August 18, 2021 — Meeting Transcript

So congratulations to all of them. And I'm looking out in the audience. Milena, since you're here, congratulations as well. And then Dan. Dan's here as well. So congrats to you as well. Anybody else that's here that I missed? Okay. Well, congratulations to everybody there.

That's great. On behalf of the Board of Education, we are... We congratulate everybody and more important. Lee we are. We appreciate your years of service and the teachers in central office and everybody on the facilities team. You guys are what makes this place what it is. Which is the best school district and we thank you for all of your hard work and your years of service. So, uh. Dr. Patel, do you want to go ahead and move on to superintendent communications? We'll do.

Thank you. So I'm going to start off by first and foremost thanking everybody, including all of the board members, including my CO team, and then all the administrators, all the teachers, parents, and students. for the support and guidance you've given me so far as I settle into this role. So officially, thank you from the bottom of my heart. You have no idea how much it means to me. And I get to work with amazing individuals every single day, and you make me stronger every single day. So thank you for all of your work for that. And as we're getting ready, our kids are going to be here Monday. and we've had a lot of busy busy few weeks especially last week and this week we had an outstanding week last week where we had our new teacher induction and we had all of our new educators come in and a lot of professional learning with them we've had our district leadership council retreat that we do every year to set the vision for the upcoming school year we've done a lot of professional this week with our teachers You know, especially today we started our content PD and then building PD will be spread out throughout the week. We've had opening day, which is another tradition here. Unfortunately, we didn't do it in person. We did it virtually. But for opening day, you know, we had George Kouros, the author, come in and he did it via Zoom. But it was a great professional workshop. learning opportunity again to like show how we want to make sure our kids are empowered and through their learning by various forms so and his work really connected with goal two of our strategic plan so it was exciting to see that so a lot of busy um work but making sure that we're getting ready for our kids and so we're so excited for monday to come and get and i know that just talking to the students that i have been speaking to they're ready to be back in person And so with that, I also want to thank everyone for the support that you have provided us in making sure that we are a safe environment in getting our kids back with all the mitigating factors, including making sure that we're wearing masks. Masks is a very strong mitigating factor because it also will allow us to not have to quarantine if both the parties have their masks on properly. That means the kids can stay in school, and that means we can start to carry on some of the normal activities that we have. So that is something I do want to thank the entire community for their support on that. And then also, one of the fun things I get to do is like I'll look outside my office window or I'm walking around in the different buildings, and you get to see students who are out in the fields practicing. So, you know, fall season is here and practice has started. So it's neat to see all the cross-country kiddos literally at 630 in the morning right out here in Shaw Park enjoying in the heat running around. And then the other day I think I looked out and I'm like, what are they doing? And it was yoga. They were doing a little bit of yoga right there. So it's been great to see all of our students getting into the swing of things. I think they're excited to be back in school in person. So that's we're looking forward to it and we're looking forward To a very strong smooth start next week And we'll be doing a lot of building walkthroughs as well So excited for that Thank you

You should join their yoga practice

I will definitely be talking to them I don't know if I'll be joining them Amy

Okay Itana do you want to Can you give us an update on what's going on in your world

Yeah, just working. Yeah, okay. So hi everyone. My name is Zaitano. This is Linhard and I'm going to be this year's student representative to the Board of Education. I'm really excited to work with you all and to help represent the students in the district as we slowly start to move towards a sense of normalcy after over a year of a global pandemic. I am extremely grateful for this wonderful opportunity and will strive to do as well as Caitlin and Adam before me. I would like to thank everyone who has supported me, and also mention the classmates I'll be working alongside. Zoe Hall, the Student Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Anisha Durang, who will help the District Advisory Council connect with the middle and elementary schools, and the District Advisory Council itself, which will help to represent the students in the district across multiple grades. Although the pandemic is ongoing and continues to take a toll on everyone's lives, slowly some things are starting to feel a little more normal. And while a return to this normalcy is exciting and refreshing, I know that many students may feel overwhelmed at this return. After some students have been learning remotely for over a year, I can't even imagine how stressful it would feel to go back to school in less than a week. And it's not just school, but many other aspects such as current events, family situations, and more that deeply affect students' mental health this year. That is why I think as kids come back into the buildings and back to a sense of normalcy, it's crucial to value social and emotional well-being as well as mental health in the district. We should continue to foster a sense of belonging and comfort. No matter what race, gender, or sexuality a student is, they should wake up in the mornings excited to go to school without the fear of being treated differently for who they are. The construction of gender-neutral bathrooms at the high school is a big step in the right direction, but we still have much more work to do together to achieve greater equity across all schools in the district. As student representative, I will focus on facilitating increased communication to not only the high school but the elementary school and middle schools so that the District Advisory Council and the Board of Education can better identify and solve problems at their root. With a greater sense of communication across all schools and between all students comes a greater sense of belonging. I hope that we can come together to create an environment where students feel heard and understood in the coming year and every year after that. Once again, I am excited to work with you all over the next year and am looking forward to seeing the great changes we will make together. Thank you.

Thank you. Itana, that was great. Thank you. You did a great job. We are, for those of us that are following along, we're on Section 5, which is the information item, and we are going to get an update on our safety, security, and cybersecurity. We can get Chris and Jeff, please, to head on up.

All right. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for this opportunity to talk a little bit about safety and cybersecurity and all the work that we've been doing here lately in the district to focus on this. So when we think about safety, and that's actually the part of this, we've kind of broken this up into two parts. We're talking about the safety piece first. Jeff was going to talk about the cybersecurity kind of same topic, but not a whole lot of overlap between the two. So when we think about safety here in the district and when we talk about it tonight, there's kind of really three things that we think about that's driving this conversation, which is kind of the firm belief that next to learning, keeping our students and staff safe while we're at school is one of the most important things we are charged with. So that's kind of an ongoing commitment that the district has. Two years ago during Proposition E, tax levy that we passed back in April of 2019. We made a commitment to the community that if they supported that, that we would follow through with an intensive study of what safety looks like in our schools and then take the steps necessary to make some changes and make some improvements, which is what we're doing. And then we also have to think about when we talk about safety, especially in a public meeting, that we do have to keep it at a very high level conversation and limit some of the details and things that we talk about because we don't want necessarily all of our safety plans or security measures live streamed on YouTube for everyone to really see and listen to. So what drives a lot of the conversation that we've been having about safety lately in the district is the safety study that we completed. We actually finished it up right before we all scattered for COVID back in winter, spring of 2020. And it was an opportunity to really look at. any gaps or opportunities for improvement that we had in planning, training, and physical security of our buildings. And to really look at all of our district facilities, so not just our schools but our administrative center, our facility services buildings, as well as all of our outdoor fields and complexes. So when we went through the safety study, like I said, we really went through all of our campuses and locations. And we looked at a number of different things, kind of four main things really that drove the questions that the group that was evaluating this were asking. And that group that was evaluating, this was an architectural firm called Bond Architects, who is actually well known for their safety and security work within the K-12 public school environment. And a group called Tier 1 Tactical Solutions, which are the kind of, I wouldn't say inventors, but they are the proponents of the model that we use for active shooter training, the four E's, escape, evade, engage, and educate. I always forget about the educate part. Thank you. So, and they do a lot of consulting and work with bond architects on safety studies. So, we looked at all of our facilities. and looked at entry control and visitor management. We looked at kind of what are, what are opportunities again for improvement that we have in those buildings? Um, what are the, what are the training procedures that we're using with our students and our staff as part of our ongoing safety program? And how can we improve those, um, across the district? And then, you know, what are the plans that we have in place in case we do have something really bad happened? and we need to get students out of the building and safely to rally points and reunification points. So that kind of really is what drove the safety study. The things that we've seen come to fruition as a result of the different opportunities that we have. In that safety study, we made some changes to our active shooter and intruder training that we do with our staff. Actually, we had that on Monday of this week. We moved that up into opening week to provide that training and a refresher for our staff at the beginning of the school year as opposed to previously we would just kind of try to find a point in the school year where we could could slide that in. Last spring, Tier 1 went through, analyzed all of the places that we had identified at our schools as rally points. And what a rally point is, is that when a school When students and staff need to escape from a school, rally points are pre-identified points around that school. There's usually two or three where they go to that they'll know there be safe. Those locations are shared with our partners at Clayton Police and at St. Louis County. so that if there were an active shooter or intruder situation or something like that, they would know that these three points around Merrimack School for example are where students are going to be gathering and we're going to get them picked up, brought to a reunification site or brought for medical treatment or anything like that that they may need. This week, we actually started the final pieces of implementing our visitor management system. So that kind of ties into some of the construction that we've done in our buildings, which I'll show you pictures of later. But there is, so that'll be a new thing for our students and parent, well actually not for our students, I'm sorry, but for our families, for visitors in our building. And in line with what you've seen a lot of other school districts in the area do in terms of being able to manage and screen the visitors that are coming into your building. And then we've got a pretty lengthy list of physical improvements that we're doing to our schools. Phase one kind of started and is wrapping up this week into the next couple weeks. And then phase two, we have work scheduled in the rest of the buildings as well as here at the administrative center for the summer of 2022. When we looked at some of the physical improvements and different things that you'll see, At our schools once this is all said and done. So once this is all set and done is still about 12 months out from now, but Creating opportunities for what they call a single point of entry and control into all of our buildings We have some schools that had multiple entrances even though they were locked in and monitored we've kind of brought that down to to one single entrance that has a transaction window and actually a vestibule of for a visitor to come into, identify themselves, explain why they're there before they actually gain access to the rest of the school. Again, really kind of getting in line with what best practices are for visitor management in different schools. This will also look at just places where we can improve security cameras and monitoring, looking at places where we can As Tana mentioned earlier, we also looked at, took this as an opportunity to create some gender neutral restrooms in each of our schools as part of kind of the social emotional safety component of this work. So this just shows very quickly how we've kind of broken the work up in into two main phases. The work this summer was focused at Captain Glenridge wide down in the high school. Next summer will be at Merrimack, the administrative center and family center and facilities. And that's mainly for kind of the ways that we're changing, physically changing the building entries as well as putting in gender neutral restrooms. And then next summer is when we will do all of the work with security cameras, monitoring, changing outdoors, working with some different systems to automatically close off sections of our building if we needed to make sure that students needed to be put in a safe condition in a very short order, a very short amount of time. So just four quick slides that shows pictures. I don't know if you've been into our schools and seen what you're looking at. This is the new visitor station at Clayton High School. Now it is not complete because if this was complete, you would actually be looking through a wall right now that would start right about this column and come across the lobby. that would actually separate and create a little vestibule there for people to come into the building, check in or drop off a lunch, have a child called up front to take to a doctor's appointment, that sort of thing. Then on the right is a picture of the still under construction, the gender neutral restrooms that we're putting. Those are the ones actually on the ground floor over by the art wing. And then at high school, because of its size, there's a second location on... Um, I don't know if it's, it's, I guess it's the first floor cause it's up a half flight of steps, but over by the music, over by the music wing, um, over back kind of tucked in behind the administrative offices there. You see a similar thing at Y-Down, the front office there, if you can kind of look back behind that door that has been reconfigured and that desk is up against that transaction window. And then the vestibule that's already there in the entry to Y-Down kind of becomes that staging area for visitors to come in and check in or for parents to come into the building and pick up students, drop off lunches, that sort of thing, and do that in a way where we can still provide that level of service and access, but also not necessarily let them into the building if they're just there to drop something off or have some sort of transactional business. Yes, Steve?

So how do you address the fact that buildings are used for voting?

No, and I mean, when we had buildings set up to be used at polling places, we usually had alternate entrances for them that were, as best we could, locked off from the rest of the school. So we would continue to do that if we want to continue allowing our schools to be used as polling places. This is the front office at Glenridge coming in. And I think this is, Glen Ridge is probably where we'll see the biggest kind of procedural change in terms of, you know, there will really only be one official entrance to the school, which some would consider now kind of the back of the school. But, you know, the A phone and the buzzer to come in on the front side of Glen Ridge will no longer be active, and parents or visitors will need to come around through the back part of the school. And we're working with um, Beth and her staff there on making sure that, that she communicates that out, um, to her parents as well. Um, but again, you know, that's in the white down photo showed, you know, doors that were still missing just because of, of, of COVID and some of the delays in construction and manufacturing. Um, and Mary Jo can talk a little bit about that if, if, if she needs to, but we are seeing some of these projects that will be finished up, you know, probably a week or two after school starts, um, just because of, uh, the materials delay. And then on the right is a shot of the gender-neutral restroom up at Glen Ridge, and that is up in the fourth grade area right now is where they decided to place that. And Captain's the last one. If you walk into Captain, you'll actually see the... see that this little visitor station has actually been built out into the front lobby that will actually separate off one side of the lobby or one side of that vestibule from the other. Again, what's missing here is a glass partition that will create this little entry area over here. They haven't had a chance to put the doors back on yet that used to be there. And again, creating that single point of entry and control for parents and visitors and people coming to our building And then on the right is, as of today, where we are with construction on the gender-neutral restroom up at Captain. That is up by the fifth grade area, if you're familiar with that. I was talking to Mary Jo a little bit about this before the meeting, and she said they have plans to work all weekend and have a lot of the materials in place. So they do think that they'll have these restrooms online and working when students return on Monday. We talked a little bit about the visitor management system, so that is a new procedure that we'll have in place at all of our schools. We finish up the last bit of training with all of our different school front office staff tomorrow. So we will ask all visitors, volunteers, and vendors, parents, guardians, OASIS volunteers to check in with this system. It does perform a sex offender check on the name and date of birth that's on the ID that's given to them when someone checks in with the system. The system also has the opportunity, which is actually probably the biggest benefit that we will see from it, of putting together lists of just individuals all the other issues that front offices at schools have to manage. So if you have a non-custodial parent, who's not supposed to be there with, um, what to pick up a student or, or something similar to that, um, we can create, you know, we, we can put that information into this system, create a notification that automatically happens that lets the principal, the counselor, um, that school school resource officer know that, that somebody who, you know, it shouldn't be there or is not supposed to be at that time. uh, is actually there. So then we have a team of educators that can come in and help diffuse the situation. Uh, it's also something that integrates with our district issue ID badges. So it, it also, in addition to being a visitor management system replaces the paper sign in sheets that we have at a lot of our schools that we use to keep track of who's actually in the different buildings. Uh, district staff can just use the barcode that's on their ID to, to scan in and check in when they go to the buildings. And then in terms of kind of what our ongoing safety program contains, I mean, these are a number of different things that we look at. Probably the most significant and important on that list, which is why I'll kind of give it a slide of its own, is our school resource officers and the partnership that we have with the Clayton Police Department. We're fortunate enough to have Captain Mark Smith here with us tonight as well as Jack Boger and Herman Whitaker, our two school resource officers that are there. And in talking with our SROs, talking with all of our principals about The work that they do, I mean, yes, they obviously play a large safety and security role in our schools. But I think the expression that I use is that there's so much more than just that in there. our mentors, their counselors, teachers, positive role models to some of our students. I mean, they spend the bulk of their day not dealing with discipline issues or anything related to that, but building relationships and connections with students and making a meaningful impact on their lives. They get regular professional development through the NASRO, which is the National Association of School Resource Officers. So they go to state and take turns going to state and national conferences every summer in addition to completing a course with them when they're actually assigned to first become one of our school resource officers. And then in terms of the rest of the things that we have in our ongoing safety program, of course, we have all of the required drills that the state and DESE and our fire officials here in Clayton ask us to do on regular intervals. We talked a little bit already about the the kind of extended version of the active shooter and intruder training that we do with our staff. We also do school-based intruder drills with our students once every semester, not to the level of intensity that we do with staff that we just did on Monday, but do go through the idea of escaping, evading, or engaging and talking to students about about rally points and where they would go if they did need to leave their building in a hurry. So that's really kind of the bulk of what we see as our ongoing safety program, and that also covers all the various improvements that we're doing. So I don't know if we want to do questions about this now or we want to do Jeff's piece and questions.

We can go ahead and do Jeff's piece, and then do questions overall, if that works. Yeah. Okay.

Hi, everyone. It's good to see you in person. Mr. Singer, nice to say hello to you. Welcome. Good evening, everyone. Before I get started, I want to introduce a couple of really important people that are here tonight. So Adam Jones. Some of you know Adam. He is our technical operations manager. And I wanted to really highlight him because he is an amazing individual who is so crucial to what we're about to talk about. So I wanted him to be here. And also sitting next to him is Chris DeWill, who is our data systems manager. So as you can also imagine, is very connected to the work here tonight. And so I wanted them to be here as well because it's such an important topic and they're so critical to the work that we do. So thank you guys for being here. So as we think about cybersecurity, I think each of us has a notion of how important that is to us as an individual person where we're thinking about things like our bank accounts or thinking about our digital footprint, thinking about our computers at home. All of those are really important considerations for us as individuals. When we start to scope that out and scale it out to a large organization, It becomes critical because it's not just your own information that you're worried about. It's everyone's information that you're worrying about. So I put a, just to sort of ground us in what we're talking about tonight with this, I put a definition up here that is pretty widely accepted definition. And it really talks about how you're going to protect your stuff, your data. from the people who shouldn't have it and make sure it's accessible to the people who do need to have it. What it's not really saying, though, is that really it's not about the information as much as it is about protecting people. And I think that's really what I want to stress tonight is I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the things that we do. from sort of a system standpoint, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it. I'm going to give you some highlights of that because really what this is about is kind of protecting people. So all the things that I'll be mentioning tonight are about that. We use a variety of resources when we're thinking about protecting our people and our data, all the way from national agencies, some of these you may have heard of, even the Department of Homeland Security. We're connected in with lots of national resources to help us stay ahead of potential vulnerabilities, potential threats that might be coming our way. So some national resources help us with that. We recently joined an organization that's called – well, they love their acronyms, by the way. MS-ISAC, we thought we were good at acronyms in education, but I think they might beat us. MS-ISAC is an organization that the School District of Clayton belongs to that basically is an information sharing agency that's connected to the Center for Internet Security and then funded also by the Department of Homeland Security. So the idea there is it's not about just getting information about possible threats. It's also about sharing information about possible threats with others. And so I'm excited about that partnership because that's fairly new. But what's happening in the world is a constant progression. It's a constant move to try to keep up with some of the threats that are out there. You're never done with cybersecurity. You're just strengthening your cybersecurity stance as time goes on. So we have these national ones that we look at. We also look closer to home. We use a variety of resources just in the area to help us kind of keep up with with what we need to know and that includes things like a missouri consortium that we're part of for student data privacy we're actually on the leadership board for that group and it's a startup that happened just a couple years ago right before covid and we've continued to strengthen that organization and there's there's a number of school districts now in the state that are participating in that work about protecting student data We take advantage of lots and lots of different resources, including some sort of penetration testing and auditing of our cybersecurity so that we can get a third party perspective on this. And so I mention all this because all of it sort of plays a part in informing us and helping us not only sort of prepare but also respond in the event of something happening. So I talked about protecting people and really that's what this is about. Some of the things that we do to help our people are listed up here, but I'm not gonna go through all of them. But this idea of thinking about we're all just people trying to do our jobs, we're all just students trying to learn, we're all families trying to connect. And so we can sometimes fall victim to all kinds of bad guys trying to get our information. So to try to help the end user, our stakeholders, our students, our staff, to protect them, we have a lot of things in place. So whether it's spam and content filtering, whether it's the approach that we take to allowing certain applications to be run on a computer Those kinds of things are really important, and one of the most critical is really the training for the person to try to remind them of some of the dangers that exist out there. So whether that's our staff with annual staff trainings, whether that's our students that we work with digital citizenship lessons, those constant reminders are really important. And they're really important for all of us, whether we're at work or we're at home, and we're going to protect our credit card information, etc., So we really kind of take that approach about protecting the end user. On a more technical note, we also do what they call system hardening as much as we can. So this is the idea of sort of applying best practices for our data systems. So whether that's like offsite backups and patch management whenever there's a vulnerability that's detected. And you guys, you watch the news and there'll be like Microsoft vulnerability, Apple this, breach, those kinds of things. All of those things inform the rest of the population in the world what to watch out for, and a big piece of that is making sure that you are staying up-to-date on these applications and these operating systems. We have vendor controls in place. We encrypt our connections from point A to point B. We have a lot of physical controls to keep people out of a data center, for example. And the list sort of goes on. But again, the point here is more about if I had given you a list five years ago, it wouldn't be this extensive. And in a few years, if we have this conversation again, some of the things on here will be replaced with something new, but it's an ongoing process. And I think that's what I really wanted to bring tonight was that sort of recognition that we're never 100% protected against anything, but this idea that we understand our mission about keeping students safe and our staff safe. And so the things that we're doing are going to continue to do and continue to evolve are really pointed in that direction and doing the best that we can to make sure that we're watching out for those vulnerabilities. We know the bad guys are out there. We know that we have something that they want, and so we're taking the measures to try to prevent that as much as we can and make those steps. And so, again, I asked Adam and Chris tonight because none of this would be possible without the work that they do. And if I was to be honest, people listened in our conversations. They may be a little bit like bored to tears because we're talking about safety, security, maybe not bored. They're just like, okay, we get it. Privacy is important. But that is the reality. Those are the conversations that we have on a daily basis. that we're constantly thinking about that and putting it at the top of the list. So with that, I would kind of, that was the end of my piece, and we're happy to answer some questions.

So Jeff, you're basically saying that I need to make sure I change my password? You do, Nisha. We'll talk about that later. Okay, thank

you,

Jeff. Thanks, guys. That was great. So I have a few questions. What, is Quick Tip the anonymous reporting system that our students use? Or which is, what's Quick Tip?

Yeah, Quick Tip is, I mean, it's available to more than just students. But that is kind of our anonymous tip line. You know, we've had students use it. I mean, we've had community members use it when they've seen things going on at our school playgrounds, that sort of thing. So it is out there and available.

And do you think everyone knows, does everyone know about it? Like how do we publicize that that exists?

So we, um, throughout the school year last year, um, ran, you know, regular pieces of information on social media to push that out. Um, had posters up at our secondary schools about that and we plan to kind of renew that push this year.

Okay, good. Thanks. And, um, I wanted to thank you for giving such detail on our SROs. And this might be a question for later when we're talking about the contract, but are officers Boger and Whitaker staying? Are they going to be our SROs again this year? Okay. I think that's great. And the reason I ask is I'm so glad you brought up that like such a big part of their role is building relationships with our students because I think you know, especially for our students of color and our black students who maybe have a mistrust of the police. I think these guys developing relationships with all, I mean, all of our students to create a trusting relationship is so important. So I was happy to hear that. And I'm glad also that you said there's a lot of courses and conferences they attend for training. But one question I did have as far as our role in it is do we share with the officers Our discipline data that we know is historically skewed, that our African-American students typically have higher discipline rates that we've talked about in our equity work. And I'm just wondering, do we share that data with our SROs so we can work together to alleviate that?

That's a question that I would probably- I might

not be articulating that well. Did that make

sense? I think what you're asking is, do we work with them or do they understand where our discipline data is and how we're working to correct the inequities related to that? Right. That's probably a question that would be better answered by somebody else besides me, so I don't know. I would kind of look at Robin. Or Dan, maybe. Or Dan, just to see what that role is.

Well, I think it's important to clarify that suspensions are given out by building principals, not SROs, but there are times where a disciplinary incident does involve us having to report to law enforcement and we may rely on our SROs to help us gather information or help us connect to resources that they need but they do not actually play a role in like the actual administration of consequences with disciplinary incidents right do they have a general understanding of some of the disciplinary things that our building administrators are working on yes because we do at times need to rely on them but they do not play a role in the administration of

Yeah,

that's exactly what I was looking for. So that's great. Thank you. I just want to make sure they're a part of that community and those discussions and understanding the inequities that exist with students that are either disciplined by administration or require the SRO's intervention. So thank you. That's all. Thanks.

And Stacy, thanks for bringing that up because as we talked about earlier, looking at discipline data is part of one of our action steps in terms of analyzing that, right? So having the SROs be a part of that conversation once we do have the data in front of us and we're analyzing it would be a great lens to have as well. So appreciate that.

Great. Joe?

So thank you, guys. This is great. I appreciate in particular that we used the opportunity to look at SEL, physical safety, and you looked at the, you know, we're doing something with gender-neutral bathrooms. That's awesome. Maybe not necessarily your guy's role, but I encourage us to look at other mental health supports, right? I mean, when we think about, right, this is the physical piece, but You know, there's also the mental health support piece too. So this is a general comment, but just two questions. One is, so I think the visitor management system is great, but my question is right in the age of COVID, uh and my nemesis delta um is there anything that uh we're doing differently with the visitor management system around covid or are is it just kind of as is in other words are we restricting in a different way folks coming into buildings because of covid or is it you know per this protocol folks can come in as long as they meet this protocol

yeah i think i mean do you want to talk a little bit about our visitor protocol or The visitor management system with COVID or do you want me to?

Oh no. So what we've decided as far as COVID and a number of visitors coming into the building right now for first quarter, we're allowing it. Obviously the expectation is that if they are in the building, they're following all of our mitigating factors, which means wearing masks at all times when you're with somebody else and making sure that if there is a meeting that's being held, that's community meeting, you know, we're trying to social distance as much as possible, but We're trying to get back to as much as normalcy as we can while still keeping all the safety places and safety factors in check.

Okay. And then my next question is, you didn't speak to it, but in the presentation there's something about the consideration of vape detectors, and obviously vaping is a big deal, right? I mean, kids are doing a lot of vaping, maybe even in our bathrooms in our schools because we can't video there. So talk a little more about what your, well, it's true. And talk a little bit more what you're thinking about vape detectors and that piece of it.

So that is something that we like to take a look at during phase two. We've done enough research into it to know that it is a pretty heavy lift from a standpoint of budget, a budgetary impact. I mean, the vape detectors, I believe, are anywhere from about $1,200 to $1,500 per detector. You would need two to three detectors per in a restroom because they're based on square footage. So just in looking at what that budget lift would be to do that. I have had conversations with Kim Schironi, who is the director of the All-In Clayton Coalition, and she has been exploring some opportunities that are out there to possibly find grant funding to come in and help support something like that. But those are, you know, that is what's, there would be a low voltage installation in terms of like the power And all of that work is intentionally bundled in Phase 2, so it's in what we would be looking at doing next summer. We're just going to need to figure out. It doesn't really make sense to do them just in some of the restrooms at the high school if you can't do them in all the restrooms. So I think it's looking at what that would be and then, you know, what the cost-benefit analysis is. Thank you. Just a

question. On the question that Joe asked about coming into schools and COVID protocols, what if someone comes into school and doesn't want to wear a mask? Have we gone through a process on how we're going to deal with that?

That's a great question. I wouldn't say we have actually mapped out exactly what we would do. The conversation would be just like anybody who would walk into, let's say, into even this boardroom and refuse to wear the mask. You know, we would start off with trying to have a conversation with that person, trying to help them understand this is our protocol. This is what our expectations are. And they say absolutely not. Then at that point, we would ask them to leave. you know, but we would hope through our conversation we can get to a place where they would be willing to do that. Yeah.

Thank you both and the other guests for being here with us and talking about this. I do think it's really important especially tying back to what we told the community that we were going to do in Prop E and these updates are really great so I appreciate that. I too had a question about First question about the visitor management system, and I think I understand that. And it's a great improvement, and it's a bigger change in some schools than others. I just want to clarify, Chris, a little bit that this is a program that we can, if I understand it correctly, we can implement during school, during the school day. It's not necessarily something that when our schools are used for other events. Correct.

The intent and the way you see most public schools using it is that that program operates during school hours. So any time that you would actually, if you think about our schools and the way the new visitor stations are set up or even the schools where you have a person who is responsible for greeting guests, any time that that person is there during kind of what we'd say normal school or normal business hours.

Yeah, I just think it's important that everyone understand in a community and we have a lot of events in our schools at other times. And I just think that's important for people to grasp that distinction. So when we have board meetings in schools as we do sometimes or PTO meetings or other events, it's a different type of regime. Correct. Or when

we would have band concerts or something like that at the high school, we would not have that system in place after hours. Alternate ways to explore how we would use that system for an event that would attract a large group of parents like during the school day For example, so we've been having those ongoing conversations with Mainly our elementary principals is where you would see, you know, those are the schools where you'd have big parent-type events during the school day. You don't have a lot of, they're far less frequent at the middle school or the high school.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And then, I mean, Jeff, I just wondered if you could maybe, we've talked about this a little bit too in terms of how cybersecurity and information security is an evolving and growing part of your what you handle and how you manage. Can you give us some sense of how much of the department or yours personally, like your attention and time needs to be kind of focused on that? I know it might be hard to kind of tease those things out, but I just want to make sure that we're We're watching that demand and that need as it grows and making sure we're allocating resources and time and energy appropriately.

Yeah, that's a good question. There's no way I can give you a percentage, but, you know, to sort of answer your question, though, a few years ago the board adopted the policy, I think it's EHBC, which designates an information security officer as a person. So that was a big deal because what that did is kind of – really put a pin into a say, we have a person, we've named who that person is, whose job it is to really be thinking. And I was already doing it, but like this idea to say, now we're putting something behind it. We're saying this is happening. It wasn't just symbolic, though, because what it did was it really – it was across Missouri. It really sort of – that sounds bad, but people are like, wow, this is a thing we really need to pay closer attention to. And so as a – across the state, people that are in positions like mine started to really maybe take a slightly different stance. the system hardening part of things has already been going on for a long, long time. And I can't speak for everywhere but here for sure. I'm not spending much time more than I would have before. But if we talk about Data privacy, specifically for students who are minors who are protected by different laws than adults are. And how the number of engagements that we have with third parties, so app developers, right? The free app. Well, did you read the privacy policy? And if you did, maybe a flag will go off. So as consumers, we often just click through those because I want to use this app. But we don't do that here. And I think what that policy did is it gave us an opportunity to say, okay, here's why we're asking these hard questions about privacy. Here's why we want to see that privacy policy. Here's why. We might have to say no. And we do sometimes say no. If we have to say no, sometimes we can actually convince the vendor to modify their privacy policy so that it satisfies our standard. So in that regard, it does take a lot more focus and energy from that because when you think about technology moving as fast as it does, The number of apps that are out there, the number of things that are innovative that we might want to try continues to ratchet up. And so finding systems to try to manage kind of the workflow there have been really important for us, and we've done that. But to be honest, yeah, there is way more focus now than there was a few years ago and before that, way more than before that. So I think we're just seeing that natural progression. So I think that's a fair question. I don't know how to put a – but I can tell you how it has been evolving over the last – You know, especially the last three years, especially in the student data privacy side, we've seen some really good improvements in vendors and in state consortium to try to help manage it and take some of that burden off individual people and spread that around a little bit so we can kind of use each other's work for the benefit of our students.

I appreciate at least trying to give some insight into that, and I feel confident that you will keep our attention on it and let us know what we need to be doing in terms of... Change your passwords. Like Misha's done. Right. Thanks to you both.

So I have a couple of questions and then a slight editorial question So I've been wondering what it was going to be like to be sitting here again. It's been a very long time. And I have to tell you, I was stunned by the quiet, and this is not a critique of Chris, when you talked about the active shooting training. And it saddens me tremendously that somehow that has become a normal that we have accepted. And it's not normal, and we should never accept this. Not in any way implying that we shouldn't do this, but it is breathtakingly unnormal that a school district is spending lots of resources and time on that. So that's the editorial part. And it's kind of a time warp to me to think that I wasn't on the board that long ago that we didn't talk about that. And here it's like, you know, it's like teaching math. You know, it's just sort of part of the game. And that should not be normal. So my questions really are about cybersecurity. You talked about that you do an audit and penetration testing. So as reference points, this is related to what I do work-wise. Do we have a third party company doing a cybersecurity audit?

Yes. Yes, so we – go ahead.

And I guess is there a document that then is presented to the board as part of that? No,

nothing was presented to the board. We've done this – we're due for another one, so that could be something we think about for this next round. But we have engaged – we've engaged – an external company that we paid to do this sort of vulnerability testing, okay? So this is like looking at our servers and looking at the details about our network and actually like poking to see what ports are open and those kinds of things. It's very, very technical, you know, like you would understand. Then from the results of that, then we can make modifications and adjustments and take advantage of the fact that we have that data. The second way we do this is with a relationship with MoreNet. As a member of MoreNet, we get access to their cybersecurity experts. And so that sort of audit is really an interview process for us for them to ask us hard questions about security controls and provide them with information about how we do things and how things are configured. so that then we can get essentially sort of rated on a scale for each of the controls and then offering suggestions. So we are due for doing that again this winter, and so that's our plan is to go through those processes again.

So we're really looking – but we don't have anybody – just so I understand, you're not doing anything in industry like a SOC 2 or something like that where you're – looking at our policies and procedures and seeing how they measure against an industry standard or a governmental standard or something like that.

I mean, that's essentially what's happening when we're putting them up against the CIS controls, which are the Center for Internet Security controls. That's what we do whenever we have that. So that's the industry standard, and we're measuring our sort of stance against those controls.

And there is a document that's produced? Mm-hmm. Okay.

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, it seems to me that the board's, our job is obviously procedures and process rather than the details. I guess I would be interested in understanding you know, more about that process, how we mitigate to make sure that, you know, I assume that they are constantly finding things. And then, you know, how do we mitigate all of that? And, you know, is all of that being mitigated? I don't want to know the details of what, I want to understand the process better, basically. Similar to on the financial side, I want to make sure that we have controls in place to make sure that this is an area I think that the board should be involved in making sure of that process. And then on the penetration testing you. So do we have a third party, I mean there are a number of accounting firms offer that service where they effectively try to break into your systems and then therefore identify weaknesses.

Yeah, that is a layer that we have not done with the full penetration testing where you have essentially somebody posing as a bad guy, poking at everything. What we've done is on internally, we have intentionally let this company poke from the inside. And so it's a little bit different approach, but it's not... It's not a bad approach. It's a good approach. It's just a little bit different, but that was a couple years ago that we've completed that. We're coming back to it again, and so that's definitely on the list of things that we're considering.

Okay.

Going down the row here. Okay. So it's funny, mine's a follow-up kind of to Steve's question. I had penetration testing and auditing, and have we done it? And it sounds like we did some form of it a couple years ago, and it's up for renewal again. So it's kind of a similar question to Steve. Usually there's like a red flag report that comes out of that, and were there any red flags that came out of that that then were addressed two years ago or between now and two years ago now that it's up again?

Yeah, I wouldn't say we had any red flags. We had things that were suggestions for us to change, and we've done those things. Okay. At least... And more. So this idea of like, you know, that was two years ago, so it's constantly evolving. And so this idea of what happens on a... It's not like something we just put on the shelf for two years and then come back to it. This is something that has constantly... on our conversations and our adjustments. Our environment changes. So every environment change kicks off another review of that. Well, your environment

changed a ton in this past 15 months of COVID too, right? So when you talk about the number of apps that are being used and the privacy policy around apps and penetration, it's also penetration through things like Zoom, which we've all experienced in some way, shape, or form either here at the board or our kids have experienced. So this next round of penetration testing and auditing, you probably incorporate some of that because I think we're retaining some of that stuff, right? Which wouldn't have been on the radar two years ago. And I know in your world, I'm looking at your whole team here, you know, the pace of change with which that stuff changes is almost impossible to keep up with whether you're an army of three or an army of 300. And then I heard you use the actual term server. So I'm assuming we have physical servers and we're not in the cloud. Right?

We're a combination.

We're a combination?

Mm-hmm.

Okay, and then with the physical servers are we, do we have backup servers that we're downloading to offsite or? We do. Okay. We

do.

So, and we feel pretty good about that in terms of?

I feel good about that. Excellent.

the SRO officers and Jeff's team for being here tonight. I know you guys all have family at home and pets that you probably really appreciate, but we appreciate you being here tonight. At some point this year, I'd love to get an update from SRO officers. I'd like to hear what their thoughts are on how our kids are doing with drugs and alcohol. And along those lines, I just wanted to mention, I don't know if we've had any conversation. I know homecoming is coming up and how we're gonna manage that night. I know that's a experiment with protections in place and

I am sure Dan and his team have been thinking about it in quite a different ways, especially having homecoming in the middle of a pandemic and how we're going to address it. Dan, I didn't know if you wanted to share.

We're still in the planning stage. We think we can do most of the outdoor things that we normally do, like the parade and the bonfire and the spirit games, that sort of thing. We're still kind of holding a holding pattern on the dance, just kind of... And Dan do we do breathalyzers okay

Well, and Amy, not to go back to the future or anything, but $1,200 to $1,500 for a vape detector does not seem cost prohibitive to me. So that's the other thing that I would add. It sounded like you needed two vape detectors per bathroom, and you probably need them just in the middle school and high school, and to me that's not a cost prohibitive number. That doesn't

include wiring. Also, on the gender neutral, it has to be in every stall. So overall, the initial estimate was about

Now that is cost prohibitive. So, okay, that's a good point of clarification because when I heard, you know, $3,000 a bathroom, we can't have more than 15 bathrooms, but half a million dollars is, that's a big nut.

Question for you, so just real fast, I don't know anything about vaping and how you buy it and what the ages are. What's the age on buying vape products?

Depends if you're talking about... Anybody who might know.

Anybody who might have

kids. Tobacco, same as tobacco.

So I was wondering, I'm just thinking about like we can fight it at the back end here, right? When it's too late, they're already smoking in the bathrooms or we can, as a board, be more proactive and try to fight it at the legislative level, trying to prevent these things from becoming available to these kids. Same thing with our issues with the guns. In 2013, 2010, we passed some egregious laws and we've had horrible suicide rates ever since then. And so we could do a better job of playing more offense at the legislative level as opposed to always trying to spend money to play on the back after these bad decisions have been made. There's something for you all to think about, us to think about.

And I need to recuse myself?

Okay, action item 6.01. I move that the Board of Education approve the PTTE listed below. Second.

Okay, the moved and seconded. In favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes. And...

We'll get Joe for us. Joe! Come on back,

Joe. how was your break joe good okay okay so we are on to seven uh number seven which is consent items uh before we i stacy before you read the motion i want to recognize a donation um from the melman family for their generous uh they they uh made a generous donation for the Natalie Melman Memorial Award. Natalie Melman graduated from Clayton High School in 1996 as an exceptional student and student athlete. She was a vital component of the baseball program and her role as student assistant. She loved Clayton High School, and Clayton High School loved Natalie. Tragically, she passed away on March 2nd, 1999. And we will continue to honor Natalie and what she meant to the high school by post hosting the Natalie Melman Invitational at Clayton High School. Thank you for the donation. With that, I will ask you to please read the consent agenda.

Yes. Item 7.01. I move that the Board of Education approve the consent agenda item 7.02. through 7.13. Second.

Okay.

It's been moved

and seconded. I have a question. Yes? I have a question about the SRO contract, and I think it's a three-year contract so I think I wasn't on the board when we did this last time, but there's like a clause in there that says the district, quote unquote, monitors and evaluates the officers, develops the job description, the goals, the procedures who, when it says the district is there, is that Chris like who in our district oversees all of those things? Chris,

do you want to respond to that?

So we work, so the administrator who is the safety supervisor coordinator, which is me, we work with our principals as well as our student services folk to gather feedback and make that evaluation. And I probably didn't emphasize this enough earlier, but what what great partners the Clayton Police are actually in this, and they've always wanted to work with us and engage with us to make sure that we have the right officers in the right place doing the right things for our students.

Thank you. Oh, I'm fully supportive. These guys are great. It was such a broad term to say the district oversees those things. I was just curious who in the district does, and I guess that's you. Thank you.

Great. So it's been moved and seconded. Any further questions? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes unanimously. And we are on to number eight, which is the financials. We just need a

Okay. I move that the Board of Education approve the payment of current expenditures and investments from May 2021. Second.

Moved and seconded. Are there any questions? Yes, Kim.

So I want to thank you for putting together this summary. It sounds like most of the delays and the expectations in cash are because of delayed tax revenues or protest revenues that are coming in. So that's last year. We had $14 million of protested taxes withheld, which

was about $3 million higher than the year before. And so I... I had an update in Nisha's Friday memo, but we have already paid back this year already $2 million in protested taxes. So those $14 million, a lot of them got settled in favor of the taxpayers. And so I would like to know as soon as possible anyone who would like to have a discussion about how we move forward with that.

Okay, great. And I saw it in the Friday memo, but I wanted the community that may be watching to hear that, so

that's why I brought it up. And basically there were like six or seven major settlements that I am asking the county to look into and give me an idea what the cause was. And I

want to thank you for your attention to that because you and I have been over in change-taking detail what properties those are, and I know that you're trying to chase them down and trying to chase them back is like swimming through a sea of black holes. So I really appreciate your attention to detail on that, trying to figure out how to navigate through a system where there is no clear path to take down that mine. And then the only other question that I had is I was looking at our investment accounts, and I'm glad to see that we're at half a percent instead of the horrible money market rate. I'm excited about our half a percent. On

$20 million, that's really good. Yeah, there's a lot of money in there. Right.

And it may be a question maybe that we take to a long-term financial planning committee when we have it, but... I know the Clayton Education Foundation for money that is not, that's kind of held aside, similar to this money that's kind of rainy day money, I would consider this held aside, has looked at alternative investment vehicles that I think might even have a better return than half that percent. And I'm not sure if that's something that

we could explore. We do have a board policy on investments and it does align with the state and it's pretty restrictive. It's pretty much just federal fund backed, yeah. Yeah. CDs,

yeah.

CDs are our second best option normally, but then you're capped at $250,000 and you have to go to 50,000 banks, which is a pain. But we do every once in a while. But right now CDs aren't even any better.

So if we want it and we are restricted by whatever the

state... Yes, we have the same investment policy as the state. Okay. Yeah, be happy with our half a percent.

Mary Jo.

Yeah. But this money ultimately we can recoup.

Yeah, that's what I want to have a conversation about. There are implications with that decision, so I want to make sure the board is fully aware of the implications of that decision. So

are we going to schedule that as a follow-up or should...

Yeah, however we, whoever, you know, I can't have more than three board members. And then we will bring it back. You know, I just, we need, there's three options, so I want to talk about the different options that we have. So,

yeah. Thank you, Kim and Steve.

Yeah, and that whole process is really transparent at the, you know, we just need to figure out. It's not something that we can make on the spur of the moment at the meeting. We have to have a discussion of which direction I'm going before the meeting, because I have to have state approval before we do it. Okay.

All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes unanimously. Chris, do we have any public comment tonight? No public comment. Okay. So we are on to board communication and I will start that with a meeting that I had on July 19th and it was for the Economic Development Committee Council. At that time, it was before the August 3rd ballot issue of Prop A, but as most of you know, that ended up not passing. We talked about the rumor that has come to fruition that the Starbucks at the corner of Whiteown and Hanley was going to be closing, which it has closed. And there are several new developments in Clayton, Forsyth Point, the Residence Inn, Bank of America, Le Meridian, Bemisden Place, and the Ritz. So hopefully those will generate some revenue for us in the coming years. And those were the highlights of that meeting. And I know that Parks and Recs had a meeting. Gary or Stacy, do you have any update on that? Oh, you're not on Parks and Rec?

Okay. Yeah, I'm not. So that met last Monday, I think. I don't know that there was anything that was particularly newsworthy. Patty always just does a great job of updating everything. One thing that I did kind of just personally stood out is she talked about how much their participation in camps this summer was up so much, and I think with certainly a lot of Some requests filled, you know, demand that was left from some request, and they seem like they had a really successful program. But there wasn't really anything that was too big news or anything to report back. We are sort of just sit and listen on those meetings. We're not making decisions with them.

Okay, great.

Great.

Yeah, so the committee assignments have been emailed out. I know there have been a few changes. There's a sustainability committee that in April will appoint a board member to that, but we're going to hold off on that until April. Does anybody else have any updates? Yes, Steve. I

have a question. Yes. And that is I'm sort of confused on what the protocol is for communicating, okay? I can only relate what we used to do, which doesn't make it right or wrong. But we used to, if one had a question, you were supposed to email it to the board president, copying the superintendent and all the board members, and then a response would come back to everybody. And that doesn't seem to be your protocol. So I'm trying to understand what your protocol is.

So that's fun. I think you brought that up. I actually, earlier today, I had asked Sandy to email me our onboarding guide with our protocols because I didn't know if we had ever even provided that to you yet. But I do have it sitting here in my inbox for you. And so, yeah, typically what the protocol is is that for questions, you would email the board president and Dr. Patel, and the rest of the board is not included in that correspondence. And then I think if it is something that would benefit the rest of the Board, then we would discuss it and make the rest of the Boards aware of it. So is that your recollection, Joe?

And, Steve, the reason for that is because of the Open Meetings Act, because the temptation is if the whole Board is copied, somebody responds and then we have a discussion over e-mail. And if that's more than three people, then it's actually a violation of the Open Meetnings Act. And so that's the reason why the whole Board typically isn't copied, because some people forget, right? We're all human. We just forget and we respond. And then all of a sudden we've started a discussion that we shouldn't.

I would also add to that, I guess. The other part of that protocol is that when any of us has a question for

Nisha that the Amy is copied to protect Nisha so that no one of us is bombarding her for lack of a better word. Um, so that the board president can always kind of keep tabs on, on our communication with hers as a form of protection. And

I will, whether it's

a text or email or whatever it is,

I will email you the latest iteration of, of our onboarding guide and our board protocols. And obviously, you know, it's a living document. And that was our best thinking close to two years ago when we did it. And so, you know, that could be a topic that we talk about in a retreat setting later on this year. But I will make sure that you get that. I'll send it to you right now.

Amy, can I just say one more thing about that, which is in the thought was that if it's important information that, you know, Sean before and now Nisha now would share that information in a Friday memo or with the whole board. So it wasn't to preclude the whole board from good information, to your point. It was just a mechanism to make sure that there wasn't a response. But we certainly want to have the full communication.

and it's been sent to you. So I think that if nobody has anything else, we can have Stacy read our motion to adjourn.

Okay, 11.01, I move that the Board of Education adjourn.

Second.

All in favor? Aye.

Any opposed? All right, we're going home.