November 9, 2022 — Meeting Transcript

And it's nice to see everybody here. We have a full agenda tonight, so let's go ahead and get started with the Pledge of 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.

I move that the Board of Education approve

the business meeting agenda for November 9th, 2022. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Questions or comments? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes. Sorry, I'm like sitting on top of Dr. Mattel. Okay. Now we're on to... recognizing our own all-in coalition. We've got a big

group here today. Good evening, everyone. Tonight it's my privilege to introduce our all-in Clayton Coalition project coordinator, Lily Schleser, and her team of student leaders who belong to the Y-Down Middle School All-in Clayton Student Coalition. And tonight we want to recognize these young people for their leadership last month in celebrating Red Ribbon Week and the different events they organized across the building in order to support and bring awareness to substance misuse among youth. So I'd like to invite Lily and her students up.

Hi, everyone. Hello. Come on up. Thanks for having us here tonight. We really appreciate it. So Red Ribbon Week is an important week where we raise awareness about substance use. It's celebrated across the country. It's celebrated October 23rd to the 31st every year. And it's a way to build community around issues of substance use and get folks involved. And so Clayton Schools and community members celebrated throughout that week. Captain and Glenridge handed out red ribbons to students, and they had them participate in the drug-free pledge. The Chamber of Commerce did a mailing for us to all area businesses to tell them ways that they could get involved in Red Ribbon Week. Clayton Police Department hung a banner outside to show the community that they were celebrating Red Ribbon Week, Clayton parents actually have the opportunity to view the film Don't Wait by Addiction Is Real. So that started Red Ribbon Week and it goes to November 25th, and that is a free film that parents can stream online. Members of our youth coalitions at White Owl and Clayton High School planned and participated in events. So here to tell you about the activities at White Owl are seventh graders Olivia Ling, Catherine Strait, and Sandy Martin, and eighth graders Zuri Mwaniki and Zuwana Mwaniki. and from Clayton High School, Jr., Grand Color. And we're going to go down the line and let you know what activities they did.

Hi, I'm Sandy Martin. I want to talk about the Friday before Red Ribbon Week, we did a drug-free pledge on the morning announcements where students would stand up and pretty much just listen to the pledge, and that would allow them to participate in the Spirit Week and follow the teachings.

OK, hi, I'm Olivia. And I'll be talking about the announcements that we did. So basically, we planned Tuesday to Friday, during the announcements, one of us would go to the office and say a fact about either marijuana, vaping, alcohol, or just general overall addiction to help spread awareness on these

topics. Hi, my name is Catherine Street. about Red Ribbon Week and make it a more fun week for everyone. All are hosted as Spirit Week that lasted from the 25th to the 28th, Tuesday being a day to wear red to support Red Ribbon Week, Wednesday being Blackie Wednesday, Thursday Beach Day, and Friday Cozy Day.

Hi, I'm Suri, and I help set up a trivia table at lunch, and we ask them questions about drug and substance use. We mainly did this to help have more open conversations about drug use and police use. Hi, I'm Selena. I was responsible for talking about the parent mailers. The parent mailers were on the lips of every family at White Owl. Within those envelopes were two items. One was a paper on composition studies and tips about talking to your children about drugs, like alcohol and marijuana. Lastly, the second item was a magnet, a reminder about talking to your teens about alcohol.

Hi, I'm Graham. Some things we did at the high school were give PA announcements about facts and dangers by using marijuana, alcohol, or vaping. And we also did a tribute table, like previously stated. That picture is actually on the left. That's us. We did the wheel. We asked some questions. And whether they got it right or wrong, we spun the wheel. We got a prize. It was interactive. It was fun.

And, of course, one week of prevention activities is not enough. So our students are currently working on strategies to address substance use issues right there in their own school based on the data that we've collected from students in those schools. And they will be implementing those strategies throughout the year. And we would be delighted to come back and share those things with you when we're doing those. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for being here and

for all the work you do.

Okay, so we are on to public participation and I will remind everybody that we don't, the board as a whole doesn't respond to the specific comment, but Dr. Patel or I will follow up in writing within 24 to 48 hours. So I didn't want people that are talking to think that we're being rude on you when we just sit here and stare at you and don't say anything bad. So the first one is Susan Brockhouse.

Hi, Susan. Hi. Good evening. Good evening. I'm Susan Brackhouse, and I'm here from the Clayton Parents for Delaying Social Media group. And I have two children at Merrimack Elementary. Next year I'll have three all at Merrimack at the same time. For a bit of background on our group, we started this year, and our group is similar to national social media movements such as Wait Until 8th and ScreenStrong.com. Despite being six months old, our Facebook page has over 70 members here in Clayton. At Ydown's back to school night, I collected names from over 30 interested parents and talked to many others. Since forming, we've met with Clayton Elementary and Middle School principals, two Clayton High School teachers, and Clayton administrators, and we actually intended to meet with more of you before speaking, but tonight's focus on the head and heart sort of moved up our plans to share our message now. And as you heard or will hear in Robin's presentation on the panorama survey and the head in the heart issue, the phone use policies currently differ between the middle school and high school. From our research, it appears the last time the Clayton personal electronics policy was reviewed was in the early 2000s as it still references the use of pagers. We're asking the board to consider a district-wide policy next school year that student use of phones and smartwatches at all Clayton schools would be limited to before and after school only. To be more specific, this is what YDOWN already has in place and we're asking that it would be applied to the entire district. One area of pushback that we've heard on this topic is that parents give kids phones at school because they want to know they can always reach their child in an emergency. So speaking from personal experience and not on behalf of the US government, I've worked for a federal law enforcement agency for 20 years and I responded to the St. Louis school shooting two weeks ago by working in the command post so I know firsthand the crisis in parental fear during school shootings but this proposed policy addresses parental concerns for reaching their child in an emergency such as a lockdown because phones and watches can be stowed in backpacks in the classroom where they can be accessed during an emergency. Our students are currently facing a nationwide mental health crisis with links to smartphone use. Additionally, teachers have multiple responsibilities and the two teachers we spoke to at Clayton High mentioned that policing phones is a difficult job that many teachers face every single day and distracts from the learning of our Clayton students. Also, our group supports equity. When students are asked to look something up on their personal smartphone in class, it's not equitable to assume that every student can afford a smartphone in the Clayton District. Our students have school-issued devices for this very purpose. Finally, several private schools and local public schools have already implemented the policy and change that we're suggesting of no phones out during the school hours. These include John Burroughs Private School, SLU High School, Thomas Jefferson School, and Visitation Academy. Additionally, according to local news reports, University City and Jennings Public School districts have also adopted this policy. Jennings is even using a special magnetic bag that the kids put their phone in when they enter the school and they get it back at the end of the day. In conclusion, Clayton has a chance to be a leader among public schools in implementing a forward-leaning policy preventing smartphone use during school hours to protect student health and development. Thank you very much for your service to Clayton Schools and thank you for the opportunity to speak today. Thank you.

Okay. I apologize if I say your name wrong, but Alicia Hamilton. Did I say it right?

Alicia.

Alicia. I'm sorry. That's

okay. I don't have the best handwriting. So my name is Alicia Hamilton, and I'm also here on behalf of the Clayton Parents for Delaying Social Media, and I also have two children at Merrimack in third and fourth grade. I'm a pediatric nurse practitioner and have focused my entire career on the health of of children and adolescents. And this initiative was actually born by the Head and Heart series that was sponsored by the Clayton School District from last spring that was discussing smartphones and the impacts of mental health. And learning the data that was focused from that in the spring, it just felt like we had to do more after we learned how much it impacted our teens' mental health. So we dove in and did some more research, and we have found that the mental health of our students should be our biggest priority as levels of unprecedented in the US history on our mental health crisis. The data on smartphone use and social media being linked to anxiety, depression, and suicide is well established. We can provide you research from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Cleveland Clinic, the National Institute of Health, and Harvard Medicine. 20% of school-aged children have a diagnosable mental health disorder. 72% of teens say they are struggling with mental health issues. And the average student spends seven and a half hours a day on social media and admit that they're addicted to their cell phone. So how is social media harming teen mental health? First, the comparison to others and the pressures to feel like they need to be perfect. The loss of empathy and just general communication skills and delay of identity development. Cyberbullying and the sexting, which is the texting of nude photos. The sexortation, the blackmailing of nude photos that we know that has linked to kids committing suicide nationally, including local communities. in the spring, a St. Charles student. 34% of children ages 10 to 17 have received unwanted exposure to sexual material. The data that we received also shows that the attempting to multitask with a phone during school has many negative effects. Teens with cell phones send 440 texts a week and 110 while in the classroom. Switching tasks is mentally fatiguing and negatively impacts their long-term memory efficiency by as much as 40%. Checking text messages on social media just a couple of times during class has led students to drop from a B to even a C plus on average. And only 3% of a teen's digital time is spent on actual content creation, such as writing, photography, coding, or composing a song. 35% of students use smartphones to cheat in school. And we just have numerous scientific studies that have found phones are detrimental to learning. So what can we do? The school district can't control what happens at home, but it can control what happens on school property. So implementing this new district-wide policy would improve students' well-being and the qualities we are attempting to cultivate in the profile of a Clayton graduate. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, Catherine Waldron.

So I'm gonna tell a personal story here. So good evening, my name is Catherine Waldron. My family's been in Clayton schools the last four years. I currently have a child in elementary, middle school, and high school. We moved into Clayton because we wanted the high-quality public school, which is a goal I think all of us in this room share, just high standards. This past spring, I and two other Clayton parents started the group Clayton Parents for Delaying Social Media. This is a group for Clayton parents who choose to delay, monitor, or limit social media for their kids. So here's my story. When my eldest child, Sarah, began white out in sixth grade, we gave her a cell phone. Using parental controls, we blocked her internet and ability to download apps. Unfortunately, Sarah was one of her only peers with these restrictions, and she soon began to feel left out. Everyone was on Snapchat, she told us. Sarah went to her school counselor, who referred us to an outside private counselor. Sarah was lonely and felt left out, he told us. After several sessions, this counselor convinced us to let her download Snapchat to use for only 15 minutes a day, after school only, and no reels. Sarah downloaded Snapchat in late August of this year at the start of ninth grade. Three weeks in, Sarah met with her counselor again for a follow-up appointment. His assessment? Sarah's anxiety levels had skyrocketed. He told us she urgently needed more therapy. The next day we found out why. When my husband logged into parental controls, instead of 15 minutes of Snapchat daily, we learned she had been spending three to five hours a day using Snapchat, mostly at school. Despite being an excellent student, at this point her grades were poor and I was horrified that she was watching these videos and spending so much of her time on social media, particularly during school hours. While parents are ultimately responsible for what their kids do outside school hours, Schools can put rules in place regarding student access to phones during the school day, and many local schools have, including Y-Down. It is striking to contrast my son's experience at Y-Down with Sarah's experience at Y Down last year and the years before this rule was initiated. Under Principal Jordan, Y-Down just instituted a new rule this year banning phones out of bags during school day hours. My son David, a sixth grader at White Island this year, has never felt pressure at school to even have a cell phone. This year, kids talk at lunch instead of looking at their phones. There is now no issue during the school day of students sending or sharing nude photos. And some of you may be aware that this was an issue at White Island last year where certain students were publicly shamed and police were involved due to the transmission of child pornography. So now... Class time at Wiedown is for focusing on academics, not on phones. Lunch and hallway time is for focusing on relationship building, not phones. So today, I am here to ask the board to consider making the district-wide policy next school year, including at the high school, that student use of phones and smartwatches at all Clayton schools would be limited to before and after school only. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Okay,

Wayne, you.

Yes. I'd actually like to speak about racial diversity here at Clayton High School, if that's fine? That's terrific. So I'm one of the class officers, actually, and I've noticed that racial diversity here at the Clayton High School has really been a growing concern for many people. It really isn't an obvious problem on the surface, but once you really dig deep into the subject matter, that's when you discover that there's a lot of trouble that's brewing under the surface. So I actually had a meeting earlier today with one of our equity officers, and even two weeks ago, the district student advisory council also held a meeting about this. And we all agreed that something really needs to be done to improve our school diversity. And while there are some factors like the VICC and zoning laws and the affordability of Clayton that are outside our control, there are a lot of factors that are within our control. And there are so many factors that are within our control, but it all starts with awareness. Awareness is the first step we can all take to improve school diversity. Awareness we can spread to teachers, students, especially at the elementary level because that's where the racial diversity split starts to grow. And teachers actually play a really big role in racial diversity because the way they group people together, assign seats, teach class, recommend students for higher level courses, all of this directly ties back into racial diversity. So we need to make sure that not only students but also teachers are very aware of this issue. And yet another example of how we can spread awareness about racial diversity is by the Greyhound Exclusive Television Network, or GET. It's regularly used for like an entertainment platform where, you know, it's really more entertainment-based, but if we could convert this to a more informational platform where we could spread awareness about racial adversity, that would certainly help us a lot in our agenda. This is just one of the many ideas that I could think of to raise awareness about racial diversity. So to end this off, I really hope that the Board of Education can start taking some serious efforts to improve our racial diversity here. And the first step to do that is simply awareness. And I hope you will all undertake massive efforts to try to spread awareness about racial diversity And let's not wait too long, because it's best to tackle this early. Because if we wait too long, we may have sealed the fate of racial diversity. Thank you.

All right, thank you so much. Okay, we are on to Dr. Patel. I'm going to turn it over to you.

Thank you. Thank you for all the public comments. We will be responding to each one of you individually within the next 24 to 48 hours, so I appreciate you guys coming up here and sharing your thoughts. Thank you. Superintendent Communications, so few things that I'm just gonna touch base on. I always like to start off by just giving a few highlights in terms of what's happening in our district with our students and activities-wise. So we've had a pretty busy couple of weeks since the last board meeting. A few things. Our theater productions are up and running, and it's great to see that in the black box. And I got to see one of them, actually, The Importance of Being Earnest. And it was an amazing performance. Our kids are just so talented. So if anyone ever gets an opportunity to go watch them in one of these theater productions, I'm telling you, you will be in awe, because I certainly was. So the high school has two already, and then the middle school is going to have one production this week. I believe I'm going to do one tomorrow. So it's nice to see. I know I'm hearing a lot from parents about just the excitement of being able to see their children in their performances. So I wanted to make sure we highlight that. And then cross country actually just finished, they went to state and they placed third. And it's the first time in the history of the program that they've been able to do that. So we had a phenomenal team. Very, very proud of them. And then most recently, we've had two professional learning days in the district. One was on October 24th, I believe. One was yesterday. And if you remember, based on community feedback, last year we used to have seven half early release days. And this school year, we changed and adjusted the calendar to two. which meant we had to look at how we do professional learning a little bit differently, which was a good thing. And so we had two very productive days. And I wanted to just let the board know that when we have these days, there's a lot of planning that happens behind the scenes. A lot of our teachers actually lead a lot of this work. And we spend a lot of time analyzing how the day went to see what we can do in the future. And that means we look at data. So every staff member, once they go through a professional learning day, gets a survey that they fill out. And then we look at that. So for example, I'm going to walk you through what we look at just so you have an idea. So this first slide shows you the data we got from the November 8th, which was yesterday's professional learning. I pulled this this morning, so we've only had 88 staff members respond as of this morning. But just to give you an idea, like the last one, we had over 200 staff members respond. When they take the survey, they have four questions that they all get. So based on yesterday's professional learning that we spent all day on, the first four questions. The first one, 94% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they had opportunities to reflect on the ways to incorporate the learning into their practice, which was good. 99% of the respondents agree or strongly agree that the professional learning experience was relevant to their needs in their role. And then the next two questions, 64% of the respondents the participants had a strong working knowledge in the areas covered prior to whatever they learned, And then after the learning experience, 90% of them felt like they had a strong working knowledge in the area that they went. So that gives us an idea of what we're spending our time on. Is it really making an impact in the classroom for the professionals? And this is not just our teachers. This includes our classified staff as well, so every staff member. And so those are the four questions that everyone gets asked. And then the other question is, that they get asked is, remember I always refer to our competencies, our profile of the graduate as our North Star. So what we really want to do is the learning that's happening, how does it connect to our competencies? And so we have them rank this and this just gives us a snapshot of what we did that day, what did it really impact? And so we look at all this data and then we just basically we look at all the things that we did well, like the key takeaways from that day We look at opportunities of how do we make it better, because there's always areas we can be better at, right? How do we grow from this? And then we also want to make sure, this is what's powerful about this survey, it's not anonymous. Like, every staff member has their name on it. So if they gave us specific feedback on how to improve, we can go back to that individual and say, hey, you wrote this, because they give us, like, you know, comments as well. Let's talk about it. And so I feel like this is a really powerful tool, and I think it's important for us to know, because we keep talking about data-driven decisions. Like, this is one way we look at it to see the impact of it. And then I always end with the slide with the competencies and the profile. But what we've done on this image, you notice, we've put our three goals around it as well. And when we talk about our strategic plan, it is transformational. We've said that. It's an amazing document. But at the same time, when we wrote it, it's also interesting on how we're going to look at capturing if we're really moving the needle on it. What are we really looking at data-wise to say, okay, we're doing X, Y, and Z? When Dr. Milena Garganigo came here about the empowered lessons, she gave you examples of what's happening in the classroom, right? So we're looking at our strategic plan not only through numbers, quantitative data, but we're also looking at it through qualitative data. So I just showed you an example of quantitative, right, the numbers. Next week when we have our board community engagement forum, That's a data gathering point for qualitative. Because we're going to talk to our community to say, hey, are we moving the needle on these three bolts? What's your experience been like? Talk to us about what you think we're doing well. Talk to us about things that we're not doing well. And we want to hear from you. So that's another way to capture how we're moving along in this. And so my reason in pointing that out is that It would be really nice for us to come to the board table when we do our board updates on our goals and say, here's where we started. Here's where we're ended with numbers. But that's one data point. We look at many. Later on today, Dr. Wiens is going to come and give us an update of in head and heart. And part of that data is the panorama. If you look at our strategic plan under the objectives, the panorama is not even listed, like the word panorama. What we say is we're looking at social-emotional surveys. But what we found in doing that is the panorama data helps not only this goal, but the other goal as well. It gets a good data gathering spot. And the good thing about our strategic plan is we refer to it as evergreen, so we're constantly looking at it, tweaking it, adjusting it. So I just wanted to make sure that we understand that it is challenging, it is fun, it's exciting, it's innovative, and it will take time for us to make steps that we need to. But I'm really excited that we're going in the right direction. And I'm excited to hear Dr. Wayne's presentation tonight because she's got a lot of information that she'll be sharing on how to move forward. And I know we're hearing a lot about mental wellness and our focus on that and what we need to do. And now to give us our student lens on everything. I'm going to toss it over to you, Carter.

Thank you. Thank you for all the public comments. We will be responding to each one of you individually within the next 24 to 48 hours, so I appreciate you guys coming up here and sharing your thoughts. Thank you. Superintendent Communications, so few things that I'm just gonna touch base on. I always like to start off by just giving a few highlights in terms of what's happening in our district with our students and activities-wise. So we've had a pretty busy couple of weeks since the last board meeting. A few things. Our theater productions are up and running, and it's great to see that in the black box. And I got to see one of them, actually, The Importance of Being Earnest. And it was an amazing performance. Our kids are just so talented. So if anyone ever gets an opportunity to go watch them in one of these theater productions, I'm telling you, you will be in awe, because I certainly was. So the high school has two already, and then the middle school is going to have one production this week. I believe I'm going to do one tomorrow. So it's nice to see. I know I'm hearing a lot from parents about just the excitement of being able to see their children in their performances. So I wanted to make sure we highlight that. And then cross country actually just finished, they went to state and they placed third. And it's the first time in the history of the program that they've been able to do that. So we had a phenomenal team. Very, very proud of them. And then most recently, we've had two professional learning days in the district. One was on October 24th, I believe. One was yesterday. And if you remember, based on community feedback, last year we used to have seven half early release days. And this school year, we changed and adjusted the calendar to two. which meant we had to look at how we do professional learning a little bit differently, which was a good thing. And so we had two very productive days. And I wanted to just let the board know that when we have these days, there's a lot of planning that happens behind the scenes. A lot of our teachers actually lead a lot of this work. And we spend a lot of time analyzing how the day went to see what we can do in the future. And that means we look at data. So every staff member, once they go through a professional learning day, gets a survey that they fill out. And then we look at that. So for example, I'm going to walk you through what we look at just so you have an idea. So this first slide shows you the data we got from the November 8th, which was yesterday's professional learning. I pulled this this morning, so we've only had 88 staff members respond as of this morning. But just to give you an idea, like the last one, we had over 200 staff members respond. When they take the survey, they have four questions that they all get. So based on yesterday's professional learning that we spent all day on, the first four questions. The first one, 94% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they had opportunities to reflect on the ways to incorporate the learning into their practice, which was good. 99% of the respondents agree or strongly agree that the professional learning experience was relevant to their needs in their role. And then the next two questions, 64% of the respondents the participants had a strong working knowledge in the areas covered prior to whatever they learned, And then after the learning experience, 90% of them felt like they had a strong working knowledge in the area that they went. So that gives us an idea of what we're spending our time on. Is it really making an impact in the classroom for the professionals? And this is not just our teachers. This includes our classified staff as well, so every staff member. And so those are the four questions that everyone gets asked. And then the other question is, that they get asked is, remember I always refer to our competencies, our profile of the graduate as our North Star. So what we really want to do is the learning that's happening, how does it connect to our competencies? And so we have them rank this and this just gives us a snapshot of what we did that day, what did it really impact? And so we look at all this data and then we just basically we look at all the things that we did well, like the key takeaways from that day We look at opportunities of how do we make it better, because there's always areas we can be better at, right? How do we grow from this? And then we also want to make sure, this is what's powerful about this survey, it's not anonymous. Like, every staff member has their name on it. So if they gave us specific feedback on how to improve, we can go back to that individual and say, hey, you wrote this, because they give us, like, you know, comments as well. Let's talk about it. And so I feel like this is a really powerful tool, and I think it's important for us to know, because we keep talking about data-driven decisions. Like, this is one way we look at it to see the impact of it. And then I always end with the slide with the competencies and the profile. But what we've done on this image, you notice, we've put our three goals around it as well. And when we talk about our strategic plan, it is transformational. We've said that. It's an amazing document. But at the same time, when we wrote it, it's also interesting on how we're going to look at capturing if we're really moving the needle on it. What are we really looking at data-wise to say, okay, we're doing X, Y, and Z? When Dr. Garganego came here about the empowered lessons, she gave you examples of what's happening in the classroom, right? So we're looking at our strategic plan not only through numbers, quantitative data, but we're also looking at it through qualitative data. So I just showed you an example of quantitative, right, the numbers. Next week when we have our board community engagement forum, That's a data gathering point for qualitative. Because we're going to talk to our community to say, hey, are we moving the needle on these three bolts? What's your experience been like? Talk to us about what you think we're doing well. Talk to us about things that we're not doing well. And we want to hear from you. So that's another way to capture how we're moving along in this. And so my reason in pointing that out is that It would be really nice for us to come to the board table when we do our board updates on our goals and say, here's where we started. Here's where we're ended with numbers. But that's one data point. We look at many. Later on today, Dr. Wiens is going to come and give us an update of in head and heart. And part of that data is the panorama. If you look at our strategic plan under the objectives, the panorama is not even listed, like the word panorama. What we say is we're looking at social-emotional surveys. But what we found in doing that is the panorama data helps not only this goal, but the other goal as well. It gets a good data gathering spot. And the good thing about our strategic plan is we refer to it as evergreen, so we're constantly looking at it, tweaking it, adjusting it. So I just wanted to make sure that we understand that it is challenging, it is fun, it's exciting, it's innovative, and it will take time for us to make steps that we need to. But I'm really excited that we're going in the right direction. And I'm excited to hear Dr. Wayne's presentation tonight because she's got a lot of information that she'll be sharing on how to move forward. And I know we're hearing a lot about mental wellness and our focus on that and what we need to do. And now to give us our student lens on everything. I'm going to toss it over to you, Carter.

All right. The first thing that I want to talk to you about ties into a little bit about what we talked about last time, which is just with the issue of school safety. So since our last meeting, we talked to a lot more kids about more specific issues that they've seen in the school district, and across the board, like the consensus is that Clayton does a pretty good job with security. Again, I'm gonna talk about a little bit later how we can address mentally how kids are dealing with this, but one thing that students did note is that they suggested that The administration work more closely with like teachers and people who are like in the building every day to sort of identify Areas of security which we can improve on like a couple students specifically noted that at the high school Some science teachers have noted that like basically every single science classroom is connected not like through the main hallway, but by like side doors, which according to them don't always lock So this is just one area that I know at least some teachers have pointed out as an area for improvement. But really just in general, just making sure that we're working with the people who are always accessing and using the buildings to make sure that we're being as secure as we can be. So now I want to sort of shift the focus to talk more about mental wellness and we talked a little bit about this at the last meeting as well but one of like the biggest priorities which I personally have and the Advisory Council has is making sure that we have the resources available to students that not only are available but also are like accessible and something that they feel like they want to use. So we talked about this last time, but since that meeting, we've talked to a lot more students. And the consensus is that it would be really helpful to have mental resources which were independent of a school counselor. Like across the board, almost every student has said they'd be much more comfortable going to talk to someone if it wasn't the same person which they talked about, like picking classes or how they're doing academically. So this is definitely a switch that not only I think we should be making, but a lot of students believe so as well. And specifically in terms of some of the data on this, almost all students have said that they don't really feel comfortable talking to their school counselor about personal issues in their life. And a lot of people have even said that they're reluctant to talk to them about when they're overwhelmed, even as it pertains to school. So I think this is definitely something that we can do, something that we should do and really the student body backs up this idea. And the second thing is not just about the resources for mental wellness but also like some of the sources of stress and anxiety in our students. So, for the most part, at Clayton, across the board, we've heard the feedback that the main sources of stress are really just academic pressures as it pertains to the high school specifically, how they're causing issues of stress. People have noted that generally the high school is pretty good on the social side of making sure there's no bullying and... In general, the main stressors that come from school specifically are these academic pressures which ultimately like being a sort of high performing district that's a little bit inevitable and I mean there's things we can do to make it better but it's always going to exist a little bit. So I think really just making sure we are making the resources available in response to those sources of stress is really what we should be focusing on moving forward. And now finally, and I love to talk about phones. Yes, please do. So something... Yeah, of course, of course. So obviously I and a lot of the students at Clayton all agree that phones are having a massive impact on our lives. We all agree with your guys' goal of making sure that our mental wellness is prioritized in and outside of school. But I think that the only area where some questions do come up is sort of what the school board specifically should be doing about this. And I know a lot of students have questions about what a blanket ban would do across the school district and how it would actually be executed and what the results of that specific approach to addressing phones would be. So for this, there's really like three main things that I want to say. So the first is that I don't know how it would be enforced specifically at schools because I don't know, or actually, I'm pretty sure that you would not be able to get the majority of students on board with this policy, at least at the high school. Because, like you guys have all said, phones are... a pretty big part of their lives and ultimately this type of universal plan, I don't think that students will be on board with it, especially at first. Um, and also something that I've seen is that even in the classes where teachers have instituted like a little cubby at the front door where you put your phone in, like even throughout the school year in those classes, by the end of the year, like no one is putting their phones in the cubbies. The teachers aren't following through with these policies and really like they just haven't really worked at least where I've seen them. So I don't know if the teachers who are going out of their way to make phones something that you aren't using in classes, and even in those classes where the teachers make it a priority, that it's ultimately not working. I'm just not sure how it would work in classes where teachers aren't already doing that on their own. The second thing that I want to say on this issue is about how we're preparing students for beyond high school. Because ultimately, once you get out of high school, you go to college, you're not going to have a teacher there to tell you, like, get off your phone. It's on you to make sure that you're either doing your work in your job or you're paying attention to class in college. So I think... It's really important to have this transition from middle school, in high school, and then ultimately to college. Because if Clayton students are spending the entire first 18 years of their life having a teacher always telling them to get off their phone, then when they do go to college and they're around students who don't have this type of background, it's going to be a big adjustment. And I have a feeling that it would probably negatively impact them in that setting. And so I think that high school is a really good opportunity for students to apply the skills which they learned in middle school, which are not using your phone in classes, but to do it on their own accord. But also while maintaining the supervision of a high school teacher so they can personally tell you, like, if this is becoming a problem, then they can step in and then they can take steps. And so I think this sort of brings me to what I think the best solution would be, is just to maintain this case by case. If it becomes a problem, then teachers step in and if parents make this a priority, then obviously a parent always has the ability to step in and do whatever they believe is necessary. But in general, I just think that a blanket school board policy banning phones across the district would not be effective, at least at the high school. And I think it would make for a large transition to when they are not in high school. But again, I mean, students are totally behind everyone on this. making sure phones are not negatively affecting our mental health. I mean, obviously they are. I just don't know how effective a blanket policy would be at addressing

that. Thank you. Does anybody want to have any questions? Thanks, Carter. So with that, I think we are on to our... presentation of our update for goal three and head on heart.

I just want to make sure I understand, man. So you're saying... regarding the school policy of a ban, a blanket ban. And you're suggesting that we should just allow kids to just like Like anything else, they should just, on their own, autonomy, just not use their phone. Figure out when the time is right to use it. Right?

To a certain extent, yeah. I think that it should still always be on teachers if it becomes a larger problem to step in. And that's something that does happen. But... I think it is important for students to develop the skill of managing their own learning on their own while still having this more personal supervision in high school as opposed to when you get to college and you're in a 500-person lecture hall sitting in the back and there's really no one there to tell you to pay attention.

I like the idea of this. In theory, I love the idea. I try to use this at home with my kids and kind of say it just doesn't work. And what I mean is that I guess what I'm looking for is return on investment today. I tell you now and then implement it right now. Because I just told you this yesterday. It was November 8th and now it's the 9th and you're doing it again. So And then the 10th comes, it's the 11th. And then it's the whole, now we're December 31st and you're still doing this. So I'm just trying to figure out like, I love the idea in theory, but from a management and adult perspective, I'm just trying to figure out, you know, I don't see teachers having the time to correct kids in class. So now it's like everyone keeps pulling their phone out, you know what I'm saying? But I'm giving you the autonomy to make the decision, but at the same time you're being very disruptive. Yeah. And in the flow through of, you know, first through ninth through twelfth, next year kids are moving to the next grade. I'm just trying to figure out, like, from your perspective, what else can we do? What else can adults do?

Yeah. I mean, at some point, like, that's always going to be an issue. Like, even if we have this, like, no phones across the board, like you said, the teachers don't have the... ability to continue to enforce that throughout the year. I think the issue of students being like, okay, I don't care. Let me pull out my phone is going to be an issue either way.

What's the worst?

Are there teachers that have no phone policies already in their classes? Yes. And so how are they enforcing that? Is that dependent on the teacher? How subjective is that enforcement?

In my experience, I've had one teacher who did that, and by the end of the year, maybe five or six students would check their phone at the beginning of class. I know that that's probably not representative across the board, and that there probably are instances where it is enforced and students do get rid of their phones, but in my experience, it has not been... enforce even in the classes that they make it a priority and I know that some teachers don't make it a priority. I think that's where it would particularly be an issue.

So I do have a question part of it. I just thought of it when Jason was talking. So I'm curious if you've talked to Dr. Kachewski about this at all, or if anyone has? Because in my opinion, it's not a school board or district decision anyway. It's his and how he's going to run his school. Right. I think it's Dr. Kaczewski's decision about, like, Dr. Jordan did at YDOT. It's his decision at his school or individual teachers' decisions, like you said before. So I'm curious if you've talked to him and what his feelings are on

this. Because I don't think it's up to the school. Yeah, I meet him on Friday, and I'll talk to him about it. Yeah,

I'm just curious if he's aware of issues. And, like, when I hear you talking about teachers that enforce it or not, I just don't know, are those same teachers also not enforcing their other rules? Are they just bad classroom managers? I mean, I'm not trying to insinuate anything, but do they have rules? Do they also have rules about no talking, no gum chewing? And is it just the phone rules they're not enforcing, or are they just kind of laxed on their rules in general? So I think it's hard to just pinpoint that the one rule about

phones... I don't know. And Dr. Wiens is going to talk a little bit about the high school part, but I know in talking to Dr. Kaczewski myself, this came up last year. So in April and May, this came up at the high school leadership team, right? And the teachers had a conversation about it, the leadership team did, and they went back and forth just like we are, the pros and the cons of it. At the end of the day, the leadership team decided that they're going to keep the cell phone practices that they currently have and they're not going to change it. They're going to leave it up to each each teacher to manage their classroom. If it becomes an issue, then take it up to the next level and get administrators involved. But they're leaving it up to each classroom teacher, and that was based on the leadership team there. So that was a

decision they made.

Yeah, and I do think it's their decision to make. But I like what you're saying, Carter, about preparing for post- High school, I think that's part of our jobs as a high school teachers and principals is to prepare our kids for when they leave. So part of that is that independence and responsibility and self-discipline. I think the bigger issue maybe would be if it's a distraction to other students. Yeah.

If

you're distracting yourself, that's kind of your loss. If it is a

distraction to others, that is a situation. But I would hope a

teacher would step in just as if they were talking or doing anything else.

Just real quickly, is this a rule or is this a practice that's unwritten? in terms of how this gets managed at the

high school. And why not at the rural? Right. At the high school, it's up to the individual teacher. Okay, so it's

just a practice of how that's how it's done. Correct. All right.

There

is a

policy. There is a policies, yeah. It just hasn't been updated in a long time. There's a board level policy in this situation. What does that

policy say? It's a board policy? There is a board

about cell phones. It's just technology. Oh, yeah, good. Because I was going to say, that seems like a very corrupt policy.

It's a personal device. And in the policy, it says that each individual principal and or teacher can decide. Okay. Oh, good. That's my one question. And it also says that parents can opt out from having their kids bring a phone, but that definitely doesn't happen as far as I know, right?

But that's good. I mean, that's a parenting decision, I guess.

Yeah, but so every teacher would have to stand at the door asking, saying, oh, I know that you, Susie, have a... That doesn't happen. No, practically that doesn't apply, right? The

policy allows for parents to say, I don't want my child to have a device. Correct. The policy is not that the district will enforce that decision. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Okay,

let's get started. Good evening, everyone. It's nice to be here. in community with you tonight, and the goal of my presentation is to give you an update on strategic plan goal number three. So goal number three states that we will be dedicated to the personal growth of our learners and their social, emotional, and physical well-being. Goal three specifically highlights competencies from the profile of a graduate, more specifically being self-actualized, being empathetic, and being collaborative. And the pathway to those three competencies in this goal really lies in the following objectives. First, that students demonstrate belief in self and engage in self-improvement and advocacy. That students demonstrate kindness, compassion, and respect of others by engaging in the district design social emotional learning curriculum. Students incorporate habits and practices that foster lifelong wellness, and that students make anti-oppressive choices and use their gifts and talents to build a more inclusive community. So the purpose of this evening's discussion, we're going to spend some time taking a look at some of our recent results from our Panorama social-emotional learning surveys. And these measurements help us understand our progress, not just in goal three, but also in our other goals. And there might be parts of this that you'll make some connections to related to goal one more specifically. So let's do a quick refresher on panorama itself. So panorama social emotional learning surveys are given twice a year here in the school district of Clayton. We give it in September. So students have usually been with us for about three to four weeks when they take it in the fall. And then we give it again right around spring break. So March, April is that window. We give it to students in grades three through 12 and we started this process back in spring 2019 with just our elementary schools. And then in fall 2019, we brought it to full scale for grades three through 12. So our surveys cover the following topics, school climate, sense of belonging, self-efficacy, supportive relationships, challenging feelings, positive feelings, self-management, social awareness. And in spring 2022, we collected data around equity topics, more specifically diversity and inclusion and cultural awareness to set a baseline for the high school. I think it's also important to note that we added the supportive relationships and the challenging and positive feelings topics in fall of 2020 because I wanted to better monitor our students' social emotional state during COVID. And so we use all of these metrics to measure our progress in the various goals that we have in our strategic plan and also allows each of our buildings to better understand the specific needs of the students in their building and address those more strategically. So the first one we're going to start with is sense of belonging. So sense of belonging questions focus on how much students feel that they are valued members in the school community. So here are some sample questions. This is not exhaustive, but here are several of the questions. How connected do you feel to the adults at your school? Overall, how much do you feel like you belong at your school? And how much respect do students show you? So at elementary, you can see that this fall, 75% of our students provided favorable responses in this topic area. This is actually the highest it has ever been since we started giving Panorama in spring 2019. At the middle school this fall, 56% of our students, provided favorable responses. That's a little bit lower than it was this time last year. And then at the high school level, 50% of our students provided favorable responses as it relates to sense of belonging. This is up 5% from this time last year. I think it's also important to note how this information falls in the context of schools that are similar to ours. Panorama has a feature where we can compare our schools to like schools. It's not available in every topic area, but it is in several of them and this is one of them. So when we compare our schools to other schools that are non-urban, that have a free reduced lunch rate less than 30% and are in that age group, like they're considered an elementary school or middle school or high school, our results fall actually across the board all in the 80th percentile. I was also curious when I was looking at the data, There's been a lot going on in the last, you know, 24 months. And I was really curious to see, like, in fall 2019, like, where were we, you know, three years ago in comparison to this? And I wanted to point out a few things. First of all, as I just said a few seconds ago, elementary school is the highest that it's ever been since we've been getting it. At Y-Down... When we gave this three years ago, sense of belonging was at 49%. So it has climbed 7% over the last three years. At CHS, what's interesting is that it was exactly 50% three years ago. But what has happened between then and now, that sense of belonging has bounced a little bit up and down. So it is now back up to what it was pre-COVID. All right. Did we not

conduct it in 2020 then because of COVID?

We gave it in fall 2020 and we also gave it, I'm sorry, we gave it in spring 2020. So during the school shutdown and actually the school shutdown happened in the middle of the survey. Yeah. Thank you. And then that fall, like that's when we had kind of the rolling start of students coming in person. So it was Those two data points are a little off. So

anyway, that's why I looked all the way back to fall 2019 because that's probably the most similar circumstances to where we are now. All right. Just a quick clarifying question. So that 80%, 80th again? 80th percentile compared to like schools. So like 80th of what?

Oh, I'm sorry. All of the schools that use the panorama tools across the country. So we're in the 80th percentile. So 80% of the schools that participate had a lower rate than we did. So really, yeah. Does that make sense? Okay. All right. Is that schools of similar size? Size, unfortunately, I can't control by size, but I can control by free or reduced lunch. like age group, elementary, middle, high, and then the choices are all schools, urban schools, or non-urban schools. I'll have to take a closer look at exactly what their definition is of non-urban school. Yeah, to see what factors they're doing that with. Okay.

I'd be curious if it's higher or lower than 80 as well. You know, then the 80th percentile, when you can control for some of those factors, like free and reduced lunch and urban versus non-urban, I would consider us an urban school. She did.

She put us in for non-urban and our percent are free and reduced lunch. Didn't you say that?

No, it's all schools is the 80th percent. No,

the 80th is not. Yeah.

Okay. The 80th is like

schools. Like schools. But it doesn't – I'm not able to control for size. Got it. Yeah. All right, any other questions before? Okay. All right, so school climate. School climate questions focus on perceptions of the overall social and learning climate of the school. Some sample questions in this topic are how often do your teachers seem excited to be teaching your classes? How fair or unfair are the rules for students at your school? And how positive or negative is the energy of your school? So at the elementary level, we had 78% of our students provided favorable responses. Again, this is the highest it's ever been since we started giving the Panorama in 2019. The middle school came in at 65%, which is very similar to where we ended the year last year, which was at 66%, but you will notice that it's down 6% from this time last year. And then at the high school, 65% of students provided favorable responses, which is basically holding steady because throughout the times we've given the panorama, that has floated right between 62 and 65%. Again, I think it's important to note that when we look at where we've been over the last three years, in fall 2019 for Wydown, that school climate number was 57%, so that has climbed significantly. 8% over the last three years. And similar to what I said just a few seconds ago, CHS has been hovering the entire time between that 62 to 65. And in fall 2019, they were at 65%. Again, against like schools, all three levels are coming in at the 90th percentile compared to similar schools in Panorama's data set. And then the last data piece I wanted to share with you was self-efficacy. And self-efficace relates to how much students believe that they can succeed in achieving high academic outcomes. Some of the sample questions in this area include, how sure or confident are you that you can complete all the work assigned in your classes? How sure or confident are that you can do the hardest work that is assigned in your class? And when complicated ideas are presented in class, how confident are you that can understand them? So at the elementary level, we came in at 63%, which is about 3% higher than where we were this time last year. But it is also a 5% drop from where we were last spring. At the middle school, we've been hovering in those low to mid 60s. So it is 2% lower from this time last year and at the high school, we did creep up from fall 2021 up to 54% from 50% in fall 2019. And typically, this number has floated right between 50 and 55% for CHS. When compared to schools or elementaries coming in at the 50th percentile, and at middle and high, we're at the 80th percentile. I also want to highlight that at the middle school level in fall 2019, self-efficacy was at 57%, so that has actually climbed 6% over time. And then CHS back in 2019 was 50% and has climbed 4% to now. All right, so what does some of our work at Goal 3 actually look like and sound like in our schools? So at the elementary school level, we have been rolling out the zones of regulation. And so you might see some of these posters in classrooms or in offices. And zones of regulation is a framework and curriculum that helps develop students' awareness of their feelings and the energy that they're feeling in their bodies with those feelings. And the purpose is to help students name their feelings, identify how they're physically feeling, and also to start empowering them to know what to do when they're trying to move into a different zone. So if one of the counselors or social workers or teachers asked me right now, Robin, what zone are you in? I'd say, you know what, right now, think I'm in the yellow zone and I'm in the Yellow Zone because I'm excited to share all this information with you and my heart is beating a little bit faster than it probably should be because I'm a little worried that I might leave out an important piece of information that would be helpful to the school board here in Clayton. And so I'm using some breathing strategies and I'm squeezing my toes into the bottom of my shoes right now because I'm trying to get into the green zone to help stay focused and to calm my body down. So that is kind of how those words and that color coding and those emotions are associated and taught to our elementary school students. So our teams have been working to share this information with families, so you might have seen it come out in a couple of the elementary parent weekly newsletters. Like I said, you might see some of these posters around our buildings, or you might even hear some of the children say, like, oh, I'm in the blue zone right now because they're not feeling great. And they might be feeling great because they're sad or because they're not feeling well right now. And so our teachers and our counselors, our social workers and our principals are all working to integrate this language in their conversations with students and to help give them strategies on how to get themselves into different zones if needed. All right. At the middle school... It looks like and sounds like a lot of work with circles. So the middle school has really invested a lot of time, energy, and training over the last several years in implementing a circles model. And so what are circles? Circles are a method, a structured process for communication that allows students or adults to reconnect with themselves and connect with others And one of the key components of the circle's model when students are talking to each other isn't just the physical arrangement of them in a circle, but it's also really to create a safe space for all students to share their voice and also have the opportunity to pass if they don't want to share what they're thinking. And it's a way to reinforce that connectedness and respect that we hope our students will share with each other throughout their day and time at Y-Down. So one of the reasons this is such a powerful strategy is because it allows a team of educators to move with a lot of alacrity to be responsive to students' social-emotional needs. So several weeks ago when the tragedy happened at CVPA, the YDAM team was able to push out a lesson plan related to circles and this was the prompt that they gave all the teachers so when they received students on Tuesday morning, they could all run a circle in their classroom to give students time and space to process all of the different feelings that they were experiencing. And one of the things I think that paid off the most for them is because they had been doing circles, not just in times of crisis, but as a regular practice for students to connect with each other, it didn't feel weird or awkward of like, oh, we're doing this because something terrible happened. I mean, yes, it is something terrible happened, but it was also in response of, we value your voice, we value the feelings that you're having right now, and we want to give you a healthy and safe place to talk about it. And I also want to note that two of our elementary schools are starting to get their folks trained in the circles model and are starting to roll that out in their buildings as well as part of their school improvement plans. And then at the high school level, there's been a lot of work to create the Greyhound Scholars Profiles. So at the high school, a committee was formed to imagine what the profile of a graduate traits would look like for our CHS students. And teachers have started making explicit connections between the traits that you see listed up there and their time with students. And so the high school team has been using professional learning time to unpack each of the competencies related to the profile graduate and what it means specifically for their content area. And ultimately, the goal is for us to create a community that has a shared understanding and a shared language on what the profile of a graduate means for all of the students at Clayton High School. Another component of our work in the area of Goal 3 is our community partnerships. So you will probably recognize some of the organizations that I listed here because you approved the MOUs that I had submitted in the last couple months, and I wanted to give you an update on that work. So first of all, we've got our work going with the Center for Mindfulness. We have therapists that are coming to our elementary and middle school buildings to run small groups. We have about 30 students right now across our elementary that are meeting with a therapist once a week, and then about 15 students at our middle school who are also meeting with the therapist once a week in small groups. And the goals of these small groups are to work on coping skills, emotional regulation, and stress management. We also have things moving with Kids in the Middle, which is an organization that supports students whose families are going through transition, either related to separation or divorce. And we have 15 students across our elementary schools who are participating in that small group program. And then we have about five at the middle school. That number is growing. And those groups, again, are focused on navigating the stresses of family separation. And then we also have a therapist coming in from Safe Connections. And this therapist has a caseload at Clayton High School and meets one-on-one with several students, and the focus of that time is to develop strategies for healthy relationship building. And then finally we continue our partnership with All in Clayton Coalition. I started this work with the Caring for Head and Heart series with Kim Schironi and now with Lily as you heard her with the students earlier this evening. Some of our current work is we're going to be hosting Julie Smith, who's a faculty member at Webster University, and she's also a media literacy expert. And she's going to be doing a free webinar on parenting related to healthy social media usage on January 23rd. And then this is also a follow-up to the Parenting During the Smartphone Age event and the Social Media Impact on the Youth Brain event that we hosted in the last 18 months as part of the Caring for Head and Heart series. We're also in the process of scheduling a screening of the next installment of the Screenagers docuseries, which focuses on youth well-being and screen usage. So speaking of screen usage, I wanted to just kind of give you all an update on where we are with our device usage and the education around social media use and mental health. So at the elementary school, as I think has already been shared, personal devices like cell phones are prohibited. We know that there are some families that feel like it is necessary for their children to come to school with a cell phone, but all the cell phones are silent, off, put away. They are not out at all during the school day. And our students at the elementary level get educated on cyberbullying and what that looks like and sounds like. At the middle school, their cell phone policy, which has already been shared earlier in this meeting, phones are put away in silence basically from bell to bell over the course of the school day unless a student has a very specific permission to use it for a very specific purpose. But otherwise, the phones are completely put away during school hours. Students are also part of... lessons where they receive internet safety education as well as education related to mental health. And at the high school level, you know, The principal's work, Dr. Gattusi's work with his leadership team determined that it's teacher discretion at the high school. And as part of our health curriculum, all students who take the CHS-based health course get instruction around mental wellness. And then our ninth and 10th graders this year are social studies teachers collaborated to provide instruction around cell phone usage, the risk around cell phone usage and addiction and its impact on the brain. All right, so next steps. I am continuing to support our principals with their school improvement plans. Our school improvement plans have a very, very strong through line to connectedness, both teachers to students and students to students. From very deep work around trusted adults and identifying trusted adults for students at the high school, to the return of Greyhound time, which allows clubs to meet during the day for students to connect with each other and with their teachers. to focus groups with really specific identity groups at the middle school, and then using some of Panorama's other data tools to make some more targeted interventions for specific students. Those are all different pieces that are part of school improvement plans in the district. The other piece of that are curriculum and social work departments are starting their self-study. And in the coming months, I am hoping to be able to return to you with a request to approve funding for a consultant who can help us through these next couple bullet points. As it's been referenced in a couple different ways here in this meeting, our students' needs on the social-emotional side are evolving quickly. And I think with our return to in-person learning and a lot of the return to things that our students were familiar with over the last few years, we know that there's an increasing need for supporting students with anxiety, depression, and ADHD. As part of that work, we also know that we need to study the clarity of our roles. You know, what is the full scope of the work of a social worker, of a school counselor, and where is there overlap or where is there a gap that needs to be addressed in a different way than how we're currently doing things? And then we also want to take a closer look at the curriculum, revisiting what's previously been in place and then exploring some new resources that can help us address some of the needs that feel very relevant right now. And part of that goes back to finding resources that will align with our new report card indicators. The profile of our graduate competencies, at the elementary school level they've been working hard to identify what do the traits of a profile of a graduate look like in our elementary school students? And that work is also starting in our secondary schools with leadership teams really taking a close look at what those competencies look like for the age groups that they work with and support. And finally, I do anticipate coming back to you next semester with a request for resources. I think some of those requests could be for space. Some of it could be for personnel. As I spend more time looking at our data, I know that we have some needs that need to be addressed for our students in a different way than how we have in the past. And I think ultimately we want to be able to position all of these resources, both human resources, space resources, and time, in a way that helps all of our students thrive. So that is the conclusion of my presentation, and I'll open it up for questions or discussion.

Thank you. I have a few specific questions, and sorry, maybe more than normal for me, but you kind of bring these topics out of me. I think I would really like to start, though, by just acknowledging something that I really like in that what you included in the presentation, these pathways to our being self-actualized, empathic, and collaborative. I think if you read these statements and say these are the things that we want our students to be, these are, they're just, I find it really inspiring that we would focus on this for our kids. And I kind of wish there was someone, you know, my whole life that had been saying, I'm going to make sure you're all for these things too. I think it's just an example of how if we, as a board and as district leadership, we focus for a long term on these specific pathways to achieving this goal, I just think it's really innovative and I think it's incredibly, incredibly impactful in this social-emotional area, which will impact the other areas as well. So I just want to acknowledge that. Good for us, I guess, in summary. So a couple of specific questions for you, Raman. On the panorama study, a measure that we've talked about and heard about, I think, over the years is the trusted adult. Do I have a trusted adult? And I don't know if that's a specific question that comes on and off, or is that, would that be included in one of these, and I guess which one is that?

Yes, so the trusted adult question is in there, and it actually asks students do they have an adult within the school setting? And it's not specific to like a staff, you know, like a teacher. I mean, it could be any district employee.

It's at school but not necessarily there. Yeah, and then

ask the same question for outside of school. And ask them about a similar question, a parallel one, about friends. So is there a friend at school that you know you could rely on no matter what? And then is there an adult either, you know, in school or out of school that you could rely on?

So would that be in the sense of belonging?

That one is actually under the supportive relationships, which was not part of this particular presentation, but it is one of the topics that we monitor. So we kind of look at both of them together to see what is it telling us about the students. I will say, though... The high school is going to be rolling out, if they haven't already done it, they're about to do it, which is they actually, pre-COVID, used to have students fill out a card that said, like, who is your trusted adult? And for the students who did not write down anyone, specific follow-up to those students, they're going to be doing that again.

Thank you. I wasn't sure if I just didn't know where that would fit or how that worked. Okay, so question number two, I guess. The professional development that we do, can you give us a sense of how maybe a quantity of examples of what portions of that professional development that we deal with the staff that are specifically intended to you know, address this goal. And that's one of our three goals, right? So can we speak to that a little

bit? Yeah, I would say the first one is all of our work around empowered learning because it really draws upon so many of these skills, like students being able to have voice choice, you know, in what product they're about to produce, you know, students working with each other in collaborative ways and getting students to be able to manage their frustration tolerance as they are really, you know, moving through projects. I think our gifted specialists have also been working with some of our teachers around what that looks like in terms of helping students manage their social-emotional learning as it relates to the different challenges that a student might face. And then our counselors have also been working with, especially at the elementary level, with our classroom teachers around how to manage your classroom, both the behaviors but also really strong focus on the community building. And that's also one of the goals at the middle school as well is to start using that packed time as a way for students to be seen and not to have anyone kind of fall through the cracks or not be on anybody's radar. And so it's absolutely a work in progress, and it's something that we're always aspiring to do. I think last year, you know, the trajectory of our district-wide learning days incorporated a lot of the overlap between all three goals, especially the work that I did with Dr. Poole, et cetera, around, you know, tying our equity work to the social-emotional learning piece and understanding why it's so important to center our students' identities in the work that we're doing and why it's important to make sure our students feel like their identities are reflected in how they experience our teaching and learning environment because we know those are all things that contribute to sense of belonging, school climate, and self-efficacy.

It's all very much tied together. I was thinking about that Empowered Learning presentation during yours and how many sort of common goals and maybe even pathways to that. So it's interesting to bring that up.

And I also want to highlight, too, over the summer I brought in a couple different resources to be – experiences during our summer institute. I've worked with West County Psychological Associates to have therapists come in to talk about what does it look like for anxiety in the classroom setting, what does depression look like in the school setting and of course those are kind of opt-in experiences but I'm hoping to incorporate more of that into Assured Learning Experiences for our staff.

Yeah, appreciate that for sure. So the third thing that I wanted to kind of ask you about is a little more, a little bit more vague, so I guess maybe just a little more conversational, but it's around, you know, that idea of these evolving student needs that we have driven so much by the the learning, the changes in the learning models that we've had over the last two plus years now. And we had a time when kids were all learning at home, we had hybrid, we had different schedules. So I think that we have thought of the learning loss and the difficulties, the social-emotional challenges from some of that time, which is right to acknowledge. I want to think about how has that, how have those lessons and those challenges and that evolving need informed what we can now do? And we've talked a lot about technology tonight. That too. Do we think about technology usage differently now because of what's happened with the way we've had to use technology to deliver teaching than we did before? How are we drawing on those challenges and those experiences and the things that our kids have had to endure to inform this kind of work. Does that make sense?

Yeah, and when I hear your question, what strikes me as what I think students' evolving needs, I guess I haven't necessarily thought of it through the lens of our Chromebook usage and how we've been using Chromebooks, etc. But what I have been looking at is through things like the number of suicide risk assessments we conduct each semester. I can tell you right now that this time last year, we had conducted 13 suicide risk assessments across the school district, and at this point in time, we're at four. And that lines up to what our SEL data showed in this last round of Panorama, which is I also look at challenging feelings. And some of that data was really startling over the last couple semesters where we have given it, and when I looked at the challenging feelings results compared to where it was last spring and last fall, more of our students are feeling less sad, less angry, less frustrated, et cetera. So that is a need that I think is changing in the sense of it's still a very intense need. And it let me know actually how intense it had gotten. And now maybe it's coming, you know, it's changing shape and is still here. So what I'm thinking is, what are the things that we need to be doing for all students as it relates to building coping strategies and resilience as it relates to anxiety, depression, attention, et cetera. And then what do we need to do differently around tier two supports for that 15% of the students who need something a little bit more or a little bit different than what the other 80% need? And then the remaining 5%, for those of you who might be doing the math along the way, you didn't forget about them, are our tier three students. And these are students who we are looking at you know, what does their schedule look like? What do we need to do differently for their entire school day in order to help them be successful? And sometimes that means we're partnering with an outside provider because that student's in an intensive outpatient program. So maybe they're doing half days with us. And so I think that there is a lot of room for us to be reflective and thoughtful about what the data is telling us, what the students are telling us, because This data is congruent with the qualitative information that I collected through the community engagement forums that we hosted this time last year, where there is an overwhelming sense from so many of our students that they're not good enough. And if they are not good enough at getting a good grade on a certain assignment that's about to get turned in, that they're going to get a bad grade in that class, and if they get a bad grade college or they're not going to get into a good enough college. And if they don't get into a good-enough college, they will have disappointed the adults around them. And so I think what Carter mentioned earlier about school academic performance is a huge stressor. And I think, again, we need to think about tier one. What are we doing environmentally that supports all of the children to be more successful and to mitigate the anxiety, the depression, the ADHD that is so clearly coming up?

It's really helpful. Did that answer your question? I didn't really ask you a very good question, to be fair, but the topic, and I think it helps me and hopefully other people too, to think about our kids in those tiers and having different needs, but everybody's in tier one, right? Yes. So that's kind of an important concept, and it gets to that each and every thing that we've talked about, right? That we have to not think about one kid, but all kids and one kid, right? So that's helpful to think about it that way. So I'll let other people ask questions now because I don't want to monopolize anymore, but it's very thoughtful and I just appreciate the conversation.

First of all, thank you, Robin, for your thorough work in this and for making it a priority because we know I feel like we've been talking for years about addressing our kids' social emotional needs and we're like but we still have kids who are you know, struggling at school for different reasons. So I really appreciate, first of all, the last thing you said, which is that you're going to probably come to us in the spring wanting resources for additional personnel or space or something because I don't want to – I want to make sure we're listening to our students. And Carter's now told us two weeks in a row that our school counselors are not who the kids would go to to talk to about – personal issues whether it be related to school or not so i just want to like keep that in our head that we can clarify their roles and give them professional development and you know all of that but it still won't change doesn't

matter

how our kids feel about their counselor so i just want make sure we're always remembering you know we can do all that but if the kids still don't feel comfortable with those people it's not going to matter you know they're not going to use it so I'll tell you right now, I would approve whatever you're going to ask for. For that, because I think it is really such an important urgent need. So thank you for thinking forward in that. I also wanted to... The data we looked at, I just wanted to get your thoughts on this. So much of it, we were in really high percentiles compared to other like schools, which is great, like 80th or 90th. But I still couldn't get past the fact that some of those percentiles were so low. Like 50% of our high schoolers felt a sense of belonging, even though that was in the 80th or 90nd. Comparatively, that's horrible in my mind. Half of our kids don't feel like they belong, or I think it was 50%. So a lot of those were in the 50s and 60s, which in my mind is still so low, even if we're doing better than other schools, we're still not doing great, I think. So I first of all appreciate you using data to drive your decisions, but I'm curious how you... Do you agree with that or do you think like 50 or 60% is great? I mean, I don't, I was shocked to see us so high, like 80th or 90th, but the percent tell me so low.

I would love for it to be right. Of course, because I look at the, when I see that 50%, you know, I think about the parents and the families of the students who are in the other 50%. Right. I think about, I aspire that every child who walks through any of the doors into the building, into any of our buildings, that they feel like school is a place for them and that they can fully be themselves in all the spaces in every single one of our school buildings.

So I don't think anyone would look at that number and say that, oh, it's a great number. Like

we're in the 90th

percentile, yay. But what we were trying to work at is like first of all looking at the data, A, step one, believe it or not. Step two, what are we doing to address the 50th percentage, right? So this panorama data, which we're doing PD with the staff, like here's how you log on to your survey results. Here's how you can run a report. I'm serious. That's how basic some of these sessions are because we need to teach our staff how to do that, right? And it even goes down by kid. So for example, Stacey, to your question. For example, Dr. Poole just, he and I were talking the other day. There's an elementary school which has taken action because they didn't like that number. They found out that in the subgroup, right, the African American students specifically had a lower sense of belonging than the others. So the teachers now have identified those students, have taken the initiative to actually create like an affinity group with those students. You know, like they're creating structures to be able to address these numbers. I

mean, I guess it was probably a dumb question, but I just wanted to think. I mean, a dumb question is to say, how do you feel about it? Of course we want 100%. I just wanted to point out that it's crazy to me. Comparatively, we were doing so great. I mean, it makes me so sad for the other schools we were comparing actually, honestly, too. But I think about, really, those are so low, which I thought, I don't think anyone... 80-90 percentile sounds great, but it's really not great.

But historically, it's never been over 50%. Right? In no time in history in school has there ever been over 50%. We haven't been there for that long, but true. Right. But it just goes to show you... If you put it in perspective, school's not for everybody. Or some kids are just filling the structure of school. I don't think it's sad. We should just understand it. Because it might, you know, get an affinity group, might not be the move. Who knows? Might not be the move? I'm just trying to find out, maybe just get the data and try to understand it as opposed to always trying to, like, find some additional process to fix it. You know what I'm saying? And it might not, and maybe that's the wrong question to ask, man. It's not about... What was the question you asked about that? Oh, for

sense of belonging?

Yeah, I mean... Yeah, so some of

the sample questions are, and this is not exhaustive list. There's like three or four other ones in addition to these. How connected do you feel to the adults at your school? Overall, how much do you feel like you belong at your school? How much respect do students show you?

Yes, I mean, some of those kids, I don't... It might not be bad, I just don't feel connected. But, you know, I don't feel connected to do a lot of stuff. I mean, they just might need something different. I'm just trying to understand. What I'm trying to say is that it may not be problematic. Yeah, we just need to, I mean, we feel sad. I feel it's great for one 50%, the other half is like doing so poorly. It might not be that, what I'm trying to Is there someone out there that can help us read it and maybe ask the questions differently? Or, I don't know. Is there another way to manage this process? But I'm not sure if I just completely 100% agree like it's all or nothing. I love it. I don't love it. They're sad. Let's find a way to fix it. Make sense? Yeah.

Is the survey anonymous? Yes. Or can you actually identify not just subgroups,

but students? So it's a little bit in between. So what it will do is... So for example, Little Robin takes the survey and... The platform will aggregate all of her responses for that specific topic and generate a number for it. Usually it's like a scale of 0 to 4. And so depending on the topic, usually any number between 3.0 to 4 is going to be considered green, like mostly favorable responses. And as the more unfavorable responses were calculated in, that number will be lower. So for example, one of the first things I do after we close out the data is I look at the supportive relationships category and I immediately look for all the students whose scores are like 2.0 or below. So again, so it lets me know They did not pick some of the greatest answers out of these questions, and that's an area of concern. So I'm going to pull that list. I'm going to email it to the counselor to let them know these are the kiddos who popped up when I did this search. Okay. So I don't know how every single student answered every single question, but I do know, like, the aggregate of their answers for specific

topics. Okay. Well, that's good, and I'm glad to hear that it's – somewhat actionable then when you do see an aggregate low score because that is the that's actually the benefit of any survey that we do is that there's something that's positive and actionable out of it.

Do the respondents know it's not totally anonymous? If I'm a student, I'm taking it. Do I know? I don't know if it's good or bad or not. You know, I just... No. You don't know?

I mean, they tell us they're anonymous. Okay.

I'm

sorry.

I'm sorry for the process.

I will say it is very helpful in being able to filter to a specific identity group. So if I wanted to see how are all the fifth grade girls who are Hispanic in the school district of Clayton, what did their scores look like for supportive relationships? I can drill down to that. I was going to ask that too because she brought up... Yes,

exactly. So you can look at the free or reduced lunch kids, the African-American kids, the Hispanic kids, gender, IEP kids, like there's a whole bunch of subgroups. Yes. We're just not seeing it, but you have access to all

of them. Okay, good. So if you take out the black kids, what's the number then? If you take out that number that are unhappy, that don't feel good about the school, they don't feel connected, then what does that number look like?

I'm not sure. I would need some time to go through to figure that out.

Hmm. It might be pretty easy. Exactly. Just take the number.

So I think what's going to be a really important thing is that I think everybody's bringing up a point and that we're going to engage a consultant to help us navigate some of these issues, which, quite frankly, none of us are really experts in this area. And they can help us then identify what we do need to be doing. Maybe it is an affinity group, maybe it isn't. All we can do right now is work with what we have until we get these people in to help us work through some of these issues. And I think that... That will inform a lot of the work, the specifics of what we do next year and in the years thereafter.

So working with what we have, I've got a few specific questions based on your presentation. Thank you, by the way, for all the information, Robin. It sounds like there's two elementary schools that are rolling out that circle model, which seems like it's pretty positive. Who's the holdout? Why are not all three doing them?

That is an excellent question. It's a building-based decision with the building principals. Each building principal writes their own school improvement plan, and so they are all trying different strategies. Two of them are deciding to incorporate circles, and they're kind of in various levels of the rollout. And others are trying other strategies related to building connectedness.

Okay. Well, I mean, maybe the consultant can help us with this, but one of the challenges I know watching my own kids go through middle school from the transition from elementary to middle school and then the subsequent transition from middle school to high school is that we all know that the three elementary schools have different cultures and different climates, even if the curriculums are the same. And it all mismatches together once they get to middle school. And so I wonder, in this case, if they're not all doing something similar and then they all get to circles in the middle school where it seems like it's working and two schools' students have had exposure to that and one hasn't. What does that do to the odd one out? So that would be my question, which I don't expect you to have an answer for today. And then Center for Mindfulness, that sounds like a great program. That sounds like an independent program. Why is that not at Clayton

High School? So... My hope is to expand into Clayton High School. I attempted to do it last school year. The bell schedule was a little different last year than it is this year. One of my greatest design challenges is scheduling and time. One of the other barriers that I ran up against, which did not anticipate was the follow through in returning the consents. So we had several counselors in this building social worker were reaching out to families providing the paperwork and there wasn't, you know, there wasn't follow through and so the therapist can't connect with the students unless we've gotten that consent out. So my hope is to try again second semester, you know, we're rolling out and we have a a slightly larger caseload this year than we did last year. Last year was the first year that I tried it, but I absolutely agree with that thinking. I think that it is something that we need to get into the high school.

Okay, great. And then Safe Connections, which it sounds like it is in the high school, How do students access those services? Carter, are you aware of that? Have you heard of that? I have not. So how do they access it? Is it by recommendation of the teacher or a counselor or a social worker? It's a social work referral. OK. Yeah. And is that the only way to access that particular service through Safe Connections?

Ultimately, yes. I mean, they can go to the counselor as well. And the counselor will work with the social worker to get that referral made and get those

consents completed. OK. Great.

And then, going back to the, since the device thing has come up multiple times, I agree with you, Stacey, it's probably not a board decision. But as the... As the leadership team at the high school looks at it, I do recall hearing from one of the public comments that there are very high-performing schools. It sounds like they've implemented this, like Burroughs and SLU, I think were two of them. I know one of the practices that we've had as part of our PD for teams in the past is a blast walkthrough. It would be interesting if that leadership team at the school did a blast walkthrough at one or two of those schools and assessed the different climate of learning versus what they see in our high school for a comparison as they make their decision this year that would be a recommendation maybe that I would have and then not to be devil's advocate Carter because you know I will be the devil when I go home and tell my two high schoolers this but you know the opposite side of what you said and I share Jason's frustration with you know you tell teenagers to do something they're not always responsive to the suggestion but you want them to be able to develop the self-regulatory skills for the future. I wonder if there's not devices in the classroom, if that helps them with developing good study habits that then they carry over into college. So that's it for me.

Okay, I have plenty. I'll start with what Kim just ended with. I would agree with Kim that autonomy is really important and learning how to use your device is really important, but I do wonder... When you have a device that is, as we've talked about, we've used the word addictive. And we know from studies that that's what's happening. And Carter even used the word it's not great for our mental health. But then Robin used the phrase, what are we doing to address the challenges that kids are facing with depression and anxiety? So to me, those two don't jive together. It seems like we're talking out of both sides of our mouth. Does that make sense to you?

Sort of. I'm still processing it all because there's been a lot of perspectives shared. Yeah,

so I'll just specify. If we are trying to address students' depression and anxiety needs, and we know that they are... capable of getting on a device that we know to be both addictive and bad for their mental health, as stated by everyone in this room. How do those jive together? Are we really going to meet the goals of your profile of a graduate when we're doing two of the opposite things? things for our students. We're wanting them to be well and to have great, you used the word lifelong wellness, but we're also saying, but use this thing that makes you sick. I don't think they're

encouraging you.

I didn't say they are. No, I'm just saying they're allowing it. I definitely don't think anybody's encouraging cell phone use. But I'll speak to what Kim said, and the reason why this is so present in my mind, Robin, is because Nisha and I and Spacey were just at the high school doing a walkthrough. And we happened to go, because we chose to go, into our kids' classrooms. And my son, who's a junior, was on his phone. Didn't even realize I was in the room, because he was on his phone while the teacher was lecturing. And the teacher didn't say a word about it. And he wasn't being disruptive, but he certainly wasn't engaged in the class. Somebody actually had to say, hey, Beckham. Like, hello, there's people here. And then he was like, oh. So we went to another classroom. And Stacy's son, same exact thing, on his phone. So literally we went into four classrooms and of two of them, our kids happened to be on the phone while we were there. So I think phone usage in school is happening a lot more than we know or realize. And if we're saying this thing gives us our kids depression and anxiety, period. and we're allowing them to do that during school, how is that affecting their cognitive functioning? How is that affecting their test scores? How is that effecting their mental health is what we're here to talk about tonight. But it doesn't feel good to me. It doesn't feel morally good to know what the studies show and to then say, well, we'll just let them figure it out, how to use this thing, which is you can say this is a very big word, but is addictive, is a drug. We'll just see how it goes, Carter. You know, I know it's bad for you, but, you know, and I'm not saying we're encouraging it. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it's happening. I'm saying that teachers are having to face this, and I'm saying that students are having to deal with the temptation that their mind is not developed to deal with. So again, whether this is a board policy or not, I think for what you're doing, if I was you, I'd be screaming, hey teachers, let's get on board with this. And again, let's let the teachers be the ones that call it up to have it happen. But because we are not, we are doing the opposite of what we're saying we want to do for these kids by allowing this to happen in our classrooms.

And Chris, I hear you on that, but I also, what you just said, let the teachers give us the voice. Yeah. The teachers did. Exactly. So I want to address that too. They spoke through the leadership team. I hear that. They spoke about it.

I hear that, okay. They debated that. So my thought on that, Nisha, would be, you tell me because I wasn't at that table and I don't know. Who is at that table?

The leadership team is made of the administrative team, so like the assistant principals, Dr. Kaczewski, department chairs from each department. So like your language arts, social studies, electives, you have your counselor there. Like basically everyone from each department. Everyone is

employed by the district.

Correct.

Right. And how many of those people have a degree in, like how about a medical degree? I would guess not. Right. And how many of them are then, even without a medical degree, have a master's degree in counseling or mental health or any of those? But I would say that

almost

all of them have seen the research on it. But they are not, that's not what they do for a living. They teach social studies or math. Correct. So in my opinion, it's okay for that board to be part of making the decision for themselves, for their own community. It's their community, and I want them to have the autonomy to make that choice. If someone that is an expert can say to them, that makes a lot of sense, what you're talking about. Or actually, the data shows this, and this is how it applies to kids this age. You see what I'm saying? I don't think they have the right information. They can't. They're not experts in those fields.

But, yeah, I just want to jump in with respect to this conversation. It's, in my opinion, you guys can keep talking about it if you want, it's extremely micromanaging. And this is not – we should not be dictating – none of us really know because we're not professionals. Maybe Chris knows more than some of us, but – Until these consultants can do an audit of some sort and they can tell us what needs to be done, for us as board members to be sitting here opining on whether the kids should have cell phones, I think it's kind of a conversation that is misplaced. But you guys can keep talking about it if you want to. I

disagree.

That's fine.

Yeah, I appreciate that. that we just disagree, and I think that's why we're all here. That's why there's seven of us. Again, I think when there was data showing that seatbelts worked, again, there's really good data. What are you saying,

Chris? I just want to make sure. What's the baseline of your point? What are you saying?

I'm saying that because kids' mental health is so bad tied to the use of cell phones, that allowing them to have them in our classrooms is talking out of both sides. We really want to teach you how to have lifelong wellness, but we're also letting you have this thing that we know is associated with poor lifelong wellness. And again, it's micro. I get what you're saying to some degree. But as someone in the public health and social work background, it's also a community issue.

You know what I mean? Well, it's not that micro, honestly. The whole topic of conversation since the beginning of the evening has been about cell phones and

classrooms. So I don't think it's micro. I think

the gist of it is that, I mean... you know, we need to figure out whether or not we want to come up with some kind of blanket way of dealing with this, or do we want to continue with the measures that are put in place allowing each teacher and in each school, bar down versus elementary school versus the high school, to make their own decisions. But we know that the results, we know that based on statistics, based on these outcomes, based on some of the data that's been shown and gathered, that It's been, you know, a detriment to our students' learning. And disruption to... I'm not saying that. We

need... Wait, I don't know, like this premise that we've proven it and the data proves that this is bad for every kid, we just have to reject that premise. I'm saying there's data

out there that proves that it's been a detriment. For every kid? I don't think that's true. I've never seen that data. No, it's associated

with a decrease in... We're talking about this as if those are accepted premises that this is bad Maybe it is. If it is, we should find that out. But that's not – I think we're jumping into that and also diving into it.

That's why we'll hire

them. Right. I agree. Plus, we

do know that we use our cell phones for instructional purposes. We talked about that. In the classroom. Yeah, we talked about it. I've talked to several teachers about it as well. They use that for instructional purposes.

Yeah. I think the risk of what that cell phone gives a student during the class day far outweighs any – productivity that they can get from it, especially because of Chromebooks. I've talked to teachers about it. We're not

supposed

to be talking to teachers either, by the way, as board members. Oh, it was in a parent-teacher conference. It wasn't about this specific... It was about my child's cell phone use.

I worry that... I'm not at all disagreeing with what you're saying, Chris. I actually do see that correlation. Totally, but... I worry if the board is wanting to dictate that for a rule for one of our schools, that that's a slippery slope. That we should leave it up to teacher and principal discretion. It's almost like if we were going to vote on a dress code policy for the high school. Whatever. There's other reasons. As an example, I worry that... then we're getting to micro in school rules. I don't disagree with discussing this, but I agree that Robin had on the slide and we're all saying that it really should be the school figuring it out with the teachers and the principal because if we start dictating rules at one of our schools, that's getting way in the weeds for us and I think then where does that end?

And I haven't questioned that once. Okay, good. I think the school should decide. I think there should be discretion. I don't disagree. I would like for our schools to look at other schools that have done it, to just learn more about it. My biggest issue is that we're making decisions. We're asking teachers to make decisions about mental health, and they don't have expertise in it. That's my biggest issue with all of this. Yeah, that's fair. That's what I'm getting at. I'm not getting at, hey, let's all make this a huge... I'm not saying that. But I do think that If you don't have the expertise at the table, you're not going to get the right answer every time. You know what I mean? So that's, again, to me, I've looked at the data really closely, Gary, and it's new-ish, but it's really clear. Like as of 2011, you know, things really changed for our mental health in this country in general, just in cell phone usage in general. So I do think there's a correlation. And again, I don't know enough about it and neither does Mrs. Nichols at Glenridge to really know what to do about it. So let's just bring the right people to the table and let's let data

bear out what to do. Exactly. And that's where I keep going back to is that if these people come back to us in the spring and, you know, they have their conversation with Robin and make their recommendation, then I'm sure, you know, Robin and her team will take measures to... you know, to do what needs to be done.

But I don't want to give Jason a short shift. I think he wants to have the ability to ask Robin a question about the presentation.

Well, yeah, all of my questions were answered. I just want to say, first of all, congratulations on a great job on getting these numbers back up that we saw at the beginning of the PowerPoint presentation. So that's not easy, especially over the past couple of years. I really appreciate that. And I also just, I have to mention that my kindergartner talks about the zones like every day. So, um, so I can see it just as a parent. I can see it working. So I wish I was just that green and red.

I

never knew about the middle things. Oh yeah. She comes home with a yellow zone every day. Uh, Her birthday's coming up. She's determined to be in the green zone all day on her birthday.

I love it. That's awesome. That's true.

That's it. I just want to say one thing, but I do like the fact that we're having this dialogue. I don't think we should shut each other down when we're saying things. We may not agree. We don't need to be defensive either when someone's saying something about an opinion. I don't think anyone in here is trying to make a decision tonight. And I think we all agree that the data, having someone come in, a consultant, will be helpful in the future. But I see what you're trying to say. I want to make sure you understand that you can say what you want to say. I don't support you on that. But it can get kind of dicey. So I just want to make sure we're on the same page. You can say what you want to say, Chris, and I think I understand your point.

This is the reason that I live in this world, is to be an advocate for health and wellness. So of course this is going to be the meeting that I talk the most at, right? I mean, any time this subject comes up, I'm going to be talking about it. I believe strongly that that's the core of us being a healthy society, is to have positive health and wellness. And to me, when I see... things happening that aren't to that, even if the board itself isn't the one that's gonna be the deciding factor on how this plays out in our schools, it needs to be talked about at this table. So I just wanted to be some, that's what I brought this to do, was for us to just really think about who's making these choices in our schools.

Thanks for your voice. Yes, and I hope you didn't think I was trying to shift. Oh, I didn't think you were. I just wanted to refocus. I just wanted make sure we weren't discussing this to try to be the ones making a decision. I heard you, Stacey. I think at the end of the day, we all have the same goals, which is what you're saying, of course, which is Robin's whole point. And so I think that's why it is healthy discussion. I think, of course, we all want our students to be you know, mentally healthy and taken care of at school. And that's why I'm so happy to see what Robin's next steps are is asking for more resources, bringing in a consultant. Yeah, it's great. Okay,

so my first question is about the things we're doing that outsourcing therapists and other Mental health resources. So I just want to sort of hear like how that's going and how Accessible that is to students across the board

so I would say it's going well in the sense of we are getting resources to students and families who have not previously had access. Obviously, we have to have conversations with all of the families about the consent forms if they want to participate, et cetera. And the support from parents has been overwhelming. They understand, especially once we brought in kids in the middle. We had so many families who were like, yes, this is what we need right now. And at the middle school, what we've been trying to do is understand that yeah, our data can help us identify students or maybe students based on how they're experiencing the teaching and learning environment have kind of popped up on our radar anyway. But at the middle school we've been trying do a better job of just getting the information out to parents so that way if it is something that they feel like is a need but maybe it wasn't on the radar for whatever reason because every family goes through a different set of circumstances to finding support for their child, that they can opt in so they've been able you know we provide them with the contact information like going through the district social worker to get that referral done and so that's why i mentioned like with kids in the middle that that number was growing because it has gone out in multiple why down parent messages and more parents are seeing it and saying yes that is a resource we need and so um it was actually kind of funny but the well not funny haha but like interesting in terms of the response was with our center for mindfulness um it was almost like we've in some spots um you know like we're reaching very close to like what our caseload threshold can happen because the therapist she spends four hours a day um one day a week in each of the elementary school buildings and so for in some spots the age group and the need like the focus of the skill group um we maxed out so um so i so i'm pleased with where we started and where we are now and i am looking forward to again getting some outside eyes on this as a tier two support and what are some things that we can do to continue and augment it because i do think the need is there

And how would you compare that to like the idea of having like a designated district employee who's like a school therapist, just like a familiar face that like every student knows they can go to if they have something to talk about?

I think that is absolutely a solution that we should take a closer look at. One of my greatest concerns is really just like bandwidth, like what is a realistic caseload and what do we think the need is? I will say that quite a few of our students have providers outside of school and that's what works for their family. Because there are some pros and cons to having a child or a student meet with their therapist in the middle of the school day because, oh, guess what? It's 1-11 and you just finished your session and now you have to go be emotionally regulated in your next class. And that can be hard for some students. But I do absolutely think that that is a solution that we need to take a closer look at. I think we need to take look at where does that fit into the tiering? Is that a tier one, is that a tier two? And what are the qualifications of said person or people that we think could fill that role for our students? And I think right now what I think, the way I'm looking at it is by getting these outside community partnerships, we're able to fill a need where our current staffing isn't able to reach. And so I think your idea that you just shared is absolutely on the table.

And then can you talk through quickly all the legal regulations that go hand in hand with outsourcing this type of thing? Like where parents come in and how much a student can sort of just do on their own with these outsourced therapists?

That's a really great question. So with our MOUs, we usually outline what the exchange of information is going to be. We really try to be thoughtful about once a family gets started, really try to be thoughtful about the amount of information we actually need to know about those sessions. And oftentimes we don't know all the details because we don't need to know. We want to honor students' privacy. But sometimes a therapist might be able to share with us in the small group, here are the goals, here are the focus areas now that I've gotten to know this group better. These are the things that we're really working on. I think that it's worth exploring, you know, some school districts do kind of a blanket consent, which helps especially in moments of emergency where we've got to bring in outside, you know, where a district might need to bring in outside providers on the last minute notice. So that way students can go in. And so that, I think, would be a component that we'd have to look at in relationship to if we were to add personnel or staff. develop a more sustainable partnership with an outside provider. Thank

you.

Good question. Yep. What else? Anyone? It's a hard conversation, for sure. Complex. Yeah, so hopefully... But the good

news is it's obviously very important.

Yeah. Okay, so

We are on our action items, and our first one, Stacy, is policy GCBDA.

I move that the board approve the second reading of policy GCBDA, professional staff short-term leaves, and policy GDBDA, support staff

believes. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Are there any questions or comments? Okay, all in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes.

Okay, I move that the board approve the second reading of Policy IICC, School Volunteers.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. Questions? All in favor? Aye! Okay.

Consent agenda. I move that the Board of Education approve the consent agenda 9.02 through 9.05. Second. It's

been moved and seconded. Any questions? All in favor? Aye. Terrific. So we are now on... There's a couple donations. I'm

sorry. Oh. There's more than that's reflected there, so I would hold off on that, on the donations. I mean, we can acknowledge those donations, but The soccer program actually raised, like, close to $12,000. So there's many more and larger donations than that. Can I ask a question about that?

Can I ask a questions about that? Nisha, when we recognize donations, it seems new to me that we're recognizing, like, every... I don't want to at all insinuate that not every donation is meaningful. I don't remember that we used to acknowledge, like... I mean, I know of donations in the past that we've never said a word about personally. And there's

a lot that are missing here. So I just want to make sure we're either

covering every single one or we're not because I don't want to slight anyone.

I

mean, I've personally made donations that have never been recognized. I don't care. I'm not doing it for the recognition. It's just an example. It's just not consistent. Yeah, it's not consistent. Yes. So

I

100% agree with you. Or is there a

minimum amount that we recognize? We recognize any check $500 and over, and I believe they pick this up through... When they send in, like, the donation, it goes through finance when they put it in for a deposit. That's where they pick it up and supply it to me. So maybe there's some donations that are lower. No, they're higher. It's just not collected here. Well, maybe it hasn't been. Maybe it hasn't gone through yet. Because I believe it's picked up. I just want to make

sure. In recognizing some, we might be missing others. And I want to make, I just, we might want to. Well, we can look into that. Or there's another way to acknowledge them. Yeah,

we should probably acknowledge the Soccer

District

Club for raising all the money that they did. Tons

of sports teams do it and clubs and individuals and everything. So I just want to make sure. I don't know if there's a better way to do this. Maybe we recognize them a different way. Maybe it's not just a consent agenda. I mean, I don't know. Maybe at the end of each quarter we just publish a list. I don't would be the right answer, but I definitely, I've been noticing lately that it's just been different than in the past. Thank you. We can look into them. Thank you.

Sorry. No, that was a good point. Okay, so we are on number 10. Okay, so let's see here. Did anybody have any interesting meetings they want to talk about?

I

went to

the teacher's learning advisory meeting, which was we talked about the health curriculum, health and PE curriculum. It was really cool to have a bunch of parents, teachers, administrators from across the district all in the same room talking about their experiences in health and PE and also some initiatives which we think we should focus on moving forward. Some of those specifically we talked about making a health curriculum that focuses more on the practical side of the impact which healthy teachers can make as opposed to maybe like an idealistic way of teaching health and just focusing on how we can actually better people's prioritization of their health as it pertains to health classes. But in general, we've got more of those meetings throughout the school year and it's just a really good opportunity to talk about how our curriculums are working and how they can change and getting a lot of different perspectives on that.

Thank you. Thanks for being there, Carter, of course. And I just say I'm happy we formed that advisory with parents especially too because years ago we used to have parents on like the math curriculum committee and social studies and we slowly got away from that because we were getting input in different ways like surveys or community engagement events or whatever. and i think parents were upset like they they like to be part of those discussions so i'm happy that we've kind of recreated that not by department but just as a general so i'm glad that you found that good

yeah and another really good thing about the way they did it is it wasn't just like uh tell us about your experiences there's also like a big educational experience like they told all these parents of like how the health and pe is actually running and then after we learned about the way it works then we could have Oh, that's good. That's good.

Anybody else? Well, Jason and I went to an SBA conference. That was, I really enjoyed it. It was, you know, it's a lot of eye-opening, a lot of learning. You're coming together with schools from the entire state. So you meet a lot of people that have similar experience, some, but most that have very different experience than us. And I met superintendents. I met teachers. I met mostly fellow board members. And so many of them were from St. Louis, which was great because I feel like I learned a lot from the folks that are – right here with us that we recognize their names. But the breakout sessions were great this year, and I think, you know, I was happy to see that social-emotional learning was on everybody's mind. We talked about the book issue in one of the breakout sessions. Basically everything that we've talked about this year, they had a breakout session about it. So I went to – I was really happy that I got to get some of their perspective and think about things, you know, in a little bit of a bigger picture. while I was there. So, what do you think?

I thought it was great. I may agree with everything you said. You know, I particularly liked, it seems like Special School District is doing some cool things with, there's a topic, equity in governance. It was something like that, and someone from Special School District came and presented, talked about how they incorporated equity work into what they do, and There's just a lot of, it makes you realize there's a lot of like-minded people around the state that they experience things a little bit differently than we do, just by definition being in a different school district. But there's definitely relationships to make and people to learn from around the

school. I will say something that was really cool was one of the breakout sessions was about elevating parent voice. And I know that's something that we really are, it's important to us And they specifically related it to, you know, the efforts that a lot of districts get help their parents. And as a district use lobbyists to really, you know, make sure that the issues that are important to them get spoken about in Jeff City. I had no idea how many schools did that. Either just the grassroots, like the parents are mostly the ones doing it, which is what we've always thought is the most powerful way to do it and really kind of the way it has to be done, right? But I was surprised how many schools had a very strong Many of them employ lobbyists, and there's just – we know that a lot of stuff has already affected our school this year. It will continue. You know, legislation is happening constantly. So that's just something for us to think about. These other districts are being super proactive. They have what they want to see, and they have a lobbyist that is their – actually speak to what they are experiencing in their district. So it's an important thing for us to just

talk about. Let's see, what else? So I think that...

Great Clayton Education Foundation meeting on

Monday.

Great Clayton Parks and Rec meeting on Monday.

Chris and I, as she mentioned, went on a walkthrough of the high school with Nisha, which like I always say, I would encourage anyone to do whenever you can. We were like, we purposely went to first we were purposely going to try to hit some honors and AP courses to observe the diversity because we're always talking about that in those classes and it was definitely varied. Like one class we went in and we were like, oh this class isn't very diverse and then there wasn't one that was. I mean so I think it's you know, we have the numbers so we know what it is but to see it I think in action, I think you can feel the difference in those classes for sure. We commented on that. What was really cool too is we made sure to go to like a business class, the What was the FACS class we went to? Oh, yeah. Oh, Dr. Compton's class. Were they talking about pregnancy or something? Yeah. Very cool. But talk about diversity. I mentioned this to Dr. Patel. The class was all female. And I'm like, man, we need to get some boys in these classes talking about pregnancy. Anyway. Yeah. So I think when we think about diversity in classes, we need to talk about gender needs to be part of that conversation too. Not just race. Anyway, so it was cool. We went to the band. There's not a single guy in the fax bus? No. Not in that one. Not that one. I mean, there's several FACS classes. This one was maybe child development, I think she said. Anyway, but it was cool. I mean, because there's so many different courses offered at the high school, it's really cool to pop into those. There's so much going on. What we heard in the art classroom, remember how important

that was? Oh, oh. Mention that.

Yeah, the art was... The

discussion that she had... with the students prior to looking at...

This was like an AP art, like a high-level art class. But talk about co-curricular things. They were studying religion. and how religion is depicted in art, and then she starts talking about biases and your preconceived notions about different religions and minority religions, and when you see a piece of art that depicts that, how do you feel, and how would you judge someone of that religion? It was deep. I mean, it was like... And

she tried to give them... All through art. A safe place. She tried to sort of say, this is how we're going to speak about it. You know, we're going to be hard in some places, some... but we're going to speak about it respectfully and kindly, and we're going to think of, you know, it was just done so well. It really, to me, is the profile of a graduate. That conversation, that class, and that teacher was excellent.

It was like what we all talk about, like what Cameron talks about all the time, and just inclusion of different groups, but through art. It was an AP art class? It was like AP art studio class or something. It was just cool that they were talking about really deep stuff like that.

And how inclusive it is. It was so inclusive because they

were really focusing on minority religions and how that's depicted in art and how they're going to express that. Anyway, thanks for reminding me about that. That was cool. Anyway, so if you guys have a chance to do those walkthroughs, I always get so much out of it. It's cool.

So I will remind everybody that board candidate filing runs from 12-6 through 12-27. So to the extent that anybody wants to join this fine board, put your name in, sign up. And what else? I think that's really it. What are the dates again? It starts 12-6, December 6th, and it goes through December 27th.

Which is a change this year. Yeah. Last year it was. Last year it wasn't. Oh, from right last year. But it's changed from previous. It

used to go, it used to be a month. It used to be almost two months. Wow. Yeah. Like six weeks. Wow. And now it's during the holidays. I guess one year it's going to end on Christmas Eve. I mean,

fantastic.

It makes no sense.

All right. Are we adjourning? We can adjourn. I move that the Board of Education adjourn.