March 29, 2023 — Meeting Transcript

Is this on? Hello? Okay, let's go. All right, good evening. It is Wednesday, March 29th, and I hope everybody had a nice spring break. This thing sounds really weird tonight. Do I sound weird? Okay. It does sound weird. Let's go ahead and start with the Pledge of Allegiance. Okay, before we get started, I just would like to take a minute and for us to acknowledge the recent tragedy in Nashville. And our thoughts and prayers are with those families. And hopefully, I don't know, our politicians can get a hold of this. gun control situation. So with that, I will go ahead and turn it over to Stacey so we can adopt the agenda.

I move that the Board of Education approve the agenda as posted.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. Questions? All in favor? Aye. And now we are on to recognizing our own. We've got some amazing athletes here tonight.

So I'd like to invite Steve Hudson and Caitlin Long and the students up at the podium. Oh, Buddy's here. Sorry, Steve's not here. Yes, Buddy. So every board meeting, we take some time to recognize amazing students and staff and just give you the platform of recognition. So tonight, we are here to recognize some outstanding student athletes. So Buddy, if you would like to start. Yes,

thank you. We're here tonight to recognize Senior Ethan Faust.

Would you just push the button there, buddy? There you go.

This is my first time using my phone.

You're

good. Yeah, we're here to recognize Ethan Faust, a senior here at Clayton High School. Ethan had an amazing season as well as an amazing career. A couple things I want to share with the board and our guests here today is Ethan really rewrote the boys' basketball record book this year in a single-season manner and also in a career manner. So during this season, his senior year, he set two school records for most steals in a season. and most blocked shots in a season. Over the career of his three-year varsity career that was cut short in a shortened season in COVID, set career marks for three-point field goals made and blocked shots, which is an interesting dynamic in basketball. So that is a really cool accomplishment. So four school records completed this year as a senior. During his senior year in February, he became only the third member of the Clayton Boys Basketball Program to reach 1,000 points for his career. And as of last week, he was named to the Missouri Basketball Coaches Association Class 5 All-State Team, which is a recognition of the top 15 players in the state of Missouri. So we're really, really proud of Ethan and his accomplishments this year.

And I would also like to recognize, first of all, congratulations, Ethan. It was nice talking to you as well on the Clayton Experience video. So it was nice to meet you and learn more about you on there. But I know Buddy is very, very modest, and he would not say this, but we would also like to congratulate Buddy because he was District Coach of the Year, recognized by his colleagues.

Thank you, Dr. Tull.

Any opportunity to highlight you, Buddy. Thank you for all that you've done for our students, truly. You're amazing. All right, Kaitlin.

All right. My name is Caitlin Long. I'm the coach of the CHS Swim and Dive team here, and we had a fabulous season this year. We had a record of 10-1, and then we finished second in our conference and sixth in state. So we've had an incredible season, and swimming tends to sometimes be a pretty individual sport, but when you're on a high school swim team, it's much more a team sport. And I can say that our success this year would not have been possible without these two swimmers sitting next to me. So this is Emma Welch, and we have Kaitlyn Coleman. And both of these athletes broke school records this year, longstanding school records. And they were set by... let's see, swimmers who are very, very accomplished swimmers. So Emma set the record in the 200 individual medley, which had originally been Lydia Welty's record and she was class of 2013. And Caitlin set the record in 100 backstroke, which was originally held by Angie McBride, class of 1998. So they are very, very honored and excited to have them on our team. Swimming is an incredibly difficult sport and sometimes pretty heartbreaking sport. You can train an entire season, year, years of your life to drop tenths of seconds in a race. And both Caitlin and Emma had incredible seasons this year. having very substantial time drops. And so it's really exciting, and we're just really proud and happy for them.

Awesome. Did our student athletes want to say anything? Yeah. Look how they're so excited. They cannot wait. They can't wait.

I guess thank you for this recognition. It's a big deal to be in front of the most important people in this school district. And thank you, Coach, for the last three years.

We're definitely not the most important people. That's what you guys are. That's you guys.

Well, our accomplishments would not be possible if it wasn't for our amazing coaching staff for the Girls Swim and Dive team. So Coach Long basically is the founder of our success because she trained us the entire season.

Yeah, thank you guys for having us, and thank you for supporting all of our school sports teams. I know all of us really appreciate it.

And we wouldn't be here if it wasn't Thank

you. Are you guys planning on playing sports in college too?

Yes, ma'am.

Yes. Awesome. Girls? Yep. Slim? Good. We still got a couple more years. Oh, okay. Sophomore and junior. Okay. There you go. All right. Well, congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you for being here. Okay, let's see. Public participation, and I believe we have one comment tonight from Robin Laurie. Hi, Robin. Hi.

Good evening. My name is Robin Laurie. I have two children. who primarily serve the high school and middle schools. I've been told by administrators that some of the families don't want an armed officer at the school. That response inspired me to call some of the Clayton families that I know over the past 24 hours. I asked 38 families, 28 are in favor of having an SRO at all campuses, two were not in favor, one did not have an opinion because they felt it was Eight have not yet responded. I would be happy to take this survey to more district families, but believe this is a solid starting ground for this conversation. Clayton has a focus on equity. It doesn't appear equitable to have SROs at two campuses and not afford the same safety and optimal response time should an incident occur at the other campus. The safety and security of students to a range of threats, including violence, crime, and emergency. Having SROs at elementary schools can help to mitigate these risks and create a safer learning environment for students. We know the district already believes in SROs being a meaningful addition to security at some locations. We believe elementary schools should also be covered with a full-time SRO. First and foremost, SROs are trained professionals who are specifically equipped to handle that could occur at elementary school. The presence of SROs can serve as a deterrent to potential threats. Knowing that there is a trained law enforcement officer on campus can discourage individuals who may be considering committing a crime or engaging in violent behavior. This can help to create a safer atmosphere for students and staff and provide a greater sense of security and peace of mind for parents. There are several examples of SROs providing a safe environment for students in elementary school. In 2018, a shooting at an elementary school in Noblesville, Indiana was prevented from escalating further thanks to the actions of an SRO. The SRO, who was on duty at the school, quickly responded to the shooting and was able to apprehend the shooter before anyone else was injured. The incident highlighted the importance of having trained law enforcement officers on campus to respond to emergencies. Additionally, a 2019 survey of school resource officers conducted by the NASRO found that 93% of respondents reported that they had intervened in incidents of bullying or harassment and 94% reported that they have provided mentoring or counseling to students. These findings suggest that SROs can play a positive role in promoting a safe In conclusion, my hope is that we implement this program across the district and it's never needed in response to an active shooter. But I would prefer to take these steps to safeguard us versus relying on hopes and prayers that our districts not experience the same tragedy we see at schools across the country. If this program saves one child or staff member's life, it's worth it. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Patel to

do her update. Thank you. Thank you, Robin, as well, for giving us that patron comment, and I appreciate you emailing me as well about that. And as I mentioned in the email, we will definitely be having that conversation further in our safety security committee that we've put together as well. So thank you. So welcome back, everyone, from spring break. I hope everybody got some chance to relax and spend time with family, friends, hopefully rejuvenate. Monday started fourth quarter, believe it or not. Our year is flying by. So just as I was thinking about it, you know, thinking about the three quarters, this is our final quarter of the year, started thinking about all that we've accomplished so far this year, and I started just writing it down. And I started thinking about it along our three goals for the strategic plan. And these are just, if we were looking at it from a 30,000-foot view under each goal, what are some things that we've worked on this year? So if you look at a place for everyone, we really started our empowerment nights this year, which were focused on our African-American families. We focused on our families EL families, and now we're gonna expand that to our board grant families. And I know Dr. Poole's been working really diligently to make sure that's happening. We're continuing with our affinity groups, and then our equity committee has really been focused on looking at data and not only just academic data, but also panorama data to see how it's impacting all of our students. So a lot of good work happening under goal one. And then when you look at goal two, we've really been focusing on empowered learning. As a leadership group, we meet once a month, and that's all our administrators from the district. And we've really been looking at what does empowered learning really mean? And what does it look like in the classrooms? So when we do our instructional walkthroughs with our building principals, We actually go into classrooms and see, are we seeing that in action? So a lot of focus on empowered learning because if you remember last year we introduced some of that work. It's progress, right? So this year we really wanted to see it being translated into the classrooms. Another thing we've been really working on is having the profile of the graduate in the elementary report cards. A lot of work has been happening behind the scenes to get that going so that next year it would be part of the report card and a lot of communication around it. The digital portfolios has also been another focus. Widown Middle School this year started digital portfolios for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. And what we're noticing is that there's some elementary classrooms that are also starting digital portfolios, so we've put a committee together this year to start to align that work. So we don't have different digital portfolios and the meaning behind what it is, and it's not as disjointed. So moving into next year, we want to have that conversation about how do you align the work behind that. And then this year, we also started our Teaching and Learning Advisory Council, which was brand new to get parents on. And we have a school board member rep on there to really learn about what we're doing with our curriculum work. And again, Dr. Milena Garganigo leads the charge with all of that. So again this is just like 30,000 foot view of what we're doing and then finally in head and heart with Dr. Wiens with all the work with the mental wellness because of the board support we've been able to hire the consultant we're working towards and student input we're working towards a mental health specialist hiring one a space at the high school eventually if that's what comes out of the needs assessment. But that's a direct result of listening to our student voice and our board support for that. And then obviously this year we had the new athletic philosophy and policy, and you can see that we're going to be competitive not only in academics but in athletics as well. And we've been keeping, Steve Hudson has been keeping data on all of that. Like has that made an impact on it? Because I know in the beginning we were worried that we would have fewer kids participating in sports. So he goes season by season to keep track of that and is meeting with his captain's council and community groups that he's put together to get input on that. And then finally, we've been really working on having a social emotional learning curriculum because that was again from our community engagement nights where the parents were very vocal about having something for our students and so K through five I believe, Dr wins has really started to get that going and then we're working on the middle school and elementary eventually as well. Besides that, obviously salary conversations, PTTE study results that we're gonna be bringing forward pretty soon. And then this year we've really been working as a leadership team to create a data dashboard that we would like to go live in August on our website that aligns the work to our strategic plan. And so looking at data and putting that under each goal so that if any patron or community member wants to see where we are specific to an objective that can go on our website to look at it. So we're going to be working on that. We have been all year, and then hopefully this summer we can start building it through the communications department. So a lot of work happening. And one of the main things that we're really starting to communicate and articulate and be intentional about is we talk about every child in this district. We want to make sure we have high expectations for the success for every child. So even if a child is not where they need to be, what are we doing to help them? And how are we being very strategic about it. And so that's we're being very intentional focus on it. We actually asked all of our building principals to attend a conference before June and at that conference when they return to have an action plan outlining how we're going to help every single child in the school. So a lot of that work is with interventions and so we're hoping to continue that into next year as well. So we talk about each and every child. And I share all that with you, again, 30,000 foot view, but I think it's good because we continue to always talk about, which is my, I do that a lot, like how do we get better? How do we get better, and we never pause to really celebrate and think about all the things that we are doing, and that we're doing it really well. is there room for improvement? Always is, but there's some amazing things that we're doing. And today I'm so excited because you get to hear about two of the programs that we have at the high school and I'm glad to see the students here with their advisors who are gonna talk about these amazing things that we are doing. But having said that, I also know that there's a lot of room for growth. So all of that I share with you because it would not be possible without each of you as board members. It is March. That means from one week, we used to recognize you for one week in March as School Board Appreciation Week. This year Missouri said let's make it a whole month. So the whole month we've been celebrating you. But I know it's volunteering. You're giving up your time and it's not just on Wednesday nights once a month. Board members are constantly working emails, you get questions, you have to read things that I send you. There's a lot of work that happens and a lot of sacrifices. I know that a lot of you even miss your own children's activities because you have to be here. And I know that you've missed that. I know that when you do go to events, you probably get asked a thousand questions. So you're not even really present at that event for your own children. So really none of this work in this district wouldn't happen without you. I put my own note for you guys in your baskets, but the schools also wanted to thank you. So they've sent the cards and they've sent you some gifts just as a small token of appreciation from the bottom of my heart. I really want to thank you for your support, your perspective for challenging us and pushing us to be better because we really, really appreciate all of you. So thank you very much. Appreciate it. And I will hand it off to Carter.

do her update. Thank you. Thank you, Robin, as well, for giving us that patron comment, and I appreciate you emailing me as well about that. And as I mentioned in the email, we will definitely be having that conversation further in our safety security committee that we've put together as well. So thank you. So welcome back, everyone, from spring break. I hope everybody got some chance to relax and spend time with family, friends, hopefully rejuvenate. Monday started fourth quarter, believe it or not. Our year is flying by. So just as I was thinking about it, you know, thinking about the three quarters, this is our final quarter of the year, started thinking about all that we've accomplished so far this year, and I started just writing it down. And I started thinking about it along our three goals for the strategic plan. And these are just, if we were looking at it from a 30,000-foot view under each goal, what are some things that we've worked on this year? So if you look at a place for everyone, we really started our empowerment nights this year, which were focused on our African-American families. We focused on our families EL families, and now we're gonna expand that to our board grant families. And I know Dr. Poole's been working really diligently to make sure that's happening. We're continuing with our affinity groups, and then our equity committee has really been focused on looking at data and not only just academic data, but also panorama data to see how it's impacting all of our students. So a lot of good work happening under goal one. And then when you look at goal two, we've really been focusing on empowered learning. As a leadership group, we meet once a month, and that's all our administrators from the district. And we've really been looking at what does empowered learning really mean? And what does it look like in the classrooms? So when we do our instructional walkthroughs with our building principals, We actually go into classrooms and see, are we seeing that in action? So a lot of focus on empowered learning because if you remember last year we introduced some of that work. It's progress, right? So this year we really wanted to see it being translated into the classrooms. Another thing we've been really working on is having the profile of the graduate in the elementary report cards. A lot of work has been happening behind the scenes to get that going so that next year it would be part of the report card and a lot of communication around it. The digital portfolios has also been another focus. Widown Middle School this year started digital portfolios for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. And what we're noticing is that there's some elementary classrooms that are also starting digital portfolios, so we've put a committee together this year to start to align that work. So we don't have different digital portfolios and the meaning behind what it is, and it's not as disjointed. So moving into next year, we want to have that conversation about how do you align the work behind that. And then this year, we also started our Teaching and Learning Advisory Council, which was brand new to get parents on. And we have a school board member rep on there to really learn about what we're doing with our curriculum work. And again, Dr. Garganego leads the charge with all of that. So again this is just like 30,000 foot view of what we're doing and then finally in head and heart with Dr. Wiens with all the work with the mental wellness because of the board support we've been able to hire the consultant we're working towards and student input we're working towards a mental health specialist hiring one a space at the high school eventually if that's what comes out of the needs assessment. But that's a direct result of listening to our student voice and our board support for that. And then obviously this year we had the new athletic philosophy and policy, and you can see that we're going to be competitive not only in academics but in athletics as well. And we've been keeping, Steve Hudson has been keeping data on all of that. Like has that made an impact on it? Because I know in the beginning we were worried that we would have fewer kids participating in sports. So he goes season by season to keep track of that and is meeting with his captain's council and community groups that he's put together to get input on that. And then finally, we've been really working on having a social emotional learning curriculum because that was again from our community engagement nights where the parents were very vocal about having something for our students and so K through five I believe, Dr wins has really started to get that going and then we're working on the middle school and elementary eventually as well. Besides that, obviously salary conversations, PTTE study results that we're gonna be bringing forward pretty soon. And then this year we've really been working as a leadership team to create a data dashboard that we would like to go live in August on our website that aligns the work to our strategic plan. And so looking at data and putting that under each goal so that if any patron or community member wants to see where we are specific to an objective that can go on our website to look at it. So we're going to be working on that. We have been all year, and then hopefully this summer we can start building it through the communications department. So a lot of work happening. And one of the main things that we're really starting to communicate and articulate and be intentional about is we talk about every child in this district. We want to make sure we have high expectations for the success for every child. So even if a child is not where they need to be, what are we doing to help them? And how are we being very strategic about it. And so that's we're being very intentional focus on it. We actually asked all of our building principals to attend a conference before June and at that conference when they return to have an action plan outlining how we're going to help every single child in the school. So a lot of that work is with interventions and so we're hoping to continue that into next year as well. So we talk about each and every child. And I share all that with you, again, 30,000 foot view, but I think it's good because we continue to always talk about, which is my, I do that a lot, like how do we get better? How do we get better, and we never pause to really celebrate and think about all the things that we are doing, and that we're doing it really well. is there room for improvement? Always is, but there's some amazing things that we're doing. And today I'm so excited because you get to hear about two of the programs that we have at the high school and I'm glad to see the students here with their advisors who are gonna talk about these amazing things that we are doing. But having said that, I also know that there's a lot of room for growth. So all of that I share with you because it would not be possible without each of you as board members. It is March. That means from one week, we used to recognize you for one week in March as School Board Appreciation Week. This year Missouri said let's make it a whole month. So the whole month we've been celebrating you. But I know it's volunteering. You're giving up your time and it's not just on Wednesday nights once a month. Board members are constantly working emails, you get questions, you have to read things that I send you. There's a lot of work that happens and a lot of sacrifices. I know that a lot of you even miss your own children's activities because you have to be here. And I know that you've missed that. I know that when you do go to events, you probably get asked a thousand questions. So you're not even really present at that event for your own children. So really none of this work in this district wouldn't happen without you. I put my own note for you guys in your baskets, but the schools also wanted to thank you. So they've sent the cards and they've sent you some gifts just as a small token of appreciation from the bottom of my heart. I really want to thank you for your support, your perspective for challenging us and pushing us to be better because we really, really appreciate all of you. So thank you very much. Appreciate it. And I will hand it off to Carter.

All right. So as you guys all know, we're going to be talking about the CTE division, especially as it pertains to empowered learning. But I'll let everyone here tonight tell you all about how much students love these programs and how they're going at the school. But what I will say is that I know a lot of students, as they really enjoy these types of programs, would also like to see these styles of learning come into their other classes as well, where really students can be accountable for what they're learning and really feel as though what they're learning is very applicable to what they'll be doing in the real world. And I'll also talk a little bit about this idea of empowered learning and how it's playing out at the younger schools. So we talked to the students at Merrimack, Glenridge, and Captain, and they've all talked about how they've seen a lot of progress as it pertains to these empowered learning initiatives where students do have more choice as to what they're learning, how they learn it, and sort of like they're setting in the classroom which is a good sign but they also talked about how it's not yet like sort of the norm in these classrooms and it's something that teachers are striving to do but it's not necessarily completely like the normal in their classrooms yet which I mean it has to be expected as this is sort of a new change but it's definitely there's good indication that it's going in the right direction. And another thing that we talked about them with was maybe getting some of these sort of CTE experiences at the elementary school and middle school level, maybe not necessarily through like complete classes, but just getting the experience of taking what you learn in school and seeing how it could apply to the real world, maybe through like some special days at school or clubs outside of it, which would be accessible to kids. And then the last thing that I'll talk about is sort of some of the things that we talked about earlier in the year as it pertains to like grading policies and things like that, and sort of how they've played out at the high school. So some of the things we talked about earlier were things like school policies about retakes for tests and whether or not homework would be counted in grades and how curriculums are changing between the same class with different teachers. And overall, something that I and other students have noticed is that it doesn't really seem like there's been a lot of follow-through in sending out the message of what we think are the right policies to the students and teachers. And a lot of students don't really know what is the school's homework policy as it changes from division, division, and they don't know, like, am I allowed to get a retake in all of these different classes? And as a result, we've seen that it really has enabled teachers to really just go with their gut, which, I mean, on some level can be a good thing, but it also has resulted in getting these different practices between the same class with different teachers so I think it would just be really helpful to sort of lay it all out there or even allow the teachers to come together and like publicly say like these are our policies as it pertains to retakes homework and things like that because I just feel like it'd be a lot more clear and fair to students so that's it

thank you Carter and I agree All right, so we are on to our first presentation of the night, Empowered Learning. So come on up, guys.

Good evening, everyone. I have the pleasure of introducing two of our career and technical education teachers, and then I'm going to let the teachers introduce their teams of students that they've brought. But one of the things that I want to say publicly is, and Carter teed this up for me, I feel like you do this a lot for me. Like you... I feel like you tee it up for me with a pretty regular basis, so thank you. I appreciate that. So our career and technical education department, so Justin Hildebrand is here with us and then Steve Beecham and his team are here with us and they're here to talk about two different programs that we feel like do a really nice job of amplifying empowered learning within the district. So taking the theoretical that students learn across disciplines and being able to put it into practical application within settings that oftentimes allow students to interact in real world settings, allow them to interact with adults outside of the school setting and really try to explore their passions. So publicly I want to thank you all as well as your entire department because I think you are a model of empowered learning within the district and I know that the commitment that you have to children and to the work that you do with students on a daily basis is one of the things that makes us great. So I appreciate that. So I'm gonna hand it over to Justin. He and his team are gonna talk about the Catalyst, and then we'll shift groups that are at the table, and Steve Beecham will come up with his team of students to talk about a new program that we started this year called Global STEM Squads.

Thank you, Melina, for those kind words. Thank you, board, for having us here. So I'm Justin Hildebrand. I teach business and marketing at Clayton High School. First of all, apologies for my less than professional look. I came from golf practice. And trust me, the hat is way better than no hat. And I also make them look a lot better. So I think it's a win-win for everybody. Chris, are you going to queue up the presentation? Yeah. So this is a pretty robust presentation about our Catalyst program. I wanted to make sure our board and our community had it so that you can learn more information about it, ways to contact us. But I'm going to go through a lot of this pretty quickly because I'm sure you don't want to listen to me speak, rather hear from our student associates. So you can see, I love hearing this experiential learning, empowerment learning, because that's basically our slogan, right? Make pitch experience. The idea of giving them real hands-on innovative learning. And so our concept is we call it professional immersion, experiential learning. That basically means let's have them learn by doing it. And we do this in a wide variety of ways. This program was started at Clayton High School when I first came to Clayton High School six years ago. I mean, it's since grown into a four-district consortium. So one of the cool aspects of our program is that students from all four of our consortium districts, Brentwood, Clayton, Ladue, and U City are all leave their home schools and then come to our shared catalyst space down on the Hanley Industrial Complex. So it's about five to 10 minutes from Clayton High School in traffic. And so it's a pretty nice local area for all of our students to come learn. We really want them to feel like they're leaving their high school setting and now they're joining our catalyst program. So I'm actually going to use the term associates because that's how we refer to them, not as students. Again, we want them to feel this is real life learning We are part of a larger program called the CAPS Network, so I want to say we're not a unique program. We are, but there are a lot of sister programs throughout the country, over 100 programs nationwide. This began in Kansas City, but there are, I think, actually over a dozen just in the St. Louis area. Parkway Spark, for example, STL Caps in South County, St. Charles has one, Washington. I could keep going on. There's a lot of programs with similar like-mindedness, but we all offer different strands and kind of approach it in different ways. So kind of how we approach it is that we – actually, you know what? Let me introduce our associates first. You know what? I'm going to skip past this and introduce you guys in a second because – Oh, you know what? Sorry. This is the shorter presentation. My mistake. All right. So before I kind of introduce our associates, I want to tell you some things that we do. So professionalism training is a really important component. We want to make sure that as we, so to speak, release them into the world to find their learning opportunities, we want to make sure they're trained and they feel appropriate to do that, are comfortable doing that. So things like interview strategies, make sure they have proper resumes, LinkedIn, cover letters, those kind of things. And just that professionalism correspondence that I think a lot of people don't necessarily are taught in high school. They just kind of learn by doing. So we hopefully give them a good amount of training with that. And then from there, it's back to the empowerment that even Carter mentioned a little bit, which is we call it student choice. And the concept is what do you want to learn? What do you think is going to be most valuable? And so they have the option to pursue an internship. Again, these are all things they do during their class time. that we don't take them out of other classes. So they come to us and they can now pursue an internship during their class time. They can partner with businesses and work on small projects with them. They can run an event, something like that. And so again, they have a lot of different options where they can launch their own business. And actually the Clayton Education Foundation has been great about funding that. We call it Angel Grants. And the concept is if they have a business idea, they can pitch it to one of our investors or one of our education foundation members and it's basically no strings attached money. It's not like Shark Tank where they get a cut of the money. It's here's the money, let's see what you can do with it, and hopefully they can launch and grow a business. So having said all that, now we can hear from our associates and some of the cool things that they're doing. There has been a little bit of change in who's here, so I'm just going to, rather than flip slides, just introduce you to who they are, and they can tell you about their experiences. So if you mute us, we have Dylan Rossini, we have Nathan Sandler. So take it away, Sophie. Thank you.

I think

so. Can you

guys hear me? Okay. Hi, my name is Sophia Mutis. I'm a senior at Clayton High School and I am an associate for Catalyst. So I kind of just want to explain how he was saying at the beginning of Catalyst, so in August and September, we start off by making our LinkedIn, by making our resumes, by learning how to interview and just practicing with other people who come in and practice with us. And after that, they kind of just send us out on our own and obviously help us get our internships done or whatever we need. So I personally went the internship route at first. I reached out to a few of my connections, and I was able to get an internship for Sweetology. I don't know if you guys know what that is. And I was their social media marketing intern For about six weeks, I did blog posts. I did Pinterest pins. I did about five to seven Instagram and Facebook stories for them. And then shortly after that, I kind of realized that was just not for me. So I ended that, and Mr. Hildebrand came to me and pitched me – to help do the visual and audio recording studio design because we are remodeling our whole building, and that was one of the rooms that needed redesigning. And Mr. Hildebrand knows that I'm the podcast editor for The Globe here at Clayton, so he thought that I would have expertise or knowledge with the equipment already needed. So for about a month and a half after that, I researched and I budgeted and brought different options of different sections of materials we needed. And before winter break, we kind of pitched our... what we've been doing all semester, and that was what I used to pitch what I think that we should bring into the studio. So over winter break, Mr. Hildebrand kind of started buying the stuff that we needed, and then when we came back, Dylan here started helping me assemble the room, and now we're pretty much done. There's just a few things we needed to do. So after I finished that project, me and Dylan, we kind of started looking for another internship because that's really what I wanted to do. This podcast studio was kind of a side project. And we were able to land an internship at Laura McCarthy Real Estate, which is kind of where we're starting now. And we've only been doing it for about the beginning weeks of March. Yeah. So that's where I'm at right now.

Hi, I'm Dylan Rossini, and I'm a senior at Clayton High School. And so how I started this year, as well as Sophia and Nathan, is I did all the internships, the interviews, and the resumes, and everything like that. And then I actually have been doing a lawn care business for most of my life. And so I was on the route to pitch that to the Angel Grants to hopefully get some money. expand my business a little bit. And so I worked on that a lot during the first semester. I came, Mr. Hildebrand helped me come up with like a slogan, a logo, a name, an email and everything that I needed to really get going. And then from there, I started advertising more on the Nextdoor app and flyers and more stuff like that. And then from there, I helped Sophia at the podcast room. And now we're on our Laura McCarthy internship, which I think should help me a lot in my future life because I'm hoping to be somewhat into real estate. I don't know if I want to be a real estate agent or an investor or something like that, but I just know that I want to be involved in real estate. And so this is a great starting point for me to pursue that path.

Hi, I'm Nathan Sandler. I'm a senior at Clayton also. And well, you already heard what we did at the beginning of the year. But I decided to go the route of the internship. And so I reached out to a couple of my connections and I was able to get an internship at CareVet, which is based here in St. Louis, right down downtown Clayton. And I don't know what I want to do yet in college. And so I kind of used this internship to like go through all the different phases of business and explore it and see what I most want to do in life, really. So first I started out with the marketing division, and they had me – I wrote blogs. A couple of them got published to all of their websites across the U.S., and then I realized, kind of like Sophia, that it wasn't really for me. And so I then migrated to the deals and acquisitions team. And that's where I wrote like, uh, they're called CMAs. And I basically just helped care vet analyze the area of which like hospitals and vets, um, and basically decide whether they were like, if they wanted to purchase them, um, And now that we're back from spring break, I'm planning on starting with the finance team. And I don't really know what I'm going to do yet, but I'm pretty excited and I'm going to continue this internship over the summer.

Thank you. That was awesome. So. If you want any more information, obviously we're here to answer questions as well. But you can certainly reach out and contact us. And we're very active on the socials. So you can kind of see what we're doing day to day. I did kind of skip through a few other things that we do facilitate, which are our monthly panels, speaker panels. We bring in people, four to five people from various industries just to kind of candidly share their experiences with our associates prepare questions and just kind of a little back and forth as opposed to a guest speaker which everyone knows that's just people talking at them as opposed to speaking with them um and then we also facilitate site visits so it's pretty powerful to actually take a team into the business and walk around and get a behind the scenes uh look of what it's really like to work in a particular xyz we went down to the foundry we've been to purina we're going to um Nisa, which is a marketing firm in downtown Clayton here in the next couple weeks. So we're just kind of trying to expose them to as many people in this industry as possible. And like Nathan said, maybe figure out some things they want to do and explore for the rest of their lives or at the very least check some things off that they don't want to do anymore, which these two definitely had that experience as well. So yeah, that's pretty much it. Thank you very much for having us. And if you have any questions, let us know.

Awesome. Thank you for being here. Does anyone have any questions?

I just want to say congratulations to you kids, but also to you, Mr. Hildebrand, because I'm a huge fan of the Catalyst. And it seems every year you get more and more kids interested and can't even maybe take everybody that wants to do it. But I just think giving our kids these real-life experiences is priceless. And we actually talked about this yesterday. today, I had to walk through at Clayton High School. But I would be so curious to follow these kids through college and beyond and see if they did pursue the interests that they learned in Catalyst as a career or as a major in college or whatever. I just think that would be an interesting follow-up to the program. Is it really having the impact on them in life that we hope it is?

Yeah. Like I said this morning, we're starting to do a better job of tracking moving forward. Yeah,

that'll be really cool to

see, I think.

Anyway, so thank you. I think it's, we're giving our kids such an awesome opportunity to be able to do this. So thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, I agree. Go ahead.

Thank you all for being here with us and not to repeat too much, but I love this program and have been fortunate enough to kind of see pretty close up the way it's worked and congratulate you, Mr. Hildebrand, and all of you for your efforts and what you've been able to do. I think I can't overstate the importance of some of the lessons that you each touched on or one of the lessons that each touched on, which is finding out what you don't want to do. If you ask certain people who might be related to me, I might have harped on that a bit too much, but it's such a valuable thing to be able to try something and know that, like, No I've tried this and now I know I want to do something else. I think that's just a great thing that we've given our students. I would love to hear any of you if you have ideas or thoughts about something that Carter mentioned which is how we can take the kinds of experiences and the things that you've You've done in catalyst and incorporate some of those concepts into other classes or other curriculums Or if you you have ways to compare what you've done in catalyst versus other Other classes that might be helpful for us

Yeah, so I think Catalyst is a great class overall. It helps people prepare for the outside world, outside of school. So I think that's a great concept right there. But within Catalyst, you learn how you have to get stuff done on time. You learn how to interact with other adults through the panels and everything like that. You know how to ask a question. You know how to go to an adult and talk with them, which I think could help your teachers a lot. You know how go to them and explain, oh, maybe you didn't finish an assignment on time. OK, can I get some extra time? Or ask them a question, like a simple question, like how do you do this assignment? And I think KALIS gives you a great experience for working with people that may be older than you and more experienced in the real world, and they can help you a lot in life.

Um, more specifically, based off what Dylan was saying, I think that the two most important skills that you guys should try to incorporate into middle school and probably not elementary school, maybe elementary school is public speaking and learning how to interview because I feel like those are really two important soft skills that maybe classes don't directly touch on but are very important in building students who are able to not only get into college but find jobs later on and build them up for success. So I don't know how that would be incorporated into classes, but I think those are two skills that younger students should learn.

And also aside from the jobs, like even most kids like try and find an internship in college. And that's like a great goal. And then with Catalyst, that's our main, like you have the opportunity to do that and pursue that. And just a great experience overall. Yeah.

And you guys are kind of a step ahead too of most students in your position. If you're going to major in business in college, To already have a LinkedIn set up and already have a resume and experience with interviews and stuff will help you so much. So

that's great. So is this a class that you can take any year or do you have to be a junior or senior to take it?

So technically anyone could take it, but there is the transportation component because they have to leave their homeschools. They have to get to where we are. And then as they're mentioning the internships, a lot of them are off-site. And often they will just sign in and then just go to their internship. Got it. So there have been some of our associates that I haven't actually seen in weeks because they've just been off working at their internships. And then they come to the other learning experiences when they – they feel like it's able, they're able, or it's something that really interests them. And the other layer to that is that it's really hard to fit. This is a two class period commitment. It's two full credits, but finding the time in your schedule just from a counseling perspective is really hard to do with graduation requirements. So generally we see seniors and now we're starting to see some juniors. Really exciting. We're starting to see juniors and then repeat. They're repeating at the second year, which is pretty neat. We had one from last year that repeated and we're going to have three from this year repeating next year. So

Thank you

all for being here. I'm so excited about this program. I have a question for you first and then for the students. Tell me about the numbers. You know what I mean? Tell me just because I don't know. I would just love to know how many students are in it, how many students want to be in it, what's the capacity. And then also tell me What do you do to sort of market this class? Because I think there probably are students that don't know a lot about it or the amazing things that you just mentioned that go on in it because I had no idea all of those skills, the fact that you have professionals come in and just talk with, I mean, it just seems like a lot of different learning opportunities that maybe reading on a course description may or may not capture. So I guess in addition to the numbers that you're getting, what kind of, again, we don't do marketing for classes, but you know what I'm saying? How do you spread the word about what you offer?

Right. So, well, we started kind of grassroots. We started as a semester-long class that was embedded in the middle of the school day, just kind of like let's rework this class and make it kind of similar to this experiential learning things. And since then, we've grown from that was a seven-person class with just Clayton. This year, we have 55 associates from all four school districts. Next year is the first year that we have, and these guys, it doesn't matter to them because they're graduating, but we've had them apply. They go through the application process, but frankly, we've just pretty much been accepting almost everyone because we want the program to grow. And we are also a program that doesn't accept people because of GPA. We don't ask questions like what's your GPA? What classes have you taken? There's no prerequisites, but it's why do you want to be here? What do you think you're going to get out of this program? So having said that, this year we really have been promoting and at least informing all four of our districts. I've gone to open houses for all of our districts, I've spoken to the incoming 8th grade parents or 9th grade parents at the 8th grade parent night whatever it was called um so those are kind of the things we're doing is to inform the parents and hopefully that kind of disseminates down to the students and then we've been at various you know things that high school does like they do like a quad day where you learn about all the clubs and organizations so those kind of things a lot of it's word of mouth and like i mentioned the social media i think the best advocates for the program are these guys yeah i'm kind of telling their friends and seeing the cool things that they're getting to do and then exactly that kind of I could sell anything to a high school student, but they don't care what I'm going to say. It's about their peers.

Totally

agree. And so this next year is the first year where we are going to potentially have to start having conversations about, I don't want to say cutting people, but not accepting everyone and kind of looking at what juniors are applying first or seniors first and then juniors.

What would be the number?

So 50 is our capacity. A lot of that's just based on space.

But that's spread out amongst the four programs? Yes.

Right, but we all do meet at the same time. So there is kind of another layer to this in that as our applications continue to grow, we are hopefully going to be offering morning and afternoon sessions. And then we also offer multiple strands. So global business and entrepreneurship is the main strand. We also have humanities and social sciences. Oh, that's

what I was going to ask. We're

expanding to education next year with the Grow Your Own program, support from Clayton and Dr. Arnold. And we're hoping to expand into other high-demand industries as Things like bioscience, things like medicine, things like engineering and advanced manufacturing. But again, those are all kind of things that numbers dictate that. So as the numbers grow, we can maybe have multiple sessions and then the numbers probably grow more because now you can fit more in your schedule. There's a lot of logistics behind it, but we've seen nothing but growth in the last five years despite the COVID hit. We had a little bump, and now we're kind of going back up again. So we're pretty happy about that.

That's amazing. That was one of the questions I was going to ask, too, is what other things can students do? Because there's so many options out there. So it's amazing for them to have all the different things that they could look at and say, yes, that's something, other than just what they've done. Sounds like you guys are really enjoying it. I love that. Tell me, you basically cued me up to say, Do you know are other students talking about it is this a well-known program yet, or is it still relatively sort of you know not? You said I'm saying are the students knowledgeable that this is there and what actually is and

Um, yeah. So when I was a freshman, I don't know if it's still how it is now because I have not given like tours to freshmen, but when I was a freshmen, this was the class that like captured my attention. This was the class that I really wanted to take. Um, just based on like what I heard from the students and then talking to Mr. Hildebrand, um, uh, Personally, I tell a lot of people to take this class. I highly recommend it. I feel like I've learned a lot of great skills that will help me later in life. And yeah, I think that a lot of people, I'm sure they'll tell you about it, but I'm sure a lot of people talk about it to juniors and sophomores and even freshmen maybe about it. So yeah. Awesome.

Yeah, the same as Nathan. I heard about it through that tour that we had where we went through all of the different sections, and I kind of scheduled my whole classes just to be able to take this class senior year because it captured my attention, and I knew I wanted to take it. So even though there's no prerequisites, obviously getting to know the teachers, both Mr. Cochran that now left and Mr. Hildebrand was important, so I made sure to schedule... Other CTE classes that had them in it so that they would get to know me and I would be able to apply. And then people, whenever we talk about this class, oh, we're going to Catalyst, they ask what it is. And then they're like, oh, I wish I would have known about this class. Right. And I wish I would've been able to take it. That's what I'm thinking too. Yeah. Yeah.

And then for me, I have two younger brothers, and they know about this class, and they want to follow in my footsteps as well. And all of their friends, they just keep talking about it. Good, good. It's word of mouth, especially around the junior class. Yeah. I know a lot of my brother's friends know about it, and they're hoping to take it next year.

Awesome.

Awesome. All right. Good job, guys. Thank you for being here. You want a break? Okay. Yeah. What?

All right, everybody get a seat. While they're getting settled here, thank you for having us. My name is Steve Beecham and I am our career and tech ed curriculum coordinator and I teach our engineering and computer science courses at the high school. And tonight, we're here to talk a little bit about our Global STEM Squads program. And so before we turn it over to the kids, I'm going to have the kids do most of the presentation tonight. But I just want to kind of give you a little bit of background on how this came about. So this is a program that we decided to pilot this year. I came across this program in August. And the organization is called Global Brigades. And, you know, we've been talking a lot about empowered learning tonight. What's really interesting is Global Brigades, their whole mission is empowering communities. And so they do this through a holistic approach. And I apologize I don't have this on the slides, but their main website states, and I'm just going to read this, save lives through increased access to health care. change lives with clean water and in-home sanitation projects and better lives by developing business and community-owned banks so their goal is to get into these communities empower the communities so that they can lead their own way permanently out of poverty So it's really a neat program. The students are going to go ahead and talk about kind of like our journey through that. And so the presentation that you'll see tonight is what we actually presented back to the community and they'll tell you about the community. So we'll take it away. All right. So we'll start with some introductions here. So we just want to actually I'll have them introduce themselves as they as they go if that's all right. Okay. All right.

All right. So to give some more information on global group brigades, like, hi. My legs are really sensitive, so we don't need

to eat them.

Yeah, you're good. Just talk. Okay. Thank you. OK, so my name is Henry Shook. And to add some more information to what we just learned, Global Bregrids is a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve access to health care, clean water, and economic opportunity in under-deserved communities around the world. The organization was founded in 2004 by a group of university students who wanted to make a positive impact in the world. The organization has chapters in universities and schools like us across the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. These chapters organize volunteers who travel to partner communities to work on various projects. In addition to providing volunteers with hands-on experience, Global Brigades also offers educational programs and resources Help volunteers develop the skills and knowledge they need to make a meaningful difference in the world And it's a unique organization that seeks to empower communities and individuals and develop in countries to improve their lives and create a better future for us all

So this we Our section is more CAD-based, where it's more engineering-based, rather than some of the other groups that may be doing something else. So our purpose with this specific project is to improve the quality of life for the community of Cerro de Agua by designing an affordable, potable, and clean drinking water system. So that's where the engineering aspects comes in. Our partner school designed the piping system from the water source, and we are providing design plans for the water storage tank, which is all constructed from local materials, where we're also trying to limit the impact that we have and try to keep it as sustainable, but just make sure it can last for a long time and isn't causing more damage than... benefit, I guess. Our goal is to design a system that will serve the community for at least 20 years and will amount for the projected growth of the community. Working together with the community members we want to create a reasonable price range and a working solution to deliver clean water to each house and the school in that community.

Anyways, basically our process was spanning over 10 weeks. And what we did was we learned about the community, which is Cerro de Agua. And then we looked at the data, all of our available materials, and we learned about a lot of water systems. And we also had to learn new design softwares as well as calculating future needs for the community. So then we designed a system that will meet the needs of the community and developed a budget and our presentation. And yeah, that's basically what we did.

Community info. So the community that we built the water system for is Cerro de Agua and it's a small community in Nicaragua. There are 23 houses and this tank will benefit 85 people. The Global Brigades, the organization that we partner with, did a baseline survey to get more information about the people, like the name, their age, and the occupation. So around 43% of the individuals work as housekeeper, and then 39% are working in agriculture. They either own the land or they rent it from other people, and some of the crops that they grow are cabbage, potatoes, corns, and beans. The remaining 18% of the individuals who work as teachers are in day labor, and their income is not really high, like they earn like $2,500. to 6 000 cordobas monthly which is like 100 to 200 dollars which is really low and the highest they earned is like highest someone in the community earned is 600 dollars and that's just like one to two people and they also have a bank but people don't really earn that much

me again so the current water supply and sanitation conditions in the community are that no one has any form of public water service in their home most get water from nearby boreholes streams creeks or springs either via long hoses or carried in buckets and barrels from the springs those who carry the water spend an average of one hour per day carrying said water to and from their home. Then they store the water in bottles or buckets in their house for usage throughout the day. They're not filtered, not purified, just taken straight from the water source. In regards to sanitation, most people have a pit vitrine with a slab which is a kind of makeshift toilet with the occasional resident owning a flushable toilet with a septic tank built in. To wash their hands, they use buckets filled with water or pias with plastic bowls, which is makeshift sink. To bathe, they either have baths outside their house or none at all and few having one located inside their house, two or three members. Installing a community water system will improve the quality of life and overall health of Cerro de Agua because then they'll have access to filtered water.

So, hi, my name is Helen. And based on the assessment we mentioned above, the current population for the Cerro de Agua right now is 85 people. And using the formula provided for the projected population, we estimate that the population of Cerro de Aguas after 20 years will be around 200 people. And based on capacity of the water source, which is the maximum coming for this rain, it will be around 28 liters per minute and this determined that the water per person per day will be around 62 to 63 liters. And the table below shows the calculation we did from using the formula they have provided. Based on our calculations, the total amount of waters the community needs including the school each day is 16,000 liters of water. We want to make sure that the community has enough water each day and with the amount of water that the spring provides, the tank needs to hold about 5,600 liters of water to have enough for everyone.

Location is marked with the sea. It's the highest location in the community and the tank will The water will be distributed to the homes using gravity and there there will be 24 houses that are connected to the water system and So this is the tank that we designed. It is a cylindrical tank. meters tall with a diameter of one meter. It has it has an input pipe, and then an output pipe and event pipe. In addition to a ladder and an access on the top for cleaning the tank is the tank has to be cleaned. And then it also has a fence surrounding it to keep the tank safe from people Yeah. These are more views of the tank, where you can see the pipes. And then also, the capacity of this tank is 6.2 cubic meters, which is a little bit more than the 5,000 liters per day that we projected that the community would need.

Test results. So in order that the people could actually drink the water, we had to test the water. So the people who were involved in the project and who are currently in Cerro de Agua, they tested the water. And for the metal contaminants, the lab was 0.1 milligram, and it was lower than that. So they passed the result. And then the physical properties, which was like the pH of the water. So the allowed was various and the actual was various too. So we passed that one too. And the microbiology, which was 1.8 and it was lower than that. So it could be treated with chlorine. So since the water is treated and they can actually drink it, we can move forward with the plan of building the water system in Cerro de Agua.

So the total budget for the project will be around $2,800. This included both materials and labor costs, which is shown in the table. But this will only be the total cost of the tank because the pipelines and other networks will be designed by our partner school.

As much as we wish we could provide the tank to the community for free, it is unfortunately up to the community to foot the bill of the cost, to foot the cost of the bill. And with incomes ranging from at the very highest as we saw around $800 US dollars per month to as low as 30 US dollars per month, it would be extremely difficult for the community to raise enough money taking years to actually pay off the tank. To help the community with this cost, we made an effort to fundraise money using both a donut sale and an online fundraising website. It was our goal to fundraise about $1,500 for the cost of the tank. In the end, we have fundraised $926 as of today. Sorry, we've fundraised $951 as of March 15th 2023 and I have not And it is our hope that this fundraising effort will help the community with the cost of the tank

All right, so that's basically been our process throughout this. One thing that I would like to add, so this is the presentation that they did to the community and presented their solution to the community. But what they didn't tell you is I had them present it in Spanish. So they did present this out to the community in their native language, which was really cool to see. So we'll take any questions you got.

So is this a formal class at the high school or a club at the high school? How are you guys resourced? Is this the entirety of the club, and how often do you meet?

This was organized as an after-school club. We would meet semi-weekly. I think it was weekly. Wednesday nights. Yeah, Wednesday nights. After school, going until about 5.30 or 6, and during those meetings we would collaborate with the community, Sierra de Agua, and we would also spend time learning the programs that we could use to design the tank, and we spent time collaborating on efforts like fundraising.

Yeah, so this is the first year we've done this. The organization has a couple ways that schools can get involved. The first way is through a virtual component, which they actually started when COVID hit, just like a lot of things. But they also have an in-person component. And so since we were piloting it this year and we wanted to kind of like see what the experience was like, we had talked to some other schools about their experience and they all had amazing experiences. So we decided to go ahead and implement the virtual component this year right now because we were again piloting it and. Wanted to see how it went. We decided to put it in as an extracurricular activity, and we just put it out to the school and whoever wanted to join. So we had eight students, seven of which are here tonight. One student wasn't able to make it tonight, and they were all very committed and did a fantastic job with all of it. So I'm very proud of this group, but as far as moving forward we're still kind of figuring out I mean, we know that we want to continue this but we're trying to figure out like Where this fits like where we're going to put this if we're gonna try to put it into say one of like Like the civil engineering class for example might be a good fit But again, we just we're just trying to like figure out Still working it out, but it will continue, but we don't know if it's going to be extracurricular or if it's going in the curriculum at this point.

Well done, all of you. I mean, for a first-year program and for you guys to have accomplished this and the math and the CAD-based engineering and the language component, I mean, talk about an interdisciplinary kind of learning opportunity that's at the high school. I mean, I think it's amazing. So well done.

Thank you.

Any more questions? I'm so sorry if I missed this. Where is this, in Nicaragua?

So it's like, I'm trying to think, was it central? It was kind of like a northern central Nicaragua. And so we were able to, like in one of our, I think it was our second meeting, we went into Google Earth and we plotted it and we were able to kind of see all the surrounding areas and it was interesting. And then we were able to meet with the actual community via Zoom, which they don't have. So you guys, where were they? They don't have internet. So they had to go to a nearby town. And so they were doing this Zoom call in a restaurant. So it was really loud, but it was neat.

I'm just like blown away by you guys. This is really, really cool. I mean, you're changing the lives of real people that need it. And I just think it's, I hope you all feel really great about that. I mean, very cool. What is the timeline to getting this actually up and running? Do you have any idea?

So what do you mean by like

the getting the water? Is that,

oh, so it, so it's, it's like, um, you're talking about getting the system installed. So what has to happen now? So basically, um, the plans are done and, uh, you saw the test results. We were, we were actually, um, the, the engineers in Nicaragua had done tests on the water. but they have to send it off to the government. And it just so coincided with, we were presenting our plan to the community and Julio, who is our guide said, this literally just came in. I'm gonna let you guys tell the community that they've passed the water tests. And so we shared that information with them. So basically everything is in place. It's ready to go. What they're waiting on is they have to be able to fund it. So Global Brigades has, I mean obviously we've done some fundraising. The community will have to kick some money in and then they'll either look at grants from other NGOs or whatever but once they have the money, the funding, the construction will start.

Thank you so much.

So I don't think it's possible to overstate how amazed we all are at hearing about this. I mean it's an incredible experience for you all but it's probably an even more important experience for the people that you're impacting so thank you for that. And I'm sorry if I miss this, because there's probably a lot of things about this process that I didn't understand. But how are you able to do the testing of the water before the system is built? And I'm sorry that's a dumb question, but I don't quite understand how you know how it's going to work when the system's not built yet. Does that make sense? Does anybody want to answer

it? OK, go ahead, .

The first step in the process is to find a suitable source at the location where it's happening. So they do the global group brigades does tests on the water, like, including, like, the rate of the water flow. So make sure it's enough to support the community. And so they chose this was the source before. before we designed our tanks, so they took samples from the water from that source and did tests on it to make sure the contaminants were at acceptable levels.

Okay, so the test is sort of, and again, I'm sorry if this isn't the right terminology, but the test is kind of on the raw source water? Yes, it's a lab test. Okay, not that, I was picturing like... what the treatment that the tank provided or the filtering system provided, and I just wasn't quite, I probably just didn't listen well enough. So

if you want to break it down, basically what will happen is there's a spring. It literally comes out of the ground, and it literally flows down the hill into a little stream. And so the other school designed a system that basically builds a wall around the spring, and then so it'll go into this little basin. And then from the basin, they have a pipe that goes over to a pump station. And the pump station will send it up to the tank. And then the tank uses gravity to feed all the homes, to create the water pressure and feed the homes.

Okay. That makes sense. So

that's the whole system. But we did the tank portion of the system.

And is that spring? Like you talked about... residents getting water in buckets from a source. Is that where they're getting water from now, or is that some? Anybody

remember? You want to talk about the source?

There were many different sources they could get it from, but this was the most Viable for our project specifically because it was so elevated That's we chose this specific water source I don't know if the majority of them use this water source, but it was on someone's land which they did Donate to the project

Thank you for explaining that this is yeah, it's incredible.

So thank you I

So how can the board support this program?

That's a great question. And I will let you know.

OK. Be sure to, because I think you are hearing that there is a lot of support for this. And this type of opportunity for students and the experience you guys are having, it's incredible that you can have it outside of the classroom. I would love to think of ways that we can incorporate that into the engineering programs in the classroom to increase participation. So yeah, let us know. What we can do to help support these types of programs and efforts it's very impressive

yeah right now we're like our hang up right now is we're kind of waiting on schedules. If so, what my fear is that we have multiple civil engineering classes run and then how do we do that across multiple sure. class so like I said we're working out some logistics we definitely had an amazing experience and I think that this is something we want to definitely continue with we just got to figure out the best way to implement this

and the globe should do a story on you guys if they haven't already. So, I mean it's, like I said, it's well done. Thank you for sharing with us.

They did a fantastic job. Thank you all for having us tonight.

Thank you. Do you all speak Spanish or did you need help from Spanish teachers? So

me and a few other people kind of worked together collaboratively. We had a few parents who spoke fluently, so we were kind of going off of that, though there were some... Variations in the dialect.

Yeah,

so that was a bit challenging but it was mainly a few of our students who spoke the language and then we were just relaying off of what our parents corrected

I guess because I was thinking that's a cool opportunity to Interpret, you know between the Spanish Spanish classes and you guys to work together on the communication piece

How did you guys choose that location?

We did not choose. So when we signed up, they basically have projects lined up. So they had recently... I had mentioned earlier that the way that Global Brigades makes contact, so they initially make contact within a community, usually through free medical screenings. But it takes a little while to... make the connection, build the relationship, build the trust of the community, get to know the community leaders and then educate the community around sanitation and all of that. And so basically they're actively working to foster these relationships and then once these relationships are in place and the community's on board with partnering, like again, they're very adamant about the community as a partner in this, like they have to have a stake in this, then they can start moving forward with these projects. So Cerro de Agua was a newer community that the Global Brigades is working with and actually they had tried to do some things on their own and without any success and then a neighboring community worked with Global Brigades and they kind of were like we want to get in touch with them. So they're the ones that reached out to Global Brigades then establish that connection and then it's we worked from there so so next time we do it we would be with most likely another community and maybe even a different type of project depending on on the need

so yeah it's

nonprofit that I think originated by university students. So a bunch of university students started in 2004 and it's grown ever

since. And if you talk to people in the medical profession, especially if they're connected to the universities in any way, when you say global brigades, they'll be like, oh, we've worked with them before. A lot of our students will go and do medical type stuff with them as well.

Yeah, it's interesting because this also integrates public health. And I don't know how much you guys actually spoke about that because so much of what you're doing is engineering and all of this sort of scientific stuff. But in general, it also is a public health service that you're providing and you're getting to learn about what that is and what that looks like in a community. So yeah, if you guys have had any interest in public health, you have this, you know, Now they have this actual real-world knowledge of what that would, oh, maybe I want to major in that. So again, just all these ways that our students are able to see what they may or may not like. And now that we all know so much more about public health because of our recent history, it's amazing to see students actually seeing what public health is in action. So that's very exciting. And again, a way to integrate into our biology classes what public health is. We're going to continue to be as a nation and as a globe, needing to really be experts in public health in general and all of us as a community being aware of what that means. And so this is one small but really mighty example of what that could look like. So kudos to all of you. And if it was something you are passionate about, I would say take some classes in college.

One, I hope I'm not cutting off any questions, but one thing I would like to add as a student who was part of this group that stuck out to me about this experience as opposed to other extracurriculars that I've done in the past was how student-led it was. We showed up for the first session, and we were put in touch with the community. And from there, it was essentially entirely student-led. I mean, we got to ask the community representatives questions. We received direct answers. There was no middleman for communication. Mr. Beecham was in the back of the room just making sure we didn't veer off topic, but other than that, there was almost no mentor intervention in many parts of the process. I feel like this experience not only gives us the opportunity to apply the things we've learned in class and in some of the other extracurriculars we've taken, But it also allows us to come into our own as members of the global community to personally and as a team of students and people help, directly help some of our fellow humans. And I think this is, in case any of you are still on the fence about supporting this program, I think this is an incredibly important opportunity for both the students and for outreach as a whole.

I don't think so either. Well said. And when we think about the portrait of the graduate, think about all the competencies. You guys are literally like modeling every single competency in this one project. We're so proud of you. And I'm so glad the board got to hear from them. And thank you, Steve, for guiding them and bringing these opportunities to them. It truly means a lot. Thank you, guys. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for

being her. Appreciate it.

I guess let's take a five minute break.

I want them to become like a clock.

Okay, so We are on we're gonna talk about our Policies right now and I think we are on our DB our annual budget

uh... msb use of submitted some uh... recommended changes to this policy regarding our budget uh... most of its proven by changes in regulation or legislation uh... specifically updates the policy to align with m six six regulations at the section regarding title one funds and how we compare spending between buildings uh... this is very critical on federal funding uh... where they expect to see schools that multiple schools they have the same grade set up to have equal spending so we have multiple elementaries And so as we prepare the next budget, we're looking closely at how spending is equalized between those buildings. It removes some language for a hearing that was never had a legal requirement and it modifies some budget experiences to match statutory language. So that's the gist of that. If you do pass this budget, you'll see right behind us there's a policy regarding fiscal year. That language has been moved over here as we would be rescinding that policy. This is a first reading only.

Does anyone have any questions on this policy?

So my only question is, it references a budget officer in place of what I think used to be the superintendent in the policy. Does that need to be a defined person? I guess I'm asking both our legal counsel and I'm asking John. Who is the budget officer for the district if it's not the named superintendent or the CFO? so that's the only language change that i just wanted to make sure that that's not am you know there's no ambiguity there that what is who is the budget officer should that be a defined term should it be the superintendent or the superintendent's designate example the cfo that that's my only um comment on you know the the policy and i understand that it incorporates the other and so you don't need the other one but that that's my um question is

Fair comment. Typically our policies stipulate the superintendent or the superintendent's designee, and that would be completely acceptable here, or it would also be acceptable to appoint the CFO.

And in this one it says the board designates the superintendent to serve as the district's budget officer. Right.

So it's not an extra person because I was confused

a little bit too by the going back and

forth in the language. I think consistent presentation, superintendent or superintendents designated. I thought

before in the past we discussed there was going to be somebody else. in a position like that or something else that was similar in finance.

Well, I think if you have it as a defined term, right? If you capitalize the B and you capitalize the O, then you can have it as a define term legally on the bottom and then say superintendent or designate because I noticed that you got rid of most of the superintendent and it just says budget officers. That would be my recommendation as long as that passes the sniff test again with the lawyers and the intent of the language.

Yeah, cuz

I mean otherwise who you know, who's the budget officer? Yeah, I think a janitor I just don't want there to be any confusion that You know the buck stops at the superintendent or the superintendent's designate so

Yeah, it does say in that first sentence of the second paragraph under budget planning and adoption, I think that's what you just read, Nisha. The board designates a superintendent to serve as the district's budget officer, and then it goes on to talk about the budget officer will direct, which is the superintendent, because it just specified that. So I knew when I read it, but I can totally understand why it does. It's two different things, sort of, and yet it's the same thing.

I think the consistent approach is elsewhere in our policies. It's superintendent or superintendent-designee. Yeah. Okay. Very appropriate. Thank

you. Okay. And then policy DBB.

We can cover that.

Covered it. Oh, sorry.

Okay. I kind of covered DBB. You covered both. Sorry. It's going to

be rescinded.

That was the one that was rescinded.

So

where

are

we?

We're on to 7.03 now, okay. JFCL.

Good evening everyone. Tonight I'm bringing forward policy JFCL for its first reading. This policy outlines good citizenship schools that offer the A-plus schools program. This is a new policy for district consideration. It is not required by any state law, but MSBA does recommend that districts who do have A-plus programs have a policy in place. We usually have anywhere between five and seven students each year who participate in the A-plus program. And so MSBA has created this initial Policy just based on feedback that school districts have received because often districts have received Appeals related to the citizenship

component.

However in our school district Historically some of the peels the building has fielded have been more related to the attendance requirement as part of a plus and not necessarily the citizenship one I After perusing the policy a little bit more since I posted it, I think there is a little bit of language in the citizenship component that I could probably rewrite to make it feel a little less punitive. It's got a firm hand to it right now with some of the word choice, and I think there's some synonyms that I could probably use. Flip into there. I have to

say, it did seem a little antiquated, this whole thing. We have a culture of community members that let their kids drink, let their kids do a lot of stuff, and they're good kids. They're solid, doing really well in life. And like these, I'm not saying, I don't condone underage drinking, but I'm just saying there are kids in here who do some interesting things. A lot of kids. And I would hate to alienate these kids because of these things that are kind of like

antiquated.

And then, go ahead.

What is the A-plus program? You said only five to seven kids practice every year. What is it? Why do we have it? So it's a

program that students can sign up for, and based on their grades, their attendance, their scores on a math EOC, and service hours, can qualify for financial assistance to go toward two-year programs or community college. So all the other financial options that they would be eligible for through their FAFSA application have to be exhausted first, and then they can become eligible for additional funds to go through their education. So this is really a

needs-based program? Yes. Okay. And so I kind of agree with Jason, is it seems like there might be a bit of an unspoken double standard for this needs-based program based on the requirements for good citizenship that are currently reflected here.

And then I was also concerned on paragraph four, last page, not paragraph four, it's last page.

Yeah.

It reads, I'm going to read this out loud. If the coordinator determines that a student who has submitted a participation agreement has violated the terms of that agreement or district policies or procedures regarding A-plus participation, the coordinator will notify the the student in writing and may put the student on probation or expel the student from the program. I don't like that. That's a bit rough. It's subjective.

So the probation piece is certainly a piece that a lot of school districts follow, basically putting students on notice. We notice that you're not necessarily meeting the expectation in its fullest sense. I agree that The expulsion expel piece makes it feel like this is this huge disciplinary process, and I think there's some other language in there. I would recommend saying something like removed from the program. And of course, again, the probation step is in there to give students a chance to Turn things around. And then the appeals plan, appeals part is also an important step. So in the event that a student feels like they have redeemed themselves and would like to be further considered, that they can appeal at the building level. And then it can also, after that decision making process, similar to some of the other appeal processes we have in place, could appeal then to the board as well. in closed session.

Last question. So what's the etymology of this A-plus program? Where does it come from? Who came up with this?

Well, MSBA has drafted this policy based on what the state has put together as a problem. And I'm happy to, yeah, it's a state-funded program to help students access higher education.

And we don't have to do anything with this at all?

We don't have to pass this policy at all. How long have we

been participating?

I am not sure. I'll have to look that up. But the

whole time it's been without a policy?

Correct. And if we don't... Is

it you that does most of this?

Do they handle it at the high school? They do. Yeah.

So if we don't have the policy, then we don't have a program?

No. No. No. It's a business already. There's no policy. But they just recommend that we get a policy.

They recommend a policy so that way we have an appeals process that's documented and board approved. Sure.

Yeah, this seems like it comes from something that I'm not feeling it.

Well, what's your experience? Do you feel it? Tell me from what you know with our students that are in it, do you like it? Do you think it's great?

I would, in terms of the program or just this policy? The program. I think the policy meets a need.

The program

does? Yeah, the program meets a need and creates an opportunity for students who may not otherwise have access. Okay,

great.

I was like, maybe this is a double negative. We can continue on with the program without policy. That's right. Yes. It is not required. Is it on? No, no, it

won't turn off. Oh!

Your question was actually really good. It doesn't mean anything because there may be something to it on a state level, on a legislative level that we don't know about.

I understand why they're suggesting it though. It's a valid suggestion because they're saying if the student wants to appeal then there needs to be something in writing saying that they can't.

And also I think the spirit of it is to help support even application of the program and the review process.

I guess my concern too was if we put these, what they're suggesting in place, are we harming the, like, is it unfair to the Americans that are going to need this? We already have a disparity in suspensions. it any more difficult for any of our students

to access the book? Yeah. So I'll just . You never know. So I don't disagree with any of the comments that are, wow, that got loud, that have been,

yeah,

sorry, Chris, that have been made here I'll just say if we're going to participate in the program which we should because it does meet a need we need to provide the administration with some guidance on how some guardrails and how it should be implemented because the absence of a policy I think leaves them in a really difficult position so to the extent that we say hey we don't want to have a policy I would be against that

But you also mentioned

FAFSA.

I never knew how to say this. FAFSA. All right? Which is government-funded money, which means if we don't have that policy, could they then not be – are they not able to receive that FAFSA money? No, those

aren't related. Down the pipeline. Yeah, those aren't

unrelated. FAFSA's

federal and A-plus is state.

Okay, gotcha.

Thank you, so I just want to Along the lines of what Jason was saying because we're kind of doing a little bit of a popcorn thing but just to clarify this is a program that we do participate which is a Initiated by the state saying there are guidelines that you have to meet to Participate in the a plus program that is that right? Yes for students and there's there's things that they have to have an application They have to submit that to us and they have to demonstrate that they've done it done the

service hours that they got the right score on or fell in the right categories on their math EOC and they have had a certain attendance rate and

And that if they do that and we provide the certification of that, essentially, then they're able to access financial aid. Yes. Basically from, that is state funded. Not us funded, but state funded. Correct. Right? So I think what we have seen MSBA do is say, oh, that's a thing that's happening. Do you have a policy that clarifies how you administer that? And the answer for us is no. Right? So they're saying, hey, do a policy. Is that right? Yes. I think they probably did do a policy that feels a little dated, but we could probably make it a policy that doesn't have quite as many It sounds like kind of punitive and maybe arbitrary and hard to objectively administer. So I think that probably makes sense, but I just don't want it to get muddied what is happening versus what could be happening or continue happening. Does that make sense? Am I off on anything? Yeah, and

so I think based on your feedback tonight, what I'd like to do is go back through with a more fine-tooth comb around the language and the tone. and bring it to a more supportive place and less of a punitive place, and have you guys take another look at it.

Yeah, and we, I mean, obviously there's a lot of policies that just get served up, and like, what do you guys think? They're not finished. That's why we do first readings. We need to, like, think about what are the ideas here, and then what do we want our policy to look like? And that puts a lot on you, but I think... We appreciate you being able to help us come up with language that we can follow. I mean, I don't want kids to get this money, to not get this money in the future because we don't like the language here.

But you are saying that even without the policy, they can still?

That's correct.

Yes. That's what I heard. Yes, because where the tension for school districts across the state has been is around that definition of citizenship. and where some districts have been in positions where students and families wanted to contest their child's ineligibility related to not meeting the citizenship requirement. And so they are encouraging districts who do have the A-plus program to have a policy that's board approved that outlines that a little bit more clearly.

Board approved. Yeah. Good.

Carter?

I'm just wondering, like, How frequently are kids who pursue this opportunity not accepted into it? How often do people in Clayton have to go through the appeals process?

Not very often. I can get more specific numbers for you, but based on the information that I have collected, it's been more related now. held them back a little bit from being able to meet their requirement. And again, they've been able to appeal at the building level and they've had conversations and gone through that process to make determinations.

And sort of how frequently would these types of criteria make a difference if someone would get approved?

I see that being a problem like you know oh I didn't know this was going to play dry slightly on accident

freshman year. Like a teacher comes up out of nowhere like oh they were in my classroom.

Okay so you're going to do some tweaking and bring it back to us next board meeting? Yes. Okay. Okay that sounds good thank you. Okay, I've got a lot of papers here tonight. Okay, so we're on to our financial action item, sorry. Go ahead, Stacy.

I move that the Board of Education approve policy JHG regarding the reporting and investigating of child abuse and neglect with the proposed changes.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. Are there any questions? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Go

ahead. 8.02. I move that the Board of Education approve policy GBLB references.

Second. It's been moved, and seconded. Questions? All in favor. Aye. Any opposed. And now we are on financials. I think we could get a motion. Yeah.

I move that the Board of Education approve the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 teacher salary schedule as presented.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded. Questions? Okay. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, very good. It passes and thank you for your work on that. You bet. Thank you. Okay. 9.02.

I move that the board authorize a contract for the purchase and installation of an outdoor scoreboard and sound system at Gayfield purchase and installation of an indoor scoreboard at stuber gym the purchase and installation of scoreboard control equipment upgrades at adzic field from digital scoreboards llc pursuant to the ncpa cooperative purchasing agreement in the amount of 750 577 dollars and further increase the fund for capital improvement budget by 750 000 to provide for project costs and further Authorized ancillary project costs for installation of related electrical fiber components required for the scoreboard installations. Second.

Yep, it's been moved and seconded.

Almost interrupted.

Are there any questions? I love that we're doing this.

Yeah, so John, this is a, and Steve, if he was here, I would tell him this is much needed as far as the scoreboard upgrades. Does this also incorporate the ability to add additional digital components like recordings of games so that students can do student recordings and broadcasts of games? Or is that a component that can be added at a later date? I'm just thinking of some of the other schools that we're surrounded by, like the LeDoux School District, Lindbergh School District, where not only do they have better scoreboards than we do, they have better production media booths. at some of their facilities where the students are then involved and the production of the students that are not the athletes on the field or on the court are involved in the production of the live game broadcasts. And so that would be something to consider hopefully that whatever this is can incorporate in the future if it's not already been planned for.

It's absolutely possible to incorporate a curriculum component where students would be involved in developing graphical presentations. These are basically like very large video screens that can stream television. Yeah, that's great. You can play video games on them for esports. Okay. Perfect. You can stream anything in there. Yeah, that's exactly

what I'm thinking because like what I've seen at some of the other schools is, you know, the video production departments, the students are working on will showcase like the on senior night, like the senior athletes and there'll be a video program of that that can be projected onto the board or just more basic like live game streaming. So, uh, you know, students that are involved in the journalism program or they're involved in communications program or in an afterschool club then are you know doing you know like getting broadcast booth experience type of stuff and we don't have any of that here right now but it would be really cool if as part of these capital improvements we can try to expand into those areas

and

that's been part of the vision for this is to actually get the broadcast journalism classes that we have at the high school to do those productions that you were talking about. And our teacher right now has actually already spoken to Ladue's teacher who's really taken that out, and they've already collaborated on how to make sure that

happens. Awesome. I think that'll be great for the students that are both in the sports program and outside of the sports program as well as the community. Incidentally,

I handed out some mock-ups of what this might look like in our space. And the timeline for completing this is this summer, hopefully by the end of June, actually. Great.

I had a question about, I know the cost, when I looked at the cost breakdown you gave us, it does not include like the fiber and aluminum But you have any Est approximate cost of that extra

it's only at the football stadium and we already have that equipment in the ground It's unsure. We're gonna have to retest it and potentially upgrade it Not sure the cost yet. We're still gonna have to test that all out

More questions, okay All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Great, motion passes.

I move the Board of Education to adopt the amended flexible benefit plan as set forth in the formal record of action resolution.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. Are there questions? All in favor? Any opposed?

I move that the Board of Education approve January 2023 disbursements in the sum of $1,939,455.79. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Questions? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? I move that the Board of Education approve February 2023 disbursements in the sum of $7,974,307.80. Second. It's

been moved and seconded. Questions? All in favor?

Aye. I move. Oh,

sorry. So let's see. We're on our consent agenda. Before we start that, I just want to acknowledge the generous donations we received that we are about to approve and consent from Mrs. Jennifer Bierman and John Bierman. They made a very generous donation to the robotics program, and we would also like to thank Amy and Scott Wilson for their also very generous donation towards the purchase of a trailer for the robotics program. So thank you very much. We appreciate it.

So, Amy, before we get to the consent agenda items, can we bring John up just one more time for financials? I want him to share some information with the board.

Oh, yeah.

So, I think everybody at the board table, for sure, and the community at large is aware of the kind of banking emergencies that we've experienced here at the federal and national level, starting with SBB. I guess it was just last week. It seems like a lot longer than that. So I wanted the board to be aware that John has taken proactive steps to make sure that all of our deposits for school district funding are secured. And so, John, you just want to kind of recap what you reached out to me kind of the Monday after the SVB crisis and The decision that you and Nisha have made which I fully support as BOE treasurer And I just think that the board and the community should be aware of because I think it's an excellent decision that you guys collectively made so

It's required by law our deposits are required to be collateralized So that you have no risk of loss and typically historically that was done by having the bank put up a government securities that were held by the federal reserve, a third party so that we could collect those if the bank failed. This bank that we have when we began with them used a different procedure through a third party bank called Intrify where they would technically make it appear as though our deposits were scattered across many banks so that we had FDIC protection for all these receipts. process would relied on a letter from a FDIC staff attorney and as we investigated that and had conversation with legal counsel that that letter was not binding and It was not backed up by legislative action so we pulled back from that and required them to Post a bond because they were unable to post the securities and As it turns out, when this SBVB thing happened, that was one of the banks that they were scattering deposits to. And they sweated out getting those deposits insured. So we had already backed away from that process. This is the year we go out for banking bids. And in our new bank bid, we will require deposits to be collateralized in the old-fashioned way. Securities held by the Federal Reserve so that in the event of bank failure. We are 100% protected in that mechanism The reason for that is the bonds that we currently hold through insurance companies insurance companies fail to So we're gonna make that we're gonna strengthen that up as we go forward our new banking contracts will start in July but in the meantime, we've we've completely gotten away from all that inner fi concept and

Yes, that's really good news. I mean, and I want to thank John and Nisha for being proactive and calling that to my attention and then sharing that with you guys. So we will probably look at different banking relationships going forward starting in July. So it's one of those things where Nobody expects the banking system to fail until it fails, right? And there's a run in deposits like there were on SVB. So anything that we can do to try to make sure that we mitigate the risk of that happening for any funds that we have for the school is a good thing. So thank you. Thank you.

Go ahead, Gary. So thank you, Kim, for calling that up. And John, can I just ask a couple questions? In terms of our obligation, legal obligation to have deposits in some way secured, if they were deposited only in an amount up to FDIC insurance, That's adequate. Does that qualify? That qualifies. So the Entify or whatever this was, was their concept, we've got it spread around in less than $250,000 with each bank, so therefore it's covered by the FDIC? Right. Is that the concept? Okay.

So the bank maintained custody of the funds, but electronically it was posted as an account in another bank. Okay. At $245,000 apiece.

Thank you for explaining

to

us.

Yeah, it was smart until it's not guaranteed.

Right, true. Yeah.

So, yeah.

That was smart.

I agree. I totally,

yeah.

Bankers are crafty.

All right, cool. Thank you very much.

Okay, I move that the Board of Education approve the consent agenda for items 10.02 through 10.09. Second.

It's been moved and seconded. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? So we are now on to board communications. Any updates? Anyone? Anyone? Okay.

Bueller. Bueller.

Okay, so he, go ahead, Chris. You guys, okay, you guys, I'm gonna start, I think we should go back to calling on people. So every, so I just, I think it works better and that way everybody can, everybody's voice is heard and everybody gets a chance to talk. So I'm just gonna go around. And Chris, any updates?

Yes, there's been equity committee meetings since we last were here. Everything's still going as planned. I've also went to the SSD Governing Council meeting. There were some elections for some new board members there. A couple of them went through. One of them did not. There'll be another election because there was never a quorum that voted yes for one of the folks that... one of the positions. And then, oh, I wanted to say thank you to Nisha and Heike for doing all of this for us. That's really sweet of you. We really appreciate it. It feels really good. These are incredible. They make a big difference because, yeah, we do a lot of not getting to talk to the students, right? And so this is really cool in addition to the beautiful things. And then the last thing I will say on a serious note, I really appreciate that the parent was here to make the comment that she did today. I actually had the exact same comment to my principal at Glen Ridge when my boys were in first grade when the Sandy Hook Promise tragedy happened to a classroom of 21st graders because I immediately as a parent started to think What is our situation in terms of security? What does it look like in terms of our buildings, et cetera? But one of the components is the SRO. And when I found out, just like our parents did, that it wasn't the elementary schools that have an SRO, that their other ones do, it did feel strange to me. Again, this was the week after a tragedy happened in an elementary school, and we know that these tragedies happen in all schools. I'm just going to put out there that I would love to see this. I'm so glad you're talking about it, Nisha. I would love to this happen for our community. We talk so much about mental health. And I hate that our teachers and our students and our parents are struggling every day sending their kids to school. And whatever we can do as a board member, I'm going to do. And so I do support really looking at potentially having an SRO at the elementary schools as well. I know that there's always hurdles to doing new things like that, but I don't think we're at a day and age where we can not do it. So I just wanted to make that comment so that the public knows that we heard that very well-spoken parent, and I think that's all. Okay.

Awesome. Jason, any updates? Stacey.

Yes, thank you. First of all, gosh, we haven't had a meeting in a long time, I feel like, so I do have a few updates. Jason Growe and Chris and I had a really nice walkthrough at Clayton High School today and saw some really cool classes in action. It's really amazing. And I do feel like we see components of the profile of graduate in every room we enter. And in particular, I'm remembering Chris and Gary and I did a walkthrough at Whiteown before spring break where there was an art class that literally had the profile of a graduate plastered on the board. And they were doing art projects around the different competencies. It was just really neat to see in a discipline like art even taking shape. So we had a Monday with Robin, we had a SEL wellness committee meeting. And we did hear a little bit about the new SEL curriculum that's starting in elementary school. But most of the meeting we heard from Jessica Colvin, who's the consultant that we've hired to talk to explore an opportunity for a wellness center. And I hope that at some point the board will have the opportunity to hear from her. because it was great. And, um, she has set up wellness centers in many, many, many schools and each of them look a little different. And that's the beauty of it is that it's tailored to the needs of the individual school. It's not a one size fits all situation. And what I also loved about it is that it very much student driven. The students help design the space, the students help come up with, you know, the rules of the space and, um, how it's used and she really drove home the fact that this is not like an opportunity to skip class. This is a really an opportunity for I think she said prevention, intervention and or something else. I don't remember the third word but really to meet those mental health needs of our students and it can be anywhere from just them needing a five to 10 minute brain break to leave class to making an appointment To a crisis situation, so I think that it just sounds amazing if we could make this work at clayton and she's right now assessing what we do have in place to come up with suggestions of what we. maybe need to put in place. As part of the process, we're getting the district, I should say, not me, we, but we are getting input from various stakeholders. Dr. Moore at the high school has already, I believe, has already met with students or is going to be meeting with students and has a meeting set up with parents later this month, I believe, to get input into what we want out of a wellness, what we would want out of a Wellness Center should we choose to make one. And... Let's see, what else? I took a bunch of notes on it. But what I also liked is she kept calling it, she calls it a safe and brave space. And I think that really encapsulates what students would use it for. And there's confidential ways of actually referring friends to it, which I think, and peers, which I think could be really helpful. She said one of the things they do in a lot of the schools is they just put all over the building QR codes that you can just scan it and make a referral. And it can be anonymous, and it's held confidential. So anyway, I just think we've been talking about something like this for a really long time, and it was really great to hear specifically what it could look like and what it would provide for students separate from the counseling office, a true mental wellness center. I would say the downside is I asked what's the timeline to maybe put this in place, and she did say like, a full school year to really get it implemented. Like, I want it, like, you know, to open tomorrow. But I realize if we want to do it well, it will take time, and I'd rather it be done well. That's the thing. But I look forward to everybody hearing from her because I think she brings a lot of experience and knowledge and great ideas that will be specific to Clayton High School for what we could use it for.

Yes, thank you. First of all, gosh, we haven't had a meeting in a long time, I feel like, so I do have a few updates. Jason Groh and Chris and I had a really nice walkthrough at Clayton High School today and saw some really cool classes in action. It's really amazing. And I do feel like we see components of the profile of graduate in every room we enter. And in particular, I'm remembering Chris and Gary and I did a walkthrough at Whiteown before spring break where there was an art class that literally had the profile of a graduate plastered on the board. And they were doing art projects around the different competencies. It was just really neat to see in a discipline like art even taking shape. So we had a Monday with Robin, we had a SEL wellness committee meeting. And we did hear a little bit about the new SEL curriculum that's starting in elementary school. But most of the meeting we heard from Jessica Colvin, who's the consultant that we've hired to talk to explore an opportunity for a wellness center. And I hope that at some point the board will have the opportunity to hear from her. because it was great. And, um, she has set up wellness centers in many, many, many schools and each of them look a little different. And that's the beauty of it is that it's tailored to the needs of the individual school. It's not a one size fits all situation. And what I also loved about it is that it very much student driven. The students help design the space, the students help come up with, you know, the rules of the space and, um, how it's used and she really drove home the fact that this is not like an opportunity to skip class. This is a really an opportunity for I think she said prevention, intervention and or something else. I don't remember the third word but really to meet those mental health needs of our students and it can be anywhere from just them needing a five to 10 minute brain break to leave class to making an appointment To a crisis situation, so I think that it just sounds amazing if we could make this work at clayton and she's right now assessing what we do have in place to come up with suggestions of what we. maybe need to put in place. As part of the process, we're getting the district, I should say, not me, we, but we are getting input from various stakeholders. Dr. Moore at the high school has already, I believe, has already met with students or is going to be meeting with students and has a meeting set up with parents later this month, I believe, to get input into what we want out of a wellness, what we would want out of a Wellness Center should we choose to make one. And... Let's see, what else? I took a bunch of notes on it. But what I also liked is she kept calling it, she calls it a safe and brave space. And I think that really encapsulates what students would use it for. And there's confidential ways of actually referring friends to it, which I think, and peers, which I think could be really helpful. She said one of the things they do in a lot of the schools is they just put all over the building QR codes that you can just scan it and make a referral. And it can be anonymous, and it's held confidential. So anyway, I just think we've been talking about something like this for a really long time, and it was really great to hear specifically what it could look like and what it would provide for students separate from the counseling office, a true mental wellness center. I would say the downside is I asked what's the timeline to maybe put this in place, and she did say like, a full school year to really get it implemented. Like, I want it, like, you know, to open tomorrow. But I realize if we want to do it well, it will take time, and I'd rather it be done well. That's the thing. But I look forward to everybody hearing from her because I think she brings a lot of experience and knowledge and great ideas that will be specific to Clayton High School for what we could use it for.

It does feel like it's been so long, but we'll definitely miss some things. So I don't have any specific updates, but I will just highlight the legislative advocacy groups that are still meeting. I guess it would be two Fridays from two days from now the next time. There's still a lot of things pending, both Senate and House bills and all kinds of stuff going on. I think a lot of the stuff is pending. Not settled that's gonna affect education still so I just would encourage everyone to keep paying attention to it and I was able to be down in Jefferson City today and Just there's just a lot of things in flux still So we all need to be paying attention to it, and I hope the community is as well and I'm not able to give very good updates on everything, but there's a lot of things going on. So we all need to be paying attention to it. So that's the main thing I wanted to highlight.

I'm sorry, can I just add something to what Gary said? Yesterday was the MSBA advocacy day, and I just have to apologize because I told everybody I was going to go, and then something came up with my daughter that I couldn't go. But I'm wondering if, Nisha, if you've heard how that went because it was open to school board members across the state to kind of gather together to lobby. Have you gotten any feedback on the day?

They sent out actually, they sent out like a newsletter type thing and it said that it was very well attended. They didn't give any more specifics than that but they just appreciated everybody that came. So they'd had quite a few student groups and parents as well including board members.

Yeah, I wasn't there yesterday either. I was actually there today with a different group. But I did talk to a couple of legislators and ask them, did you see some of our people yesterday? And they talked about good turnout and a lot of attention around it. There were, yeah, so I think it was well attended.

No, I don't have anything. I just want to say, I mean, there's probably 100 or more of these cards around the table. So you can't see them if you're watching us on video. But I want to thank each and every student and the teachers who encouraged these students to make these. It's really thoughtful and kind. And they're amazing students. So thank you.

No, I just want to add my thanks for all the effort for tonight. And it's very much appreciated.

Uh, no. The only thing is, the one thing I didn't talk about that the captain kids are very interested in is they want to bring back dodgeball.

Dodgeball?

Yeah, they want dodgeball back. They claim

the foam balls are safe.

I move that the Board of Education adjourn

aye