September 11, 2019 — Meeting Transcript

All right, we're going to get going. So I want to state that adequate notice has been given. Welcome everybody here. And we always want to start with a pledge. So if everybody would stand and we'll start with a pledge and we'll ask Adam to lead us, please. Awesome, thank you. So just a couple things as we start. So welcome everybody. It's excited to have our joint meeting between the city and the center board and the school district. So that's really exciting. I do want to just say one thing, which is so the last two days I was traveling in Mississippi. And what's interesting about that is it's just a reminder about how special our partnership is. I mean, it was... Everywhere I go, when I talk about the kind of partnership we have between the school district and the city, it's awesome. People are jealous. They're like, oh, tell me more. How can we do this thing? How can we do the center thing? Or how can we work together? So it's just a reminder. So even in Jackson, Mississippi, they were talking about all things Clayton, so I just wanted to say that. We also, just as a kind of a token of our appreciation of that partnership, we would like to give the city officials just a small Clayton School District token. So this is, maybe we could just pass it around. Yes, let's pass it around. So thank you, city, for your partnership. It's small, but we wanted to just give you all one. That's nice. Yeah, and then, right, yeah, sorry, school district folks, you'll have to skip.

I didn't get you one. Another time, another time. They're kinda cool though, I mean, I'm a little jealous. Right, yeah.

Michelle, what did we get for them?

That's it. I was just thinking. Well, we didn't bring you a present, but, you know. It's

goodwill. That's okay. That's

right.

Next time. You know, we're really excited about having a – we now have a student on our board, so Adam Jaffe over there. Raise your hand. Raise your hand, Adam, right, in case you didn't know that was our student, right? So, you know, for us, of course, it's all about the students, and so – Stop that. What we wanted to do is just start with a little report from Adam. So we're going to move, and Adam's just going to give us a quick report on what's going on in student land.

Hello, everyone. It's loud. Okay. So the first thing I wanted to talk about, for those of you that don't know, at the high school, we're going to be having what's called the District Advisory Council. Turn that off. Stop. So we're

beginning what's

called...

Someone else's mic.

So is it working now? Okay. Yeah, better. All right. Thank you. So next, thank you very much, Adam. Appreciate that. Next, Mayor Harris is going to talk about the Mayor Youth Advisory.

Well, hello, everybody. It's great to be here. We certainly do, as a city, appreciate the partnership that we've got with all of you and have had for such a long time. And so we want to do everything possible to further it and continue it and strengthen it. So thank you for the gift. We'll try to do something next time. So today, though, I'm just going to tell you a little bit about the Mayor's Youth Advisory Council. I think you all know about it, but these are students at the high school who have volunteered their time to help the city on various projects or other research things that they would like to do but also benefit from getting to have a behind-the-scenes kind of view of city operations. This includes public works, the salt dome, the jail, whatever. We give them a full training and we also work closely with them on their project and we look forward to what the results of that will be. I think this year they are going to do something in the sustainability area so I'm very excited about that. So why don't I though just introduce them. If you all, there they are, would you all stand up? I'm not gonna introduce them by name, but there they are. A fine group and I would like to say that all of these students are new to MIAC. We don't have a single person returning and that is kind of by strategy so that we give everybody an opportunity to participate. So give them a round of applause.

So thank you. So I think next up is Patty, and Patty's going to go over the budget for CRSWC and give us an

update. I can talk loud too, so. Well, thank you for having us here tonight to do our annual joint meeting and talk about the center of Clayton. And really the intent is to talk about the budget, but we have a couple other things we want to update you on tonight. I wanted to just mention that there's other people in the room that certainly help a lot. Mary Jo being a critical piece, Janet Watson, Tony Searing, who's sitting right there. Feel free to ask her pointed direct questions because she loves to be answer questions in meetings, and Tim Wanisch back there who's trying to hide. Hi, Tim. And Jim Brunel also is critical to our operation. Tony and Jim and Tim and I are spending a ton of time together this year on our weekly construction meetings for the Center of Clayton, and so we'll see if we're all still standing next year. That's all I'll say. So I'm going to give you sort of just an update on where the center is. Do I push this? That one there, okay. On where the center is and just kind of some background for, I don't think there's a lot of new people on this board, on either of the boards. I know Susan is, but she's pretty familiar with our operation. And Stacy, Stacy's on our Parks and Rec Commission, so she's been getting a little info on Parks and Rec. So I just thought we'd share with you the mission, just kind of this is the guiding principle uh... mission that that we think about when we're making decisions about the center this was set over twenty years ago and release continues to service well so the center will serve the evolving needs and interests of all constituencies at the city of clayton in the school district of clayton by providing a broad range of recreation sports wellness and community based programs we continue to to do that on a daily basis. The CRSWC, which anybody who's new always has a little bit of difficulty with that, but it stands for Clayton Recreation Sports and Wellness Commission. It was created through a partnership in the late 90s There are two City Board of Aldermen on that commission, two district members, and two at-large. Todd Thomason is here tonight. He is one of our at-large members. And then Ken Shapiro could not make it tonight. He's the other at-large member. The city manager and the school district superintendent are also ex-officio members, and they meet quarterly or as needed. We have three main committees that serve for the commission. The finance committee, they meet somewhat regularly, monthly. They're there to provide advice and direction on finances. They're made up of district members, which is the CFO, the director of accounting, and the director of facility services. And then city members, the finance director, myself, and Tony. And then some CRSWC members, generally the president and treasurer, serve on that committee. and they'll talk about anything related to finances uh... may date reviewed annual budget they did review membership fees anything else related to that also have an operations committee that meets monthly uh... that is it advisory on the day-to-day operations for the center has made up of a lot of the people that do the work in the buildings and and the associated high school uh... it's made up of uh... facilities services uh... The athletic directors, assistant athletic directors, assistant principals. This year the principal for the high school is serving on that committee. Myself, Tony and then our recreation manager. Oasis also sits in on that meeting and then the school resource officer. And then the final committee is a programming committee that makes recommendations on programming. That's generally parks and rec staff but we'll bring other people in. Oasis sits in on that. Sometimes we bring outside experts. How's our membership doing? We're a little bit down. We saw some people put their memberships on hold during the renovations, but we still have over 8,000 members, a little bit over 8,300. 58, 75 of those are just members to the center, then almost 13,000 are platinum members. Those are people who buy a pass to the pool, rink, tennis center, and center of Clayton. And then we have 238 seventh grade memberships last year. We did that again this year, that was well received, really worked very well. It got a nice group of kids in the building and they utilized it very effectively and so we're doing that again this year. That's gone well. And then 933 CHS students have privileges. This is just to show you where we generally draw from. So this is most, you know, about 40% are Clayton residents. And then we draw from U City, Ladue, Olivet, Richmond Heights. It's not surprising, most places will tell you that rec centers are gonna draw from about a five mile radius. Most people are gonna live 10 to 15 minutes from where they work out. People won't really drive much further than that. So this is not a surprising representation. And we also bring about 12,000 people in each year who pay a daily fee and again gave you the breakdown of what's resident, what's corporate, what's non-resident. And then whether it's youth, senior or adult. You can see that we have pretty good breakdown between resident and non-resident on the daily fees. And then by age it's pretty well split between adult, youth and then senior. Senior is our smallest group there. We had nearly 16,000 program participants at FY18 last year. We're probably on track for that again this year. The biggest majority are in fitness classes, so nearly 13,000 in fitness. About 1,600 swim lesson registrants, 120 youth basketball teams, although if you're there on the weekends in the winter it seems like a lot more. And then we have 23 youth volleyball teams. So that's just, I just thought I'd give you sort of some brief talking points about what we do. I'm now gonna talk about the budget. So this is the proposed budget for our upcoming year which is October 1 through September 30th. Our objectives are really to present a balanced budget through revenue generation and cost containment. We need to provide the resources and then really look at ways to improve and evolve to adjust to changes. We have actually four different budgets, four different accounts this year. We added a construction budget. So all of the construction for the center, the revenue and expenses is going through a separate budget so it doesn't inflate our regular capital budget. So normally we only have three that we use. The operating fund is where most things go through. That handles our ongoing operations. And so the majority of revenue goes into that. Membership being the main piece of that, we are not projecting a membership fee increase in FY20. due to the renovations, we did not feel like it was a good time to do that. We did a small increase in FY19, so we'll be due for one in the following year once we finish the renovations. We really try to focus on programming benefits that add value to the membership. You may remember things like adding childcare to memberships, discounted programs, things like that. Anything that, because the more people we have using it, On a regular basis, we feel like we're achieving our mission much more effectively. We are not projecting very little growth during the renovations. We really anticipated that. However, we have continued to see growth in fitness personal training and some of the other training opportunities and programming, so that's been good. You're going to see some dips in things like swim lessons because of the pool shutdown, things like that. All anticipated and in programming we're able to also have some reductions in costs that help offset that. And like I said, we just continue to look for good programs, new programs, things that will help make people want to have a membership because the program discounts are good if you have memberships. As far as expenses, we do have increases. A lot of those are related to personnel. As you know, the full-time staff is employed either by the city or the district. So whether you're on the Board of Education or Board of Aldermen, you're pretty familiar with whatever increases you saw in your budgets. Those are part of ours too. We are working to raise the minimum wage for our part-time staff. This year we have where $10 will be the minimum for any of our jobs. Last year it was $9, so we are on track to raise our minimum wage to stay ahead of the state-mandated increases. They are at $8.65 this year, I believe, and so they have, I think it's 85 cents a year until 2023 when they get to $12 an hour, I think. So we're trying to stay ahead of that just to continue to be able to attract good staff and then pay them fairly. We do our pricing strategies based upon making sure that programs at a minimum cover cost. Some do a little bit more than that, so we tend to have a pricing strategy that if it's a program that everybody takes, we try to make that the most affordable. If it's specialized, then we charge more for that. So personal training is going to cost you more than a group fitness class. We do have some IT expenditures that are included in our budget And we are replacing our the city. We the city does payroll and finance and So all of that we're kind of part of that with the city's upgrades This is relatively small, but you have your own. And this is one of the pages that we reprinted for you. There was a slight formatting error in the daily passes just in where it was percent change. We had it formatted incorrectly. This is correct. You can see that we're showing a decrease in daily passes next year Primarily due to the renovations. We're just not you know this summer. We had really Significant drop and we'll continue to see that till we get everything up and operational Our annual passes, so this is a percent change from budget as opposed to our estimated year-end Much many of our projections are better than year end, but they are a reduction from the original budget that was submitted. So we are projecting a decrease of a little over 4% in our operating revenue in FY20 and then a slight increase in expenditures of .47%. And like I said, the majority of that is personnel or utility based. Our second fund is our equipment replacement fund. This is what we pay for the replacement of all our cardio fitness equipment. We do annually replace anywhere from eight to ten pieces of equipment based upon its life cycle, usage, there may be changes in what people want to do in our building. And we do that on a cash basis. You may recall probably 10 years ago we used to finance that. It just was not, it didn't seem to make sense. We're able to fit this in every year. We do have some IT expenditures in equipment. And that's where those show up. And then the contribution that the city and district make annually, 25% of each of those go into this fund to help cover the costs. Yes. In general, some of that is some changes in fees for programs. Some of it is Part of it is related to something that also happened this year is the way that our accounting is done is we went to accrual accounting so some of our membership money is showing up the month that it's Like if you pay for a year it used to be used to do some adjusting for that But you it would all show up in May for the following year and our new software puts it in on a monthly basis. So that is making a difference in our year end this year, and then that will change next year. We'll see a full year of revenue versus sort of a truncated year this year. I did not explain that. That was the other thing. So we are continuing to see a reduction in daily passes. Most of the people, or the majority of people who pay a daily fee want to use the gyms. And so our gyms should be open most of the time. So we think we'll be okay with that. And the membership, I think, is really based upon the flattening out of that impact of the accrual. So, yeah. capital fund this fund is where we pay for most of our normal repair and maintenance and we have not put a lot of projects in there for now I will probably talk a little bit about this a little bit more about this when we talk about the capital project but we generally generally do about two to three hundred thousand in capital this year and next most of the work that's being done is being put into the construction fund and we have there are a few things that are included in this we'll have to do some evaluation of this at the end of the project or keeping a list of things we weren't either able to fit into the budget or were identifying through the construction so good example is the gyms gyms three and four just opened this week they look great everything was done the one thing we were not able to work into the budget is the replacement of the curtains that go in between the gyms those need to be replaced so we've got that on the list to put in a future probably not today but you know two to three years that'll be easy to fit back into a normal capital budget so we're just starting on those i think that Hopefully that list won't get too big, but I think every place we touch, we go, oh, we didn't put that in there. Okay, let's start this list. So generally about 100,000 of each contribution goes into this, and then we also transfer any excess funds if we end up with any in the operating fund into the capital fund because that's where we feel like we need the most money. most shoring up um this year it was it was a few things like amplifiers some front door work some roofing repairs and we've placed the slide we've placed some lighting and it generally is is going to handle that this in this current year's budget and next year's budget And we do have three tenants, so I wanted to update you on the tenants. Oasis just exercised their option to renew for another 10 years. They had an agreement with us from the beginning that they could have up to two renewals of their 10-year lease, and so they are very happy being there. They sent us notification. I think that's great. They've been a wonderful tenant. They bring a lot of people in our building who might not otherwise come. I think we had 220 memberships budgeted in FY20. This year, we had a little over that. I think it was more like 230. And so they're just a great partner to the organization. So the people that set that up were really forward-thinking. Subway is currently closed through the renovations. I just was notified that they accepted our proposal to increase their their percentage of sales, so we had some discussion. They had wanted to renew theirs. They also have some options to renew and wanted to extend that. They are investing in some new equipment and quite a bit of money in the new renovation, so they wanted to ask for some things as a result. The commission talked about that, asked me to go back and try to renegotiate. And so they did accept all of the terms that I proposed. So they'll be looking at a renewal to the lease. I think in November is our next meeting. So they'll back. And then the final one is the Clayton Community Foundation who runs the Heritage Center. They will be back too. and they do a quarterly utility reimbursement. They have been relocated. I think it will be a nice space that's been created for them and a little bit more visible, a little bit more usable for a lot of reasons. Yes? Yes. The subways money generally goes into concessions. Oasis and Community Foundation go into lease, and they're pretty set. They really don't change very much. The payment from Oasis is calculated based on our annual operating budget and a formula that kind of doesn't move much. And then Community Foundation is based on a square footage utility reimbursement. So it does not move much. We have not incorporated what Subway just agreed to, though. So that will be a change that we'll make after that gets approved, hopefully. Good question, though. This is a summary page that just shows where we project that we will finish the year and then what next year will be. Actually, it just shows next year. It doesn't show this year. We are projecting a deficit for next year. Staff spent a lot of time looking at this trying to see if there was any way to not present that. Um, it, we have not had a deficit, uh, budget presented for a while. We just feel with the renovation, it just, it's just not possible. Um, so we've done the best we can and then we are showing that this will have a negative fund balance. Um, but then in 2021 we show that ticking back up and having a positive cashflow. So, um, Just so you know, I think most people are aware we have an agreement. The operating agreements call for the city and district to split that deficit. What happens is at the end of the year, once we go through generally the audit, we know what that deficit is, and then the city and district both get a bill for that. This year it was a little bit over $23,000 each. We had about a $46,000 deficit last year. And we'll talk about that in a future slide where we talk about cost recovery, but we are projecting a deficit for the coming year. I do think that and I told the Commission this that if we don't see a rebound after the renovations Then I think we'll have to make some tougher choices At this point. We're not recommending any any significant changes in how we operate or reductions But we will if this continues I imagine there'll be some more serious discussion next year about potential changes, but Any questions on this slide So let's talk cost recovery. This is something that I think is important because most of our recreation facilities in general set a cost recovery target. We have cost recovery based upon the operating fund and then all of the funds. So you can see that the operating fund, which is where our day-to-day come from, We have been pretty good at that. We've been 99, 100%, 101. FY17, we saw a dip in that down to 92%. And then last year went back up to 98. I will tell you in FY17 when we did the initial implementation of our software, we had about 450 memberships that we had to re-get their... credit card information, they were monthly memberships and it took us through about November to get all that back. So for the end of our year we saw a significant reduction in revenue while we got that. That was part of that year. This year we're projecting about 98% cost recovery and then what you've seen is about 95%. The next line is the operating fund cost recovery if you take out any contributions from the city and district. This year we put $200,000 in there from the city and districts so that's why we provided those. I thought that would be probably some information you might like to see. So you can see in 16, 17, 18 there was not a contribution. This year and next year because of the renovations we put a contribution in there. We felt like we would need that to hit our targets. And then cost recovery for all funds is next under that, but keep in mind that includes the contributions from the city and district. So the fourth column, you see it without the contributions from the City and the District. From 16 until 18 there was a 200,000. That is from both, 100,000 from each. This year we got 150 from each, and next year we have budgeted 400,000, 200,000 from each, And then the final line is where it shows you the additional subsidies. So that's when we talk about billing at the end of our year. The 1995 feasibility study said that we would be anywhere between 85% and 88% cost recovery. And then we just thought we'd let you know the national average is 29%. So it's a pretty high mark to meet, that 85% to 88%. The 100% was wonderful to meet the years that we met it. And I think we should continue. That is our goal always, but it's a difficult one to attain. So I do think... And it's been a that we've done a nice job with that and we've been able to always stay at or above The subsidy that was established early on for this building that initial initial feasibility study also did not include capital or any kind of capital plan at all it had a There is language in there that says, there is no accommodation for any capital expenses. It is anticipated the city and district will pay for this. So that was the understanding at the time or at least the study that was done. There were two different studies done. They both basically said the same thing. Any questions about this slide? So those would correlate to the top line, really, because they did not take into account a capital fund. So I think, you

know.

Yeah. Any questions about this? I know it's a lot of different numbers, but it's pretty clear. So this is just a slide to show the cost recovery and where that one line is is what was said at the beginning and where we've been through the years. So I am happy to answer any specific questions on any of the budget lines. If anybody wants to go to that level, I'm happy to do that. Normally that's not asked, but before I move on to the renovation update, I thought I'd check. Okay, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to give you an update on the renovation. if you haven't been in the building. So we are really excited to have this underway, so thank you so much for giving us the resources to do it. Both the city and the district really stepped up on this. And people are very excited about it, so that's great. Just a reminder, we're doing about 1600 square foot addition on the first floor, 4200 upstairs, relocation of offices, Kids Center, Youth Activity Center, and Clayton Heritage Center. That's really the expansion piece of it. These are a couple of renderings of what it's supposed to look like. I'm supposed to remind you that we'll never spread our equipment out that wide. It will be much tighter in our building than that. We're like, where is this? Our timeline, let's talk about that a little bit, because it's kind of moved a little bit. We were a little behind in starting. That was the result of, I'm sure you all remember when the bids came in we needed more money, it took us about a month and a half to get back and get that in place. So we're a little behind where we would have liked to have been at this point, but we are picking up steam, I'm happy to say that. We began with the new construction and then also really had probably an aggressive goal of getting the pools and gyms done in two months or less. Clearly it was aggressive. And so we're probably about a month behind on that, but we did open gyms three and four on Saturday, this past Saturday. They look excellent. We had volleyball kids in there and lots of people in there this week So we're excited to get a piece done. We feel like we've made some progress. I will tell you that we will be shutting down gyms one and two next week for two weeks. Well, up to two weeks it might be less. All we're doing in there is painting, replacing pads, but then that kind of finishes the gyms for us so then we don't have to go back into that area. The pools themselves have been a little bit more of a challenge. One of the things that I would recommend is you should never start construction with the finishes. You should never start with trying to finish something fast. They told us you should do that at the end. So I've learned that about the pools, is that the tile has held us up a bit. But the good news is the tile is in place on site. They are tiling the competition pool. They're installing lights. We are on target to open the end of September. That's about a month later than we wanted to. I know it's been very inconvenient for the high school swim team and for our members. The good news is that I got Indian Summer, and people are really happy to be at the outdoor pool. So everybody who's unhappy about the heat, please let it stay for another two and a half weeks, and that'll make everybody really happy. I was there yesterday, and there were tons of people at the pool. Todd was there. Everybody was happy because the sun is out. I know it's inconvenient. If the sun goes away and it gets cold, this would not have been as pleasant. But the school... Steve Hudson and the swim coaches. They've been great at working with us They they're very understanding of what we're going through and I you know, I know they've made other arrangements so that their meats are away I think they have a contingency plan if they have to go somewhere else because of the cold so I think that's good most of our members have been very appreciative of the fact that the outdoor pool is open enough and the Sun is out and That we had valet parking for our older members and especially our senior fitness people senior water fitness people it would have been very inconvenient for them if in july they had to fight with all the families trying to get to the pool so that worked really well i think that that was a great idea and came from one of our instructors who said hey have you thought to do this so Good plan and then a lot of help getting that in place. So I will feel a lot better when we get a pool open and the gyms open and then the lockers should, the main locker rooms should be done in October and the leisure pool and then we'll move on to the, we have to do the team locker rooms and then Really, we've kind of picked up steam and we've got a lot of the materials ordered and decided and that was a lot of work at the beginning. So we still have some things, a couple of hurdles to work through. I would say the biggest one is how we're gonna sequence the fitness renovations The contractors of course would love to do everything upstairs all at the same time But we don't want them to do that because we want to keep fitness open so that there's there's fitness available So we're working through all of that though. I'm sure there'll be a few short shutdowns At different times, but I think we're in pretty good shape. So We are just some pictures if you haven't seen the front of the building scooped out we did have bad dirt we had all all of the construction stuff that you could think would happen delays and materials bad dirt underneath things you didn't think of electrical issues there's all kinds of electrical stuff at that place what's that It wasn't good for, we were intending to use the dirt that was underneath the old section to put it back and then put the addition on. So we hired an independent testing company and they said we could not do that. So we had to fill it with, we had to bring in infill. It would not compact well, so. I don't know if that's very scientific. Tim might have a better answer for you.

It's typical for all of our projects.

But it is some of the things that you would anticipate. Sometimes things come up that you don't anticipate. Electrical issues seem to be common in construction. So if you've been there when the lights weren't working in the parking lot, that has happened. But Tim and Hankins and Bond have been very responsive whenever we've had any of those problems. So if you want to come in and see anything torn up, feel free. You can come in and we can set up a tour for you. But this is what the locker room looks like now in the pool, or at least last week when Dan put these pictures in. And all of that is targeted for us to do a 20th anniversary celebration next year. May 1st, 2020 is our 20th anniversary. So we can't wait to start planning that. That is what we're shooting for. So that's it. Any questions? I'd be happy to answer. I think that's it.

So thank you, Patty. Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Tim. I want to say it's really impressive to think about 29% versus 100% or 95%. You guys are miracle workers. So thank you. Really awesome. Awesome in that. So if nobody has any other questions, the only thing we need to do is adjourn.

Are you going to bring out the gavel for that? Sure.

Move to adjourn. We're done. OK, adequate notice has been given. So we're going to start our meeting of the Board of Education. So I'm going to call it to order. And we're going to star, since we already did the pledge in the other meeting, we're not going to do that again. So we're actually just going to jump right into public participation. And our first person is Suzanne Whitman. Can you do? We can. Our first person, I take it back, is Stephanie Conrady. Sorry, you're so far now. I apologize. Are we good? Are we ready? Can

you hear me? How would I turn it on? Good evening. Recently, we, the Parent Coalition for Excellence in Literacy, or PCEL, emailed you an article that covers some really important concepts. Some of them we've already talked about here. Things like phonological processing, phonics and decoding. We introduce these concepts to you in the context of our children who have dyslexia, mainly because kids with dyslexia are the ones that struggle the most with these skills. When PSAL members met with district administrators this past summer, we were happy to hear that the district plans to add phonics instruction not only into remediation programs but also into the general classroom. The district has made huge progress in recognizing screening laws and studying dyslexia, including spreading knowledge more generally to teachers and administrators. It's great that phonics will be a consistent part of every child's literacy learning. Now we need to emphasize yet another paradigm shift. Because as we parents were researching what our children needed, we became more familiar with the science of how all children learn to read. And we discovered that the science points in a totally different direction from how reading is taught in the Clayton schools. As the American Public Media article we sent to you stated, quote, for decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works. a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. Currently, according to the district website, for a first grade child to read aloud with fluency, they must follow this procedure. Quote, when I don't know a word, I check the illustrations, reread the words before and after, and try to think of a word that makes sense. This approach is called cueing, and from what we understand, it's a central tenet of the Lucy Hawkins tool on which the district curriculum is based. Notice that decoding is not mentioned. But from the article we sent, you'll remember that the science says that decoding is the essential first stage to skilled reading for all children. The article says, quote, skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way. Instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That's how good readers instantly know the difference between house and horse, for example. So now you know the science. All skilled readers begin by decoding to figure out what the word is. They use context only after they know what the word is, for instance if the word has two possible meanings. We introduce decoding to you in the context of dyslexia. It's actually a universal. No skilled readers use context to identify the word. All skilled readers use decoding and their vocabulary to identify the word and then use context only after that. Now Suzanne is going to speak to our understanding of what the district's plans are from their literacy review and why those plans are concerning. Thanks.

Thank you, Stephanie. Suzanne Whitman.

good evening so we've been to a lot of school board meetings by now we've heard the expressions of concern about racial equity we've heard the concern about the 20 percent of clayton students that don't read at grade level so in the meeting last summer when we were told that the district was planning to add phonics but otherwise just stick with the same lucy caulkins based curriculum i asked so how many other curriculums did you examine in your literacy review their answer was none So they had the chance to go and examine other curriculums to see if they were better in terms of how they treat people of color. They had the chance to learn about the science of reading and to use all of these criteria that have been bemoaned in these meetings to come up with something better, and they decided essentially to stay where we are. So let me tell you about another article that we've come upon recently. It's from a reputable journal out of the UK called the Journal of Curriculum Studies and refers to the Fontis and Pinnell LLI books, which is what Clayton uses in its resource rooms for reading pullout. The research states that 70% of fiction and 20% of nonfiction F&P LLI books present people of color as inferior, deviant, and helpless. While 30% of the fiction and 100% of the nonfiction books present whites as heroic, determined, innovative, and successful. Clayton is using these books to teach our children. I'm not concerned that the district doesn't know off the bat what these numbers are. What concerns me is that you didn't think to look. So here's our ask. Review some other curriculums, compare the curriculums, and convince the school board why whatever curriculum you choose is the best of all possible ones out there. Second, do not teach our children these ineffective cueing systems. Teach them to decode because the scientific literature has completely established that this is how all children become skilled readers. The article we sent you specifically calls out the Lucy Calkins curriculum, explaining that its cueing systems are detrimental to children becoming skilled readers. Because when you ask children to pay attention to the pictures, to the context, you're drawing their attention away from what they must pay attention to in order to read the word and remember the word. Can they guess at the word? Yes. Can they become skilled readers that way? No. What about adding the phonics to the Lucy Calkins curriculum? Well, when you present both options, some kids will get it. But other kids will skip the sounding out if they're taught that they have other options. Phonics is hard. And by using context, they can look like good readers until they get to about third grade when their books begin to have more longer words, harder words, and fewer pictures. And then they're stuck. They haven't developed their sounding out skills. All of us are human. All of us have things that we wish we'd known before, and we are not looking to ding you on that. But now that you know, we expect you to apply your curiosity, intelligence, and investigation. Review some other curriculums. Prepare a comparison among those curriculums to present to the school board. Do not teach our children these ineffective cueing systems. Follow the science and teach Clayton children to become skilled readers by teaching them to decode. Thank you once again for your attention.

Thank you, Suzanne. We are now going to, that's all the public comment we have. We're gonna move to superintendent communications.

Thank you, Joe. Good evening, everyone. So as we start tonight, I just think it's important to acknowledge today. Today is 9-11, and it's an important day for us to remember in our history. I think it's important for us just to acknowledge that publicly that we remember this day. And I think each of us at the table can probably remember the moment where we were at that time when 9-11 happened and I think it's interesting that now has been 18 years and now our children that we're teaching the only you know they don't they won't have that first that experience because we were teaching it through text and through our conversation so it's interesting to think about it that way that's been 18 years and none of our students would have experienced that like we have so I just think it's important to publicly acknowledge today At the beginning of the year, it's really integral for our educators to start developing positive relationships with our students and continuing to make those relationships strong throughout the year. They are the foundation of our work and over the last few weeks I've had the privilege to go into classrooms and to see how our teachers are doing such a great job with developing strong relationships with our students. And I think about that and I just want to reiterate What Joe said is that when I see that there are strong relationships, there's progress for the students. And I think that's why we have had such progress with the city is because we have developed strong relationships with the city and I just wanna acknowledge that. I really appreciate that our Board of Education has worked collectively with the city to think about how we can grow and how we can make sure that our community's the best for not only the community members, for our students. And I think that those relationships that we've had have led into conversations around use of the center for us. And I think even at the end of the meeting, having that conversation about how can we work collectively around issues will be important for us in the future. And so I think it's really important to continue to foster those relationships because they're not only important for the city of Clayton and its citizens, but for the students of our school district. So we have been in session for about a month and we have a great momentum going. And I bring that up is because when I was in class, I was actually at Y-Down today and I was seeing how far they were into the curriculum already and looking at what they were doing And then I was kind of reflecting on next year at this time, we would only be in school for 14 days. And so because of House Bill 161, we are prohibited from starting the first day of school earlier than 14 days before the first Monday in September. So we've talked about that being something that is something that we're addressing and shared that with you before through our board communications. But I just wanted to make sure that you understand that there's a lot of work going on behind the scenes in addressing that. And we have been having numerous conversations at central office. We now had conversations with our district leadership council and had another conversation with our PRC which is teachers and we're going to expand that conversations to community members and parents and students and so I I want to just say that we are having those conversations and it's gonna take us some time to develop the best calendar for us and and I think that we need to I want the board to know at the heart of that is we're doing what's in the best interest of our students and we're looking at a lot of different factors and mainly instructional time making sure that we're not doing anything that's going to compromise that so I just wanted to put that out there that we are instead of this being something that's you know a total ouch to us we're looking at is okay this is an opportunity and I think that's what's really great is that it sparked some conversations that might be new opportunities for us that will allow us to have some some incremental change with the way we approach our programming So we're probably gonna have some changes for next year's calendar, which then would probably lead into some other types of bigger changes in the calendar after that. So I just wanna let you know that we're having those big type of conversations as well. So an influencer of how our calendar might look is our strategic plan. And I just wanted to let people know, remind you that we are launching that plan development on Saturday, October 5th. I do appreciate the board in giving me names of people to consider for those invitations. And so we're excited about that launch. I'm really truly energized by the traction that our profile The Graduate has given to us in the district. I really actually didn't realize how much traction that was going to impact some of the work that we're doing in our district, especially around social-emotional learning, basing that around the Profile of the Graduate. I just recently saw how some of the homework across the district at the elementary level is being aligned to the Profile of a Graduate, and so students are given choices about what they can do at home to think about how they can connect to those attributes that we have connected to that. So I'm excited about the work that we're going to start on October 5th, and just a reminder is that that is gonna be the launch. There's gonna be some work that's gonna happen after that with a smaller group that's gonna actually help us develop the action steps and the metrics that are gonna be connected to our a strategic plan. And again, I'm asking you to trust the process as we go forward because it's gonna be different than what we've done in the past. We're actually wanting to do something that's not gonna be something that's gonna sit on our shelves and we want it to be a living document that's really pushing us to, actually driving our work. And so I just am excited about that and just wanted to remind everyone. Tonight, the focus of our agenda is really around policy. We have two policies that are going to be brought forward for you as a first reading and then we have two policies that we're asking you to approve and these were from our first board meeting. There was a third policy that we reviewed and after looking at that when we started rewriting it we noticed that there was a lot of redundancies with some other policies and so We're rewriting that completely and going to be bringing that back to you and making sure that not having redundancies with other policies. So we're going to go ahead and get started with the rest of our agenda.

Thanks, Sean. So we're gonna move right into our study items. As Sean said, we have two policies in terms of study items. So the first one is a first reading and a discussion about policy DG. And so that's 9.01, is that you? No, it's Mary Jo. Okay, sorry, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo, do you want to just give a brief overview of the policy before we have the board do the first reading?

So policy DG is in regards to depository or funds, which is basically a banking and how we go about acquiring a bank. It's pretty simplistic in the sense that everything, almost everything that's highlighted was already in a procedure. So procedure DG AP1 moved all of that into the policy. So we were already doing this. So that's really the main reason why there's no, I didn't have any concerns with it because it was something that we're already doing. But it does do one other thing, which removes an antiquated process of collecting a good faith check in the amount of $2,500 that was required in the bid process. So that was something that was a legislative change, House Bill 1879 and Senate Bill 769. That was passed last year. Seems kind of weird but all the banks knew they had to do it so on bid day they would present a $2,500 check. We would hold it until we got through the process of selecting a bank. Once the board approved it, the next day I would write a nice letter that said you weren't selected, here's your good faith check back. And then the bank who won, we would hold the check until our deposits finally got deposited. Once they were deposited, we would give them their check back. We never cashed it, didn't do anything with it. So it was kind of a silly process. I don't really even know the purpose of it, but it was something that was written into law and we followed it. So

does anybody have any questions or comments about this policy? No? Okay, great. Then we're going to move on to 9.02 which is policy DFA.

This one is also a pretty simple policy change. It's revenues from investments or surplus of funds. So when they say surplus, it just means excess, not like disposal of assets or anything. So it basically primarily incorporates the Missouri State Treasurer's model into the policy instead of referencing it. So again, it was something we were already doing. It is our model policy and so it just clarified work that we were already doing

Any questions on this one, DFA? Okay, thanks Mary Jo. Okay, we are going to move on, thank you, to a check out to the extent if you wanna, is there anything you wanna capture?

Yeah, is there anything, really I didn't see that there's anything to check out from those policies, so yeah.

We'll move. All right. Okay, thank you. So next we're moving on to action items. So the first action item is 10.01, approval of the CRSWC or Center of Clayton budget. Go

ahead. 10.01, I move that the Board of Education approve the fiscal year 2020 CRSWC budget as submitted.

Is there a second? Okay, thank you. It's been moved and seconded. Is there any questions or discussion about the budget? Okay, all in favor? All right, any opposed? Okay, it passes unanimously which in this case is 6-0 since Amy's not here. Okay, so we're going to move on to 10.02 which is the ADZIC field change order.

10.02, I move that the Board of Education approve the attached change order to revise the tie-in to the existing sanitary sewer structure per MSD. Is there

a second? Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Are there any questions or comments? Go ahead.

We've had a lot of discussion about the end date on this. We've had lots of hang-ups because of MSD, and so basically our goal now is by January because of the starting of practices. But we're not even sure. I think today they finally dug in the ground, so we're happy. Great.

Any other questions or comments on this one? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Passes 6-0. Thank you. Okay, we're moving on to item 10.03, the approval of policies triple B and quadruple B.

10.03, I move that the Board of Education approve policies BBB and BBBB as submitted.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Are there any questions or comments? Okay, all in favor? All right. Any opposed? Passes unanimously, 6-0. Thank you. Whoops, we're moving on to our consent agenda. Do you want to go ahead and

read that? 11.01, I move that the Board of Education approve the consent agenda.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Anybody have any questions or comments? Okay, all in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, pass is also 6-0. Thank you. So we didn't originally, but we've added on now board comments. So I don't know if there are any board comments. Yeah, I'm sorry. Board communications. Yeah, well. Does anybody have any board communications that they'd like to give? Go ahead,

Anne. I just wanted to let everyone know that I will be gone on the next meeting at the 25th. I'll be a counselor for 6th grade camp from the 22nd to 26th. So I just want to let everyone know. And hopefully the district advisory council will have an alternate by that point so someone can be here.

Awesome. Thank you. Go ahead, Lily.

This is related to a specific committee, but I did attend the – St. Louis public school board meeting that was pretty, pretty publicized about dealing with the recent deaths of a number of students and city people from gun violence. And they had an open forum. I mean, it was a lot of raw, I don't know if anybody else was there. I don't know And they really did a good, I compliment the board on just listening because there were some things that were pretty pointed at the board, well, at the school district or at the superintendent and just a lot of feelings about what's happening in the community. You guys probably saw Susan Buse sent on, I guess it was to their board, our gun resolution. she heard back from their president, you know, just kind of inviting any of, you know, if we want to think together and that she really appreciated the resolution. So it's just something kind of in light of what Susan mentioned at the earlier meeting, we just might wanna think about as a wider community, you know, ways to join together about this that's hurting our children and killing our children.

Thank you. Just a comment just on the, it was widely publicized, but not just here. I was in Nashville on Monday in a conversation with two people from California and I think maybe Atlanta, and all of them had heard about what was going on in St. Louis and like the attention that it's gotten. So this was interesting to that perspective.

And I heard the same thing in Mississippi last two days. Yep. Go

ahead. We had a Parks and Rec Commission meeting just this past Monday. Patty gave most of the information as it relates to the center, but a couple other things. The new ice rink, which really is not, they don't like to call it an ice rink, is now going to be the Shaw Park something. Like all, like All Seasons Recreation Complex. Spark is what they're calling it. Anyway, they're looking to demolish the current rink and building by the end of this year and start construction early next year. And it's looking pretty good that they are hopeful to get some private funding to put a roof on the rink so that truly can be an all-season facility. And Demond Park is hosting a grand opening of the park on September 28th from 10 to 1130. There's going to be like a food truck and arts and crafts for kids and they're expecting a big turnout. So that was it. Everything else was about the center. Patty updated us on that already.

Does anybody have anything else? I did have one thing, which is this St. Louis County Board PLC that we've had two meetings on. We're moving towards having another meeting, a fall meeting, on November the 9th in Kirkwood from 9 to noon. So you'll see more information about that. But just FYI, just to give you guys a heads up, Saturday, November 9th is what the 95% date is at least right now. Okay, all right. So in this case, we're actually going to move to adjourn but actually into executive session because we do need an executive session. So

12.01, I move that the Board of Education adjourn pursuant to RSMO 610.021, subsection 3. The Board of Education will meet in closed session for discussion related to personnel matters.

So we need a roll call vote for this one. Oh, right. Sorry. It's okay. Just call people. Just call them. You're good.

Lily? Yes. Stacey? Yes. Kristen? Yes. Jason? Gary, yes. Joe? Yes.

Okay.