacher retention. The state interview started this month and we're focusing initially on our non-tenured teachers of color. And the goal would be to have all teachers of color in the district to be offered a time to participate in a one-on-one conversation with myself before the end of February of 2021. A huge focus this year has been on creating new recruitment materials that focus on the district's equity initiatives. And the communications office has been a huge partner in this work. We are creating a hiring data visual pictograph that will indicate all of our work that we've done in this area with hiring. So it will reflect the hires that we had last year of teachers and administrators of color being at 44%. So we can show the efforts in our work in this area. Our current teachers of color are featured in advertising campaign for the diversity recruitment networking fair from quotes and pictures that we'll have out on social media, as well as short video clips with each featuring a different staff member sharing their personal experience working in the district and what they appreciate about working here. We're also going to develop a Clayton recruitment video featuring our equity work and diversity that we can use beyond the recruitment fair. And then we will have promotional ads on the radio stations 100.3, 104.9 after winter break promoting the fair. And finally, we're currently in the works of developing a diversity hiring statement regarding the district's commitment to attracting a diverse teaching force and find the best candidates for our positions and service of our students. So all that'll be focused on recruiting, developing and retaining that talented diverse staff that we want to have to reflect our student population.

Goal two is we'll commit to the educational growth of our learners through an equitable, personalized, and individualized learning experience. So I'm going to turn it over to our central office staff, and I think we're going to start with Robin on this one.

Thank you, Dr. Doherty. We continue to have a focus on the gifted identification process to make sure we're continuing to make progress toward meeting or exceeding our equity index goals, as I've previously described in other equity updates. I am pleased to announce that we finished our fall round of gifted identification. So many families may have received some letters in the mail this week. And I just wanted to thank all the gifted specialists, our gifted coordinator, Megan Monteiro, and then the teaching and learning office, and also the rest of the student services team to help make the process run so smoothly during a pandemic. And we had about 20% of our students who were eligible for individual evaluation actually defer their evaluation until the spring. So there are about 20 more students who we will be evaluating for the gifted program, but their families were given an option as to whether or not they wanted to do it this fall or in the spring because of the pandemic. And so we still have about 20 more students we would like to look at individually next semester. However, we did have about 70-ish families that we did work with to have their students evaluated. And I was pleased with the representation, excuse me, that we achieved through this fall's round of identification. I was concerned that because we had 20% of the families defer until second semester, that we might lose some of the progress that we had made last year, but I'm happy to say that we were able to maintain that progress. And so our representation of across the 338 students who are now identified in grades two through eight, 20% of them are Asian, 7% of them are black, 1% of them are Hispanic, 11% of them are multiracial and 61% of them are white. And so this is very close to how we finished last school year.

Thanks, Robin. The terms personalized and individualized learning are omnipresent in our strategic plan. And these words in education while having definitions can be nuanced in many different ways depending on an educator's experience, the literature that they read or the philosophies that they hold. So it's imperative as a district that we hold a shared and collective definition of these terms and approach our work with learners from this shared space. So in order to do that, we have a couple of things in place. So currently as a coordinator's council, we're engaged in shared learning about deep learning. This is the work of Michael Fullen and Joanna McKechn. And the mantra from deep learning is engage the world, change the world. Deep learning is based on global competencies. These competencies are skills and attributes needed for learners to thrive as citizens. The deep learning competencies parallel our district profile of the graduate and they include such things as character, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. The premise behind deep learning is to shift learning to authentic engaging learner centered work. Similar to deep learning, project-based learning is a teaching method in which learners learn by actively engaging in real world and personally meaningful projects where they solve problems or answer complex questions. In PBL, the project is the vehicle for teaching the important knowledge and skills learners need to learn. The project contains and frames curriculum and instruction. By having representative curriculum leaders participate in these learning experiences, we can more quickly and effectively influence curriculum writing to take on a more personalized approach for learners, allowing them to have more agency in their learning. Additionally, each of our content areas that make enrollment recommendations between eighth and ninth grade are currently working on refining those practices to remove barriers and correct discrepancies in representation and enrollment. A part of this work will include the incorporation of learner voice in providing us with feedback on successful culturally responsive teachers and their practices. And then the last piece is about Clayton High School and how they've identified a goal that focuses on assuring that our grading policies disrupt inequities. The high school has approached their work through the use of Joe Feldman's book, Grading for Equity, to adopt universal grading practices at the high school that embodied the principles Feldman lays out in his book. He wants grades to be accurate, biased resistant, and motivational. So our incremental changes have included a universal grading scale from 50 to 100%, feedback loops that include multiple opportunities for practice with formative assessments prior to student receiving summative grades, and then the separation of behavior from achievement in grades. So removing participation and effort from grades is an example of that. The middle school is also embarking on a similar study and is committed to a universal grading scale parallel to the high school already.

So in our last goal is goal three, and we'll be dedicated to the personal growth of our learners and their social, emotional, and physical wellbeing.

So earlier this year, our social work and counseling team partnered with the Clayton Education Fund and the PTOs to raise funds to support our building-based food pantries and our families who are struggling to meet their basic needs for their students. And through those collaborative efforts, we were able to raise over $9,000 to help restock our pantries and help families get some of the basic things that they need. Also this fall semester, our counselors, nurses, social workers, and several of our partner staff from SSD received additional training in how to conduct suicide risk assessments through the CHADS Coalition. And then this week, several of us participated in a training on how to support students who are facing anxiety. Also, the Office of Student Services, we continue to secure memorandums of understanding with different community-based organizations that address things such as suicide prevention, counseling needs for high trauma experiences, and healthy relationships.

Thank you to the administrative team. I'm

going to stop sharing. Again, we wanted to make sure that the board was hearing some of the steps that we were taking towards the achievement of these goals. And again, this is not a comprehensive list of what we're doing. It's our current reality. And so we wanted to see if you had any questions that we could clarify for you or anything that you were just wondering about as part of some of the things we shared tonight.

Thank you, Sean. And thank you, Cameron. And thank you Robin. And thank you Milena. Thank you, Tony. So let us see board members if you have any questions. So I'm going to start with Amy. Any questions or comments?

I don't necessarily have any questions, but I'll say that I just, I want to thank you guys for continuing to work on this and to come up with a plan that's so intentional and is going to work for our school district, especially in light of what we've been going through since last March. I really appreciate your continuance to work on it and have it at the forefront of your to-do list.

Thank you. Stacey, any comments or

questions? Yes, thank you. And I would just say I'm so happy to see that so many of these were things that we've already been doing. Um, so it's nice to see how well those fit in with the, what we practices we have been working on have are already fitting in with our strategic plan because we've already been implementing a lot of this and, um, I really appreciate all the time, all of the administrators and coordination teams and teacher leadership has put into this because I think all of these steps for each of these goals are very intentional, well thought out, very thorough. So thank you for all of your work on this. My only question, and this is very small, and is that on goal three, it seemed like everything Robin, you were mentioning was focusing maybe more on social and emotional wellbeing and not on physical. So I didn't know if there were some other comments you had about physical wellbeing or if maybe that ties into some of those partner organizations too. At

this point in time, most of my work has been focusing on the social emotional learning simply because of the challenges we know our students are facing related to the pandemic. You know, we are certainly always looking at things like, you know, our health curriculum and where are some opportunities, you know, to adjust that to fit kind of what we're doing right now, given the circumstances of some of our students learning at home, some of our students being in the building. But I will say the primary focus over the last couple months has certainly been on the social emotional piece, just because it's been something that has come through in both our student and staff surveys.

Right, which is understandable. I just wanted to ask because I know the physical well-being is mentioned in that goal as well. So thank you.

Thank you, Stacey. David, any comments or questions?

No,

none there. Thank you. Jason, any comments or

No, no major questions. Just Milena, you mentioned removing participation and what else would you say again?

I think I said participation and, hold on, I have to scroll back. I think it was effort. Effort, effort. Okay. It's like the idea of separating behavior and achievement and reporting on achievement and treating behavior as something that we report differently to families.

Interesting. Is that something like, how did you all come up with that as a strategy? I mean, where did that come from? And was that one of the books you mentioned or authors you mentioned?

Yeah, and it's some of the beliefs around like some of the gurus related to grading and everything that the grade should really reflect the academic side of things and that the behaviors are things that one should address. So if I'm nice, I shouldn't get an A, that my grade should reflect what I'm doing towards the standards. And that the other behavior kinds of things are handled differently with students. And so like our elementary report card has done that for a long time, has separated. So that first page of the report card that talks about the approaches to learning is sort of the behavioral part and then the standards for the grades. So it's paralleling some of that work that we did at the elementary level.

I like that. That stuck out really good. I'm glad you mentioned that. for the most part, it was, it's all good. I think you all are doing a good job. I mean, anybody right now who's eager to see change and who understands like the historicals when it comes to education and its slowness to, um, to change and be progressive or to get caught up to the 2020, um, could say anything right now. But I want to see, I think my goal is to sit back and allow you all to allow your plan to develop. So you're off to a great start and I appreciate it and keep up the good work.

Thanks, Jason. Kim, any comments or questions? Okay, thank you. Caitlin, any comments or

Yeah, just a comment. From my conversations with the students, it seems like grading for equity is something that particularly resonates with them. So thank you for doing work around that. And I'm interested in seeing how that progresses and reporting about it to the students.

Thank you. Gary, any comments or

questions? Just a quick comment. I appreciate all the continued effort at this. I have to overcome my own natural inclination to jump back in after we spent a lot of time over the summer and early fall. But I appreciate the staff's effort to continue to work on this and develop the specific steps to implement the things that we approved. So thank you all for your work on it. And yeah, it's

great. Thanks, Gary. And I would just say for my part, I think, you know, great job. And I really do love a place for everyone to grow as learners and head and heart. I think that's fantastic, by the way. So I really appreciate and I appreciate you breaking it out that way and speaking to those three pieces, because I think. If we really, truly achieve that for all students. We'll be like worldwide, right? We won't just be nationwide. We'll be worldwide. That's pretty awesome. So thank

you. And Joe, can I just say something about that? You know, that really came out a lot of the work that came out of the subcommittee and it was interesting. I was in a meeting this afternoon with some teachers and one of the teachers said something like, I just put it all together. like the phrase and she said, I really like. And so it made us think that we really do need to do something that's more of like a specific rollout communication wise in terms of we put it on the website but making sure that people understand what that we mean by that phrase and making sure that they are seeing this visible in our schools and visible in our building. So that's gonna be a next step for us as well.

Awesome, thank you. So we are going to move on to study items. And the first study item is 8.01. It's the first reading of policy DC taxing and borrowing. Very exciting. And I think this is Mary Jo.

The audit and exciting board policies all in one night. What can I say? So this policy, believe it or not, was too wordy. And so basically the MSBA, they decided to kind of tone it down. I guess a lot of times they reiterate what is exactly in statute and this time they decided to remove it. So the part that they're removing, they actually added last April. and they're decided to take it back out. So it simplifies the policy is basically what it does. And then it takes one more item and adds to it an allowable mechanism of financing, which is one that is in statute. And we used through the center of Clayton, the cops financing. It just wasn't always in policy. So it was allowed by law, but it wasn't in policy. So they added it into people's policies. So that's all it is.

Gotcha, thank you. So I'm just going to go around and see if folks have questions or comments. Gary, any comments or questions about this one? No, thanks, Jeff. Thank you. Caitlin, any comments or question? Thank you. Jason, any comments or quesitons?

No, thank you.

Thank you. Kim, any comments or qustions? Thank you. David, any comments or Qustions?

No.

Thank you. Stacy, any comments or Thank you. Amy, any comments or questions? Nope. Okay. Thank you. And I don't have any comments or questions either. So thank you. Um, so I think, uh, Mary Jo, you're up for the second one, which is the first reading of policy EF food service management.

So, um, every, you can change it to a three year cycle. The state does a food service audit on us and, um, It's a very detailed, in-depth internal audit. And they noticed that our policy for the discrimination disclosure does not align with the USDA's required language for discrimination disclosure. And the odd thing is the USDA changed it literally a month after we adopted the policy. So we called MSBA because we were like, you gave us this policy, why doesn't it agree? And that's what happened. So this is just updating it. We needed to do this kind of timely because they won't remove the finding from the audit unless they can tell that the board is addressing this. So by doing this tonight, they won't write us up for it. All

right. Thank you. So I'm just going to go around again. Amy, any comments or questions on this one?

No, I sent. Did you guys get what I sent you guys?

Yes.

Earlier. So those are, that's really my only comments or little edits to the, that I wrote into that. That I redlined on the actual policy. Do I need to go to publicly say what those edits were?

I

was

going to say, I didn't see it. Was it on the part that I changed or was it on a different part of the policy? The, was it on the highlighted yellow section? Yeah. We are not allowed to change that. That is a federal required language. So if we don't have it exactly worded like that, then we'll be out of compliance.

So it sounds like maybe offline, Amy, you could talk to Mary Jo about that.

Okay.

Because this, again, this is the first reading.

Okay. If you could send me the email, Amy, I can look at it. Okay,

I'll do

it. Thanks.

Stacey, any comments or questions? Thank you. David, any comments or question? Thank you. Kim, any comments or ques? Thank you. Jason, any comments or?

No.

Thank you. Caitlin, any comments or ? Thank you. Gary, any comments or . No. Thank you and I don't have any comments or either. Thank you, Mary Jo. Okay, so now we're going to move on to action items and another set of action items, I should say. And the first one is the second reading and approval of policy GBEBB, employee alcohol and drug testing. Will you please read the motion, Gary?

I would accept I just closed the wrong tab. So give me a second here. I've got all kinds of technological problems tonight. Sorry, guys.

Do you have it? Or I can read it if you want. I

have it. Yeah, so I'm just opening board docs back up. Sorry. I just literally like closed the wrong tab.

Okay. Sorry.

Well, while you're doing that, I'll read this one, right? So it's that the board approved the second reading and adoption of policy GBEBB employee alcohol and drug testing as presented. All right, it's been moved and seconded. Any comments or questions? All right, all in favor? Aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? All right, thank you. It passes unanimously. So we are moving on then. To the next one, which is 9.02, the second reading and approval of policy GCBA professional staff compensation.

Go ahead, Gary. All right, 9.02, I move that the board approve the second reading and adoption of GCBA professional staff composition as submitted.

Second. All right, it's been moved and seconded. Any comments or questions? All righty, all in favor?

Gary

Valentz, I all. Any opposed. Gary Valentz, All right, it passes unanimously. All right, we're now moving on to the 10.01 which is the consent agenda.

Gary Valentz , 10.01 and move that the Board of Education approve the consent agenda for agenda items 10.02 through 10.07

All right, it's been moved and seconded. The consent agenda. Any comments or questions?

Can I just make a quick? Can I have a question? Or do I need to pull it out of the consent agenda?

It depends. Is it a comment or a question? It's a question. Yeah, you can go ahead. Ask your question.

Well, on the surplus property, I'm just wondering, remind me, and I know we've talked about this before, is there a way that the old computers, I guess we can't donate them to any of our students that might need computers?

Unfortunately, no. State statute requires that everything be put out to bid or thrown away. So you cannot donate it to individual people. Okay, thanks.

All right. Any other comments or questions? All right. All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? All right. It passes unanimously. And just want to note that there's a donation. Mr. Gary Berger donated $500 for the Merrimack Elementary School food pantry. So we're thankful for that donation. PB Harmon Zuckerman, All right, we are moving on to the financials. So 11.01 the financials for October.

PB David Ensign, 11.01 I moved that the Board of Education approve the payment current expenditures and investments for October 2020 as presented. PB Sarah Silver, Second, PB

David Ensign.

Alright, it's been moved and seconded any questions or comments. All righty, all in favor? Aye. Any opposed? All right, it passes unanimously. So we're moving on to 11.02, which is the financials for November 2020.

11.02, I move that the Board of Education approve the payment of current expenditures and investments for November 2020 as presented.

Second.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Any comments or questions about the November financials? All righty, all in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Okay, passes unanimously. All right, we are moving on to public comment. Sean, Chris, do we have any public comment tonight?

There is no public comment tonight.

Okay, thank you. Then we are moving actually now on to board communications. Does anybody have a committee or board communication

to report?

Joe, I just want to let you know that we got an email today that they are going to start the legislative advocacy meetings again in right after the new year. And we will have, those will be Zoom. So we will be sending and anybody can participate. So once the dates are set, we'll let everyone know about that.

That's great. Thank you. Yeah, I was actually, I've been wondering about those. Good to know. Any other board communications? I have one real quick if others don't have one. So Amy and Amy can add to this, but Amy and I had a conversation last week with the search consultants. And so I just wanted to give you a quick update of what we heard. So because of course the position for the superintendent closed last week, which is why we had part of why we had a conversation. So there were 22 kind of bonafide applicants. So I want everybody to hear that. There were kind of local and regional and national folks. They were represented different gender and race diversity. And I think our search consultants feel very good about the candidate pool. and that it's very strong, and that they will then take those 22. We don't want to know who those 22 are because remember some people applied with confidence, so it's not appropriate for us to ask who those 22 are. However, they're going to bring us the finalists. right and a recommendation that the finalists they bring us right we all need to actually myself included i haven't done it yet i need to do it still send a uh our confidentiality um agreement if you will to sandy just to agree that we're not going to release because on january 6th we're gonna we're gonna get the finalists we're gonna see videos of them we're gonna know who they are and again um All those folks, we need to maintain their confidentiality. So that's what maybe I'll just say one other thing real quickly and then see Amy if you want to add anything. We are of course then going to be planning for right we the board will select of the finalists our finalists right whether it's a big group small group right we're going to winnow it down probably even further and then we'll have interviews. And as a part of those interviews, we will all have the opportunity to participate and ask questions. But soon the search consultants will send us a SurveyMonkey document that will ask us to select among kind of prioritize among which kinds of questions we want to ask. the prospective candidates, the prospective superintendent candidates. And just a reminder that of course there'll be a process and if my question is what's your favorite color? Of course it's not gonna be that one but just as an example and we had four candidates, I will ask every time for all four people, what's your favorite colour? and if gary's is what's your favorite animal he'll ask all four times what's your favorite that's the way that works that's kind of that's so anyways but it'll be more sophisticated than that i just want to give you a slight preview of coming collections um so maybe i'll just pause there i'm sorry amy do you have any do you want to add anything

no i'll just um you crack me up i'll just add that um Yeah, Judy and Jeanette were super excited about the candidates. And they were really confident that our new superintendent was among the 22 that had applied. So that was good to hear that we had such a qualified and diverse pool of candidates. So I'm excited to get to see them on January the 6th.

Awesome.

You can still apply.

Yeah. Any folks have any questions just before we move on from that? Any questions about that?

Go ahead, Gary. What's the timing on that survey mechanism to submit questions or that process? Do we know that yet or

is that... Yeah, their hope is that they're going to get it out on Friday. So two days from today that they're going so that's their hope. I mean, if not, if not that very soon. And again, we'll all give our input and then it'll be kind of this weighted list right of which questions we ask and you know remember we're a team right so you might not get all your questions right i mean because it's going to be kind of prioritized and then weighted. and divided by seven, if you will.

Any other questions about that? Okay. Any other board communication?

Joey, I didn't know if you, we mentioned earlier during the audit about PB Harmon Zuckerman, The long term financial planning committee meeting that was that we used to have. And we're just think it's important that people know that a subcommittee. PB Harmon Zuckermann, Jason and Joe and David have been meeting to re envision that with Mary Jo and me and we are PB Harmon Zuckerton, Excited about some of the things that we're going to be doing with that group. So I just think it's Important to put it out there that that's something that PB Harmon Zuckerson, It's being re envisioned

Yeah, thank you, Sean. Thank you for mentioning that because I think that I'm excited. We're in the process of kind of figuring out who's going to be on that, right? Mary Jo and Sean and myself and Jason and David will be kind of as administration board representatives, but we're working through who's going to prospects, if you will. So I think that's good. Good news.

Anything else? All right.

I guess we need a motion to adjourn. All right. I move that the Board of Education adjourn.

Second.

All right. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? All right, we're adjourned. Thank you all. Take care.