September 9, 2020 — Meeting Transcript

tonight take a minute this might take a minute or two

as well if I can find it

okay we are live we are live streaming

OK. So we want to start the meeting. And again, say that adequate notice has been given. I want to say before we start the pledge just that we're sorry we're starting a little bit late and that there are a number of folks who are having Zoom issues tonight. So hopefully if people come in or out, we'll just work with it as we need to. So I see the flag in back of Sean. So we're going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance. 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.

Okay, thanks everybody. You know, typically we would go to recognizing our own and this would be if we were meeting in person, just a reminder, this would be a joint meeting with the city. However, we're not having a joint meeting with HAB-Jacques Juilland, Today we are going to have later a presentation by Patty de forest. But, um, so we're, we're actually moving straight to superintendent update. So Sean. HAB-Terry

Palmos- Okay, thank you, Joe. Well, good evening everyone. Again, we apologize to the community since we were delayed a little bit tonight. We are a community that's built on strong relationships and we know that relationships are integral to our students' success. We know that by investing in our students and having good relationships with them, we understand their perspectives and we're able to provide personalized learning to them and pertinent differentiation for them. One of the things that's unique in the city of Clayton is that we have a strong relationship with the city. And we are connected with them. We're collaborative in varied ways. We serve on committees with one another. We participate in certain projects with one another. And our biggest collaboration is the Center of Clayton. The center is an asset to the community and it's also a benefit to the students of the district. Over the last few years, we've been able to look at ways that we've been able invest and improve the Center of Clayton and make it even stronger. And for our Clayton students, We've been able to increase the hours for them and able to provide passes for our seventh grade students and created a workout space that is completely state of the art for our athletes and our students who participate in other programs. We have benefited from this partnership. We are now faced with the challenge and impact of COVID-19 and its impact on the Center of Clayton, which has caused us to which has caused us to think more about how we need to invest in the sustainability of the center, which I believe is a very worthy assessment investment. Tonight before we so tonight we're going to have an opportunity to kind of get the state of the center of Clayton from Patty DeForest and we're very fortunate to have her here and she is going to give us a little bit of update and then the board is going to be asked to approve the budget concerning the center of Claydon. But before we get into the center, OSBT- Dave Kuntz & I want to just to take some time to update the board on our remote learning and again i'm continue to be impressed by our educators, who have really made this experience very different than it was in the spring. OSBT- Dave kuntz & We have continued to make decisions in the best interest of our students and staff, making sure that we're using data to inform our decisions. OSBT- We also know that in order for this to be highly successful, we know that our parents also are partnering with the district because we also have to recognize that this is very difficult for them. But we do feel it's the right decision and we feel it's what's best to keep our students and staff safe. I will have to say that I'm proud that we're a district that has been thoughtful about differentiating support for our students based on their needs. And since the first day of school, we have been providing in-person learning for students. And I commend our special education teachers who are true heroes to this work. We've also started to expand that support to other students who have additional needs, and we're building capacity within our buildings. And today the county executive made an announcement that he recommends that school districts to consider bringing younger students back to school. So over the last few weeks, even before this announcement, we have been preparing for an opportunity to bring our youngest learners back into the schools. And we've been working with building leaders to look at different plans that we can enact and put in place if we were feeling that it was safe for our students to be back in school. And part of those plans incorporate an orientation and also a timeline that would allow us to bring students back in at certain points and gradually get our students fully back into school. We will also make sure that even though that announcement was made today, we're going to make sure that we're providing time and space so that way we can get enough time to prepare for that transition, and also make sure that we're absolutely ready. Sam Page has also recommended that schools start, so started making, had some recommendations around sports. We are able to start with competitions for low contact sports, which includes golf, tennis and cross country. But we can only continue to have practices for moderate and high impact sports with precautions in place and no timelines have been set for competitions. So those announcements were made today and we will continue to use those recommendations to inform what we do in the district. The other thing it's important to remember is our work around equity. And we are going to make sure that we make it a guaranteed topic that we bring up at every meeting. And so I want to just to let the board know that all of our certified staff have participated in anti-bias training before the beginning of the school year. And just recently, all of our classified staff have participated in that training. And that when we talk about classified staff, we talk about support staff. who still have interactions with our students and parents and our staff. Our director of equity and inclusion has been, Cameron Poole has been meeting with principals and preparing equity audits within the schools. And he's also getting other pertinent information that's gonna inform the development of our district equity committee. The other thing I had the privilege of doing last Friday during our professional development day was to observe Cameron, Mr. Poole, he'll be doctor soon at some point. He did a presentation on the power of humanization. And it was a really incredible presentation, but he talks about how sometimes within systems, we inadvertently are dehumanizing people. And he even used such a strong term such as soul murder. And it is a strong term, but it does mean that thinking about how This has an impact on our students and their identity and how they feel. And I loved how he put it to the broader perspective in terms of society, in terms of how things are working in the community and then he brought it back into education. And he talked about the importance of looking at discipline data, making sure we're getting student voice, making sure that we need teacher familiarity and students seeing themselves in our staff the importance of looking at academics and relationships and participations and programs. And what's great is that so many of those things are connected to our strategic plan that we're going to talk about later. The other thing that he emphasized is the importance of collecting data on our social emotional learning, which is connected to our work around equity. And so you'll also see that connection to our strategic plan. Cameron has also been working with and has been working with our staff and he's gonna start developing affinity groups, which is going to be for our students and for our parents and for our staff, which is gonna allow a safe space for them to have conversations about their experiences. So I just gave you a lot of information around COVID, the pandemic, about our equity work, and then just kind of setting the stage for what we're gonna see around the Center of Clayton tonight. I am going to turn it over to Caitlin to see if she has any updates from the student perspective.

Yes, so for some updates from the student's perspective, I can tell you a little bit about how extracurriculars and sports have been these first two weeks of school. So the extracurriculars that are graded classes have started the first week of school. For example, GLOBE has been meeting twice weekly in the mornings. And for GLOBE, this month's cover story is profiling the Black Lives Matter movement in St. Louis. And another article that you may find interesting that will be in this month's issue will be what students are thinking of the new schedule for virtual learning. Extracurriculars have found a way to connect with current events in the U.S., which has been helpful to individualize learning for students. Also, other student-run clubs are waiting until after the virtual clubs fair that Miss Young set up to begin their meetings. And the clubs fair will be tomorrow from 3 to 4 PM. As for sports, tryouts happened last week and students have been excited to get back to sports, although unconventionally. And I will also share my screen and show you a walkthrough of my biology and my history classes. So this is my AP Biology classroom, and there are two different categories here, stream and classwork. So stream contains the announcements, and most of the teachers, based on the feedback that they heard, decided to keep the stream just announcements and put their feedback. assignments in classroom. And a lot of things that teachers have been utilizing are like these different emojis to organize the classes. So here, Mr. Bergeron uses a pointer finger for announcements, a fire emoji for homework, a book emoji for notes, a pencil and paper for in-class activities, and then also labs and a computer for assessments. Something else interesting is that World History also uses the classwork tab and they use weekly hyper slides. And these have the agenda and link all of the presentations that were used that day in class. in addition to having the homework linked below. So everything for the week is on this organizer. In addition, there's also an objectives tab, which helps the students keep in mind the goals that they are learning for that week. And teachers have also been using interactive methods like, for example, Pear Deck, which is an interactive slides program. And then they have been using Zoom breakout rooms to help with smaller group discussions.

Thank you, Caitlin. And thank you, Sean. So we're going to actually... So just as a... This meeting is going to... We're going to do a study item, then an action item, then we're going to go back to an information item and study item. So the flow is going to be a little bit different because Patty DeForest is going to give us a... an update on the center of Clayton and we wanna just out of respect to her, allow her to give her update. You can ask some questions and then we're actually gonna have an action item that she'll be a part of and then we'll just release her so she doesn't have to be part of the whole meeting. So I just wanted to explain that to you all. So our next item is 4.01 which is the Clayton Recreation Sports and Wellness Commission or the CRSWC annual update in the budget for fiscal year 2021. slash 2021. So I don't know if Patty, you're Mary Jo, you're going to set it up or Patty and Mary Jo? I

think Patty has issues. Yeah.

Great. Thank you. So I'll just go ahead and speak. First of all, Caitlin, if you're still on, thank you because my grandchildren will not show me that. How in school or virtual learning works, I've asked them to show me in their lives. They just look at me like you don't need to know Nana, you're not in school. So I appreciate seeing that. So we're going to talk about the CRSWC. I mean, I'm going to give you a presentation. Mary Jo, feel free to jump in at any point. I'm going to share my screen and go through sort of as those of you that have been on the board before now, we usually give you an update on things that have happened. And then we talked about the budget and share that I'm going to do sort of an update on where we are and how we develop the budget. And then we'll talk about the budget. And I have some slides at the end to talk about things that we still haven't decided that, that the three committees at the center will be really working through over the next couple of months. So I'm going to share my screen. Hopefully there it is. And Get this going. All right, so this year during the budget, obviously we were just starting to work on the renovation or on the budget at the time of the shutdown. So it really reflects the fact that we knew going into the development of the budget that we had problems related to the pandemic we needed to address. Obviously we were coming out of the renovation. Day we shut down is when we had planned to shut down for about 10 days. So, um, we were trying to wrap up the renovation. So that had impacted our budget for this year and last year. And then we were forecasting for another year. And then really keeping in mind that the economic forecast moving forward is not great and is not going to rebound quickly. So we had to keep all of that in mind and developing and putting the budget together. I did want to report a little bit on our usage. I thought that would be of interest to you. This chart will show you how we opened, what we started with from a number standpoint, and where we are to date. I had shared this with Sean and David Gipson, the city manager, about a month ago. And so you can see we've had still steady growth in usage. When we first opened the first week of July, we were averaging 213 members a day. Um, the week of August 10th, we were up to 311. Um, this past week we were at three 32. So each week we really have seen an increase. It's not significant. It's not back to where we were, but at least we're growing and people are not, um, uh, leaving us there. They are coming. Um, our weekend hours are a little bit shorter. So that average is less than 200, but we were actually two Oh two Oh eight this past weekend. So we're really tracking usage. And as I had shared with the commission about a month ago, we really feel like the slow, steady measured progress is great because that's showing us people are comfortable working out. We're able to add things in and get more people back. The bad news is we have lost a significant number of members. We were about 7,200 members in February this year. Susan Peterson, July 1 which is when we officially reopened. We were at 5800 members. We are now as of August 1 at 5000 so we are continuing to lose some of our memberships, but that's still pretty strong. Susan Peterson, So we're trying to do everything we can to keep those people comfortable This is that new weight room for the district. And I'm sorry to say that you haven't all been in to see it already, but those schools are athletic teams and coaches are using it. I believe that it has been very well received. We're continuing to do some little improvements there, but it's exciting to have them in there and have their own space. We felt that We really worked closely with the district and Steve Hudson's been doing a great job of keeping us informed of the athletics and the activities that are coming back. We've coordinated both his plan, which he's really working with a group of people that are advising the county, and then the county is also setting the guidelines. So we're all working together, but it's great to see them back. As Caitlin said earlier, it's nice to see the kids be able to swim and play tennis run cross-country, so we're excited about that. As far as programs and rentals and all the other usage of the center, we really have gone very slowly into that part, and we've really done a measured and very slow resumption of services. We are doing personal training and private swim lessons. Those seem to be going okay. People are comfortable with the one-on-one type situation. And we've done very limited rentals, but some of our regular users are back. We're starting to see a little increase in people calling about renting. In putting the budget together, we varied our reductions in revenue from anywhere from 25 to 50%. We really looked at the activity of our members in the first six weeks and kind of extrapolated that through the end of the budget. Some of the membership categories are pretty strong and some have seen a lot more drop off. So we've seen a lot of seniors drop their memberships. So there's a variety of percentage reductions that you'll see on revenue. We have two full-time positions that we are holding open. The one that is a city position will be held open all year. It was not funded in the city's budget, which was a piece of it and we're not funding in the center's budget we believe that that's okay to do at least for this year uh the district has an open maintenance position and they're not we're not necessarily not going to fill it but we're not filling it quickly at this point um we have looked for reductions whenever possible you make you probably know that we did have to furlough our part-time staff um we did pay them for five weeks, and then at that point we furloughed them. Many of them were able to collect unemployment, which was great. They were very happy with how we handled them, and we have about half of our part-time employees back. The rest have, at this point, been technically laid off but are still eligible for unemployment. We've looked at reducing, shutting down any areas that we can to serve on energy. Tim Wanish and the maintenance staff have been great at really helping us with that. So with all of that, we used all of that to put a budget together. It was challenging because we knew that no matter what we did, we had significant reductions in revenue. But in putting it together for FY, so that really impacts this year, but as you all know full well, this pandemic has gone way longer than anybody anticipated, I think. Well, I think some people did, but we anticipated. So we are projecting that it will last at least another six months. So the first six months of the budget year will be very difficult. I don't think people are gonna rush back indoors at a quick rate, but we do, close the gap by being open. We lose more money being closed than we do being open, so we are continuing to open, really focus on maintaining our current membership and trying to figure out how to get some of the other things going while we can. But we have been very vigilant at following the St. Louis County Health Department and the CDC guidelines. So their 25% capacity is still in place. We have really seen reductions expected in other revenue sources because we have not resumed programming. We don't have a lot of the programming revenue coming in. We don't anticipate that it'll resume until 2021. This budget does not anticipate that. We have put a lot of focus on the private instruction and are working on developing some other ways to bring in some revenue from that type of instruction, and maybe some small group early in the year. And we have the operating fund includes a contribution from the city and district of 150,000 each. As far as expenses, the main increases in personnel is really related to pay and benefits. I don't think either you or the other board needs to be schooled on that. Our full-time staff get increases based upon whatever the city and the district do We have, as you may recall from the last two years, we're working on increasing our minimum wages to stay at least a little bit ahead of the state minimums. Those are going up annually. So we do have an increase. All jobs will be paid a minimum of $11 effective October 1 and we'll be at $12 next year. So we really were able to reduce expenditures associated with programming. We do have a large IT expense scheduled this year. Our software program is really not working well. We've had some accounting issues with it, so we are going to look at some other programs and we may replace this year. And probably the other good thing is Tim and Jim have done an excellent job with utilities. They've held really steady and some of our energy conservation has really helped So all of this stuff that was included in the construction has helped with that. So this is just a one page summary of all the different areas. You can see that we had a significant reduction in revenue. We had estimated three, or we had budgeted 3.27 million. We are looking at about 1.87 as it will be our end result for this year and proposing 2.5 for next year. You can see across the board reductions in all revenue sources, except for contributions from parent organizations. And then down at the bottom, but really a significant reduction in our revenue of about $700,000 next year and nearly $1.4 million this year. So we've tried to offset that with reductions in expenditures. You can see that this year, much more challenging because that's very hard to move those once you're that far into the year. Next year, we have identified reductions. Most of where you see it like a 57% in sports and 13% in fitness, that's because of programming reduction. So you're going to see that up above that the revenue is not there. So we're projecting that this will be our end result for revenue and operating expenses. And then our second fund is the equipment replacement. Please stop me if you have any questions, but the equipment replacement fund, we do have a small replacement money in there for FY21 36,000. We normally budget between forty five and fifty thousand a year. We purchase new equipment, cardio, the treadmills, bikes every year on a plan. This might be something that we could discuss when we start looking at places to hold. We will hold this order until after the first of the year because of all the new equipment that we have. And then we already talked a little bit about the replacement of the recreation software that that'll be about a 50 to $70,000 expense. And this is where we put 50,000 from each of the parent organizations. Next year's capital fund is pretty small. We didn't put a ton of money in there. We have a few things hanging out that were not able to fit into the construction that we're going to try to do, but we really just have money in there for those things that come up that we have UV lights in the pool that costs $6,000 a year to maintain that goes in the capital budget, things like that. Tony Searing and Jim Brunel, who work with Tim and I, if you don't know who they are, they're our assistants, are beginning to work on a new capital plan. Tim and I feel that they need to start taking some ownership of that and can do that. So we're going to really start working on that in the finance committee so we have some idea of the next five to 10 years, any future capital needs. And we plan to put 100,000 of each contribution in this fund. This slide will show you basically the summary of where we'll end. A piece of good news is that the auditors this year, they just completed our audit last month and they did find an AR issue, an accounts receivable issue. So we have a little extra money at the end of 2019. That 222,000 actually is money that we thought was was gone and they identified an issue. So that helps us a little bit this year in that we're showing the deficit of a million this year, but we will not have to build both parties for all of that since they've already basically paid some of that. But we are showing a $1 million deficit this year. And then next year we're projecting about 595,000. As I said, we did not project beyond that. We did not do, you know, 2022 and 2023. I think there is just so much unknown that would have been just an exercise and probably would not have accomplished much. I think that we feel like this fall, we need to, I'm sure the district is similar to the city in that we need a lot of focus to be on how do we come out of this. And we have three committees at the center, the finance committee, the operations committee, and the program committee. And all of them really need to start talking about how do we move forward if we do not rebound from a membership standpoint? Because I think that $600,000 makes me nervous. Makes me uncomfortable, quite honestly. So we do talk about cost recovery usually every year and you can see that we've had really good cost recovery model for a long time. We've been around between 90 and 100% cost recovery for the operating fund and all funds somewhere in that range. Those of you that haven't been on the board before You've always heard us talk about the original agreements estimated the cost recovery of between 82 and 86%. So I feel like we've done well. Unfortunately, this year and next year will not be that way. But I think that the reality is that we have to spend the next four to six months figuring out how do we get out of this situation and how do we change? it are there ways to change our operations to recoup some of this so i that is what i wanted to talk about i do know that there's probably some questions out there that about things that we haven't talked about so i'm just going to go through these slides real quickly and then you can ask whatever questions um we there are things we have not resumed at this point the climbing wall has not opened the kids center has not opened the yak and group or recreational swim. Some of those programs are very difficult because they're in really confined spaces, and so I doubt probably the Board of Education needs me to talk to you about how difficult it is to bring a lot of children back together. So we are working on a plan to get those services resumed. Our members have really not been too upset about it. I think they're figuring out what to do with their kids right now and enjoying the outdoors. but I do believe we have about another month before we really need to get these things going again. The student activities, as I said earlier, we've really been in close contact with Steve and his staff and all the coaches. They've done a nice job of getting things going back to, you know, getting the sports that can go, working with us on our requirements at the center as opposed to what most high schools are probably, you know, they can just do whatever they want inside their building. So the teams are there. I know that physical education probably won't come back until they're in school. And we have had discussions about the seventh grade memberships. And right now we need to have some further discussion about that. There's been some thought that we Until the kids are back in school, we wouldn't necessarily want to do that because they shouldn't be coming during the day, but that we may want to delay that and give seventh and eighth graders a membership next year. So that will be something that I will discuss with the finance and operating and CRSWC. And I think you should talk about that. No matter what, they're not going to get the same experience if they all get a free membership this year. So we could do it so that next year it's intended for both groups. Something to consider. And then all our programs and leagues, that is really challenging. It's very hard to do those. We are not planning to run our basketball league. Certainly, if things change with the health conditions and the pandemic, we can do that quickly. But right now, it just would be very difficult to run these types of programs in the current environment. Oasis has informed us they will not be back until after the first of the year. They're doing everything remotely. Occasionally, people come in and check things, but they are not here. The Community Foundation is really not going to do any big opening of their history area until after the first year. Subway is still waiting for the health department to give them their certificate to be able to open. We are hoping to get them open in the next two to four weeks. They're ready and we're ready. So hopefully that will resume soon. And then all the variety of other people who want to rent space and do things with lots of people, we're hoping to get them back in as soon as we can. But right now we're not bringing that type of activity into the building. So that's kind of it for me on my presentation. And then Mary Jo, I don't know, should I go through the action item or do you do that? Yeah, we will

Great. Thank you. So I'll just go ahead and speak. First of all, Caitlin, if you're still on, thank you because my grandchildren will not show me that. How in school or virtual learning works, I've asked them to show me in their lives. They just look at me like you don't need to know Nana, you're not in school. So I appreciate seeing that. So we're going to talk about the CRSWC. I mean, I'm going to give you a presentation. Mary Jo, feel free to jump in at any point. I'm going to share my screen and go through sort of as those of you that have been on the board before now, we usually give you an update on things that have happened. And then we talked about the budget and share that I'm going to do sort of an update on where we are and how we develop the budget. And then we'll talk about the budget. And I have some slides at the end to talk about things that we still haven't decided that, that the three committees at the center will be really working through over the next couple of months. So I'm going to share my screen. Hopefully there it is. And Get this going. All right, so this year during the budget, obviously we were just starting to work on the renovation or on the budget at the time of the shutdown. So it really reflects the fact that we knew going into the development of the budget that we had problems related to the pandemic we needed to address. Obviously we were coming out of the renovation. Day we shut down is when we had planned to shut down for about 10 days. So, um, we were trying to wrap up the renovation. So that had impacted our budget for this year and last year. And then we were forecasting for another year. And then really keeping in mind that the economic forecast moving forward is not great and is not going to rebound quickly. So we had to keep all of that in mind and developing and putting the budget together. I did want to report a little bit on our usage. I thought that would be of interest to you. This chart will show you how we opened, what we started with from a number standpoint, and where we are to date. I had shared this with Sean and David Gibson, the city manager, about a month ago. And so you can see we've had still steady growth in usage. When we first opened the first week of July, we were averaging 213 members a day. Um, the week of August 10th, we were up to 311. Um, this past week we were at three 32. So each week we really have seen an increase. It's not significant. It's not back to where we were, but at least we're growing and people are not, um, uh, leaving us there. They are coming. Um, our weekend hours are a little bit shorter. So that average is less than 200, but we were actually two Oh two Oh eight this past weekend. So we're really tracking usage. And as I had shared with the commission about a month ago, we really feel like the slow, steady measured progress is great because that's showing us people are comfortable working out. We're able to add things in and get more people back. The bad news is we have lost a significant number of members. We were about 7,200 members in February this year. Susan Peterson, July 1 which is when we officially reopened. We were at 5800 members. We are now as of August 1 at 5000 so we are continuing to lose some of our memberships, but that's still pretty strong. Susan Peterson, So we're trying to do everything we can to keep those people comfortable This is that new weight room for the district. And I'm sorry to say that you haven't all been in to see it already, but those schools are athletic teams and coaches are using it. I believe that it has been very well received. We're continuing to do some little improvements there, but it's exciting to have them in there and have their own space. We felt that We really worked closely with the district and Steve Hudson's been doing a great job of keeping us informed of the athletics and the activities that are coming back. We've coordinated both his plan, which he's really working with a group of people that are advising the county, and then the county is also setting the guidelines. So we're all working together, but it's great to see them back. As Caitlin said earlier, it's nice to see the kids be able to swim and play tennis run cross-country, so we're excited about that. As far as programs and rentals and all the other usage of the center, we really have gone very slowly into that part, and we've really done a measured and very slow resumption of services. We are doing personal training and private swim lessons. Those seem to be going okay. People are comfortable with the one-on-one type situation. And we've done very limited rentals, but some of our regular users are back. We're starting to see a little increase in people calling about renting. In putting the budget together, we varied our reductions in revenue from anywhere from 25 to 50%. We really looked at the activity of our members in the first six weeks and kind of extrapolated that through the end of the budget. Some of the membership categories are pretty strong and some have seen a lot more drop off. So we've seen a lot of seniors drop their memberships. So there's a variety of percentage reductions that you'll see on revenue. We have two full-time positions that we are holding open. The one that is a city position will be held open all year. It was not funded in the city's budget, which was a piece of it and we're not funding in the center's budget we believe that that's okay to do at least for this year uh the district has an open maintenance position and they're not we're not necessarily not going to fill it but we're not filling it quickly at this point um we have looked for reductions whenever possible you make you probably know that we did have to furlough our part-time staff um we did pay them for five weeks, and then at that point we furloughed them. Many of them were able to collect unemployment, which was great. They were very happy with how we handled them, and we have about half of our part-time employees back. The rest have, at this point, been technically laid off but are still eligible for unemployment. We've looked at reducing, shutting down any areas that we can to serve on energy. Tim Wanish and the maintenance staff have been great at really helping us with that. So with all of that, we used all of that to put a budget together. It was challenging because we knew that no matter what we did, we had significant reductions in revenue. But in putting it together for FY, so that really impacts this year, but as you all know full well, this pandemic has gone way longer than anybody anticipated, I think. Well, I think some people did, but we anticipated. So we are projecting that it will last at least another six months. So the first six months of the budget year will be very difficult. I don't think people are gonna rush back indoors at a quick rate, but we do, close the gap by being open. We lose more money being closed than we do being open, so we are continuing to open, really focus on maintaining our current membership and trying to figure out how to get some of the other things going while we can. But we have been very vigilant at following the St. Louis County Health Department and the CDC guidelines. So their 25% capacity is still in place. We have really seen reductions expected in other revenue sources because we have not resumed programming. We don't have a lot of the programming revenue coming in. We don't anticipate that it'll resume until 2021. This budget does not anticipate that. We have put a lot of focus on the private instruction and are working on developing some other ways to bring in some revenue from that type of instruction, and maybe some small group early in the year. And we have the operating fund includes a contribution from the city and district of 150,000 each. As far as expenses, the main increases in personnel is really related to pay and benefits. I don't think either you or the other board needs to be schooled on that. Our full-time staff get increases based upon whatever the city and the district do We have, as you may recall from the last two years, we're working on increasing our minimum wages to stay at least a little bit ahead of the state minimums. Those are going up annually. So we do have an increase. All jobs will be paid a minimum of $11 effective October 1 and we'll be at $12 next year. So we really were able to reduce expenditures associated with programming. We do have a large IT expense scheduled this year. Our software program is really not working well. We've had some accounting issues with it, so we are going to look at some other programs and we may replace this year. And probably the other good thing is Tim and Jim have done an excellent job with utilities. They've held really steady and some of our energy conservation has really helped So all of this stuff that was included in the construction has helped with that. So this is just a one page summary of all the different areas. You can see that we had a significant reduction in revenue. We had estimated three, or we had budgeted 3.27 million. We are looking at about 1.87 as it will be our end result for this year and proposing 2.5 for next year. You can see across the board reductions in all revenue sources, except for contributions from parent organizations. And then down at the bottom, but really a significant reduction in our revenue of about $700,000 next year and nearly $1.4 million this year. So we've tried to offset that with reductions in expenditures. You can see that this year, much more challenging because that's very hard to move those once you're that far into the year. Next year, we have identified reductions. Most of where you see it like a 57% in sports and 13% in fitness, that's because of programming reduction. So you're going to see that up above that the revenue is not there. So we're projecting that this will be our end result for revenue and operating expenses. And then our second fund is the equipment replacement. Please stop me if you have any questions, but the equipment replacement fund, we do have a small replacement money in there for FY21 36,000. We normally budget between forty five and fifty thousand a year. We purchase new equipment, cardio, the treadmills, bikes every year on a plan. This might be something that we could discuss when we start looking at places to hold. We will hold this order until after the first of the year because of all the new equipment that we have. And then we already talked a little bit about the replacement of the recreation software that that'll be about a 50 to $70,000 expense. And this is where we put 50,000 from each of the parent organizations. Next year's capital fund is pretty small. We didn't put a ton of money in there. We have a few things hanging out that were not able to fit into the construction that we're going to try to do, but we really just have money in there for those things that come up that we have UV lights in the pool that costs $6,000 a year to maintain that goes in the capital budget, things like that. Tony Searing and Jim Brunel, who work with Tim and I, if you don't know who they are, they're our assistants, are beginning to work on a new capital plan. Tim and I feel that they need to start taking some ownership of that and can do that. So we're going to really start working on that in the finance committee so we have some idea of the next five to 10 years, any future capital needs. And we plan to put 100,000 of each contribution in this fund. This slide will show you basically the summary of where we'll end. A piece of good news is that the auditors this year, they just completed our audit last month and they did find an AR issue, an accounts receivable issue. So we have a little extra money at the end of 2019. That 222,000 actually is money that we thought was was gone and they identified an issue. So that helps us a little bit this year in that we're showing the deficit of a million this year, but we will not have to build both parties for all of that since they've already basically paid some of that. But we are showing a $1 million deficit this year. And then next year we're projecting about 595,000. As I said, we did not project beyond that. We did not do, you know, 2022 and 2023. I think there is just so much unknown that would have been just an exercise and probably would not have accomplished much. I think that we feel like this fall, we need to, I'm sure the district is similar to the city in that we need a lot of focus to be on how do we come out of this. And we have three committees at the center, the finance committee, the operations committee, and the program committee. And all of them really need to start talking about how do we move forward if we do not rebound from a membership standpoint? Because I think that $600,000 makes me nervous. Makes me uncomfortable, quite honestly. So we do talk about cost recovery usually every year and you can see that we've had really good cost recovery model for a long time. We've been around between 90 and 100% cost recovery for the operating fund and all funds somewhere in that range. Those of you that haven't been on the board before You've always heard us talk about the original agreements estimated the cost recovery of between 82 and 86%. So I feel like we've done well. Unfortunately, this year and next year will not be that way. But I think that the reality is that we have to spend the next four to six months figuring out how do we get out of this situation and how do we change? it are there ways to change our operations to recoup some of this so i that is what i wanted to talk about i do know that there's probably some questions out there that about things that we haven't talked about so i'm just going to go through these slides real quickly and then you can ask whatever questions um we there are things we have not resumed at this point the climbing wall has not opened the kids center has not opened the yak and group or recreational swim. Some of those programs are very difficult because they're in really confined spaces, and so I doubt probably the Board of Education needs me to talk to you about how difficult it is to bring a lot of children back together. So we are working on a plan to get those services resumed. Our members have really not been too upset about it. I think they're figuring out what to do with their kids right now and enjoying the outdoors. but I do believe we have about another month before we really need to get these things going again. The student activities, as I said earlier, we've really been in close contact with Steve and his staff and all the coaches. They've done a nice job of getting things going back to, you know, getting the sports that can go, working with us on our requirements at the center as opposed to what most high schools are probably, you know, they can just do whatever they want inside their building. So the teams are there. I know that physical education probably won't come back until they're in school. And we have had discussions about the seventh grade memberships. And right now we need to have some further discussion about that. There's been some thought that we Until the kids are back in school, we wouldn't necessarily want to do that because they shouldn't be coming during the day, but that we may want to delay that and give seventh and eighth graders a membership next year. So that will be something that I will discuss with the finance and operating and CRSWC. And I think you should talk about that. No matter what, they're not going to get the same experience if they all get a free membership this year. So we could do it so that next year it's intended for both groups. Something to consider. And then all our programs and leagues, that is really challenging. It's very hard to do those. We are not planning to run our basketball league. Certainly, if things change with the health conditions and the pandemic, we can do that quickly. But right now, it just would be very difficult to run these types of programs in the current environment. Oasis has informed us they will not be back until after the first of the year. They're doing everything remotely. Occasionally, people come in and check things, but they are not here. The Community Foundation is really not going to do any big opening of their history area until after the first year. Subway is still waiting for the health department to give them their certificate to be able to open. We are hoping to get them open in the next two to four weeks. They're ready and we're ready. So hopefully that will resume soon. And then all the variety of other people who want to rent space and do things with lots of people, we're hoping to get them back in as soon as we can. But right now we're not bringing that type of activity into the building. So that's kind of it for me on my presentation. And then Mary Jo, I don't know, should I go through the action item or do you do that? Yeah, we will

do

that afterwards. OK.

Yeah, we'll do that after, Patty. So yeah, thank you, Patty. So I am just going to go and maybe stop sharing your screen so we can see everything.

OK, that's what I was going to say. I'm trying to figure out how to do that.

But you know what, just for the kind of the sake of all voices, I'm just going to ask each board member if you have any questions. And I'm just looking across my screen. So Kim, you happen to be the first person. So do you have any questions for Patty?

No, just one, Patty. So you mentioned brilliantly that there was a timing on the accounts receivables on the AR. So is that just a one-time accounting adjustment or is there something more significant that needs to happen with process so we don't see that in the future?

It is related to the problem we're having with our recreation software. And it is a one-time fix for this specific problem, but is the reason that we're looking to change software.

Got it.

Because we've had some recurring issues. Okay.

Thank you. Jason, how about you? Do you have any questions for Patty?

Yeah, just one. You know, we're losing $500,000. How much have we been losing again this year? I didn't write it down.

A million.

A million. So does it cost more to operate it or does it cost less to just shut it down?

So it's not a simple answer to that because it depends on if you close it down and lay off all the staff. The Delta right now, when we're open, we're losing about $3,000 a day. When we're closed, we're losing $6,000 a day, so it is more effective to be open. We are closing the gap and we close the gap a little bit more each time we have more people. If we were to shut down and lay off all the full-time staff and shelter the building, shutter the building, Of course that would change, but that's not really what we've been talking about yet. Or at this point.

That's one to make sure I understood.

Yeah. So that's, you know, and one of the things, and I really appreciate this, both Sean and David with the city said, we need to run it for a while to figure that out. You know, I think Sean may disagree, but I felt like after about two or three weeks, I thought, oh my God, we just need to shut down. This isn't worth it. And we're just continuing to lose money. I don't know what I thought that we'd magically open and close the gap and everything be great. I do think that, but I do want that. But after, I think Sean, it might've been three to four weeks in that we met and I was like, maybe we need to change hours. And their focus was let's try to let it run for, you know, really we've only been open about eight weeks now. Let's see if we can get more and close that gap. And that's what we're looking to, is to close that gap of that $3,000. So I think that's our goal at this point. But a good way to look at it, Jason. Thank you.

Thank you, Jason. Amy, do you have any questions?

Hi, Patty.

Hi, Amy.

I just want to thank you for the presentation. I know you guys have had a rough time over there and you guys have been very, you and your team have been very, very thoughtful about how to go about things in such a difficult time. And I appreciate your efforts, especially in trying to mitigate some of the financial impact of what I know you've had to make some really hard decisions. One quick question. The tenants, are they paying rent?

Yes. Yes, they are. But unfortunately, the way Subway's lease is written, they don't pay if they're not bringing in money. So they are not. But Oasis is and the Community Foundation is.

Yeah.

Got it. Terrific. Okay. Thank

you.

You're welcome.

Thanks, Amy. Gary, do you have any questions?

No, I don't. Thanks, Patty, for walking us through it. And thanks for trying to close the gap and deal with this as best as we can. I don't know how many questions we have.

Thanks, Gary. Thanks, Gary. David, how about you? Do you have any questions?

Yes, I do. And I'm not sure if Mary Jo or Patty's best to answer. I think we are going to do a budget adjustment, if I'm not mistaken, for this plan year for this half million dollar hit. But is there any way we can start accruing for the anticipated loss in calendar year 21? Or is that something we will do as an ad hoc adjustment again next year?

We'll probably include that in the actual budget document next year moving forward. Because that would be a one known cost. I didn't include a lot of this in this year so that it would be more transparent to the board on what was coming forward and not some of it being buried and some of it added afterwards. So I was trying to do it more open this year.

Yeah, no, and I know we talked about it. I agree with the approach. It's what I was just curious so we can just start a crew in port.

David, explain for us non-financial people what you mean when you say that.

I guess the easiest way to say it is, in our world, we take that big expense hit. Mary Jo, what is it? July, when we write all those checks. And I'm just wondering if we start to build up the budget for it in advance so that it's on the forecast. We know it's there. It's not an ad hoc item that's going to whack us, you know, mid-year next year. I guess I may not be explaining that the best way I think in balance sheet terms, but long and short is just that we're budgeting for it as opposed to treating it as a one-off.

Yeah, we'd definitely be budgeting for it. And also, you know, in the sense of kind of accruing, actually paying it or something, you know, the center and both entities the city and the district have always had the agreement that we weren't going to have the center hold a lot of our funding um that you know they would get what they would need and keep a minimal fund balance and patty i don't remember the exact amount but we didn't want the fund balance at the center of the crswc to build too much where they were holding both of the entities funds and so it's just something that we know we'll budget for it and then we'll build off of that and so you know i don't remember what the fund balance is normally

I think we had said 200,000. That's what I was thinking. But it was a long time ago.

Yeah,

it was minimal. 10 years ago, and that was about what we were keeping in there.

Yeah. And I think it was at the time, it was during the recession when both the district and the city were very minimal revenue streams. And we were like, we can't give you our money to hold. We have to hold it ourselves. Yeah.

So just a follow-up question based on that. So if you're not holding a fund balance with such a shortfall between revenues and expenses, are you concerned about the timing of payments this year for employees or anything like that?

Well, no, because the way the agreements are written, so the city pays all the bills and for a large portion of it, the district pays all the maintenance department bills and then we bill each other And so I think we're fine because we're not expected to pay the bills. The city and district are paying them.

Got it, thank you.

I think if we were an individual organization that you were supporting, we'd probably have a whole different conversation. I think that's why we ended up that way. There was discussion probably, I think it was like 2009, 10 of maybe we need to film start building up the fund balance and each district and city should give the center $250,000 a year. And then they'd have this fund balance for capital. And then I think that's when everybody was like, wait a minute, we're not going to give them our money to hold. It's our money. So And I think Mary Jo, you've been putting money aside too.

Yeah, I've had a separate fund for capital expenditures set aside that we did use some this year for the parking lot and for that equipment. You saw that great picture of that. That was beautiful.

Caitlin, do you have any questions? I know you blipped out and came back.

Yeah, I don't have any questions.

Okay, thank you, Caitlin. And Stacey, do you have

Thanks,

Stacy. And I really don't have any questions either just to compliment Patty, you and Tim and the whole staff and continuing to really make it a going concern. It's really difficult. And I know there are some facilities who even to Jason's earlier question, who just decided that the math was better to shut down. Yeah. And so to your credit, you're you know, working the math to not shut down and make it better. So we appreciate that. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks. So we are then going to move on to our action item that is kind of associated with this. And this is a 5.01. It's the Clayton Recreation Sports and Wellness Committee of the CRSWC budget approval. Um, and again, just so do we have a, uh, emotion for that? Gary. Yes. I moved

at the board of education approved the fiscal year 2021 CRS WC budget and submitted

second.

Okay. It's been moved in seconded any questions or comments. Okay. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, it passes unanimously. Thank you. And thanks, Patty. We really, again, appreciate it and understand that you might want to enjoy the rest of your night.

Thank you. Who knows what I'll learn? I might learn something next.

You could.

Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

Thank you. So we're moving on to 6.01, which is actually an information item, and that's the COVID-related impact update, which is really around budget. So Mary Jo. Okay.

Let me see if I can share screen. I haven't done this before.

All right.

Okay, so I wanted to provide the board with a brief update based on what is currently known as of today. So I want, I'm stressing that a lot. So please keep in mind that things are literally changing daily. So for example, just yesterday, one of the items that I have listed in here, we received a notification from the state of Missouri That 50% of our unemployment claims would now be refunded. And that was one of our substantial costs that I included on the slide. So now we're estimating $40,000 will now get refunded back to us. And so applying this new information to the analysis I just presented, it shows that we actually have more organic savings than we had cost. So I know this will not be the overall financial result at the end of the year. So, but I, and that's where I'm saying that things are literally changing daily. So as the district progresses with returning students into the classroom, I am anticipating there'll be other necessary expenses, perhaps such as like more instructional support, such as interns, the need for additional long-term substitutes to assist with perhaps supervision of students or coverage of staff absences due to COVID. Further, we know we're going to require additional custodial support. Depending on how we bring the students back, we're going to shift some of the support, but once we get all the students back in the building or at least in a hybrid model, we don't have enough daytime staff in order to clean and disinfect touch points and restrooms the way that we need to. There also might be other supplies or technological supports that are required, but we won't know until we're actually in the classroom. And then, you know, as Patty mentioned, you know, she's estimating next year's loss of that 595,000, but you know, as the year goes on and she gets more information, you know, we'll continue to monitor that, but that amount might even change. And so everything is we receive, I'm trying to provide updates to the board and we'll determine the best way to move it forward. But part of the reason I wanted to do a presentation tonight is because we are asking for budget revisions. As I mentioned with David, um, I'm trying to do these transparent so that everybody knows what's going on and it's not all buried into a document and we're not really positive. So I just want to make sure everyone knows what's going and it's been transparent. So the summary I made, as I mentioned during the budget presentation in June, We were anticipating some savings to be achieved organically and due to these restrictions. And so as you can see, there is currently approximately $60,000 worth of reduced overtime expenses for hourly staff. And most of that is due to overtime in the summer for maintenance because of the heavy use of our buildings in the summer for summer programs. We end up doing a lot of condensed overtime in order to get summer projects done. for all the staff's facility improvements that we can get done in the two week timeframe that we get. Plus other times on the weekends, we ended up doing a lot of weekend work and stuff like that. So due to that stay at home mandate and not having the summer programs in all of our buildings, maintenance projects got completed during the normal work day with no overtime. I will say Tim and Jim were extremely happy with the summer being able to get so much work done. The other items is substitutes. Through September 30th, we're estimating approximately $60,000 of reduced substitute costs due to all this remote learning. We're not hiring substitutes during this timeframe. Administration also reviewed part-time temporary employment contracts where staff would not be able to perform the necessary duties related to the PTTEs. And then we did inform those impacted staff that that PTTE would not be paid. I am... thinking that possibly some of them may be reinstated as students return to the campus, but then they would be adjusted to a lesser amount. But right now that is a total amount that we have that we've at least put on hold. Transportation, the district rents a substantial amount of buses to transport students for field trips and athletic events. And we do have three of our own buses, but just like a grade level trip requires the use of six buses, like say at Y-Down in an elementary is like five buses. And we have to rent those because we can't have all of our buses out at one time. So we do in athletic events, we're constantly running buses for athletic events. So currently through September 30th, we're estimating the savings of $40,000 there for the rentals and the gasoline and maintenance of our current buses. As I also mentioned, you know, we didn't run a full summer program. This is not related to Summer Quest at all. That's a break-even program. So we neither had expenses or revenue related to that. This is strictly the summer school programs, which normally we budget around $250,000 of expenses to that. Um, most of our students participate in the Springfield launch online program and they actually enrolled as students of Springfield, Missouri. And therefore we didn't have to pay anything for that. Um, so we only, we did run the, um, elementary and some, and the Y down. And then we did have a few teachers at the high school running. So we ended up spending around $187,000 on that program instead of the two 50, um, And then with professional development, since staff can't travel right now, we're restricting all travel. We want staff teaching students and focusing on the instruction. And summer is actually our heaviest time for staff travel. We've had $44,000 of savings this year on that. And then finally with utilities, as Patty mentioned, we too have seen a lot of energy savings not having 350 students in the high school for six weeks in the summer. has caused a lot of savings in utilities. And so that's been estimated through September 30th to be around $73,000. So the other category I have titled as costs, but a few of them are actually more due to loss of revenue. So as I go through, I'll explain those areas. So the first one with Family Center, we have not furloughed any Family Center staff. So those staff are still working with students We decided to present a reduced tuition amount to families and we did have many families take that. It basically provides them some services and holds their spot in line for when we do come back. If you did not pay the 30% reduced fee, you lost your spot. So it was a little enticement. So this 150,000 represents the estimated loss of revenue through September 30th on that program. On the KidZone, we did furlough all of our part-time KidZone workers And we are also not receiving any revenue for this program. This program does generate revenue for the district and therefore there is a loss of revenue on it. And then there's also, we did maintain the two full-time staff site directors. So that 33,000 not only represents the loss of the revenue but then the expenses for those two staff. Jennifer Gillissen, Regarding technology costs that's really representing our online and digital learning resources that we needed to purchase in order to be fully remote Jennifer Gillissen, And teach in a different manner than we did in the spring. That's not, I don't think there's any equipment in that number at all. Jennifer Gillissen, I'm regarding the PP and cleaning. We've been purchasing plexiglass dividers for support staff workstations teachers desks students desk. social distancing signage, face masks for staff and students because we do plan to have all students wear them. Again, just continuing with disinfectants and other cleaning supplies. So we had spent about 60 some thousand last year. We've already spent another 50,000 this year. And that's just through September. The virtual instruction represents the expense related to students who have selected one from home because we're using a different platform from them. So that's associated with that learning experience. The $60,000, as I mentioned, for the unemployment expenses. If you're familiar with unemployment claims, as I mentioned we've only furloughed one set of staff and it's just been recently in the last month. But the way they calculate it, the district doesn't pay an insurance. We pay actual claims. And so there's a base period with unemployment claims, and it's the first four of the last five quarters. So they do a look back. So even though we might not have been the ones that laid them off, if we had salaries for them, we're going to pay a portion of that base period. So coaches and subs or any teacher that's worked here in the last year and a half or J. About your nap would be eligible for unemployment, that we would be paying for so we do dispute any claims that we don't feel is real there have been a lot of fraudulent claims and we've monitoring for that. J. But we typically budget around $20,000 a year for unemployment we're estimating 80,000 so that's 60,000 it's the amount above that. But we're hoping, based on the letter we got yesterday, that we should get back about $40,000 of that $60,000 additional cost. And finally, food service. This program, too, has an offsetting revenue to it. So like KidZone, it represents both the loss of revenue and the expenses. Right now, we only are maintaining the current director of the program. They hire their own staff and furlough their own staff, so that's not running through the district. So as you can see, if we apply that $40,000 to offset that cost, it reduces the cost down to $466,000. But yet we've had organic savings of $477,000. So administration is gonna continue to look for savings whenever possible to offset future costs. But I do anticipate by the end of the school year, we will have expenses that do outweigh our savings. There are also some current extraordinary items I wanted to discuss. And in regards to revenue, we talked about the CARES funding from the state of Missouri that we were notified last year. We thought we were going to receive it last year. Unfortunately, it's going to come through this year. Well, unfortunately or unfortunately, either way, we're going to get it, but it'll be in this year's budget. We also received Title IV funding that covered the cost of hot spots that we purchased for students in need. So all of those costs were covered by a grant. And we're also set to receive additional hotspots from the county. We just completed all of that necessary paperwork to secure those devices. And we are applying for any type of funding that we can to offset expenses. We've applied for some grants through the county for kids zone losses. And we've also, as I mentioned in my summary for one of the expenses on that needlepoint bipolar ionization system, there is funding for potential capital projects that improve air quality. So in regards to expenses, as Patty's presented the district will need to pay our portion of the operating deficit. So I do have a budget request for tonight that I'm asking that you guys approve so that we can increase the budget. And we don't normally ever do this. So that's why I'm trying to do these presentations. Last year was the first time in the 11 years that I've been basically in this position that we asked for a budget increase, and that was for Adzick Field. So this is only the second one. So this is very rare. And the reason we do this is because if we exceed the budget, that's a state finding. It'll be written up in the audit. So we have to ensure that our budget is always in excess of what we spend. And $500,000 is a large amount for one fund. And so we want to make sure that we don't exceed our budget request. So and then the second expense is called a needlepoint bipolar ionization system. And as that executive summary that I wrote for that request, it'll provide pathogen removal remediation, which is integrated into each building's HVAC system. This total project cost is estimated at approximately $500,000 because we have Most of our buildings have been expanded on throughout the years. And each time we add onto the building, that's another air conditioning unit. So because we have so many, like Captain actually has the same number of air conditioning units as Whiteown. But since Whiteown is new, they have less even though it's the building's probably a third of the size larger than Captain. So once all these final bids are received, we'll put in an official budget request for that and ask for the approval. I did not ask for that budget request right now because we were only working off of an estimate. But I did want to be able to provide all of this in a presentation. So as those things move forward, you at least have some background on it. And as we get any other requests, we'll move forward with those as well. So I'm presenting the fund balance projections with all these estimated costs and savings included. And I will also update this once we get information to set the tax levy at the end of the month. So this might look a little different at the end of month once we get all of the assessed value information and all the necessary information to set the taxes levy. I do anticipate that we will still be able to roll back the levy. And because of the successful passing of Prop E, we're just in a much better secure financial position to cover all these extraordinary expenses. And I'm just asking for the board's support as these requests are brought forward for approval. So administration will just continue to ensure learning environment that's as safe as possible, both physically and emotionally for our students and staff. We'll look for every potential area of savings that we can find. and we'll consider to pursue any federal state or county funding opportunities that we can. I just wanna give the board some assurance that we will continue to work on all those things. So does anyone have any questions?

Thank you, Mary Jo. Yeah, so I'm just gonna go through again and maybe I'll go in reverse order. So Stacy, do you have any questions?

Just a quick one, and I'm sorry if I missed this. The ionization system, is that something that we're getting

bids on? That's what you said, right? Right. So it was presented because it wasn't budgeted. So the policy states that if it's over $50,000 and was not budgeted, we have to ask for approval just to go out for bidding. Right. Okay. Thanks.

Caitlin, do you have any questions?

No questions for me.

Thank you. David, how about you? Do you have any questions?

No, I'm good. Thank you, Joe.

Thank you. Gary, do you have any questions.

So just clarifying where I think we are, you're describing and giving us a background for both of these extraordinary expenses. And then we are going to come back and do action items specifically approving the center, the revision in the center of the budget for the center and then also just approve getting bids. But we'll come back to approve any contracts on the ionization system. Right.

And the budget revision at the same time so that the budget matches the request.

So we'll do another budget revision then for that. Okay. Exactly. I don't have any

other questions. Thank you. Amy, do you have any questions?

I do. It's just kind of a clarifying question building on Stacy's question, I think. So that ionization, you mentioned pathogen. So is that one of those like air filtration systems for COVID?

Yeah, it's not necessarily a filtration system, but yeah, it's kind of the same. It actually adjusts the molecules in the air, changes them. Got it.

Okay. That's what I thought, but I just wanted to make sure.

It does improve, it improves the filtration because it can actually kill some of the molecules before it even gets to the filters. But yes.

So are we working with any consultant to figure out which is the best system for that? I have no idea. I just know there's all different types of systems.

Yeah. And that summary we did put in there where we felt this one was the best because it has like the least amount of side effects. And it's not just a, like UV lighting is more of just a surface cleaner. And this is more of a, like a total air cleaner. So it's better than just filters.

Perfect. Okay. Thank you.

Thanks. Jason, any questions? No, I'm fine. Thank you. I'm sorry. Kim, do you have any questions? Okay. All right. Great. Thank you. And I don't have any questions, Mary Jo. Thanks for putting it together. I think it's very helpful for us to, I understand it's a snapshot, but it's helpful for us to see kind of, you know, cost savings and additional costs. So thank you. Okay, so we are going to move to the next item, which is 7.01, which is the strategic plan slash data dashboard and Sean

I'm going to hand it over to you. Josh Triplett, Sorry. Josh Triplett , I apologize. I'm trying to Josh Triplett,, Get this up. I apologize. Right there. I am so I am

it's shut down on me. I'm trying to get it back up. I apologize. Let's

see. Sean, would it be helpful if we take a two or three minute bio break? I think I'm almost there. Let's see if this works. Okay, can you see that all right? Let's see if it's loading.

All right. So thanks for your patience on that. And so as Joe said, we are going to spend some time working on our strategic plan. And this is really an exciting time for us because there's a lot of, there's an influence of a lot of work coming together for what we're going to be doing tonight and presenting to the board. And I want us to remember that when we're thinking about who we are as a district, a hallmark of our district has been our excellence. And as I've said to you in the past is that we have to make sure that we're looking deeper than some of those things that we use to measure our success. We have to really start defining how do we wanna measure success and thinking about how we approach teaching and learning in a transformational way. So instead of it just being complacent and saying, you know what, we're already doing great things, we have to push ourselves to think differently about what we do for our students so that students, no matter who they are, no matter their race, no matter their zip code, no matter their ability, they are going to be successful in our district. When we think about our strategic plan, oftentimes when you think about what a traditional strategic plan looks like, you'll see that there will be measures within that that are measuring academic performance. And you'll see that we'll have measures connected to quality of teachers and also fiscal responsibility. And when we approached the strategic plan, we thought about it like what are those givens that are gonna be the absolute essentials that we are going to be measuring no matter what we're doing? And then what are the goals? What are those ways we can be different? Or what are those ways that we can be aspirational or bold or transformational in our approach? So when you look at the plan that we presented, we are gonna have, our dashboard is gonna have some different measures that might be different than what we've measured in the past. But I want to assure the board that we will continue to make sure that our academic performance is still being measured. We'll make sure that we still have high quality teachers and we'll make sure that, you know, dedicating time to make sure that we are being fiscally responsive. So at this point in history in Clayton, we're at this pivotal point where we're launching a new strategic plan We have a dedicated focus to equity and anti-bias and anti-racism work. And then we also have, even though that Mary Jo just shared with you some of those things that are challenges for us, our community has come together to support us and helped us be fiscally healthy by the passing of Prop E. And the confluence of all those coming together really helps us decide what we want to do for the future of our students. And when we're thinking about our strategic plan is we are asking ourselves that question, what future are we trying to create for our students? And when we started this whole process two years ago, we started with the end in mind and developing the profile of the graduate. And that profile was developed through an engagement of stakeholders, through community members. Also, we had parents, students, we actually had our former student board representative helped facilitate some of those meetings. And we came up with our profile to graduate. And I will say that probably more than any of the work that we've done, it has been incredible to see how the profile has already influenced some of the work within our classrooms, our curriculum development, and really trying to make sure that we are looking beyond just what we would, you know, the typical measuring the academic performances We're trying to measure what is going to be good for creating human, putting in place good human beings. And I would say that some people might look at the skills that are on this profile to graduate and use the term soft skills. And I would that we need to stop using that term because these are the skills that are gonna be absolutely essential for our students to be successful in school and when they leave the district. So they're absolutely essential and they are the grounding for all of our work in a strategic plan. Now, our strategic plan is going to be the roadmap that we use to guide our work. So this is this is these This strategic plan is put in place for us to say, what are we going to be doing for the next three years? It's also gonna be important that we know what we're gonna measure. So what measures, what we're measuring matters. And so we know that it's gonna be important for us to keep coming back to the strategic plan and what we're measuring to determine whether or not we need to adjust. And that adjustment is that evergreen model. Just because we present something to you today doesn't mean that some things might not, that might not change later based off the data that we're looking at. And then we're also making sure that we're being learner centered. And when we talk about learners, it's not just about the students, it's about the educators. It's also about the parents and the administrators and the community members. Now, when we talk about our story, our story did start two years ago when we started The Profile. And we collected a lot of data. We collected a lot of input. We researched what other school districts were doing. And then we also engaged the community in this past year when we started working on the development of the strategic plan, we engaged the community in a different way using a facilitator called Filament that helped us get some additional input and data that helped us create our goal statements. And those goal statements became our priority. So we have worked to engage, develop and prioritize these goal statements through this whole process of collecting data. PB Harmon Zuckerman, We also wanted to make sure that we wanted to do everything right. And so we were hope our hope was that we would be able to present this in August and we are PB Harmon Zuckerson, We wanted to make sure we're presenting something that was right. And so, we still feel we're doing this in a timely manner which PB Harmon Zuckerton, Is important because we just didn't want to rush something and make sure we wanted to make sure presenting something that we felt very confident about the board. When you look at the strategic plan and the document that we provided you, we focused on two things for the board. And the two things that we focused on were the strategic goals and the objectives. And when we think about our objectives, We know that our objective, when we start about, when we think about our goals, our goals are what are bold and aspirational. This is what we want down the road for our students. The objectives are what is, wouldn't be true if we were going to be reaching those goals. So I would say that they're more specific. This is where you're going to see the measures, and this is where the board is going to be holding us accountable to the work. So the goals and the objectives. The other aspect of the strategic plan are the action steps and the strategies. And so tonight we are really, and that is really the responsibility of the administration, and those are the responsibility of our different teachers and curriculum coordinators and other positions that are within our district to help put those action steps into place and to actually follow through with those. Once our action steps are moving forward, then we're going to see progress with our objectives and that's ultimately going to help us reach our goals. I would say that, so one of the things you'll see in the document tonight is part of our conversation is about just those strategic goals and those objectives. But the other aspect is the measures of success. And so we have provided with you a dashboard that would allow us to make sure that we're coming back and constantly looking at what is our progress and how do we know whether or not we're making progress and whether or not we need to make some adjustments. So based off all of the work that we've done over the last two years, our district strategic goals are the following. We'll ensure learners of all identities feel safe and valued. We will commit to the educational growth of our learners through an equitable, personalized individual learning experience. And we'll be dedicated to the personal growth of learners and their social, emotional, and physical wellbeing. Now you would say like, okay, that's a pretty big lofty goals, but that's what they're meant to be. They're supposed to be bold and thinking about being aspirational. When we come down to the objectives, as I said earlier, this is what would be true. This is what we're working towards. They're clear, they're measurable, And then following those would be the action steps. These are the ways that we're gonna reach our objectives and our resources are connected to those action steps. So similar to what, when we're thinking about, we can't just say that we're gonna enact an action step but not also think about what is the capital that we're going to be using to make this happen? What money do we need to dedicate to this? What adjustments do we need to make to our budget to make sure that they are being supported And then the other thing too is that these action steps would be fluid. So if we're not seeing that there's progress towards our objectives, this is where we as the board or the administration can make recommendations to say, this isn't working and we haven't seen the progress and we have to make some adjustments. The one aspect that you won't see in the document that we shared with you, but we'll share at the end of the week is that we have already started developing all the action steps that are connected to the objectives and the goals. And I wanted just to show you an example that we are developing action steps that are measurable that we can monitor their progress. And then we're also assigning oversight leaders who are going to be responsible. And what I'm going to do is connect the goals of our central office administrators to the aspects of the strategic plan. And similar to what you will do for me in terms of holding me accountable to these goals, I will also be doing that with our central office staff. The other thing that's important to know is that we have developed a dashboard that is going to be a way for us to measure our progress over a period of time. And we've looked at three years for the strategic plan. And we definitely are gonna go beyond that, but we wanna make sure that we're making progress in each one of those areas that we have designated. And these measures of success are going to help us they might change along the way. So the dashboard we provided for you doesn't have all the data in it yet. One, because some of it we don't have the baseline data. And two, we are actually creating the measures and looking at ways that we are going to measure our success. So that's going to be part of the process. I wanted you to get an idea about what this would look like. And so this top part is going to be an interactive part of our website that people can go to to be able to see the data very transparently. But then we also have something that's a little bit more looking like a spreadsheet that the board will be able to monitor as we keep coming back to the board meetings. And you'll see that we will monitor progress as we go along throughout the year. There will be benchmarks that will be in between here. So that way we can constantly say whether or not we're moving towards those goals. So I wanted you to see that this is going to be graphically on our website, but it's also going to be something that's very pragmatic and easy to see through a spreadsheet. The Board of Education just recently passed the anti-bias and anti-racism board resolution. And as you can see through the document, we've wanted to make sure that we're holding ourselves accountable to the information that was in that resolution. And so we not only looked at every action step and every objective, but we wanted to make sure the resolution. So we weren't missing anything. And it was also going to be a way for us to hold ourselves accountable to that work, which is so integral to being successful district. So tonight, what we're going to do is this is going to be a collaboration between the central office administrators and the board members. And what you're going to do, is have some time to process. And so we have provided the two documents which are the strategic planning document and the dashboard, and those are in board docs. And what we'd like you to do is take about five to 10 minutes just to look at the documents. and just to be able to process through them, look through them to see, so that way you're familiar with them. And then what you're going to do is spend about 15 to 20 minutes working with central office administrators and one another in four different groups. And then we're going to be asking you some probing questions that the central office administrators are going to take notes on. And we want to make sure that the board and the central office administrators have time to look at these documents with one another. And that first probing question is, does this plan represent the direction we want to go? And what we've been talking about over the last two years. And what makes you say that? What are those specifics in the plan? You may say something like, you know, I'm not seeing this. And the reason I say that is because we've talked about this, but I'm not noticing it. We also want to take note on that. The other thing that we want is that this plan is gonna be brought back to the board for approval. And so the question we also want you to consider is what questions need to be answered before the board votes to approve? And so our central office administrators are going to be taking notes and they're gonna be participating in this conversation and try to answer questions as much as possible. But what we want to gather is those questions that we still think that need to be addressed before the board approves. And then what I'm going to ask you to do is not go into the document and start wordsmithing and looking at changing things. We want to look at it at the 10,000 foot level and really ask ourselves, it's like, okay, does this represent where we need to go as a district? And then what still needs to be answered in order for us to move forward with a vote? And so we're going to break you into smaller groups and allow you to have about 15 to 20 minutes to focus on that. And then what we're going to do is ask our central office administrators when we come back to give a, or you can bring someone who, our board member, you can choose to provide a tweet for maybe something that represents the conversation that you had. And when we say a tweet, it's like a succinct statement that has a lot of information but not a lot of words. So So I wanna stop there and see if you had any questions before we break into our small

groups. Anybody have any questions about what we're gonna do next? Okay.

So the next step is that Chris is going to and Chris Tennill is going to help us with this. I'm going to stop sharing. I had I sent the questions to the central office administrator so they can repeat those questions to you. And then the central office administrators will be taking notes as you're talking. For those of you in public who are viewing this, we are going to have a little block of time when the board is going to be working. And we will be coming back in about, we'll say about 15, 20 minutes. And I will send out a notice at 15 minutes and check to see how much time you need. Okay. Chris, would you be able to break us into smaller groups?

So the next step is that Chris is going to and Chris Tennell is going to help us with this. I'm going to stop sharing. I had I sent the questions to the central office administrator so they can repeat those questions to you. And then the central office administrators will be taking notes as you're talking. For those of you in public who are viewing this, we are going to have a little block of time when the board is going to be working. And we will be coming back in about, we'll say about 15, 20 minutes. And I will send out a notice at 15 minutes and check to see how much time you need. Okay. Chris, would you be able to break us into smaller groups?

Yeah, I just sent everybody

their breakout group invitations. So we should have everybody in their breakout rooms right now.

Thank you. Okay, it looks like everyone is back. Hopefully you had a productive time in your breakout groups. So what we're gonna do now is just take a few, take some time, takes a few minutes to go around to each group. And I asked you to think about like, what would be if you had to write a tweet to represent maybe something that's out of your conversation that you think would be good for the whole group to hear? This would be the opportunity to do that. And so I was gonna see if we could start with Gary, Kim and Milena to see if you could, do your tweet and see if you have any questions that go along with that.

Sure. So our tweet was that we haven't stopped focusing on what makes us who we are and what already makes us great. I don't know if you want me to explain a little bit about, I'm not sure it stands on its own. But what we were talking about was that from a standpoint of maybe what you were talking about with the givens and the goals, what's a way for us to be able to capture the givens within the document so that that's not lost? And so we came up with some ideas of ways to capture that on the front end of the document to then be able to focus big picture on the goals.

Okay, that's helpful. And that could be something that we could easily incorporate. Thank you. How about Amy, David, Cameron and Chris?

So we had some good discussion, I guess, you know, a good tweet would be, you know, great potential on the road to success. But Great potential on the road to success, but we need to be able to account for bumps in the road and detours that we may encounter. So pretty much explaining that, you know, there was strong confidence in all of our goals, you know, from a broad standpoint. I think once we got into the objectives, you know, we had some questions on exactly, you know, not only if our measurements were going to give us the data that we need, but kind of what is the individualized plan and what does the practice look like? I guess on a daily basis and from a yearly plan standpoint from each goal. So there were some objectives that had some of those questions, but you know, in terms of capturing everything that we needed to capture, you know, the goals and objectives did a good job of that. But really just once we get into the nitty gritty details, what does that look like in terms of, you know, everyday implementation?

Hey, thank you. Appreciate that. How about Stacey, Jason, Tony, Mary Jo?

So our tweet was, Clayton's fluid strategic plan aligns with the attributes of Profile of a Graduate and ABAR focused on action, results, and accountability, hashtag outcomes. We thought that kind of represented the work because we thought what came out was that we really felt that the plan aligns well with the attributes of profile of a graduate And a bar work is clearly lined out throughout the document. So it was very purposeful and really just seeing how everything sort of comes together in this one document. The questions that we had that came up in the group were just around accountability and measurement. How are, how are all these things going to be measurable. And with that being said, really complementing the idea of the dashboard and having that great visual tool for the public to see the progress at any given time would be great. But some of the things being a little complicated, especially as they apply to ABAR and SEL, as they are based on, a lot of these are based on assumptions and being subjective. So how do we go about measuring some of those? And then the other big question that we had HAB-Jacques Juilland, That came up in the group was, how do we go about approving a plan without seeing what the action steps are for implementation. HAB-Danny

Teodoru, Okay, thank you. HAB-Jacque Juilland, And we will make sure that the board gets to see the entire plan to with the action steps as well. HAB-Judy Nogg, And then the last one would be Joe Robin and Jeff and Caitlin.

So I can share. So our tweet was still areas for growth and focus on mental health and empowering students of color through a diverse curriculum. But the strongest plan we've ever had, helping prepare students for a diverse world. That might be more characters than we were allowed. But we also started our own hashtag, which was SDCSP20-23, if you want to follow that. The reason that we focused on that for our tweet was that we had some good conversations about and a lot of good support, I think, overall for the goals and objectives that are part of this, but also some areas that we could maybe be more specific about. And so some areas specifically about mental health and about addressing racism through empowerment and communities of color instead of in a deficit viewpoint, more of an empowerment point of view. So we talked quite a bit about that. And then we also really spent some time thinking about the measures. And so I think that was one of the pieces that would have been a question that came up about the measures, just making sure that we're providing context for our community when they are reviewing those, the numbers and the metrics that we're providing, that we're not just throwing numbers, we're actually providing context for what they might mean. That was something that came up for the group. as being important. But again, really overall support for the goals, objectives, and the conceptual framework of providing data points. And really being careful too about the kind of looking at the right kind of data points for this so that we're not just putting a number out there, that we're giving it context and that there's quality over quantity.

Thank you. So all the central office administrators should have collected those questions and that information. And what we're going to do is take that information back and synthesize it and think about how we need to make some refinements before we bring the plan back for improvement. I will say that just from my perspective is that the plan is one that I feel like people can really be invested in. And it's not just that typical type of strategic plan where we have it's focused solely on just a, you know, academics. and solely just on maybe those types of measures, it's really looking at the human aspect of our students. And I think it's really grounded in our profile to graduate. So hopefully you will take some additional time and we will add some additional information to the Friday memo so you can see some more of the action steps. But just this, this part right here helps us think about what refinements and we want to just make sure that we're going in the right direction. And what I'm hearing is it feeling like we are moving there might be some refinements in terms of measurements providing context to our community and also Just for those committee members listening is that we will be providing this as a transparent document on our website with those measures and the dashboard so So at this point, we'll take that information and bring it back to the board and appreciate your time working groups.

Thank you, Sean. And thank you, everybody. So again, this isn't the last time we're going to we're not approving it tonight. This is just to give kind of some preliminary input.

Harmon Zuckerman, And then Joe. Can I just say one other thing is that I also just want to make sure that we are emphasizing that this work has already started Harmon Zuckerman , So I mean, I know that there might be some refinements, but we're already moving on all the work that's in this plan. And so it's not like we're waiting for this improvement and we will get approved by the board, but we're not holding back and we're moving forward with it.

PB Harmon Zuckerman, Awesome. So we're going to speak of action. We're going to move on to our action items. We have a number of them. So we're gonna start with 8.01 which is the Glen Ridge Children's Center or GCC Inc termination of the lease agreement and memorandum of understanding. So Gary, do we have a motion.

Yeah. Uh, so 8.01, I moved that the board of education approved the termination of lease agreement by and between the school district of Clayton and the Glenridge children's center Inc effective September 9th, 2020, and the separate memorandum of understanding by and between the district of Clayton. And the Glenridge children center Inc for a one-year term ending June 30th, 2021. Second.

Okay. It's been moved and seconded. Are there any questions or comments about this?

I actually have a question about it, Joe. I don't know if you want to

go ahead.

What order you want to take? Um, and is this, is Mary Jo still with us on this or she is so to risk being a little bit, um, probably slightly annoying about this. I was hoping that you could walk us through a little bit how this still seems necessary to have both an agreement that terminates our lease with them and also a continuing memorandum of understanding that goes forward. I'm just not following why we need both of those. and what the relationship is going to be going forward once we've terminated the lease and we've implemented KidZone. It's just not, and again, I'm sorry to be a pest about this, but I'm just not following the process of why we're doing it that way.

And basically the GCC, their board, I would say, I don't think they're not dissolving the entity. And so they wanted to move forward in a manner where I guess they feel they're a partner with the district and how we're moving forward. the memorandum of understanding defines their role and our role. Um, and if, you know, as, as you read it, you can see, you know, there's not, it does outline, you know, that we're not, you know, required to hire their staff. You know, they have to go through district procedures and stuff like that. You know, we'll cooperate with communications, but in reality, you know, we're going to operate that program just like we do our other programs. Um, and so, uh, it just seemed to make their board feel better that we had an agreement together moving forward and that we will have a discussion about how it moves forward at the end of the one year.

And then Gary, just so you know, so I looked at it last week and asked them to split it out into two separate agreements. Um, and I think some of it was a by-product of, of their council. Um, So I just wanted you to, yeah. And that was why last time we ended up not, we didn't vote on it.

Yeah, I mean, I think it certainly does make it, I mean, the termination agreement makes more sense. I mean, again, I don't want to critique other people's work or whatever. I just It's not clear to me why the district would enter into this memorandum of understanding to be born. Like, I don't see why we would obligate ourselves to an outside entity to do things like provide care for an aftercare student for students and families in the community. We haven't done that with anybody else for the other schools. That just doesn't make

sense. And Sean, you, I think, I don't know. Were you at their meeting where they had the conversation or not? Some of it was just individual conversations, but they had separate board meetings. They haven't dissolved. And so I don't think they're ready to just dissolve the entity. And I think this makes them feel like you know, as you can see from the memorandum, Gary, they really have no voice or anything. If you read it, there's not a whole lot. They don't have a whole lot in

there. Right. And I mean, just historically like Sean, like this is goes back a bunch of years and historically, you know, GCC is a very beloved, um, You know, it was something very unique to Glenridge and it was, I know that the other schools didn't have, they had the kids on structure but it was a very beloved, you know, organization at within Glenridge and there's a lot of history there so I don't know if that sheds any light on it, but yeah.

Harmon Zuckerman, I would, I would frame it is that in similar to what Amy said that this has been like an institution within our district that we have Harmon Zuckerman , We have supported in a lot of ways. If you think about it in terms of providing space for them and we And I think that with this agreement, it is very hard to think about dissolving something that's been in place, I think for multiple decades. And so when they were thinking about this, it was almost like they were feeling a little bit better about moving forward with this plan because it is a big change for the Glen Ridge community that after a year being able to evaluate how things have gone and seeing whether or not they would continue with having kidzone at glenridge and that's how i'm kind of taking it but i think that for the most part they're feeling very confident about the kidzone program and feel that this is a really good move. And I personally feel like as the leader of the district, having oversight over the programs and knowing that we have more oversight over the afterschool programs is a good thing for us. And I feel like it allows for there can be some consistency and then our schools can work between one another once we get back that, you know, having programs where they're sharing. So I think it was just kind of a, almost like a gradual release. And so that's my un-technical way of describing it, but I feel like it's a good step moving forward that we're moving in, having KidZone as part of Glen Ridge.

Yeah, and they did actually want it to be a two-year memorandum of understanding, which I was a little uncomfortable with. And I felt like doing it one year HAB-Juliette Boone, With a opportunity to have both entities come together and discuss it and then it would be the district's decision whether or not we extend this for another year but HAB-Julie Petersen, So that was another you know negotiation back and forth with them that they did agree to so HAB-Danny

Teodoru, And I think it's important to note that these are parent volunteers who are on this board and they have been they have been very amenable to any of these conversations and they have been extremely supportive and i actually have to commend them for running such an amazing program for so long

any other questions or comments

i don't want to monopolize it joe but like if just one i guess one follow-up for that sean and mary jo well it's kind of too far. I mean, I assume we did have our own attorneys look at this as well. Is that right?

Yes.

And I mean, I guess, I mean, I don't want to at all take away from like the spirit of where this is coming. It was just, as I was having a hard time understanding what the goal for having that memorandum of understanding was, and I didn't want it to be, you know, there to be expectations that they can decide next year that we don't get to have kids on there again. Because I don't think that's really a fair expectation if that's what it is.

Yeah, and that's why we tried to make it clear in there that the district is making all the decisions in that memorandum. And so they really didn't have a whole lot of rights in it.

Thank you. I'm sorry for... Just

real quick, Gary. That's a good point. So then just real fast, make sure it's clear and simple. So what's the point of it again? What's the point of the memorandum? Like if they don't have any rights, we control the dice. What's the point again?

Lisa Smith- That we would be moving forward, at least in a partnership to help the community, you know, transition together so that the district and the GCC community. We're transitioning together moving forward.

Lisa

Smith- You know, Lisa's terminated. They have no, you know, they have no rights to act by the premises. There's no, you know, anything moving forward is strictly the decision of the board. And so.

Is there like a way for them to say, I know this was just asked, but if they wanted to say, we don't want you all running KidZone out of there. We actually want to do it ourselves. We have a petition, we have whatever. Could that be an obstacle for us?

That would be at the end of the program during the evaluation, we are going to do a survey, you know, to make sure that we're working with the community, the Glenridge community, you know, and then everything would be brought forward to the board, you know, for any extension of that MOU or any requests to initiate a second lease. So it'd be for the board at the time, at the end of this agreement to make that decision.

Any other questions or comments?

And I guess I will make one client just as Sean said, you know, the district values, the opportunity to take over that program. And I think, you know, administration from family center to kids zone from Sean and myself, you know, we all think this is the best way to move forward.

Any other questions? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, it passes unanimously. Thank you. So we're moving on to 8.02, which is the approval of purchases that may exceed 50,000 and were not budgeted.

8.02, I move that the Board of Education authorize the solicitation of bids for pathogen removal remediation using a needlepoint bipolar ionization system.

Second.

And moved and seconded. Any comments or questions? All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Passes unanimously. Thank you. So we're moving on to 8.03, which is the 2020-2021 budget revision to the general

fund. 8.03, I move that the Board of Education approve the 2020-2021 Budget Revision requesting a $500,000 increase in general fund operating expenses to cover the district's portion of the CRSWC FY20 operating loss.

Second.

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

Aye.

Any opposed? It also passes unanimously. So 8.04, which is the second reading and adoption of policy BBFA, which is the board member conflict of interest and financial disclosure policy.

8.04, I move that the Board of Education approve policy BBFA board member conflict of interests and financial disclosure policy with the recommended changes.

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

Aye. Aye.

Any opposed? It passes unanimously. So we're on to 8.05, which is the second reading and adoption of policy GBCA, which is the staff conflict of interest.

8.05, I move that the Board of Education approve policy GBCA staff conflict of interest policy with the recommended changes.

Second. We moved and seconded. Any comments or questions? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? It passes unanimously. So 8.06, which is the approval of meeting minutes for the August 26, 2020

meeting. 8.06, I move that the Board of Education. Oh, hold on a second. I'm on the wrong page. I don't know if it's just written. I'm sorry, I moved that the Board of Education approved the meeting minutes from the August 26th board meeting.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded. Any comments or questions?

Aye. Oh, sorry, no.

There you go, all in favor.

Aye.

Any opposed? Okay, it passes unanimously. So we're moving on to the financials. 9.01, the financials for June 2020.

Harmon Zuckerman, 9.01 I move that the Board of Education approved the payment of current expenditures and investments for June 20 second Harmon

Zuckerman.

Moved and seconded any comments or questions. Harmon Zuckerman All in favor. Harmon Zuckermann, Aye. Aye. Any opposed. Harmon Zuckerma, A passage unanimously. So we're moving on to 9.02 which the financials for July of 2020

9.02, I move that the Board of Education approve the payment of current expenditures and investments for July 2020.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded. Any comments or questions? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, it also passes unanimously. So we're now moving on to 10.01, which is public participation at board meetings. Just reminder, right, we've moved public comment towards the end of the meeting. So Sean, Chris, do we have any public comment?

We do. There were actually four comments submitted, but one of them was actually a duplicate. So we have three comments to read this evening. The first comment this evening is from Laura Horwitz. She writes, I've recently begun watching board meetings with more frequency and have a number of questions and concerns. First, I applaud you for addressing issues of board functioning. It's clear that board members invest a huge amount of time and energy into their roles and deeply care about our school. Has the board considered setting a standard length of meetings, such as one and a half hours? The unpredictable length of meetings and the fact that most are over two hour limits over two hours limits their accessibility to the public. Would the board consider moving parent comments back to the beginning half of the meeting? I understand and support the greater focus on policy discussion. Nevertheless, parents already have a very limited voice in the board's process. I would like my comments to have a chance to be heard while board members and community listeners are fresh. Why do some board members leave when they wish instead of participating fully in the meetings? In the last several meetings I've viewed, I've seen board members come and go in ways that have been difficult to interpret. This is also out of step with other public bodies of which I am a member or observer. Especially as all of us adapt to virtual meetings, more transparency about what's happening off camera will help viewers like myself understand what is going on. Each of the above points speaks to ways the board can deepen its commitment to transparency and

effectiveness.

One second, please. Each of the above points speak to the way the board can deepen its commitment to transparency and effectiveness. The meetings I have watched have also included what seemed like both confused and contentious conversations about racial equity. I would like to implore board members to follow Stephen Covey's advice to first seek to understand, then to be understood. Specifically, in each meeting, I've observed Jason Wilson not being listened to by his colleagues. This concerns me not only for immediate issues of board functioning, but also because it seems to reinforce a negative racial dynamic our district has struggled with, whether board members intend this results or not. Mr. Wilson is our district's first ever African American board member, which is shocking in and of itself. I think that context suggests that even if board members have different styles or opinions, there is much to learn here. I know the board is leaning into these topics, and as they do, I hope they will attend to naming and rectifying the current group dynamic that puts one voice against the others. I saw this tension summarized recently as follows. Diversity asks, who's in the room? Inclusion asks, has everyone's ideas been heard? Equity responds, who's trying to get in the room but can't? Justice responds, whose ideas won't be taken as seriously because they aren't in the majority? Finally, what happened to presenting the strategic plan in August? Those of us involved in the recent petition effort were told via email that the strategic plan was where we could expect to see our ideas incorporated and that August was the time that it would happen. And that's the end of her comment. The next comment is from Angela Flotkin. She writes, members of the Clayton School Board, thank you for your time today. I have been a parent in the district for 12 years. I am an environmental health advocate and like you, care deeply about the health of our students and staff. Science and safety protocols surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak continue to evolve as additional studies are published and facts turn to fiction. We know by now that COVID-19 is primarily spread from person to person, mainly through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks. As plans continue to be refined to bring math students back into our classrooms, we need to focus on slowing the spread by addressing our indoor air quality, a strategy that is wise and health protective even in the absence of a pandemic. A recent study from MIT supported by evidence published in a March article in the Journal of American Medical Association suggests that small COVID-19 aerosols, as small as three microns or less, can linger for hours in the air. An unventilated, unpurified classroom can be a petri dish for the virus. A recent Wall Street Journal article suggests four tools that should be used in schools to reduce spread. One, upgrade HVAC systems. upgrade HVAC filters that can remove a large portion of airborne particles, such as MERV 13. Start HVAC systems earlier to allow more time for airflow and filtering before the school day begins. Three, add standalone air purification and change HEPA filters regularly. Four, increase outdoor air either by opening windows or through the HVAC bleed system. Additionally, it is important that we select EPA approved disinfectants that simultaneously produce health, protect health while killing COVID. The return to learn plan on the district website highlights the use of a disinfectant product that contains one of the many ingredients we should be avoiding. It contains an ammonium quaternary compound or quat. Quats have serious health concerns for anyone who used them, teachers, children, janitors, including skin irritation, lung irritation leading to breathing problems, Reproductive harm potentially affecting fertility and leading to birth defects, antimicrobial resistance, occupational asthma, and other serious consequences. Additionally, the plan cites that the product will be sprayed via an electrostatic sprayer. The risk of aerosolizing many of the disinfectants on list N hasn't been studied, and there are very few that are approved for aerosolizing, misting, or fogging. Currently the EPA is still researching whether these strategies will create a healthier environment for our children to not only return to school, but to stay in school successfully by minimizing risk and the spread to the extent possible. Let's please not use our children as the test dummies when safer alternatives exist. I have consulted with a childhood medical expert in the community and in providing several resources that can help the district identify safer alternatives for cleaning. I am available for research to help with any of these issues. Thank you for your time. Angela Flotkin, and she included a number of resources along with her comment. Final comment this evening is from Becky Patel. She writes, I thank the district and the BOE for creating a Facebook event for this meeting that includes the link to the agenda as well as the live stream. Can you address why public comment was moved to the end of the meeting? Are board members sent the comments in advance of the meeting? I request that the board modify the comment policy under COVID-19 to allow for the public to actually speak in their own voices during the public comment portion of the meetings. This capability is available on Zoom webinar and other platforms, and I've used it as both a panelist and attendee. I'd like to hear open board discussion about the influence of recent petitions from within our community, student-led, teacher-led, and parent-led. Since passing the resolution against racism in our district, what have board members done to personally learn more about how

to be anti-racist? And that's the end of our public comments. Thanks,

Chris. So, um, we are moving on to a board communication. So does anybody, I mean, I know that committees aren't meeting very much, but, um, does anybody have any reports on board communication? Okay. Then I think we just, does anybody want to make a motion to adjourn?

Move that the Board of Education adjourn.

Second. All right. All in favor?

Aye. Aye. We are closed. All right. We're adjourned. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Good night.