October 29, 2025 — Meeting Transcript

Welcome. I apologize that we are a few minutes, a couple minutes late getting started. Thank you for being here at the earlier time tonight of 630. Adequate notice has been given and I would ask everyone to rise and join us in saying the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. And Chris, would you read the motion to adopt the agenda?

I move that we

adopt the agenda as posted.

Second.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion passes. We're moving now to recognizing our own. And I'm going to ask Gina Tarte, our Chief Communications Officer, to recognize William and Lauren Carey.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion passes. We're moving now to recognizing our own. And I'm going to ask Gina Tartt, our Chief Communications Officer, to recognize William and Lauren Carey.

Good evening. I'm actually here with Dr. Trita Murdoch from Glenridge, and she's going to do our formal presentation.

Great. Thank you, Dr. Murdoch. Welcome.

Good evening, everyone. You know, today is you're too bright for drugs, so that's why I'm the brightest thing in the room. So in the aftermath of the heartbreaking acts of vandalism that occurred last On our campus last spring William and Lauren Carey parents of Patrick and Charles a first grader and a family center student reached out with the simple but powerful question how can we come together as a community to heal. From that conversation the idea of our very first school beautification day was born. The Careys collaborated with the PTO to secure funding and promote the event, which occurred on Saturday, September 20th. This day was more than just planting flowers, and I even found myself getting emotional throughout the time of how many people showed up, who showed up, and just the idea of the day. The day was about restoring beauty, fostering unity, and demonstrating the love and resilience that define our school community. What began as a response to harm has grown into a movement of hope and togetherness. As we beautified our grounds, we also strengthened the roots of our community, reminding everyone, especially our babies, that kindness, connection, and care will always triumph over negativity. Thank you.

Thank you very much to the Carey family. Next, do we have any public comment tonight? No, okay. Moving on to our superintendent communications with

Dr. Patel. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for being here tonight. A few updates that I have. I want to start off with some really exciting news that we got to share. Dr. Murdock left, but yesterday we went to Glenridge Elementary School and we were able to surprise Jeannie McQueen with the Emerson Excellence in Teaching Award. She is one of our amazing, fabulous teachers at Glenridge Elementary. And she's a fifth grade teacher. She actually started at Clayton at Merrimack as a reading specialist, I believe in 2000 and I want to make sure I get this right, 2014. And then from Merrimack, she spent a few years there and then moved to Glen Ridge as a fourth and fifth grade teacher. Anyone who knows Jeannie knows her heart, knows her love and compassion, and she is the epitome of being student-centered. She not only loves our kids tremendously, but she also pushes herself—that's what I admire so much about her—to grow professionally. She's always taking on challenges and supportive supportive colleague, it could go on and on and on and about Jeannie but she truly is so good so we were excited to like surprise her and her family was there as well so they kind of snuck out when we announced it so of course. She couldn't contain the emotions. And I think we've got a few good pictures there. So congratulations to Jeannie. And we will officially honor her also at the Mayfair Awards every year. So we'll recognize her there as well. Moving on, last week, I believe it was, we had our former board member breakfast at Glen Ridge. We hosted it there. We had a great turnout. It was a good opportunity to connect with former board members who've left a lasting legacy in this district. It was exciting because they got to talk to one another. Some of them had not seen each other in years. And not only did we have a chance to continue to strengthen the connections, but after breakfast, Dr. Murdock took them on a tour of the building. And for so many of the former board members, it was an eye-opening experience from what they had seen years ago when they were on the board to now. And Dr. Murdock kind of told us stories about the impact of what Glen Ridge has like on the students and the staff now and the facilities that are there and the struggles they face with all of it. So I think a lot of them, I would say the majority of them, if not all of them left just wanting to be very supportive of whatever work we are doing with our facilities master planning process. Next, continuing with board involvement and engagement. This weekend we were at the Missouri School Boards Association Conference in Kansas City. So thank you to the board members who were there. We felt like it was a very great opportunity for us to connect but also we went to some really good sessions And one of the sessions actually was from Clayton High School. They did a presentation at the conference, and they talked about the innovative wellness center that we have, the one of its kind in the Midwest. And Jen McEwen and the principal, Dr. Gachewski, were there, and they presented to a room filled. It was like, I don't think there were any seats left. It was packed and they did a wonderful job showcasing the Wellness Center. And at the end of the presentation, we had a lot of individuals go up to them and ask to tour our facilities. And I think some of them are coming from Kansas City, already scheduled, like I believe in December. So I thought that was a great opportunity for us to share what we're doing in Clayton with other school districts across the state. Point of pride for us on that. And then, oh, students. Oh my gosh. So once you hit October, November, December, you will see our students shine on stage and behind the scenes. So our plays have started. I've got to, I went to see that and that was phenomenal. And then we have the orchestra concerts. We have band concerts, choir concerts, you name it. All our students are out in the community and in the schools performing. I hope you get a chance to go visit them and see some of them. I believe, I think there was a concert last night as well. Yeah, band. So if you get a moment, please take that chance and go see them perform. They are some of our amazing students with so much talent there. So I wanted to highlight them. And then our work continues to accelerate with, of course, our long range facilities master plan. So tonight there will be a presentation from the design team about that and we'll get to learn more about it in terms of what our next phase is with the work. We have continued to do tours at Merrimack and Glenridge were the most recent ones. We had our community engagement forum, which we got really good feedback on. Whoever was there, they all said that they appreciated the fact that it was less sit and get and more of being able to go into small groups and have conversations with areas of interest they have there. So that is ongoing. And again, we'll have an update later today for our facilities work. Presentations, we have three tonight, so fasten your seat belts. The first one is from Excellence K-12. They're gonna share our survey results followed by our long range facilities plan update with our design team and then the last presentation will be a mini assessment report with Dr. Milena Garganigo and Ms. Robin Hogg are going to come here and talk about academic growth for a specific population of our students. Those are our three presentations. And now I'm going to hand it off to Nina for our student board update.

Dr. Patel. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for being here tonight. A few updates that I have. I want to start off with some really exciting news that we got to share. Dr. Murdock left, but yesterday we went to Glenridge Elementary School and we were able to surprise Jeannie McQueen with the Emerson Excellence in Teaching Award. She is one of our amazing, fabulous teachers at Glenridge Elementary. And she's a fifth grade teacher. She actually started at Clayton at Merrimack as a reading specialist, I believe in 2000 and I want to make sure I get this right, 2014. And then from Merrimack, she spent a few years there and then moved to Glen Ridge as a fourth and fifth grade teacher. Anyone who knows Jeannie knows her heart, knows her love and compassion, and she is the epitome of being student-centered. She not only loves our kids tremendously, but she also pushes herself—that's what I admire so much about her—to grow professionally. She's always taking on challenges and supportive supportive colleague, it could go on and on and on and about Jeannie but she truly is so good so we were excited to like surprise her and her family was there as well so they kind of snuck out when we announced it so of course. She couldn't contain the emotions. And I think we've got a few good pictures there. So congratulations to Jeannie. And we will officially honor her also at the Mayfair Awards every year. So we'll recognize her there as well. Moving on, last week, I believe it was, we had our former board member breakfast at Glen Ridge. We hosted it there. We had a great turnout. It was a good opportunity to connect with former board members who've left a lasting legacy in this district. It was exciting because they got to talk to one another. Some of them had not seen each other in years. And not only did we have a chance to continue to strengthen the connections, but after breakfast, Dr. Murdock took them on a tour of the building. And for so many of the former board members, it was an eye-opening experience from what they had seen years ago when they were on the board to now. And Dr. Murdock kind of told us stories about the impact of what Glen Ridge has like on the students and the staff now and the facilities that are there and the struggles they face with all of it. So I think a lot of them, I would say the majority of them, if not all of them left just wanting to be very supportive of whatever work we are doing with our facilities master planning process. Next, continuing with board involvement and engagement. This weekend we were at the Missouri School Boards Association Conference in Kansas City. So thank you to the board members who were there. We felt like it was a very great opportunity for us to connect but also we went to some really good sessions And one of the sessions actually was from Clayton High School. They did a presentation at the conference, and they talked about the innovative wellness center that we have, the one of its kind in the Midwest. And Jen McEwen and the principal, Dr. Gachewski, were there, and they presented to a room filled. It was like, I don't think there were any seats left. It was packed and they did a wonderful job showcasing the Wellness Center. And at the end of the presentation, we had a lot of individuals go up to them and ask to tour our facilities. And I think some of them are coming from Kansas City, already scheduled, like I believe in December. So I thought that was a great opportunity for us to share what we're doing in Clayton with other school districts across the state. Point of pride for us on that. And then, oh, students. Oh my gosh. So once you hit October, November, December, you will see our students shine on stage and behind the scenes. So our plays have started. I've got to, I went to see that and that was phenomenal. And then we have the orchestra concerts. We have band concerts, choir concerts, you name it. All our students are out in the community and in the schools performing. I hope you get a chance to go visit them and see some of them. I believe, I think there was a concert last night as well. Yeah, band. So if you get a moment, please take that chance and go see them perform. They are some of our amazing students with so much talent there. So I wanted to highlight them. And then our work continues to accelerate with, of course, our long range facilities master plan. So tonight there will be a presentation from the design team about that and we'll get to learn more about it in terms of what our next phase is with the work. We have continued to do tours at Merrimack and Glenridge were the most recent ones. We had our community engagement forum, which we got really good feedback on. Whoever was there, they all said that they appreciated the fact that it was less sit and get and more of being able to go into small groups and have conversations with areas of interest they have there. So that is ongoing. And again, we'll have an update later today for our facilities work. Presentations, we have three tonight, so fasten your seat belts. The first one is from Excellence K-12. They're gonna share our survey results followed by our long range facilities plan update with our design team and then the last presentation will be a mini assessment report with Dr. Garganego and Ms. Robin Hogg are going to come here and talk about academic growth for a specific population of our students. Those are our three presentations. And now I'm going to hand it off to Nina for our student board update.

So over the past couple of weeks, I've gotten the chance to meet with both Y-Down Student Council and a group of fifth graders from Merrimack. One of the questions that I asked to both groups was, what do you not like or not like about your school building? And how do you think this could be improved? Y-Down students said they love how modern and efficient their building is, but they wish they had more opportunity to move between classes outside. For example, there's like an area between the sixth grade and 7-8 hallway, which is like an outside area that they say isn't used very often. So they said that they would love to use that more if they got the chance. They also said that because the orchestra hallway is a center for many popular electives, it gets really, really crowded and prevents kids from getting to class on time. This is one I heard a lot. But I don't know how much of that is also just like middle schoolers love to talk and chat with their friends in the hallway. So I was a little bit torn on whether this was actually a problem or just a problem of people wanting to talk to their friends. But that was really good feedback to get. And when I asked them how they felt about their field, because I know that's kind of something we're considering with the long range facilities master plan, They said that they love how spacious and accessible it is, but they wish that they used turf instead of grass. A lot of them said it would hurt less to fall. I don't know how much they're falling in PE, but apparently it would hurt less if all on the turf, and it would recover more quickly from rain and snow, meaning they would get to go outside still in the winter months. And then when I asked Merrimack students about their school building, they initially struggled to identify any aspects that needed improvement. They told me a lot of things that they loved, which I think is a pretty good sign. But when I pushed them a little bit harder, they told me that they wish their classrooms and specials rooms were a little more spread out. Right now, Merrimack has almost all of its classrooms on the top floor, and then its specials rooms like PE, music, and art on the bottom floor. They also wish their school had more shortcuts because transitioning from room to room often cuts into their time for certain activities. But all in all, everyone had such helpful and well thought out feedback to share. And I was so impressed. And I look forward to meeting with both of those groups again. And then for our next slide, yes. And then on Thursday, October 9th, I had another meeting with Clayton High School's Principal's Advisory Club. We continued our discussion about the long range facilities master plan by thinking through which areas of our school don't improve efficiency and learning environment. Some things I heard were if you're in the chemistry language or CTE hallway, you have to walk pretty far to get to the nearest bathroom, which I definitely agree with. And then also the placement of the stairwell sometimes makes it difficult to find a quick and concise path to your next class. We also continued our discussion about Gayfield. In general, the group seemed pretty in support of the possibility of moving Gayfield to Shaw Park. The only potential issues that we saw arising were the rerouting of the homecoming parade and the decrease of green nature space outside in Shaw Park, which are both issues that I think can definitely be solved through planning and careful thought. which I know we're doing. And then our last topic of discussion at Principal's Advisory Club was the presence of hate in our community, which we opted to talk about the meeting before we decided we wanted to talk about this meeting. We talked about what can be done to combat inappropriate and hurtful jokes made in class, in the hallways, and even at sports practice. The group agreed that jokes, many of which have to do with anti-Semitism, often come from a lack of knowledge and understanding, though this is never justification. Many students say that they wish they talked more about current events and politics in their classes, as they feel this would be a good way for the student body to gain more information about what's actually going on in the world. We decided that although groups like the Intercultural Dialogue Group, which is a new club at CHS, and the Current Events Club do a great job of encouraging critical thinking and debate, they wish there was more outlets for discussion, and we're going to talk more about that next time. All in all, it was a very wonderful meeting with the Principals Advisory Club, and I look forward to meeting with this group again in the future.

Thank you, Nina. And thanks for meeting with the middle school and elementary school kids too. It's always great to hear their perspective as well. Okay, we're moving on to our agenda item six, or 6.1, our presentations. And we are going to start with Excellence K-12. Excellence K-12 is the company that did the survey, both phone and online surveys for us regarding the facilities planning. We're looking forward to hearing about those results. Thank you.

Turn it on, okay. I'm going to go through an executive summary of the telephone survey, kind of hit the highlights for you, and then I will talk about some data mining that we did that I think will give us clarity on what was going on with the telephone survey, and then I'll talk about the online surveys. If you have any questions, holler out so I'll get started as you know in late September and early October we did a telephone survey with 300 randomly selected head of household registered voters living in the school district calls replaced the landlines and cell phones completed interviews were divided into three geographic segments that the district gave us and when we do random digit dial combined with population pattern matching Our margin of error is 5.6%. So you can kind of keep that in mind as you hear about the stuff. Our first section when we do these types of surveys is grading the district's performances on a number of areas. This is your brand. This is what people think about your brand. As you can see there, we had some very high numbers. Overall grade, 4.78. Quality of education, 477. Even down to class sizes, 447. These are the highest scores we've seen on this type of survey compared to similar districts in Missouri and the Midwest. Terrific scores. We were blown away. Really good. Okay. The next area we ask about is strengths and improvements. Uh, strengths of the district provides a good education. Um, don't know, uh, which I would like to not see in the second place. Uh, I would like to see them be able to talk to other attributes, you know, of the district there. So that's an opportunity, uh, quality teachers and staff, and strong community support. Areas for improvement, managing the budget and spending is always the number one area of improvement in every school district that we've ever worked with. They're doing fine is really good. Don't know, that's the only place in a survey you want to see don't know is areas for improvement. So good scores all around, and like I say, People like you a lot. We then went to what we call statement exercises, and we made six statements, and we asked people how they how much they agreed with these statements the the purpose of this to see if citizens are civic minded so we ask questions like is that important it isn't important it is important to maintain our school buildings quality the district provides a strong foundation for property values and again you can see here when you combine strongly agree and somewhat agree overwhelming numbers in terms of civic minded, and I didn't expect anything less than that. So we got through the statement exercises, and then we go to support or opposition of the potential projects. Level of support for the potential projects. Good news, less than good news here. Construct academic labs dedicated to career and tech programs had more than 50% of respondents showing support. That was the only project that scored at 42% or above. Top items in the group were of what we have here, 11 options I think. Gayfield scored highest at 42%, and then the numbers kind of drifted down from there. And we'll talk in a minute about reasons for that support, and we'll talk about the online surveys, which were vastly different. Answering the questions related to the elementary schools, Only 8% of people said they would be more likely to favor the bond issue. People seem to be a little indecisive on their answers, trying to figure out does education matter and why. Bond issues, after hearing all 10 project ideas, 35% of participants said they would either strongly support or support a general bond issue if the election took place today. That's your benefit of the doubt question. Without knowing what's on the bond issue, without knowing the cost, Would you support it? 35%, again, a number lower than you would want to see. When we got into typical tax levels, $500,000 home at $447,000, your percent was 32%. 223 per month your percent was 33 and support increased Somewhat when we ask about a zero rate increase Although not as high as I would expect And again, there's a I think there's a good reason for this Communication from the district Very good. Number one, newsletter and mailer is the only district that I can think of where social media isn't number one. It shows that Gina's doing a great job with the newsletter. Kids in school website, those are all fairly typical. Summary. Why did we get the information that we got? I think there's six things going on. I think one, there's a level of satisfaction that precludes the perceived need for additional improvements. When you have grades that high, it's not unusual for people to look at it and say, How do you get any better than we are? We're already great. So I think that's one thing. I think there is a general lack of knowledge about the reason that the potential projects are needed. And I think that goes back to the perception of it's very good. I think people assume that the buildings and everything associated are fine. General disinterest in projects that would not directly affect them because of geography or not having children or grandchildren We went through all of those, and it's none of those. What it was was the people who answered it would not affect me are people who have lived in the district for 15 years or more but not their entire lives. And what I would deduce from that is those are people who moved to the district specifically for the school district. their kids are no longer in school, and so it's like, eh, it doesn't matter if I vote one way or another. Okay, so that makes sense. It didn't make sense to think that it was one particular area, geographic area or something, so I was glad to see that it wasn't that. A distaste for anything related to athletics, maybe a too strong of a statement, but Um, that is typical. The farther you get away from the classroom, the harder it is to get support for something. Um, where we included the word athletics, we got lower scores than when we just talked about academics. Um, finally, an uncertainty about the world that we live in now. Uh, and we're seeing, we've got four or five other surveys with other districts going on and we're seeing some of that same thing. Uh, no matter what side of the aisle that you're on, um, It's chaos on a daily basis. And I think people tend to get very conservative about changes when there's chaos. So that's what we have there. Questions about the phone survey?

Who would like to start? Any questions?

Anyone?

Jason? Go ahead.

I guess that leaves me. Yeah, I'm sorry.

If it makes sense to do the phone. I was just going to say. First and then to take questions at the end. For both? Yeah. Or do you want to ask a specific question? Oh, you mean

the online? The online.

This was just the phone survey. Right. If we have questions specific to the phone survey, we can go over it. It's just about the surveying in general. We can wait for it. Maybe let's hear the online

survey

presentation, and then we'll ask questions about all the surveys together.

Just let me get you a little more information on the phone survey as an addendum. When we talked about the 11 options, people who lived here less than two years, two to five years, or five to ten years, We didn't see anything higher than a 10% of those people who said, it doesn't matter to me. For the most part, they were in the 3% and 4%. When we got to more than 15%, it ranged from 17% to 36%. So it really stood out that this one demographic group had that attitude. So I just wanted to share those numbers with you real quick.

Wait, so just to clarify, if you have lived in the district 15 years or more, you were, you disproportionately answered that question of it doesn't, I don't care, it doesn't matter to me, versus if you were in the district for two years? Any other amount of time. Any other amount of times.

Yes,

yes. Yeah. So long-term district residents have more indifference than others.

Yes, 15 years plus, but not people who lived there their whole life. So I think there's a distinction to be made right there with that. Okay, talking about the online surveys, and let me preface this by saying with opt-in surveys, with online surveys, what you tend to get are your raving fans and your cave dwellers. Cave stands for C-A-V-E, Citizens Against Virtually Everything. And there's a percentage of that in every market that is against anything related to taxes, whether it's the municipality or the school or the college board or whatever. Keeping that in mind, I think what you've got here is you've got a lot more people who are raving fans than you did detractors. the on the online surveys that's a good thing okay if you look at the grades compared to the telephone survey in some case and again the telephone surveys numbers were very high and in most cases the Weighted scale for staff was at that level or above. Teachers were a little bit, I mean, not teachers, parents were a little bit lower than that. Community was higher for the most part. I'll give you an example. Preparation of students for college, vocational training or employment. 4.69 for the phone survey, 4.56 for parents, 4.78 for staff, 4.71 for the general community. So your numbers in most cases were higher with the community than they were even with your parents and teachers, which is pretty cool. Hit a couple of numbers in particular for you. If you look at the options for Glen Ridge Elementary, for example, 39%. were more likely to vote in favor of a bond issue on the telephone. That number jumps to 52% for parents, 51% for staff, and 44% for a general community. So again, the numbers are higher. It would make no difference in my voting decision. This is interesting. 47% said that it would make no difference, but when you get to the other... demographics only 13% of parents said that only 18% of staff said that and only 14% of the general community said that so we didn't have a lot of people who were 15 years plus in the district taking the online surveys which doesn't surprise me because they already told us it makes no difference to them okay so that's what you get there An interesting one that, and I just picked out some that I thought were kind of glaringly obvious. Second option for Glenridge would be to build a brand new school. You had 22% of people on the telephone say that they would be more likely to vote against. In the community survey, and this is the anomaly, 44% of people said they would be more like to vote against. Your cave dwellers came out, but you also had some other people who were saying that to get that high of a number. I don't know what the issue is with Glen Ridge. If there's a specific issue, it looked like a good option with the... you know, the same site in the storm shelter, but we got kind of some negative stuff there. Merrimack was pretty even across the board for the first option. More likely to vote in favor of the bond issue for the second option, the brand new school. Not as high on the fund survey and other than the staff survey, not really high on the community survey as well. And again, there's 11 different options that we went through with this. I'm not going to read them all to you and bore you to death. Another project idea was Clayton High School. More likely to vote in favor of academic labs, dedicated CTE programs across the board. People were more likely... uh, in favor to vote for that than were negative. Um, more likely to vote against here was, um, generally speaking, 10%, which tells me that your percentage of cave dwellers was about 10%. It's usually 10 to 15% in most communities. Um, I think in this poll you got about 10% and it looks like you got about 25 to 30% of people who are your raving fans. Um, This was an interesting one. Replace the current grass field at Wyden Middle School with artificial turf on the phone survey. You only got 3% of people say they were more likely to vote in favor of that. Parents were at 52%, staff at 60%, and online survey at 50%. a dramatic difference in the opt-ins versus the telephone survey. One more that was kind of a head-scratcher was the options at Gayfield, renovate the existing campus. You only had 1% of people vote or say that they would vote against that on the phone survey. You had 53% of people say it would make no difference when you get to the percentage of community online survey that's only 13%. So again, the people who live here for 15 years or more and you don't have their interest anymore, for the most part didn't take the online survey. That's what we can deduce from that. Same thing on build a multi-use field next to the Clayton High School campus. 47% on the phone said it would make no difference. Only 9% in the community said it would make If the district proposed a bond issue that included the list of projects you just read about, how would you vote if the election were held today? Again, benefit of the doubt without knowing anything. Support and strongly support on the phone was only 35%. Support and strongly support in the community survey was 61%. even higher among parents and staff, 73% among parents and 82% among staff. So you know that your parents and your staff are on your side, and it's important to know that because they're not always on your side. I've actually seen it happen where a school was going to do a levy issue and staff was against it. which meant raises for the staff that were against it. Talking about the tax tolerance, 447 per year, fairly low numbers on the phone survey, good numbers for parents, good numbers on the online survey, and 53% on the community online survey compared to 34%, 32% on the telephone. So again, your numbers went up dramatically.

53% on the online survey said they would support the highest. Did I mishear you?

Yes. I know, right? Good numbers. When you drop down to the mid-level, 223 per year, your numbers didn't change on the phone survey at all. The numbers got a little bit better among... parents and staff and for Community online survey the numbers jump to 66% would support it at 223 Zero tax increase, and this is a little bit of a head-scratcher, because on the phone we only had 39% of people say that they would approve of a zero tax increase bond issue. When you get over to the online survey, that number is 84%. I'm at a loss to tell you why that is. I told Gina before we started today, I've been doing this 40 years and this is the strangest survey results I've ever seen. I have never seen numbers that are this high of either don't know or doesn't make any difference to me. Well, I would agree after seeing this. Yes. I know that was a lot of numbers to throw at you. I'm sorry. There's a lot of data there to chew through and I'd be happy to take any questions that you have.

Thank you. And just so the public knows we've received this data ahead of time. So we're not just, we've had time to kind of digest this and formulate questions too. Um, so who would like to start with some questions? Jason. Yeah.

Thank you for all that. Just a couple questions. There are some numbers in here that I just would like to understand a little better. You may have said this, and if I missed it, I apologize, but do you have the crosstabs on who makes up the 30% of undecided voters? Yes.

Could you share it? The 30% of undECIDED voters. More data. Makes no difference. Makes no difference for age. And it's different for every question. Yeah,

I'm with

you. But generally speaking, it is... We do the second option for Captain Elementary School, make no difference by age, 2%, 11%, 10%, 12%, 12%. Sorry, not the

make no difference. Oh, I'm sorry. So if the vote were held today, how would you vote? 30% were undecided.

Yes. Who are those people? Ah. 30%. A combination, including the list of crimes that we just talked about, your 18 to 24-year-olds were only 3%. Your 25 to 34-year-olds was 12%. 35 to 54 were 12%. 45 to 54 were 10%. Interestingly enough, your 55 to 64s were 16%. 65 or older, 9%.

So roughly equal, I mean, I could say this in generalities, and I guess it's right because it's so general, but roughly equal distribution across age groups. So there's nothing distinguishing there. Are there any cross tabs? And that could be an answer that you come back with, and I would rather have that than the like. I think we just need to have some clear understanding, if at all possible, about who makes up those 30%. You see what I'm saying?

Yeah, the only crosstab that made sense was people who have lived here 15 years or more. Okay.

The second thing is, can you go back to one of the first slides? I apologize, I don't have it right in front of me, but the... One more. Nope. More. Okay. Okay. So I guess I read the first one. I'm willing to support school improvements, et cetera, et cetera. That's 78% of people either strongly agree or agree. Yes. Which is a good sign. Yes. Right? Yes. And so I square that up with the variety – as you correctly pointed out, a bunch of people said like this option makes no difference in how I vote. That option makes no difference. The statement sounds negative like it makes no difference and I don't care about this. But isn't an alternative explanation that it's that I was going to vote for this whether you did something to Captain or not. I live in Merrimack, so I'm only going to say more likely for Merrimack, but do whatever you want to do with Captain Glenridge, et cetera. Excuse me, yes.

Okay. That is another explanation for it. Yeah. I think the election will come down to turnout. I think some of those people... sorry it went down the wrong way I think some of the people who said it doesn't matter, as long as the tax tolerance is zero or reasonable, I think those people will vote yes. Yeah. I think if the tax tolerance is not reasonable that they will vote no. I think on a zero tax that they probably won't vote out of apathy. Yeah. I don't know where you're at in needing that. I think zero passes easily. 223 passes with a good campaign. 447 is a little bit of a reach. Okay,

that's great. Thank you. Okay, sure.

Yeah, I want to follow up on that. I was thinking when someone would respond like it doesn't matter or... Does that in any way reflect kind of like whether I vote for it or not, like I'm not heard? Is it like a trust issue at all, do you think? I mean, is that a factor at all?

I do not think so because that would show up in your grading questions. Okay. And it didn't. I really think it's I'm done with school, so I'm not going to think about this. And I don't know the age here where you no longer have to pay taxes. Is it 60? 60.

The senior tax freeze. The

senior tax freeze, yeah. The senior thing, is it 60? 60. 62. 62, I

think.

I think we may have some of those people in there as well. Okay. I've seen that in other markets where you have quite a few older folks and they're like, I don't care, doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother me either. I vote yes because it doesn't affect me in my home market, so.

Gotcha. Thanks. So on the phone survey, do you have similar breakdowns in terms of like what population you're speaking to? Like you have that data as well? I'm just curious, like you mentioned that one particular 15-year-ish kind of cohort, right, residents. I'm just curious if in the phone survey, I'd be interested to see like in the report card, do we have that broken down by? We

do not have a report card broken

down, no. Okay, gotcha.

And I don't think there's anything else here that you would really look at and say, oh, yeah, there's something going on there. And, again, we spent a lot of time data mining and a lot of time looking at the numbers trying to figure this out. And the absolute last thing we did was amount of time living in the district.

That

was the last thing I thought it would be. So it was the last thing we did, and we were finally like, oh, my gosh, there it is. That's what it was. I got you. All right, thanks. Now, you have your digital dashboard that everybody has access to. That was helpful. And there's more data on that than I have here. It's impossible to present that whole thing. So you can go in and you may find some things that are interesting or of interest to you.

Kim? Yeah, so I mean, do you think that the differences between the phone survey and the online survey have to do with the fact that you're missing that moderate middle in the online survey because the majority of your respondents were your super fans or your, as you put it, cave citizens against virtually everything? um folks yes does that explain in your opinion based on the number of surveys that you've done before the difference

it's exactly the difference yes

okay so but otherwise you think in terms of the questions um the results are consistent

yes

between the two

yes

okay so then based on those results what are your three top takeaways from the combination of those two surveys

Number one, I think you have a lot of raving fans that are going to support it. We had a lot of people take the survey. I don't remember the number of people that took the online survey. It was a pretty good number of people. So I think you're gonna have a lot of rating fans that support it. I think your cave dwellers are probably 10% or less. So that's kind of one thought. I think that the people who said no are the people who said it wouldn't matter need more information than they have. We ask a general question about do we renovate this elementary school or do we tear it down and build a new one? There's no why there, and you can't do that in a survey because you'll skew the results, but I think that you have people who need more information about that in order to make a decision So I think the plan that we had talked about of educating people in the next couple months and doing another survey in January, I think that this bears that out. And I guess the third thing that kind of strikes me a little bit about this is just the – The strength that you have with your parents and your staff, really, really good. And like I say, that's not always the case. There are markets where parents are unhappy because it changed the boundaries on the high school 12 years ago and I'm still mad about it type of a thing. I don't see any evidence that there was any problems in the past that cropped up on this. And we would have seen that in the open-ended questions about biggest strengths and areas of improvement, and we didn't see any of that. So that is a good thing. I think this comes down to turnout. I really do. If you get your teachers and your parents turning out and you get your other raving fans turning out, I think you'll do well.

And do you believe that there is enough time between now and the potential April listing to execute that sustained information campaign that you believe is necessary in order to turn enough undecided or indifferent voters to successfully pass?

I think we'll know depending on what happens in the next two months. The idea is if we can move the needle some in the next two month, then that would give us an indication that in the three months that we have next year that we could move the needle even farther because whatever we do this year is going to be not as intense as what we can do next year. So that's the whole premise of re-survey again, just to see if we can move it a little farther again. And I don't think we need to re-survey online. I think we just need to do the telephone survey.

And how much do you think that needle needs to move in 60 days?

Great question. I think if we could move that 15% to 20%. Keep in mind on some of the scores you have that are 32% in favor, we need to see, you know.

So you need to see above 50% in order to be confident that you'd have the next 90 days after that to get to the point where you could pass it at 62 or something like that.

Not necessarily. If you're at 32% and we move it 20%, that's 20% of 32 is six. So if we go from 32 to 40, I think that's a good indicator that we can take it from 40 to 50 or better.

Oh, I see a 20% improvement from the base.

From the base, yes.

Okay.

And I was told there would be no math. Don't hit me with that.

I'm a treasurer, so I got to ask

math questions. No, no, that's great.

Thank you.

Anything else?

Pam, Chris.

I just think I just have one question. So, you know, the questions are about the different options, more likely to vote in favor. If it's today, more likely to go in favor, more likely to voted against or it makes no difference that it makes no difference. We don't know if that is like no way or I don't care. I'm going to vote the way I'm going to. Vote yes or no. We have no idea what that means. No

idea. Um, one of the things that I And I haven't talked to my team about this, but one of the things I thought about driving here was do we put a why after that? If you answered makes no difference, ask the question why. Why? I think that would be great information for us to have. Right,

because they might say, I'm voting yes regardless. That might be there. Or I'm voting no regardless, but it would be so helpful to know.

Or I'm not going to vote.

Which way that

would change the choices. Whichever way it is, you know. and the whole And at the end of the day the whole point of the survey is to inform your marketing campaign to pass a bond issue So I think having that information will be critical to what Gina's gonna do To come you know to address whatever people are thinking

What do you Which survey? I think know the answer to this, but just so everyone hears. Should we be paying more attention to the results of the phone because it's random and it's not just the cave dwellers and the super fans?

The phone because it's statistically accurate. Your staff and parent surveys, I didn't look to see what percentage of staff and parents that we got. You would need to get upwards of 66% of the people taking those online surveys for it to have... any viable accuracy. With the community survey, it's 50% margin of error. That's the way that it works.

And I love knowing that the staff is so supportive, but actually most of them are not registered voters in this district. So that's something to consider as well.

In other districts, we've seen that the staff that doesn't live in the district doesn't take the online surveys nearly as much. So I think there's hope that the people that took the survey are people that actually live in the district. I'm sure we have a number of how

many staff took it, though,

right?

Yeah. Okay. Chris, did you have...

Any other questions? Everyone asked the things that I was going to say. I was glad to hear what you said. I think what you alluded to, the way I read it initially is for these folks that are saying I don't know or it makes no difference, education is what they need. Information is what they need, you know. And then in January, if we do give them that information, that'll tell us a lot about what to do.

And I think by asking why, we'll find out that I either need more information, I don't care and I'm not going to vote. We'll find out what that is, and that will inform the campaign that you end up doing.

Yeah. And I just appreciated you pointing out that our grades were so great compared to... Grades are amazing. That makes us feel really good. We work really hard to... to make sure that our community feels like we're doing a great job. And I do think, and I'm sort of asking because I'm assuming myself, that that does bode well for us in terms of once we get information out, then potentially, because we have folks that are very invested and have given us an A, the more potential to say yes to that information.

And keep in mind that the average person patron hasn't stepped foot in a school building in 30 years. So they have no idea of what you're facing with this. So that's why the education campaign is so important, so they know why you need to tear down the school and build another one.

Thank you. One thing that jumped out at me that I wanted to point out from the phone survey was the question about the high school academic wing had a really high percentage of support, like over whatever your minimum threshold is. When I compared that survey question to the questions about the elementaries and the athletic fields, I realized that one was very specific. Like it listed what programs would be at the high school. It said robotics, geometry and construction. And so what that tells me is the community wants to know exactly what we're gonna do. And maybe had the other questions been more specific, maybe we would have seen stronger results. I don't know. But that was something to me that that point pointed out, that I think the community just wants to know specifically what we're doing. Just saying a storm shelter for safety is important, but I think maybe

modernize schools is

kind of like a vague term that maybe people don't know what that means.

We always struggle with how much information do you give somebody on a survey knowing that Joe Sixpack isn't going to have that information when he walks into the ballot box. So, yes, I think that helped on that. I also think CTE helped. And the high school touches

everyone. Every kid in this district ends up at the high school. So that's another thing, too. But I think it did help just being very specific with exactly what that would be. And the others were a little more broad and vague. So that's

something for us. To follow up on your point, Stacey, the one just underneath that was about turf at Wydown. And it explained why turf would be good. And it was almost 57% vote against it and like 2.6 voting for it. Yeah, that one surprised me. So it is also, I mean, it's your same point. If you're specific, you get a clear answer.

Yeah.

Turf didn't surprise me at all. I

think just the athletics in general didn't. Not at all. Oh, it didn't? No.

Every district we work with has trouble

convincing

people that turf is a good deal. Even when they show that you save money with turf, ultimately, people think that's a luxury. And we've done some postmortems on that to know that. People think it's a luxury.

Yeah. Well, I think, I guess maybe more than I was thinking about the academic questions, you know, the elementary schools. The athletics didn't score well in general, but... Okay, Nina, do you have any questions about the survey?

I do have one question. So I think the first set of statistics that you showed had, like, just, like, overall ratings. And I noticed, like, the lowest one, and it was still pretty high, was, like, communication or... Do you have any... Yeah. So the district's efforts to involve the community in decision-making. Decision-making. Do you have any, like... Because I think there was another question that was, like, how people... Like, what they feel is most helpful for getting their information from. Do you have anything, like... data to show the percent of people who were voting maybe lower on feeling like they weren't involved in community decision making and how they were, and what they were saying their biggest place they were getting information from was?

I do not. We don't do demographics on grading questions. It's kind of a whole different set of algorithms that isn't in the dashboard that we offer. I will tell you that district efforts to involve community and decision-making is low at every district we go for. 392 is a great score on that. I mean, we see people in the low threes, high twos with that. And keep in mind that that could be anything from... My daughter didn't get in choir to anything. What was the decision-making process of the district that my kid didn't get in choirs? It could be something like that. But it's low everywhere, and that's a really good number. That's

good to know. Thank you. That's a great question, Nina, because I think as we move forward, we need to figure out, first of all, why, like you said, the social media was low, not our

top,

or whatever. Figure out our means of communication and how we're going to reach people the best and make them feel like they're involved in our decisions. So thank you.

Yeah, part of our informational campaign needs to be social media, Facebook in particular. Yeah.

I would just say, too, that the timing of our Inside Clayton came out just a few weeks prior to the survey hitting. So that might have been really top of mind for the individuals who were called to participate.

And that's a really good point. And we got such great feedback on that, on that mail.

Yeah, that really nice. Yeah, so that's the hard copy that went to every household in the district. That

really nice magazine. Yeah. So you're right. Okay. Well, if there's no other questions, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Appreciate it. And thanks for sending us the data dashboard too because aggregating it was really helpful as well. And

if you have any questions about that, please reach out. Everybody's got my email, I think. Please reach out on that. I know it's a lot to dig through. So if you come across something else that doesn't look quite right.

Thank you. It's very helpful as we move forward to know what we need to do and who we need to target and how. I look forward

to resurveying in January. It will be terribly interesting.

Yeah, terribly.

Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, we're moving on to 6.2, which is our long-range facilities plan update. And we have a team from Paragon here and Perkins and Will. We've got everyone here, BLDD.

Yes?

Good evening. It's great to be back. So this is on the heels of our community engagement last week, which we had really good turnout. It was a lot of fun. I think we had, to echo Dr. Patel's sentiments earlier, I think we had really great engagement from the community as well as the district staff and the design team. So I think it really helped us propel forward and be able to provide some additional feedback tonight as well as we move forward. This is just a snapshot of where we're going and where we're at. So we always like to think with the end in mind. In order to be successful April 7th, we need the ballot language passed in January, which really means that our design teams will be working hard over the next 45, 60 days to be able to provide you with more clarity on the direction of the designs for the December and January board meetings. kind of picking up on the comments tonight about the survey, it's really important for us to have more defined design documents, presentation modes so that you can share that information before that survey goes out in January. So just know that our design teams are aware of that. We're working towards that. We're going to talk a little bit about what that process looks like as well as just some updates on each one of the designs tonight. So the first part is... In order to do that, we have to enter what's called the schematic design phase. And you can kind of see some of the bullet points there. So when we talk about the elementary schools and the athletics, this is the main push for our design teams over the next 60 to 90 days. Because what this does is provide more definitive information for the board, for administration, and for us to also be working with the construction manager to really start to work through what those costs will be. And so when we get to looking at that December board timeline, and especially in time for the January survey, we'll have more definitive information because we are now in that schematic design phase right now our recommendation would be and just a you know question for you guys moving forward is right now we are planning on pausing at the end of schematic design which for us would be sometime in that January time frame and then once the ballot passes we would pick up on the design after that point for the elementary school and for the athletics When we look at the high school projects, that might look a little different. And the reason is is that very similarly to the elementary schools, we're in that schematic design phase now. If we continue to move forward into design development and construction documents before the ballot, in April, that allows construction activities to take place this summer of 26 so that the high school projects would be ready by August of 27. If we were to take a similar pause on the high school projects like we do on the elementary, that would push it back. Instead of opening August of 27, it may be January of 28 or August of 28. So just a consideration for the board as you think through the timelines. It's not impacting us for the next 30 to 45 days. We're still working through this schematic design, but it's a decision for the board to give us permission to move forward or not pass that. There's some cost implications to that, but also just that benefit of opening up the high school projects a semester or an entire year earlier just because we're able to push forward and design this spring.

Okay, I'm going to run you through the elementary schools. Before I do that, I think it's worthwhile to just always keep present and remind ourselves the work that's come in advance of where we are today, and I'm going to take that all the way back to the beginning of the master plan phase that Paragon led when needs were assessed, buildings were assessed, conditions of buildings were assessed to really understand what you've got in your facilities district-wide. And so I think those are important benchmarks to keep reminding ourselves and the community, in fact, of the work that has come so far to the extent possible. The elementary schools... Captain is contemplates a Existing which have two slides for each elementary school and the existing site plan and the proposed We're just going to sort of quickly jump to the proposed Captain contemplates a new building or replacement building and again the why for that goes back to all the findings that were that came out of the master plan and One of the things that we did starting earlier this summer after we came on board was a series of workshops where we worked through all of the issues, where the district sees elementary school education going into the future, the types of spaces that are needed to support the type of work that's being contemplated, that really wants to happen. It happens today, but in spaces that are perhaps not ideal for that. So that has a lot to do with things like classroom size It has a lot to do with things like the flexibility of space, having places for students to break out or work in small groups and to collaborate and to build those kind of skill sets that all of our clients are looking for their students to walk out of their K-12 education with. And it starts in elementary school. And so dialing those right-sizing spaces, bringing those types of different programmatic elements to each of the schools is one of the things that's driving the size of the buildings. What you're seeing in the footprint here is again it's a replacement of the existing building. You'll see on all the proposed site plans the red dotted line is something that goes away. So in this case it's the entire Captain Elementary School. The footprint that's there is in the east-west direction is roughly the same as the existing building. It's a little bit more compact. That left side, the Phase 1, is a three-story academic portion of the building. It's principally academics. The right side of that, the Phase 2, is cafeteria, gym, and some support spaces for that. So it all happens on the ground floor, but it's a two-story volume because those spaces are taller. The play area is really just flipped to the east side of the site, so this actually puts the building where the original Dunoon Elementary School was on the west side of the site. And it allows that phase one, if this building stays occupied during construction, that's why it's shown in two phases. If this building perhaps like Glenridge or Merrimack takes advantage of a swing space, the district is working on what that might look like, then it would not be two phases. It would just all happen together in one phase. Glenridge Elementary existing site plan, we'll just jump to the proposed. This bears a lot in similarity to Merrimack in that the existing what you know of as sort of the front, sort of the classic front of these schools remains unchanged. So that experience that the community has had with these buildings now for almost 100 years is what it will be in the future. The additions, the demolition you'll see there and again at the dotted line. This case happens on the north side of Glenridge which is its traditional I guess rear of the school although one of the points we've made about this campus in particular is it's surrounded by streets and folks front yards and their living room windows looking at this building. We don't see any side of this building as the back necessarily. but the traditional front of this school is on Wellington, and we're proposing via the work here, and this is true at Merrimack as well, to reestablish that front door where the traditional front door was originally for these buildings, and handling at the same time ADA accessibility to the fronts of these buildings, which is why sort of the main entry, I'll call it the front door, the main entry currently is not at the traditional front of the building. So the additions, again, are helping to right-size. They are doing things like making the gym an appropriate size, coupling with this, this is true at Captain as well, coupling with it a cafeteria space so they work together. The cafeteria, in fact, becomes a stage to the gym, so it doubles as a performance space to the gym. So those things are all common. Programmatically, the schools are basically the same. The only one difference is at Merrimack, there is an additional classroom that we're calling a flex classroom, and that just has to do with the population at Merrimack to handle bubbles that's running through the school. The playgrounds and the turf field at Glen Ridge remain intact where it is. And again, the building addition sets to the north. Merrimack, very similar. You have to sort of reverse this in your mind now that the traditional main entry to this school is now to the top of the page. Excuse me, north is to the right towards downtown Clayton. And then a bit of a removal of the building on what is actually more of a backside here because you don't have front yards facing it to the east. Still, all of these additions to Miramac and Glen Ridge, we see those architecturally as being very, very respectful to the architecture of those original buildings. primarily brick buildings with articulated in a way with, you know, there's a fair amount of detail and interest to those existing buildings that we feel like might be important in these additions. So coupling those additions with the new buildings is going to be very important. Like Glenridge, the addition, the big part of that addition back there is a new gymnasium and a new cafeteria combined with it. Playground, and I should have mentioned the turf field is a common element at all three elementary schools. It's just, again, for playability. It's that same conversation you were just having about Y-down. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Brad for the high school board.

So we're just a little bit further along in the high school in the development. Not much has changed over the last couple of weeks, so essentially we're looking over on the west side. You can see the baseball field kind of out to the left there. You'll also see on the left-hand side a couple of other places little violet colored spaces. So one option is moving the school store up to where the current Hounds Grounds is, so better access for students, visitors, parents, guests, and then also be able to get Hounds Grounds down there on the lower level of the commons closer to the cafeteria. As we talk about the CTE expansion there on the west side, one of the drivers there is to maintain our west access, our driveways, as well as the access back into, I'll say, the more mechanical and maintenance yard of the high school. What you see there in purple is the geometry and construction. The green is the robotics field. And then those light blue are the classrooms for math, a dedicated CTE classroom and the AMPT program. We still have to work through some details to still try to work through how we can connect to the existing building, work with the existing math office, still get some daylight into that math office as well. But we're a little bit closer there. You can also see there's that red dashed line again of the small portion of the existing high school that we would demolish in order to get those spaces in there. Currently, we have the geometry and construction identified as the tornado safe room space. And so, as we work through that again kind of what Steve mentioned being very respectful to the quality of architecture that is on that side of the building as well from the large expansion that was made with the science wing to its north. Right now, we're just looking at this as a one-story addition. We'll be working with BSI to see if there's advantages and what the costs would be to design it in a way that could be a second or third floor added in the future. Because once we put this... Footprint here. There's really no other spot on the high school campus where you can easily add classrooms And so we just want to be cognizant of that and make that decision early on and we'll have some opportunities for that decision, but I'm

sorry, isn't the robotics field like a story? Yes. Thank you

yeah so the classroom story is just one single level if we have the ability to build above it for the second or third floor it would be stacked on top of those blue areas on the south we would not put anything or plan to put anything above the robotics or the geometry and construction because those will be a story and a half And the diagram up there at the top is just trying to show what we're going to have to do with the shape of that building in order to be keep those windows and the science labs intact so there's some. Some design details that still need to be worked out there, but we're cognizant of keeping the daylight and into the science lab classrooms on that second third floor. And then we just don't, the other side of campus, we don't have the visuals of it. And this may be funded through many different ways, but it could be capital projects that could occur in a summer or these projects could be tied in with the CTE project next summer, for example. But there's limited mobility to get to the backstage area for ADA purposes. It's there, it's accessible, it's by code, but there's better ways to do it. So we're looking into that. looking at within the auditorium some opportunities for some seating replacement, taking the auditorium lobby restrooms and giving them a refresh, not an overhaul, but just a refresh. And then back of house, back by the band, choir, and orchestra rooms, there's some HVAC improvements that are pretty typical at what we see after something's been around for 20 years, but there's some improvements back to that area that would make a big difference for the faculty, students, and staff.

Thank you. Okay, so as your priorities come into more focus, our focus has evolved a little bit, right? So now we're looking at gate field modernization. I want to be clear that that still includes the work at Y-Down, which is replacement of that field and some multipurpose playing surface. It also includes a softball infield at one of the Shaw Park fields. It includes work at ADZIC, which would be improvements to the dugouts and a new press box. The work at Gay Field is taking advantage of some of your assets already on site. So we aren't going to redo the track. That track has been resurfaced recently. It's in good shape. You have a brand new scoreboard that stays in place. And so we would look at replacing the turf. But really, and also focus on the athletics building, renovation of that, renovation of the concessions and toilet building, and really focusing on that home side bleacher press box area, create a pedestrian way. These spaces need to be inviting, they need to be inspiring, they need to motivating, but most importantly they need a place where the community can come and celebrate, hopefully celebrate mostly. Um, so that's where we will be focusing our efforts. Obviously we understand that there are issues with parking, so we'll have to work through that. Um, we just today did a really sort of more, um, you know, specific look at Y down and, um, Gayfield to sort of look at all of the ins and outs of what makes the most sense. And we're going to focus really on that upper level, trying to figure out what's the best way to make that safe and welcoming and also allow ADA parking and ambulance access and those sort of things. So we're focusing on that modernization of Gayfield and plan to meet your goals in terms of the schedule.

Thank you so much for the update. Any questions for anyone? Pam,

go ahead. Hi. Let me just kind of go through my list here. Okay, elementary schools. At one point somewhat recently, there was talk of keeping the original fronts as the fronts but building out part of them. What happened to that

idea? The school you're referencing was Glenridge. Merrimack we never were looking at in addition to the front, it was just Glenridge. What we've done is found an alternate way to do that and it primarily was being driven by the size of the library. We found another way to handle that at Glenridge that allowed the addition just to be one consolidated addition on the back of the school instead of doing it on the front as well. When we were talking about the front, we were talking about being very much in keeping with the architecture of the existing front of the building. But the simple answer to your question is we found another way to get that library to happen So the addition in the back got incrementally larger. The advantage of it having, there is an advantage of having it in just, or really two advantages of having it just in one spot. One advantage is the front of the building remains unchanged, right? So from a community asset standpoint, from a community experience standpoint, I think there's a message there that the beloved chairs building, it's gonna look just the way it always looks. So I think that's one thing. The other thing though, from a constructability and a cost standpoint, consolidating additions in one spot is more cost effective than putting them, putting a number of additions in a number of different spots.

Cost effective, I like that. Okay, next one is about the high school. A few questions. You talked about the theater. Well, I'll actually stick with the theater. At one point I heard also that we're going to make the lobby larger, not just the restrooms. Is that still when you talk about lobby?

Yes, we talked about that earlier. Right now we're focusing just on the restrooms. We think the cost-benefit ratio there of expanding the lobby really wasn't worth it. So we've put that part to rest for now.

Okay. Another thing we've heard about is that the science and language wing at the high school, that there's not, Nina actually spoke about it, there aren't bathrooms there in that whole addition. And we talked sometime about how the reason, there wasn't, when they did that addition, they didn't put bathrooms there for financial reasons, it seems. And so is there a need to think about that?

Yeah, there's two restrooms right there just south of the geometry and construction, the two gray boxes are our restrooms. Yep.

Thank you. Wonderful. That's great. Yeah,

we recognize that was a

pain

point in that area of the building.

And those are multi-stall?

Yes.

Okay. Thank you. Okay, then the next one is the Little Theater, Black Box Theater. Any talk of weaving that in with the other?

Currently, we do not have any work shown in that area.

Okay. I would like to push us to think about, I don't know, the need for that and then the cost associated. Risk benefit discussion of that one. And then with your work over there in the main lobby, the wellness center, is there a way, I know that we just put all this money into the wellness center where it is, But what we do know about wellness centers is that they are most effective when they are near the colleagues that they work with, such as counseling and nursing. And if we're already going to be doing some work up there, I don't know if there's any way to rework that area. I just wanted to put that back on the docket.

So back to the master plan, one of the things that we showed was if we expanded and grouped some of those forward-facing student services all in that one wing of the high school near the front lobby area, that would have to relocate all of those social studies rooms. So there'd be anywhere from two to four, I think, social studies rooms that would have to be relocated. in order to fit those rooms anywhere else that we saw right now, it would require a second or a third floor expansion into that area in order to make that switch. So that was the other reason from our perspective tying it back to the master plan is if we make that a one-story addition with the math, the CT, and the AMT that can be built onto the future, whether it's that need or any other needs that might come up in the next 10 or 15 years for the high school, that would be the opportunity to build above that space. And because it's challenging to build above an occupied space, but because we know that going into that's a possibility, we can make the right design decisions now to make it easier to do that later versus more difficult later.

Any other questions, Ben? Go

ahead. So on Glenridge, there is an addition that's about 20 years old with the cafeteria. I think upstairs it's got like science classroom. Does that remain untouched in your recollection? Yeah, let

me go back to that.

It's all the way on the east side. Yeah,

it is. Yeah, I

think it's that. It's less than 20

years.

Okay, so that

currently down below? Gotcha. So that space remains there, although the cafeteria gets reconstituted up above. Right. So I guess

any vision on what that cafeteria space would be repurposed

for? At Glenridge, we don't have any classrooms in the lower level right now by request. We do have administrative spaces down there, however, including the main office, which it's not in that location. It's kind of in the middle of the building where the front door would want to be. But there's two options for that existing space where the cafeteria is now. One is more administrative-type offices. Another is sort of more back-of-house kind of functions for the school in general. Okay. So we are cognizant that those are nicer spaces, and so I probably lean toward them becoming more administrative-type spaces and finding other homes for back-of-houses. Okay.

Switching to Merrimack... Can you describe what the percentage change in the hard surface play space is?

It's not a quantity. It's not a number that I have off the top of my head. One of the changes that I did not talk about but I can now, given your question, is there's a drop-off that happens up here off of this turnaround. And so what this is showing is a notion of essentially building a retaining wall to allow more of a flat play surface. So we're definitely aware that we're taking up some existing playground space with the new addition. So we're trying to sort of reconstitute that back here. What exact form or shape or surface it necessarily takes, that's work yet to be done. But the notion is, again, the retaining wall to allow more horizontal flat surface instead of having it sort of... So you're going to kind of

push back into that...

The

hillside, yeah, exactly. You're going to push back into that hillside and become a little bit more equal to what it is today. That's right. Without doing that, it's definitely less. It's definitely less, yeah. Okay, gotcha. And who owns that

property? Is that school district property, that pushback? Or is that city? Okay,

thanks. To follow up on that, when we did the workshop this summer with Merrimack, the faculty had the exact same

concern. That's a priority for them.

Very much a priority for them to make sure they have as much space. I've heard the same,

yeah. Now, on the high school, so the addition, I'm just trying to understand, is that you mentioned that things could get pushed back based on getting construction documents ready. Is that work going to happen during the school year? You know, the demolition and the construction itself and what kind of impacts will that have on the school? So

the benefit of... Having construction documents ready for bidding and permitting, we might be able to do some of the demolition work during the summer, maybe. But in either scenario, there's going to be construction activities taking place throughout the entire school year. Okay. We might be able to get some of the dirtiest, noisiest stuff done in like last part of July, early part of August. Part of that's how we can get permits handled quickly. But there's a higher likelihood of being able to do that if we're able to have documents ready to go out for bidding and permitting right after the ballot passes versus three to four months later.

So kind of on a related question in a way, you know, if I guess at some point we're going to have to figure out exactly what we're going to be asking to do. So based on what has been presented, I feel like there's a chance that not all that's going to get done or going to get asked for in terms of the, you know. So I guess the question then is do we need to go forward with schematics on something that we're not actually going to pull the trigger on, if you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, so that was in our conversations internally within the design team and with the district. That's why we felt comfortable taking it to the end of schematic design on most of the projects because what that allows us to do It allows us to get more definitive information to make better decisions and be able to communicate better with the community to show them what they're getting, so to speak. And also allows the construction manager to get better pricing on that to be able to make that decision better until we get to the end, true, the end of schematic design. It's a little bit more based on, I'll just say square foot numbers and what's been typically built elsewhere in the community. At the end of schematic design, we have some pretty good hard numbers to do actual takeoffs, actually be able to talk with subcontractors and suppliers to get better numbers to make better decisions. That's on the elementary schools. That's why we recommended stopping right there, because when we actually looked at the analysis by pushing forward, let's just say on Glenridge further along, it really didn't buy us any advantage in time wise for the district, especially with a move in date. Getting done with a brand new large elementary addition in October doesn't really benefit the district as much as getting it done in July or December, for example. So by stopping the elementary schools where we've proposed keeps the district in a really good spot for construction and move-in. The only one that showed a clear benefit was the high school to be able to essentially possibly move in as much as an entire year early. Right.

I guess the reason I ask also is that, you know, if we kind of know at a macro level where things are going to fall, even by, you know, kind of ROM estimates or whatever, then it might, I guess, will there be an opportunity to say, okay, we kind of know what we can get done for X amount of dollars. So maybe we would hold off on schematics on some of the projects or one or I don't know, whatever it may shake out to be. Just because I feel like if we're not going to utilize that anytime soon, right, those schematic effort, that it, I mean, well, let me ask you this. Would that be usable in three, five years out or whatever it may be?

It's actually one of the things we didn't talk about very clearly was Glenridge and Merrimack were actually proposing to go through the schematic design phase. Captain, we're actually pulling back to like 35% schematic design because of that exact reason. It'll be able to be in the same reasons as I said of like the benefits of it. We think we can be able to be successful in everything I talked about and get to technically it's 50%, but it's 35% architecturally. And so that's the good, where we thought the good break point to be able to get the best value and the lowest risk for the district.

Perfect. That's excellent. Great. And then on the gate field renovations proposed, one of the things that was brought up at the community meeting is the need for storm shelter there. And I see that renovation of the existing building is part of that scope of that work. Would that serve as a sufficient storm shelter for, I mean it would be better than someone being in a car, right? But I guess is that part of the goal with that renovation?

So, yes. The athletic facility, if we are able to take over the entire lower level, that adds space that would be allowable to use in the case of an emergency. I don't want to have anybody assume that this is a tornado shelter. So we will have the existing facilities at the concession and toilet, the athletic facility, new press box. Ticket booth. Those will all be small. So those are all places you can go in case of emergency. We're not building anything, any new structures that would add to that capacity, but you'd be surprised how many you can actually get into a locker room when you have to. Gotcha.

Okay. Thank you. Sorry, I got a lot of questions. Um, uh, regarding Y down, uh, field is there, I feel like we talked about this. Is there a shade structure plan for that?

It is one of the planning elements. Um, when I talked about your priorities coming more focused, what that means is dollars that are available. So that's one of the things that I'm going to be pushing on to make sure I understand what those needs are so that we, um, provide you what you need and try to make sure we get into budget. I will be the first to admit, I don't know about the rest of the team that The dollars that have been allocated to our projects, we have work to do to reduce scope. So we have to get the dollars down. And so I'll be asking very difficult questions to our user groups. Prioritize. Yes.

Great. Gotcha. Fair enough. And then last question is part of the, you know, obviously we're eager to have visuals and things that we can show that people can really kind of connect with. Will one of the things that's made available, are you going to utilize any kind of digital virtual tools? Are we going to get fly-throughs or any of the cool kind of new things they have in design? Like I think like having people at least have some kind of, you know, this is what the new Glenridge experience, for example, would be like. And it would be helpful to have some of those tools. I'm not sure if that's part of the scope or... It doesn't have to be like, you know, choose your own adventure. It could be a preset fly-through. Gotcha. Yeah.

It's a great question. It's something that we've talked about. The buildings are, Glenridge and Merrimack in particular, are already... The existing buildings are already built in a 3D modeling program that we call Revit. The additions, anything that we change to will be doing the same thing. So we've talked about it'll be frankly a little bit easier for us to do those sort of imagery from the outside perspective. The potential difficulty of going flying through the inside of the building is to make it look realistic. You actually have to know all, you have to have all your material choices. Everything actually has to be modeled inside the, in the model for it to actually look good. So probably more likely to be, let's pick a couple of spaces that we want to grab like a still image of and show that instead of flying inside the building. I'd say that's more likely what would be an outcome. Getting the inside is more likely happen at the end of design development because in the design development we're finalizing all those interior finishes colors materials that type of thing gotcha okay

that helpful thank you thanks

any other questions from anyone can

i just have one just so that um everybody can hear it again for probably the umpteenth time but and how many of these uh projects that you guys are scoping out, how many of them require swing space? Not the high school, not Y-Down, not Captain, but all of the other two elementary schools. Yes, yeah, in

order to successfully complete Glenridge and Merrimack, people have to move out.

There is no way to do Glenridge and Merriment with students in the building?

I would highly discourage it. Is it technically feasible? Yes, it would probably take two plus years to do and the cost would probably be 50% more because of how long it would have to take and there'd be a lot of disruptions.

Yeah, I just needed people to hear that answer. Yeah,

I can share with you. We were the architects, the design architects for Spady Elementary School over in Ladue If you're familiar with what happened over there, we ended up basically keeping the gym. Everything else got replaced. Most of the construction happened

Thank you very much for the update. Look forward to more. Thank you for being here. Okay, our last presentation tonight is a mini-presentation on assessment just on a portion of our student population. We will, of course, hear more on assessments in the springtime too. Hey,

Luke, can you check on the mics up here? I'm not sure if

mine sounds good, but those.

Yeah, for Malene and those two, I don't know if they're still on. Can you hear me?

I don't know. Is it working? Hi. Thank you for having us. Like you said, this is not our full-blown assessment report, but a smaller version of it where we're going to laser in on some specific things related to assessment and related to a specific population of students. So before we started, we wanted to get ourselves grounded in our CSIP, so in our Comprehensive School Improvement Plan, which we refer to as our strategic plan. And in goal two, we focus on the educational growth of our learners. And so that's the focus of our work tonight is to talk about growth on our local assessments. So as a part of our work within the district, a year and a half ago we started to reboot our multi-tiered system of support process across the district. And really trying to align language across all of our buildings and really focus on our tagline of our MTSS process, which is knowing our learners well and responding to their needs. So our goal as educators is to know all of our learners and how they're achieving and then being able to respond to their needs. Tonight we're gonna focus in on really two areas of this, so our strong collaborative teams and our continuum of tiered support. So tonight's presentation is different from our annual assessment report that we will do in February. The presentation is gonna amplify our MTSS work as well as the superintendent's goals. So it's gonna be some high-level information. We're gonna talk a little bit about what the MTSS process looks like for us, but just to get you regrounded in the superintendent goals, in 23 and 24 there was a focus on reading, specifically on reading improvement plans and reducing the number of reading improvement plans across the district. The state made some changes for us in 24 and 25. We saw that as an opportunity, and we were... We sort of lost some longitudinal data because we had to change our assessment practices. So we moved from FAST to the STAR as our reading assessment to be aligned with the requirements from the state. And at that time, we also added Educlimber as a data visualization tool for us and a way for us to track information across the system. And so rebooting everybody in thinking about how we look at data as well as how we track that information across the district. And then this year we continue with the reading focus, but then also layered on the math piece. So tonight we're gonna show you some baseline data from both the NWA map, which is our local standardized assessment that we focus on for math and the STAR reading assessment. Both are standardized assessments meant to report student achievement as well as student growth in those two content areas. So unlike the annual assessment report in February, for the purpose of our focus on MTSS, we're gonna talk about students scoring at or below the 50th percentile on the NWA. So those are the red and the orange that are circled here. And then we're gonna talk to you specifically about data from fall to spring of the school year 24-25. The purpose in that is to remove summer from the conversation. So we like to look at growth fall to spring because we're responsible for children that entire time. And so we feel like it gives a more accurate read of growth. And then with NWA, we will only be focused on elementary because in the spring we had a tornado which prevented us from assessing the middle school students because of what our plan of education was for them after the tornado. The testing companies or the state, depending on the assessment, determine the cut scores for us to use and it's important to note that while there's a percentile determined for us to consider to be at grade level, we remember that this is one data point on one day. So in addition, a percentile just to recalibrate everybody on a percentile is not a percent correct. It means that in a testing session, if a student were to score in the 50th percentile, it would mean that their score was as good as or better than 50% of the norm group. So it reports a relative comparison. Another thing to consider with NWA, the company reports scores within a range, generally a plus or minus 10. That becomes kind of difficult for us to report to you, so cleaner data for us to report is actually a single score. So that messiness is what we deal with in the schools when we're talking about student data, but it's difficult for us to present to you in a clean way, so we just make a decision to go with just one score. For STAR, we'll talk to you about data from below the 46th percentile. So this is red and yellow that's highlighted here. The state sets this threshold for us. So unlike NWA, which is set by the company, the state is setting that threshold based off of the Senate bill. With each of these assessments, Robin's going to share data with you about growth between fall and spring, as well as students meeting projected growth as determined by the testing companies. So she'll go into more detail about what that is. For growth, it's important to know that as a student ages up in the system, growth norms on assessments are smaller as students get older. So we anticipate that they will make larger growth at earlier ages. So, for example, in first grade on the NWA, the norm growth is around 16 points. But by seventh grade, it's six points. So that's a pretty significant difference. So Robin's going to walk you through the data.

Hi, good evening. Thanks for having us. So you'll notice that I'm going to start going into some tables, but our grain size is going to just continually get smaller. Okay. so that by the time we get to the end, we are down to one individual child. And that's intentional, right? Because that's the goal, to know our students well and to respond to their needs. So you'll kind of see us take you through that throughout this presentation. So this first table looks like a lot of numbers here. So I'm just going to take you through what the blues and the reds mean and what the different numbers mean. So the first table is showing us potential areas of disproportionality in our data. And as Melina just discussed, we're spending this presentation narrowed in on 24-25 school year and data for about 15% of our population is what we're looking at. So the first table is how that 15% actually breaks down. And this is breaking down by student group. So in the table, you can see that we're discussing 34 African American students, 9 Asian students, 13 multiracial students, and 68 white students in math, and 83 African American students, 27 Asian students, 16 multiracial students and 118 white students in reading. So similar to how MSIP 6 provides a scoring breakdown that includes total population and then also student group populations, so we're focused specifically tonight on the growth of student group populations. So where the student group matches or is less than the percentage of the total population, we have put those numbers in blue. And where the percentage of that particular student group is higher than the group in the total population, we have put those numbers in red. That's to highlight disproportionate data. So in order to maintain our anonymity, there are some groups that are not going to be represented throughout that data. As we look at this table, you will notice that the total percentage of African American students in the district is 12.8%. But the percentage of African-American students falling below the threshold in math is 25.6%, and in reading is 33.2%. Those numbers are highlighted in red to show that disproportionality. So that's just an example of what you'll see as we go throughout the presentation. So the second table is going to show us those potential areas of disproportionality in our data by groups that receive a specific or targeted support plan, like an IEP plan, a 504 plan, or a language acquisition plan. So in line with the previous slide, those groups in math and reading that are at or below the percentages of the total population are noted in blue. And those that are above the percentages of the population are noted in red to show that disproportionality. As we examine this particular data table, we note that our percentages in math and reading for our students with IEP and language acquisition plans are above those of our total population. So both of those initial data slides are simply just to inform you what is the general makeup of our students last year that fell below the threshold. So the next several slides, we're now going to start looking at growth for these groups, and that's really the key to our MTSS and our intervention processes. So these next two slides are just kind of the big number overall slides. And like I said, the grain size will continue to get smaller. So here we've broken down math and reading by growth that our students are making in STAR and NWEA indicators. We are defining growth by any positive change in the score between the fall and the spring assessments. So in the 2024-2025 school year, you can see that our students were showing growth across the board. But the importance of this slide to this particular data presentation is the growth of that group of students that we're zooming in on. And so you'll notice those are both in blue. That group is noted in blue because they demonstrated growth at a larger rate than the total population. And while this is one data indicator and the larger picture of our students, we are encouraged by that data and its connection to the intervention processes that we are continuing to refine as part of our system. So as Melina also just spoke with you about, there are also some projected growth numbers that are provided for us by the companies or by the state. And so this next table is showing that based on the norms of growth provided by STAR and NWEA, our students scoring below the threshold are making larger gains in projected growth than our total population. So the slide before was just general growth, right? This one is the projected growth. And the goal for students that score below the threshold is to achieve, on average, more than a year's growth in a year's time. So that's what we want to try to get to. So again, you'll notice some encouraging data in this table that shows us that our students scoring below the threshold are making some gains. So now we continually bring that grain size down again. So our previous growth tables have told us that our students that score below the threshold are growing in reading and in math, right? So that's what we just looked at. But as we keep breaking it down, we're going to start to see it now again by our student groups by race and ethnicity. So those with numbers too small to maintain confidentiality are not included in the table. And as a whole, large percentages of our student groups that fall below the data threshold are demonstrating growth. We are continuing to move them forward. In this slide, we highlighted blue, those groups that are demonstrating that growth at the higher rates than the total population, and in red are the groups that are demonstrating growth at lower rates than the total populations. So in math, as you can see here, that is our population of multiracial students. And in reading, that is our populations of African-American students. And they are just slightly below that growth threshold. So then we'll kind of continue that, going to the smaller sizes. So similar to that previous table, this is now the breakdown of math and reading based on those STAR and NWEA normed data. So we're back to projected growth again that is provided for us by those companies or by the state. And this is for our students with a support plan in place. So those IEPs, 504s, and language acquisition plans. The majority of this data is highlighted in blue. But we are remaining cognizant of the data highlighted in red showing disproportionality in the math IEP and 504 growth data in comparison to the growth of the total population in math. And that growth of the total, if you remember, in math from a previous slide was 94.97. So that bar is set pretty high. And now we're going to go kind of back to that projected growth, those norms set by Starr and NWEA, and the approximate amount of students that are growing in relationship to that norm. So this table returns to that idea and shows projected growth by race and ethnicity. When we look at all of our students who fall below the threshold as one group, they were demonstrating that projected growth more often than the total population. This continues to be true for the groups broken down by race and ethnicity with the exception of our African American math data. And then finally, similar to the previous slide, we're looking again at projected growth and those students scoring below the threshold are making projected growth when we consider IEPs, 504s, and language acquisition plans. And as we examine our 504 data, this appears to be an area of growth for us as a district, and the data indicates a need to focus more specifically on both math and reading for our students with a 504 plan.

So a part of our story... A part of our story is not just the data, but what we do with that data. And so we wanted to share our process of when an assessment window closes, what happens for us. I don't think this is the right slide. I don't have the right. I can talk from that one. If you

put it back up, I'll just talk from that one, we're

going

to skip a couple things.

I'll just talk from whatever we've got, but I can't click at the moment. I'm going to have you pretend that you're looking at some things. Some of it you've already seen. You want to drive for me? Okay. So if you remember the hexagons when we were talking about the hexagons before of our overall MTSS process, we're really talking specifically once a data window closes around the strong collaborative teams and the continuum of tier support and personalizing and individualizing practices to respond to data and plan to address learner needs. So we can set up Educlimber to automatically run reports for us once data are entered into the system. And so this slide here shows, we're actually shifting now to this school year's data to talk to you about Educlimber. So we're shifting out of the 24-25 school year into this year because this is the most accurate data and I'll tell you why in a minute. But so we can automatically run the EDUCLAIMER system to set up the system to run a report for us when a testing window closes. So this right now shows YDOWN when we closed an assessment window this fall. And 59 students at Wydown scored at or below the 32nd percentile on STAR. 32nd percentile is important in this story because of reading success plans. That's the first threshold, so we're casting the first wide net with the state assessment data. So then we start to zoom in on those 59 students and start to look at that. So NWA and STAR we look at as essentially universal screeners And then from those data, that determines where we go from there. Gina? So when a student's... Yeah. So I'm going to talk

without slides

being up there. All right. So when a student scores below an established threshold, so some of the things that we've already talked about, so 46th percentile, 50th percentile, the team look at other data points, so subscores, classroom performance, et cetera, and then they determine if and what additional data are needed to make a decision about a student's plan of service. So the team, once they've made the determination about what additional data they're going to gather, they gather it and then they analyze those data and put a plan and service in place. So the next thing that you would be seeing at this point is... A slide that talks about the interventions that we have in place this year. And so tier three interventions this year, and we planned with Educlimber to, last year we started to roll things out and pilot them, and then this year things were established K through five, K through eight, and then we're working to establish them as students age up in the system. But so what you will notice is that this year, K through eight, currently we have 240 intervention plans, tier three intervention plans in place. Sorry, 240 intervention plans in Educlimber. 206 of those plans are tier three academic plans offered by 15 different faculty members. So 102 of those plans are in math and 104 of them are in literacy. That represents 184 unique students. So there is some overlap of some children having a plan both in literacy and in math, but it's not a significant overlap. And then the last slide that we would have been showing you is what an intervention looks like in Educlimber. And once we put the intervention in place, we set a goal for the child, we determine a progress monitoring tool, and then we start to track attendance, the goal, the exit criteria, and then we provide the individualized or small group instruction using those tools and collect the data with the progress monitoring tool. So what we can confidently say is that we're well on the journey of ensuring that all of our students show academic growth and well on the journey showing that we know our students well and that we're responding to their needs. What questions do you have?

Thank you. Yes, who has questions? First of all, I just want to say I appreciate the mini assessment in the fall and not just waiting for the spring to receive all of the information. I like that you focus this just on that one student, that one student group, the one group of students so that we can have kind of like a mid-year update and not receive it all in the spring. I like breaking it up into two separate ones. So thank you for that. Does anyone have questions on it? Jason,

I don't really have a question. I mean, I just wanted to echo that. I just want to thank you guys for preparing this and for the conversation. I just, you know, this is something that's a topic that's particularly important to me. So I appreciate it being, you know, the focus on an agenda item. And I don't know many, I mean, I'm not an expert in every school district, but like the fact that we're able to have this conversation about our student group population and speaks to the culture that we have around this topic and the fact, you know, that we're willing to put some numbers in red and put some numbers in blue, I think just speaks a lot to the team here and the focus that we have on that. And so for that, I just really thank you guys.

Thank you. Yeah, anyone else?

I want to thank you also. This is great. I asked some questions beforehand and you 100% explained them just now, so thank you. And I just want to point out for the community that not only have you shared with us information about Student groups below the threshold of I don't know if it's for this 132 ish percentile or something but that you're also looking at Kind of the middle group also that you're not only looking at these at the below the thresholds Yeah, so these are

actually below the 50th or below the 46th. Great. So, thank you That's good to

know I just have a tech question Does Educlimber pull in that data for STAR and for NWEA easily? Is it like a nice, easy integration? It's a direct

import.

Oh, cool.

STAR and Educlimber are owned by the same company, so that one is a really easy one, and then NWEA has made it an easy import.

Okay, thank you.

Our other assessments are not as easy to import, so I have a departmental assistant who helps pull in all those other data.

I just want to say thank you for this as well. I'm really happy to hear all this now instead of having to wait for it, especially because you have such good news. I just want to make sure that you hear me say that I heard that really good news, and I'm really proud of that work. So keep it up. And I did get to see the entire presentation, so don't worry. We did see your amazing slides. They were very effective. I mean, I was pretty proud of them. You

should be. I really do love Andrew Kleinberg.

It is amazing. And we're

good.

Thanks, though. No, I really did. The slides were very helpful. I looked through all of them. They were very easy to understand and, again, it's very clear, the work that you're doing. And from a parent point of view, someone who's been in this district, now my boys who were two-year-olds at the family center are now 20, This is a very different school district. What you're providing here is steps above what they got provided. So I'm just thrilled by how much it's changed and grown in that amount of time. That's remarkable. So keep up the good work. Thank you for what you do. Thank you.

and I know I have, or we all have sung the praises of EduClimber in the past, but it's really great now to see how it's evolved and all the more data we now have entered in it. It took time, of course, when we started, but it really is so great to see that and how we can meet individual student needs with all of that data in one place. It's really great to see, so. So yeah, thank you for the good news. Thank you for your work. And the most important part of the presentation to me was the second half. What do we do with the data? And everything you presented there and what we saw, what we have seen before tonight is the most important part and we're doing great work. So thank you for pointing out that part out. Did you have a question?

No, I just have a comment. So the good news for me is that you have actionable data and you're taking action behind it. I just want to be... I guess I just want to say out loud that if you're one of these families, though, that has a child that is African-American that is... not um doing as well as the as you know peer groups that are in the same class this may not feel like good news and probably doesn't so i just want to you know make sure that in our praise for the tools that we have and everything else that the takeaway for me is that um There are interventions in place to help those students you now can identify exactly who those students are and if there is any silver lining it is that They're outpacing the growth in this school district that they would otherwise experience if they went to another school district it does not mean that there's still not a lot of hard work between the teachers and the specialists and and those students in order to get them to the point where they're feeling as successful as other students that are in the district. So, that's it. Good point.

Okay, anything else? Okay, well thank you, Robert and Melina. Thank you very much. Okay, policies tonight. We have five first readings and I believe five second readings of policies. So the first reading, Dr. Poole, policy ACA sexual harassment. Do you, Chris, want to read the motion and then we'll? Wait, I don't know why there is a motion. Oh, this one we're only doing one reading, right? Because we're changing the title. Yes, you're right. This is the one we're only going to do one reading. So go ahead and read the motion and then we can.

I move that the Board of Education approve the change to Title IX Coordinator from the Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning, the Assistant Superintendent of Equity and Student Services.

Second.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded. So are there any questions or comments on this one?

I just want to point out something I discussed with Cameron, that this policy refers to another policy AC that has people in charge that have titles that we no longer have in our district. And so that policy is going to be coming to us soon to update that as well. That's it. Yeah.

Good. Okay, policy IGBB programs for gifted students. There's no motion on this. Again, first reading. Oh, no, we need to vote. Sorry, I forgot about this one was just a first reading. Okay, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that motion passes for the first reading only policy ACA update. Okay, now we'll move on to IGBB programs. For gifted students, does anyone have questions or comments on this one? for Cameron, for Dr. Poole?

Thank you for making the changes that, putting in the changes that I had suggested.

Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Anything else? Okay. How about policy IGBCA programs for homeless students? Any questions or comments, suggestions for that one? No? Okay. Policy IGBE-1, students in foster care. Okay. No. Okay, policy JHDF, suicide awareness and prevention. Are there any suggestions for changes in this one? Yeah, Chris.

Okay. Let me see where I'm at. Does Chris know about the edits?

No, I'll bring it up after.

Yeah. Oh, this is the one. Go ahead, Chris. Yeah. It's under for students who may be in suicidal crisis number four. Let's see. Do you see where I am? Yes. There's two, and then there's a one, two, three, four.

Does

everyone

see

where I am? On page three. Yes. It says conduct a debrief of the response with the crisis response team. I love that that's there. I'm wondering if that should be a little bit less vague. Because when we're talking about a team that has come together to manage a student who's actually in suicide crisis. There are going to be many things that team experiences on an emotional, personal level. So when we talk about debriefing, that part of me that knows about crisis intervention, et cetera, Therapy, you know all that kind of you know post traumatic therapy etc. It knows that that's part of that debriefing But this really doesn't say any of that it just talks about It doesn't give any delineation between what we're going to debrief on is terms in terms of what did we do? Well, what we learned from this what what are our areas of growth and then separately How are we as a team individuals personal? personally doing so I didn't have I started to mess around with some language and I can get it to you but I didn't you know, completely, you know, I wanted to see how everyone else felt about that and whether you felt that was necessary. But I could propose some language. I just don't have it right this second.

Just so I understand, are you asking, is your question or your point about the membership of the CRT? No. Or is it more what the procedures and prescriptions are to what they should be discussing?

The second thing you said. What the debrief is, correct, entails. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that would be great if you sent that language over, and I think that's a good segue into – Well –

But –

Go

ahead. I think we're probably – I mean, I don't know that

that's – I don't know if that's – I'm not against making sure that's as important of a – that's a really important conversation to bring up, so that's not my point. But that strikes me as below the level of policymaking. That's more – Like a procedure? Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, procedure is what you mean.

Yeah, I was going to echo exactly what Jason just said. So everything you're talking about is important and needs to be part of what the CR team action plan is, but their action plan may be different than what is written into the policy. Sure, yeah. Or it's separate. It just lives in a separate place.

It's a different document,

yeah. Okay. But everything you're talking About is

important. Okay.

That's

important to make sure that goes into the discussion of whatever the... Or seizure. Exactly. Which we don't see.

Right. I would also say on that number four, that exact sentence she's pointing out, for whatever reason, the entire document uses CRT, but that sentence spelled out crisis response team. I don't know. It's not a big deal, but I just was curious why that was different.

I mean, if Leo were here, he would say change it to the acronym.

Right.

Because it's kind of a defined term. It's just inconsistent.

I just didn't know why that one wasn't the same. Okay, we can change

that. So how are we gonna know from this that that debrief includes what I said?

So, and again, I think this is a good segue to go into, I think the whole, Pam and I were talking about the entire section and just kind of improving some of the language that is within it. So a possible proposal that we have, and this could be a part of the second meeting would be You know, after any crisis situation, CRT members will debrief the response, document actions taken, and identify opportunities for improvement of procedures and support systems. So it can be fleshed out a little bit more just by adding some more clarity in terms of what the process looks like without actually going into a lot of specifics. Okay. And we talked about, and Pam, you can share as well, we talked about just kind of that section in its entirety, which is making it a bit more clear in terms of what our process is and kind of the steps we follow. Great.

So what I brought up was that whole section called response plan and they divide it by students who may be at risk and students who may be having a crisis. And I felt like the people, that those should be combined into one and that at a policy level we should not separate who may be at-risk and who may be in crisis. That I believe that that is a decision that is made by people who are licensed and trained in risk assessment.

Yeah.

So we combined it. I gave him some wording for that. It was sent to MSBA. I'm happy to read it. I don't know if I should, but just the bigger picture is just to combine it.

Okay. Oh yeah, exactly. Exactly.

That's exactly the point. Yeah.

MSBA I think approved

it. MSBA, you know a few minor tweaks just in terms of you know structural things but yeah MSBA was fine with the changes.

Okay good so we'll see that when it comes

To the second read for the second

so that the point is that it's just clear in the policy that any student who has showing any sort of suicidal risk or thoughts or intentions is The policy guides all people not separate post evaluation,

right?

Okay, but how do I know from sitting here since I don't look at the procedures I How do I know that that's there? How do you reassure me that that's actually getting done for our faculty?

Yeah, so as it kind of outlines, each building combined with district personnel, there's a crisis response team. So anytime we are within a crisis or the risk of one, we follow the process that is in there, kind of to a T in terms of assessing the child, having one of our licensed clinical social workers run the assessment. Then that usually goes into the action plan for the safety plan. So a safety plan is something that's progress monitored. It could be a matter of, you know, resources. It could be you know, other outside agencies that we referred the family to. Um, and then within house, we would develop a safety plan, which is progress monitored by the, uh, by the team within the building. And that team usually will consist of, um, of course your administrator, your counselor, social worker, depending on the building, if we're at the elementary level, your IC, you know, would be involved as well. Um, possibly folks from central office, depending on the level. So our director of student support has been a central key person and being a key cog in the response teams as well as helping with the structure with those as well. So it just kind of depends on student's teacher, but the main core people would be that administrator, that counselor, that social worker that would be a part of that.

So you can't tell me right now from your knowledge whether or not that debrief outlines that it would be discussing both the learned, you know, the things that we learned from the debrief plus the emotional, you know, place of each of the people that were involved in it?

Yeah. So that's a part of our postvention process. You say

you have read that is what I'm asking?

Mm-hmm.

Okay. Great. That's all I need to know. Okay. That's it. Thank you so much. Okay.

Anything else on this one? Nope. Okay. Thank you, Dr. Poole. So now, I think that was the last first reading. Yes. So now we have some second readings up for adoption. The first one is policy DFA, revenues from investments and use of surplus funds. If you would read that motion, please, Chris. 7.6.

I move that the board adopt policy DFA revenues from investments slash use of surplus funds as presented.

Second.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments on this one? Okay, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay, motion passes. Now 7.7, policy DFA-1 revenues from investments use of surplus funds.

I move that the board rescind policy DFA one, revenues from investments slash use of surplus funds.

Second.

Okay, moved and

seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that motion passes. Now policy DFI dash one, setting tuition for district programs.

I move that the Board adopt policy DFI dash 1, setting tuition for District Programs as presented.

Second.

Moved and seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No, that motion passes. Policy DGFA Federal Programs and Projects. DJFA,

thank you. I move that the board adopt policy DJF a federal programs and projects as presented okay

all those in favor any opposed motion passes and the last one policy KK visitors to district property and events I move that the Board

adopt policy KK visitors two district property and events as presented

okay moved and seconded all those in favor Any opposed? OK, that motion passes as well. Thank you. And moving on to 8.1, academic calendars. that we're voting on as well. Will you read that

motion? I move the Board of Education approve the academic calendars for the 2026-27 and 2027-28 school years.

Second.

Okay, this has been moved and seconded. And are there any questions or comments for Dr. Solberger on the calendars presented? Jason, do you have a question? Anyone else? Just so the board knows and everyone knows, I was on the calendar committee this year with... a diverse group of stakeholders, administrators, teachers, parents, support staff, and we met maybe four times to come up with the calendars. There are a lot of parameters that we are working between, so there are some compromises and concessions to be made when we are creating the calendars, most of which comes from the state. So anyway, it took four meetings to get here was my point. Five or six yeah.

We kept making calendars for the 25 26 27 school year and then we modeled the 27 28 off of that. And there I would say there is no significant changes to like our current calendars. No, it stayed pretty consistent. When we tried to get creative and make shifts, we ended up liking the way we currently have it.

I would just say to everybody, enjoy your Indian summer next summer because we do start later because of the state requirement of not starting 14 days before the first Monday and Labor Day falls very late this year in the calendar. So you will have almost the entire month of August off. For

the first time in a long time. Okay, so it's been moved and seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion passes. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, 8.2. Would you read the motion please for the comprehensive literacy plan? I

move that the Board of Education approve the district comprehensive literacy plan as presented.

Okay, this has been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments for Dr. Milena Garganigo on the literacy plan? Anyone? Did you have a question, Pam?

Okay, this has been moved and seconded. Any questions or comments for Dr. Garganego on the literacy plan? Anyone? Did you have a question, Pam?

Okay,

anyone else?

No? Okay. There is one thing I wanted to point out. I think you wrote this answer. I had asked, so this is the literacy part, and I had asked about the amount of writing that our students, writing and reading that our students are getting nowadays compared to the olden days. And as I will say, what I think Milena said to me is a part of the literacy curriculum review, they're continuing to look at the practices in all areas. And this past summer, they put an emphasis on increasing the volume of writing

for

all

grades. For

the middle school. We

did our middle

school rewrite. For middle school. Yeah. Great.

Which I thought was great. Thanks. I'll just say that it's incredible what you're doing. I mean, I was just blown away by it. And it's just a mile, a million miles away. So, and you know that, and I love you for it. So thank you.

It's a very impressive plan. So it's online if anyone would like to look at it the way we have. Okay, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No, thank you. Motion passes. We read the 8.3 Title I plan. I move that the Board of Education approve the District Title I plan as presented.

Second.

Okay, moved and seconded. Any questions on this one for Dr. Garganito? Okay, all those in favor? Aye. Aye, any opposed? No, that motion passes as well. And... One more the bond underwriter

engagement letter. I move that the board approve the engagement letter for underwriting service with Piper Sandler for issuing voter approved general obligation bonds.

Second.

OK this has been moved and seconded. Any questions for John Breazeale on this one.

John can you just comment a little on the selection of Piper Sandler. For their services here.

I'm sorry I'm sorry.

The selection of Piper sandler as the bond underwriter.

they have issued the existing debt. They've been the long-term underwriter and financial advisor for this district. I saw no reason to look elsewhere.

Yeah, big learning curve if we would have picked somebody else.

True.

I just wanted everybody to hear that.

And

we've been

happy with them, I assume. Sometimes, yeah.

Yes, they're a very good company. Done excellent work for us. I have a lot of confidence in them. Their staff's been with them a very long time. Know the markets well.

Thank you.

There's no fee for their pre-bond issue services, which are mostly financial advisory and getting things ready for the bond issuance itself.

Good. Believe me, they'll get their fees.

If voters approve this, they'll get there fee.

All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay, that passes as well. Thank you. Moving to the consent agenda.

I move that the board approve consent agenda items 9.2 through 9.6.

Second.

Okay.

Moved and seconded. Any brief comments on anything in consent? No. Okay, all those in favor? Any opposed? Okay, the consent agenda items pass, and we are onto board communications. Ben, did you have a technology committee meeting?

I did, yeah.

How was

that? Today, in fact. Yeah, it was the second one. Today, the group was split into AI and one-to-one device committees. I chose one-to-One. AI is just like, I can't get my head around it. No, it is actually both very compelling issues. I feel like for me, I think being on the one-to-one is kind of something I have a lot of experience with, and I'll be interested in the process, which is really, really cool. I feel like Luke and Milena and the team there are putting together a great kind of process and getting a lot of feedback. It's just kind of great to be in the midst of the teachers and hear them talk about things Their kiddos and what they use and like why and what could be better so So yeah, so it'll be interesting process. I think come Spring we should have a recommendation on device kind of direction

I just have a question. On the AI front, is there somebody that's in that group, either external or internal resource, that has a lot of expertise on large language models? How do we know that we're talking about the right things

there? I can't say, really. I mean, I think it's – so we have a bunch of our tech folks are engaged, so there's that. And I think, yeah, we have science teachers. We have teachers that are using AI today, or they have at least a strong – Feeling for it. I would say like in terms of

so it's more users than developers of the technology. It's

not no No, it's just it's all just teachers and staff. There's no I may be the only external person Okay, so yeah

All right, well I think at some point probably I work in a lot of AI with art with outside of the school board It's probably worth getting somebody who's developing AI are involved in the development of AI to ask for their input on Well how they think it might change the educational? Landscape for better or worse.

Yeah, I think the other thing to mention is that you know We are plugged into like ISTE and other kind of tech-oriented education organizations that have a lot of information and opinions on these things, too. But yeah, I agree with you. I mean, the more information, the better. So,

yeah. Can I follow up on that? So to follow up on that, last week I went to the AI symposium at MSBA, so I spent all of Wednesday talking, listening. to that exact thing, which is how can we harness this tool for good for our students and make sure that it's being used properly. And I went to as many of the presentations as I could. I wish more of us had been there because they were really great because they talk about exactly that issue, which is how is your school specifically figuring out how to integrate it and what policies are, you know, exist around it. And if we don't have a policy, we should sort of think like I heard amazing stuff. So I was hoping I was going to talk to Stacy, but I think this is something that I would, you know, as a board member, I think we would all like to sort of know where we're at on this topic. I wouldn't, I would love for it to end up being a, you know, presentation that we, that we get to hear what it is that the district has in mind for, you know, tackling this, this issue. In terms of making sure that our policy is in place that of course as a board we have to do that But there should be consequences in place. There are so many things but I want to say that overall in addition to just hearing about all these like sort of logistical Things it was a very exciting time like, frame of mind that day. And it wasn't this sense of, oh, people are going to use it to cheat. There was this sense of okay, people use things to cheat all the time. They always have, they always will. But this is actually a tool that we're going to be now able to use. And if we do it correctly, if we introduce it properly in our school buildings and if we have great policies and if we have educators that are educated on how to use these, not only do our educators become better by using it, but so do our students if we really implement it properly. So I was kind of the same way, like AI is like this big scary thing But I left that symposium feeling like as long as we have a grasp for how it fits into our strategic plan and we are very clear with our buildings and our administrators and our students and our teachers about what we expect to get from this tool, It could be an incredible thing. But I think as a board, I think we would love to hear where that plan lies and what's the status. Well,

technology is doing a self-study right now. Exactly. So I'm sure there will be a

presentation. So yeah, if that could be a specific part of that, that would be excellent. because I think our parents, right? They're all wondering the same thing. Like, wait, what's my, is my kid allowed to do this? It was fantastic. The resources that I got from that symposium are fantastic. And I can pass those along to you because they made, they had some great recommendations about how each, each teacher can say, here's, here's a sample rubric of here's what you can and can't use AI for on this exact assignment. I mean, it, There are students and teachers already thinking about this, that we can go and use these resources that they've already established that are out there. And the sooner we do that, the better. So it is helpful that we're in our tech study right now. This is perfect.

Pam? There was an equity question.

There was an equity committee meeting last Wednesday that I unfortunately was unable to attend because I was at a board community coffee. However, thank you Cameron for updating me. The focus of it was, This is kind of a take off of last one, which is we've been doing this for five years. What is the next five years going to look like? What do our stakeholders want? What do our students want? What does our faculty want? And to really focus on that part of the strategic plan of this being a place for everyone to grow in head and heart and looking at the sense of belonging.

Second. I don't know if Ben or Chris or both of you went to a safety and security meeting recently

and i also went to teaching and learning you guys are gonna hear way too much i was gonna

say

that next i'm gonna be real brief on these um safety and security committee meeting first one of the year um jim or net burnell was there and reviewed all the fire signage stuff that's been going on it's been a very large project it's almost complete um talked about the status of the vestibule at the greyhound entrance that's almost complete too of course we had some windows come in that didn't fit awesome um uh let's see mike reviewed the changes since we met last time in like the cameras the eop and the vap the updates that we have for our emergency operations plan and our building emergency action plan So he just gave an overview of all the amazing stuff that he's doing as well as speaking again about some TGICs. And he was just about to have another meeting with them about the issues that we're having and how can we continue to use this product as efficiently as possible. So yeah, great meeting. Many participants.

Good. Okay, and Chris went to teaching and learning for me. Yeah, I was teaching and

learning for Stacy, and that was an interesting meeting because it was a little different than normal because Melina did a lot of talking, and she doesn't usually. Usually it's much more interactive, but she apologized profusely because what she had to do, we went over the M-STEP, we went over our three goals of our strategic plan. We talked about... the accomplishments we have in each one of those goals, and then our next steps for each one of those goal. And then the second half of the meeting was us making sure we are in compliance with Title I, and we talked about the needs assessment, et cetera, et cetera, in order to have parents involved in our Title I discussion, which is required by M-6.

Thank you. Okay. And the only other two things I wanted to mention quickly, which Dr. Patel mentioned earlier, just so everyone knows, I want to thank all of my fellow board members who went to the Missouri School Boards Association annual conference in Kansas City. Looking forward to hearing about not just our wellness center presentation, but the other breakout sessions that everyone attended. And wanted to thank board members and the community who showed up to our board coffees and conversations. We had two of them in the last couple weeks, which were great. And we felt good about making ourselves available to the community, and it was really nice. And lastly, on behalf of the board, just want to wish Felicia Smith best of luck in the future. This is her last meeting with us, and we will miss seeing you around. So best of luck in a future. And with that, Chris, will you read the motion to adjourn? CHRISTIE WOODARD- I move that the board adjourn. Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Board meeting's adjourned. Thank you.