April 12, 2023 — Meeting Transcript

Let's see. Okay. All right, we're going to get started. Can people hear me? Hello? Is this on? Okay. Okay, so it is April 12th, 2023, and adequate notice has been given. We're going to go ahead and get started with the Pledge of Allegiance. Okay, so we are on adoption of agenda and I'm going to ask Stacy to read our motion.

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

So instead of seconding that motion, I actually would like to move to amend the motion and thereby amend the agenda. As follows, moving item number four, recognizing our own to be item number two. If that makes sense.

Yes. So I move that the Board of Education approve the amendment to the agenda.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Okay, motion passes. So then do we need to also... Okay, I guess that's fine. Okay,

I move that the Board of Education adopt the amended agenda.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? All right. It passes. And now we are on to recognizing our own.

So this evening we're gonna go ahead and start with our recognition. Our first off is our CHS Dance Marathon crew, so if they could come up here. And yes, we can have a seat. There's a couple of chairs there. And I believe Ms. Young is gonna introduce everyone. and just say a few words, including our sponsors. This is a big deal, so please don't be shy.

Good afternoon. Thank you so much for the invitation to be here. I am not going to take any credit for anything. I'm going to hand it over to Macy and Ava, and they're going to give you just a quick summary of Dance Marathon and the wonderful things that they did this year.

Hi, I'm Macy Klaas, and I'm a senior.

I'm Ava Marson, and I'm also a senior, and we're the co-directors of Clayton Dance Marathon.

So Dance Marathon is a student-led nationwide organization that raises money for local hospitals. And the two hospitals we raised money for this year were St. Louis Children's and SSM Cardinal Glennon.

So throughout the year, we have a board, which this year was about 100 students at CHS that collectively come together and raise funds and awareness for St. Louis Children's and SSM Cardinal Glennon. So we would meet like once or twice a month and plan the actual dance marathon event and also put on fundraisers.

Yeah, so we kind of like to think of it as broken up into two parts throughout the year. So we're pushing fundraising and then come... I mean, we're planning the event at the same time, but at the beginning, we're really working on fundraising. And some fundraisers we did this year were last spring when we first... Got chosen to be the directors. We had a kiss the seniors goodbye, which was little like Hershey kisses and people could write notes like kind of like a candy grams. And then we also did some restaurant fundraisers and held a car wash at the high school and had a movie night.

So our goal for this year was $40,000 because each year it's like a tradition to beat last year's fundraising total. So this started four years ago. So this was our fifth year and we hit our goal by a lot. We raised $50,000. Thank you. which was really amazing and shocking for us. But we were very, very thrilled.

Yeah, so kind of to talk a little bit more about the night. So the event was three hours, and it was in Stuber. And so we had all of our board members come right after school and help set up the gym. And then we had a bunch of food catered, some favorites of mine. It would be High Point and Sugar Fire for sure. So we had food set out and we do like a big morale dance that one of like a smaller group on the board made throughout the year. And we also had a few hospital kids come and share their story, which was really touching because we haven't been able to have that the past couple of years. So this was the first year in a while. And I think all the students really loved it. And I know it's like so heartwarming to know that like you're actually helping these people and to hear their story and see them in real life. Amen. Oh, yeah. Also, another main way we raise money is sponsors. Ms. Schaefer, if you want to turn around because they're all in the back of your shirt. So these are all of our sponsors. And as you'll see, the elementary schools are on them as well because a huge way that we raised money was doing change wars with the elementary schools, which I'm sure a lot of you in here are aware of that. And so we had students bring in their loose change and that raised over $3,000, which was a big chunk of money for us. So thank you everybody who participated in that as well. Thank you guys. Thank you.

She was supposed to just recognize your sponsors who supported you guys. Ms. Claire Miller and Ms. Katie Schaefer.

Thank you.

Thank you

everyone.

Wait, I have a question for Macy. Sorry to put you on the spot. Do you know where Dance Marathon started?

Dance Marathon started at Indiana.

And where are you going next year?

It is exciting.

Yeah.

Yeah. Are you going to dance for us, Jason?

Thank you. Um, and then next up we have Dr. Wiens with our next recognizing our own.

Well, good evening, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. And as you can see, we have a full house this evening because we have some really special awards and recognitions to give out tonight. And before I get into the details of it, one of the greatest pleasures as a district administrator is to be able to recognize employees, students, and staff in front of their families. So I'm really excited and energized to have all these very special VIPs with us tonight. So I'll go ahead and talk to you a little bit about what we're doing this evening. So Inclusive Schools Network and the School District of Clayton designated the first week back in December as Inclusive Schools Week, and the theme was Unity in Our Community. So Inclusive Schools Week celebrates the progress that schools have made in providing a supportive and quality education to an increasingly diverse student population, including students who are marginalized due to their disability, gender, religion, socioeconomic status, cultural heritage, language preference, or other factors. And so this week also provides an important opportunity for stakeholders to discuss what needs to be done in order to ensure that their schools continue to improve their ability to successfully educate and welcome and include all students. So today we come full circle from inclusive schools week in December to today to announce and honor the 2023 Clayton packet inclusion awards winners and honorees. So I'm now going to, uh, hand it over to Christina Blankenship, the chair of Clayton's packet.

Hi, glad to be here with you guys again. We are so excited again. Look at all these wonderful smiling, supportive faces, and we are so happy for them to come out and support Clayton pack added and the Inclusion Awards this year. and everything about flipped out when I was like, wait a minute, my RSVP said like 50 some odd people. Where are we gonna go? So anyway, we'd like to start out with our Making Inclusion Happen Award honors. Clayton and SSD teachers and staff throughout the district who have demonstrated efforts in the area of inclusion and for their dedication to providing a quality education and experience for our increasingly diverse student population. Receiving the Making Inclusion Happen Awards this year are the following. So when your name is called, please come up to Dr. Cameron Poole and he will hand you your award. First up, Adrian King, who is the Special Education Department Chairperson over at Clayton High School. Ms. Sarah Romanoski, forgive me if I chewed that up a little bit. She's the Quest and Special Education teacher over at Clayton High School. Melissa Becker, Special Education teacher at Merrimack Elementary. Laura Bruns, she's a teacher over at Meramec Elementary. Amanda Ketzer, she's a Teacher at Captain Elementary. Alicia Shue, teacher at Glen Ridge. Thank you. Jody Tomchak, school nurse at the Family Center. Thank you. Michelle Snyder, special education teacher at the Family Center I'd like to say this year we had a really good representation amongst all the buildings this year, so we're really glad for that support. Next up, we have our student awards. For the first time this year, we will be presenting the Student Champion for Inclusive Excellence Award. It honors School District of Clayton students who have demonstrated outstanding efforts in advancing the district's goals in the areas of diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice on behalf of or as part of our increasingly diverse student population. Our two main winners tonight were Tom David Gipson and Penelope Mines. They're not with us. Oh, Tom is here. Tom is here. Okay, great. I know Penelope had a prior obligation with the Captain Elementary Choir Tom is one of our wonderful students from Merrimack Elementary. So thank you, Tom. And then we have our runners-up, our honorees. We wanted to honor these students that were also nominated. And our honorees are Ava Disney, Clayton High School. Jonas Glick, Clayton High school. Yeah, come on up and get your award. Eva was unable to attend tonight. And then Lona Shin, Glen Ridge Elementary. Let me tell you, when somebody from Glen Ridge Elementary gets an award, they show up and they show out. I'm serious. All right, and finally, to our last category, we're pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Clayton Packett Inclusion Awards in the Area of Visual Arts Contest. Prizes were awarded at the high school, the middle school, and the elementary school levels. We are pleased that we had a broad spectrum of involvement from both the high school, First place for Clayton High School was Jay Lee Deck. She wasn't able to be with us here tonight, but we definitely want to honor her. And for the middle school entries, first place goes to Olivia Lin. She's a seventh grader at Y-Down Middle School. There she is, okay. And then second place is Sarah Vitsky, White Island Middle School, eighth grade. She may not be here tonight, okay? So we'll get her certificate and ribbon to her. Third place, Isabella Pearl Keough. Thank you. And also third place at Widown Middle School is Max Shung. Sorry, I apologize. And he's in sixth grade at Widown Middle school. Okay, and last but certainly not least, first place at the elementary school level Kavya Chowdhury, Merrimack Elementary, fourth grade. Thank you so much. Again, I apologize if I butchered any names. Robin's over here keeping me in check. as I continue to learn. On behalf of the Clayton PAC ED, I would like to thank the Clayton and SSD administration, the Clayton Board of Education, the Clayton Communications Department, and the Clayton school community for their continued support of the Clayton Pac ED mission and its initiatives to benefit students with disabilities and their families within the district. Thank you again for having us here again this year for this and to help us to honor our students and our teachers. Thank you so much.

Hi, glad to be here with you guys again. We are so excited again. Look at all these wonderful smiling, supportive faces, and we are so happy for them to come out and support Clayton pack added and the Inclusion Awards this year. and everything about flipped out when I was like, wait a minute, my RSVP said like 50 some odd people. Where are we gonna go? So anyway, we'd like to start out with our Making Inclusion Happen Award honors. Clayton and SSD teachers and staff throughout the district who have demonstrated efforts in the area of inclusion and for their dedication to providing a quality education and experience for our increasingly diverse student population. Receiving the Making Inclusion Happen Awards this year are the following. So when your name is called, please come up to Dr. Cameron Poole and he will hand you your award. First up, Adrian King, who is the Special Education Department Chairperson over at Clayton High School. Ms. Sarah Romanoski, forgive me if I chewed that up a little bit. She's the Quest and Special Education teacher over at Clayton High School. Melissa Becker, Special Education teacher at Merrimack Elementary. Laura Bruns, she's a teacher over at Meramec Elementary. Amanda Ketzer, she's a Teacher at Captain Elementary. Alicia Shue, teacher at Glen Ridge. Thank you. Jody Tomchak, school nurse at the Family Center. Thank you. Michelle Snyder, special education teacher at the Family Center I'd like to say this year we had a really good representation amongst all the buildings this year, so we're really glad for that support. Next up, we have our student awards. For the first time this year, we will be presenting the Student Champion for Inclusive Excellence Award. It honors School District of Clayton students who have demonstrated outstanding efforts in advancing the district's goals in the areas of diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice on behalf of or as part of our increasingly diverse student population. Our two main winners tonight were Tom Gibson and Penelope Mines. They're not with us. Oh, Tom is here. Tom is here. Okay, great. I know Penelope had a prior obligation with the Captain Elementary Choir Tom is one of our wonderful students from Merrimack Elementary. So thank you, Tom. And then we have our runners-up, our honorees. We wanted to honor these students that were also nominated. And our honorees are Ava Disney, Clayton High School. Jonas Glick, Clayton High school. Yeah, come on up and get your award. Eva was unable to attend tonight. And then Lona Shin, Glen Ridge Elementary. Let me tell you, when somebody from Glen Ridge Elementary gets an award, they show up and they show out. I'm serious. All right, and finally, to our last category, we're pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Clayton Packett Inclusion Awards in the Area of Visual Arts Contest. Prizes were awarded at the high school, the middle school, and the elementary school levels. We are pleased that we had a broad spectrum of involvement from both the high school, First place for Clayton High School was Jay Lee Deck. She wasn't able to be with us here tonight, but we definitely want to honor her. And for the middle school entries, first place goes to Olivia Lin. She's a seventh grader at Y-Down Middle School. There she is, okay. And then second place is Sarah Vitsky, White Island Middle School, eighth grade. She may not be here tonight, okay? So we'll get her certificate and ribbon to her. Third place, Isabella Pearl Keough. Thank you. And also third place at Widown Middle School is Max Shung. Sorry, I apologize. And he's in sixth grade at Widown Middle school. Okay, and last but certainly not least, first place at the elementary school level Kavya Chowdhury, Merrimack Elementary, fourth grade. Thank you so much. Again, I apologize if I butchered any names. Robin's over here keeping me in check. as I continue to learn. On behalf of the Clayton PAC ED, I would like to thank the Clayton and SSD administration, the Clayton Board of Education, the Clayton Communications Department, and the Clayton school community for their continued support of the Clayton Pac ED mission and its initiatives to benefit students with disabilities and their families within the district. Thank you again for having us here again this year for this and to help us to honor our students and our teachers. Thank you so much.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you everybody for being here tonight. Okay, so at this point of the meeting we are going to swear in our board members that are not really new board members but are three board members that are going to serve for another term. So I'm gonna read this little blurb that I think I'm supposed to read. And it says, as permitted, under Missouri statute section 115.124, the school district of Clayton did not need to hold an election on April 4th, 2023. The district published the required notice under section 115.127.5 RSMO. The number of candidates filed equaled the number of open positions. Incumbents Gary Pearson, Kim Hurst and Jason Growe filed for the open three year positions and will continue to serve for their next term 2023 to 2026. And I thank all three of you for your willingness to do this again for another term. And I look forward to working with everybody for the next Yeah, at least. So right now we got to adjourn. This is a funky word, but it's sine die. Yeah, Heike said sine dine or something. Anyway, let's just do it. So go ahead and read the.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you everybody for being here tonight. Okay, so at this point of the meeting we are going to swear in our board members that are not really new board members but are three board members that are going to serve for another term. So I'm gonna read this little blurb that I think I'm supposed to read. And it says, as permitted, under Missouri statute section 115.124, the school district of Clayton did not need to hold an election on April 4th, 2023. The district published the required notice under section 115.127.5 RSMO. The number of candidates filed equaled the number of open positions. Incumbents Gary Pearson, Kim Hurst and Jason Grove filed for the open three year positions and will continue to serve for their next term 2023 to 2026. And I thank all three of you for your willingness to do this again for another term. And I look forward to working with everybody for the next Yeah, at least. So right now we got to adjourn. This is a funky word, but it's sine die. Yeah, Heike said sine dine or something. Anyway, let's just do it. So go ahead and read the.

I move that the Board of Education adjourn the board sine die is how. Heike pronounces it.

Second, however it's pronounced.

Okay. It's been moved and seconded. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Excellent. Motion passes. So I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Patel.

Okay. We'll go ahead and do the oath of office for each of our new board members. So we're going to start with Gary Pearson. Okay. I'm going to swear you on, Gary.

All right. Here we go. Pass me your seatbelt. It's right here. Don't we need to stand up? Yeah, but do you have that? Oh, I have it on here too, but okay. Button up. Okay. Is this where you want us?

I don't know. We could sit around, though.

Okay, you have to repeat after me. I, Gary Pearson, do solemnly affirm that I am at least 24 years of age.

That I am a citizen of the United States and a resident taxpayer of the

school district of Clayton in St.

Louis County in the state of Missouri.

And a resident taxpayer of...

and that I will support the constitutions of the United States and of the state of Missouri and that I will abide by and uphold the school district of Clayton

board member code of ethics

this one? Okay. Repeat after me. I, Kimberly Hurst, do solemnly affirm that I am at least 24 years of age, that I am a citizen of the United States, and a resident taxpayer of the School District of Clayton in St. Louis County in the state of Missouri.

And that I will support the constitutions of the United States and the state of Missouri. And that I will abide by and uphold the School District of Clayton Board Member Code of Ethics. And will faithfully conduct myself in office.

I want a picture with the empty seats. Yeah, exactly. At the break, I'm doing that. Thanks for coming, guys. It's really nice of you

all to be here.

I could have FaceTimed you.

I could. Easy on him.

You ready? A little closer.

I, Jason Growe, do solemnly affirm that I am at least 24 years of age. That I am

I, Jason Groh, do solemnly affirm that I am at least 24 years of age. That I am

a citizen of the United States and a resident taxpayer of the Clayton School District. Wait, I messed that up. Clayton, District of Clayton. I am a resident and taxpayer of the School District of Clayton

in St. Louis, in St. Louis County, in the state of Missouri. In St. Louis County in the state of And then I will support the constitutions of the United States. I will support the constitution of the United States and of the state of Missouri and of the state and then I will abide by and uphold the school district of Clayton's Board of Education. I'm bored. And I'll

bye-bye and uphold the School District of Clayton Board Member Code of Ethics. And will faithfully conduct myself in awe. And will faithly conduct

Do you want to stand on a chair?

We take a break for champagne, right? Of

course. Of course, that's what we do. Okay, congratulations again to all three of you. All right, we will go ahead and start with the first election this evening, which will be for the office of the president of the board. And I will actually open the floor for nominations.

So before... We do that. I just wanted to say that I've been incredibly honored over the past two years to be able to serve as president. It's been eye opening and fun and a labor of love. I am willing to do it for another year, but I also very much welcome conversation to the extent that anybody else wants to take over this job.

Thank you, Amy. So I will open the floor up for nominations for board president for the school board.

Yeah, so I'm going to nominate myself as well, if I don't mind. Do I just say anything else about why I want to?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

This is kind of nice. All right, so... I think this is an incredible job, incredible position to have, especially during these times that we're living in today. I think what's happened in the last two years has been incredible when it comes to Amy doing a good job with Nisha being an incredible superintendent. And I think that going forward with how our state legislature is operating, our federal government's operating, I would like to be a part of that process and deal with some of the heavy load that's going to come our way. I think there's a lot of burdens that are coming down the pipeline, and we need people that will be able to stand firm and with resolve, make decisions in the wake of just tough times. And I think that I have, at this table, asked a lot of hard questions. Sometimes it may seem like I'm bloviating or a little bit going off the rails, but... But I think it's all for good merit because I think at the end of the day, we want to make sure these policies that come to our table are justifiable and they're going to be supportive of our children in our school districts. So that's why I think I should be president. Thank you.

I appreciate you putting yourself out there for that, Jason. I guess... I'll go ahead and second it. And then is there any questions or comments, or does anybody want to say anything?

Is the board still contemplating having a legislate? I saw an email earlier today circulated that we might discuss today the role of a legislative position to tackle some of these maybe issues that Jason is talking about that are coming down the pipeline. Is that still on the agenda for discussion or no?

I, like, so as of right now, I'm not president. If I would like it to be whoever takes over as president, I would like that to be a discussion. But that's something that, you know, another something else that we need to have conversation around.

So that new position would be contemplated after the traditional slate of officers is elected today? I guess I'm just trying to figure out procedurally how this works.

In my brain, we would elect that person tonight too. Okay. And I think Gary circulated an email basically having two vice presidents. also a vice president, and the new one being vice president of legislative advocacy. Gary, I know you're the one that crafted that email, and there's kind of a job description, or everybody's had a chance hopefully to look at it. So the answer to that is yes, but again, I say that with, I'm not technically the president. I'm not the president right now. And so my hope is that you guys would be in favor of that role and that we will do that too.

Yeah.

So just in the context of, I mean, first of all, Jason, I think the things that you're expressing about what you want to do and why you want to do that, certainly admire that and think that those are things that are really important for us and for all of us. I actually think that I mean, it goes along with some of the things that I shared today. I think we all need to be taking those kinds of things more, not more seriously. We take them very seriously, but it's something I've been thinking about for a long time and struggling with how to figure out how to sort of make a spearhead for that. So that's why I put that out there. But I do think in the context of your nomination and your reasons for wanting to be in leadership it's exactly right on so i appreciate that um i did think as i was putting that together that it made sense to think about that in the context of the other leadership positions and i don't probably sound self-serving to say that because like hey make this new role and maybe i'd like to do it if nobody else wants to but i if i would love for any of us to to do that um i would love for there to be that position i think it takes a seriousness and a i think it elevates the seriousness of our attention to that i think in some ways in my mind having a person who is not doing all of the chairing meetings planning meetings doing committee assignments that kind of operational things that the president is doing is a good thing in that role and i think would be taken seriously um by the community by the people that we would be doing the advocacy if that's what we called it too and that's why i kind of did jump over the edge to say hey let's talk about this in this context obviously we don't have to do that the board has to organize within a certain number of days of the election the board has to uh within another certain we have to have officers that the statute designates within a certain amount of time this isn't one of those so it doesn't have to be this way but in my mind it's a serious and important enough position that it should be considered alongside the others and that's why i put it out there and this may be the longest i've ever spoken at once so I'll stop talking

now. So I don't disagree that what's coming out of Jeff City is serious and threatens our ability to produce our profile of a graduate. You can see how it could get to that place. So, first of all, I applaud Jason for raising this, you know, being the drumbeat on this issue, meeting after meeting. You know, so thank you for that because it needs to be brought forward. As far as this particular role, first of all — and I guess I sort of look at HICA — I don't know that we can even contemplate this because it's not on the agenda. So, I think there might be a timing issue here. We didn't publish this topic as part of the agenda. But even if we could, I think it's totally healthy for a board of directors of any kind to contemplate, take a look at itself, think about how it wants to organize, think about that in the context of our strategic plan and all that good stuff. And I encourage further consideration of this role. And then if we want to do it, who might be a part of it? I just don't think we should do it tonight. I think we can take the summer. There's no statutory requirement that we have this role. You know, if we want to think about how we want to organize and change some stuff, let's do that. Let's just not rush it because it's pretty, you know, it's a serious thing to do. You know, and I don't like the precedent of, hey, we want to do this day of, so let's, you know, day of let's do it. I think it's a great idea. Let's take some time to consider it as a group.

Any other thoughts or comments?

What does the statute say as far as when we do have to elect a slate of officers?

The president and the vice president have to be

in place tonight.

You have to swear in new board members within 14 days of the election, and the board has to be working. Now, the treasurer and secretary technically

Okay, it's just I don't think I've ever known that. So I just thought it'd be good for us all to know that. And then is there a... Is there, I mean, maybe for, I mean none of us are new board members here. Some of us are newer than others though. The roles and responsibilities of the president, the vice president, I think the treasurer's pretty obvious what those are, and the secretary also. But what is, what's the division of responsibilities between the president and the vice president? Do we have a job description for either of those roles? Or? Okay. Would

it be helpful to read

that?

I think it would be. Oh.

Well, Hacker, you're saying that the president and vice president have to be nominated this evening, though. We can't push it off and keep Amy as president.

The board has to reorganize.

You

have to swear in the members and you have to reorganize.

I can find it and read it if you give me a few minutes.

While Gary does his research, do you know, can we even be talking about the creation of a new session tonight?

So you're correct that it's not on the agenda. It would have to be an emergency item to add it.

That answers our question. That's right, we can't do it. I was just going to table that until next board meeting and elect that individual. Next board meeting, the other thing that... Yeah. Go ahead, Stacey. So I guess

that answers... question we can't do it tonight regardless but I guess where I'm a little conflicted about it because I agree with what you said Gary and I agree with what he said Jason is that it if if we know for sure we are gonna create this position it might affect how we vote or nominate the other positions tonight and there might be someone interested in I don't know it's tricky because I don't know how to articulate that. Someone, we might think someone is great for that role or maybe someone would be maybe interested in that role that then we're also going to elect to another position tonight. So I don't know. I guess it's just food for thought to think about then when we're nominating and voting on the other positions tonight. Maybe if anyone even just wants to say they're even just interested in it. I don't know if that helps or hurts when we vote tonight, but. In my mind, it kind of muddies things a little because there's this other executive position kind of possibly hanging out there.

Yeah. I mean, my main goal, just to be clear, was that we talk about it and we talk about this idea, what the mechanics of when we can do what. I mean, I didn't... That's a very good point about the agenda, obviously. And while I was kind of thinking of it as an officer, it's not a statutory officer, so, you know, it kind of falls in a different timeline. So, yeah. Yeah.

Well, so I guess we have to table it regardless. So...

Well, I think we have to not elect it regardless. I mean, we can't

elect it tonight.

Yeah. Do you want me to read the... But we

should put it on the agenda to talk about at some point in the summer, like Jason Growe said, to work on it. That's, you know...

should put it on the agenda to talk about at some point in the summer, like Jason Gross said, to work on it. That's, you know...

Do you all want me to read that? Yes. So this is our policy, BCB, duties of the board president. The president of the board, in addition to duties prescribed by law, will exercise such powers as properly pertain to the office according to Robert's rules of order revised. He or she shall have the right, as shall other members of the board, to offer resolutions, to discuss questions, and to vote their own. The president will fulfill the responsibilities of the office as follows. One, preside when present at all meetings of the board and be responsible for the orderly conduct of such board meetings. Two, sign all legal documents as required by law, which includes all checks or warrants of items ordered for payment by the board, contracts approved by the board, bonds and deeds of conveyance issued by and for the district, and the district's annual financial statement. The board provides authorization for signatures to be affixed in facsimile. Three, bring before the board matters which in his or her judgment may require the attention of the board. Four, appear on behalf of the board in all actions brought by or against it unless individually a party, in which case the duty will be assigned by the board. Five, consult with the superintendent in planning agendas. Six, confer with the superintendent on crucial matters that may occur between board meetings. Seven, call special meetings of the board as found necessary. Eight, appoint special committees subject to approval of the board. Nine, act as a public spokesperson for the board unless this responsibility is delegated to others. 10, perform any other duty formally allocated by the Board of Education, the Missouri State Board of Education, and or the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, or by legislative enactment. And 11, receive and acknowledge community correspondence to the board except as otherwise delegated.

Go ahead. So my thought is, and I told Gary this, I have also been really concerned, as we all have been, about all this and thinking about how can we continue to be involved as well as helping our community be involved, et cetera. And what I had thought about is a subcommittee rather than just one. I mean, Gary did a great job of saying, yeah, this would be the person, but it would be all of us doing it. And so I just wonder, instead of electing someone as a leadership role, we could, the president, whoever becomes the president, could form a subcommittee that meets regularly, you know, of us plus Glover House. But the board members would be on that subcommittee and would continue to meet on a regular basis and then report back to the whole board. But I agree. This elected position is an option, I think, but it doesn't have to be, I guess. I'm just throwing that out there saying we could do it a different way. And then I had a question about if there's four elected positions. I mean, I don't know how much the president... Let's do this and I don't mean to interrupt you or and I don't need to interrupt anybody But given given that this was not published on the agenda. I Think Gary for

The idea and for circulating the email today, but since it wasn't since it is not published on the agenda I think we need to switch back to electing a new president and Jason put himself out there. And so I think the conversation needs to be around that right now as opposed to the proposed vice president of legislative advocacy and then we can have that conversation and at the next board meeting that's on the

agenda.

So the nominations, right now we have Jason Wilson is nominated and are there any other nominations?

I'll nominate Amy. She's expressed interest. And is there anybody else that's interested?

Are there any other nominations. Okay. Hearing no further nominations, nominations are now closed. We will now proceed to the election. The candidates for president are Jason Wilson and Amy Rubin.

I don't know that either one of these were seconded, and I think they have to second for nominations. We don't,

okay. So we will be voting, and we'll be voting in order of the order that they were nominated. So all in favor for Jason Wilson?

Wait a minute. Hold on. No one's going to vote for me?

Any opposed?

Nobody?

I'm not

good enough? Wait a minute, this is kind of sad. No, it's not. I'm just saying, but no one's going to go for your boy?

Like, I'm happy to have conversation around it, too. I mean, I know you are, but I'm happy to Have conversation around it. I'm just saying, man,

I mean,

it's okay to like vote and

It's not personal, Amy, that I'm going against.

Trust me,

I am

happy to relinquish the

job. You know what I'm saying, Gary? I'm just saying, Kim, Jason Growe, Stacey, Curtis, it's not a personal thing. I just feel like I can do the job pretty well, and I put the work in. I've shown it, talked a lot. I'm not saying that I'm trying to convince you by belaboring this moment here, but I'm just saying I can't get one vote. Okay, just remember those things. That's good, that's good. I like this, this is good. Cool, let's go.

job. You know what I'm saying, Gary? I'm just saying, Kim, Jason Gross, Stacey, Curtis, it's not a personal thing. I just feel like I can do the job pretty well, and I put the work in. I've shown it, talked a lot. I'm not saying that I'm trying to convince you by belaboring this moment here, but I'm just saying I can't get one vote. Okay, just remember those things. That's good, that's good. I like this, this is good. Cool, let's go.

So we will now proceed to the second nomination. All in favor for Amy Rubin?

I'll say something, because

I'm not going to let you hang out there like that. I mean, I'll just reiterate what I've previously said, which is, you know, I personally would really like to see you in a leadership position with this next slate of officers. I think your voice, and I've said this to many people sitting at this table, your voice needs to be elevated and your voice needs to honored and you have, you're now like one of the most senior people. You might be the most senior person, second most senior person on the board now. All right, whatever it is.

Amy's first.

whatever it is, you know? And so if you wanted it, you know, whatever. I said what I said earlier. To me, I think I'm really pleased with what our superintendent and her senior team in the administration has done in terms of advancing our strategic plan. I think in order to continue that, the board owes it to them to provide some continuity. The best way to do that is to have someone who is currently an officer be a president. to continue, you know, to be present. That's it. Like I said earlier. You know, and so, you know, but beyond that, I'll vote for you for whatever you

want, you know? You don't think a little bit like it might be a little bit, it might benefit us a lot more also to have new leadership, someone with a different perspective, a broader lens, just a different person, you know? I think that, look, I can't take away anything from Nisha and Amy. I think they put work in. And it was some tough times. And we dealt with a lot of interesting moments this past year. In totality, two years. However, I think it's always good. Change is always good. You know, when you think about CEOs, you want your CEO to be there for 10, 20 years. You want your president to be there for 30 years. So I'm saying, like... I think it's kind of good to have change. Um, I think Amy's led us to, uh, through some tough times, you know, set some tones for us, an incredible culture for us. So I think we all get along pretty well. Um, and there's nothing wrong with wanting someone else to step in the game. That's all I'm saying. So I get what you're saying. And this is becoming, you know, obviously, um, I'm volleying back and forth, ma'am. I'm just saying at the end of the day, I just want to make sure we all understand that I'm not getting one vote. So Jason,

let me add to what Jason said. So I do also agree with you that leadership change is good as a general statement. It can also be disruptive. So I see both sides of you know, the coin that you guys are on. I know Amy has at least expressed that she may change her mind and decide to run an additional term after this one, but if she doesn't, she has one year left. And so we're going to get new leadership in her position whether we want it or not this time next year. And so that's what influenced personally my vote, because I am not really interested. I don't have the time. Given the job description that I just heard, I don't have time that it would really take to be able to even put myself forward into that role. So I'm always, I mean, I'm glad you want to do it. I'm glad Amy wants to do it. And I'm glad we have multiple people that are interested in doing it. A year from now, I hope you put yourself up again because if you're the only one that wants it, I think you're going to get it.

Well, I don't think I'm going to get it either then either. I'm just saying. With all due respect, I do appreciate what you're saying.

Yeah, so that's what influenced really my decision. Okay. I know Amy's got a year left and that's

it Want to do this a year I am I am willing to do it a year and fold transparency I Had conversation with another board member about that person taking over as president this year The person was not interested in doing it. I certainly to the extent that you know, I You know, that's why I do welcome conversation around a new president. I by no means have to maintain any type of role this this next year while I'm I said I'm willing to do it, but I don't have to do it. So I just I just want to clarify that.

I just wanted to add to to Jason and I told you this. I told him called Jason on the phone and tell us the other day, but I wanted you all to know, too, similar to Jason Growe, that I called Jason the other day to say and I did say, I do think you could be a great president one day, but that I'd like to see you in another officer role first. And I even said to him, are you interested in being secretary, being treasurer, whatever? And so I just wanted them to know that too, that I also do support you in that way and think your voice is valuable and should be elevated to what Jason was saying, to another role first and be successful and let us all hear you and see you do great. And then I would be happy to support you to be president. That's my, which I agree, which is

I just wanted to add to to Jason and I told you this. I told him called Jason on the phone and tell us the other day, but I wanted you all to know, too, similar to Jason Grove, that I called Jason the other day to say and I did say, I do think you could be a great president one day, but that I'd like to see you in another officer role first. And I even said to him, are you interested in being secretary, being treasurer, whatever? And so I just wanted them to know that too, that I also do support you in that way and think your voice is valuable and should be elevated to what Jason was saying, to another role first and be successful and let us all hear you and see you do great. And then I would be happy to support you to be president. That's my, which I agree, which is

what I want to agree 100%.

Jason and I talked about this earlier. I said, I told him that, you know, I'm not interested in any other role. And this is the reason why I was treasurer for two years and I'm not knocking anyone in particular, but it was a rough process. I felt stonewalled. I was still alienated. I don't get the phone calls. And that's cool with me. I mean, that's just kind of how, look, I don't want you all to be like, oh, sympathetic for Jason. I'm going to have sympathy or pity for Jason. It's not like that at all. You have to understand when you're this type of person and you step into these roles and in this kind of game, you have to know that this is what's going to happen to you. You know, and you had to be able to weather the storm. And I'm saying to you, I was that person for two years. And it was kind of weak. That's treasure. That's treasure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't, I wouldn't want to go, I don't think I need to prove myself again in another way to let you all know that I got the juice and the skill set. It's a different board now. To lead.

It's a difference board.

I know, but I'm still, still. I mean. I mean,

I think that, I mean, I will say, I mean, I would love to see you as president, Jason. I just, like, I would love, but I would like to see you in a leadership role. And I know that you're saying you don't want to do it. No,

I'm not interested. Don't waste your time on a nomination with me tonight. Don't nominate me. I think I love having Kim in her position. I mean, listening to her talk and some of the things I was thinking about and trying to push at the time, it was not even available. And you're getting busy right now. So it's great to see you, you know, work with John and get stuff done. This is awesome. Don't change that role. Maybe, you know, in the future, Jason Growe, because he's a man and he's good at finance as well. All three of us know business. Outside of that, though, I don't think that we should rock the boat on that. Secretary, I think, is a cool spot, but that's not really for me. I'd

I'm not interested. Don't waste your time on a nomination with me tonight. Don't nominate me. I think I love having Kim in her position. I mean, listening to her talk and some of the things I was thinking about and trying to push at the time, it was not even available. And you're getting busy right now. So it's great to see you, you know, work with John and get stuff done. This is awesome. Don't change that role. Maybe, you know, in the future, Jason Groh, because he's a man and he's good at finance as well. All three of us know business. Outside of that, though, I don't think that we should rock the boat on that. Secretary, I think, is a cool spot, but that's not really for me. I'd

just like to

add... The place where ultimately you want to be, if the board wants to see you right, wrong, or indifferent, the board wants to you in one of those leadership roles, and you've expressed that you want to be president, which I think all of us want to support you in that. And I think we need you to take on one of those roles and then for a year... And I think that's what I'm hearing. I'm not going to be here. At least I hope I'm not going be here.

You might be here.

I just want to add to Jason, because this is new coming up today, that the position that Gary described today, to me, I think would be perfect for you. And I think if we decide to do it, you should consider that, because that gets right up your alley with what you've been talking about, all the legislation, all that. I like Gary for that role. But I think you'd be great at that. I just wanted to say that.

But I just want to say, and this is the end of me talking about – I know, I got my loss here. But you got to know, when you lose, take some L's in life, man. You get stronger, you get better. All right. So what I'm saying is, as the president, man, like, I think – The agenda is important, you know, how we set the agenda, how we communicate about the agenda, making sure those policies are – those things in those policies are highlighted in the agenda. Also, I think, you know, as the president, somebody needs to be talking about some of these – about these things that are coming out of the pipeline that are major deals that are really going to affect our students. I mean, from – all backgrounds and all walks of life, right? And that's just stuff that we really need to focus on. So if I'm not the president, I'm hoping, Amy, you will please listen to what I'm saying and take me seriously when I say that I think we really need to put in the work and understand what's happening in those policies, what's happening in Jeff City and on the federal level because it's affecting us every day. I got friends in different cities that... that are on school boards, and they're having tough times. So I just want to make sure it's not like our state is turning a different color anytime soon. It's just not going to happen.

But I still think that you can, and I appreciate that, and I know that, I appreciate what you're saying, but I think you would do a great job with this stuff, and I'm struggling to understand why... If you're not president, like I know, Gary, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to upset you because I know you've expressed interest in this, in that role. No, I want that role to

exist for someone.

But I guess I'm struggling to understand why you wouldn't be willing to do that, to take on that role, which is exactly kind of what I'm hearing aligns with what you want. Because I think that part of the president's role is delegating some responsibility and having different voices. And with some of those issues, your voice might be more meaningful than my voice.

Can I get a little bit of feedback, just both on that and also specifically to the nomination and the job description? It sounds like different people talked about this. We didn't talk about it, but I'll tell you what I think now. And I think it's very, I mean, honestly, it's courageous to ask us, why not? Why not one vote? So I wouldn't do that. But I think I have had... a little bit of a view of what the actual role on a day-to-day basis is and based on that description. And I think that does drive my decision more. I think Amy has given me some view of the operational and kind of Logistical and day-to-day nature of what she does and deals with I know not all but probably more definitely more than I had before and I see that as I think a little bit of a different role than what you're describing and it doesn't mean it's and it's just my view whatever so I do see that if I know that I didn't want to do that role from a day-to-day standpoint. I mean, we should all find ourselves so lucky to be in the situation and have to think about this, right? But if she was willing to continue to do that and knowing the strength that she has in the experience doing that, I was happy for that. I don't see the same level of that being your strength. But the kind of thing that I'm talking about, I am with Amy on that. Like, I do see that as your strength and we need your voice in that. Also, Amy has more than one time said to me, and other presidents have said this too, I didn't say what I thought about that issue because I was allowing the board to You know voice their opinions as a whole so in some ways I think the president the chair of the meeting the president of an organization actually expresses less

than

everybody else and Frankly, I don't want that from you. So that's That's just how I would base it so

yeah, I mean in my view like addition to the policy like I think it's critical as a board that we capitalize on our board members strengths okay my strength is not finances we all know that okay I have no business being a treasurer I mean the right Kim my husband's by laughing as he's listening to this yeah You know, I view a large part of the role as being president as managing people, managing, you know, situations on a day-to-day basis that arise. And then I look to the rest of you guys to then take on those roles that, you know, where everybody can shine and, you know, we can capitalize on everybody's Respective strengths and we all have different strengths. So.

First of all I want to say to Jason Wilson I'm really I was happy that you nominated yourself but I have to tell you that I was surprised because I just didn't know it till now. And so for me. it is hard to give you a vote based on five minutes of thinking about, you know what I mean? Just to be honest, it doesn't mean that I don't think you're excellent and that I don't want you as a leader. Cause I do. I mean, I think we're all qualified leaders in this room or else we wouldn't be here. Right? So any one of us in any of these positions could probably rock it. However, um, if we're going to be thoughtful about this for me personally, I'll just speak for me. I would have liked to have had more time to think about it, um, and to talk to you about it versus just a couple of minutes. Um, Again, I'm very happy with this board. I agree with Amy very much. So having you here is amazing. Tell me more about what you want to do as president, that kind of thing, and then it would have been more of a decision for me than it was tonight. That's all I'll

say. I was... a little off topic. If anyone is just interested in the responsibilities of the secretary, I'm happy to share as we move forward. Because it's not just what you see here reading motions. Like I also review minutes like in detail and I'm in charge of signing a lot of documents and reviewing the agenda to make sure it's in order. So anyway, for anyone that wants to be nominated or thinking about being a secretary, I just wanted to put out there the roles more than what you see me doing here at the meetings, if you're interested.

Thanks, Stacey. I think that's a good idea. Again, as a newer board member, it is great for us to go around and actually look at these things. And I didn't think to do that in terms of secretary or whatnot. So I think that's true. We should be more, as we come into these meetings, be more prepared for Exactly. What is this role? Because I wouldn't have known any of that. The other thing, eh, I forgot. I'll come back to it. You

also signed the diplomas.

Oh, yes. Signing diplomas, yes. Well, I said signing documents. Diplomas is one of them, yes. That's a lot. It's a lot of diplomas. You signed all the diplomas? Every single one. That's a

So again from a new board member perspective here it would be really cool kind of like we were talking about earlier in our other meeting to see a system where there is some sort of teaching of other people who are potentially interested for the following year because again here I am you know what if no one runs for secretary? And I'm like, I guess I will. And then I'm like, but what does secretary do? So again, and it doesn't mean you could have taught me this year, but in a way, just our board being more thoughtful about how to pass on the skills that Amy has built for two years onto someone else, just in general, more sharing, more communication about these specific roles, and therefore more learning for the person that's going to come up next. Or even in some cases like we did with the board rep, you know, that person would potentially, the ex-president would still be there when the new president was, that kind of thing where you have that person to go to as that mentor when you're new to the role. Some sort of system like that that could really be helpful for us in making these roles continue to be, what was the word we were saying? We want consistent, yeah, yeah. Yeah, continuity is really important helpful. Thanks Jason.

I do agree with that Chris because we don't all see what each of these roles entail beyond our meetings and I do think it's important to not only know if you'd be interested in it but who you're voting for it if they if it's a good fit. Thank you for that.

And I know I'm not I know we've I wanted to make sure everybody had a chance to say something but I know I'm not a voting member of the board, but I do want to give my input in terms of as a superintendent, being in my second year in an organization and being in other organizations, stability and consistency is huge for an organization. And I welcome different perspectives all the time. But being... Again, second year, someone wise told me this once. And they said the first year you're in any new position, the lights are off, it's dark, you don't know what's coming, you don't what's going. Second year, the lights come on, you can see things clearly but you're still going to bump into things because you didn't know where they were the first year because the lights were off. And your third year, the lights are on and you are going. And so for me, when I look at it, next year will be my third year. Having Amy as board president, that stability and that consistency, it takes a while to build that relationship and that trust and the continuity is huge. And so I just want to voice that as well. So I do appreciate that. Okay. So moving on, all in favor of Amy Rubin for president? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Amy Rubin is named board president. For

the record, I... You can oppose it and

I...

You can do that and I abstain from voting. I did not. I'm just, I'm abstaining this year.

All right. All right.

So, Amy Rubin,

you're up first.

Well, thank you, everybody, for your trust and kind words. I appreciate it. So, let's move on to – do we have any public comments tonight? We

have some public comments, sir.

Hey,

you're doing the graduation speech this year, so... Okay. Okay, so are there any... Who wants to be the vice president? Carter? I

think you mean the floor is open for nominations.

The floor is open for I'll nominate myself, I would like to be vice president. Okay, I will second that. Are there any, does anybody have any commentary on that?

I have had some great conversations with Stacy about the vice president role and I think that I've enjoyed that and I'm excited to see her move into that role and I think she'll do a good job. And she's done a great job as secretary, probably better than I did. And I think she'll be really supportive. I mean, it is the shortest description in the policies, which is basically whatever the president needs or asks you to do. That's a bit of a paraphrase, but it is kind of other duties as assigned. And I appreciate your ability to take things up when you need to, but not just being flexible. And I think that she'll do a great job in that role.

And Gary, thank you. As the current vice president, I appreciate that and appreciate your offers to help onboard me and coach me into this role. So thank you. If I'm elected.

I also want to thank Gary for all of his commitment and his hard work. He's been a great vice president. I am going to support Stacey. I'm sorry. To the extent that she's elected, you've been great, and I appreciate your willingness to serve in that capacity. I

can't think of a better president to be vice president since I've never been vice president before.

Thank you. Okay. So all in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, congratulations, Stacy. Okay, so let's move on to Treasurer. I

think Secretary is next.

Does it matter? No, it's Treasurer. Okay, I nominate Kim. I second. Questions, comments, conversation?

Is there anybody else that's interested? I'm happy to do it for one more year. I've already done it for two years. I enjoy working with John, obviously, but as Jason said, sometimes new blood is good. Jason, you're very qualified if you're interested in the role. If you're not, I'm still going to drag you into all the meetings. But you'll be ready when you are interested. It's not this year. Does anybody else want it?

I

just want to say,

I nominated Kim and I'm voting for Kim, not just because she's the only one nominated, but Kim, I think you've done an excellent job. Excellent job as treasurer. And I thank you because I know treasurer really is a lot of extra work and does require a certain skill that I also do not have. So I thank you and thank you for accepting the nomination again. Okay, deal.

All in favor? Aye. And congratulations, Kim. You're the lucky recipient of the role as treasurer.

I'm lucky to be surrounded by people like John.

Yes, you are. Okay, so we're on to secretary and Gary, I know you said that you didn't like being the secretary before, but

Well, I didn't like signing all those diplomas before. No, that's not true. I actually did like it because I could take a picture of my kids and send it here.

I would like to nominate you as secretary, and the reason is that I think that on the board you are the person with the most knowledge of the Roberts rules and explaining those to us, and I think that's a critical role. for the secretary, so.

Well I don't know if you're right about that and I don't know you mean it as a compliment or not but I am happy to do any role including that one and that's one I do have some experience with so I'm happy to do it if there's not someone else who wants

to. I would like to say Gary was an excellent secretary before. and truly because of what Amy said, and you also understand governance so well. And I think that's so important as someone that's reviewing and making sure the agendas are in proper order, et cetera. So I'd support you in that if you're willing to accept the nomination to be secretary for a second time.

Thank you.

Okay. Are you okay with that? Yeah. Okay.

Absolutely.

All in favor? Well, here's the deal Gary I like to the extent that we end up you know I know that you did express interest in that role that we're gonna put on the agenda and I have no problem with You know to the extent that We end up electing you to that position with you resigning a secretary and we can nominate somebody else and If you don't want to do both because I don't want to put you in a position where You're you're taking on dual leadership roles that take on that take a lot of time and commitment

Yeah, okay. No, I understand that and thank you for making that point. I mean, I I hope that there will be a role if it's not called that that we'll decide to pursue and some of the things that I do now and i'm going to continue to do it's not going to matter whether there's a designated role like like that um and i don't see them as conflicting necessarily but i'm i'm happy to do do either one

didn't that i was going to ask haika if we do create that new position let's say that so that situation happens there's a procedure for if if that happened that gary would want would resign from secretary Like, if we create a new position that you'd want to be nominated for, I assume there's a procedure to do so, right? And then have another election for secretary? Like, if someone resigned from an officer role midterm, we can do that, right?

I think the secretary and treasurer role, the timing is July. So probably it might be complicated if it's not before that. But I think before that, it doesn't seem hard, but... Right, right.

I mean,

the secretary position is one that some districts don't even have as a board member. You appoint it. Yeah, you appointed a staff. Yeah. Too bad all the fans left for this, but.

I'm glad we didn't subject them to this. That was a good

call.

Okay, so all in favor for Gary being secretary? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, so Gary, congratulations. Okay, so we have our officers elected and Matt. Yes, and now we're going to move to superintendent communications.

Is there no public comment?

I don't think so.

Okay, superintendent update. I just have a couple of quick things. Talk about students first. Just a few highlights. One of our seniors, senior Holly Connor was awarded the Missouri Governor's Council on Disability 2022 Youth Leadership Award for her work to spread stories of awareness, acceptance and inclusion. Holly is amazing. If you've ever gotten a chance to go to see any of the theater performances, she's had lead roles in it. And most recently, she actually sang the national anthem at St. Louis City soccer match as well. I was there.

It was amazing.

Wasn't it? She's phenomenal. So yeah. So I just want to highlight her. The Clayton High School mock trial team also did really well. They placed second in the state. And what's really amazing about that is not only our students, but Their sponsor, their coach, his name is Josh Hirsfield, and he's our campus supervisor at the high school. So he's taken them on, and he's really leading them. It's one of his passion areas. And then finally, Wydown Middle School eighth grader Ava Wilkinson has been selected to perform at Carnegie.

Holy cow.

And she was selected from a pool of nearly 10,000 singers from across the world. that was phenomenal. Yeah, we have amazing kids doing amazing things. Eighth grader. So just a few highlights of the students. And then finally, next couple of months are going to be fast and furious. We're going to do a lot of the state assessments that we typically have to do. MAP, EOC, and then AP exams start. And we're going to start next week. And you can see grades three through eight for MAP, and then EOC English II, Government, and Biology. And then in addition, we have our regular internal assessments that we do with the NWEA and A reading. So a lot of classrooms, I know usually the end of April and May, I try not to pop in as much because there's usually a sign on the window that says testing occurring. So kids will be very focused. And I'm sure Carter knows that there's a lot coming on that end. So hand it off to you, Carter.

Thank you. I'll also try to make it somewhat quick. So first, I just want to talk a little bit about the two things that are on the agenda. First, with the Mental Wellness Center update, I'm really excited to see what the outside organization has to say about this. But I'll just take a second to reiterate what I and a lot of other students believe is necessary, which is separate entity in the school which is specifically like their purpose is to deal with mental wellness issues for students where students have a place where they know they can go if they just need you know ten minutes to calm down and I think it's really important that this is a distinct place to go than like a traditional counseling office where like maybe earlier that morning you went to talk about your classes or college plans. And then the next thing that was on the agenda is to talk about the calendar for next year. The students weren't super opinionated on this. The only two pieces of feedback I heard was first, this was mainly from younger schools which were advocating for longer breaks. Yeah. And I also heard some people wondering what happened to early release days because I know a lot of people enjoyed, like, you know, come to school on a Friday, get out at 1 o'clock. But, yeah. Those are the main opinions on that. And then the third and final thing that I just sort of wanted to bring to everyone's attention, something that's sort of a growing thing especially at the high school is just I think it's really important for all of us to have like how artificial intelligence is going to be used in the high school like on our radar because this is like a really growing thing which is going to have a much bigger impact on how we get an education in the coming years And I think it's important for all of us to sort of stay ahead of the ball in this so that we're able to adapt before it just, like, completely, you know, goes off on its own and we don't really maintain any control as how it's used in the classroom. So I think it's import for us to talk about this and, like, sort of figure out a plan. Personally, and based off of my conversation with other students, I think it's unrealistic to say, no AI anywhere in school because first of all, it's going to probably get used anyways and that may lead to just like unequal access to it and results based on who's willing to break the rules which is obviously something we don't want. but also in terms of how it's going to be used in our own careers. This is a tool which students are going to have to learn how to use. It's going to impact our professions in the future, and I think learning to work with it as opposed to figuring out how to do things without it is probably a much more productive thing to be doing in schools.

When you say AI, you... You mean like smartphones and things of that nature or just like chat GPT? Yeah, like that type of thing. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

Thank you, Carter, for bringing that up. I think that is huge. I saw Jeff Poles nodding his head as you were talking because he's like, oh gosh, here we go. But I do think that is super important and I think there are a lot of very positive uses for it in our schools, but there clearly are also some negative And I think you're right about that we need to be talking about it and get ahead of it. So thank you for mentioning it.

Yeah, I agree. So, I mean, I would say, Heike, if not this year, then very early next year, try and get some type of a presentation put together so we can have a conversation around that.

Before we move on though, did you have any suggestions on how we can utilize it? One or

two? I think my main suggestions would just be as to how we figure out what our stance on that would be. I think it's really important to bring teachers into that discussion because they really understand not only how

And just from the teacher perspective, I know that there have been conversations that are already occurring, like professional learning about what it is and how it impacts. And depending on what teacher you talk to, right, the majority right now are embracing the idea because it is here to stay, and who knows what it's going to look like next year this time. But how do we navigate that world in the classroom, and how can we utilize it? So thank you, Carter.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's great. It's already in the classroom, right? I mean there's already students that are using it and when you talk about equal access and Knowledge of what it is and how to use it when to use it how to not abuse it I think that's where the student voice together with the teacher voice is really important so even an example with one of my own kids in the high school where a teacher put out an assignment in the last couple weeks and and then all the assignments came back and he nullified grades for the entire class because half the class had used AI and the other half had not, but he couldn't really distinguish between which half had used it and which half had not. And so it was just a zero for everybody. He just gave everybody a zero and said we're gonna have to think about how to do this. But that's why it's really, I'm with Carter, it's really important to get in front of so that the teachers know how to apply, when to apply, how to set expectations for students, which is really important from the student perspective because it is happening already.

And I think there's, Jeff would know, but we can talk about it I guess next year. I think there's software also to detect the use of it or they're developing it now. I've read about some universities using it but I also know kids that have used it for English papers and stuff, so yeah, we need to

be. Okay, let's go ahead and thank you, Carter. Let's take a quick break and reconvene in five minutes. We are going to we're going to let's get our update on the on the Wellness Center.

Okay well good evening everybody. Back in February the Board of Education approved a service agreement with Jessica Colvin, a wellness education consultant based in California and she is on Zoom with us tonight. Ms. Colvin has a background in school social work as well as counseling and tonight she's going to give us an overview of how some secondary schools are approaching wellness for students and how the School District of Clayton can reimagine wellness offerings at the high school. And then we'll also give you an update on our work completed so far and what we've got in the pipeline. So I will hand it over to Jessica.

Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? Yeah, I hope so. Okay. Thank you so much for having me. This is kind of funny. I'm here in California and I have Midwest roots and I am thrilled to be supporting Clayton School District as you look into reimagining wellness in your high school environment. and also your middle and elementary schools. A little bit about me, I have a background in social work and public health. I've been working in schools for 23 years, and I have been opening wellness centers since the first wellness center that was ever created in the country opened in San Francisco 22 years ago. So I've kind of taken that model and curated it, and I'm working with over 75 wellness centers that have been developed and implemented over the past several years. So I'm thrilled to be doing work with you and your team, and I'm going to be sharing my screen here and tell you a little bit about Reimagining Wellness, what we're looking at, what we've done so far, and some space for questions, see if this works. Okay. OK, so I like to say reimagining wellness because we know that and one of the first things I said to your staff is you have so many amazing resources in your schools already. So it's not like we have to start thinking about wellness. We just have ways to reimagine it, make it more sustainable and be able to meet the needs of more students because the needs are high. So and with the goal of expanding the safety net for all students. So we know why wellness. As many of you know, the American Academy of Pediatrics has declared a national emergency in adolescent mental health. The US Surgeon General has highlighted the urgent need to address the nation's youth mental health crisis. We see it every day in the news. These issues existed before the pandemic, and they've been heightened since the pandemic. And schools are now a place where students are looking for this kind of support in order to be successful academically. Their emotional and social well-being is critical for them to do well in school. Why wellness? Here's some of the data from your school district. 27% of Clayton High School students reported experiencing symptoms of depression, including sadness, often or always in the past 30 days. This is different than teenage sadness or angst. So this is persistent hopelessness, ongoing sadness. So 27% of our students are reporting this. 24% of our high school students reported using alcohol in the past 30 days. That's within the last 30 days. The numbers around lifetime use are different and higher. 18% of Clayton High School 11th graders reported that they had considered suicide. And this is a scary number. It's not so different than other districts that I work with, but it's terrifying. And what we know is that of the young people who need mental health services, only 30% of them get their needs met and get into treatment or services. And 70% of those youth are looking to get those services at schools in a school setting. So what we know is our students are coming to school with more and more issues that they're juggling. We also know that Clayton School's strategic plan includes helping students incorporate habits and practices that foster lifelong wellness. And we know it's time to reimagine how we address health and wellness on campus together. So this is kind of a crazy slide, but let me try to explain. So the multi-tiered systems of support is a concept that there are certain programs and services for all students. They're universal. There are certain programs and service that are targeted for smaller numbers of students, and some are more intense. And I think what I've seen is that most schools and districts hire a therapist. to address mental health services in schools. That is a Tier 3 intervention, a critical intervention. But what happens is all of our resources often go into Tier 2, Tier 3 when we can do a lot of prevention and education in Tier 1. So the multi-tiered systems of support is focused on academics, behavior, And sometimes they'll say social and emotional or wellness. And the beauty of the model that I'm going to share with you in just a moment is it's a model that was created many, many years ago that always had three tiers of support. So instead of hiring the therapist to address the 30 to 50 kids they can see on their caseload, it addresses the mental health needs of all students. And there's three areas of focus that we've talked about with Clayton schools mental health, physical health and substance misuse and three audiences that need support and resources students families and educators. So what is a wellness center? A wellness center is a physical space on campus. Sometimes there's construction, oftentimes there's not. I've seen it in every space you can imagine that can be transformed into a drop-in space for students to get the help that they need. Students may drop in the space to self-refer or refer a friend. They may come in crisis. They may come for an appointment for a Tier 3 service. They may come to get health education and information. They may come just to hang out. We want it to be a comfortable space where we destigmatize mental health. They also might be coming for a youth development or leadership opportunity. We want them to come to this space and know how to access prevention, intervention and crisis support once are ongoing. And the spaces look different at every school. But the one thing in common is that they're designed by and with students. So everything you see was picked by students. They let us know some of the books that they liked, some of the artwork that they liked, what they thought was comfortable. And then you'll see kind of over here, there are very structured self-care coping and emotional regulation tools. That's a key component of our drop in space. The wellness center model that I've kind of worked towards and curated for many years includes nine key components. And it takes time to get to all of these areas, but it's a very comprehensive program. There's the safe and brave spaces like I just showed you. There's coordinating care to ensure that we're not duplicating, that we're talking, that we're following guidelines. HIPAA and FERPA, we are looking to expand community partnerships because we as school districts can't do it alone. We can diversify the types of services and programs by partnering with our community. We love doing health education and prevention where we're doing school-wide awareness events, education in classrooms about important topics that are relevant to our teens where they need the education and information to be healthy in their lives. And one of my favorite parts is the youth development arm. There is a youth arm of the wellness team, a wellness youth council where students are trained to not only educate their peers about different health and wellness topics, but also to advise and help steer the growth of a wellness program, which is a program that changes every year depending on what the most important topics are that are coming up for our youth. There are systems that we have to share around data management and evaluation. Wellness centers have been evaluated for over 20 years and shown great success. We want a part of our program to be staff professional development, parent and caregiver education. And since COVID, we've developed an entire program digital wellness program, which I can show you if there's time in a moment. But when students are not in school, there's 24-7, 365 support and information that they can get through our Wellness Center website. What wellness is not is a place for students to skip class. There's high expectations and high support. It is not a place where students can come during class time without a pass. If they come with a pass, we assess if they're in crisis. If they're in crisis, we communicate with teachers. Our goal is to get them back to class if they're healthy and well enough to be back in class. Some teachers allow for a brain break. This is a 10 to 15 minute period of time with a pass where they participate in the wellness toolbox, which is a structured kind of offering of self-care coping activities. and emotional regulation tools, and then they head back to class. It's not a replacement for social and emotional learning in the classroom. We complement this work, but in order to keep the wellness center open with limited staff, we can do only so many workshops in classrooms because we do have to close the wellness center when we're in the classrooms, but we can support teachers in implementing SEL and help curate SEL. And it's certainly not successful without staff, student, and parent caregiver input. So I think Robin is going to tell you a little bit about what's been happening, what's happening now and what's happening next.

Thank you, Jessica. So what's been happening since our agreement was approved? Jessica has been meeting weekly with myself and with Dr. Regina Moore, one of the assistant principals at Clayton High School. to help us start planning initial stakeholder engagement. And so, so far that has looked like meeting with high school counselors, social workers, SSD staff, health services staff at the high school to learn more about the wellness center model, what wellness programming could look like at an elevated level. And then from that group, that initial core group developing a wellness working group of kind of our initial stakeholders who will help us gather additional information from other stakeholder groups that I'll talk about in a second. We were also able to have the district SEL and wellness committee hear from Jessica and also provide some information on what they were excited about and what were some of the barriers that they anticipated. And then Jessica had also started working with us on how to engage students and parents and caregivers in effective ways as we go through this needs assessment and asset mapping. So what's currently happening, I just met with the students from the All in Clayton Coalition to start getting their ideas around what elevated wellness programming could look like at the high school. We also have started planning to work with the Clayton High School staff. Their next big staff meeting is on May 1st, so we'll be a part of that, as well as having the wellness working group starting to look at some of the feedback that's been coming back from the other groups we've already talked to We just got some parent caregiver engagement events on the calendar, which will be communicated out to Clayton High School families in the next couple days. And then we also have started looking at job descriptions, like what does the wellness coordinator position look like in other places? What could it start looking like in draft form at Clayton High School and how does that fit with potentially an outreach specialist, which is another critical position that has been used in some of the other wellness centers that Jessica has helped launch. And then what's happening next, Dr. Kaczewski, Dr. Moore and myself will be traveling out to Marin County at the beginning of May to do some site visits to wellness centers that are currently open and operating in various stages of their development so we can see what it looks like when it's in action and learn a little bit more from those educators about what their lessons learned have been since those have launched. We'll be hosting two parent and caregiver engagement sessions that will be open to all Clayton parents at the high school. We'll do one on Zoom during the day, and then we'll do one in the evening. We'll also be putting together an event for a lot of our student club representatives to attend a session at the high school during Greyhound time later this month, so we can also gather feedback from them as well as executing the presentation with the Clayton High School staff and utilizing some of the folks in that wellness working group to facilitate these events. And then using that information, as well as what we learn at the site visit and ongoing work with Jessica, to really finalize what we want those job descriptions to look like, posting that job, going through the hiring process and begin that training process in the development of procedures and routines for a wellness center. I think it's also important to note that a couple weeks ago I'd also submitted approval for a DESE grant, a one-time grant to go toward mental health. The good news is a few days ago we found out that grant was approved. So we will be receiving $43,000 to go toward mental health, which we hope to put toward the wellness coordinator position.

Thank you, Robin. And just to explain why we're focusing so much on stakeholder engagement, I really appreciate your staff for focusing on stakeholder engagement. This is a shift for schools and we want the staff who are doing this work to feel valued. We want to build on the strengths of the work that they're already doing. We want to hear from the students. We want to and for your district. So although there are core components that I've seen work across demographics and districts, we want to make sure we're engaging folks in your district and hear what is going well and what the needs are. And I can tell you from experience this process is so worthwhile. I've seen districts who've skipped this process and it's a big change to the culture of the school. So I really, really appreciate these stakeholder engagement meetings and we're learning a lot. And the one thing that I'm really walking away with from each of these meetings is there's a lot going really, really well and we want to build on those strengths. And then finally, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and give you a chance to ask any questions.

Okay, so over time at the last meeting we talked about just I was going to go around and call on people. So I'm going to start Carter at your end. Do you have anything that any questions?

Yeah, I just have one question. I was just curious like sort of what the timeline specifically looks like as to getting these facilities and personnel up and running.

Yeah, Robin, do you want me to answer that or do you want to try that one?

I can try it. So right now what we're thinking is if we can get through all the stakeholder engagement in the next four to five weeks, we should be able to finalize a job description, get that posted before the end of the school year with a hopeful start date at the beginning of August for this position. The first semester for the wellness coordinator would be to set up all of the routines and procedures associated with the center as well as kind of the marketing to students and to teachers and to families about what it is and what it isn't, with then a soft open to students in January. So we would like that person to be on board to help be part of the planning and execution process so we know how all the puzzle pieces fit together in the ecosystem and then have it be available to students beginning in January.

Thanks. I just have a couple questions. I couldn't help myself. Um, so first of all, I really appreciate the update and I just want to congratulate you Robin on the $43,000 grant. That's a big deal. So good job. Um, a couple of questions. One is it sounds like you guys are committing a lot to stakeholder engagement. Uh, and maybe this is a question more for, for Jessica and I really appreciate that. Um, can you talk a little bit about how, like what, what's the actual staff feedback on this concept? I know that you've heard we have a lot of great things going and we do. And that's really great. But like, this is a new concept. Do we have any like, input on how you know, we're feeling about this new concept of a wellness center?

I can share with you what I'm hearing from California, but Robin can share more on the ground. Yeah, whoever's doing

this.

Yeah, we've had surveys at the end of our presentations and we've had amazing supportive feedback. I'm always looking for folks who are worried, who are concerned that this is duplicating services, that it's something that's not necessary. And I haven't heard that. Robin, have you? I've heard a lot of excitement. And actually when we asked for Some of the key stakeholders, which are the student services staff in your high school, if they wanted to participate in the ongoing working group, almost everyone wanted to participate, which was exciting. Robin, I don't know if you have a different lens.

The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly supportive. Everyone so far has shared that they feel like this is going to address a really important need that they feel like isn't being fully met, even though we have a lot of things in place. And so people have been very supportive and feel like it's going to help us reach students who we aren't currently able to reach in a fuller way. The top two concerns have been related to space and making sure that it's... a proper space for the services and easy for students to access. And then the second one that came out of the district wellness committee was some concern about stigma, about how do we create, you know, how do we set this up for students not to feel self-conscious about going to get extra help and support and have it not be a shameful experience? And so Jessica has helped us talk through about the logistics and things that other sites have learned about like where is it located? How do we educate students about what it is and what it isn't? And then what was interesting is even though we're very early in the student engagement, two of the things that came out right away with students in terms of what they wished we had was a place for students to come in without an appointment to decompress. And that currently the spaces that are kind of filling that need are being able to go to the library and and stopping in the nurse's office, which was corroborated indeed by other adults in that initial stakeholder group, and they agreed with that. So there's definitely a lot of support and interest in bringing a model like this to the community.

Great. And then the other question is – and whoever wants to answer it. So I think the scope of work covers K through 12, right? Right? So maybe we can talk a little bit about what's going on with kindergarten through eighth grade. Or am I wrong about that in terms of the scope? Jessica, your scope of work.

So the scope of work was focusing primarily on secondary. But I think already we've learned so much about what it can look like, especially in the rollout to eventually get to a place where our students, particularly even in middle school, begin to realize like they don't where they wouldn't even remember what it feels like to be in secondary school without a wellness center. So I think phase one is definitely looking at what this piece is going to look like for grades 9 through 12. How do we then branch it out into middle? And then what are the things that we can start doing at the elementary school level to feed into this? And I think we've already done some of that groundwork. Our partnership with Center for Mindfulness had tremendous reach in year two, and that was focused a lot on coping skills and helping students learn be able to develop their own capacity to handle big feelings, friendships, kindness, et cetera, and even taking better care of themselves in a lot of different ways. So I feel like we've already been making some headway in an age appropriate way for our younger students.

Okay. Yeah. And the one thing I'll add is I have a lot of experience opening middle school wellness centers as well. And I don't recommend a wellness center model for elementary school. We want them in their classrooms, but we do have a lot of tools to use in elementary schools. And I think bigger than the wellness centers is really focusing in on wellness, and social and emotional support on three tiers. And that can go across K through 12. So we will absolutely be talking about programs for all students, some students, and the highest needs students at all levels.

Okay. So those three triangles, for lack of, you can't see my hands go like this, I know, but that's supposed to scale down all the way down to kindergarten. That's the hope. Yeah. Okay. Got it. All right. Thank you.

So thank you. I think some of the statistics that were mentioned in the slides, tell me if I got this wrong, Robin, but I think it was 30% of high school students that were identified as needing mental health services, and of that 30%, 70% were getting them at school. Is that right?

Let me clarify. So that's a national statistic. Right, right. Yeah, it's not Clayton specific. But I think the reason why we put that statistic in is because it tells us that a big portion of kids want to get their services at school. And hence, we need really good systems of support without providing we really cannot provide therapy to all students. It's just not cost effective or what a school can do. So this model provides a three tiered system of support so that not all students funnel into one to one.

So, and I apologize for digging into a national survey that you might not know all the details about, but would anything that's happening in our wellness center as we are thinking about it now be what would have been included in that 70%? Or I'm just trying to understand the overlap between those services and what we would have happening.

My understanding is that you have school social workers, school counselors, and other folks already on campus doing the tier three work. A little bit of tier two, mostly tier three. And as I was mentioning, that's very common. And a lot of students get their needs met that way. But the problem is, is you can hire... many therapists are social workers and they're never going to meet the need unless we go, it's kind of the river parable. We got to go up river and figure out why the kids are falling in, in the first place, rather than pulling them out and giving them, you know, the one-to-one some kids, no matter what are going to need the one-to one support, but the model provides support to figure out why are the kids falling in? Can we give them a life jacket? So that not every kid ends up at a crisis level. And in my opinion, schools are not meant to be therapeutic clinics. So we provide short-term counseling and help families navigate resources in and outside of the school. We close at four, we're closed for the summer. So we wanna make sure that the only service we're providing is not that tier three one-to-one, that we're educating our students, providing prevention and navigating resources for them during the school day and outside of the school day.

Okay, that's really helpful. And then the other question I was going to ask Robin is, are you aware of any other metro area districts that have a trauma center, like anything like what we're talking about?

Not this type of model. There are ones that focus more on the physical health, but not kind of this more comprehensive mental health, and then coordinating with community partners, having that be part of the role too. Not that I'm aware of.

Thank you.

Um, okay. Kind of a two part question and the first part would maybe be for Robin. So I think of our, of all the stakeholder groups that we're talking about that need to be kind of involved in creating this. One of the really important ones in my mind are our current school counselors. So I'm wondering like from Robin, like, I think it's so important that we have buy-in from them and support. Do they yet know how their roles will change or be impacted with this? And the second part of the question is maybe more to Jessica. How do we foster collaboration and not like competition, if that makes sense? Our school counselors might feel territorial over this work. And so I guess I just want to know how you're going to work that out. And are they supportive and they understand and not threatened by taking this piece away from them?

So they are very excited about this work, and they have been part of that initial stakeholder group, and many of them have volunteered to help facilitate some of these future engagement events. They are excited about it because they definitely see its potential in helping us expand our reach to those Tier 1, Tier 2 students so that way they can ultimately serve more students' needs and address them in a more comprehensive, coordinated manner. way. The other piece, and it's funny that you brought this up because Jessica and I were just talking about this at our last check-in, is that one of the biggest pieces we want to figure out right now is taking a look at the wellness center coordinator job descriptions that she's used in previous spaces and comparing it to our current secondary social worker job description with our grade level counselor job description. And then meeting with those folks also in small groups to really deeply understand their daily work So that way we can craft a job description that is very clear and helps everyone understand where their jobs end and begin alongside each other and where there might be some overlap. And so they are absolutely a part of this process, including not just our secondary social worker but also our SSD social worker and our SSD staff too because I think they bring a really important vantage point to this type of work.

Yeah. I was thinking thank you for that. I'm happy to hear all that. because I was thinking in particular our school counselors, they go into counseling because they like this type of work and they unfortunately get bogged down with a lot of the academic advising type of work. And so are any of them feeling sad about maybe losing the little bit of this work that they do? And so I just wanted to make sure that, like I said, that they're supportive of it and can collaborate and not feel like that piece is being taken away from them and be resentful. I'm glad you've been having those conversations to make sure that everyone's on board and okay with it.

I just want to say how important this question is. I have seen a lot of success in wellness centers, and one of the biggest mistakes I've seen made is not to include school counselors in the discussion, and it has taken districts years backwards without having these discussions. stakeholder engagement is critical. And school counselors are one of the most important stakeholders. I couldn't agree with you more. Many school counselors go in for the social and emotional and have gotten put into more of an academic counseling role. I can tell you that those conversations, that's why it was the first group we met with included school counselors. And now we're meeting with a smaller group of them. And those relationships are critical. And What I found is over time, the relationship is so strong between wellness and school counselors. You can ask school counselors, they will tell you it is the best program that's ever come to our district. It allows us to do more social and emotional counseling. So what happens is instead of every single student getting filtered in for one-to-one they can work with some of the highest needs students because the numbers show us that about 80% of kids who come to the wellness center can get their needs met without going behind closed doors. And then about 20% of them do need a higher level of care. And one of the first things we ask them is, would you be comfortable? Could we take you over to your school counselor? So it's actually increased the number of kids who need that next level care that they get to see. And for the kids who have issues maybe a lower level issue, we can take care of those students so they can work with some of the most high need students.

Great. Thank you so much.

Question for you though. Is there any like, I don't know, training that we can like, Training is not the right word. Saying this I'll get the right vocabulary here but like is there any training for these kids on how to decompress? teaching them how to, you know, because sometimes it's a matter of experience and just not knowing. You know, it's your first time as a freshman, your first time as sophomore dealing with the pressures of trying to get into Yale. And, you know, it's just a lot of stress. And so is there any training for that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yes. And so, and I've actually really structured it over the last couple of years. So when students come into the wellness center for a brain break or to regulate emotionally, the first thing they do is there, it's called the wellness toolbox and it's a built out program. So again, it's not a place for, they're not allowed to use their phones. They're not allowed to take a nap. This is not a place to skip class. And what happens is there's kind of two posters that go on the wall. One is to help them identify what they're feeling. And so, you know, what do you, looking at a feelings wheel, you know, I'm angry and then getting more detailed into what they're really feeling. Where do you feel it in your body? At what level of intensity have you felt it before? What have you done in the past that has made you feel better? Where do you rate yourself right now? Then you go over to the toolbox and there's 10 options, everything from mindfulness to journaling to art to sensory. There's 10 different choices. And then they choose what they want to try. And they engage in some type of coping or self-care or emotional regulation strategy. And then if they'd like, they can actually take information to go. So if they learn some type of breathing technique that felt calming for them, there's actually a slip of paper that they walk away with. or a QR code so that they can practice that in and outside of the wellness center. So we really want them to develop tools and not become dependent on the wellness center. Our hope is that they can come a couple of times and walk away with tools. So I always think, I wish I had something like this in high school. Nobody talked to me about what my feelings were, nor was I ever told how I could address those feelings. And we also, as part of the check-in, we talk about the difference between Coping, which is what some of our kids need in the moment. I am so stressed. I'm so overwhelmed. I'm having a panic attack. That is coping versus self-care, which is you are putting things in for your future wellness, right? So people come in for different things and helping them identify that is also useful.

And what about, like, young people, I guess, someone they can identify with who's their age? You all appoint anyone or teach those kids on how to, like, engage those kids who are in need of self-coping mechanisms. Do you ever do that? Is that something that you all thought about at all?

Are you talking peer-to-peer?

Yeah, peer-to- peer, yep.

Yeah, so we'll start working on a wellness youth council, which will be a group of students who will both advise the wellness center and also be able to educate their peers on different topics. So when we do school-wide awareness events, we do stress less events before finals, right? And the students help us plan the events and they help run the events. There's always adults there, but it's this, when you come up to the activity, to the spin wheel or to the therapy dog, it's the students, the trained students who are teaching their peers. how to practice these tools. So ideally, students are teaching students and we don't want to put students in a place where they're teaching something that's not comfortable for them. We definitely have had some hard times around peer counseling. We don't do peer counseling anymore. We have been doing some peer mentoring, but very careful. that like young people can't be counselors without a master's degree, right? And there's a lot of students. There was, I think it said 18% have considered suicide. We don't want students who are considering suicide to get referred to a student. We wanna make sure that we're giving them the appropriate level of care. But in terms of health education, love it. We would love to use peers and we'll use the Wellness Youth Council as much as possible.

Thank you.

Um, I'm sure none of you are surprised to hear that. I'm thrilled about all of this. Um, Jessica, we are kindred spirits because my background is in public health and social work as well. Um, and so I actually worked at WashU 17 years ago and, um, started a well help to start the wellness center that exists there now. Um, we had all of these same programs. We had peer health educators, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm the reason I mentioned that is because I think a lot of our students will be going to colleges that have these programs, and it only makes sense for them to start using them now and learning more about it even in the elementary school level. So there is so much that we can do. I mean, Jessica, you've hit the nail, like, I think I have a good idea of what all these pieces could look like, but I think most of us probably don't. It is a very comprehensive look at the way that we can have peers and staff or sorry students and staff really engaged in wellness in our on our campus. And I'm just thrilled that it's here. I do want to say again I have something that I've said before which is a concern of mine and it's confusing for me which is those current counselors that we have. I see that counselors in the elementary school and in the middle school giving you know help with SEL I don't know that that happens in the high school and if that do we want to really look at calling having a set of people that are just academic advisors and that's it and they don't do any SEL type of one-on-one stuff I know that goes maybe that's not really what you said in fact you said sort of the opposite I just don't know and Rahmad would know and Are high school counselors really there because they like counseling with, you know, not just the academics? Academic stuff is still counseling too, but you see what I'm saying. There's academic counseling and then there's social, emotional, and wellness counseling. And I just don't – I would love for a physician to be just an academic advisor, just like in college. I don't think an academic advisor should be the person that you're talking – and this goes along with what Carter said. You know, in college, none of us went to our academic advisor to say, well, I'm really depressed, and last night I was thinking about blah, blah, blah. Right? So I just think to do this really well, we should have separate entities, like you said, where there are people advising for classes, and they're experts in that, and they know all about the classes, and they can tell you about these teachers because they are just – that's what they do all day long, and they can give that information to their students that come to them to ask about, you know, this class or that. Oh, do you think I'd be good at – in a totally separate set of people who they would go to about other mental health concerns.

I think you bring up a really interesting point. I've watched counseling departments shift significantly since wellness centers have come on campus. Just an example, at a high-performing district like Clayton and a district like we have in Marin, we had students come to us and say, when I go in my school counselor's office and there's college flags all around, I feel anxious. I'm going for my social and emotional health. needs but it's this they're writing my college application or my college recommendation so our some of our counselors have made significant changes have taken down flags not because they don't want kids to go to college but want to make sure it's a more neutral space where they can get all of their needs met and the only other thing I'll say and it varies I like what you're saying and I don't know who the folks are that are hired in the positions and what they want um but I often look at the school counselor in schools as the primary care physician, right? So everybody's assigned a school counselor and everybody can get most of their needs met through that school counselor. They can get their classes scheduled. They can get basic social and emotional support. They can get college and career advice. And then there's these specialty services, right? Like special education or college and career or wellness. So we've had a great experience You know, where knowing that all kids are connected to a school counselor, which is also a great safety net for kids. And then also making sure that the counselors know when it's the right time to make a referral to the wellness program or to shift. You know, counselors are usually not doing weekly sessions, tier three sessions with students. So knowing when to make that referral for a specialty service.

I just want to say, Chris, to kind of answer your question. I have a master's in school counseling and I... did it because I wanted to be counseling kids like this, and then got stuck in advising and realized that's not what I wanted to be doing. So...

It's

kind of a systemic problem. Which is what I was asking earlier, too. I wanted to make sure that counselors weren't

missing that piece being taken away from them. Yeah. And again, from what I've seen, and this doesn't mean this happens across the board, but our counselors at the high school, as far as I know, aren't doing a huge chunk of any of the, you know, here's this issue I'm having. I don't I don't, maybe I'm wrong. Robin would know, but I just think that it's okay to separate those two and not, and again, I know we have tier one, two, totally agree. So we're not going to, every kid's not going to get a tier three cause they don't need it. Um, but again, just thinking about that broadly about how just what you said, I don't, my son is very stressed out about getting into college right now. And so he's not going to go into his counselor's office and say, I'm worried about this too. When, literally it's pasted with college you know banners so just how do we do that for kids how do we make it comfortable for them to have a space where they know they can ask every question about every class and that person is going to know the answer and the space where they can go and say this is my trusted adult i i have some stuff i want to say i know it's going to stay within these walls and that i it's not about whether i'm getting a good grade or what college i'm going to

Chris, I hear what you're saying. You're talking about two different disciplines, like one person who does this and one person who does mental health counseling. Is that something that's even feasible that we could even think about doing? Is it something that we should even consider doing? I guess is the question. I mean, it would be great to hear Chris get an answer on that.

So I think right now at the high school with our evolving mental health needs and academic needs, I think right now our counselors are doing the best they can to do all the things. You know, we have students who are being treated for a variety of medical conditions. We have students who are getting diagnoses in anxiety, depression, ADHD. We also obviously just finished the registration process. So I think our counselors are, you know, working to address a huge range of needs for our students. And so they are very excited about the idea of having another teammate who can help coordinate some of the care because it's hard to juggle all the things around, you know, making sure the release of information and questionnaire got out for students 504 to this provider over here. And now we know that the student's also working with another provider over here. and also so-and-so just got discharged. And so there are a lot of moving parts, and I think they are looking forward to having another teammate who can help share in that load of coordinating the transmission of information within the building to make sure that we can have really seamless support for our students as they move in and out of different services.

Another thing that I'll say on that idea of having these separate services is I feel like, especially from the student's perspective, it's less of a problem of whether or not they can get their needs met from a counselor who's doing all of their academic work as well. But really, it's just having the... actually going to them in the first place. So I think that once, if we have this wellness center where like we're getting like this sort of like tier two type of self-targeted intervention, I feel like that's a really good place where that place can sort of funnel kids who need the more personalized intervention so that we have an adult who can also be pushing kids towards this need if it's something that they do need.

You're exactly right. And what I've seen, just to give you a statistic, before we built a wellness center at one of the districts that I'm working with, we had about 5% to 10% of students who were receiving services, mental health services, were self-referred. The majority of students were referred by an adult who noticed them in a class or a parent. And when we built the wellness center and we do a lot of marketing around the wellness center, every bathroom is going to have posters and QR codes. And we are out there on what we do wellness Wednesdays where we're bringing the wellness center outside so that all students can be part of it. What we found is the last time we did our analysis and our evaluation is 67% of the students that we were seeing were self-referred or referred by a friend. So it's really like turning the system inside out. So instead of us waiting for kids to come to us, we let them know what's available and we come up with all kinds of creative ways. We have a poster campaign right now that is 25 quotes from students about why they went to wellness. I went to wellness because, and we have these 25 quotes around the school. So students know that it's a place for them and they come in and they do ask for help.

Awesome. Nobody else has any further comments? I have a few. Thank you for the presentation. Like many of you, I'm really passionate about this work. I'm wondering... This is a little bit micro, so I apologize. But how can we, what I've heard from Carter is that there's a real need and desire for the separateness that Chris was describing. And I also think I've heard from him that there's this underlying concern from students that what they say to the counselor well, is this going to get back to my parents? Is this going to get to the teacher that I'm struggling with? Is this going you know, like, I think and I don't know. I mean, I know we have there's HIPAA and there's, you know, school districts are bound by different laws than a regular psychologist or therapist. But my hope would be that the children there's a very clear conveyance to the kids that it is truly a safe space and whatever is discussed stays within the four corners of that room, unless obviously it's something that is absolutely critical that a parent knows about. Because I think that's really the only way where kids are going to feel, um, are going to be willing to have open and honest conversations. Um, so that's my first, uh, that's my first question. My second question is I'm wondering how many of these folks are we planning on hiring? And then my third question is why can't it be open year round?

Those are all great questions. Let me answer real quick, Robin, and then you can continue. Confidentiality is the key to the success of our program. If students don't trust that the wellness center is confidential, it's not going to work. So what we do is we've created... posters that are required in every part of the wellness center that tell students what remains confidential and the reasons why we would break confidentiality. And we've gone way past like, you know, if you want to hurt yourself, hurt someone else or someone's hurting you to give them very detailed like explanations of what we might share so that they really feel like everything else they share is safe and confidential. We also have created a really youthful consent form, if those two things can be in the same sentence, where school counselors have the ability to do educational counseling without a consent form. The Wellness Center, if you're going to see someone, we have a very detailed teen-friendly consent form so students really know what they're signing up for and how their information is kept confidential. So that is critical to the success of the program. The second question, and then Robin, I'm going to give you a moment, is there's two key positions. I don't know if you already have folks who want these positions or if you need to hire someone new. I don't that information. But there's usually the wellness coordinator, which was my role for 13 years, which is a school social worker or a therapist who's interested in not just direct clinical services. Only 25% of their job is direct services because they have to do all three tiers. That person oversees the wellness center and case manages all mental health for the school community. And that is a certificated job. I think that's what you call them, too. And then there's a classified position who is you don't need a master's. You don't need to be a clinician. They're often people who graduate who want to be social workers, want to be therapists, want to be educators one day and sometimes not. Sometimes it's other types of people and they are sitting out in the wellness center. There's never a moment where the wellness center doesn't have an adult when you walk in the doors. And they are not behind closed doors and they're never behind closed doors. And what I think there was a lot of pushback at first, like who's going to talk to somebody who's just sitting out in the open? Oh, the kids do. They swarm around them like bees if you hire the right person. And it's that person and the training of that person to figure out when a kid needs a higher level of care. And what we found is about 80% of their kids can get their needs met with that person in the open space. And now I forget the last question. Robin, do you want to jump in?

The last part of her question was about could it be open year round?

Oh, yeah. So that I've seen it. I've seen family resource centers and wellness centers be open all year. And that depends on your district and what other resources are on campus. We do in the district that I still work part time in. We have our wellness center open during summer school. And I would say that's up to your district. And the only thing I would say is, you know, one of the goals of a school-based wellness center is to differentiate from a school-based health center, which may have primary care, dentists, you know, all kinds of services. The wellness center is a hybrid model and we... We can be open as many hours as you can have staffing there, but we also really want to teach families and students how to navigate outside of the school. So we don't want to build dependence, but we want to help students get the care they need and then navigate what it's like when school is closed.

Yeah, just to add on to what Jessica was saying, I think we'd have to, through this kind of data collection stakeholder engagement piece, take a closer look to find out, you know, if we were to be open over the summer one, at what point in time would we want to extend our services like that? And also, um, to ensure that we're not duplicating services in the community that are already available to our families. I think taking a look at it being open while summer programs are operating is a good idea because we have currently been supplementing that with staffing a counselor and doing extra days for social workers during the summer months. So I think it's definitely something we can take a closer look at. And when we think about the sustainability financially around it, like what kind of commitment do we want to start with and then extend into?

Okay. Thank you for that information. Does anybody else want to follow up with anything? Okay. Well, thank you, Robin. Thank you, Jessica. I'm so excited about this work. I think it's amazing. And I appreciate everybody's work on it.

Thank you for having me.

Okay, we are gonna move on to, we're gonna talk about our academic calendar now.

Hello. Tony and I are here this evening to present the 2024-2025 draft calendar. So, Carter, this is not next year, but this is two years out. So we took care of next year's last year because we try to stay two years out in our calendar development here in Clayton. So, I mean, this calendar, if you looked at it, is going to be very similar to the calendar that we have right now. I mean, this was put together based on a set of organizing principles that we reaffirmed with our calendar committee last year. Was it last year or two years ago? It was last year. We reaffirmed it with our calendar committee and one of those kind of more important organizing principles that we had in that calendar committee is that If we're just kind of taking the same calendar and moving forward, you know, the folks on the calendar committee felt like we didn't need to go through that entire process of bringing a committee together and going through that. It's when we want to look at years where we want to change this calendar or change some of these principles, that's when we want go out and engage staff and parents and community members about some of the changes that we're considering. Our calendar continues to be driven by the fact that the state has decided to mandate when we can start school, which is 14 days before Labor Day. So that always kind of puts us on that second-to-last Monday in August, and we just build out towards then. And with the goal of maintaining the same number of student contact hours from year to year at each level, elementary, middle, and high school. They do differ slightly just because of the lengths of their days as well as maintaining the same number of teacher contract days within that calendar.

Okay. I'm going to start here now with Chris. Okay, Jason, Stacy.

Okay, I do have a question. Or an observation, I should say. It appears to me that we are creating an Easter break because we've always, I know we don't call it that, but we have historically been off for Good Friday and this calendar also shows the day off after Easter.

That is correct. So this is actually the latest that we've seen Easter, fall, and a calendar in a long, long time. And we would have had a professional learning day that week regardless. So normally it would have been that last Friday in April is when we have a professional learning day slated in April. So- we thought rather than have two four-day weeks and have two consecutive Fridays off, that we would build a Friday and a Monday off since we were already off the previous Friday or Good Friday. And the reason-

So April 21st, April. So what concerns me with that is that it does look like an Easter break. It's a four-day weekend for our students. And based on the number of complaints and concerns that Dr. Kaczewski, Carter, Dr. Patel and me for one received this year and in previous years about having school on Jewish holidays and I know Dr. Kacziewski and I think Dr. Poole has been part of those conversations too have struggled with how to handle those days and not really coming up with good solutions about what to do with having to have school those days knowing that and knowing that a few years ago Melville approved to now always be off on Eid al-Fitr, a Muslim holiday, because I assume they have a sizable Muslim population. I would assume, this is just a total guess, that our Jewish population is probably the same or greater than Melville's Muslim population. So what the signal that we are having a four day Easter weekend and not respecting other religion, how religious holidays were being off when Easter's actually a Sunday. We don't have school on Easter. But now we're giving a whole long weekend for that and not paying attention to the complaints of our community about having school on Jewish holidays. The optics of that and how that makes me feel personally are not good. That's

all I'm going to say. Yeah, I mean, I agree with Stacy, and I also feel like we've got Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Like, I don't understand why we can't have the teacher's professional development day on...

Well, we have Jewish teachers also. That's true. So I would just point that out.

That's

true, but I looked ahead at the Melville calendar. This Eid al-Fitr, like next week it happens to be a Friday. They're off that Friday, but the next school year they're off on a Wednesday because that's just when that holiday falls. It's the same, follows a lunar calendar like Jewish holidays. So the fact that, well, I already said how I feel. So I just think it's worth consideration and I think that now that I'm saying this publicly and the rest of the community might find out, I think it's worth considering And maybe even talking to Melville, I don't know, how did they come to that decision to be off on a Muslim holiday every year? Like I said, I assume they heard complaints from their community and there were enough of them that it made sense. And I think we need to look at the size of our Jewish community. And I know we've already gotten complaints about it for years, and this year in particular a lot. Carter even brought it up at a board meeting at least once. And Dan has called me about it couple times and so yeah i mean this comes up every it comes up all the time and now that we're getting a four day easter weekend i know you're saying it's not you're just conveniently put it at easter because we needed one anyway but it's sending a really really offensive message to jews

chris you want to talk about the um the good friday the 18th why it's why that's traditionally been off

yes

yeah

that's that's a sub issue i

understand that so So

go ahead, I'll wait till my turn.

Well, yeah, I think we're all saying a lot of the same thing. And just to clarify, I don't know if I couldn't pull this up, but I'm trying to read this. So if I'm reading the key correctly, April 18th is a day that happens to be Good Friday. Correct. And that's a comp day for teacher conferences. That is correct. No school for anybody. For that day, right? Correct. And then the 21st as a purple square would have been a professional learning day. Correct. Which doesn't have to happen on any particular day of the week or month, right?

That could be anywhere. Could be anywhere. I mean, we typically try to keep them on Friday at the beginning or the end of the week. There'd be a

logic to it, but it could be. Yes, correct.

Yeah, so the only thing I would add is, I know you said that you didn't go back to look at stakeholder engagement because there wasn't a big change to the calendar. But if I recall when we did our last stakeholder engagement on this, I don't recall there being a big ask for trying to court. I appreciate that you guys have taken out a lot of the early release days, which was in direct response to the stakeholder engagement. The other two big things that I remember from stakeholder engagement that I still see in this calendar that aren't reflected in any changes are trying to end the school year before Memorial Day. And that's obviously isn't happening. So is there a way to take any of the no, or the October, the difference between the teacher and student attendance days in October and in April, regardless of the whole, I think we've talked about the optics around the religious holiday and move those to may so that the students don't need to return. You have the same number of student contact days and you move some of the professional learning. I think that answers a need that both, uh, the community from a broad perspective as well as the teachers had requested. And or I also believe that it's very difficult to appease all the different potential religious sectors that are in our school district. And since we're a public school, I think there should be a clear separation between that. regardless i mean i appreciate that other school districts because their populations have chosen a particular date but my preference would be that you were agnostic across the board as a public school and then the other thing that um uh we had had during covid um was a fall the concept of a fall break um so we have

what's here

we but we and we have it here but again i think the the preference for the community would be to move those fall dates into May for the students to be released before Memorial Day. Plus, first semester is so much shorter than second semester in terms of student contact days and everything else that I wonder if that was taken into account as well. So that's what I recall from the survey. I don't know what you guys remember from the

Mean not to go back out of order, but I mean it's I do think there is a survey I do also think we have to remind people all the time that they do want us to do things that The Missouri legislature has made very difficult if not impossible to do which is in school before Memorial Day But also get all these days, but LeDoux

does it you city does it? I mean, we're one of the only school districts that can't figure out how to do it and

I do think I remember, though, that the fall break people really liked. They did. And the teachers did. Am I remembering that right? I don't know.

Correct. I mean, and the fall break for staff is just that Friday, and it's their conference content that they get after parent-teacher conferences. The following Monday is actually a professional learning day, so we have staff back in buildings.

But when we did fall break the first time, it was the first two days of Thanksgiving, or the first two days in the week of Thanksgiving. Yes. But that's what the concept was based on. It wasn't trying to find another three-day weekend during the fall. It was extending Thanksgiving to be a longer break. So kind of two different representations.

What about Christmas? We're

always off on

Christmas. You want to switch that up a little bit? I come to school on Christmas. I'm not even trying to be funny. If we want to be agnostic, we should go to school on Good Friday.

So if we went to school on Good Friday, we wouldn't have any teachers to teach the students.

Well, I'll just add my support to what Stacey said. I think she articulated it well, and I think the point's been made. And, you know, I would like to see some changes, whether it happens this year or in future years, you know, play it straight. You know, we all live by it, right? I understand there's a business need around Good Friday, you know. what I call a business need to staff around Good Friday, right? But beyond – unless there's a pure business need, for lack of a better term, we should play it straight. The only other thing I would add is – and what I hear a lot when I'm talking to people in the community is the hardship that any sort of day off puts on – dual income families or single parent homes. And I would just challenge us to, and I know this is top of mind. I'll, you know, I assume that it is think as creatively as possible about how we can help those families on those day offs because it is, um, it is a stress. If you don't work for yourself, you don't have a flexible job. You got to show up to an office from eight to five. You know, it's really hard for those folks to figure out what to do with their particularly elementary school age kids, you know, on those days. And, uh, I don't need to get too prescriptive, but someone mentioned that the juniors were going to do another kid's night out or their parents' night out to raise money or something. Can those kids on those days off do some babysitting at the center of Clayton? Just creative ideas like that. For as long as I'm on the board, every year this comes up, I'm always going to make this comment. So here's year one. And I started four times eight years. Yeah, a year.

Liz just once. You said that we wouldn't have any teachers here on Good Friday?

So even before... public schools in this area, we're dealing with a substitute shortage that's come on. It's been a nationwide crisis in the last three or four years. We could not fill the number of substitutes that we would need on Good Friday because of teachers taking personal religious days and on the years that Good Friday also coincides with the first day of Passover, that need becomes even greater.

And so if you wanted to, could you switch the 21st to like, I don't know, the 11th? Two Fridays in a row? Or find a few days in

May. Or move the October fall breaks to Yom Kippur. That would be what I would say.

What was it you

said? We're off, like, we created a fall break. One of those days in October could rotate with a Jewish holiday.

Yeah, it could be on Wednesday.

I mean, it changes every year. There's actually two holidays, but I'll settle for one.

So Yom Kippur in 2024 is actually on October 12th, which is a Saturday.

Oh, great.

So

when's Rosh Hashanah? When's Rosh Hashana?

Yeah. Rosh Hashana is on the 3rd.

October 3rd. I

thought you said the 23rd. I'm

sorry.

But you're talking about the day off, like Friday off before Saturday. That's what we're talking about,

right? No. You're just talking about being off. It's on a Saturday.

Oh, okay. Yeah,

but it's on a Saturday more or less. So for this year it works. Well, I don't know what it is for 2023. Well, that's what Chris just said.

For 2023? I said Rosh Hashanah was

October 3rd. I can pull up 2023. But Easter's on the

20th. And the 21st, we're just giving people off. But that's not off on Easter.

God, just for what it's worth. I saw that yesterday. I was just sort of like, Oh, I guess we're gonna have a holiday around Easter. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, silly me, like, thank you, Stacy, for saying something. I was just sorta like, that's the way of the world, you

know, like, it's sad that that's how we look at it and just accept it. And we shouldn't bring up Melville just as an example of, you know, another religious holiday that that community saw was important. And Like I said, I just know there's been a lot of conversations here with Dr. Kaczewski, and there's not been a solution for our Jewish students. That's why I brought it up.

I think what we can do, because this is not for action tonight, since you gave us a lot of good things to think about, let us go back and look at all our options and then bring some options to the table for the next meeting.

Thank you.

Would that work?

Yes. I would appreciate that. Okay. Thank

you. And would you like us to also bring options? I know we've already voted on it, but for the upcoming school year? Sure.

23-24.

Although

I think this next school year, you guys do end by Memorial Day. Isn't it next year? There is one year where it does, that we already...

No, it's not. I mean, we end the last week in May, which we do in this. But it is to build the number of hours that we have in our calendar with the number of days that we have for staff and teacher contact days and start only 14 days before Labor Day, which is the biggest handicap. I mean, it is... It is difficult, if not impossible, to build a calendar that makes sense for student learning and also fits in things where, for example, professional learning, where it makes sense to have professional learning. If Melaina were sitting here, she would tell you that professional learning is more impactful early in the year and ongoing throughout the year as opposed to stacked up all at the end of the year could you rearrange all these puzzle pieces and make a calendar that has this done before memorial day yes would it be the best calendar for for student learning and teacher engagement i i don't think so

yeah i just want to give you guys just some you know encouragement because i i hear that this is hard and i understand that it's you know you guys have already worked on this for a long time for nine years people have been saying stuff et cetera et cetera So I feel for you. There's never going to be a calendar that everyone likes, period, end of story. But if we can educate people on why we're doing stuff, I agree, optics aren't good, right, Stacy and Jason? But it didn't even occur to me, someone who's not religious, I didn't even know what it used to was. So again, there's a lot of education that goes into the fact that, you know, we start 14 days later, my gosh, you're cramped. I mean, you are so cramped, and I see no need now that we have I would say to the public, we have 14 less days period. Well, whatever that ended up being five less days already because of that, maybe than we used to, how are we going to end before Memorial day? I mean, it's just education has to be part of this conversation. It can't just be, why can't you just, well, there's reasons, you know what I mean? So it's a, it's a very hard conversation. And I think we all need to be just really as flexible and as patient and understanding as we can, given the fact that all of us have, competing interests. I don't want to say competing interests, but you know what I'm saying? And there's only so many days to work with. And above all else, we want our students to get as many hours as they can because that's important to us in our academics and we want our teachers to also have enough time off to be good teachers. So anyway, this is tough. So thanks for your work. Carter.

Yeah, I would just like to reiterate what People have said, I know that all of our students, especially our Jewish students, I mean, the current schedule, like it hasn't been working for them this year. And I think, you know, we should have them in mind when making this decision.

Yeah. I mean, even like Passover, I hate to use my daughter as an example because I don't like to bring up my kids, but like she was, it was the first night of Passover. She had a test the next day. she was extremely stressed out, or a quiz or something. She was all very stressed out about it. And I said, well, go tell the teacher you can't study tonight. It's Passover. And, you know, it was like, ah, well, it's Passover. She was very stressed out about that. So, I mean, I also think that, like, to the extent that we do have school on those days, like, we need to continue to reiterate, I think, that they need to be, like, from, I don't know how to do it but.

I think that was part of the issue that Dr. Kaczewski's had though is he was very, very clear with teachers about what they could and couldn't do and it still didn't work. Some teachers didn't listen, some teachers did listen and there's really not a good solution other than not having school to be totally honest with you Parents and students are mad if they miss a test, but they're mad if they miss the review day. None of that is fair, and none of that works, because if they don't want to teach any new material for kids to miss, then they just review. Well, then it's not fair that kids miss the review.

They could just do, like, if it's the day of the holiday, you can't schedule a test the night before the

But that's all my point is just not have school would be the best solution. And I have no idea the percent of Jewish families we have in this district, but it's high. And I don't know if we've ever looked at that. But it's really Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur because those days Jews are in synagogue all day and not allowed to work, including schoolwork. So those are the main ones. And I have, sorry, one more thing. I know kids that came to school on those days because they were missing such major things. They were afraid to miss and that's heartbreaking to me. I think Carter talked about that too.

I, I've had like, in the beginning of the school year, I had like, an in depth meeting with Dr. Kachewski specifically about this. And, like they've had different practices over the past couple of years, like it's been a, you know, don't teach new content, they don't have tests. And they've rotated through all the possible things that could work or like or that they thought would work. And, you know, the truth is, regardless of what you're doing in class that day, people are missing something.

Very interesting. It's almost touchy. You can't say much, but it's a very interesting conversation. I just think about there's a lot of people missing a lot of stuff, not having access to a lot of stuff. All the time, on a consistent basis. And they're not even thought about on a consistent basis all the time. All the time. So I think that, you know, try your best to consider everybody, but we all have to know that everybody can't get everything. This is a very... Just listening to this, this just really puts a lot of stuff into perspective. Like, wow. Wow. which I was just considered like that on a consistent basis. You know what I'm saying? It's just interesting, and I hear what you're saying, Stacey. Don't take this, oh, Jason is dissing people. That's not what I'm doing. I'm just trying to say, man, this is just a very interesting conversation, and this is why we need to have more dialogues, more conversations like this on a consistent basis, But yeah, it's just a very interesting conversation. It's just listening to this. I know you have something to say, Jay. I see you looking at me, man. I know that look. No, go ahead. You have the floor. I'm just saying this is a very interesting conversation So I don't want you to think that I'm trying to disrespect anything, but I'm just trying to say that, man, this is just a very interesting, we should play it back and listen to it.

I mean, I will remember that we're a public school,

not a secular school. That's also very important. And so whatever we adopt as a calendar needs to keep that in mind. And the optics of this.

Yeah.

That's my point.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess it's, you know, you do all or nothing.

Melville's not?

Well, that's, well...

I'm just saying. Yeah, I mean, I don't... We do what works for our community.

Right, I mean, and I would say to the extent that, like, this is just my opinion, to the extent that there's other religions or races that celebrate a holiday where the people... don't work on us on that day. And we've got, you know, more than call it 15, whatever that that number is 15% of students that fall into that. I mean, I don't think that this should be limited to just Jewish people. I just am unaware. Like I just unfortunately, as I don't know all of the situations.

So we will give it some thought and bring it back to you.

We appreciate that. Okay. So we are going to move on to our, let's see here. Okay, so we are on policy 9.01, which is curriculum development. Hi, Melaina. Welcome at 10 o'clock. We're kicking it old school, aren't we? Right. It's like circa 2015. Yes.

I actually kind of wonder if it might be best for me to just handle this package of policies sort of all together in me telling you something. And then any questions you have for me, I'm happy to consider and think about, but since it's a first reading.

Yes. And Carter, if you need to leave, leave. Seriously. Please do. It's too late for you. You gotta go. Go do your homework. Yeah, go. Thank you for even staying this late. We appreciate it.

So my recommendation with all of these policies are really actually very small changes, most of them around language. to sort of freshen up the language and connect them, particularly to MSIP 6. Some of them are related to some legal things. Most of the legal stuff is actually in the procedure as opposed to in the policy. So I'm actually very comfortable with all of the changes that are being recommended here because I don't think they're significant, but I do think that we should go ahead and adopt the changes because I feel like the freshening up of language keeps us in line with the work that the state is doing. So that's my one statement about these, but I'm happy to answer questions that people have. Yeah.

So on, what document is this? This is... Career and Technical Education. And on the back page, just number three, it talks about crime statistics. Do I need to read this

out loud? No. So that part of this policy is in place only for districts who do something with post-secondary. We don't currently do anything with post-secondaries. And it's the requirement of when districts do that, that they have to disclose certain information around those people. And so that's actually a statute piece. So I don't think we have a lot of movement around that. We're

just seeing a little awkwardness. Kind of antiquated, a little intrusive.

Um, I will, I'll double check. Yeah. But that's how I interpreted that.

So I did too. But I just thought I'd ask you just to see if there's, you know, cause you don't know until you ask. I just thought that. Yep. Damn, it seems a little bit rough. Yeah. I guess the word crime and statistics seems a little bit of rough in general with students. So yeah. Well, what do I know?

All right.

All right. Jason, do you have anything? No. Kim? No. Gary?

Stacey? Just quickly. So this would be, this virtual learning that we create, would be just another option like in addition to like launch or instead of for our students?

No. Okay, so the policies, I'm wondering if you're talking about what we signed an MOU with, like the consortium that we signed an M.O.U. with and these policies?

I guess the policy's based on this Senate bill that's like, you must create virtual learning. So I guess just overall, our kids would, sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead, our kids would. Would have to do, sorry, I didn't maybe give context to my question. I was thinking in my head. If our kids need a virtual learning program, they would have to opt into what we're creating, or they could still do launch, or no?

Yeah. So these policies don't deal at all with what we're doing with that consortium. I mean, it falls a little bit underneath it in that it's an option for students. But the options for students still, when you're talking about funding from the district, the options for students fall under MOCAP. which Launch is a part of. So those are always available to students. Non-MOCAP courses are available to students also, but the district is not required to fund them in the same way. The reason why these policies are coming forward is because... The first one, IGCD, was already a policy that you all adopted. IGCDA is the most recent version of the law, made some change in full-time virtual and part-time virtual. So IGCDA fits with full-time virtual, where that used to be that the district, if a student came to us and said, I want to be in a virtual program full-time, the district was paying for that. This is different. And they stayed a Clayton student. If a student comes to us as a part of IGCDA and the statute that's attached to it, if a student comes to and says I want to be a full-time virtual student, we would say yes, enroll in the MoCap piece. If it's a part of a school district or a secondary institution like Mizzou, then they would then become a student of, so if they went to launch, they would become a student of Springfield instead of staying a student of Clayton. So that's the difference of why they wanted to separate them, to be able to distinguish between the full-time and the part-time. So the part-time we would still be required to fund, but the full-time becomes different because that district takes on the ADA for the student.

And then the part about the

consortium that we're a part of, so the St. Louis Virtual Campus, is currently not a full-time virtual piece. So it's between us and various other school districts. And

that's still happening?

We're starting the courses. So this year, we started courses. At one point, we had one elementary student enrolled in that. Next year is when we're starting the high school piece. And so right now, the course catalog for that is pretty narrow. It's about 10 courses. that we're in the process right now of hiring the teachers to build out the content for those courses. But those courses are in our program of studies as well as the program of studies for the other districts that are part of that consortium. So we're starting small.

As in, we are hiring though, like Clayton. So

I sit on the board that hires the teachers for that. They're actually employed through Parkway. But I sit on the Board so we just went through and vetted all the teachers and approved that. So all the voting members on the Board are the ones who hire the teachers.

Okay. Let's just go to, this won't be long, IF, policy IF. Number three, it says grow from thoughtful review of teaching methods and educational theories and practices. That's hard for me. How do you feel about that, Melina? It feels so vague that it's almost like it says nothing. I mean, it could just say grow. I don't mean to be... You know, I know I've talked a lot about data around various curriculum, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, how does that fit into us really being thoughtful about our curriculum and whether or not there's, you know, new theories and new practices? I know we do this all the time, Elena. You're the best at this. But does it need to be in the policy that we're a little more clear on that or not? You tell me.

I was okay with the language in that because I feel like it gives us the latitude to do the things that I think we've been able to do and being able to solicit information and feedback from that. I think the addition of the district teaching and learning advisory council has been a good addition to help us both in the communication piece of like things that we're considering and the feedback piece of hearing from people, you know, families within the district. What are the concerns with that? So I appreciate sort of the latitude there, but I'm worried if we get too specific that I think it's gonna be harder for us to be able to have those open conversations that we're able to have now.

Does this though give us, do we need to say in here that that's, we continually have to be doing best practices? Does that make sense? It says we should do it. We should do a review of the things, but if we know there's good data around X, Y, and Z things, shouldn't we be compelled to adopt something that has better data than something else that we might be doing?

Do you think we wouldn't do that as a consequence of the way this statement is written? Possibly. In our review of that we would do?

Yeah, I don't know. To me, it leaves it open to not do it. And I guess I'm wondering if we should always be compelled to make sure our methodology, our practices are in line with the best knowledge and the best data that we have at the time.

I think my only thing that I wonder about there is In saying that, so I tend to not use the phrase best practices because it's based on whose opinion. Yes. Who decides that that's the best practice, right? That's right. And so we tend to use things like promising practices, evolving practices, those kinds of things. And I worry that if we say something that's based on best practices, who's making... I assume that's us as, as the professionals making that decision, but we're always going to come to you. So like through the curriculum review cycle, we're always coming to the board with like, these are the reasons why we're making the decisions that, that we're making. And I think that, and with the addition of the council, I think it provides multiple opportunities for people to give us feedback with within that.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. It's a different... Saying best practices in the health field is much more... You see what I'm saying? You're right, though, to point out that in education you have very valid points. So thank you for...

The other thing about this policy, IF, is that this is the one that when I was talking about some of the things don't necessarily appear in this one. So I know you're very well-versed in Senate Bill 681. The... the evidence of 681 is actually in the procedure versus the policy. So what is helpful to this policy is there are a lot of things through statute that are very specific, and so it's within the procedure for us to ensure that those things are happening. So things like when the statute was put into place that we needed to teach all students before they graduate CPR, that's in the procedure. So there's things for me to check off. So the piece that I think would be most interesting to you about that of how Senate Bill 681 is reflected in here is that it talks about the fact that the district will provide evidence-based reading instruction programs K through five. So it's embedded within the procedure. So it allows for, like, what may be up for interpretation here, like in the procedure part. There's not a lot of interpretation there. Yeah?

Yeah. Awesome. What does the board-based input of students mean? It says district staff with board-based, like board hyphen based input of students, staff, parents, guardians, and patrons. that didn't make any sense does anybody did do you under it's underneath so you have the one through seven paragraph that that's first couple of sentences at paragraph under number seven and it says the district will provide resources and then it says district staff with board-based input of students staff parents guardians and patrons I just don't have any idea what that means. I was going to say broad-based. Oh. See, because I was like board-based. What is board-based? Are we more – what's happening? Yeah, I didn't get it. Broad-based. Is that what it's supposed to be, Melina?

I actually don't actually see. Okay, under seven, start reading. Yeah, with broad-based input. Thank you. That's also not something Spellcheck would pick. Yeah.

Okay, good. That's helpful. I wonder how

many boards

have

adopted this already.

Right? I'm like, what does that mean?

And then if you go to the next paragraph, actually, the only thing I didn't really love about this was taking out actual student needs and indications of student mastery. I don't know why you couldn't leave that in. Okay. Because I think, you know, I love to see policies that are student-centered. And when you take that out, it kind of, for me, it just kind of weakens the solution.

Okay. I have another comment on that paragraph too. It says a district will devise a systematic plan to regularly review each curricular area. We don't want us to be more specific in that? I know what we do. It's in the procedure. Perfect. And then what about when it says individuals who are well qualified in a designated area of study will be appointed to by the superintendent or designee. This goes back to the comment that I made about are teachers qualified to make decisions around a policy as big as cell phone use in the school because they are not also health educators or specialists in mental health in any way. And so I said, well, if we have people at the table that can give us this kind of really good, so this is what we see, this is what we don't see in terms of mental wellness and how much of it plays comes from the use of a device, then we can make more informed decisions. What do you mean by well called? Could there be a nurse, a psychologist, a physician as one of these people that is appointed to be part of the discussion on these issues other than not just teachers? Teachers are obviously there too.

So I'll remind you that this policy is about curriculum. So like yes, if it was health I would say, yes, a nurse would be a helpful person to be a part of that committee. But I think we have to make a distinction between like when you like on the counseling committee. Yes. Somebody who's related to like the wellness field would make sense. I think it has to be particular to the work that we're doing. We've also had over time, like we've had various iterations of involvement on committees and with some levels of success and some levels of not having success, which is why we're at the current iteration of the committee of the board with the Teaching and Learning Advisory Council to be able to still solicit that input but in a broader, more general piece. The other thing I would say is this also helps to include when we look for consultants. So oftentimes with any content area, if we're looking at something specific that's outside of our scope, or we want a broader... like more in-depth piece, then I think this statement actually allows us to be able to think through it in that way of bringing a consultant in. And you all, I mean, most of the time those consultants cost something that you all are going to have some kind of say in that. I have for curriculum things brought in consultants to help us that haven't cost us a lot of money but have helped oftentimes with curriculum pieces. I'll bring in two consultants that I force to work together that come from... sort of divergent oh

interesting

um and i forced them to work together and write one report for us

yeah interesting which

has been super helpful to us in some of our some of our work because they see things differently but then

yeah

provide us with one unified report back

yeah

so i i like that statement there yes it provides us with some

yeah because it is open in that sense it could be mean a lot of different things depending on what you're looking for yep I like it too, I just wondered what it meant. So thank you for that.

Are there any other comments on that? Okay.

Okay, so I'll make those changes.

Thank you. And then we should have a few. Let's see. Do we have action items? Yes. Wait,

do you want this agenda?

What? I have it. I

have

it.

Oh, you have it. Well, I have it.

No. Not since we, yeah. Okay, so we are on still number 10, right?

Yep.

Okay, so I move that the Board of Education approve the part-time temporary PTTE payment structure and the summer program's pay rates as presented.

Second. Okay. Are there any questions or comments? Yes. Why does it say the

PTTE flat rate draft if we're now voting

on it? We presented you all with the draft because we ran it through PRC last night, and we used the same document. So if you guys approve this, this is what we will put up as a final copy. Okay.

This isn't our first reading of this, correct? This is the same one?

This is the only time that it's been presented.

This is the first. That's what I meant. So if it's the only time it's been presented, why are we waiting on it already?

This is impossible. It's not possible.

Thank

you. Okay. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay.

Great.

Thank

you.

Okay, Gary, consent agenda. Anywhere. Oh, shoot. Are you sure it's your third year as

president? It's late.

Okay, 10.02. I've

got a very convoluted looking thing tonight. I can't.

I got you. We're on it. Move that the board approve the readoption of policy BBFA board member complications and financial disclosures. And I will just note that there are no changes to this policy. We just have to adopt it every year, right?

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

Okay, 10.3, I move that the Board of Education adopt revised policy DB relating to the annual budget and that would also, I don't know, I'm now butchering this motion, I'm sorry, but that would also rescind policy DBB, right? Because that's being included in policy DB. So if you can make sense out of that motion. I'll nod your heads.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay.

Now your favorite. My favorite, and you're doing such a good job. I move that the board approve the consent agenda items 11.02 through 11.04. Second.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. Are there any questions? All in favor? Aye. I just want to,

I mean, there's a bid here for the, it's not, I mean, it's $100,000, right around $100,000 to replace the flooring and the high school cafeterias. It seems like there were two bids that were very competitive with each other, so no. No.

All in favor? Aye. Okay. Is anybody opposed to that? Okay. This is really communication. I don't know what's going on. Okay, we're on board communications. Stacey, did you have a teaching and learning thing?

Yes, but I couldn't attend.

Okay.

But I have something else.

Okay, go ahead.

I just want to remind everyone, as we've been talking a lot about the importance of legislative advocacy, that there is the monthly legislative advocacy Zoom is next Friday, April 21st from 8 to 9. And I think, Heike, you always put that on everybody's calendar, right? And those are always very informative, so I encourage anybody to attend that can.

That's it. Thank you. Jason Growe, did you have a CRSWC meeting? No? Okay.

That's it. Thank you. Jason Groh, did you have a CRSWC meeting? No? Okay.

I do have a quick, I mean. Education Foundation update. Yeah, so sandy striker has resigned and has taken a job at slew in the Public health and allied allied health public and allied health school doing development work there so that executive committee is preparing to launch a search and Will be prepared to help them. However, they see fit

I

Well, I mean, if they send – I'd be happy to help them. I mean, I think we'd be happy to have them think through what the right job description is. I mean, it's their call, so I don't think we want to get in their business, but think through – I think this is an opportunity to really think through what can the foundation do, what should it be. Maybe there's an opportunity to think who should be – what's the right profile of the person who should be leading this. And if we know someone in the community that meets that profile, I'd be happy As I hope we all would.

Yeah. Okay.

That's my update.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening.

All right. Jason Wilson and Chris Equity.

The meeting that would have happened between last time I reported and this time didn't happen.

Okay. Okay. Stacey PTO Council. Was there a meeting? Okay. Parks and Rec?

There was a meeting earlier this month. I can't think of anything that is imperative to update the board.

Okay. Jason Wilson and Stacy, social emotional wellness.

There wasn't one since our last board meeting.

Okay. SSD governing council. No, there wasn't one. Okay. Any other updates?

John and I are trying to schedule a financial planning committee meeting before the end of this month, which we're also going to drag Jason into here.

Beautiful.

You guys have fun with that. John's looking at some dates, and we hope to get that out. We have a pretty robust agenda planned, so that should be good. So if anybody's listening from financial planning committee at 1030 on a Wednesday night, look for those invitations to come out from... John's office here in the next couple weeks.

Awesome. Do you want me to come?

No. Okay.

It's not

shopping.

Okay. I think, Gary, we can let's adjourn.

All right. I move that the Board of Education adjourn.

Second. All in favor? Aye.